VOL VIII, No 4 [Autumn, 1981]

John Le Carré’s Spy Jargon: An Introduction and Lexicon

Victor Lasseter, The California State College, Bakersfield

John le Carré, the British author of such best-selling spy novels as The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, has invented not only intricate, suspenseful plots but also a new nomenclature for spies—what the narrator of The Honourable Schoolboy calls “their own strange jargon.” Le Carré’s new spy jargon is so strikingly appropriate that the international espionage establishment now uses some of his fictional expressions. Thanks to le Carré,mole has become standard spy nomenclature for a ‘double agent who burrows to the top of the enemy’s secret service.’ The term became popular after the great success of Tinker, Tailor in 1974; according to Thomas Powers in The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA, mole now belongs to “the vernacular of counter-intelligence.”

This strange jargon clearly delights le Carré, who often introduces a definition with the expression “as the jargon happily puts it.” His jargon thus carries neither the usual pejorative sense of “both ugly and hard to understand” nor of “long words, circumlocutions, and other clumsiness” (H.W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage). Rather, le Carré’s coinages have the simplicity, vividness, and lucidity (to insiders) of such trade jargon as knowledge box the ‘box containing oilfield drillers’ reports and orders,' kittens ‘unsanitary balls of dust in hospitals,’ Robinson Crusoe and Friday ‘two theater seats on the aisle,’ dead man an ‘anchor for the rigging of a circus tent’ (borrowed from nautical language), and punch bowl a ‘boxing arena.’

Le Carré’s spies use strange jargon like walk in the park a ‘clandestine rendezvous,’ not to deceive the opposition (spies have cryptography for secrecy) but because the unusual terminology suits the secretive, dangerous vocation of spying. Le Carré’s spy jargon is therefore a kind of professional or trade jargon that, like slang, appropriates words from other contexts to create an insider’s language—unlike slang, however, the new language communicates precisely. At the same time, the jargon is more colorful and concise than such businessese as maximization of profit potential ‘making a lot of money’.

The nature of le Carré’s spy jargon becomes clearer when it is compared to other kinds of spy nomenclature in the nonfiction world of espionage. CIA jargon, for instance, can become heavily euphemistic, as in the example disinformation activities—the agency’s term for ‘propaganda.’ Le Carré detests such dishonesty and parodies it with his expressions agent potential and exfiltration assignment ‘bringing home a spy.’ Rather, le Carré delights in candid jargon like stolen photograph ‘one taken secretly.’

As a writer of espionage novels, le Carré has at hand a considerable body of espionage nomenclature. He sometimes borrows rather dry terms like fieldman, deskman, preliminary interrogation, surveillance, case officer, operational subsistence, courier, and cryptonym—all of which are literal and transparent enough for the layman to understand. Furthermore, he uses some of the more interesting metaphorical expressions for existing jargon such as tradecraft ‘espionage techniques,’ cover ‘disguise,’ and blown ‘having had one’s cover exposed.’ To the writer of fiction, the understatement of a word like tradecraft for the ‘techniques of secret radio transmission or silent killing’ appeals more than the flatness of a term like case officer.

Still, a writer like le Carré prefers to go further and create his own language. The CIA uses deception for a ‘double agent’; le Carré invents the now famous mole. A less imaginative writer refers to a spy school; le Carré invents the grimly ironic Nursery.

Nursery is a good example of a major category of his jargon—words from domestic life and the childhood of nursery rhymes. Appropriated to the new, colder context of espionage, the words become ironic. Nursery designates the British spy training school, which le Carré sardonically defines as a “charm school for outward bound penetration agents.” Here young recruits are nurtured and trained by elders like George Smiley, secluded at Sarratt from a world they are not yet ready to enter. Their nurturing includes the arts of interrogation resistance, sabotage, and silent killing. It is here, in the climax of Tinker, Tailor, that Jim Prideaux kills the mole Bill Haydon.

Similarly, at London headquarters an ‘internal security officer’ is a housekeeper; a ‘senior secretary’ is a mother; a ‘conference room’ is a rumpus room; the ‘CIA’ cousins or neighbours (although they are untrustworthy as Moscow); and ‘agents in charge of domestic intelligence’ are lamplighters (because they spend so much time on the street). A ‘master spy’s bodyguard’ is a baby-sitter. Sandman refers to ‘Karla,’ a workname for the head of Moscow’s counter-espionage; he is the sandman because those who get too close to him go to sleep. Circus is highly ambiguous jargon for ‘London headquarters’; the word refers to the address at Cambridge Circus, but the expression the Circus also carries negative connotations of frivolity and confusion.

Other words come from commerce: competition, customer, department, one time sale of assets, product, stock, and travelling salesman, for example. These words had originally benign or neutral connotations but take on ironic and sinister implications when transferred to the terrifying world of espionage. The life of a spy, especially a le Carré spy, is surrounded by the constant fear of boredom, betrayal, or death. The spies recognize the danger, but reject cloak-and-dagger jargon, preferring instead the subtle shock of understatement. The ironic jargon compares to that of other dangerous professions. Sky divers, for instance, describe the ‘failure of a parachute to open’ as coming all the way in. Steelworkers on skyscrapers and bridges describe a ‘fatal fall’ as going into the hole.

A second major category consists of words that have ominous, sinister connotations in themselves. These include gorilla, a ‘Soviet watchdog of Soviet spies’; hood, a ‘Russian spy’; bloodhound, a ‘British watchdog of British spies’; reptile fund, ‘one for illicit operations’; leash dog, a ‘surveillance expert’; and scalphunter, a ‘specialist in strong-arm tactics like blackmail and murder.’

This duality of threatening words and innocent words that become threatening perhaps reflects the paradox of the spy’s life: periods of great danger and activity alternating with periods of calm and boredom. Overall, the effect of the jargon is to reenforce the spiritual chill that permeates le Carré’s world.

To those concerned about language in contemporary society, jargon has understandably become a repulsive term signifying a cloudy, pretentious insider’s language subdivided into ugly types such as psychobabble, educationese, sociologese, and bureaucratese. John le Carré, in inventing a spy jargon, has shown that the language of insiders may be simple, lucid, and evocative.

The following glossary includes only the jargon not already defined. Le Carré’s own definitions are shown in quotation marks.

alimony delayed payments to “agents working in hostile countries… who for reasons of cover cannot enjoy their pay while they are in the field.”

appetizer a piece of intelligence offered to arouse interest. audition the meeting at which the source produces the appetizer.

bear leader an instructor at the Nursery.

body talk an agent’s safety signals, such as an open collar, used to arrange or cancel a rendezvous, etc.

burrower a Circus researcher.

competition rival British intelligence groups.

crash meeting an emergency, clandestine meeting.

customer the government official or department receiving intelligence reports.

department “one of Whitehall’s many euphemisms for the Circus.”

duck dive a quick escape.

fallback an alternative plan.

feed someone smoke to lie, deceive, confuse.

gold seam the route of laundered Soviet payments to their agents.

handwriting a spy’s signature or style of tradecraft.

hard-man a specialist in strong-arm operations.

inquisitor an interrogator.

janitor a guard at the circus.

leave in one’s socks to leave immediately. See also duck dive.

listener electronics surveillance expert. Syn. sound thief. one time sale of assets a single offering of intelligence by a source.

product intelligence.

sound thief an expert in electronic surveillance.

pavement artist an expert in tailing.

second bite when the Circus is not content with a one time sale of assets, it pressures the source for more.

stock “sale or exchange with another intelligence service: a commerce in small time defectors handled by the scalphunters.”

spike to tap a telephone, open mail, plant a microphone. talent spotting looking for potential agents or defectors. test the water to determine if one’s own mail is spiked. tradesmen “marked collaborators in certain fields who are pledged, if called upon any time, to drop everything and, asking no questions, put their skills at the service’s disposal.”

trail one’s coat to invite a pass (approach) from a source or an enemy agent. Syn. trawl.

travelling salesman a spy.

unpack to confess, to tell everything.

watch someone’s back to see if someone is being followed.

witchhunt a purge of an intelligence service.

wrangler a code breaker.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

Parking meters in Norwalk, Connecticut, offer: “15 min for each nickel; 30 min for each dime; and for convenience, one hour for one quarter.” [Submitted by Charles King, Jr., Wilton, Connecticut.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“I can say again that those who teach have done something without which most people could not do for themselves whatever it is they do; that the act of teaching is an exemplary act, of self-fashioning on behalf of knowledge that teaches others how to fashion the self; that no teacher is due more respect or affection than he or she has earned, but that the drive behind the teaching effort is a positive one… That moment of poise when what is known becomes accessible and must then become what is to be found, is the act of teaching, and those acts in sequence are a life, in which, once we learn how, we are all teachers and students of ourselves.” —From an article by A. Bartlett Giamatti, President of Yale University, in Harper’s, July 1980. [Submitted by Henry Morgan, New York City, who confesses, We didn’t know that Yale offers Teach-Yourself Courses in English! It’s a pity they aren’t available to the staff at a discount.]

When Paragons Nod

Lillian Mermin Feinsilver, Easton, Pennsylvania

Over thirty years ago, when the American Mercury carried an article of mine which justified occasional disregarding of grammatical don’ts, a reader insisted that traditional rules of rhetoric must be followed strictly. In reply, I had to point out that a sentence in his letter had broken one of the time-honored rules.

That interchange comes to mind in connection with John Simon’s Paradigms Lost, which somehow never received the kind of detailed criticism that Simon had given the prose of others. Now that the book has appeared in paperback, the ironic case against it must be stated, for its lapses from literary grace are both frequent and varied. To cite a few of many examples (page numbers apply to both editions):

Tense is imprecise on p. 64: “I just returned from a short journey through France and Italy…where I had ample opportunity….” The first verb of course should be I have just returned…. As it happens, the author inveighs against such inaccuracy on p. 183. Tense is further confused on p. 100: “Even if this was a misprint for adapting, it still wouldn’t make sense.” The shift from was to wouldn’t is jarring. I’d suggest either Even if this was…, it still doesn’t… or Even if this were [contrary to fact]…, it still wouldn’t…. As Simon himself declaims on pp. 44 and 186-87, the subjunctive is not yet expendable in careful writing.

Punctuation—to which an entire essay is devoted—in practice flouts sensible standards, as in a sentence on p. 110: “Vidal’s intelligence, pace Wolcott, does not ‘curdle’ on television and his quick mind—prejudiced in many ways but still quick and clear—buttressed by a delightfully ironic wit, is just what the American public needs….” To avoid the impression of curdling on his quick mind, we need a comma after television; and another is required in place of the second dash, which should be moved to follow wit. We then have the more understandable statement:… does not ‘curdle’ on television, and his quick mind—prejudiced in many ways but still quick and clear, buttressed by a delightfully ironic wit—is just what the American public needs….

