VOL IX, No 3 [Spring, 1983]
Prep School Slanguage
Richard Lederer, St. Paul’s School
Not long ago (it could have been any night), a group of students who board at St. Paul’s School, where I have been teaching English for twenty-one years, sat around waiting for a shipment of starch to arrive from a local pizza emporium. When almost an hour had passed beyond the appointed time of delivery, one of the boys called up and asked the parlor to bag the za (meaning ‘cancel the pizza’). The pizza parlor person asked, “You want me to do what?” “Bag the pizza,” the boy explained. After a pause, the voice replied: “We don’t bag pizzas here; we put it in boxes.”
Take 500 boys and girls who are blessed with an abundance of linguistic exuberance and word-making energy, gather them into a close-knit boarding school community far from a big city, and you can be certain that they will create their own special vocabulary, full of daring metaphors, cryptic abbreviations, surprising semantic shifts, and curious coinages. Since one of the purposes of such a vocabulary, as to the thieves' cant to which it is cousin, is to make it possible for the group not to be understood by the uninitiated, the pizza man, quite naturally, did not comprehend the special usage of bag in St. Paul’s School lingo.
According to H.L. Mencken, the word slang developed in the eighteenth century either from an erroneous past tense of sling or from language itself through blending and clipping, as in (thieve)s’lang(uage) and (beggar)s’lang(uage). The average prep school student combines the more bizarre elements of American jive talk, beat lingo, student cant, and regionalisms with a number of terms that are pure preppie. Thus, I have adopted the broad term slanguage for this disquisition on the informal speech (seldom the writing) of students (seldom faculty) at St. Paul’s School, a rural boarding school set in Concord, New Hampshire. Most of the words I shall discuss are not to be found in even the most up-to-date dictionaries of American slang.
Slanguage words tend to lead mayfly lives. Like Shakespeare’s poor player, they have their hour upon a school’s stage and are heard no more. But while their birth is more violent and their expiration more rapid than those of standard English speech, all slanguage words are created and derived in a number of time-honored methods of word formation. My hope is that readers may use the following analysis to make sense and order of the slanguage that is slung in other environments and may gain insight into the ways that all new words are formed.
Clipping. The shearing away of a part of a word so that the remainder comes to stand for the whole is called clipping. Much of prep school slanguage consists simply of the shortening of familiar terms so often used by a homogeneous group that a hint is sufficient to indicate the whole. Brevity is the soul of slang.
Thus, a preppie who attends St. Paul’s School is a Paulie (clipping + pet suffix -ie). All Paulies start life at school as newbs (‘new boys’; girls are also newbs). Paulies begin each day in their dorms, from which they go directly to breck (‘breakfast’) and then to chap (‘chapel’) for nourishment and nurture. Afterwards come classes, whose titles are often clipped, including Intro (‘Introduction to Religious Studies’), Hum Rel (‘Human Relations’), Hum Sex (‘Human Sexuality’), and (gasp!) Hum Per (‘Human Personality’). Paulies who don’t vedge (‘vegetate’) will produce good grades to show their rents (‘parents’). On spring afternoons, some Paulies go to lax prac (‘lacrosse practice’), where they hope to be jocks, not spazzes (‘spastics’), as their bods soak up rays.
Acronymania. The most extreme form of shortening is in the acronym, in which words are reduced to their initial letters. Such verbal compacting is bound to happen at a place like SPS, where community members need to refer to buildings, committees, and programs succinctly yet comprehensively. Thus, rule-breakers will often find themselves meeting with the DC (‘Disciplinary Committee’) and having to go OR (‘on restriction’) or, worse yet, OB (‘on bounds’). All students may relax at the CC (a reduplicative acronym for the Community Center) or pick up news from home at the PO.
SPS slanguage has spawned two particularly clever acronyms. First, when a suite of audio-visual rooms was installed in the basement of our main academic building, some waggish genius added a suffix to the acronym A-V to create the brilliant and apparently enduring pun: The Aviary. Second, the arrival of coeducation to our school in 1971 inspired the verb to to scope (a clipping of telescope) and the derived noun scoper, ‘one who appreciatively ogles the opposite sex.’ From this process has arisen an unofficial organization named SCOPERS, an acronym said to stand for ‘Students Concentrating On the Palatable Extremities of the Reciprocal Sex.’ Happily, the society is open to both boys and girls.
Shifty conversions. Because modern English has shed most of its flexional endings, its words are endowed with the happy facility of changing their so-called parts of speech with great ease. This ability of our words to rail-jump from one grammatical class to another is called function shift, or conversion.
Prep school slanguage fully exploits this lively characteristic. Many SPS conversions are desubstantival verbs: to book, to brick, to duke (it out), and to tube mean, respectively, ‘to do something rapidly’ (“the track captain’s really booking”), ‘to be frightened’ (“I took one look at the exam and just bricked”),‘to fight,’ and ‘to watch television.’
As the boundaries between word classes become blurred, almost any interchange, it seems, is possible: “that guy’s a real grind” (verb into noun), “my dormmaster sure serves great munchies at our feeds” (verbs into nouns), “let’s go pond a newb” (noun into verb), and, most exotically, “I’ve just been latered” (‘done in,’ adverb into passive verb).
Two vogue words that are prominent in the SPS lexicon were formed in strikingly similar ways. To boze means ‘to mess up because of disorganization or sloppiness’; a team with a big lead must be sure to avoid bozing in the last period. The word appears to be a clipping of the name Bozo (the Clown) that has been converted to a verb. To bogue, ‘smoke a cigarette,’ has traveled the same morphological route. Take the name of cigarette-puffing Humphrey Bogart, convert the surname into a verb, and then lop off the last syllable. Thus, both words are eponyms that have been clipped and function-shifted, illustrating that very often several methods are simultaneously at work in the formation of a slanguage word.
