VOL IX, No 2 [Autumn, 1982]

Eponymous Anonymous

Diane Chapman, Phoenix, Arizona

An eponym is the person for whom something is named or one whose name is so prominently connected with something as to be a figurative designation for it. But at the point where the name passes into such widespread usage as to be figurative, the fame or notoriety once attached to it has, ironically, often evaporated into the great mist of obscurity. Let these notable people be rescued—or at least momentarily recalled—from the anonymity of the common noun. Excluded are such forms as Morse code, Erlenmeyer flask and Brinell hardness, where the eponym has retained its capitalization. Geiger counter, for example, is clearly not some epidemiological eponym, some census sensor for counting Geigers. (Actually, the apparatus is, properly speaking, a Geiger-Müller counter.)

In the scientific disciplines, eponyms have naturally flourished. Each measurment, unit of energy, or energy characteristic is a scrupulously defined entity. The name stands, jewel-like, splendid and unadorned: ampere (Andre), watt (James), ohm (Georg Simon), and volt (Alessandro [Volta]) are all part of our daily lives, companions of such delightfully arcane quantities as the (Michael) farad[ay], (Karl) gauss, (Anders) angstrom, (Samuel) langley, (Joseph) henry, (Heinrich) hertz, (Johann) lambert, (Isaac) newton, and (James P.) joule.

Many terms give a lower-case and, sometimes, differently spelled but lasting fame: the macabre guillotine of Dr. Guillotin, Rudolf Diesel’s engine, artist William Morris’s chair, John McAdam’s macadam road surface, François Mansart’s mansard roof, John Mason’s jar. Cotton is given luster, strength, and receptiveness to dye by being mercerized (John Mercer). When metal is coated with zinc for resistance to rust, it is galvanized (Luigi Galvani). Louis Daguerre created a type of photograph, the daguerreotype. Chemist Charles Macintosh developed a method of rubberizing cotton to waterproof it; the name remains the British generic term for raincoat, in much the same way that, on the Continent, a browning (American John M.) refers generally to any automatic pistol. On this side of the Atlantic, nearly any small pocket pistol is now called a derringer, from Henry Deringer’s short-barreled muzzle-loader.

In the United States, John Philip Sousa is both recent and popular enough to remain the recognizable parent of the sousaphone, but what of Antoine (known as Adolphe) Sax, a Belgian maker of musical instruments, and his marvelous reedbrass hybrid that enriches all types of twentieth-century music? Hollywood’s dazzling lights were the joint invention of the brothers Kleig[l], John and Anton. (Klieg eyes is a condition marked by conjunctivitis and watering of the eyes resulting from excessive exposure to intense light.) Perhaps unique among eponymous inventors is Benjamin Day, the American printer who developed the technique whereby line engravings can be shaded by the addition of varying numbers of dots. To the name of the process he contributed both of his: benday. And then, of course, there’s John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich, layering his roast beef between two slabs of bread that he might eat and still keep his fingers grease-free at the gaming table.

“Thomas Crapper,” however, whose life is supposedly chronicled in Flushed with Pride, must be exposed as a sophomoric joke. A quick peek into the Oxford English Dictionary reveals the root noun has a pedigree almost a millennium long. Still, the hoax has been highly successful when measured by the number of presumably scholarly types deceived. (Less effective was the same prankster’s Bust Up by “Otto Titsling,” which purported to describe the development of the brassiere. That aggrandizing appliance arose anonymously in France about 1600. At the time of her death in 1603, Queen Elizabeth I owned one.)

Politics has spawned some memorable eponyms, perhaps the inevitable offspring of its proverbially strange bedfellows: Charles Boycott, the English land agent in Ireland who was ostracized for refusing to reduce rents; Nicholas Chauvin, legendary blind adherent to Napoleonic patriotism; Étienne de Silhouette, Louis XVI’s controller-general of finances, either because he demanded such confiscatory taxation that its victims were left with nothing but the outline of things or because his term of office was “incomplete” (March—November 1759); Vidkun Quisling, the collaborator with Norway’s Nazi invaders, who made his name a synonym for traitor. A (Vyacheslav M.) molotov cocktail is a crude hand grenade.

Fashion, too, has its eponyms. A bertha, a wide round collar covering the shoulders, is presumably named for a queen of the Franks, the mother of Charlemagne—an exceptionally durable eponym, if true, since she died in 783. Prussian field marshall G.L. von Blücher designed the blucher, a sensible (one might even say pedestrian) shoe, but American feminist pioneer Amelia Bloomer startled the world with her underpants. Outside of England, a certain style of man’s hat is called a derby (after Edward Stanley, Twelfth Earl of Derby); in England the identical article is a bowler (after John Bowler, a nineteenth-century English hatmaker). French aerial gymnast Jules Léotard gave us a garment; so did James Thomas Brudnell, seventh Earl of Cardigan, who distinguished himself in the Crimea, but Lord Raglan, a fellow campaigner, had to be content with adding a sleeve style to history. (Irresistible, though a geographical eponym, is the snug knitted peaked cap from the same war: the balaklava. It has not fared so well as the Earl’s sweater, perhaps because of its overly exotic sound, leaving some misreading moderns to wonder why anyone would name a hat after a sweet, sticky Levantine pastry.)

In the realm of the gastronomic, where a chef’s flair seems inextricably related to his fame, proper nouns abound but some true eponyms exist. Peach Melba retains its personalization, but Australian soprano Nellie’s taste in toast prevails in today’s calorie-conscious kitchens. Sylvester Graham was a nineteenthcentury dietary reformer. Graham flour referred, originally, simply to whole wheat flour. What would the old faddist have said about the only popular survival of the eponym, the usually chocolate-covered graham cracker? Would he have condemned it as nutritionally oxymoronic or merely smiled at the sugarcoating of his wholesome message? Less than ambrosia—less, even, than a graham cracker—is the understandably embarrassed anonymity of K-rations, the World War II soldiers' lightweight packaged emergency food. Stand up and take a bow anyway, Dr. A.B. Keys, American physiologist. At the opposite extreme, some foods preserve the panache (not to be confused with a portmanteau stomache from overindulgence therein) of their aristocratic origins. What pudding, pie, or ice cream is not ennobled by Nesselrode? Where is the gourmet punster who can refrain from querying: who ate napoleons with Josephine when Bonaparte was away?

In botany the convention has been that he who discovers a flower adds to its loveliness his own name. Although most of these become obscure because of the unpronounceability of their Latin construction (the modest wild rose languishes under the burden of Rosa bourgeauiana), the names of some gentlemen and scholars long dead flourish under the noses of gardeners around the world: begonia (Michel Bégon); bougainvillea (Louis Antoine de Bougainville); camellia (Georg Josef Kamel); dahlia (Anders Dahl); forsythia (William Forsyth); freesia (F.H.T. Freese); fuchsia (Leonhard Fuchs); gardenia (Alexander Garden); kerria, an attractive yellow rose-like flower (William Kerr); lobelia (Matthias de Lobel); poinciana (de Poinci), poinsettia, perennial martyr to misspelling in the supermarket, being nearly always rendered as pointsettia, or pointsetta, or, in the chance absence of that upstart third t, poinsetta (Joel R. Poinsett); weigela (Christian Weigel); and wisteria (Caspar Wister). Patent roses are often named for great or lovely ladies. W. Atlee Burpee, the famous American horticulturist, wished to so honor Clare Boothe Luce and, chancing upon her in the club car of the train bearing them cross country, hastened to introduce himself:

“How do you do? I’m Burpee.”

The quick-witted but impatient lady replied with icy dismissal: “Yes, I sometimes get queasy on trains too.”

Or so the story goes. In any case, there is no Clare Boothe Luce rose, though there is John Macadam and his nut.

With the passing of literal horsepower passed also the victoria, the stanhope, the clarence, and the hansom, but even today, and for many days to come, we laugh with the tangletongued Reverend William A. Spooner and his isms and (though currently we bleep rather than bowdlerize) glower from the safe retrospect of history at puritanical editor Thomas Bowdler and his expurgations of “indelicacies” from the works of Shakespeare and other plain speakers. But one generation’s taboos may be transformed into succeeding generations' conversational canapés. The “Marquis”—actually Comte—de Sade has a perversion named for him; what of its counterpart, masochism? File it with the otherwise forgotten Austrian novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. (The delectable sacher torte is obviously unrelated to the petulant pursuer of pain; credit Frau Sacher, owner of one of the most famous of old Vienna’s coffee houses.) One explanation of hooker, ‘prostitute,’ is that it derives from the camp followers recruited by the inept Union general Joseph Hooker, who felt that debauchery on post was preferable to dalliance out of range of his control.

Because language is a living organism, simultaneously shedding and accreting, the individual fates of eponyms are as insecure as those of any other noun. Scientists and physicians disappear into trade names: Kelvin(ator) and Lister(ine). Slang is dependent on the durability of its eponym’s reputation; for how many years in the future will swaggering, aloof young men bogart a cigarette? That arch attempt at an almost-eponym, reaganomics, may not even outlast the administration responsible for it. Yet for every orrery, venturi, or vernier that endures in recondite realms, some vigorous new eponym eventually will shoulder its way into our daily vocabulary and ultimately be confirmed as a legitimate part of the language by its appearance in a dictionary. The process will be complete: the person will have disappeared into a definition.

EPISTOLA {Donald R. Morris}

Victor Lasseter’s delightful article—“John le Carré’s Spy Jargon: An Introduction and Lexicon” [VIII, 4]—does indeed garner most of the jargon terms, real and invented, which appear in le Carré’s work. But, as an outsider who apparently has never served in an agent-handling intelligence service, Mr. Lasseter sadly confuses actual jargon terms, le Carré coinages, and a variety of slangy expressions, really ironic quips, which le Carré is using for literary effect and which—although a working case officer might use them colloquially—are in no sense a part of the actual jargon.

The endless fun poked at jargon, in which Mr. Lasseter also indulges, stems from Webster’s first definition, as strange, outlandish, or barbarous language. Intelligence jargon is employed not for the argot sense of establishing a private means of communication, but for accuracy; the terms have precise and technical meanings and can be used to describe an operational situation clearly and unambiguously. They would, for example, be used regularly in official dispatches and cable traffic, which argot and slang would not.

There is, to this day, no clear understanding, by the public or media, of the terminology; writers—including le Carré, who knows better—spatter their prose with gobbets of impressive-sounding words. Some of these actually gain currency, and in due course the public is convinced that these words are the actual jargon.

Until recent years, both fiction and the media relied on a vocabulary of two terms: spy, and, if anyone were over forty years of age, master spy. Almost all dramatic works hung on a single plot device. An unfriendly nation was in possession of several sheets of paper, or at least one sheet—the plans of the Bruce-Partington submarine or that hackneyed substitute, the formula for a new gas of exceptionally toxic merits. (This had the advantage of reducing the amount of paper involved to the absolute minimum, permitting it to be concealed in fiendishly ingenious places or even to be memorized and dispensed with.)

The protagonist, a clean-cut fellow at loose ends for the nonce, is recruited either by a high-ranking military officer or by a senior diplomatic official, whose precise position is murky but who is invariably speaking for the nation’s chief executive. The hero gallantly sets out to recover the item, which he does after much derring-do—climbing walls, crawling through windows, swiping addresses out of locked desk drawers in the Upper Slobbovian Foreign Ministry, or passing himself off as a colonel in the Slobbovian Army to gain access to the secret testing ground. In his labors, he will be aided and abetted by a mysterious and alluring female with no visible means of support. She generally turns out to be the daughter of the professor who developed the poison gas formula.

The fact that people, even Upper Slobbovians, notice such antics, was of no concern to the writers; the genre still enjoys a lusty life—as a visit to Firefox, now playing in a theater near you, will testify.

It was le Carré’s tour de force to remove espionage fiction forever from this rut, which he did by hanging his stories on the actual framework. Espionage operations are conducted by large bureaucratic organizations, much like other official entities. They operate through case officers stationed abroad, who spot, develop, recruit, and handle the actual agents, who are foreign nationals. These agents do not “steal” information or documents; they are carefully selected to have perfectly legitimate access to what is wanted, so that their possession of it is quite natural and causes no comment. The illegal aspect of espionage is not the acquisition of the material, but its passage to an official of a foreign power, and the entire thrust of secrecy in espionage is devoted to that critical act—the contact between the agent and his case officer. Since the word spy does not even distinguish between agent and handler, it is never used in the intelligence community. Describing an espionage case using the word spy is like writing about a strike with only one word for both ‘labor’ and ‘management’: the result is confusion. (The FBI, however, uses Special Agent for its case officers—usually abbreviated SA—and source or informant for its agents.)

Le Carré’s stories deal with the personnel of the sponsor service and their opposite numbers in hostile services and rarely involve actual “agents,” which accounts for the freshness and impact of his approach.