The difference between etc. and et al. is surprisingly ignored by this devotee of Latin (p. 6): “…great novelists, poets, et cetera are too busy….” Ironically, the spelling out of the former expression spotlights the error.

Someone’s less is corrected to fewer on p. 153; yet six pages earlier we have been told: “Two readers, no less (Hortense Berman and Thomas A. Long), have sent me….” Since two is not a large number, why use the phrase at all, especially since no less has another meaning, as in “The King and Queen, no less, will be greeting our party”?

Simon writes (p. 100): “Why, you may ask, is correct speech and writing important, as long as the meaning is clear?” I would counter in Talmudic fashion with a different question: Why does Mr. Simon forget that the subject of the sentence— correct speech and writing—is plural and requires a plural verb? Yes, correct speech and writing are important. He asks again (p. 202): “What good is correct speech and writing, you may ask, in an age in which hardly anyone seems to know and no one seems to care?” In addition to the same error in subject-verb agreement, there is vagueness as to what it is that hardly anyone seems to know. It might help to insert why they matter or what they are after know.

Simon trips himself on like as conjunction. Although he criticizes such usage in the work of Erica Jong (p. 116), he himself employs it, as on p. 101: “I couldn’t disagree more with the structural linguists and their disciples—and thus with most dictionaries in current use—when they contend that ‘language is what is spoken by the people’ and, as if it followed like the night the day, that ‘language is a living thing, not something codified by pedantic scholars.’ ” Surely Simon would agree that …as if it followed as the night the day… would be more graceful and would incidentally quote Shakespeare more accurately (“And it must follow as the night the day…”). Particularly awkward is his unlike in on p. 192: “Well, I am glad to note that in Mr. Owens’s book, unlike in Mr. Mehegan’s, graceless is still a pejorative.” Possible substitutes might be not as in or if not in or as opposed to.

I must add that the book title seems forced—partly because paradigm is often properly pronounced with a short i— and is not original. Edwin Newman used the same pun in the singular as the heading for chapter 6 of A Civil Tongue in 1976.

Two of the essays in Simon’s book appear in another recent volume which should have shown a more consistently high level of writing and editing than it does: The State of the Language, Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks, editors (University of California Press). One gets an inkling on p. xii, in the prefatory note by Ricks (Professor of English Literature at Christ’s College, Cambridge University) that the prose ahead may be less than faultless: “ ‘Our language,’ said the creative and critical genius who was American and then English—T.S. Eliot—‘Our language, or any civilized language, is….’ ” Such repetition is sometimes useful in lectures, but in print the sentence seems careless, its deficiency compounded by inexact punctuation. (Replacing the first dash with a comma might help a little.) A neater arrangement would be: As the creative and critical genius who was American and then English—T.S. Eliot—said, ‘Our language….’ Ricks continues: “It is not only that a language has an astonishing power of renovation. For when a language creates—as it does—a community within the present, it does so only by courtesy of a community between the present and the past.” Why the confusing For in the second sentence? An additional point is being made, and the statement might more effectively begin with When.

On p. 9, in “Sound Barriers and Gangbangsprache,” Randolph Quirk (Quain Professor of English Language and Literature at University College, London) makes a statement in which subject and verb do not match in number: “One of the things that reduces 1985 from horror to farce is Burgess’s projected linguistic engineering.” Logical choices are One thing that reduces…or One of the things that reduce…. Similar imprecision occurs in novelist-essayist Edmund White’s “The Political Vocabulary of Homosexuality” (p. 239): “Gay is, moreover, one of the few words that does not refer explicitly to sexual activity.” Since the antecedent of that is words, the verb should be do. The very next sentence is even more awkward: “One of the problems that has beleaguered gays is that….” There one could simplify by changing that has beleaguered to beleaguering and by replacing the repetitive One of the problems with A problem, producing: A problem beleaguering gays is that…. Because of its long history and current growth, some observers are inclined to accept the type of non-agreement under discussion; but there are still many readers (including John Simon on p. 185 of his aforementioned work) who are jolted by it. Indeed, two examples of usage from Professor Ricks’s article (p. 57) reflect the viability of the logical forms: “…one of those eerie films which speed up…” and “…one of the few who have delighted in….”

Tense in an infinitive is badly expressed by Frances Ferguson (Associated Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley), in “The Unfamiliarity of Familiar Letters” (p. 84): “If Lee Marvin had only read Clarissa, he would have known better than to have written any letters….” The needed form is to write.

The uses of who and whom are at times embarrassing. David Lodge (Professor of Modern English Literature at Birmingham University) gives us who in place of whom (p. 508): “Later, Kate refuses to tell him who she is meeting for a lunch date….” (Although whom may be dying out faster in England than it is in the U.S., the who seems improper in an American academic work.) And Kathryn Hellerstein (poet, translator and essayist), in “Yiddish Voices in American English,” twice writes whom for who. On p. 197 we read: “When Edelshtein wanders in the snowstorm, searching for Hannah, the young girl whom he hopes will be his translator….” Need it be said that the relative pronoun is the subject of will be? On p. 198 the thought is restated and the error is repeated: “He begins two letters to Hannah,… who knows Yiddish, whom he hopes will be his translator….” The same contribution contains other kinds of error which should have been caught, as on p. 184: “Another letter portrays a father’s response to his son’s conventional birthday wish as ‘May you live 120 years,’ the life-span of the patriarch Abraham.” That life-span was attributed to Moses (Deuteronomy 34:7); Abraham was accorded 175 years (Genesis 25:7).

Man-of-letters Kingsley Amis, in “Getting It Wrong,” provides a description of current deteriorating usage (pp. 32-33) which might be applied, at least partially, to the above-quoted samplings: “… growing imprecision…; quite commonly ambiguity or sheer nonsense; and everywhere awkwardnesses that force the reader to pause without profit, even if only for an instant. This is decline.” If John Simon is sounding the clarion to combat such decline, I’m afraid his call is muffled; and the state of the language (in both lower case and italic initial capitals) is indeed cause for complaint. Simon is more than half right when he charges (p. 92): “The real culprits are the editors….” Although editors and their staffs may not be able to catch every infelicity in the manuscripts they process, they should certainly know—and care—enough about exactness of expression to carry out their own proper share of responsibility for clarity and accuracy. Writing and publishing, after all, are like any other services or products in requiring careful attention to detail by trained persons at every stage. Such painstaking effort is known as conscientious workmanship and quality control—which readers, no less than consumers, still have a right to expect.

EPISTOLA {J. Bryan, III}

A few more for Onomastica Nervosa [VIII, 2]:

Benedict, a newly married man.
Bertha, a kind of cape or deep collar.
Billy, 1. a he-goat. [2. a policeman’s club. 3. a poster. 4. Australian. a pot or tin for boiling water over a campfire.—Editor.]
Bobby, an English policeman.
Dick, Slang, a penis.
Dolly, a small platform on wheels or rollers.
Jack, 1. Slang. money. [2. a he-ass.—Editor.]
Jehu, a furious driver.
Jemima, 1. a dove. [2. Aunt Jemima. a female Uncle Tom.—Editor.]
Jasper, 1. a hick or rube. [2. a variety of quartz.—Editor.]
Jock, 1. a jockstrap. 2. an athlete.
Jezebel, a loose woman.
Joey, 1. a clown. [2. Australian. a young kangaroo.— Editor.]
Joseph, a chaste man.
Jerry, a chamberpot.
Jenny, 1. a traveling crane. 2. a she-ass.
Charlotte, a kind of pudding.
Charlotte (Russe), a sweet dessert.
Louis, a French gold coin.
Magdalen, a reformed prostitute.
Mary, Australian. an aborigine woman.
Nanny, 1. a she-goat. [2. a children’s nurse.—Editor.]
Reuben, Rube, a hick or jasper.
Teddy, 1. a one-piece ladies' undergarment consisting of panties and a chemise. 2. a toy bear.
Victor, a winner.
Warren, an area abounding in rabbits.
Xanthippe, a termagant or shrew.

[J. Bryan, III, Richmond, Virginia]

[A few duplications have been deleted.—Editor.]

EPISTOLA {Eric Hamp}

Addenda to Onomastica Nervosa:

(Big) Ben, the clock in the tower of the Houses of Parliament.
(Big) Bertha, a huge railway gun used by the Germans in WWI.
(on the) Fritz, broken; out of order.
George, a generic, like Joe, Mac.
Jerry, WWI Slang. a German or Germans collectively.
Judas, 1. a traitor. 2. Judas tree. a kind of tree. 3. Judas Priest. euphemism for Jesus Christ.
Heinie, WWI Slang. a German. 2. the behind; the buttocks.
(Tin) Lizzie, 1. Model T Ford. 2. a jalopy.
(Black) Maria, police van for transporting captives.
Mickey (Finn), a knockout drop (especially chloral hydrate, when surreptitiously added to someone’s drink).
Moll, a gangster’s girl friend.
Ned, euphemism for hell: to raise Ned. Also, Hob (from Rob).
Oscar, Academy Award trophy.
Sally (Lunn), Brit. a sweet teacake.
(Doubting) Thomas, a skeptic.
Timothy, a kind of grass.
Toby, a style of pottery mug or jug.
(Uncle) Tom, a black man who toadies to whites.
Tom and Jerry, 1. a hot buttered rum drink. 2. a cat and mouse film cartoon team.

[Eric Hamp, University of Chicago]

[And then there’s ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center or Electronic Remote and Independent Control), HAMP (Hampstead, Hampton National Historic Site, or High-Altitude Measurement Probe).—Editor]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Selling America, Puns, Language, and Advertising

Michel Monnot, (University Press of America, 1981), viii + 125pp., 62 photos.

On page 125 of this book appears a photograph of the author, and one would be hard put to see in that pleasant visage the sinister character of a thief. Yet, it must be known that Professor Monnot has purloined my idea for which I have been gathering material these many months. Worse still, the wretch has made a better job of it than I ever could! In the photograph he seems to be perched atop a slate roof, presumably because he expects the drinks to be on the house.

It is unavoidable, one must assume, to prepare a collection of puns without explaining the nature of paronomasia. Unfortunately, such explanations come off as badly as explaining puns, an exercise in which the author engages now and then, but chiefly to elucidate a context that might not be immediately apparent to the reader. Monnot has classified puns into five main categories (Grammatical Ambiguity; Same Spelling, Same Pronunciation; Different Spelling, Same Pronunciation; Same Spelling, Different Pronunciation; Different Spelling, Different Pronunciation) and the inevitable Miscellaneous.

As is to be expected, some (if not most) of the examples cited are rather corny and crude: it is almost as if the copywriters who created the lines were told to come up with a pun at the peril of their jobs. Examples are

Arrow shirts [picture of Joe Namath sporting one]:

“When Arrow made this shirt, it wasn’t for any old Joe.”