Curious combinations. True to its Germanic heritage, the English language loves to make compounds by welding together two independent words to form a new concept. Among such combinations in the slanguage corpus are
moon-man: a noun describing a person not like ourselves. We are popular, attractive, and clever. Moon-men may be smart, but they are not popular, attractive, or clever. Moon-women do not exist.
space cadet: a neophyte moon-man.
embryo Joe: a large-brained computer-jock: a science-loving moon-man.
wale on: to embarrass or to triumph, as “I waled on his face.”
Sometimes in English we combine morphemes in such a way that the beginning of one word runs into the end of another to form a blend. Lewis Carroll’s chortle (chuckle + snort) and galumphing (gallop + triumphing) are famous examples. Two slanguage words that mean ‘sickeningly sloppy’ may fit into this category. About half of my informants insisted that scuz is a bland of scum and fuzz, while the other half claimed that it is a front and back clipping of disgusting. Similarly, some maintain that the vogue word rasty is a blend of rancid and nasty, while others assert that it is a pure coinage.
Figuratively speaking. In “A Visit to the Language Zoo” [VERBATIM, IX, 2] and “You Said a Mouthful” [VERBATIM, IX, 3], I attempted to show how zoological and food metaphors enliven our vocabularly, proving the truth of James Greenough’s and George Kittredge’s statement that “language is fossil poetry which is continually being worked over for uses of speech.”
In the slanguage of prep schools, this metaphorical substitution for the plain, literal word can be seen in full activity, and it is not surprising that the words with the greatest metaphorical energy concern academic life. Disastrous performances on tests generate two striking linguistic clusters. The first I call the rotisserie metaphor: one doesn’t just do poorly on an exam: he or she (in vaguely increasing degrees of heat) gets smoked, lit, torched, burned, toasted, fried, baked, roasted, or sizzled. Then there is the violent, paramilitary pattern of verbs: one gets hammered, bombed, shot down, or blown away.
Note that all the verbs are in the passive voice. The student is seen as a helpless victim of menacing, uncontrollable forces. In pale contrast stand a few active verbs, most notably “to ace a test” (probably a golfing metaphor). This is not to say that preppies don’t often perform superbly on examinations, just that it is bad form to talk about it.
A few other slanguage metaphors are
cooler: a relatively ancient refrigeration metaphor for the Infirmary, where one’s social activities are put on ice.
tool: one who is used by others; a stooge.
to cruise: a ship or airplane metaphor denoting a social tour of the campus after hours.
In the figure we call synecdoche, a part of the whole becomes a name for the whole, or vice versa as in “sixty head of cattle” or “fifty sails.” Paulies play puck (ice hockey) or hoop (basketball, also acronymed to b-ball). Paulies do not watch television; they watch the tube, or they tube out. Here we have a synecdoche, which is the result of a function shift, which in turn is a clipping of picture tube. Metonymy, a figure by which something is designated not by its own name but by the name of something that suggests it, can be observed in the Second Floor (a locational designation for the School’s administration), pit (another name for basketball), and jock (an athlete). In jock, an item of sports apparel has been (figuratively) clipped and has come to stand for the person, so that girls can also be jocks.
Semantic antics. Once a word has been invented and taken its place in our language, it doesn’t just sit still, as we know from the recent histories of entries like gay, clone, and Mickey Mouse. In SPS slanguage we discover that the word lush has come to mean ‘easy,’ as in “a lush course,” that bag means ‘to drop from one’s agenda,’ as in “bag the za,” and that a turkey, which has nothing to do with geography or ornithology, describes someone we can’t stand. A fog is not a weather phenomenon but, rather, a person who is out of it, in a mental fog, and a fogue (probably a clipping of fogey) is a stupid mistake that a real fog makes, like pulling an all-nighter and then sleeping through the examination.
One process of semantic change is called emptying. Words which once possessed very real and specific meaning can, with time, become vague and hollow. In the late Sixties, at many schools, everything was cool or neat, from the style of a friend’s boots to an epic poem. By the mid-Seventies, the vogue words expressing approval were unbelievable, fabulous, and fantastic. Today the affirmative grunt-words on campus are intense and awesome, be the subject an athletic victory or a great symphony. Negative grunt-words include rude, beat, and rasty.
Curious coinages. Very few words in English are fashioned from unrelated, meaningless elements. The abundance of resources for making new words that I have outlined above, plus the cheerful willingness of English to borrow from other languages, make outright coinages rare. Nonetheless, the SPS slanguage mint has produced an impressive array of pure coinages. Among the current currency are
doof (or doofus): one who habitually bozes.
dweeb: a nerd, a social incompetent who wears white, unalligatored socks and high-water, polyester trousers.
snarf: the act (or non-act) of falling asleep on or in a bed with one’s clothes on. One who snarfs is a snarfer. The concept of snarfing has become so sophisticated that four degrees have been identified—4th degree snarf: falling asleep on top of bed with no shoes on; 3rd degree snarf: falling asleep on top of bed with no shoes on; 2nd degree snarf: falling asleep under covers with no shoes on; 1st degree snarf: falling asleep under covers with shoes on.
Throughout history it has been the custom to sneer meanly at slang as a kind of vagabond language that prowls the outskirts of respectable speech. But, in fact, slang is nearly as old as language itself, and in all languages at all times some slang expressions have entered the stream of standard usage to pollute or enrich, depending on one’s view of the matter.
Slang is a powerful stimulant that keeps a language alive and growing, and many of our most valuable and pungent words and expressions have begun their lives keeping company with thieves, vagrants, hipsters—and, quite likely, prep school students. One day, in the not-too-distant future, everyone may laugh at dweeb newbs and snarf out at parties, and pizza chefs will not fogue when someone asks them to bag the za.
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: The American Heritage Dictionary
(Second College Edition, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1982) 1568pp.