There is indeed an official jargon—the CIA and other services have from time to time issued glossaries. This jargon, however, bears little resemblance to that employed in fiction and the media. To comment on Mr. Lasseter’s listings:

mole: “A double agent who burrows to the top of the enemy’s secret service.” Mr. Lasseter is quite correct in pointing out that this is a le Carré coinage, previously unknown in the intelligence community. It appeared in 1974, and now belongs to “the vernacular of counterintelligence.” But a mole is not a “double agent”; he is an official of one service who has been recruited by another service and is a penetration agent. He would not become a double agent unless his own service discovered the recruitment and turned—or doubled—him. Neither Kim Philby nor Oleg Penkovsky, neither George Blake nor Guy Burgess was a “double agent,” despite the universal use of this appellation by the media.

A Soviet KGB officer stationed in East Berlin who recruits an East German citizen and sends him to West Germany is running an agent. If the West German service—the BND— discovers him, breaks him, and runs him back, the agent becomes a double agent for the BND. If the KGB in turn discovers this, the man does not become a “triple agent”—there is no such animal. No intelligence service in its right mind plays such games: the agent is dropped.

The Soviets on rare occasions have been known to allow such a double agent to continue—without letting him know they have discovered his perfidy—sometimes because dropping or chastising him would pinpoint the source from which they learned it, but more often simply to tie up the opposition case officer’s limited capacity to handle multiple cases. (Case officers are relatively easy to spot; agents are not. It is far better to know than not to know which agents an opposition case officer is handling.) The Soviets refer to such cases as screen operations; the term is not used in the West, but it is of course highly significant if the Soviets refer to someone as a screen agent. It can be seen that precise terminology in referring to agents is of some importance; the terms are never used loosely.

disinformation: Lasseter calls this “heavily euphemistic” CIA jargon, and claims le Carré “detests such dishonesty.” This is nonsense. Disinformation is the literal translation of the Russian word desinformatsiya, and it is the official title of a department (at various times numbered A, D, and 12) of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. It plans, coordinates, and supports sophisticated political deception and disruption operations on a global basis, which are implemented by the KGB field rezidenturas. Many of these operations involve forgeries of official foreign documents or media publications. Although Western services sporadically conduct such operations, they are not nearly as extensive or intensively organized, and they are never referred to as “disinformation.” They come under covert action, or CA programs, and the military, which conducts them in wartime, refers to them as black propaganda (as opposed to white, in which the actual sponsorship of the material is acknowledged and not falsified, purporting to be from someone else).

agent potential: An official term. Once an agent has been recruited for a specific task, it almost invariably develops that he has access to a considerable range of other targets. These will be explored to make the most effective use of his services.

exfiltration: Also an official term, actually of military origin and dating from about the turn of the century. It is the natural converse of infiltration. An East German agent resident in Leipzig would have to be “exfiltrated” to be brought out permanently, as opposed to coming out for a short visit.

fieldman, deskman, preliminary interrogation, surveillance, case officer, operational subsistence, courier, and cryptonym are lumped together by Mr. Lasseter as “literal and transparent enough for the layman to understand.” I seriously doubt it.

Preliminary interrogation, surveillance, case officer, courier, and cryptonym are official terms and transparent in the sense that they might be used in any context. But few laymen would know the exact subjects required to be covered in a “preliminary” interrogation, or the precise meanings of cryptonym, pseudonym, and alias, which are three totally different animals, with no overlap whatsover. Neither Webster’s nor any other dictionary would serve to distinguish their exact meanings in official intelligence jargon.

Fieldman and deskman are not official terms or intelligence jargon but simple colloquial descriptions, which might be understood in any field of endeavor. In similar contexts, American intelligence officials might use “paper-pusher” and “door-bell puncher,” since almost all agent cases start with someone somewhere in the field pushing a doorbell. The terms would be understood, but they are hardly in sufficient currency to qualify as jargon.

I have no idea what operational subsistence is supposed to mean; it is evidently a le Carré coinage.

tradecraft: This is not really an “interesting metaphorical expression for existing jargon.” It is the official term for the mechanics of espionage operations: agent communications, security practices, and the like. It has been in use since OSS days and is unquestionably of even older British origin. It is taught in courses, and espionage novels are known as “tradecraft fiction.”

deception: Lasseter claims the CIA uses this for “double agent,” while le Carré has invented the now-famous mole. No one, in the CIA or elsewhere, uses “deception” or “deception agent” to refer to a double agent. Deception agent does exist, but the term is not transparent and does not mean what the public and the media imagine. Status as a deception agent is quite incompatible with being doubled, since such an agent was never formally recruited in the first place.

nursery: A le Carré colloquialism for the British tradecraft school for incoming intelligence officers, and, for all I know, in common use in MI-6. The CIA equivalent, long since disclosed, is located on a World War II military base in rural Virginia. It is known colloquially as “The Farm.”

With only a couple of exceptions, the remainder of the terms Lasseter has taken from le Carré are not intelligence terms or jargon but simply arch colloquial expressions which le Carré may have heard at one time or another, but which he is using purely for literary effect—dramatic impact. He uses many of them as substitutes for concepts that do exist and for which an official jargon term would be used; le Carré substitutes vernacular slang because the official jargon term is not transparent and would not be understood by the layman.

Many of le Carré’s terms refer to violent functions and functionaries: baby-sitter, gorilla, hood, bloodhound, reptile fund, leash dog, scalphunter, duck dive, hard-man and the like. All of these, alas, are pure le Carré coinages, invented of necessity because le Carré introduces into his fiction violence and potential violence which simply don’t exist in real life.

This is hard to get across to a public raised on James Bond novels and the “Mission Impossible” series; people are willing to believe absolutely anything about an intelligence service. It is true that there are paramilitary operations, but these are the province of military personnel; the intelligence services are used for administration and logistic support, because they don’t clank as loudly as the military when they have to lay something on. But expecting an intelligence service to conduct a war without anyone noticing is like asking an elephant to hide behind a lamppost.

I spent seventeen years in Soviet counterespionage operations with the CIA, with eleven years overseas, in Europe, Africa, and Asia. For stretches I was in almost daily personal contact with KGB and GRU officers and Soviet agents. I was never trained in karate, nor did I ever carry a gun in connection with my work. (In Vietnam, however, I was issued a revolver and two hand grenades for the defense of my apartment in case the need arose. I kept them in my freezer and had a devil of a job finding and defrosting them when I left.)

In all that time, I knew of three instances of violence. An officer had a glass of beer thrown in his face by a Soviet in a bar in Vienna, and—by a wild coincidence—twenty years later the same man was hit over the head on a Tokyo streetcorner in broad daylight by a Soviet who took umbrage at something he had said. Another officer got into a fistfight with a Soviet at a diplomatic reception in Teheran; they were separated by their scandalized ambassadors.

In the last sixty years, the Soviets have murdered at least four hundred people, but these have invariably been those they regarded as “their own” —defecting officials and potential defectors, emigrés who made major nuisances of themselves, Soviets who failed to report their doubling, and the like.

Western case officers have nothing to fear (although they might well be detained if they entered denied areas).

The Soviets conduct such operations exclusively through the Thirteenth (Executive Action) Department of the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, using only officers from this department, never case officers from the field rezidenturas. The KGB jargon term for this group is the mokryye dela section; this is Russian criminal argot translated literally as ‘wet affairs.’ There is no equivalent in any major Western intelligence service; a common colloquial expression for such Soviet activities is cowboy stuff.

This might be the time to try to lay to rest three other expressions the public fondly believes are intelligence jargon. Two of them stem from Time magazine, far and away the most prolific source of intelligence coinages in sight. Their “Yes, yes, we know all about it” approach to espionage operations has produced more intelligence pseudo-jargon than le Carré ever dreamt of.

black-bag job: About 1970 Time ran a cover story on “The New Spy,” with a side-bar box listing a glossary of about thirty “Intelligence Terms.” I circulated it to some twenty intelligence officers representing decades of experience; none of us had ever heard most of the terms, and all but two that we had heard were incorrectly defined.

One of the terms was black-bag job, which Time announced was used for intelligence burglaries, as in the case of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. The correct term for such operations (which were quite common in World War II) is surreptitious entry, or SE. Time was so smitten with its own phrase that it used it by actual count no fewer than six times in the very next issue; it has been part of its editors' working vocabulary ever since, although it has yet to appear in the intelligence community. (They also delight in slinging about phrases like “the NKVD man in Havana”; the Soviets have not used “NKVD” since 1943.)

terminate with extreme prejudice. This is now firmly planted in the public ethos as intelligence jargon for ‘to murder,’ again thanks to Time. I have terminated at least four agents with extreme prejudice myself, without ever infringing on the Sixth Commandment. To terminate simply means to ‘sever contact’ with an agent on friendly terms, usually because he is no longer needed or because he has lost his access to the target for which he was recruited. He is usually given contact instructions in case he ever needs to get in touch again, and his file is retired to Registry.

To terminate with prejudice means that a note will be put in his file strongly recommending that no future contact be initiated (nor will he be be given the means to establish it). He has been a handling headache, whether insecure, inaccurate (or worse) in his reporting, unreliable, cheating on his expense account, or found to be engaged in criminal activities on the side.

To terminate with extreme prejudice, a burn notice is circulated to friendly liaison intelligence services, informing them that while he did indeed work for us, his conduct was so bad—outright fabrication of information or an attempt to perpetrate a major fraud—that we are warning them to have nothing to do with him if he appears on their doorstep, as he probably will.

SmerSh: The late Ian Fleming is responsible for the misuse of this acronym. Yes, Virginia, there was indeed a SmerSh, and it did indeed shoot people—lots of them. But what it shot was Russians, not foreigners. It was a military unit under the Ministry of Defense and not connected to the intelligence service. It was formed in 1943, shortly after the German invasion, and it roamed the areas immediately behind the Russian lines, locating and executing partisans fighting for the Germans and Soviet soldiers suspected of desertion. It went out of business in 1946, and it has never been resurrected.

Its offical title was GUKR NKO ‘Chief Counterintelligence Directorate of the People’s Commissariat of the Armed Forces,’ and the official acronym SmerSh was derived from the Russian Smert Shpionam! ‘Death to Spies!’

Pyotr Deryabin, a KGB officer who defected in Vienna in the early 1950s, was an officer in the Guards Directorate during the war and was present when Stalin signed the GUKR NKO order. The original acronym proposed was SmerInSh ‘Smert Inostrannikh Shpionam,’ or ‘Death to Foreign Spies,’ but Stalin smiled sweetly and crossed out the “Inostrannikh,” murmuring “No, no, death to all spies!”

The proper term is SmerSh (Sh being one letter in Russian), and “Smersh” is probably acceptable. But any article or book that refers to SMERSH or, worse yet, S.M.E.R.S.H.— Time has done both—stands self-convicted of not knowing what it is talking about.

But le Carré is damned good reading.

[Donald R. Morris, The Houston Post]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Connoisseur’s Collection of Old and New, Weird and Wonderful, Useful and Outlandish Words

Paul Dickson, illus. (in part) by Paul Dickson, (Delacorte Press, 1982), xi + 366pp.

[A VERBATIM Book Club Selection.]

…And that is just what the book is. Like any similarly compiled book, Dickson’s reflects his personal tastes and biases, though, even allowing for prejudices, it is difficult to see how one can accumulate so much divers material on the English language without pleasing some of the people all of the time. [Yet, as a personal aside, one wonders how Dickson could have avoided VERBATIM, which has been about for more than eight years.]

Divided into 52 sections, or chapters, the book is organized, more or less, as a collection of specialized glossaries, beginning with Acronyms, passing through Burgessisms, Junk Words, Sexy Words, and Travel Words to end with, appropriately, The Last Word. It is indeed a fascinating collection and worthy to be on the shelf of any logophile’s library. It is amply illustrated to show items that are not readily described in a meaningful way. The mini-glossaries are not exhaustive—thank heaven!—which means that one can read through them painlessly and without being bored.

If you collect word books, you must have this one. It would be superfluous to point out omissions like strickle, which would have helped explain struck measure (described under heaped measure, p. 165), or stylistic slips like sawed for sawn, so I shall control myself. I cannot, however, refrain from criticizing the absence of a useful index—unforgivable in a book arranged into 52 alphabetic sets—or from execrating the plainly bad practice of capitalizing every entry word: How can one tell whether a word is normally capitalized or not? But those failings must be laid in the lap of the publisher’s editor. To Mr. Dickson we must be grateful for a most pleasurable romp through the nether reaches of the English lexicon.

—Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Morrow Book of New Words

N.H., and S.K. Mager, (William Morrow and Company, 1982), iv + 284pp.