But—isn’t the real point that it was for “any (old) Joe”? Some backfire:

Avis Rent-a-Car:

“Ride Avis out of town.”

I’m sure Hertz would love to.

Some are apt:

Baldwin pianos:

“Rent a Baldwin for a song.”

Bank of A. Levy:

“Our interest in you is guaranteed.”

Some are simply inappropriate:

Burgess batteries:

“Burgess batteries turn me on.”

Burlington (Textile) Building in New York:

“Burlington wants you to go through the Mill.”

First National City Bank:

“We work like elephants. For peanuts.”

Some are farfetched:

Cannon towels:

“Cannon puts it right on the line.”

After some thought—about .001 seconds—I realized that the line is the clothesline. Or the firing line? Any other suggestions? It is meaningless to me. And is the following a pun?

Icelandic Airlines:

“A world of difference.”

This one relies on familiarity with an expression that is, I think, rather archaic:

Mumm Champagne:

“It was marzipan, carols, candles, and Mumm was the word.”

Besides, the expression is Mum’s the word (that is, is). Recently, I have heard this revised to the present tense. There are some that are simply in bad taste:

American Hardware Mutual Insurance [picture of a wheelchair]:

“You could get the chair for reckless driving.”

Why not “You could get a lower premium for wreckless driving”?

March of Dimes [picture of Arnold Palmer:

“What’s your handicap?” (Tag line: “Birth defects are forever.”)

Rugby:

“It takes leather balls to play rugby.”

SPCA:

“Don’t litter. Neuter your pets.”

The worse the distortion, the more painful the pun. It seems that when the consonants of a word are distorted to force a pun (Supp-hose socks: “Sock therapy”) the results are “better” than when the vowels are mangled (Ventura Luggage: “For gracious leaving”; Hill & Hill Liquor: “Tell your boss to go to Hill”).

Other distortions almost demand explanations (for me, at least):

Chris' and Pitt’s [sauce]:

“California’s No. 1 grill friend.”

Holiday Inn, Barstow, California:

“Try our seafood. Just for the halibut.”

(The last is supposed to be a pun on Helluvit, scarcely a good reason to try restaurant fare, I should think.)

The most atrocious, appalling examples can be found in the Miscellaneous category, where, apparently, anything goes:

Noxema [sic] Shaving Cream:

“Let Noxema [sic] cream your face so the razor won’t.”

Ewe’s milk cheese:

“It’s Ewe-nique.”

Clearly, advertisers rely heavily on arch, catchy copy to draw the attention of readers. Almost all of the examples compiled by Monnot are from graphic sources; some that have been found in print also appear on television, and a few can be heard on radio. Considering the much broader impact of television and its greater audience, it is surprising that promotion of a paronomastic character hasn’t yet penetrated that medium to any great extent: perhaps advertisers (or their agencies) feel that the relatively low mental age of viewers, as set forth by the media statistics firms, precludes the intelligence required to understand puns. On the other hand, I have seen many children’s shows and cartoons on television and offer the impression that a large measure of the humor directed at children is based on word play. Maybe children can understand puns better than their parents.

My own collection of word play is drawn from department-store advertising in, mainly, The New York Times. Here is a sampling:

Gloria Vanderbilt jeans:

“New York Magazine says our bottoms are tops.”

“New York Magazine we thank you from the bottom of our jeans.” —N.Y. Times, August 26, 1981, p. 34.

“put your best fit forward in Gloria’s new jeans.” [Macy’s advt.] —Ibid., p. 32.

Clinique cosmetics [figures on chessboard]:

“Saving face is the name of the game in this city. It’s your move.” [Macy’s advt.] —Ibid., p. 4.

Ralph Lauren:

“Ralph Lauren. He shows, once and for all, how the East and the West are one.” [Macy’s advt.] —Ibid., p. 15.

NYSE shirts:

“How fitting. New York gets in shape: the new fitted sports shirt by NYSE.” [Macy’s advt.] —Ibid., p. 26.

Continental Quilt Shoppe:

“So…you think you’ve got it made…. The Continental Quilt literally makes your bed!” —Ibid., p. 30.

Bloomingdale’s:

“The great coverup: 20% to 50% off sleepcovers and roll up blinds.” —Ibid., p. 38.

Saks Fifth Avenue:

“Express Yourself… to K.I.D.S. on 8!” [=‘the 8th floor’] —Ibid., p. 41.

New York Times [picture of many kinds of balls]:

“Have a ball with the Sports Pages of The New York Times.” —Ibid., n.p.

Henri Bendel [picture of 2 models, one pointing]:

“The point is that Perry Ellis does clothes for dedicated collectors.” —Ibid., p. 52.

UV Factors Corporation:

“Raising Capital? Don’t plant in the heat of day.”

—Ibid., Section 3, p. 2.

CCS Communication Control, Inc. [anti-bugging device]:

“Bugged?” —Ibid., Section 5, p. 16.

Okun Co. [patching compound]:

“Don’t Crack Up.” —Ibid., p. 16.

If that isn’t enough for one day’s advertisements in The New York Times, regard the following headlines in the same day’s paper:

“Star-Crossed At the Bolshoi.” —Section 4, p. 1.

“Rhodesian Theme: Guns Before Barter.” —Ibid., p. 2.

“Ivan Go Home, Says Nigeria.” —Ibid.

“Sauce for the Gander.” [about a golfer who clubbed a Canada goose to death] —Ibid., p. 6.

“State Fairs: The Pulse Slows in the Heartland.”

—Section 3, p. 1.

“Runaway Prices for Racehorses.” —Ibid.—Ibid.

“A Horse! A Horse! $1 Million for a Horse!” —Ibid., p. 6.

We’d best keep on our toes, since something is obviously afoot….

My only adverse comment about this book is about the price: the text is not even typeset, and the production is, in general, of rather low quality. The hardbound edition might appeal to libraries, but ordinary mortals could be well satisfied with the paperback edition.

[Note: It might be difficult to find this book at your neighborhood bookshop, so orders should probably be sent to University Press of America, Inc., P.O. Box 19101, Washington, D.C. 20036.]

Laurence Urdang

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Much of South Florida was plagued by an abnormally dry rainy season this past spring…” [From Today, October 10, 1981, page 1. Submitted by Deborah J. Rahn, Melbourne Beach, Florida.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Words

Jane Sarnoff and Reynold Ruffins, (Scribner’s, 1981), 64pp.

Directed at parents of children 9 to 12 years of age who are interested in language—or whose interest in it might be aroused—Words is an attractive book with illustrations that look like linocuts. Most of the etymologies, which are couched in suitably simplified syntax, are accurate, but a few misspellings here and there (“Romney” for Romany, p. 18; “pupura” for purpura, from porphyra, p. 24; “muscalus” for musculus, p. 33) mar the work. Also, there are some word origins the accuracy of which may be questionable, such as genuine, which comes from gen(u)us ‘kind’ plus the adjectival suffix -ine and not from “an old custom in which the father of a newborn child placed the infant on his knee as a way of accepting the child as his real son or daughter”; shirt and skirt are not given their traditional etymologies; flotsam, ‘the part of a ship’s wreckage floating on the water,’ and jetsam, ‘ship’s gear or cargo deliberately cast overboard to improve stability, especially in a storm,’ are distinguished by those who know the difference; the Old French forms of the ker and chief of kerchief were not couvrir and chief: they were properly cuevre and chef and first appeared in English as keverchef, of which kerchief is a syncopated form. I am not for a moment suggesting that such terms as “syncopated” should be used in a book for children (and they could probably be avoided, to advantage, in books for adults, too), but I do think that the authors (or was it the proofreaders?) should have attended better to their sources. One other matter that crops up as a continual source of annoyance in books written by amateurs and based on evidence adduced in, for instance, the Oxford English Dictionary: the earliest citation given in the OED is not necessarily—and certainly not probably—the first time a given word was used, merely the earliest written evidence that OED’s citation readers were able to find for a form. Thus, it is probably inaccurate to date words as the authors have: “It was not until the 17th century that cracked or crazy was used about people,” “In the late part of the 13th century, the word [scyrte] divided into shirt and skirt,” “Car has meant a ‘wheeled vehicle’… since the middle of the 14th century,” and so on. Admittedly, continual hedging and qualification make for a dull book, but a note in a foreword could absolve many authors from the onus of commitment to unattested scholarship. Among the sources credited is Fowler’s Modern English Usage, “especially the entry of irrelevant.” That entry does not appear in this book; perhaps it was deemed to be a self-referring word.

—Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Jonathan David Dictionary of First Names and The Name Dictionary: Modern English and Hebrew Names

Alfred J. Kolatch, (Jonathan David Publishers, Middle Village, N.Y., 1980), xxxii + 506 pp. and Alfred J. Kolatch, (Jonathan David Publishers, Middle Village, N.Y., 1967), xiii + 418 pp.

If the availability of name books is a gauge of the birthrate in the United States, then those who lament the decline should not worry. A spate of dictionaries and other listings of first names is now marketed, including some good ones by Leslie Dunkling, George R. Stewart, Elsdon C. Smith, and Christopher P. Anderson; several bad ones by here unnamed compilers who have freely plagiarized their superiors in the field are on display in supermarket bookracks alongside aphrodisiacal reading material that possibly contributed to the pregnant need for such books in the first place. Even with a reduced birthrate, a sufficient demand by parental expectants exists to require a book of names for those either not necessarily concerned with traditional naming practices or not imaginative enough to create a sensible name that will not be an embarrassment to a child when he or she becomes an adult.

Alfred J. Kolatch has been active in onomastics since at least 1948, when his first book on names appeared. His The Name Dictionary, published in 1967, now appears in tandem with The Jonathan David Dictionary of First Names, both handsomely bound and jacketed. These two books, however, are presumably too scholarly to appear side by side with the usual fare found on mass-media racks. Still, the popularity of the first is such that it had gone through its sixth printing by 1979; The Jonathan David obviously grew out of the first, for most of the same names and “meanings” appear in both.