The publication of a new and thoroughly revised edition of so fine a desk dictionary as The American Heritage Dictionary is cause for great interest if not excitement among language enthusiasts. The original edition of 1969, product of a distinguished staff of editors, was remarkable for its fresh approach to language and lexicography, and had, along with its very attractive format and appearance, a host of features that made it unique and very useful. It was and is an important reference book. The 1982 AHD displays throughout the kind of extensive and thoughtful revision that we should expect from the editors at Houghton Mifflin, and incorporates new features and improvements while retaining much of what was so appealing about the first edition.
Would that the story could end there. Regrettably, the new AHD also has been changed significantly in ways that diminish the qualities that the many satisfied users of the first edition had come to cherish. Most obviously, the format has been reduced from 8½ × 11 to 7 × 9½ ins. This would not in itself be bad were it not for the fact that the type and illustrations suffer noticeably from a proportionate reduction. The new edition is more wieldy, but once open it is harder to read and has a grayer, more crowded, less sharply defined appearance than the old. Illustrations, so comely in the 1969 book, are much less attractive and clear (as a comparison of the line drawings at argali demonstrates), a fact which not only detracts from the book but vitiates the efforts of those who toiled to revise it. Fortunately, the sheer number of illustrations can still be counted as a prime advantage of this dictionary.
Perhaps most distressing, at least from a lexicographic standpoint, is the disappearance of the appendix of IndoEuropean roots, cornerstone of the 1969 edition’s etymologies and the feature which made it an enduring value. Gone with it are the more thorough etymologies; the new edition has brief, cryptic etymologies that employ abbreviations. In the entry for be, for example, the ten-line etymology of the first edition, explaining the multiple roots behind this verb’s unusual paradigm, has been replaced by:
[ME been < OE beon.]
Etymology, it may be argued, has little general interest or appeal and may be the least noticed part of most dictionaries. Houghton Mifflin, in choosing to style its dictionary more like that of the competition in the college dictionary market (i.e., with smaller format and truncated etymologies), has done a disservice to language lovers both present and potential. One could spend many a pleasant hour with the 1969 edition, being referred by the etymologies to many intricate and interesting connections between words. This trimmer AHD can be offered at a price competitive with its rivals', a victory for marketing, “the consumer,” and the corporate balance sheet, but a setback for the dictionary-conscious public.
All is not lost, however, for the new AHD does contain about the same amount of raw information as its larger-sized predecessor (a comparison of page and line counts reveals this), and reorganization has made room for thousands of new words and definitions (the jacket claims 25,000), which are, after all, the foundation of a dictionary. Close examination of a segment in the Ns revealed the addition of no-show, no-win, nucleophile, nuke, number cruncher, nut house, and nuts and bolts, while on the technical side nucleosome, nucleosynthesis, nullipara, and nurturance were added, among others. Inexplicably, number one, Nutmeg State, and nympho are gone, but the general trend is toward marked improvement, with a significant number of new, well-chosen entries both from general and specialized language. Another useful new feature of the book is the grouping together of phrasal verbs and idioms, now labeled under appropriate headwords.
The very handy, albeit controversial, usage notes have been thoroughly revised, expanded, and improved under the watchful eye (and attentive ear) of Edwin Newman. One may not agree with all that is found in them, but these notes are a great convenience to the user and allow the editors to take a (usually reasonable) stand on many linguistic and stylistic disputes of the day. The very sensible approach generally found in them is reflected in the note for hopefully:
Usage: The use of hopefully to mean “it is to be hoped,” as in hopefully we’ll get there before dark, is grammatically justified by analogy to the similar uses of happily and mercifully. However, this usage is by now such a bugbear to traditionalists that it is best avoided on grounds of civility, if not logic.
The several new appendices are another improvement. In separate sections biographical entries, geographical and political entries, and standard abbreviations (all moved here from the main listings) are defined and illustrated, followed by a list of two- and four-year colleges and universities of the United States.
On the whole the new edition of the AHD is substantially different from the 1969 edition. The revision necessary to maintain a dictionary in these times of unprecedented language growth and change seems to have been well done, without sacrificing the pleasant readability and defining style of the original. The 1982 AHD is a college dictionary, and as such is an excellent choice for anyone needing a handy and up-to-date quick reference source. Those who were expecting to replace their tattered but beloved AHDs with a new, revised, more current version may be disappointed, and justifiably so. For many, the 1969 edition was a cut above other college dictionaries. Its descendant is a good book that should do well in the stores; whereas the first AHD surpassed its competitors, this new one aspires only to meet them. Frank R. Abate
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“A free lamp to the first ten customers who purchases a King Size bed every day.” [From an advertisement in the San Francisco Chronicle, 1 July 1982. Submitted by O. William McClung, San Francisco. Those sleepy (and soporific) copywriters!]
OBITER DICTA
Lingua Collegiensis Circa 1850, Charles Lafayette Todd
Reading through my bound copy of Verbatim [Vols. III and IV] I ran across a piece by Sterling Eisiminger of Clemson University entitled “College Slang 1975.” As a collector of such arcane items during my years as a Professor of Speech at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., I was frequently called upon by several older colleagues on our joint Faculty-Student “Sin Committee,” known officially as a “Student Activities” committee, to translate some of the words and phrases that came so trippingly off the tongue of our student members. For example, I recall a case in which a roomie of a young gaper who had caused some damage at an Eastern women’s college (Skidmore) tried to explain his friend’s behavior. “Well,” he announced, “We rolled off on the Skids that weekend, and Joe got stuck with a turkey. As a result he got snoggered, started to flail and caused some demo.” I translated this along these lines: ‘This obstreperous young fraternity pledge drove to Skidmore for a weekend mixer, found himself paired off with an unattractive date, drank too much and demolished some furniture.’ According to Eisiminger, Clemsonites are familiar with gapers and turkeys—though I am not certain they are aware of flailing and demo.