Dictionaries of “new words” seem to be appearing at a rate only slightly less than new words themselves. Their proliferation reflects our awareness of linguistic fashion and desire not to let the public vocabulary get ahead of us. We read them, in other words, to satisfy our neophilia—a new word for an old concept, defined in The Morrow Book of New Words as ‘strong interest in new things.’ That definition may not capture the appeal of this book as nicely as its definition of neophilism: ‘morbid or undue desire for the new.’ If the distinction imposed by these definitions can be trusted, it is neophilia that makes a book like this one pleasurable, but it is neophilism that seems to create it.

Among the pleasures of a dictionary of new words is the discovery of new things: our language is a mirror held up to our reality. I learned from this book, for instance, that kamagraph is a name for a ‘special printing press that faithfully duplicates up to 250 copies of a painting, including raised brush strokes, destroying the original in the process.’ I think I will use the word from now on as a metaphor for all of the ways we have invented of destroying the things we want to reproduce faithfully. This book is something of a kamagraph.

The pressure on compilers of dictionaries of this sort to be up-to-date no doubt accounts for the errors and inconsistencies they contain. A book as up to the minute as this one, with definitions for Reagan’s safety net, toxic shock syndrome, and ultimate frisbee, cannot have benefited from much time to ponder, to research, or even, unfortunately, to proofread. The book has too many inconsistencies, too many flawed definitions and too many typos to be a dependable reference for anyone whose neophilia goes beyond the pleasure stage. In short, the book is a kludge—another new word I think I learned by reading this book, defined as a ‘term of endearment for a pet computer, esp. one with undesirable characteristics.’ It is an endearing book for the pleasure of discovery that it holds, but its odd inconsistencies make it less than useful as a creditable guide to the linguistic creations and follies of our time.

I was struck, for instance, by the irregularity of the application of the terms abbreviation and acronym. The introduction explains that the distinction will be made “principally on the basis of verbalization,” according to which COMSAT is designated acronym and LPN is designated abbr. The distinction is not only arbitrary, it is inconsistently applied. For instance, CBW and CD are called acronyms. Similarly confused is the distinction, unexplained in the introduction, between colloquialism and slang. Entries are designated one or the other in almost random fashion (luck out, for instance, is called slang, hang loose is colloq), and in many instances (e.g., ticky-tacky) the problem is surmounted blithely by designating entries slang or colloq; others are not designated at all. The term jargon is infrequently applied. Interface is designated jargon, but input, isn’t. Input, in fact, is labeled substandard, as is the barbarous messaging, but many other jargon and substandard usages go unlabeled. The same inconsistency applies to the labeling of entries that are metaphorical usages. Coinages or etymologies are also included willy-nilly. Origins are cited for benign neglect, E-prime, flak, gork, home free and weatherman, for instance, but not for doublespeak, eightfold way, FOSDIC, honcho, HO scale, wimp, Age of Aquarius, Clifford trust, and numerous other terms as interesting for their derivation as for their usage. Such relatively minor inconsistencies serve only to frustrate the user.

Major inconsistencies confuse as well. The definitions of terms sometimes shift when they are found both abbreviated and spelled in full. For instance, artificial intelligence is defined as ‘capability of a machine to reason and improve itself, esp. involving verbal comprehension,’ while AI is defined as ‘abbr for artificial intelligence, the capability of computers to create new knowledge.’ These definitions are sufficiently different to suggest that not enough work was done to discover what people who use the term actually mean by it.

The authors' choice of terms to include is also inconsistent. The introduction tells us that many “words of earlier conception and long acceptance” are included because they do not appear in Webster’s III, but the explanation hardly suffices to tell us why mechanical bank (for the 19th-century toy) or method acting should be considered “new words.” The book’s subtitle promises “8500 Words Not Yet in Standard Dictionaries,” but the claim is somewhat inflated considering the presence in the book of axiology, charisma, disposable, dissonance, dyslexia, ethnic, face (as a verb), guru, hit (to mean ‘a theatrical success’) ionosphere, karate, maternity (as an adjective), mole (in chemistry), Nematoda (in biology), ontology and welfare state, to name but a few. Some of the “old words” contained are justified by new usages, but the criterion for selecting “new words” is a bit hazy, even with a restricted view of what a “standard dictionary” is.

The book makes no claim for completeness, but it frequently reminds me to look for words that I do not find. It omits intentional fallacy, pathetic fallacy; WASP; butt out; dike; diaphragm; shock treatment; video games; CREP, deep six, deep throat, Gemstone, plumbers, post-Watergate morality; agitprop; twist; bubble chamber; into (“I’m into jogging”); black out; puka shells; Me Generation; new money; rolfing; hemisphericity; high tech; tofu; ESL; gypsy moth; over achiever; waivers; and zip (“The score was one-zip”). Despite numerous terms from sports, it omits PB (as an acronym—or abbreviation—for personal best, also not included) and PAR course. Some other obvious usages not included: no growth, nuke, nose job, no nonsense, overbuilt, perks, and vanity press. And, despite the presence of a good deal of it, this dictionary does not define alphabet soup.

Among the definitions themselves are many that seem to me to be wrong or to miss by enough to make them uninformative. Disneyesque is defined as ‘resembling Disneyland,’ dyad as ‘serious dialogue or relationship,’ false negative as ‘an incorrect diagnosis that the patient does not have a disease or condition,’ found poem as ‘prose with unintended poetic content,’ hands on as ‘using the hands,’ housebroken as ‘suitable for polite company, esp. of a pet,’ five as ‘phony,’ Ms as ‘form of address for a woman whose matital status is unknown or irrelevant’ and performative as linguistics of a statement of performance; e.g. “I go.” '

Though we may excuse lapses in editors and compilers who are in an obvious hurry to catch the language as it flies, badly written definitions are inexcusable. Consider, for instance, that the authors define convesation pit as ‘dropped living with seating arranged to promote conversation.’ Duck pins, they tell us, is a kind of bowling ‘using three small balls without finger holes for each game.’ Is that “for each game” redundant or is duck pins a short game? Are the authors being euphemistic or just careless when they tell us that dum dum refers to ‘a bullet that expands on impact, causing greater pain?’ For entelechy, we get this mouthful: ‘the study of elements of a phenomenon that essentially affect the actualization of its potential.’ The definition of pixel is said to be ‘the picture element in a television image,’ as if there were any other kind.

The authors are not above bad grammar, unfortunately, as in the definitions of kinetic art as ‘an art form in which portions of the structure moves’ and of late bloomer as ‘one that matures later than normally.’ Faulty parallelism intrudes on this definition of xenon lamp: ‘high-intensity lamp used in projectors and testing textile fading.’

Books of new words have their place in our lives, if we want to keep up with ourselves. Books rushed into print to satisfy our neophilism—or our neophilistinism—we can live comfortably without. On the bright side, one kludge is worth a thousand pixels.

[John T. Gage, Eugene Oregon]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Dictionary of Anagrams

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

Je n’en vois pas le nécéssité 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 0 (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 up the answer to anything 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

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Police show improvement; man dies from wound” [Headline in Dominion Post, Morgantown, West Virginia. Submitted by Stephen D. Tanner, Morgantown.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Dictionary of Euphemisms & Other Doubletalk and Slang and Euphemism

Hugh Rawson, (Crown Publishers, New York, 1981), viii + 312pp. and Richard A. Spears, (Jonathan David Publishers, Middle Village, 1981), xxviii + 448pp.

Rawson’s Euphemisms and Spears’s Slang basically deal with the same subject matter but are diametrically opposed in approach. Rawson, a professional journalist, presents some 1,500 entries of positive and negative euphemisms, mostly well explained, precisely dated, and amply illustrated by anecdotes or citations from literature and the media. Spears, a professional linguist, lists some 17,500 entries, tersely defined, vaguely dated, and poorly cross-referenced. Both books are useful for anyone dealing with language. Rawson’s main value is the extensive treatment of most entries, thereby greatly increasing one’s repertoire of word stories and histories, and he provides an excellent introduction to euphemisms, or “linguistic fig leaves,” used in daily life and particularly by the notorious euphemizers: business, education, and government. His 11-page introduction to euphemisms is among the best I have seen. In short, this book is an amusing, intelligent, well documented, informative, and readable reference work.

Spears’s Slang is useful, too, but for other reasons: the far greater number of entries, the valuable lists of synonyms, and the broader historical and geographic coverage. While Rawson broadly discusses some 70 synonyms for “prostitute,” Spears lists some 560 euphemisms and dysphemisms. Spears’s book is, however, a most frustrating, vexing product of a professional linguist who created a skeletal data base with his computer (limiting most entries to 254 bytes) and then inexplicably hid the best parts of his corpus—the synonym lists—under silly key words. Subtitled A Dictionary of Oaths, Curses, Insults, Sexual Slang and Metaphor, Racial Slurs, Drug Talk, Homosexual Lingo, and Related Matter, it has three major flaws: the definitions and explanations are too brief, the cross references are poor, and one can’t find the extensive synonym lists. Farmer and Henley, in their monumental Slang and Its Analogues (1890—1904), had reasons to hide their sexual material under inconspicuous entries. In 1981, Professor Spears has no censureship-caused reasons to ape Farmer and Henley by camouflaging his dirty-word lists.

For example, if I want to find all the synonyms for fuck (which he coyly defines as ‘to coit’), I look under fuck. No luck. Let’s try to copulate, his sense 1 definition. Nothing. Try to coit. Nix, but references to screw and phallicize, neither of which helps. To lay? Again no help. Frustrated, I turn to Farmer and Henley, Spears’s major source of material, to see where they hid the synonyms: under greens and to ride. Back to Spears, but no luck. Now vexed, I leaf through the book, inspecting every long list of small-caps synonyms. Finally, on page 278, I find all the synonyms for fuck, listed under the key word occupy. Occupy!? Well, occupy such silly games!

The extensive lists of synonyms are very useful: one does not have to cull them from the dozens of reference works consulted by Spears (American, British, some Canadian, Australian and Caribbean terms, from the 1800s to the 1970s)—but try to find them. One has to make one’s own list of references; don’t look at the obvious places, and don’t bother with the cross references.

The following is a Guide to Spears’s Synonym Lists, which the publishers should incorporate in their next printing, as a minimal courtesy to the readers. A few synonym lists are actually where they are supposed to be listed: anus, cunnilingus, deflower, erection, genitals (a few), god, gonorrhea, group sex, lecher, lewd, pederast, pimp, and stupid. Most of the second group are harder to find: alcohol > [= listed under] booze; black woman > raven beauty; breasts > bosom; chamber pot > pot; cocaine > nose-candy; coward > yellow-dog; devil > fiend; diarrhea > quickstep; die > depart; drunkard > alchy; fellation > penilingus; fool > oaf; horny > humpy and lust; intoxicated with marijuana > tall; marijuana > mari; masturbate > waste time; mulatto > mahogany; Negro > ebony and nigger; oaths > ‘Zounds; pederast > sodomite; policeman > flatfoot; posteriors > duff; prostitute > harlot; sanitary napkin > manhole cover; toilet paper > T.P.; urinate > retire and whiz; venereal disease > social disease; whorehouse > brothel and house; woman, girl > bird and quail; woman as a sexual object > lay and tail.

The final group of synonym lists is what I call the “crazies” —who in his or her right mind would list, look up, or expect these words listed as synonyms under the words following the arrow? Condom > eel-skin; copulation > smockage; defecate > ease oneself; delirium tremens > ork-orks; drunk > woofled; fart > gurk; ejaculate > melt; female genitals > monosyllable (F&H); female public hair > Downshire; ghost > revenant; gin > ruin; homosexual male, hermaphrodite > epicene, fribble, and queen; Jew > five and two; kill > scrag; lesbian > lesbyterian; male genitals > virilia; menstruation > floods; mistress > spare rib; naked > starkers; nonsense > animal and bullshit; penis > gadget and yard; preacher > sky-pilot; pregnant > fragrant; rascal, sneak > snoke-horn; semen > mettle; sexual play > firkytoodle; slovenly woman > trollymog; syphilis > specific stomach; testes > whirlygigs; toilet > ajax and W.C.; trousers > galligaskins; vagina > passage; vomit > york.

Sort of makes you york, really. Just what got into this Indiana-University-educated doctor, now teaching at Northwestern University? And what about his dozen helpers and the publishers’ editors? Are they all bananas (sense 2)? Incidentally, there are dozens of synonyms for crazy, but I could not find such a list.

If you are able to find the synonym lists you want without the preceding Guide, you speak no doubt a strange, Spearsian English, to wit: My spare rib, a five and two, is no trollymog. When she’s woofled, she presses her monosyllable against my virilia. Then, after some good smockage, I ejaculate verbally, “I’m melting! I’m melting!” ‘Zounds! Sounds just like the wicked witch.