The popularity of The Name Dictionary is not difficult to account for: it is an unabashed “guide to Jewish parents seeking an appealing English and Hebrew name for their offspring,….” As far as I know, Kolatch is the only specialist in Jewish first names, although, as he points out, the dictionary “is more comprehensive in scope” than an ordinary baby-name finder, including, as it does, many surnames and other information. Furthermore, it contains thousands of names, both English and Hebrew, and provides enough material for choices to be made. The main entry is a name found in English, appropriate though not always commonly so: Vered, Noga, Datia, Hemda, Shalgia, Gozal, and many others just do not occur often. Nevertheless, Kolatch has found enough instances, he says, to warrant their listing, but he omitted Bonaparte simply because it appeared only once “in an army list of Jewish names.” Beneath each entry, Kolatch lists Hebrew variants, not always equivalents, for both men and women. The appendices contain a slight history and development of the use of personal names, as well as a listing of 3,221 names, printed in Hebrew, followed by the Anglicized spelling and reference to text entries. The Jonathan David moves into the mainstream of name dictionaries as we now know them but compares unfavorably with ones by Smith, Stewart, and Nurnberg and Rosenblum. Although a sameness hovers over these accumulations of names, they differ somewhat in direction and scholarship. A command of Hebrew gives Kolatch an edge but also causes him to load his entries with purely Hebrew names from his previous books. In addition, he continues to claim that his more than 10,000 names, with derivations, will serve as “an invaluable guide for parents-to-be,” as well as for “scholars” and “students of language.” Perhaps. The earlier work, however, provides a better service for baby-name searchers.

The format for Jonathan David derives from the one used by Maxwell Nurnberg and Morris Rosenblum’s What to Name Your Baby, an excellent, no-nonsense compilation last copyrighted in 1962 but not listed in Kolatch’s bibliography. Also, their front matter, including the history of naming, is much better than Kolatch’s, whose loosely written account is both too short and questionable in categorization. His scholarship shows better in the appendices to The Name Dictionary, where a good account of the history can be found. Nurnberg and Rosenblum, whose listing is not nearly so comprehensive as Kolatch’s, have a main entry, followed by an etymology, followed by a historical name and a contemporary one. Kolatch uses the same pattern but is scant on some incidental information; he does add, however, place-name notes. One comparison will be sufficient to show the entries in each:

Nurnberg and Rosenblum:

Bert Short form; see Albert, Bertram, Burton, Bertie. Literature: The comical zany, Bertie Wooster of the Pelham Greenville Wodehouse novels of the British upper classes. Stage, Screen and TV: Comedian Bert Lahr, “the inimitable.”

Kolatch:

Bert, Bertie Pet forms of Albert, Berthold, Bertol, Bertram. Place-Name Usage: Bertie County, North Carolina, named for James and Henry Bertie (1722), property owners.

With Kolatch’s Jonathan David, however, several quibbles and nitpicks are in order. He enters Boyce as derived from ‘the county called Powys, in Central Wales,’ and gives usage examples as ‘John Cowper Powys, Llewelyn Powys, and T. F. Powys.’ Surely this is a proofreading error. The name can be derived only from the French bois ‘woods.’ He lists the dates of the life of Brian Borhus as 910-1014, when others list that long-lived Irish leader as living from 926-1014; the difference, however, is hardly worth noting, except that such matters begin to add up. Under Kyle, Kyle Rote is listed as a sportscaster, which he was for a time in order for the network to capitalize on his recent fame, but he is remembered as a football player for the New York Giants after a fabulous college career at Southern Methodist University. Pink is glossed as ‘a pet form of Pinkerton,’ but Pink May as the contemporary example should be Pinky May, Philadelphia Phillies baseball player from 1939 through 1943, whose name was Merrill Glend May. Potter Stewart, under Potter, is identified as an American statesman, while Lewis Franklin Powell, two entries later, appears as a U.S. Supreme Court Justice. Is there a difference?

Brinard is given the etymology of British bren ‘a prince,’ which is all right for the Welsh brenin ‘a chief’ but cannot produce Brainard or Brainerd ‘sword-hard.’ Gordie Clark should be Gordie Howe, the hockey player. Redd Fox should be Redd Foxx (stage name for John Elroy Sanford); also, Redd is obviously a fancy spelling of red, therefore not derived from Old English hreod ‘a reed,’ as Kolatch claims. Nolina and Noma are not Hawaiian for Noreen and Norman; nor is Hawaiian Noelani akin to Noel, despite some parallel letters. In fact, Kolatch should be ignored when he mentions Hawaiian names.

Wapeka cannot be derived from “Old English waepen” ‘weapon,’ ” since it is an American Indian name. Besides, waepen should be wæpen. For Loy, the entry is “A pet form of Loy. See Loy.” A proofreader should have referred the entry to Loyal. Kolatch writes that Boog derives from “Anglo Saxon boc or bec [sic] ‘beech,’ ” but “Boog” here is the nickname for John Wesley Powell, a “booger” of a man at 6'4” or taller and 230 lbs. in his prime as a baseball player for the Baltimore Orioles. Luis Gomez, the famous Lefty of the New York Yankees in the 1930s, was born Vernon Louis Gomez. And to draw this list short, Francis Scott Key may have been a U.S. lawyer, but he really is better recorded as the composer of an important song that no one seems to be able to sing.

The numerous errors, and I have mentioned only a few detract from the worth of the dictionary and exasperate someone slightly familiar with the scholarship of onomastics and with the rudiments of proofreading. Perhaps the more glaring goofs will be corrected in the next edition; otherwise, a scholar of the caliber of Benzion C. Kaganoff, A Dictionary of Jewish Names and Their History, should assume the task of producing a decent text from Kolatch’s accumulated material of thirty-five years.

[Kelsie B. Harder, State University College, Potsdam, New York]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Foreign Student’s Guide to Dangerous English!

Elizabeth Claire, illustr., (Eardley Publications, P.O. Box 281, Rochelle Park, NJ 07662, 1980), 86pp.

Anyone who cares to try writing a book like this will find out very quickly how difficult it can be; although there may be much to criticize, Claire must be commended on her forthright approach to a delicate subject: How can the foreign learner of English be informed about American English vulgarisms and taboo words? The standard works adopted for use in classes for learners of English avoid the problem, and there must be millions of instances in which new speakers of English have had to endure embarrassment because of lack of knowledge about ambiguous words and because of imperfect pronunciation of perfectly harmless words. An example of the former appears on page 13: A foreigner in a sporting goods shop enquires of the proprietor, “Do you have red balls?” The speaker means red tennis balls; the proprietor understands— well, you know. Examples of the latter (pages 34 and 35) include, “I put some clean shits on the bed” and “Do you mind if I take a piss [of cake]?” I know of one instance in which a refined lady, new to America from eastern Europe, was shopping in a drugstore; unable to remember the word toothpaste, she asked for “something for brushing my teats,” evoking not only laughter but expressions of amazement at such a diligent obsession for cleanliness.

For native speakers, as can be seen, this book is good for a lot of laughs. But it is serious business to the neophyte speaker of a language that abounds in ambiguities distinguishable only when used in specific contexts. Those who know French can imagine my consternation at discovering the nature of my request when I asked a (nice) French lass to baiser me: I thought I had said baiser, (and, indeed, I had); I was totally unaware of having talked my way right into a French pun.

Nonnative speakers have a hard time learning to distinguish taboo from standard usages of words like bang, bone, box, can, come, eat, fairy, and many others. Perhaps there are other books that can help them, but I know of none. Also, Dangerous English gives lists of words and phrases in tabular form, under such headings as Formal, General Use, Euphemism, Children’s Words, Slang, and Vulgar. A small book, it is not exhaustive and cannot solve every problem that the foreigner will encounter. But it is of some help, at any rate. More than half of the book is occupied by a glossary, and it is a pity that the words and phrases are not cross-indexed from one part of the book to another. Illustrations of anatomical parts and of various bodily functions may not be as important as some of the other information, but they nonetheless provide a quick guide to what should be avoided. A more thorough work would be welcome for those who are learning English, in particular: English dictionaries, unlike those for many other languages, often avoid naughty words, a reflection of American nice-nellyism that would keep such dictionaries out of the hands of children, the only native speakers who might need them, and deny their availability to those who are learning the language. Dangerous English is a good start in the right direction; perhaps the author will expand the material for a second edition.

—Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Dictionary of Imaginary Places

Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi, illustr. Graham Greenfield, maps and charts by James Cook, (Macmillan, 1980), 448 pages.

Do you know about the island of Hooloomooloo? If you have read Melville’s Mardi, and A Voyage Thither, you will remember that it is an island in the Mardi Archipelago, heaped with rocks and covered with dwarfed, twisted thickets. It is sometimes known as the Isle of Cripples because the inhabitants of the surrounding islands, averse to the barbarous custom of destroying at birth all infants asymmetrically formed but wanting equally to remove them from sight, long ago established there an asylum for cripples. The natives do not know that they are cripples and explain to visitors that whether a person is hideous or handsome depends upon who is made judge.

I don’t know whether that brief summary makes you want to visit the island or not. Hooloomooloo is just one of the 1200 imaginary places in world literature described in this Baedeker for armchair travelers.

I am not quite sure what it is all in aid of. It is a large, expensive book, with 100 rather stiff illustrations and 150 lovingly intricate maps. If you want to take a trip to Cloudcuckooland or Lilliput, you will see more by reading or rereading Aristophanes or Swift. The entries in this dictionary, as in all travel guides, are inevitably shorter, more jejune, and less satisfying than the original places. The fact that neither author’s first language is English shows in stilted and unidiomatic writing.

They have certainly searched the seven seas of literature diligently and come up with some remarkable Utopias and Dystopias. For your money you get not just the obvious Looking-Glass Land (to be reached by proceeding to the rooms of the Dean of Christ Church and finding the vast looking-glass above the chimney piece, carefully avoiding the vases of dried flowers protected by Victorian belljars; visitors should climb up onto the mantlepiece….), but also Hermaphrodite Island (Thomas Artus, 1724); not just Tolkien, Carl Sandburg, and the Narnia stories of C.S. Lewis, but the less obvious Dostoyevsky, W.S. Gilbert, Graham Greene, and John Lennon.

The authors indulge in whimsical flights of fancy of their own. Thus, Baskerville Hall is in the hands of the National Trust, and Toad Hall has now been restored to order; it seems that the riotous goings-on there have had a salutary and calming effect on the formerly exuberant Mr. Toad.

I think the reference to Tolkien gives away the secret of the point of this book. Over here the Tolkien elves-and-wizards industry flourishes mightily. Almost every month some new jottings from the Master’s wastepaper basket are published. There are a Tolkien newsletter, Tolkien calendars and diaries, Tolkien clubs. I understand that the cult also flourishes in the States. He became a wizard for the Sixties generation, loosely categorized by the press as Flower People and Hippies, who did not like the world as they saw it and wanted to escape into a prettier, imaginary world.

Now, I am not immune to the charm of Tolkien and Never Never Land. I remember waiting impatiently for volumes II and III of The Lord of the Rings and buying them in Blackwell’s on publication day. But I have to assert that The Hobbit is the only flawless masterpiece that Tolkien wrote and that The Silmarillion is almost unreadable. And, since I am being pompous, I also have to assert that the wish to escape from it all to an imaginary world is as old as the choruses in Greek tragedy, who, as the great axe is about to fall, burst into agitated anapaests, wishing that they could fly like birds to the Garden of the Hesperides or somewhere else at the ends of the earth, where humans are not so beastly to each other. There clearly is an insatiable appetite for imaginary worlds among those who do not like the world they have been born into.