All of this brings to mind one of my more cherished books, A Collection of College Words and Customs, published by Benjamin Homer Hall while a senior at Harvard in 1851. Hall, who was apparently acing his courses in Latin, Greek, and Rhetoric, got bored, as so often happens to over-achieving seniors, and purchased “two quires of note paper” which he proceeded to fill with “a strange medley, an olla podrida, of student peculiarities” he had picked up from his fellow students and through occasional visits to other New England colleges. Arranging these linguistic peculiarities in alphabetical order, adding notes as to their meanings and possible origins, he sent off his collection to a Cambridge publisher, John Bartlett. Fearful that Harvard’s formidable president, Jared Sparks, might look askance at his publication, he used a pseudonym; but somehow Sparks discovered the young author’s name, and, to Hall’s amazement, called him into his office and presented him with a three-volume set of The History of Harvard College with some complimentary remarks on his “scholarly achievement.” Shortly after his graduation, Hall went to work in earnest, canvassing student magazine and newspaper editors in 34 other colleges throughout the country. The response was obviously enthusiastic, for in 1856 Bartlett published a “Revised and Enlarged Edition” of 506 pages, bearing the name B.H. Hall. It was replete with an index and a list of all of the contributing colleges. Save for a History of Eastern Vermont, it was the only book by Hall ever published; he spent most of his career as editor of the Troy, N.Y., Whig and died in 1892.
Reading through Hall’s collection of mid-nineteenth-century (and earlier) college slang, one is struck by the unchanging preoccupations of college students: passing and failing tests, currying professorial favors, labeling the peculiarities of their peers, complaining about college food and other conveniences (or lack of same), cheating when necessary, and trying to survive four long years without being rusticated (‘sent home for a few weeks to think it over’), or being ruthlessly expelled. About the only aspects of college life that Hall fails to dwell upon are terms applied to that rare commodity on college campuses, females (who, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s father pontificated, “suffered from a defect of sex”) and the consumption of “ardent spirits,” which was kept very much under wraps at the time except by Eliphalet Nott, the president of Union College in Schenectady, N.Y., who constantly warned his students against the “spontaneous combustion” which might result if one smoked while drinking. Incidentally, I was pleased to discover that Hamilton College produced 16 entries, edging out Columbia and Dartmouth but outclassed by Harvard, Yale, Bowdoin, and Union.
One of the main obsessions of college students in those days was the ubiquitous privy, and, on this subject, Hall certainly got around. His first entry is bogs, emanating from England’s Cambridge University. At Harvard it becomes a mingo, derived, he says from the Latin, mingere “a structure estimated at less than 2000 pounds advoirdupois which could easily be burned down.” [Of course, we know better: mingere is Latin for ‘urinate.'] He cites the Williams College Monthly Miscellany as lamenting the “incineration of the Lem—may it rise from its ashes like the Phoenix.” At Hamilton College it was called the Joe, named, says Hall, for president Joseph Penny who was often careless about having the equipment “purified” at appropriate intervals. When the campus Joes gave out, Hamilton students sometimes hired horse-drawn carts and took off down the Hill, where they liberated local privies in Clinton and burned them on campus during ceremonial occasions. It was called burning the Joe and, says Hall, “the derivation is obvious.” Union College called it the Burt, named after the “architect of the sacred latrinae at the institution.” At Wesleyan it became a minor, reflecting, Hall assumes, its “spatial inadequacies.” Today’s students are much less inventive, referring to their sanitized facilities simply as the John, or the can.
As for one’s peers, few of the terms used to delineate them were flattering, although Princeton referred to those who were very pleasant and agreeable as bucks, usually well groomed, or diked out. Opposites at Dartmouth were called gonuses, defined by the author as “uncouth or stupid fellows.” Overly pious and sententious lads were referred to at Washington College in Pennsylvania as donkeys or lapars. Nearby Jefferson College transformed the latter into long ears. When donkeys, etc., became too vociferous in their attempts to reform their peers at Harvard they were told to ferg, or as students would say today, cool it. Cheating or attempts to do so produced such words as gamming (University of Vermont), chawing (Dartmouth), or gassing (Williams).
The ancient art of currying favor with a professor, now known almost universally by even the more refined students as brown-nosing, ass-kissing, or sucking up, was treated more gingerly by Hall’s contemporaries and produced a multitude of strange words such as cahooling (University of North Carolina), coaxing (Yale), fishing (Harvard) and bauming (Hamilton). Hall provides no explanation for the Hamilton term, though one suspects it derived from the name of a student who was adept in such matters. With regard to failing a crucial test, the author produces a fine medley of appropriate terms such as to Barney, to dead, and to burst (all from Harvard). Princeton students referred to a complete failure as a blue fizzle; Middlebury lads balled up, while Yalies simply flummuxed. In most Southern colleges, says Hall, the word is cork. Incidentally, Yale flummuxers were known as students of the science of Flunkology. Walking out on a professor who arrived late to class also came in for its share of descriptive words. Students at Hamilton and other Eastern colleges bolted. Bowdoin boys, however, simply staged an adjournment. During the 1880s one entire Hamilton class staged a mighty bolt from the entire College, and there is a stone marker on campus bearing a carved bolt in memory of a class that never enjoyed a commencement exercise.
B.H. Hall’s prodigious research produced many other student linguistic peculiarities too numerous to mention here, though I can’t resist adding to his olla podrida the word fat, which at Princeton meant a letter containing money from home—one of the more glorious events in the life of college students throughout the ages.