Spears’s introductory short essays, pp. vii-xix, on Slang, Euphemism, Taboo, Distancing, Verbal Aggression, etc., are perfunctory; one gets the impression that computer operator Spears was not interested in (or knowledgeable of) these topics but had to whip out a few pages. The extensive bibliography is useful but also flawed; e.g., Legman’s volume II of Rationale was not consulted; Read’s Graffiti are Classic, not Classical; the 1979 reprint of Roback’s Dictionary by Maledicta Press is not listed; and the source for “bad words” since 1977, Maledicta, was (apparently intentionally) ignored. Still, with the preceding Guide of where to find what, every user can benefit from this tome, compiled during five years of selfless labor. We have to be grateful to Jonathan David Publishers for making this reference work available, but their editors deserve a kick in their whirlygigs. The $12.95 paperback is a steal.

Reviewing Slang for the Library Journal, a linguistics professor at the University of Chicago snidely condemned Spears’s work as “not recommended.” That young professor is full of clart: Spears’s Slang is indeed very much recommended, despite its flaws, for in most cases it provides one with rudimentary information that one would have to hunt up by consulting dozens of dictionaries. As an editor, philologist, and lexicographer specializing in slang and “bad” words, I am appalled by the book’s avoidable flaws. Yet, for all its faults and bizarre organization, one can live with Spears’s Slang.

[Reinhold Aman, Waukesha, Wisconsin]

OBITER DICTA

Mildred D. Berkowitz, New Bedford, Massachusetts

Cleverness could get you… in trouble.

American Heritage Dictionary:

nonce word…A word invented for a particular occasion, or for the nonce.

During the Nixon administration, the White House staff invented the nonce word “nissim” for National Security Study Memorandum. When Carter came in, the title of these missives was changed to Presidential Security Study Memorandum. After a bit of thought, it was wisely decided to pass up the corresponding nonce word.

An acronym is a word often formed by combining the initial letters of words. During the 1982 Memorial Day weekend, a concerted effort was made by the Massachusetts authorities to keep the highways safe for vacationing motorists. To this end, they put on the roads what they entitled Fatal Accident Reducation Teams. The acronym they prudently chose was FARE.

EPISTOLA {Prof. A.C. Rose-Innes}

I was amused to see in your Winter 1982 issue an epistola from an American, Otto Jansen, complaining about the use of bake up instead of just bake on the back panel of a cereal packet. In my experience, Americans always back up a car; they never just back it!

[Prof. A.C. Rose-Innes, Wilmslow, Cheshire]

EPISTOLA {Dr. H.H. Macey}

I was born and grew up in Plymouth (England), very close to the Devonport Naval Dockyards; I came of a naval family. The word for anything “liberated” from those dockyards was rabbits. It might have been essentially a naval term (perhaps it was used only in Portsmouth), but it was common and widely recognized. At the age of about twelve, just after World War I, I was taken by my father to a football match. The man next to me in the crowd asked his companion, “Did you get those rabbits out all right?” The reply was “Yes,” but his small son piped up very loudly, “Twudden rabbits, Dad, twus paint,” a comment greatly appreciated by all those within earshot. I have never seen this meaning of rabbits in print, only that of the custom of saying it for luck before any other word on the first of any month: origin orabitis. In my experience, neither cabbage nor rabbits is known in Australia in any of these ways.

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

EPISTOLA {Mary Patterson}

I read with interest Philip Howard’s article on halcyon [VIII, 3], especially the section in which he mentioned the use of the word as a brand name. When I first encountered Halcyon waterbeds, I thought this was a highly appropriate brand name, since I had always used the word in the sense of “relaxed, carefree.” Discovering the word’s avian origins made me realize just how appropriate the name really is!

For some time I have been pondering the words clockwise and anticlockwise. As digital timepieces become more common, I can foresee these descriptions of the direction of circular motion becoming meaningless and dying out. Can any of your readers suggest other English words or phrases that will describe this motion as concisely?

[Mary Patterson, Toronto, Ontario]

EPISTOLA {Norman R. Shapiro}

Marjorie Sykes’s observations on the English budget [VIII, 1] are illuminating, but they shed light on only part of the story. As a bit of etymologica, the word isn’t really one of the more obscura, being only a not uncommon kind of metonymy—the container for the contained—though less usual than most examples, in that the figurative meaning has completely supplanted the literal.

No more obscure is the origin of the word itself, concerning which, however, Ms. Sykes chooses to leave us in the dark. Authorities agree that budget is from the archaic French bougette, diminutive of bouge, ‘pocket, purse’ (< Old French bolge, diminutive bolgete). I have long assumed a connection with a turn-of-the-century English (or American) noun budge, possibly a regionalism, indicating the cleavage of a woman’s bosom, a natural pocket for secreting (usually) small objects, with the Victorian assurance of inviolability. (I fail to find the meaning attested in print, the closest—differences of gender and anatomy aside—being ‘a front trouser pocket,’ given in Berry and Van den Bark’s The American Thesaurus of Slang. But I have it on the authority of several elderly female informants that it was a common usage in their youth, in and around Boston.

At any rate, English, ignoring the injunction to “neither a borrower nor a lender be,” has been both, profligately. And the word budget, borrowed from the French, was loaned back in its new form as early as the 1760s. Today, appropriately pronounced, it is thoroughly naturalized. It is only one of a spate of such “shuttle words”—lent, transformed, and subsequently returned and reincorporated. One thinks of many traditional examples: Fr. fleurette > Eng flirt > Fr le flirt; Fr rôti de boeuf > Eng roast beef > Fr le rosbif; Fr tenez! > Eng tennis (not undisputed) > Fr le tennis; et al. And today, especially, one thinks of those “designer” blue jeans (< Fr bleu de Gênes, i.e., ‘Genoa blue,’ jocularly renaturalized as Parisian bloudjinnes), designed on both sides of the Atlantic to put a crimp in anybody’s budget.

[Norman R. Shapiro, Wesleyan University]

EPISTOLA {Lester Saferstein}

The article by Byran Garner on “Meretricious Words” is one of the most interesting you have ever published.

I don’t know how many other meretricious appellations are missing from his well-researched list, but at least one designation, round-heels, came to my attention when, in a recent Time Magazine article, appeared, “the round-heeled bar girl.”

A definition for round-heel can be found in the Supplement of Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 5th Edition, 1961: “sexually compliant; a girl with heels so round that the least push will put her on her back.”

Wentworth and Flexner’s Dictionary of American Slang, 2nd Edition, 1965, indicates that round-heel was first used in 1920 to mean a ‘prize fighter who either developed round heels from spending so much time on his back, or was an easy pushover because he had round-heeled shoes.’ According to these authorities, the definition ‘a women of easy virtue’ appeared in 1943. They note that Raymond Chandler’s Lady in Lake, 1951, contains the following, “I’ve just sort of been resenting your idea I would be an easy conquest. I’m not a round-heeled like Livy.”

[Lester Saferstein, M.D., Prairie Village, Kansas]

EPISTOLA {Dr. H.H. Macey}

I was most interested in Gerald Cohen’s discussion of the word cabbage in the sense of ‘appropriating surreptitiously, pilfering’ [VIII, 1]. I lived in England for fifty years before coming here and becoming a Bloody Pommie, but this use of cabbage is new to me.

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

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Please Smoke in Grand Foyer.” [Sign at the Opera House entrance doors, Kennedy Center, Washington, D.C. Submitted by Eric Ostergaard, who observes, “…as a nonsmoking supporter of the opera, …in order to comply with their latest request, I must now participate in the smoking habit.”]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“The [Northwest Power Planning] Council is required under the 1980 Northwest Power Act to develop a program to ‘protect, mitigate, and enhance’ the salmon and steelhead runs along the Columbia and its tributaries along with developing a 20-year master energy plan. The fish program is aimed at making up for some of the loses [sic] caused by the dams along the river.” [From Northwest Energy News, March (?) 1982, p. 3. Submitted by Sandra Kirschenbaum, San Francisco. We are at a lose to know how one protects, mitigates, and enhances all at once.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“ ‘We are a little angry,’ Moss said. ‘We were never able to have a discussion, but that’s all water over the damn. I think it’s important that there not be a lot of negativity between Fernando and the Dodgers.’ ‘Has this thing left scars?’ ” [From the Los Angeles Times, 24 March 1982. Submitted by Jean MacAllister, Beverly Hills, California. “Scars” may not be the right word, but we’re damn sure that “damn” isn’t!]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Place Your Order and Get Out of the Way.” [Sign in Mexican restaurant in Chicago.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“All Peoples Welcome for the Gifts.” [Sign in Turkish shop next door. Both submitted by Jerry B. Jenkins, Deerfield, Illinois.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“…the wheres and the whyfors.” [From interview with Susan Alter, Council of City of New York, 32nd Dist., Brooklyn, WOR, 24 March 1981, 7:30 a.m.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“I consider myself a very sophisticated human being— you know, beneath this sort of thing.” [Woman giving opening testimonial on phone to Bernard Meltzer, WOR, 16 December 1979, 11:27 a.m.]

Some Interesting Characteristics of Non-Indo-European Languages

Laurence Urdang, Editor, VERBATIM

Some time ago (I cannot say exactly when: some of the third-class mail I receive remains unopened for months), I received promotional brochure from the Summer Institute of Linguistics Museum of Anthropology, in Dallas. On the outside is printed, “What difference does it make whether or not a man plays soccer soon after his wife gives birth?” Below this appears the following:

A lot—if he is a Shipibo man of Peru. For about two weeks after his baby’s birth a Shipibo man can do no heavy labor, use no heavy tools, nor hunt, according to tribal teachings, lest such work cause the new baby some harm. With the addition of soccer to the Shipibo culture, another taboo was added—a new father must not play ball for a time lest his baby’s abdomen swell up like the ball….

Very sound practice, indeed. Most VERBATIM readers are aware of cultural differences, real or rumored, between most western societies and others—differences like the eating of sheep’s eyes by Arabs, insects by some African peoples, and, “long pig” in New Guinea (if not elsewhere). But with extended communication and exposure to western civilization, many such cultural anomalies (or what we westerners regard as such) disappear: Would that African really prefer insects if he could choose between them and a roast turkey? Wouldn’t the New Guinea native find a prime rib roast more appetizing than even the tenderest missionary? Perhaps not, but with acculturation, such old habits tend to die, albeit hard.

Cultural habits, rules, and taboos survive only till that culture is replaced by another, a process that may never happen (religious Jews still refuse pork and scaleless seafood), may take centuries to happen (Eskimos now use rifles for hunting), or may happen virtually overnight (the Japanese assimilation to western ways is a good example).

Certain demands made by languages on their speakers, however, change so imperceptibly as to seem static. From even the most rudimentary knowledge of French, for instance, we know that nouns have a grammatical gender that is either masculine or feminine; in German, grammatical gender allows for a neuter as well; but English speakers, who tolerate feminine pronouns of reference for things like automobiles (She runs like a top), whales of either sex (Thar she blows), and vessels (I sailed her in the Bermuda race this year), enjoy what they regard as the most sensible system, namely, natural gender and regard German das Mädchen as exceedingly odd—though possibly the oddness is a function of the particular Mädchen in question.

Less familiar languages make of their speakers quite different sorts of demands. There is the apocryphal tale of the missionary who was delivering himself of a rip-roaring sermon before the natives of an African village.

“You are all sinners,” he intoned, addressing them in their own language. The natives cheered wildly.

“None of you will go to heaven unless you mend your ways,” he warned. Again the natives applauded.

By the end of the sermon, the missionary, who had never experienced such an enthusiastic reaction in his career, was elated. To an old trader who had observed the goings-on he said excitedly. “The natives really responded to my sermon with great enthusiasm, didn’t they!”

“Well, yes,” replied the other. “But you have to understand that in their language there exists the ‘inclusive’ you, which means ‘all of you here,’ and the ‘exclusive’ you, which means ‘everyone except those present,’ and you kept telling them that everyone was a sinner except them.”

If there is such a language, I do not know what it is (though I daresay some reader will enlighten me). But I do know about some characteristics of other languages that may strike the native English speaker as interesting if not peculiar or, in some cases, poetic.

Maninka is an important social and trading language of Upper Volta, Gambia, Guinea, Mali, Senegal, and Ivory Coast. Proverbs are an important cultural feature of Maninka speakers. They vary their utterances of proverbs for the sake of elegance. Thus, “Rome wasn’t built in a day” might come out in Maninka as “It took longer than a day to build the city of Rome” on one occasion and, for stylistic variation on another occasion, “More than one day was needed to construct Rome,” and so forth. In other words, it is the idea of the proverb that is important in Maninka, not the ability to quote it verbatim. Moreover, the ability to vary the expression is a virtue.