If this gazetteer of fantasy worlds encourages people to read or reread the original books, it will serve a worthy purpose. I am afraid that the other purpose that I see for it is a less worthy one. People in my inky trade need to appear convincingly omniscient at the drop of a deadline. I can see the day coming when I have to put on instant familiarity with the precise geography of Dracula’s castle without having Bram Stoker to hand. I shall keep the book for such hack’s emergencies. But for the rest of the time, it is more sensible to live in the real world and read proper books.

—Philip Howard

Antipodean English: Tok Bidjin

G. W. Turner

Every schoolboy knows that the Pidgin English word for piano is big fellow box you fight him he cry. Or was, when Jespersen recorded this curiosity. In current New Guinea Pidgin (or Neo-Melanesian to use a name designed to emphasize its status as an independent language), the word is piano, easily pronounced and short enough to name a now common detail of a modern environment.

The validity of pidgin languages (languages used only as a trade or auxiliary language) and creoles (pidgin languages that have become the sole language of a community) is now recognized. Like other languages, they have their rules and orderliness and can grow and change by borrowing from influential neighboring languages. But not all their problems are over. Like other languages, they are diverse, consisting of a number of sublanguages—technical, regional, and of varying formality. This variety may baffle those who come into contact with a pidgin or creole, promoting the idea that there is no order or structure in it, that it is a muddle of disjointed elements.

Some years ago, I, among others, recorded such a judgment of the pidgin and creole languages of Australian Aborigines, but recent work, especially by researchers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, has clarified their structure and orderliness, recording their grammar and giving them a spelling system. The early dismissive judgments have proved wrong.

There are four possible ways in which Aborigines may relate to English. They may be fully integrated and speak English as anyone else does; they may speak a recognizably Aboriginal variety of English; they may speak a creole or pidgin best regarded as an independent language; or they may retain a native Aboriginal language. In most parts of Australia, one of the first two possibilities is common, but in desert regions or in parts of the north and west the other two are realized.

In the Roper River area of Northern Australia, the Ngukurr and Bamyili creole was given an orthography in 1976. The needs of the native speakers being the main consideration in choosing a spelling, a phonemic rather than an etymological spelling was chosen. The difference may be illustrated by taking a sentence from a story told by the linguist John R. Sandefur. The English translation is “One day they heard that a kangaroo had a lot of children.” In etymological spelling this would run One-day two-fellow been listen gammon kangaroo been have-him lot-of piccaninny. In phonemic spelling it is Wandei tubala bin lisin geman deingurru bin abum loda biginini.

The pronunciation of an Aboriginal pidgin or creole is likely to develop through two stages. In the first, sounds unfamiliar to Aboriginal speakers are replaced by sounds from their own language and unfamiliar distinctions are disregarded. Thus, a word like policeman may be borrowed as balidjiman, because voiced and unvoiced stops are not distinguished in the language: there is no s-phoneme, so that [s] is realized by a lamino-palatal stop (something like and English j-sound), and syllables are simplified to a consonant-plus-vowel pattern. (In a similar way Maori changes policeman to prihimana.) In the second stage, the creole adopts new sounds from the donor language; in this way balidjiman is adapted towards plisman.

Words are formed by borrowing from English or Aboriginal languages (e.g., for kinship terms) or by compounding, (e.g., gabadidaim ‘tea-time, mid-morning or afternoon’; boimilk ‘underdeveloped breast’; wail dog ‘dingo’; or, with folk etymology, wailwin ‘whirlwind’).

Traces of earlier phases in development may remain in current creole. The word for ‘food’ may appear as dagadaga, derived from Australian ‘tucker’ and reduplicated in the pattern of an earlier general pidgin kaikai. Reduplication is common: ‘pig’ is bigibigi; the domestic fowl or chicken— Australian ‘chook’—is jukjuk in Roper creole. (A ‘cormorant’ is wailjuk.)

The kind of English contributing to Australian creoles is, of course, Australian English. So, along with jukjuk and dagadaga, there is loli ‘candy,’ nokimap ‘to tire’ (the innocent meaning of knocked up in Australian English is ‘fatigued’), stikibik ‘mind someone else’s business’ (Australian stickybeak), krik ‘creek,’ and of course, bush.

Meaning as well as pronunciation may change as a word passes from English to creole. The verb garadjimbat (with transitive suffix -im and continuative aspect -bat) is from English scratch (and him and about) but means ‘to dig.’ Words may be extended in meaning; e.g., uk means ‘hook’ but also ‘fishing gear in general.’

The source of creole words is spoken, not written, English, so that it is not always possible to decide whether a particular simplification of pronunciation (amini ‘how many’ or olfeshanwan ‘outdated,’ for instance) took place in English or creole.

With information gleaned from this brief account, the reader might like to attempt etymologies of these words:

meigidat ‘understand’

jangudanwei ‘westerly’

meigapwan ‘artificial’

nogudbala ‘sinner’

gambek bumareng ‘returning boomerang’ (not all boomerangs return)

brennu ‘modern’

riligudwei ‘excellently’

boniwan ‘skinny’

gulujap ‘near’.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Bad English usage is a continuing battle for everyone. It requires unending vigilance, even by those who apparently should know better.”—From an editorial in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, June 2, 1980, p. 6. [Submitted by Carol Verdun, Wellesley, Ontario.] …Or should that be especially by those who should know better?

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“…wild and wooly snap-front yolk-shouldered shirts are showing up under $300 sports jackets.”—Playboy, July, 1980. [Submitted by Dennis Moore, Greenville, South Carolina, who comments, The yoke’s on y’all, boys.]

OBITER DICTA: The Language of Medicine

John H. Felts, M.D., Bowman Gray School of Medicine, Wake Forest University

The requirements for hospital accreditation in the United States are such that house officers and staff physicians must be compulsively complete in recording what happens to patients. As Dr. McArdle has indicated, this is something of a chore at which most of us are less than competent. Medical college curricula are so laden with courses in the sciences, basic and behavioral, that proficiency in our language can hardly be expected. In 1898, the University of North Carolina School of Medicine asked only that matriculants pass examinations determining their proficiency in English composition arithmetic, algebra, and Latin; today the requisite courses for entry into most American medical schools are chemistry, biology, and physics. The need for brevity, simplicity, and clarity in medical writing is still recognized and appreciated, but only the most ardent optimist has any hope for improvement in our prose anytime soon.

Most hospital record rooms have their own selection of amazing arrangements of words put together by dictator and the typing pool. Here are some, for which doctors, I fear, must assume major responsibility.

The left leg became numb at times and she walked it off.

The patient has chest pain if she lies on her left side for over a year.

Father died in his 90s of female trouble in his prostate and kidneys.

Both the patient and the nurse herself reported passing flatus.

Skin—somewhat pale but present.

On the second day the knee was better, and on the third day it had completely disappeared.

The pelvic examination will be done later on the floor.

By the time she was admitted to the hospital her rapid heart had stopped and she was feeling much better.

If he squeezes the back of his neck for four or five years it comes and goes.

Patient was seen in consultation by Dr. —, who felt we should sit tight on the abdomen, and I agreed.

Dr. — is watching his prostate.

Discharge status: Alive but without permission.

Coming from Detroit, Mich., this man has no children.

At the time of onset of pregnancy the mother was undergoing bronchoscopy.

Healthy appearing decrepit 69-year-old white female, mentally alert but forgetful.

When you pin him down, he has some slowing of the stream.

Further comment would be superfluous, but one physician did offer some marginal notes about the results of a physical examination recorded by a third-year medical student. Martial introitus provoked “camp-follower?” and no brewery the more facetious “ailing?” Marital and bruit were obviously intended.

In a less permissive era, one of the surprises for a young medical student was the variety and vigor of sexual terms. Gonorrhea, known variously as clap, gleet, rupture, or strain in most of the rest of the country, was called running reins by black residents of South Carolina’s Sea Islands who attended the outpatient clinic of the Medical College of South Carolina at Charleston. My inquiries failed to account for the usage; nowhere else have I encountered the expression.

The OED may offer a clue identifying reins as once a common term for ‘kidneys or loins.’ Presumably these definitions survived in the isolation of the Islands after their introduction by Scots or English overseers to slaves working the plantations. An interesting example of similar usage appears in A Counter-Blaste to Tobacco, by James I, published anonymously in 1604: “But by the contrary, if a man smoke himselfe to death with it (and many have done) O then some other disease must beare the blame for that fault. So do olde harlots thanke their harlotrie for their many yeares, that custome being healthfull (say they) ad purgandos Renes, but never have minde how many die of the Pockes in the flower of their youth.” But nowhere have I heard the Elizabethan term for the venereal sore in the groin, Winchester goose, and only in Charleston have I heard the term haircut used for the chancre of syphilis. The origin of this use should be apparent.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“When officers arrived, they heard…a loud disturbance caused by people congregated in a yard, on the street and on the sidewalk. All but two who were arrested obeyed the officers' request to disburse.” [From Police Beat in The Outlook, October 21, 1981, page 8. Submitted by Douglas Lind, Seattle, Washington…. And we thought Seattle was a clean town….]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The Trojans, symbolized by their white horse, Traveler III, who races around the Coliseum’s running track when USC scores, always strikes fear in the opposition because, like that steed, they are big and flashy.” [From Sports Illustrated, 5 October, 1981, page 27. Submitted by William Simon III, Ramstein Air Base, Federal Republic of Germany. Eh?]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“And what to my wondering ears should appear but a Secretary of State speaking perfectly coherent, intelligent English.” [From the Wall Street Journal, October 15, 1981, n.p. Submitted by McColl Pringle, Charleston, South Carolina. Should that be wondering eyes? or, maybe, wandering eyes? or…]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Dictionary of Anagrams

Samuel C. Hunter, (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 267 pp.

Je n’en vois pas le nécessité de ce livre. Surely the point about anagrams, like playing Patience or doing crosswords generally, is that one does them for oneself. A dictionary of anagrams is cheating, like a pianola that makes one look as though one is playing, let us say, Mozart’s Piano Sonata no. 11 in A as delicately as Solomon, when everybody knows that one is pumping it out mechanically.

There are many of us whose genius calls us not to purchase fame in keen iambics, but mild anagram, notably those of us who do not consider that the day is satisfactorily concluded until we have done The Times crossword. Clues that are anagrams are indicated by some coded hint like “embroiled” or “broken up” or “resorted.”

Digression: I once asked Edmund Akenhead, who has been crossword editor of The Times for many years, which of the many thousands of clues he has set he enjoyed most. Impossible to decide, he replied. But he remembered with pleasure the clue which was a total blank (7 letters), to which the solution was “missing.” I remember with rage the clue that was simply a capital letter O (8,6); solution: “circular letter.”