Finally, I was pleased recently to find that Hall’s book was copiously devoured by at least one eminent twentieth-century novelist, Samuel Hopkins Adams, a Hamilton graduate best known for his motion picture script for “It Happened One Night,” and for his stories of the Erie Canal days. In his lively picaresque novel, Banner by the Wayside (1947), the tale of an itinerant theatrical company barnstorming along the route of the Erie Canal during the 1830s, Adams begins his story on the Harvard campus with a gathering of witty but indolent young seniors prior to commencement. Their leader, Aryault Quintard, who later joins the traveling thespians, “brandished his arms in an expressive gesture” and burst out with:
What avails it to make a shine in Greek if the next hour one does a barney in calculus. There have been times when in sheer disgust I have bleached my classes for weeks on end. I have been degraded, suspended, and rusticated until today I do not know whether I shall be an alumnus of this honored institution or not.
Shine meant ‘ace’ à la Clemson and Hamilton; bleach Hall defines as ‘being absent in mind if not in body at class’; barney means ‘fail.’ I feel certain that Sam Adams, a lover of linguistic anachronisms, used Hall’s pioneer work as a pony whenever his collegians appear on the scene.
Degrees of Right and Wrong
Laurence Urdang, Editor, VERBATIM
Although writing about correctness in English has been published for a long time, it is only relatively recently that books, articles, and newspaper columns on the subject have appeared in such profusion. That is probably owing to a number of diverse factors, none of which commands our attention at the moment. But it is obvious that “correct” English and the avoidance of “errors” in grammar, lexicon, usage, idiom, spelling, and, at a different level, pronunciation are serious concerns for an increasing number of people. It seems an appropriate time, therefore, to take stock of the situation in an attempt to provide some useful guidelines for those who need them.
To many of the self-styled critics, everything is supposedly quite simple: there is good, or “correct” English and bad, or “incorrect” English. Yet, as was shown in an article in VERBATIM, “When Paragons Nod,” by Lillian Mermin Fein-silver [VIII, 4], even the more vociferous and outspoken critics make mistakes. [See also the follow-up correspondence in IX, 1 and IX, 2.] One is led to believe that errors in English must somehow be classifiable into those that are trivial and those that are unforgivable, though such a view is bound to be unpopular with those who consider everything in life to be classifiable as either right or wrong. One might observe that language is in a constant state of flux, its “rules” being defined by usage; the best that a grammarian can do is describe the way a given language works at a given period. Even then, the documentation is at best sketchy, for there is far more language uttered and written in a single day than could be analyzed in a lifetime. Moreover, tradition plays an important role in influencing grammarians, lexicographers, and others who try to extract principles, rules, or models from such a vast continuum: there has long been a trend to describe good English as the English used by the best writers; that such a precept is untenable can be readily demonstrated by pointing out grammatical errors in Shakespeare, Shelley, and many other “best” writers. To excuse such writers’ lapses under the rubric of poetic license is sheer nonsense: documented errors in their writings cannot be attributed to (or blamed on) art. The simple fact is that they wrote certain things in which verbs disagree with their subjects in number, to take a basic example. It might thus be concluded that not even the best writers write perfectly grammatical English. And one is constrained to point out that even their lexicon was occasionally faulty; wasn’t it Browning who thought that twat meant ‘habit’ and refers to a nun’s twat in “Pippa Passes”? Such slips, though recorded in some dictionaries—probably out of a perverse sense of humor on the part of their editors—have done little either to change or to confirm usage. If one compares the virtual infinity of spoken and written English with what appears in the best writings, the unavoidable conclusion is that while language analysts may select the best writers' works as models for grammars, dictionaries, usage books, and handbooks, the vast majority of speakers never have recourse to such works and, indeed, before the spread of literacy, were totally unaware of their existence, let alone their need. That is not to say that certain dictionaries, grammars, and other books have been without influence—we can readily document the effect on standardization of American spelling wielded by Noah Webster, chiefly through the agency of the spelling books he published, somewhat less directly so because of his dictionaries.
Only the most obdurate conservative would deny that there is a scale of “wrongness” in the uses of English, and the most obdurate conservative of the day has perpetrated solecisms that most of us would classify as being quite close to basics. For instance, most speakers of English would agree that the combination “He don’t” is ungrammatical—even many who use it do so with the knowledge that it is appropriate to a certain level of language which they may occasionally be called upon to speak. At the other end of the scale come subleties like the difference between “He is a friend of the family” versus “… of the family’s” and “She doesn’t like me coming home late” versus “… my coming home late.” It must be acknowledged that, although certain prudes may claim that they would never allow the first member of these to pass their lips, the odds are pretty good that they could be caught saying or— worse—writing similarly heinous combinations.
It is fairly easy, in considering a continuum or spectrum, to contrast readily identifiable distinctions: ultraviolet and infrared are not difficult to tell apart. It is in attempting to classify contiguous elements that the subtleties of shading make decisions almost impossible: bluish-green is indistinguishable from greenish-blue without an elaborate spectrographic analysis. It can also be said that what may be tolerable in a plumber’s business letter may be less tolerable in a newspaper article, even less so in a magazine piece (where a longer time for editing, hence greater care, may be assumed), and totally anathema in a book on usage. In this connection, it might be interesting to examine a few typical errors of English and to try to classify them.
adverse for averse (He is not averse/adverse to being called “Red.”)
due to for owing to (Owing to/Due to the storm, the telephone was not working.)
between you and I for between you and me (Between you and me/I, George doesn’t think he’ll win.)
singular verb for plural (She is one of those women who like/likes to play bridge.)
In each case, the second choice is the wrong one, yet on balance one could easily be led to accept the wrong choice for items 2 and 4, and only the purist is likely to insist on a correction for these. Again, the question arises: for whom are the wrong choices in 2 and 4 acceptable and for whom unacceptable? That is not easy to answer, but the fact remains that some errors are more acceptable than others. Indeed, there are probably some purists who would not identify 2 as an error at all, which only proves that acceptability depends to a large extent on the knowledge of the critic.