Let us take the example of a learner of Maninka who can make his way through the language, but not without a lot of mistakes. He is talking with an old Maninka man who engages in a bit of ironic humor:

OLD MAN: Ah, you are becoming a Maninka. You speak the language just like one of us.

NEWCOMER: Gee, do you really think so? Thank you very much.

The newcomer will have fallen into the old man’s trap and come out looking close to a total fool in a society where insults are taboo, one becomes very sensitive to levels of praise. Given the context, what the old man has said would best be interpreted as the opposite of its literal meaning and, by implication, a criticism. If the newcomer accepts what has been said to him at face value, then he in effect accepts the criticism. With more sophistication on the part of the newcomer, the dialogue might go something like this:

OLD MAN: Ah, you are becoming a Maninka. You speak the language just like one of us.

NEWCOMER: No matter how long a log lies in the water, it never becomes a crocodile.

This is really the kind of response the old man is looking for. As an ingratiating way of expressing his admiration for the newcomer’s knowledge of Maninka culture, the old man might respond with another proverb:

OLD MAN: Ah, my son, a log lying in the water is still the cause of fear.

The only exposure most of us have had with this sort of cultural-linguistic technique is from Charley Chan movies or from watching Kung Fu on TV, where the wizened philosopher imparts gems of wisdom to “Cricket.”

Too much of that sort of thing, though it may sound terrifyingly profound, is often transparent nonsense:

When the moon is above the horizon, the dreamer will find his way home.

He who can see into the future shall never tell what he knows.

When the nightingale sings, all listen but the crow.

Criticize not the sloth of the snail nor the swiftness of the eagle.

May the candle at the top of the mountain light your way through the tunnel.

The sea does not yield up its mysteries to those who do not believe in it.

An old slipper is more comfortable than a new handkerchief.

A crumb of bread for a beggar may not be a pearl without price.

The moss on the tree does not ask forgiveness.

Seek not riches lest you become wealthy.

The fish that swims in the pond knows not his brother.

Look not into the mirror of life lest you see time passing.

Beauty shall not be known to those who sing alone in the forest.

She who loves butterflies loves you.

(Maybe this will win me a job in a Chinese fortune-cookie factory.)

In Jacaltec, spoken in Jacaltenango, northwest of Guatemala City, In Guatemala, speakers are required by the grammar of the language to use “directionals,” adverbial particles attached to verbs to indicate the precise movement of a person or object. That feature, which is shared by many Mayan languages, is similar to the use of the particles out, in, off, on, etc., in English, e.g., go out, come in, take off, jump on. The particles in Jacaltec are reduced forms of intransitive verbs: -toj ‘away from’ is ‘to go’; -pax ‘back, again’ is from paxi ‘to return’; -can ‘remaining still’ is from cani ‘to remain.’

Jacaltec also has a system of noun classifiers, similar in principle to gender in Indo-European languages, but consisting of 25 classes. Only concrete nouns are classified, with few exceptions. People, for example, are classified on the basis of sex, relative age, and kinship. Objects are classified into categories based, generally, on their physical characteristics: atz’am ‘salt’; Ch’en ‘rock’ (for objects of stone, glass, metal, etc.); k’ap ‘cloth’; metx ‘dog’ (only); no’ ‘non-dog’ (for all animals except dogs), etc. There are of course, other features of Jacaltec that distinguish it from the Indo-European languages, but the focus of this article is too narrow to include them.

Although in German and in Latin, the finite verb of a sentence usually appears at the end and, in English, it appears between the subject and the object, in Malagasy, a Western Austronesian language spoken in Madagascar (Malagasy Republic), the verb appears invariably at the beginning of the sentence and the noun at the end:

menasa my lamba ity Rasoa
wash the clothes this Rasoa
‘Rasoa is washing the clothes.’

Chinese differs form English in far too many respects to detail here, but we can examine, however briefly, two commonly known characteristics, tones and classifiers. Stressed syllables in Chinese carry a relative tone, identified by pitch, duration, and contour. Depending on the features of tone, the “same” syllable may have different meanings. For example, in the Mandarin of Beijing, the following pattern can be distinguished:

SYLLABLE	PITCH	MEANING
ma	high level	‘mother’
ma	high rising	‘hemp’
ma	dipping/falling rising	‘house’
ma	high falling	‘to scold’

Other dialects, like Cantonese, for instance, may have many more tones, and the entire pattern is complicated considerably by the changes that occur when the language is spoken, for combinations of words produce different tones. When a Chinese noun is combined with a demonstrative (this, which) or a numeral (one, two), a classifier must be present. For example, in Beijing Mandarin, the classifier tiáo is used with a noun for a long, thin object like a snake, rope, street, river, pole, etc., but may also be used for cattle, law, and rhinoceros. The classifier bă is used with nouns for chair, fan, knife, and rifle. Thus, the learner of Chinese must learn each noun’s classifier individually. Chinese, in one or another of its dialects, is spoken by more than twice as many people as speak English—900 million compared with 400 million—so it is evidently a language that can be learned, though it is said that, although the relatively uniform writing system can be understood by those who speak the myriad of dialects, the spoken forms are in many cases unintelligible to speakers of different dialects.

In this brief exposition, only a minuscule number of the main features of languages that are unlike English have been touched upon. Those who are intrigued are invited to dig further.

[Much of the information in this article was drawn from Languages and Their Speakers, Timothy Shopen, Little, Brown, 1979, and Languages and Their Status, Timothy Shopen, Little, Brown, 1979, to which my debt is gratefully acknowledged.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Household Accidents Kill Most Children Each Year” [Headline from The Suburban News, Westfield, New Jersey. Submitted by Keith MacLellan, Piscataway, New Jersey.]

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“HONDA ‘82 PRELUDE. Fully loaded, electric sunroof, radial tires, hurry this won’t last long.” [From The Los Angeles Times, 21 February 1982. Submitted by Julie May, Los Angeles, who comments, I’d hate to buy a car that won’t last long!]

A Visit to the Language Zoo

Richard Lederer

In many children’s magazines appear pictures in which the young readers are asked to identify a number of hidden animals. In a cloud may lurk a cow, in the leaves of a tree may be concealed a fish, and on the side of a house may be soaring an eagle.

The English language is like those children’s pictures. Take a gander at the following passage, and you will discover over 200 creatures from the animal world hidden in its sentences, a veritable menagerie of zoological metaphors. (Did you catch one of them in the last sentence?)

“Man,” proclaims the dictionary, is distinguished from the other animals “by a notable development of the brain, with a resultant capacity for speech and abstract reasoning.” Perhaps so, but how truly different are we human beings from our fellow organisms that walk and fly and swim and creep upon the face of the planet?

I mean, holy cow, holy cats, and holy mackerel—the human race is filled with congressional hawks and doves who fight like cats and dogs, Wall Street bulls and bears who make a beeline for the goose that lays the golden egg, cold fish and hot doggers, early birds and night owls, lone wolves and social butterflies, and lame ducks, sitting ducks, and dead ducks.

Some people are horny studs on the prowl, strutting peacocks who preen and fish for compliments, clothes horses who put on the dog with their turtlenecks and hushpuppies, young bucks and foxy chicks in puppy love, or cool cats and kittenish lovebirds who avoid stag parties to bill and coo in their love nests.

Other people have a whale of an appetite that compels them to eat like pigs, drink like fishes, hog the lion’s share, and wolf their elephantine portions until they become plump as partridges.

Still others are mad as March hares and crazy as coots, loons, or bedbugs—batty, squirrelly, bugeyed, cockeyed cuckoos who drive us buggy with their horsing around and monkeyshines.

As we continue to pigeonhole the human race and separate the sheep from the goats, we encounter catnapping, slothful sluggards; clumsy oxen who are bulls in china shops; cocky bullies and top dogs who rule the roost; birdbrained dodos who are easily gulled, buffaloed, and outfoxed; harebrained jackasses who, like fish out of water, think at a snail’s pace; and asinine silly geese who lay an egg whenever they parrot or ape every turkey they see.

Leapin’ lizards, we can scarcely get through a day without meeting pussyfooting chickens who stick their heads in the sand, henpecked underdogs who get goose pimples and butterflies, scared rabbits who play possum and cry crocodile tears, spineless jellyfish who clam up with a frog in their throats whenever the cat gets their tongue, mousy worms who quail and flounder and then turn tail, and shrimpy pipsqueaks who fawn like toadies.

Let’s face it. It’s a dog-eat-dog world we live in—one unbridled rat race. And, doggone it, I do not wish to duck or leapfrog over this subject. It’s time to fish or cut bait, to take the bull by the horns and to give you a bird’s-eye view of animal metaphors in our language.

Dog my cats, it’s a bear of a task to avoid meeting catty, shrewish, bitchy vixens with bees in their bonnets, who think that men are swine and male chauvinist pigs and in the doghouse. Others who get my goat are antsy, crabby, pigheaded old buzzards, coots, and goats (no spring chickens) who are stubborn as mules and who grouse, bug, badger, and hound you like droning, waspish gadflies who stir up a hornets' nest.

And speaking of beastly characters, watch out for the leeches who worm their way into your confidence and make you their scapegoats; the ratfinks and stool pigeons who ferret out your deepest secrets and then squeal on you, let the cat out of the bag, and fly the coop without so much as a “See you later, alligator”; the snakes-in-the-grass who open a can of worms and then throw you a red herring; the serpentine quacks who make you their gullible guinea pigs and cat’s-paws; the low-down curs and dirty dogs who sling the bull and then send you on a wild goose chase, barking up the wrong tree; the card sharks who hawk their fishy games, monkey with your nest egg, put the sting on you, and then fleece you; the vultures who hang like albatrosses around your neck, who feather their own nests, and then—the straw that breaks the camel’s back— crow about it; the black sheep who make a monkey out of you with their shaggy-dog stories; the flies in the ointment who are slippery as eels and put a flea in your ear; and the lousy polecats and skunks who sell you a pig in a poke or a white elephant and then weasel their way out of the deal and leave you with a fine kettle of fish.

It’s just not cricket. In fact, it’s for the birds.

But let’s talk turkey and horse sense. Don’t we also know bright-eyed and bushy-tailed tigers who are always loaded for bear, eager beavers who go whole hog to hit the bull’s-eye, and loosey-goosey rare birds who are as happy as a lark or a clam and wise as an owl? People like these are the cat’s pajamas and the cat’s meow, and the world is their oyster.

So before you buzz off, I hope you’ll agree that this article has been no bull session, no fluke, no hogwash, no humbug. I really give a hoot about the animals hiding in our language, so, for my swan song, I want you to know that this has been no cock-and-bull story.

It really is a zoo out there.

EPISTOLA {Brian A. Garner}

One of the perennial snares in writing about usage and language generally is that one’s own prose must be irreproachable. And, alas, this ideal is unrealizable. Thus Sir Ernest Gowers, in the first paragraph to the preface to his revised edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage(1965), wrote: “This was indeed an epoch-making book in the strict sense of that overworked phrase,” thereby violating warnings against “Word-patronage” in the text. Thus Wilson Follett spelled ensure (same sense) inconsistently in the introductory materials to Modern American Usage. Thus Laurence Urdang wrote, in a review of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable: “To have been fortunate enough to have grown up with this fascinating book at hand…,” in violation of the correct sequence of tenses. And thus our very best writers on language have their momentary slips of the pen. Priscian himself no doubt once slipped and broke his own head. But one who espies these linguistic peccadilloes should not gloat over the discovery, nor can one really use such lapses to discredit exemplary writers, unless the mistakes become either flagrant or frequent enough not to be considered rarities.

A less common snare for writers on language—not quite perennial, but perhaps quinquennial—is that a less than perspicacious reader will find momentary lapses where there is none and precognize them. Thus Mrs. Lillian Mermin Feinsilver’s article, “When Paragons Nod” VERBATIM [VIII, 4], assailing John Simon and Christopher Ricks, among others. To be sure, some of Mrs. Feinsilver’s criticisms are justified: for example, her pointing out the incorrectness of Simon’s etc. for et al., like for as, and wouldn’t for doesn’t where the latter is required by the sequence of tenses. Likewise, she rightly signals errors in the writing of Randolph Quirk, Edmund White, Frances Ferguson, David Lodge, and Kathryn Hellerstein. But the majority of her criticisms of Simon are subtle miscorrections of illusory falls from grace.

One must imagine that any true paragon of language (or even a mere epigone) had begun, not nodding, but violently shaking his head by the time he had gotten halfway through Mrs. Feinsilver’s article. Her emended punctuation of this perfectly lucid sentence of Simon’s is based on misunderstanding: “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.” Buttressed by is not, as Mrs. Feinsilver assumes, intended to begin a participial phrase parallel to “prejudiced….” One can see this by substituting tendentious for prejudiced.

Furthermore, the following sentence is strictly correct with the singular verb: “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?” What, as subject, takes the singular verb, whether the noun that follows is singular or plural. Here the subject happens to be the noun phrase what good rather than what alone, but that makes no difference.