I am afraid that it is a legend that he once set: “Listen carefully for an aural perversion” (5,2,4,4); solution: “Prick up your ears.”

To have to resort to a dictionary of anagrams to solve the crossword is as lowering as to have to look the quotation clues up in a dictionary of quotations. I confess that I have on occasion committed the latter, but I have always felt dirty afterwards.

Samuel Hunter retired two years ago from working for British Rail. To mitigate the tedium of that employment he has been compiling crosswords for more than thirty years. No wonder the trains never run on time. He has now compiled this majestic Folly, listing about 20,000 anagrams grouped alphabetically in sections by length from words of five to thirteen letters. His collection is confined to single-word anagrams, which spoils the fun: the best anagrams are ones scrambled out of many words. For example, “The Dictionary of Anagrams by Samuel C. Hunter” can be anagrammatized into (3,10,2,8,2,6,1,6) “Racy tome useful in broaching many a hard test.”

Much of the information in this dictionary, particularly about the longer words, is obvious. I need no crossword compiler come from British Rail to tell me that versification is an anagram of verifications, or that rumel-gumption (whatever that may be) makes rumle-gumption. Akenhead would never put so stupid a word in his crossword.

I suppose that this dictionary may be useful to compilers of crosswords, poor harmless drudges. But I should have thought that they would prefer to concoct their own anagrams, and in any case would be cribbed by the restriction to single words. We seldom have anything as simple as a single-word anagram in Akenhead’s daily examination. Solvers of crosswords who surreptitiously turn to it in desperation are frauds and poor fishes, as solvers of crosswords by definition are on occasions.

Anagrammania is an old affliction. I could give you examples from Classical Greek, except that my typewriter does not have the Greek alphabet, and it might cause grief to VERBATIM’s compositors. Wordy wits have been transposing letters for want of anything better to do for centuries. Dame Eleanor Davies (a prophetess from the Moral Majority in the reign of King Charles I) was appropriately turned into “Never so mad a ladie.” Marie Touchet (mistress of Charles IX of France) was anagrammatized by Henry IV as “Je charme tout.” And in case this suggests an unduly royalist bias in anagrams, Voltaire is accepted as an anagram of Arouet l(e) j(eune); well, OK, with a bit of fudging around the u’s and j’s. Florence Nightingale makes “Flit on cheering angel.” Horatio Nelson makes “Honor est a Nilo.” Queen Victoria’s Jubilee makes “I require love in a subject.” Quid est Veritas (Jesting Pilate, John xviii, 38) makes “Vir est qui adest.”

I am a greedy collector of reference books of all sorts. I think that my trade makes me need the security blanket of knowing that I can look the answer to anything up somewhere. But I think that a dictionary of anagrams may be taking things too far. If I find myself using it, I may have to give up the crossword.

—Philip Howard

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Naming Names

Adrian Room, (McFarland & Co Inc., Jefferson, North Carolina, 1981, and Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1981), 359pp.

The first thing to say about this book is that it deserves a place in any collection of serious onomastic works. It is the authoritative dictionary of pseudonyms and can be relied upon both for its accurate rendering of a name adopted by a particular person and for the name that was abandoned. That is something that cannot be said of many books on the subject. Leslie Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s Companion, for example, though very useful as a reference work on films and the people connected with them, is sloppy in its dealings with the name changes of actors and actresses.

Room’s scholarly thoroughness has been demonstrated now in several books. I have recently been using his Place-Names of the World and was again impressed by its accuracy and conciseness. Place-Name Changes Since 1900, another from the Room one-man factory, can also be thoroughly relied on. Of late, several word books have also been emerging with the Adrian Room stamp of authenticity on them.

But what pleases me most about Naming Names is that the first half of the title is taken seriously. We have here a full discussion of naming, if “discussion” is the right word for a large collection of entertaining anecdotes which illustrate how people go about the task of literally making a name for themselves. Thus we are told not only that Oscar Wilde became Sebastian Melmoth when he went to live in France, but why he chose that name. “Melmoth” was a name that had been invented by a remote ancestor of Wilde’s for the hero of his novel, Melmoth the Wanderer. “Sebastian” recalled Saint Sebastian, usually portrayed as being martyred by arrows. Wilde felt himself to be a martyr, and the arrows on his prison uniform had specifically recalled Sebastian.

Actually, Room could have continued a little with the Sebastian Melmoth story. Frank Harris, who went to visit Wilde in exile, says that he would not allow anyone to address him by his assumed name. “Mr. Melmoth is unknown, you see. I only use the name Melmoth to spare the blushes of the postman.” Wilde wanted to be called Oscar Wilde, the name he had made famous. A few years previously he had remonstrated with an American who entered his name in a guest book as “O. Wilde.” That too he looked upon as a disfigurement of his name.

Wilde was also responsible for a typical witticism about pseudonyms in a letter he wrote from France to Ada Leverson: “Reggie Turner is staying here under the name ‘Robert Ross,’ Robbie under the name ‘Reginald Turner.’ It is better they should not use their own names.”

That particular anecdote is not in Naming Names, but there is plenty of humor there, often in the names themselves as well as in the stories about them. Rip Torn, for example, seems like one of those names of the Justin Case, Tom Katz variety, that you dream up after a few potent glasses. But Torn is the actor’s real name, and the “Rip” nickname had been a family joke for years, already bestowed on an uncle. Torn’s parents named him Elmore, but they always used Rip. For him, then, that was his name, and he fought against suggested changes (Richard Torn, Ralph Torn) when he went to Hollywood.

A major feature of Naming Names is the way in which the pseudonyms have been rearranged into lists that bring out their common characteristics. Lists are, of course, highly fashionable in the publishing world at the moment, but they do serve a useful purpose. Room gives us lists of names changed because the real ones were “unsuitable” or “embarrassing.” Julie Lush become Julie Anthony, Jean Shufflebottom became Jeannie Carson, Diana Fluck became Diana Dors. We learn who changed sex by means of pseudonyms—the Brontes went the usual way, from female to male; but Fiona Macleod, Madame Marguerite de Ponti, and Angelina Gushington concealed male writers. William Sharp, who invented the Fiona of his new name, accidentally made a contribution to our stock of first names, since that name was later to become extremely popular in Britain.

A thoroughly worthwhile list of names in the book might at first glance seem curious for a work on pseudonyms, for it gives real names only. It makes the point that the bearers of the apparently phoney names Johnny Cash, Goldie Hawn, Suzi Quatro, and Orson Welles are not, in fact, concealing anything. Those names are real. Similarly, Adolf Hitler was quite right to call himself that: he would only have been Adolf Schicklgruber [sic] had his father not changed the family name. I seem to recall that another famous name, that of the Eiffel Tower, might have been rather different but for a name change: Eiffel’s family were originally the Boenichausens.

The actor Frank Lovejoy does not get a mention in Naming Names because that happens to be his real name. A pity though, because the distinguished British journalist, Katharine Whitehorn, in a column she wrote for The Observer many years ago, told the Lovejoy story. When he began as an actor, names of the Rock Hudson type were in vogue. He became Max Million. Then sincere names were needed: he became Abe Washington. George Sweden came next, when geographical names were in, and Marlon Ladd came when familiar names were needed. The next trend was for happy names. “How about Frank Lovejoy?” said Frank to his agent. “Great!”

Maybe you’re thinking of changing your name. It has been suggested that we should all do so periodically because we get too wrapped up in the egos our names reflect, too obsessed with “making our name.” That is certainly what the name-changers in this book were determined to do, and most of them succeeded. I once again recommend that you read about what they did and why they did it in this enjoyable book.

[Leslie Dunkling, Thames Ditton, Surrey]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors

Comp. Oxford English Dictionary Department, (Clarendon Press: Oxford University Press, 1981), xiv + 448pp.

Everything flows and nothing stays still, in language as in everything else. In this constant goddam flux we long for stability and authority. We want a Big Linguistic Daddy to tell us that this is the right way to spell that word and that is the correct meaning of such-and-such, that this word takes a hyphen and that one does not, that we are foolish to divide words like leg-ends and reap-pear in those places at the ends of lines.

Well, here is the house style-book of the Oxford University Press, listing alphabetically the latest words of the clever men at Oxford on the nice little mechanics of English. As it happens, it offers no advice on what to do with goddam, though I guess it would prefer goddamned. It pronounces that God-awful should be spelled (or spelt) thus with capital and hyphen.

The ancestor of the book was born in 1905 and then called Collins Authors and Printers Dictionary. It was intended to give the Oxford line on all the questions and problems that arise in preparing printed or typewritten documents and books. Spelling, punctuation, italicization, capitalization, abbrevs, foreign words and phrases, tricky names of people and places, and printing technicalities were its territory. In his original preface the exact and magisterial F. Howard Collins wrote: “While probably no one will agree with everything contained in this book, I hope it may be found that the number of marginal notes needed to bring it into accordance with the views of those who use it will be as few as could be expected, considering the difficulty of the subject-matter, and the fact that it is, I believe, the first time it has been thoroughly and systematically investigated in any country.”

His useful little oracle has been revised through eleven editions since then, most recently by Stanley Beale in 1973. Now it has been rewritten and revised by Bob Burchfield’s lexicophiles at the great word-factory of the Oxford English Dictionaries to bring it in as a full member of the Oxford dictionary family. It has also been renamed and given a red instead of a blue dust jacket.

Its territory is still the same, but the inhabitants have changed in the past eight years. Obsolescent and unfashionable words have been dropped to make room for considerable numbers of new tricks and traps of language. There has been a purge of such French phrases as cheval de retour and gaieté de coeur, indicating, I hope, that Oxford authors are less inclined to show off with fancy foreign expressions for which there are perfectly good English versions. Out goes kaffir-boom, the Africian tree, such unfashionable titles as Pacha of Many Tales (Marryat, 1836), paideutics, and palankeen. In come paederast (“use pederast”), the new geography and politics (Kaliningrad and KANU), the jargon of computer typesetting (VDUs, scrolling, and the Blessed K), and a surprising number of ancient omissions that have become fashionable or started to cause trouble (palladium, Tisiphone).

Oxford judges that tinplate has lost its hyphen during the past ten years, and that kari, the French word for ‘curry,’ should now be spelled karri with a double r. For the first time it tells us the difference between ti-ti (‘NZ mutton bird’) and titi (‘S. Amer. monkey’), and that palatable is the Oxford-approved spelling, not “palateable.” You will see that much of the matter is trivial, but it is the stuff in which consistency is desirable, and which is embarrassing when it goes wrong. As Howard Collins said of the first edition, you—and especially you Americans—will not agree with it all. On The Times we still prefer to spell connexion in the etymologically “correct” way with an x. If you have the whoreson letter in the alphabet, why not use it? We also prefer at The Times, with endearing antiquarianism, to spell Monna Lisa sic with the double n, to show that we know that it is derived from Madonna. Maybe we should change that when we revise the style-book.