It would be an interesting experiment to ask a group of knowledgeable editors to go through a list of common usage problems, asking them to grade them on a scale of 1 (acceptable) to 5 (totally unacceptable), with appropriate gradations in between. The experiment would be conducted with editors because they are eminently practical people who are concerned about clarity and expressiveness in language no less than grammaticality. This may appear to be an experiment similar to the rating system conducted by the American Heritage Dictionary compilers, who asked a number of writers and language experts their opinions on matters of usage. But there are some differences: first, most writers are not editors, the latter having far more experience with a diversity of writing styles and functions; second, the experiment would allow for the insertion of choices among perfectly acceptable usages in order to obviate weighting the prejudices of the group; third, the experiment would be conducted in such a way as to prevent the participants from checking their answers against a book of usage. As far as can be ascertained, since the American Heritage poll was conducted by mail, there was no way to prevent its participants from looking up the answers in a usage manual.
Despite this, the American Heritage panelists disagreed about many of the items presented to them; as far as is known, there were no placebos among the questions, which is to say that there was no inherent method for testing the honesty of the participants. An examination of the list of participants yields no reason to assume any lack of honesty, but one would feel more secure had a method been devised to ensure the untainted validity of response.
Antipodean English: The Elusive ‘Kangaroo’
George W. Turner
Kangaroos are not themselves elusive. You see their bodies along outback roads where they have been dazzled by the headlights and knocked down by the heavy protective grills (called roo-bars) on the front of vehicles. You can meet them more peacefully in zoos or parks where the constant presence of kindly visitors with bits of bread has made them approachable and tame. My wife does have a scar on her forearm which, when in Europe, she attributes to a kangaroo—truthfully—but it was gained, if that’s the word, when she was surrounded by kangaroos begging for bread and one importunate beggar found her distribution too slow. It was in fact a Kangaroo Island kangaroo, one of a species whose safe ancestral home has trained them to be the quietest of kangaroos. I have seen a female of this species let children fondle the ears of a joey peering from her pouch.
No, it is the word kangaroo that is elusive, in its origin and in its exact meaning. It is clearly Aboriginal and dates back to Cook’s voyage of 1770, not to the well-known visit to Botany Bay but to his stay at the Endeavour River in Northern Queensland for repairs to his ship on the voyage home. There the botanist Daniel Solander described and the artist Sydney Parkinson drew a marsupial and introduced the kangaroo to an interested world. Soon a kangaroo from Botany Bay would be exhibited in the Strand with the claim that “Ocular Demonstration will exceed all that Words can describe or Pencil delineate.”
In fact a Dutch explorer, Pelsart, had described a similar animal in 1629, but modern Dutch, like other European languages, has a word (kangoeroe) capturing in its own spelling system a word brought to Europe by Cook and his associates, especially Joseph Banks, in the form kangooroo or kanguru. Within the decade Buffon had introduced it into French (as kanguros plural) and the modern French form kangourou is recorded in 1800. It is now thought that the animal described by Solander was not a kangaroo in the strict sense but a wallaby, specifically a Cape York form of whip-tail wallaby with the scientific name Wallabia canguro in recognition of the connection with Cook’s expedition. Cook’s men emphasized the size of the “kangaroo” but since early voyagers referred to “a sort of raccoon” (Dampier) or “civet-cat” or “squirrel” or (most seriously) “jerboa,” all small animals, even a medium-sized wallaby might seem large by contrast with a different expectation. It is the old paradox that a little elephant is not a little animal.
A new obscurity began to attach to the name. Natives at Botany Bay appeared not to know the word kangaroo. One of them asked if cows were to be called kangaroos. This ignorance became explained when it was realized that there was not simply one language spoken by natives through Australia, that even a little way from Sydney a different language was spoken and the Endeavour River was some 2,000 miles to the north. But a new puzzle arose when in 1820 P.P. King in the Endeavour River area made a vocabulary similar to that of Banks, except that a kangaroo was called min-nar and variants. Theories were advanced that kangaroo simply meant “I don’t know,” for instance, but no appropriate phrase existed in the language (Guugu Yimidhirr) of the area. Had taboo led to a change of name for the animal? Scholars agreed that the origin of the word was obscure.
Actually the Chief Protector of Queensland Aborigines, Dr. W.E. Roth, had pointed out in a letter to the Australasian in 1898 and again in North Queensland Ethnography, Bulletin 2, 1901, that a word ganguru was still current in Guugu Yimidhirr. This information went unnoticed. Only when John Haviland began his study of the language in 1972 was it generally accepted that a word, pronounced gang-uru, was the Guugu Yimidhirr term for a large black or gray kangaroo. Perhaps the animal studied by Solander and Parkinson was not the animal pointed to by Banks at the important moment when European languages gained the word kangaroo. In any case there is some evidence that Cook’s men encountered and described more than one kind of marsupial. King’s word was probably minha, meaning ‘an animal that can be used as food.’
What is a kangaroo? We may concentrate on one or another quality of the beast, its strangeness, its leaping motion, its pouch to carry its baby or joey. Germans seem to think of its strangeness, asking visiting Australians have they seen or do they keep kangaroos. The German language seems to make no metaphorical use of the concept, unlike the Italians or French, who, impressed mainly by the pouch, use it to name vehicles that carry other vehicles. In France a railway wagon to carry the trailer of a semi-trailer (articulated lorry to British readers) is called wagon kangourou (defined by Grand Larousse as “wagon muni d’une poche pour loger l’essieu routier”), while Italians call an airplane used to launch a smaller one canguro. Since a canguro can also be someone promoted rapidly and over the heads of his colleagues, the Italians have also utilized metaphorically the leaping habit of the kangaroo, a habit noticed by the Danes when they coined kængurustylte for a pogo-stick. It is the quality which appeals to Australians too, when they choose a logo for Qantas, the national airline, or when they use kangaroo as a verb to describe releasing a clutch unevenly so that a vehicle kangaroos or moves forwards in a series of jerks. It perhaps appeals to Americans too, with their contribution, the kangaroo court. (Why? Because it leaps over the formalities of an established legal system? I’d be glad if any American reader can provide information on its origin.)