Mrs. Feinsilver betrays an ignorance of compound subjects in deprecating subject-verb agreement in this sentence: “Why, you may ask, is correct speech and writing important, as long as the meaning is clear?” “Correct speech and writing” expresses a single idea—correct use of language—and therefore may take a singular verb. “Two and two is four” and “Two and two are four” are both correct. It’s up to the writer to decide whether to emphasize collectivity or separateness.

To write, as Mrs. Feinsilver suggests Simon should have: “Two readers, no fewer, have sent me…” would be unidiomatic and ludicrous. No less, as used by Simon, falls into the realm of cast-iron idioms, treated so well by Fowler. Such literal-mindedness as Mrs. Feinsilver displays is what leads to ridiculous pomposities like “A number of people is at the party.” Only a latter-day Holofernes would talk or write this way, and be it remembered that Shakespeare had this pedant mouth many a solecism. I might also point out that Simon is defensibly colloquial in writing “I just returned…from France” rather than “I have just returned…from France.” And, at best, Mrs. Feinsilver’s difficulties with Ricks' punctuation are mere quodlibets.

Equally bad is that Mrs. Feinsilver herself is guilty of several verbal malfeasances. For instance, she writes: “Paradigms Lost…somehow never received the kind of detailed criticism that Simon had given the prose of others.” The sequence of tenses is wrong here: the pluperfect had has no sense of being further removed than another time in the past, though the preterite received creates the illusion of a specific time in the past; the logical suggestion is that Simon is no longer living. Furthermore, Paradigms Lost is too recent a book for one to say that it “never received (detailed criticism)” instead of “has not received” or even “has not yet received.” The sentence reads better thus: “PL…somehow has not received the kind of detailed criticism that Simon has given the prose of others.”

In the American Mercury article to which Mrs. Feinsilver refers, “Overruling Grammatical Don’ts” (June 1946), she wrote: “The preposition can go afterward or beforehand, wherever it reads better.” Before or after what we are not told, nor does the context inform us. Afterward and beforehand are both temporal rather than locative; equally important, they suggest precious avoidance of the simpler terms. (Perhaps this poor phrasing, however, was intended as mimetic support for her thesis.) Moreover, it should here probably refer to the sentence as a whole, and not merely to the preposition. The sentence might advantageously be recast thus: “The preposition can go before or after the relative clause to which it belongs, whichever placement makes the sentence read better.” Or, if we take Feinsilver’s message to heart, “which it belongs to….” In reference again to her VERBATIM article, I might note that punctilious writers eschew viable and viability nowadays, these words being suggestive of voguish bureaucratese.

We all, however inevitably or embarrassingly, make mistakes. But as Simon has so persuasively argued, that everyone errs should not lead to general approval and encouragement of erring. Yet Mrs. Feinsilver’s tone is iconoclastic, as if by wrangling over Simon’s punctuation and phraseology we can dispose of Simon forever and invalidate all his linguistic notions. There is a strong case to be made for Simon as one of the foremost stylists active today. Not only are his insights into language more erudite and provocative than those of Edwin Newman or William Safire, our two other popular writers on language, but also his weekly columns on film and theater are consistently of a very high stylistic caliber. It would be difficult indeed to name many other writers whose style so well exemplifies F.W. Bateson’s defining characteristics of good prose: 1) a preference for short sentences diversified by an occasional very long one; 2) a tone that is relaxed and almost colloquial; 3) a large vocabulary that enjoys exploiting the different social and etymological levels of words; and 4) an insistence on verbal and logical precision [Essays in Criticism, January 1966].

No matter how disturbing it may be to some, we need an articulate spokesman for prescriptivism. At one point our chief grammatical moralizer was Fowler; then came Partridge and Gowers; we Americans had Follett; and now we have and need John Simon. The idea that some writing is graceful and some graceless, some usages elegant and others boorish, some words preferable to others will never become defunct, no matter how furiously the descriptive linguists (or tarnished carpers) flail about.

[Brian A. Garner, Austin, Texas]

“by Golley, J.W.”

John E. Guilday, Carnegie Museum of Natural History

Do you suffer from “on-the-job ennui”? The paragraphs swim before your eyes, your head nods, then you suddenly jerk back at the bottom of the page. Although your eyes have followed every line, your mind has shifted to neutral or Acapulco, and there is nothing for it but to start again at the point of departure, wherever that is. All who survive by the printed word recognize the syndrome. But take heart: there is a cure.

Some of us are doomed, apparently for the rest of our working careers, to pore over endless lists of newly published books, pamphlets, papers, catalogues, whatever, in a vain and valiant effort to keep afloat. But the lists grow longer and we grow older. Each entry tends to look like the one before it, with the insidious effect that the eye darts down the page looking for key words that it may or may not pick up. What lies between is not only lost but may as well never have been published. This pathetic attempt at efficiency gives rise to two other consequences, neither of them desirable. You slowly and inevitably fall behind and find yourself scanning fewer potential topics in categorized lists. Your horizons narrow, if that is what horizons do.

Be of good cheer, for soon you will be awaiting each new bibliographic list with eagerness, avidly reading each and every selection with a quantum leap in interest, efficiency, and all-around joie de vivre.

Consider “The Sexual Connection. Mating the Wild Way,” by John Sparks, McGraw-Hill, 1978. That title happened to be where I was when I snapped back to consciousness one particularly dull day. I was amused. My imagination was sparked, and I drifted a little beyond Acapulco into fields where I was certainly not being paid to be. But Sparks and his wild ways had planted a seed. I continued down the list of titles and encountered, with a little shiver, “Effects of Off-road Vehicles on Vertebrates in the California Desert,” by Bury et al., and by the time I got to “Wetting, Spreading and Adhesion,” by Padday, I was off!

Here is a list of titles culled without too much difficulty within the past year. Surely you can do as well. I have even been inspired to write a novel as a result. The subject matter will be of little relevance. The title: The Verdict. Here comes the mailman.

Acha, P.N. and B. Szyfres. “Zoonoses and Communicable Diseases Common to Man and Animals.” Pan American Health Organization. 1980.

Ahlgren, C. E. “Small Mammals and Reforestation Following Prescribed Burning.” Journal of Forestry. 1966.

Angel, J. L. “Early Skeletons from Tranquillity, California.”

Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology. 1966.

Baylor, E. R. et al. “Water-to-air Transfer of Virus.” Science. 1977.

Beer, J. R. “Bait Preference of Some Small Mammals.” Journal of Mammalogy. 1965.

Behrends, P. R. “Copulatory Behavior of Dipodomys microps (Heteromyidae).” Southwestern Naturalist. 1981.

Biting, K. G. “Gastronomic Bibliography.” 1939.

Brainerd, C. J. “Piaget’s Theory of Intelligence.” Prentice-Hall. 1978.

Breder, C. M. Jr. et al. “Modes of Reproduction in Fishes.” Natural History Press. 1966.

Callender, C. “Social Organization of the Central Algonkian Indians.” Milwaukee Public Museum Publications in Anthropology. 1962.

Cannon, P. J. “Meteorite Impact Crater Discovered in Central Alaska with Landsat Imagery.” Science. 1977.

Chew, R. M. “Mammalian Predation on Honey Ants, Myrmecocystus (Formicidae).” Southwestern Naturalist. 1979.

Cleveland, A. G. “The Current Geographic Distribution of the Armadillo in the United States.” Texas Journal of Science. 1970.

Clough, G. C. “Local Distribution of Two Voles: Evidence for Interspecific Interaction.” Canadian Field Naturalist. 1964.

Cook, R. J. et al. “Impact on Agriculture of the Mount St. Helens Eruptions.” Science. 1981.

Doutt, J. K. “Mountain Lions in Pennsylvania?” American Midland Naturalist. 1969.

Eddy, S. “How to Know the Fresh-water Fishes.” 1969.

Fox, M. W. “The Wild Canids, Their Systematics, Behavorial Ecology and Evolution.” n.d.

Fox, R. and L. Tiger. “The Imperial Animal.” Natural History. 1977.

Gash, S. P. “A Study of Surface Features Relating to Brittle and Semi-brittle Fracture.” Tectonophysics. 1971.

Harms, W. R. et al. “The Effects of Flooding on the Swamp Forest in Lake Ocklawaha, Florida.” Ecology. 1980.

Hatt, G. “Moccasins and Their Relation to Arctic Footwear.” 1916.

Keyfitz, N. “Linkages of Intrinsic to Age-specific Rates.”

Journal of the American Statistical Association. 1971.

Lovejoy, C. O. “The Origin of Man.” Science. 1981.

Lusty, J. A. et al. “Oestrus and Ovulation in the Casiragua Proechimys quairae (Rodentia, Hystricomorpha).” Journal of Zoology. 1978.

Moller, E. “The Chewing Apparatus.” Acta Physiologica Scandinavica. 1966.

Netboy, A. “The Columbia River Salmon and Steelhead Trout: Their Fight for Survival.” University of Washington Press. 1980.

Peek, J. M. et al. “Elk Behavior Studied on Logging, Wildlife Sites.” Focus. 1976.

Pitt, D. C. (ed.). “Development from Below.” Aldine Publishing Co. 1976.

Spinage, C. A. et al. “Food Selection by the Grant’s Gazelle.” African Journal of Ecology. 1980.

Starling, A. “Enjoying Indiana Birds.” Indiana University Press. 1978.

Stern, J. T. et al. “Electromyography of the Gluteal Muscles in Hylobates, Pongo, and Pan: Implications for the Evolution of Hominid Bipedality.” Americal Journal of Physical Anthropology. 1981.

Stone, R. W. and E.M. Starr. “Meteorites Found in Pennsylvania.” Pennsylvania Geological Survey. 1967.

Tester, J. R. “Effects of a Controlled Burn on Small Mammals in a Minnesota Oak-savanna.” American Midland Naturalist. 1965.

Turnbull, K. E. et al. “Testicular Descent in the Marsupial Trichosurus vulpecula (Kerr).” Australian Journal of Zoology. 1981.

Waage, J. K. “Dual Function of the Damselfly Penis: Sperm Removal and Transfer.” Science. 1979.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“5. SEXUAL ASSAULT CLASSES FOR 7 & 8 GRADE BOYS ON APRIL 6 WITH MR. PLEDL IN MULTI-PURPOSE ROOM” [From Teacher Bulletin, March 30, 1982, Thomas Jefferson Middle School, Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin. Submitted by Robert F. Perkins, who observes, “It’s important for the public schools to give all students a solid foundation for the basics…”]

Philip Howard on English English

Philip Howard

I was gassing away in The Times the other day about a three-letter word in British English that is fraught with powerful magical and negative connotations. The word is not God, but gas. I rambled on about the sinister atmosphere of gas and its derivatives and suggested that it was probably derived from the use of gas, mostly chlorine, in the First World War.

Now, you cannot lay down the law about such vexed scientific matters, particularly in The Times, without tempting out of their laboratories some of the choice and master scientists of our age. Their correspondence has made me revise my gassy opinions in some respects, which I here report for VERBATIM. I made the mistake of writing that the only poem to gas that I knew of was one to the birth of KNO\?\3, written by Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather and precursor of Evolution Darwin, beginning: “Hence orient Nitre owes its sparkling birth.” One should never write “only” or use superlatives in journalism. They are red rags to bull-shitting correspondents. Of the large and highly scented selection of gas poems I was sent, I print the shortest and jolliest:

Johnny, finding life a bore,
Drank some H\?\2SO\?\4.
Johnny’s father, an M.D.,
Gave him CaCO\?\3.
Now he’s neutralized, it’s true,
But he’s full of CO\?\2.

I was put right about my etymology of gas. I had followed the conventional opinion that the word was invented by van Helmont in the seventeenth century as the name for the occult principle that he supposed to be present in all bodies. He took it from the Ancient Greek chaos: “Halitum illum Gas vocavi, non longe a Chao veterum secretum.” I am informed by an eminent scientist that it was in fact the Swiss physician Paracelsus (1493-1541) who first had the inspiration of adopting the Ancient Greek chaos to mean ‘atmospheric air.’ What van Helmont did was to change the meaning to kinds of air other than the air we breathe; and his stroke of genius was to spell the Greek word phonetically, i.e., as he and other southern Dutch-speakers would have spelled it, if, knowing no Greek, they had heard it, and had had to write it down in Dutch.

In the Times article I had mused that only in North America did gas have positive connotations, mainly because of your odd use of gas to mean the juice that makes cars go. To step on the gas is, I take it, a pretty cheerful act. What a gas!, meaning ‘What larks, What fun,’ may have come from laughing gas, I supposed. I have been sent a marvelously learned and curious alternative etymology. This suggests that the gas in What a gas! is Old French taken to North America and fossilized there. Gas appears in Old French as the nominative form of gab, with a meaning broadly similar to jape. The OED points out that it is not easy to make any phonetic connection between the two words. There was also the verb gaber.