For those, particularly Brits, who have no style-book of their own, for all who like their prose to be ship-shape and Bristol fashion, for anybody who has worried about how to spell Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist or how and what Planck’s constant is, this is a useful quick desk-book. I reckon it has more than 20,000 headwords. Serious perfectionists will also need Hart’s Rules for Compositors and Readers at the University Press Oxford, Fowler to harangue them in a splendidly old-fashioned way about their wills and shalls, and a resignation to the truth that the language belongs to all of us and that there is no such thing as perfect Standard English.

—Philip Howard

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“After all, you’ve nothing to lose, except a great way of looking good and feeling fit.” [From an advertising mailing piece for Vapa-Mist, sent by Nordic, Reigate, Surrey. Submitted by S.H. Bendahan, Wraysbury, Berkshire. There’s nothing like Truth in Advertising.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“My guide for this visit was a charming mother of three grown children named Nicole Paiement,…” [From the Columbus Dispatch, n.d. Submitted by Dorothy Branson, Columbus, Ohio. Charming, perhaps, but a little short on imagination.]

OBITER DICTA

Allen Rettberg, West Chester, Ohio

The 70s will forever be known as the Me decade. I hope the 80s will complete this trend and become the I decade.

I realized that the shift was not complete when I received a call at 5:40 AM. The caller, a friend, was stranded and needed a phone number. Groggily, I complied. After hanging up I realized that he had said “we’re” stuck out here. I began wondering if there was someone with him or he was just hiding behind the we.

It’s done often, you know. We’ll say, “Well, we’ve made some mistakes along the way….” Of course we mean, “I have made some mistakes,” but we makes us look less foolish. We also works well when we’re really not enthusiastic about something. “We’ll be seeing you,” is a good example. If we had any intention of seeing them again we’d say, “I’ll be seeing you,” or, “I’ll be talking to you,” or words to that effect.

I has taken its lumps over the years. Perhaps the best example can be found in college professors and English teachers who would not allow the student to use I when writing a paper. (One was substituted for I.) Another reason I has suffered is responsibility. There’s no question that the two most dreaded words in the English language are I do.

Few even want to take responsibility for not knowing something. Rather than saying, “I don’t know,” they say, “Beats me.” So casual. So effective. It not only makes you less ignorant, it gives you the upper hand. Not only don’t you know, you don’t care.

I have a friend who I think would benefit from using we. He’ll make a prediction on a football game and then he’ll start qualifying it. Every conceivable factor will be mentioned—including injuries, weather, etc.—to insure that his prediction is safe. If he said, “We’ll take Pittsburgh,” I don’t think we’d have to go through all that….

“Federal Emergency Management Agency officials said it was not known for certain if the dome was increasing in size because no geologist was aboard the plane.”—The Arizona Republic, July 10, 1980. [Submitted by Nelda S. Crowell, Tempe, Arizona.] Probably.

READER’S QUERY: A Punctuation Parable

When I give a talk on behalf of SAGE (the Society for the Advancement of Good English), I frequently begin with the story of a man who was asked to speak at a public gathering and who decided to prepare his own introduction. He wrote the following, with the request that the master of ceremonies use it without making any changes: “Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you a man among men. He is out of place when among cheaters and scoundrels. He feels quite at home when surrounded by persons of integrity. He is uncomfortable when not helping others. He is perfectly satisfied when his fellow human beings are happy. He tries to make changes in order for this country to be a better place. He should leave us this evening with feelings of disgust at ineptitude and a desire to do better. I present to you Mr. John Smith.

Unfortunately, Mr. Smith or his secretary made a number of errors in punctuation, so that the master of ceremonies found himself reading the following: “Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you a man. Among men, he is out of place. When among cheaters and scoundrels, he feels quite at home. When surrounded by persons of integrity, he is uncomfortable. When not helping others, he is perfectly satisfied. When his fellow human beings are happy, he tries to make changes. In order for this country to be a better place, he should leave us this evening. With feelings of disgust at ineptitude and a desire to do better, I present to you Mr. John Smith.”

This story, which so vividly illustrates the importance of proper punctuation, is not my creation. It is a reconstruction of something I read or heard as a high school student, several decades ago. I would appreciate information from readers of Verbatim concerning the identity of the story’s originator, so that I can duly credit him/her when the occasion next arises.

[Lawrence Casler, 65 Woodland Road, Pittsford, New York 14534]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Grammer is a science: punctuation is an art.” [From the NJEA (New Jersey Educational Association) Review, September 1981, page 13. Submitted by Chet Meyer, Wayne, New Jersey. But spelling is the most creative of all….]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Complementary Bar and Buffet” [From an invitation to the annual Alumni Association cocktail party of the School of General Studies, Columbia University. Submitted by Brian-Marc Rom, New York City.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Keyes… said she sees a need for the police department, but feels the three officers the city had (reduced from five) is too many and 1½ would be more sufficient.” [From a post Election Day article in the World, Coos Bay, Oregon. Submitted by D.R. Miller, Coos Bay, Oregon. 1½ oafs are better than 3.]

EPISTOLA {Patty Williams}

Regarding the quotation of W.C. Fields in “Pleonasties,” either I do not understand pleonasm or Dr. Ellner does not understand that there are also Anglo-Catholics and that the term Roman Catholic is, therefore, not redundant.

[Patty Williams, Excelsior, Minnesota]

EPISTOLA {Carolyn Opitz}

The article on Indian words in English [VII, 4] was both enjoyable and enlightening. However, I must correct a universal misapprehension that the author, Norman Ward, accepts as true: the words papaya and papaw (or paw-paw) may seem to be interchangeable, but they are not. The papaya is a tropical melonlike fruit found growing in semitropical climes like that of Cuba, Hawaii, Southern California, Florida, and Mexico; the papaw is a watermelon-shaped fruit about three to four inches long…. It is ripe for only a short time and is messy to eat because of its numerous flat, black seeds, about one third of an inch long. The skin of the papaw, which turns from pale green to yellow when the fruit is ripe, is very tough and has to be peeled off before eating…. The first filling I ever had was paid for with a large sack of papaws: the dentist adored them! That could never have happened with papayas, for they didn’t grow in Kentucky. I am sorry to say that the papaw tree has all but disappeared from the scene. I am sure that most of the younger generation has never even heard of papaws—much less tasted one.

[Carolyn Opitz, Carson City, Nevada]

EPISTOLA {G.J. Grieshaber}

Mr. Axel Hornos, in “Street Name Fun Game,” [VII, 3], lists a street, Emanon, which is ‘no name’ spelled backward. Then [VII, 4], in Mr. Harry R. Houle’s letter on odd names in Arizona, he gives “the anonymous award of honor…to Camino sin nombre,” which my high-school Spanish says means ‘street without a name.’ (Emanon!)

Now, the Russians make many doubtful claims about their “firsts,” such as TV, radio, the telephone, maybe even gunpowder. But I believe they are one up on us in the no-name department. Moscow’s Kremlin is a very irregularly shaped piece of land, about 65 acres in area. It is completely surrounded by a high, protecting brick battlement or wall. At each angle in the wall (and even in straight sections) are gates or towers— about 19 in all. These have names like the Saviour’s, Tsar’s, Alarm, Beklemishev, Secret, etc. The Kemlin was started in A.D. 1147, long before Columbus, so the structure is quite old. But on a straight section along the Moscow river will be found First Nameless Tower and Second Nameless Tower. The March 1966 National Geographic (p. 309) has an excellent scale drawing of the whole Kremlin, if anyone cares to check it.

[G.J. Grieshaber, Cincinnati, Ohio]

EPISTOLA {Irving Allen}

P.S. One time, in a Texas border town, I noticed a street sign reading Quince. At first I thought, “How nice to name their streets after fruits.” But the next streets were named Catorce, Trece, and Doce. A little learning is a dangerous thing!

A new neighborhood shopping amenity, a Japanese food store, opened recently on Manhattan’s ethnically diverse Lower East Side. The store was soon stocked with imported canned goods, cooking accessories, and a cold counter filled with Japanese food staples and delicacies. Shortly, a handsome, professionally lettered sign appeared on the store’s window, proclaiming “Japanese Dairy.” Dairy? Milk and cheese products, of course, are almost unknown in the traditional Japanese diet.

There is a variety of ethnic “delis” in the neighborhood, and this clearly was a welcome addition. The store was closed, so I couldn’t ask, and I wouldn’t, but I imagined a dialog between the proprietor, speaking with a Japanese accent, and a New York sign painter:

PROPRIETOR: “Please paint the sign to read ‘Japanese Deli”’ [confusing the pronunciation of the l in deli, such that it had the sound of the r in dairy].

SIGN PAINTER: “ ‘Japanese Dairy,’ right?”

PROPRIETOR: “Yes, ‘deli’ ” [deri].

Several weeks later the sign had been professionally changed to “Japanese Deli,” which it is, and may it long be.

[Irving Allen, University of Connecticut]

EPISTOLA {David L. Gold}

I agree with Charles Bremer [IV, 2] that “unfortunately, our language in its present state is far from an ideal system of symbols, growing as it has from an array of northern European and Romance languages with a sprinkling of American Indian, Yiddish, and a few dozen other languages” and that “therefore, steps must be taken now to purify and distill our language…” As a first step, I propose the removal of such foreignisms as American, international, language, eventual, means, people, exchange, idea, mutual, unfortunate, present, state, ideal, system, symbol, array, European, Romance, Indian, dozen, mixture, tend, develop, extensive, lexicon, complicate, degree, endanger, use, purify, distill, accurate, country, effort, communication, interest, support, Charles, city, and Oregon (all taken from his letter).

[David L. Gold, University of Haifa]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Drive Slower When Wet” [Highway sign in Ohio, in westbound lane, about 50 miles east of Indiana state line. Submitted by Robert E.A.P. Ritholz, Madison, Wisconsin.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“FAMILY PLANNING TO END IN FALL” [From a leader in the Grants Pass Daily Courier, June 5, 1981. Submitted by Helen Coster, Grants Pass, Oregon, who wonders whether the world is aware of the deadline.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The crowd was small, but that didn’t stop the Allman Brothers, noted Southern rock band, from putting on a credible show at Sweeney Auditorium in Santa Fe on Tuesday evening.” [From a review by Dwight F. Loop in the Albuquerque Journal, September 3, 1981, page C-6. Submitted by Kenneth R. Fortman, Albuquerque, New Mexico…. Incredible as it may have seemed….]