In another sense, what is a kangaroo? How does it differ from a wallaby? As Arabs proverbially have many words for kinds of camel and Eskimos for kinds of snow, so Australians have many words for kinds of kangaroo. Not that every Australian can tell you what a bettong or a tammar or even a nail-tailed wallaby is. Even scientists cannot point to a clear-cut correct use of popular names, and, for that matter, even scientific names are not always beyond dispute. Current usage seems to be that kangaroo serves as a general term and also as a term for a group of the largest marsupials (genus Macropus, literally, ‘big feet’). Wallabies are closely allied to the large kangaroos anatomically and some were once included in the genus Macropus.
The naturalist Ellis Troughton has suggested a threefold division of kangaroolike creatures by size into pademelons (also spelt paddymelons), wallabies, and kangaroos. A kangaroo in this sense will then be a marsupial with adult foot length heel to longest toe without nail of more than ten inches (more technical criteria relate to teeth). The term pademelon varies regionally in its application but may be taken to be a small wallaby.
The large kangaroos themselves can be divided into three main groups, differentiated technically this time by the hair on their noses, the wallaroo (in its western variety called euro, pronounced and sometimes spelt yuro) of coastal mountains and rocky inland ranges, the red kangaroo of the inland plains, and the great grey or forester kangaroo of open forest country.
Wallabies are more various. There are swamp wallabies, rock wallabies, brush wallabies, the nail-tailed wallaby with a naillike horny protuberance, of uncertain function, on its tail, and others. There are local names for local kinds, as the quokka or tammar of various parts of Western Australia.
More primitive than pademelons, wallabies, or kangaroos are the tree kangaroos, which have reverted to arboreal habits, and the small rat kangaroos (sometimes, but less accurately, from a zoological point of view, called kangaroo rat). Varieties of these give rise to further names, such as bettong or potoroo, but even among Australians these are hardly household words.
Much more could be said about the word kangaroo (I’ve scarcely touched on its compounds), but already the editor must be contemplating the merits of a kangaroo closure.
EPISTOLA {A. George Koplow}
Mary Patterson expresses concern [IX, 2] that digital timepieces could result in the loss of the terms clockwise and anticlockwise (counterclockwise in the States). Are we also in danger of losing another clock dial reference, as used by air controllers: “Traffic approaching, one mile at three o’clock,” for example?
What the trend to digital watches and clocks has brought about is a new and interesting use of the word analog. In electronics, digital means converting signals to binary for processing. Analog is processing the actual signal.
Digital timepieces show the time in digits, but this is a much different meaning from, say, digital recording or digital computers. But with the acceptance of digital for timepieces, manufacturers are referring to timepieces with a dial as analog. Analog has become the opposite of digital in this usage.
One thing is certain. When Joe DiMaggio tells us that the Automatic Mr. Coffee is “now available with an analog clock,” who are we to question the new use of this term?
[A. George Koplow, Rock Island, IL]
EPISTOLA {John Brunner}
The best solution to the problem posed by Mary Patterson in [IX, 2] and discussed in [IX, 3] by Peter A. Douglas is to campaign for the restoration to normal use of those splendid words deasil and widdershins.
Much as I like sungates (better than sunwise/ways), Mr Douglas does have a point about the southern hemisphere. But since neither of these favourites of mine includes a specifically solar element, they would suit our cousins Down Under just as well as us northerners. Don’t people dance widdershins at balls in Australia, too, even if over there it isn’t “the wrong way of the sun?”
[John Brunner, Somerset, England]
EPISTOLA {Rosemarie Forster}
Reading Diane Chapman’s article “Eponymous Anonymous” [IX, 2] I was surprised to learn that Sylvester Graham’s only eponym to survive in the States is “graham crackers,” whereas in Switzerland, where I live, you can go to almost any bakery and ask for “Grahambrot” (graham bread).
The German enyclopedia Brockhaus has an entry, the translation of which would read as follows:
Graham bread: An unleavened bread made out of shredded wheat according to the instructions of the American physician Sylvester Graham (1794-1891).
[Rosemarie Forster, Kriens, Switzerland]
Playing a Doublet Game
Hugh Dovey, Thetford, Norfolk
In his interesting article “Who Needs Enemies?” [IX, 1], Harry Cohen wrote about faux amis, those deceptive English and French words that look the same, or nearly, but whose meanings differ—to some extent at least. Among them he drew attention to one large category, those French words adopted in English in the past whose meanings have evolved along different lines in each country. Alongside them is another interesting group, English and French words of common origin which, as well as a change of meaning, have undergone a change of form, usually in English, and now look so different that they are unlikely to deceive.
One way of demonstrating how widely words in both these categories can differ in sense from their counterparts in the other language is to put together a bit of prose where some of the English ones are used as if they had the meaning, or one of the meanings, of their French doublets. The result is nonsense, as these paragraphs illustrate:
At the fine of a long journey Joe left the counter of the National Bank where he had been implied for thirty years. The travel was dull but his appointments were fair. As usual at the hour of affluence the going was slow.
On his way home he visited his wife who was still in hospital after a bad rut accident: both her legs were still in slices. She was as pale as the drabs. Even before the crash she had lost a lot of her slat: her eyes no longer stenciled as they used to some twenty years before at the tense when they walked down the alley together. There was no chance of a quick garrison but she was happy to scout music from her portable post and he did not stay long, leaving her the journal he had brought in his serviette.
At home he found his son Stan in the saloon with his usual friends—young men of the gender Joe disliked most. Stan was a disappointment. He had always been lazy and sturdy, he never ranged his habits and affairs, they always trained all over the place. His room was a very equerry. At school his notes were always bad, he was frequently consigned. Not surprising that recently he had once more got nowhere in a concourse. His friends were as bad: a cigarette had broiled the edge of the card table, there was a dark tack on the carpet where a glass of drink had fallen. The cashiered morsels had been carelessly pushed in a corner.