If you look at that early exercise in vernacular parody “Le voyage de Charlemagne à Jérusalem et à Constantinople,” described as an Anglo-Norman poem of the twelfth century, you will find: “Par Dieu,” ço dist l’escolte, “cist gas est bels et bons….” The adjectives retained the nominative form also at that date. If you buy this learned and engaging etymology, you are going to have to explain how they retained the nominative form gas until after Columbus crossed the ocean blue, unless we are going off on a loony voyage after previously unknown Old French explorers who discovered America three centuries before Columbus, in company with St. Brendan, the Vikings, the Ancient Egyptians, and the rest of the splendid company who have brought fame and fortune to their sponsors.

An American correspondent pointed out that gas in the States—in addition to meaning petrol and occuring in “What a gas!”—means what Brits refer to genteelly as wind. He quoted at me a sentence from Be Young with Yoga: “Indiscriminate combinations of foods make digestion very difficult and will produce gas, bloating, and other discomforts.” I have met this American gas, but have never been sure if it meant a fart, a burp, or both. Do not write. I will look it up for myself.

I received charming and persuasive letters arguing that gas has a kindlier ring for elderly Scots than for modern English. Gas-lamps were lit by the “leerie” with his tall magic wand, as the children followed him respectfully down the street. “The gas,” even if in a fish-tail burner, made reading possible after parents had gone to bed; candles were considered dangerous and damaging to eyesight. “Gassing” was cheerful and harmless gossiping. And what parents disparagingly called “that gassy stuff” was that most delicious of drinks, the American ice cream soda.

I was reminded that in Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (1818) Scythrop is “that author of a treatise, called Philosophical Gas; or, a Project for a General Illumination of the Human Mind.” I agree that it is impossible to believe that Peacock was unaware of and did not intend the ludicrous nature of this title. Therefore it is impossible to believe that the ludicrous (as distinct from the sinister) associations of the word gas only date from the First World War.

I was sent a jolly story of the present chairman, originally from Vienna, of Israel’s broadcasting authority. He was puzzled, on receiving back his first essay while pursuing his legal studies at Oxford, to find the word gas frequently penned in the margins. Requesting an explanation, he was told that it stood for ‘German Academic Style.’

All gas and gaiters, I dare say. But it’s good fun and, in its quiet way, extending our knowledge of our infinitely arguable language.

Pairing Pairs No. 9

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). Shoes that give some young girls a real lift.
(b). Hearty contingent from New York City?
(c). He gets only the sweet he merits.
(d). Dame Sheep has it all together.
(e). Shadow boxing?
(f). Okay—he has the price of a ticket.
(g). Is The Birds treacherous?
(h). Play bridge to become aroused?
(i). Special device for watching Persian fairies
(j). Defendant opposed to ordinary squabble.
(k). Doubly contemptible musical instrument.
(l). Slippery scene.
(m). Naval person.
(n). Alley’s just dessert.
(o). Forget to put out the cat.
(p). Where they wait for the flowers to grow.
(q). Marcel reported heavily Zeus had it with Leda.
(r). Impressionable leather pendulum.
(s). Flagg or nut?
(t). Taxi queue at night club.
(u). Did Porter know film director?
(v). Cockney camp follower to ask for a fight.
(w). Patch.
(x). Has it rung up for him?
(y). Order of the day.
(z). Swindler leads broker a merry dance.
(1). Apple.
(2). Array.
(3). Baba.
(4). Base.
(5). Belly.
(6). Cab.
(7). Combat.
(8). Con.
(9). Corps.
(10). Dancer.
(11). Dessert.
(12). Dutch.
(13). Easily.
(14). Enough.
(15). Ewe.
(16). Fare.
(17). Feinting.
(18). File.
(19). Four.
(20). Fowl.
(21). Gardens.
(22). Hazel.
(23). Jacob’s.
(24). Jane.
(25). Just.
(26). Knighted:
(27). Ladder.
(28). Man.
(29). Mary.
(30). Nocturnal.
(31). Omission.
(32). Ophuls.
(33). Order.
(34). Peri.
(35). Pie.
(36). Plain.
(37). Play.
(38). Queue.
(39). Rum.
(40). Scope.
(41). Ship.
(42). Show.
(43). Slide.
(44). Spell.
(45). Suede.
(46). Swans.
(47). Tango.
(48). Tiff.
(49). Vile.
(50). Weigh.
(51). Which.

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 Claurène 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 follwing: 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.

Pairing Pairs No. 8

(a). No specific truck inspired Scottish song. (5, 37) Any Lorry.
(b). Was spring drink kept in composer’s catafalque? (6, 9) Bach Bier.
(c). WW II (U.S.) agency dimly sited. (43, 19) O.P.A. City.
(d). Where secrecy reigns. (44, 50) Queue Tea.
(e). Bilabial flowers. (52, 36) Two Lips.
(f). Male mythological bird. (10, 23) Bull Finch.
(g). Uneven member of society or on third wheel? (41, 22) Odd Felloe.
(h). Celtic power from the wind. (28, 25) Gael Force.
(i). Giant steps evoke emotionless look. (49, 48) Stony Stair.
(j). A suitcase or influenza in California? (33, 29) L.A. Grippe.
(k). From the horse’s mouth? Negative! (46, 40) Say Nay.
(l). Carthusian potato cooker. (26, 27) French Friar.
(m). Top-ranking a.d.c. (24, 1) First Aide.
(n). Change the acolyte—he gets a lift from church. (2, 11) Altar Buoy.
(o). Scapegoat ruins the picnic. (3, 45) Ant Sally.
(p). Musicians form a circle at forbidden nupitials. (53, 7) Wedding Banned.
(q). Damage from entering the wrong accommodation in the Pullman. (8, 38) Berth Mark.
(r). Kiss your relatives, or give them the boot? (12, 32) Buss Kin.
(s). Rules made by the R.C. bigshots. (13, 35) Cannon Law.
(t). Major L’Enfant had it. (14, 31) Capital Idea.
(u). Shoemaker takes final opportunity to intone incantations over his models. (34, 15) Last Chants.
(v). Tick off the playwright. (16, 42) Check Off.
(w). Saudi Arabian elegance (U.S.) (4, 17) Arab Chic.
(x). Exploit the soda fountain beverage (Br.) (39, 47) Milk Sheik.
(y). What the Trojans should have done before the Greeks entered. (20, 30) Close Hoarse.
(z). Tudor car used by cowards. (18, 21) Chicken Coop.

The correct answer is (51) Thrown. The solutions are given below. The winners of No. 8 will be announced in the next issue.

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“When James D. Watkins was growing up in Alhambra, Calif., his mother would take him and his brother to nearby Navy ports to watch the ships come in like cows at milking time.” [From a “Man in the News” profile by Phil Gailey, N.Y. Times, March 19, 1982, p. B5. Submitted by Daniel James, Ivoryton, Connecticut, who suggests a solid lead medal for the most inept simile of the year.]

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Chicago Manual of Style

13th Edition, (University of Chicago Press, 1969, 1982), ix + 738pp.

[A VERBATIM Book Club Selection.]

I am not entirely sure that what follows is properly in the province of a style manual, but it is a source of confusion for many writers and has given me pause on occasion, too. The problem is whether one uses a or an preceding certain abbreviations, not knowing whether the reader is going to read the abbreviation as an abbreviation or in its full form. Certain abbreviations are so well established as such that few people will be likely to read them as full forms:

FTD — Florists Telegraphic Delivery
H.E.W. — (Department of) Health, Education and Welfare
H.O.L.C. — Home Owners Loan Corporation
M.P. — Military Police (or Military Policeman)
N.R.A. — National Recovery Act
R and R — Relaxation and Rehabilitation (or Rest and Relaxation)
S.O.P. — Standard Operating Procedure

The only abbreviations pertinent to the problem are those that start with the letters f, h, l, m, n, r, s, and x—that is, those that would, when word-initial, require a but, when their names are pronounced, require an. Those listed above are probably more often uttered as abbreviations—“eff tee dee,” “aitch ee double-u,” “aitch oh ell see,” and so on. But what about abbreviations that are not quite so familiar? It seems to me that the abbreviation s.a.s.e., for instance, is not yet widely established for people to know whether to read it as “self-addressed stamped envelope” or “ess ay ess ee.” Do you write “Please enclose a s.a.s.e.” or “…an s.a.s.e.”? The Chicago Manual of Style is not forthcoming on this subject, though it does take a sensible position regarding such Cockneylike usages as “an hotel,” “an historical romance,” etc., which it says are not good form.

Anyone writing any matter for publication should have a copy of this indispensable volume. Even those who write for scholarly publications and are exhorted to use the MLA Style Sheet or some other, specialized guide should have a copy of the CMS. Among some of the valuable pieces of information are conversion tables for the Wade-Giles system of transliterating Chinese to the Pinyin system and vice versa (pp. 272, 273), and transliteration of Cyrillic and Greek (pp. 266 and 276—showing variations that occur for the former). There is scarcely any aspect of preparing a manuscript for printing— including indexing, proofreading, etc.—that is not covered and covered well.

Inevitably, I have found another omission; though it is not particularly heinous, it should be noted by the editors for inclusion in the 14th Edition. It concerns indexing, which is accorded ample space for the description of traditional procedures. Despite the fact that there is a (new) section in the 13th Edition dealing with automatic typesetting, its content is a little sparse, and the materials are relatively naive. What is omitted in the indexing section is any mention of automated indexing, which can be accomplished more or less completely automatically form text in machine-readable form. [See my article, “The Human Use of Human Indexers,” The Indexer, April 1980; a free copy will be sent on request to anyone sending a (an?) s.a.s.e. to me at VERBATIM.]

The information contained in the paragraphs dealing with computer-driven composing machines and keyboards is slightly misleading. For example, section 20.120 contains comments about OCR (optical character recognition) devices but fails to point out their high error factor and the extreme slowness of their operation. The more sophisticated (and expensive) devices are said to be capable of “learning” any typeface and of converting its character images into bytes, but, again, it depends on whether one believes the advertisements or the performance.

There is a great deal more to be said about automatic typesetting than is even suggested in the Chicago Manual. Lest it be assumed that all that technical nonsense has no bearing on styling a manuscript for the printer, I hasten to point out that with the proliferation of word-processing equipment these days, the typewriter may well be obsolescent, and, with the cost of professional compositors' keyboarding bound to increase in the coming years, it may not be long before publishers will insist on submission of manuscript for publication in machine-readable form, probably on 5¼” or 8” diskettes (or on the high-density micro-diskettes predicted for the near future as standard). A 5¼” double-sided double-density diskette, costing only about $4, can accommodate 360,000 characters of storage (nominally)—that is, about 50,000 words. It is not surprising, then, that ten diskettes could contain a healthy novel in a form that allows for fast, cheap duplication, easy storage, and, using conversion apparatus already available and in use, the means for rapid typesetting (including automatic page make-up) at speeds of tens of thousands of characters per minute.

It is not my intention to write that segment of the Style Manual here, only to point out that the coverage given is niggardly, especially when one considers that many of those functions formerly the province of the compositor are now becoming the responsibility of the editor and often of the author.

This is not to detract from what is in the Manual; it must be conceded to be the most useful editorial tool available. Every editor, every writer should have a good dictionary, a good grammar of English, a good synonym dictionary (or thesaurus), and a copy of the essential Chicago Manual of Style. A selection of the first three can be found in the Book Club Catalogue; there is only one Chicago Manual of Style, which we are now pleased to offer there as well.

—Laurence Urdang

Crossword Puzzle Answers

Across

1. BUNGALOW (Anagram A BLOWGUN) 5. STAT-us 9. ACID TEST (DICTATES) 10. WEIGHT (THE WIG) 12. SPIKE 13. U-nused-TO 15. OVER-spent-budge-T 17. EASIER OPPONENTS (Anagram SO INEPT AS NO PEER) 20. Debunker 22. Twist 24. Lolita 25. Re-marker 26. PA-rod-Y 27. ASTERISK (STAR TYPE)

Down

1. Bram Stoker 2. IN SESSION (NOISINESS) 3. Artless 4. Obscure works 6. The-me-NU 7. Tight 8. Sit (cite) 11. Quit-E perfect 14. IT ISN’T FREE (Anagram IF INTEREST) 16. Gin rickey 18. exul-T-ed 19. Not fair 21. eeL-E. R. 23. Flap

A Memorable Agreement

Bernard L. Witlieb, Bronx Community College, CUNY

Although mnemonic devices have existed since time immemorial, none has been absolutely successful.