Paring Pairs No. 7

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

(a). Difficult upwind sailing with this in your stomach.
(b). Arrest at English boys’school?
(c). Sounds, littorally, like a palm.
(d). Heavy traffic in hybridized flora?
(e). Golgotha irritated him.
(f). Jivaro trick cyclist.
(g). Dull spouse yields nonconclusion.
(h). Shipshape.
(i). Barely destroyed paper, then went on the cheep.
(j). Staff reduction: hair today, gone tomorrow.
(k). Filthy fellow, now immaculate, wins it all.
(l). Felne in speakeasy.
(m). Lower than low to string us along.
(n). That one card is worth 2000 or 2200!
(o). Lawn game, played with grenades instead of balls, yields food for thought.
(p). Such a person does not have green hair!
(q). Priestly individual.
(r). Source for Thatcher.
(s). Oh my! No honor to be observed in Jugoslavian breeches!
(t). Raise one for Cockney intelligentsia.
(u). Profitless test for bootlegger.
(v). Nonagenarian homosexuals.
(w). Sounds as if Cronos and his cronies dispatched prostitutes.
(x). All that is left of fashion after paying the mohel.
(y). Bungay’s colleague backward in using saucepan.
(z). Catch a crab in a one-horse town?

1. Altar.
2. Back.
3. Bacon.
4. Base.
5. Beech.
6. Blind.
7. Bris.
8. Brow.
9. Carrot.
10. Chicken.
11. Clean.
12. Collar.
13. Crew.
14. Croquet.
15. Cross.
16. Crossing.
17. Cut.
18. Dry.
19. Ego.
20. Eton.
21. Eye.
22. Frier.
23. Garden.
24. Gay.
25. Glass.
26. Hard.
27. Head.
28. Limb.
29. Mate.
30. Nineties.
31. Patch.
32. Plant.
33. Quires.
34. Roof.
35. Ruined.
36. Run.
37. Sent.
38. Shrinker.
39. Single.
40. Split.
41. Stale.
42. Sweep.
43. Tack.
44. Tiger.
45. Toll.
46. Ton.
47. Top.
48. Tree.
49. Trousers.
50. Vile.
51. Water.
52. Whores.
53. Wine.

Winners will receive one of the following: the Collector’s Edition of Thomas H. Middleton’s Light Refractions (retail value, $30 or £15); English English by Norman W. Schur (retail value, $24.95 or £12.50); three copies of Wordsmanship, by Clauràne duGran (retail value, $29.85 or £14.85); twelve copies of Definitive Quotations, by John Ferguson (retail value, $35.40 or 18); Word for Word, by Edward C. Pinkerton (retail value, $39.95 or £20); four one-year subscriptions to VERBATIM (retail value, $30 or £15); any two of the following: Verbatim Volumes I & II, Verbatim Volumes III & IV, Verbatim Volumes V & VI, Verbatim Index: Volumes I-VI; or a credit of $25 or £12.50 towards the purchase of any other title or titles 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, Essex, CT 06426, U.S.A.

You need send only the correct solution, not the answers to all of the clues. Please indicate your choice of prize along with your answer.

N.B.: 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 correct answers for 21 days, starting with the day the first correct answer is received, and to draw one winner from each office.

Paring Pairs No. 6

In North America, the correct answer to Paring Pairs No. 5 (Bow) was received from Mr. Roy K. Stevens, New York, N.Y. The winner in North America to Paring Pairs No. 6 (Man) was Mrs. Roy H. Anderson, Mount Vernon, Washington. Winners elsewhere will be announced in the next issue.

(a). Chastening influence. (32, 5) Bundling Bored.
(b). Disappointment. (27, 4) Hart Brake.
(c). Coerce. (9, 2) Rail Rode.
(d). Origami feline. (23, 3) Paper Tiger.
(e). Met pieman. (8, 1) Simple Simon.
(f). Saint. (1, 20) Simon Templar.
(g). Electronic layout. (24, 5)Bred Bored.
(h). Where Trevi et al. might be kept. (25, 6) Fountain Pen.
(i). Source. (25, 30) Fountain Head.
(j). Jazz tune. (3, 11) Tiger Rag.
(k). Pre-ballpoint essential. (6, 14) Pen Wiper.
(l). Eat. (4, 24) Brake Bred.
(m). Row of trees. (16, 4) Wind Brake.
(n). Carminate. (4, 16) Brake Wind.
(o). CB interruption. (13, 13) Breaker Breaker.
(p). 007’s optic. (10, 7) Bond’s I.
(q). Infantile customers. (22, 12) Carriage Trade.
(r). Toxophilist. (28, 15) William Tell.
(s). Meerschaum. (26, 18) Pipe Liner.
(t). Modern caravanserai. (21, 15) Mow Tell.
(u). Turn of the century. (11, 33) Rag Time.
(v). Expert surfer. (10, 7, 26, 18) Bond’s I Pipe Liner.
(w). Tarkington creation. (6, 29) Pen Rod.
(x). For writing swinish prose. (17, 6) Pig Pen.
(y). Carroll’s elderly acrobat. (19, 28) Father William.
(z). End of the line. (9, 30) Rail Head.
(aa). Orange king. (28, 7) William I.
(bb). Haute couture. (11, 12) Rag Trade.
(cc). Crusader. (34, 20) Night Templar.
(dd). Eventide. (34, 33) Night Time.
(ee). Stiff printing medium. (23, 5) Paper Bored.
(ff). Hopalong Cassidy. (28, 27) William Hart.
(gg). Makes for rough going. (30, 16) Head Wind.
(hh). Quality stationery. (11, 23) Rag Paper.
(ii). New World propellant. (12, 16) Trade Wind.
(jj). Professional Journal. (12, 23) Trade Paper.
(kk). Assault in the dark. (34, 12) Night Trade.
(ll). Jacket. (16, 13) Wind Breaker.
(mm). Use a watch. (15, 33) Tell Time.
(nn). Exupéry found it in Arras. (34, 16) Night Wind.
(oo). Self-contained air-breathing apparatus. (16, 26) Wind Pipe.
(pp). Celebrity. (30, 18) Head Liner.
(qq). Chronologer. (19, 33) Father Time.

OBITER DICTA: Lost in Translation

Irving Allen, University of Connecticut

A new neighborhood shopping amenity, a Japanese food store, opened recently on Manhattan’s ethnically diverse Lower East Side. The store was soon stocked with imported canned goods, cooking accessories, and a cold counter filled with Japanese food staples and delicacies. Shortly, a handsome, professionally lettered sign appeared on the store’s window proclaiming: “Japanese Dairy.” Milk and cheese products, of course, are almost unknown in the traditional Japanese diet.

There is a variety of ethnic “delis” in the neighborhood, and this clearly was a welcome addition. The store was closed, so I couldn’t ask, and I wouldn’t but I imagined a dialog between the proprietor, speaking with a Japanese accent, and a New York sign painter:

PROPRIETOR: “Please paint the sign to read Japanese Deli” [confusing the pronunciation of the l in deli, such that it had the sound of the r in dairy].

SIGN PAINTER: “Japanese Dairy, right?”

PROPRIETOR: “Yes, deli” [deri].

Several weeks later the sign had been professionally changed to “Japanese Deli,” which it is, and may it long be.

EPISTOLA {R.K. Dillon}

I lived in London for seven years and was proud of “knowing my way around” the language and its variations. For instance, I knew that Beauchamp Place was pronounced BEE’chim and that Beaufort Street was pronounced BOW’furt. Imagine the difficulty I had when I was working on a movie called The Dirty Dozen and had to drive to a location shooting at a place called BEW’ly. I followed the directions I’d been given and passed back and forth through a town posted as Beaulieu, until I was informed by a local in the main street there that I was smack-dab in the middle of BEW’l…. Adding to my general perplexity was a pedantic friend who insists to this day that the ei in either and neither should be pronounced as in neighbor and weight. As you can see by my return address, I gave up and came home.

[R.K. Dillon, New York City]

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Make a small car smaller. (7)
5. Give a poor fish a chance to gobble up the pot. (7)
9. A pretty resident at the landlord-tenant meeting. (10, 5)
10. TV with diminishing returns.
11. Sleeping partner. (7)
12. Supposed to be a life sentence. (1, 2)
13. Adam’s opposite number. (4, 3)
14. He was O.K. in the old Persian version. (4)
16. A spot of some substance for the bride. (3)
19. Cure to restore color. (4)
20. When they halt the freight, go after amber is discerned. (7)
23. This keeps your pot under cover. (3)
24. Put it on the horse’s nose and he’ll perform. (7)
26. Patch things up and forget about that divorce. (6)
28. “Ladies and gentlemen, retire to the jury room and consider your verdict.” (5, 2, 3, 5)
29. “Dee-Dum, Dum-Dee, they’re all the same to me,” said Alice. (7)
30. Tried to keep a poor fool covered by surveillance. (7)

Down

1. Possible change of quarters for shopkeepers. (4, 4)
2. Mrs., ejected from best (6) part of bed, left in a terrible state. (8)
3. See acrimony in the alphabetic bureaucracy? (9)
4. Quite a job, but one won’t want to be taken to it. (4)
5. Shod by welfare, or was it looted? (10)
6. Sick transit? Much better. (5)
7. Was Dorian gray in advance? (6)
8. No Hyde, she, but a tough customer, anyway. (6)
12. Humor enjoyed by spoiled brats. (10)
15. Morning starts well with these French airs. (9)
17. Government store. (8)
18. No. 1, yet bawled out by the chief. (3, 5)
21. Try to get work. (6)
22. Follow the custom of hawking.
25. Well drilled. (5)
27. Change of hose for the walker. (4)

Crossword Puzzle Answers

1. Bustles(s).
5. Popcorn.
9. SH-out.
10. GARGOYLES (anagram OR LAY EGGS).
11. Motley.
12. TOT-ality (laity).
14. No diploma.
16. d-IRE NE-ed.
17. Fat-A-1.
19. Pal-PIT-ate.
22. E-c-ON-omic.
23. Critic.
26. Duplicity.
27. GENUS (genius, no I).
28. Mode-STY.
29. Open air.

Down

1. Best man.
2. S-co-OT-ed.
3. Wel-L IT HE-lps.
4. Sign.
5. Person-ALLY.
6. Poor alibi.
7. Oil pipe.
8. No style.
13. COmp-licit-Y.
15. Pillories.
17. Freedom.
18. TR-ou-PE-d.
20. Antenna.
21. EX-cu-S-er.
24. R-og-UE.
25. TYRO.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

(SIC TRANSIT Dept.) “The advent of these sleek coaches should provide a tremendous shot in the arm to both legs of Nevada’s passenger train system.”—Washington Report from Senator Gannon to Nevadans, May 1980. [Submitted by Donald Schmiedel, Las Vegas, Nevada.]

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