HOMES for the Great Lakes, Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior, is a popular but partial mnemonic success. The acronymic aspect works, but the word homes has no semantic connection to lakes.

On Old Olympus' Tiny Tops,
A Finn and German Viewed Some Hops.

is a couplet familiar to many medical students. The first letters of the words stand for the cranial nerves: olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, trigeminal, abducens, facial, auditory, glossopharyngeal, vagus, spinal accessory, and hypoglossal. Again a partial sucess—the rhyme has no connection to what it encodes. In addition, the verse may strike some as being nonsensical and lengthy, therefore hardly an aid to memory.

PALE GAS may suggest the miasma which envelops the seven deadly sins: pride, avarice, lust, envy, gluttony, anger, sloth, but the mnemonic has no direct semantic relationship to the sins themselves. And woe to the theologians or students who substitute greed for avarice and ire for anger. They must sneer LIP EGGS or admire PIGS LEGS or some other nonce variation, with an even greater distance between sound and sense.

The ideal mnemonic device, then, should be acronymic, concise, admitting of no significant variable, and revelatory of what it represents. Imagine what such a saying would do for the teacher of grammar—the rule becoming clear and imprinting itself on the students' minds. Well, I’ve molded such a key to knowledge which, alas, cannot appear in any “publishable” grammar textbook.

Teachers of writing acknowledge that one truly significant, hard to remedy problem is lack of subject-verb agreement, not the Neither my uncle, fourteen cousins, nor I (is, are, am) at the picnic exemplum, but a lack of agreement of a more basic kind: if the subject is third person singular, the present tense verb ends in -s. For whatever reason, dialectal, poor auditory discrimination, etc., often the final -s for some students does not appear consistently in the spoken or written language.

The mnemonic device which leads to mastery of this deficiency is simplicity itself:

HE SHITS.

The sentence is short, memorable, and memorizable. Furthermore, it is an acronym for the third person singular and the conjugated verb—he, sh(e), it, final -s. And obviously HE SHITS embodies subject-verb agreement. The mnemonic admits one significant variable: SHE HITS, which similarly reinforces the agreement pattern.

This modest mnemonic has the directness Jonathan Swift would have appreciated and exalted to poetic status.

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Word Watcher’s Handbook: A Deletionary of the Most Abused and Misused Words

Phyllis Martin, (St. Martin’s Press, 1977, 1982), xi + 129pp.

We do not often review paperback books in these pages, but enough copies of the first edition of this book have been— sold to warrant a “Revised and Enlarged Edition,” so it— appears to be of sufficient importance on that ground alone to pay it some attention. Despite encomiastic comments by various newspaper reviewers and William Safire, as well as a BIG BLURB from Ann Landers, I find the contents a mixed bag of good and questionable advice, of straightforward and confusing information, and of doubtful value.

Plunging, with epic convention, in medias res, we find Pronunciation Pitfalls, a list of 300-odd words that are frequently “mispronounced.” I put that into quotation marks because some of the pronunciations given are mispronunciations:

bullion bul'. yun (u as in alumni)

bouillion boo'. yun (Who says that? It is not even an accurate French pronunciation.)

á [sic] la mode,…

envelope en'.vah .lōp if a noun; en .vel'.up if a verb (The pronunciation is fine, but that is a misspelling for the verb, if case you hadn’t noticed.)

fiancée fee.ahn'.sā. (But fē.än.sā' is given on page 110.)

foyer fwah.yā was the original pronunciation, although most dictionaries accept foy'.ur. (And, indeed, Mrs. Martin should have learned by now that good dictionaries neither “accept” nor “reject”: they report what people say.)

hors d’oeuvre awr'.durv'. Please note that you do not pronounce the s. [The French do not pronounce the final s when they use the plural form.] (Presumably, the s referred to is that of hors, which, being a preposition, has no plural.)

…and so on through the horrors.

Preceding these Pitfalls, which seem to be traps into which the author has fallen as often as her prospective reader, is a chapter on Usage. Here we encounter what might be termed the “traditional” approach to among (for three or more; use between for two) which, it has been shown, simply doesn’t work when a set of three (or more) may have a relation affecting only two at a time, reciprocally, as in the Triple Alliance. There are more:

A criterion is a standard test by which something is compared or measured. (A quick check in a good dictionary would have revealed its correct meaning. And does one compare… by?)

decimate This is from the Latin decem, “ten.” It means, literally, to “select by lot and kill one in every ten.” Many people use it incorrectly to mean “the killing of a large number,” or “total destruction.” (They would certainly be incorrect if they did that, for decimate is a verb, not a noun, and cannot mean “the killing….” That aside, there is no rule that we have to use words in English in their literal Latin sense, and a review of decimate in the OED will reveal some very respectable citations for the sense ‘destroy’ that antedate this bit of parroted pedantry. And why not object to the spelling, too? Latin had decem; we have decim-.

draught Chiefly British. Pronunciation and meaning identical to draft. (Much more complicated than that as to meanings. As for “identical” pronunciation, the British are likely to revolt.)

hung A picture is hung. A man is hanged. (First, how about giving women equal time on this one. Second, a man can be well hung, which is more than can be said about a woman.)

lit The latest dictionaries sanction this usage as a past tense form of to light. (I would not characterize the OED as one of the “latest” dictionaries, and its editors found a citation in Shelley, which is good enough for most people.)

…and so on.

Following Pitfalls is a chapter called Beyond the Basics, in which the author has combined with her own list a list published in William Safire’s column in The New York Times of “Out-of-it Words” and “On-top-of-it Words.” The former are ordinary words for ordinary things, the latter the terms used by those who, presumably, are “with it.” Accountably, the On-top-of-it Words reek with jargon, euphemistic turns of phrase, and what might best be called tomorrow’s clichés. Here is a sampling:

OUT-OF-IT-WORDS	ON-TOP-OF-IT WORDS
bathrobe (for a woman)	hostess gown or robe
butcher	meat cutter
cleaning woman	domestic
divorced	newly single
idiot	developmentally disadvantaged

…and so on. Some of them are merely corrections or sensible modernizations:

OUT-OF-IT-WORDS	ON-TOP-OF-IT WORDS
icebox	refrigerator (I thought it was fridge.)
machine	automobile, car (Does anyone say that?)
porch	deck (Not the same thing)
Smithsonian Institute	Smithsonian Institution (Wrong name)
Wimpleton	Wimbledon (Pronunciation)

This is just plain silly—or should that be ridiculous?

By far the least useful part of the book is Reviewing Foreign Menu Terms, in which Mrs. Martin has adopted the rather complicated, narrow system of phonetic transcription used in the Larousse French/English-English/French Modern Dictionary. There follows a ten-page listing of items culled from the menus of restaurants where the author doubtless whiled away many happy hours with the editor of St. Martin’s Press, restaurants serving a choix of coq au [sic] vin, biscuits [pronounced biskyi], huîtres [pronounced yi:tr], and boudin. The purpose of such a section, with its elaborate pronunciations, is not clear till one learns from its introduction that its idea comes from Executive Etiquette, another book published by St. Martin’s and offering, one must assume, security to those taken to a French restaurant in the course of a job interview. Presumably, the candidate is also taught the proper uses of knife, fork, and spoon.

Well, you get the idea. What else could you expect from someone who writes:

Calvary Place near Jerusalem where Christ was crucified. I always remember the distinction between Cal vary and cavalry by associationg Calvin (the great Christian) with Calvary and the cavalier (which comes from the word horseman) with cavalry. The sequence of letters does it for me.

cavalry Has to do with horses. See above.

Using that and other mnemonics, this could become the most forgettable book of the year. Perhaps it helps explain why we ignore many of the books about language that are published these days.

—Laurence Urdang

BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The Muvver Tongue

Robert Barltrop and Jim Wolveridge, (The Journeyman Press, London, England, and West Nyack, N.Y., U.S.A.).

This is a splendid book. It is not only an in-depth study of the eccentric idiom (linguistic freak?) known as Cockney rhyming slang, but, much more than that, an illuminating treatment of the social background of those who speak that idiom, the working-class society which inhabits the East End of London. Cockney is not only a patois, but, say the authors, “an attitude of mind.” Rhyming slang is only an incidental. A glance at the index of any respectable library will reveal the multiplicity of books about Cockney rhyming slang. In most cases, the subject is given light-hearted treatment, as though this jargon were little more than food for variety turns (i.e., vaudeville acts). This is the only book I have seen that goes beyond the usually over-romanticized and too often parodied idiom, to explore its social background.

To define some terms: muvver is Cockney for mother (just as bovver, for instance, is Cockney for bother, and so on). The v sound for th as in mother and the f sound for th as in thing are among the Cockney variations. (After all, the Germans pronounce their v as our f and their w as our v, and the French don’t bother to pronounce a great many of their letters of the alphabet at all, so what’s so funny about v or f for th?)

Next: rhyming slang. This consists of a large number of two- or three-word concoctions, the last word of which rhymes with the word intended to be conveyed. Thus: boat race ‘face’; daisy roots ‘boots’; German bands ‘hands’; loaf of bread ‘head’; mince pies ‘eyes’; plates of meat ‘feet’; tit for tat ‘hat’; trouble and strife ‘wife.' But—and this is a very big but—to confuse the issue, the rhyming word is almost invariably omitted, so that we wind up with daisies for boots, Germans for hands, loaf ‘head,’ minces ‘eyes’, plates ‘feet’, titfer (tit for) ‘hat’; the list goes on and on and on. For an exhaustive compilation, see A Load of Cockney Cobblers, by Bob Alwin (Johnston & Bacon Publishers, London, 1971). As a passing note, did you know that the origin of raspberry for a derisive sound was Cockney raspberry tart? Brewer says: “ ‘Raspberry’ is heart, contracted from ‘raspberry-tart,’ ” so raspberry tart apparently served more than one purpose.

The Muvver Tongue, in scholarly depth and with affection, explores many aspects of Cockney life: the family, manners and moods, the proprieties, money matters, hospitality, vulgarity. As only one example of the social approach, the authors point out toilet humor and imagery as a recognizable aspect of Cockney talk, not because Cockneys are innately coarse, but because their living conditions have put the subject “under their noses,” literally as well as figuratively.

The authors are products of the Cockney homeland of East London, and the book is full of fun, vulgarity, and pride of that part of the world. In writing about its language, which is their own, they destroy myths and misconceptions about Cockney rhyming slang and demonstrate that it is not “bad English,” but the idiom of a special working-class culture with roots that go back more than 150 years. It is a credit to the authors, now in their sixties, that working-class bias is never allowed to get in the way of scholarly, objective treatment, which provides much of interest to the layman and invaluable information for the specialist.

Norman W. Schur
Hawkhurst, Kent

SIC! SIC! SIC!

“Einstein is wrong in his general theory of relativity, if calculations by University of Arizona physicists are right.” [From’ The Los Angeles Times, April 6, 1982. Submitted by S. Jackson, Brisbane, Australia, who comments, I thought he was dead!]

Crossword Puzzle

Across

1. Enjoy the lady’s wine and get a bag on. (9)
6. Cycle when out of shape. (5)
9. Contest for those who are in a wet pool. (5, 4)
10. Gird for war; alternatively, put on a strong defense. (5)
11. Finesse and skill needed for a drink in an explosive setup. (6)
12. Shootin' irons appear when there’s rage in the granges. (8)
14. A vile mark for such a dire fate. (4, 5)
16. Crossties on the tracks, all the ways out. (5)
19. How do you feel? (5)
20. Badly and sadly shrunk. (9)
21. Spouse, though separated, is about to turn the tide and think it over. (8)
23. Write on? Right on, for the flag (6)
26. Let me return help given by various means. (5)
27. An old sex manual. (4, 5.)
28. Barefaced gall. (5)
29. It takes a firm step for mixed-up New York City to face the noise. (9)

Down

1. Weapons of a size worth firing. (9)
2. Vigilant’s the word if the Emergency Room team can detect this spark of life. (5, 4)
3. Jog on, jog on, we’ve seen it all before. (5)
4. Off base? Keep a low profile. (4)
5. Lackwits heard about everything so they can’t be told anything. (10)
5. Topsy-turvy peak to glue down into position. (9)
7. Gunner who zeroes in on ‘em, up in the air. (5)
8. Works for pots and pots, so I hear. (5)
13. Food wagers may be financial assistance for new firms. (10)
15. Maintain equipment and don’t go off the rails. (4, 5)
17. Being from London I throw a lot of weight around. (9)
18. Type that sits, looking popeyed around the garden. (9)
21. Opera heroine hits low C. Not very original, is it? (5)
22. Duck, or your goose is cooked! (5)
24. Led on and coaxed to be relaxed after a social gathering. (5)
25. Love damage suffered by poet. (4)

Answer will appear in the next issue. Answer to No. 20 is on page 21.

Internet Archive copy of this issue