Joe watched his son toil the cards, deal and then attempt the contract. What he clearly ought to do was to play his quarrels first and his father groaned inwardly as the boy chose pikes instead. Now he was bound to be a ply or two light.
Feeling hungry Joe made his way to the cuisine to see what was in the placard. It had to be a sandwich: he spread a couch of butter on some bread he found in the hutch and coped some cheese while he chafed some coffee. All the while he pondered why nothing marched for him. He never had any vein, never achieved what he set out to do. When he had gone in for swimming, he had never arrived to do even the brace. Despite his post any actions he acquired soon lost valor. He sometimes thought he would buy a campaign propriety, run a smallholding. Then he repealed himself that when he basted some mews to keep pools the wind abated them in one night.
Lost in these sad souvenirs he noticed too late that the coffee was boiling. As he snatched up the casserole the queue came off in his hand and he watched some of the liquid spawn itself over his trenches of cheese while the rest soaked into his chemise.
To restore sanity to this text all that is needed is to substitute for the incomprehensible English words the translations of their French doublets, listed in the third column of this table:
| ENGLISH WORD | FRENCH DOUBLET | TRANSLATION OF FRENCH DOUBLET |
|---|---|---|
| fine | fin | end |
| journey | journée | day |
| counter | comptoir | branch |
| implied | employé | employed |
| travel | travail | work |
| appointments | appointements | salary |
| hour of affluence | heure d’affluence | rush hour |
| rut | route | road |
| slices | éclisses | splints |
| drabs | draps | sheets |
| slat | éclat | radiance |
| stenciled | étincelaient | sparkled |
| tense | temps | time |
| alley | allée | aisle |
| garrison | guérison | recovery |
| scout | écouter | listen to |
| post | poste | receiver |
| journal | journal | newspaper |
| serviette | serviette | briefcase |
| saloon | salon | sitting-room |
| gender | genre | kind |
| sturdy | étourdi | scatter-brained |
| ranged | rangeait | put away |
| habits | habits | clothes |
| affairs | affaires | belongings |
| trained | traînaient | lay around |
| very | vraie | real |
| equerry | écurie | pigsty |
| notes | notes | marks |
| consigned | consigné | kept in detention |
| concourse | concours | competitive examination |
| broiled | brûlé | burnt |
| tack | tache | stain |
| cashiered | cassés | broken |
| morsels | morceaux | pieces |
| toil | touiller | shuffle |
| quarrels | carreaux | diamonds |
| pikes | piques | spades |
| ply | pli | trick |
| cuisine | cuisine | kitchen |
| placard | placard | cupboard |
| couch | couche | layer |
| hutch | huche | bin |
| coped | coupa | cut |
| chafed | chauffa | heated |
| marched | marchait | went right |
| vein | veine | luck |
| arrived to | arrivé à | managed to |
| brace | brasse | breast-stroke |
| post | poste | job |
| actions | actions | shares |
| valor | valeur | value |
| campaign | campagne | country |
| propriety | propriété | property |
| repealed himself | se rappelait | remembered |
| basted | bâtit | built |
| mews | mues | coops |
| pools | poules | hens |
| abated | abattit | brought down |
| souvenirs | souvenirs | recollections |
| casserole | casserole | saucepan |
| queue | queue | handle |
| spawn itself | s'épandre | spread |
| trenches | tranches | slices |
| chemise | chemise | shirt |
Once you get the hang of this jeu de mots you can play it in reverse by writing a bit of French in which some words are used as if they had the meaning of their English doublets and so make no sense in the context. Then, for greater enjoyment of the result, translate it, literally, into English. Alternatively write a piece of English which is nonsense because it uses the translations of some French doublets and get your friends to work out which English words you have disguised. All this does wonders to your vocabulary—in both languages.
EPISTOLA {Robert Devereux}
I very much enjoyed Garland Cannon’s “698 Japanese Loanwords in English” [IX, 1], although I must confess that it left me not a little chagrined. I have been collecting such loanwords for several years with a view to using them eventually as the basis for an article in VERBATIM, a project that obviously is now no longer feasible. Moreover, I must admit that the length of Mr. Cannon’s list makes mine a dwarf by comparison. However, in checking his list against mine, I found a number of words on mine that had eluded him, namely:
catan (or cattan)
gaimusho
gyakura
ikehana
kabure
kanagugui
koku
machi
maru
marumi
matsucoccus
mishima
rotenone
sami
shoka
torafugu
yatobyo
yeki
yukon
After studying Cannon’s list carefully, I concluded that his title was somewhat misleading. He actually lists fewer than 698 loanwords, since a number of his entries are merely variant spellings of the same words. I noted, for example:
gingko
ginkgo
jinricksha
jinriksha
jinrikshaw
jiujitsu
jujitsu
keyaki
kiaki
No
noh
oban
obang
ricksha
rickshaw
rikisha
samisen
samsien
Shin
Shin-shu
shoyu
soy
I must also question whether all the words listed by Cannon are really Japanese loanwords. All the sources I consulted gave Alaskan Indian as the origin of hooch and hootch (variant spellings, in any case). The same sources attributed skimmia to New Latin and described Taka-Diastase as a trademark, without stating, unfortunately, whence the trademark came (admittedly the taka could be Japanese in origin; I must confess ignorance on that point). Also, one of my sources attributed mebos to Afrikaans, probably (my italics) from the Japanese umeboshi.
Finally, as a matter of possible interest to VERBATIM readers, I might note that some of the loanwords cited by Cannon are actually Chinese in origin, that is, they had been borrowed by Japanese from Chinese before English borrowed them from Japanese. They include:
Amidism (et al.)
ansu
chanoyu
gingko
judo
jujitsu
oban
ri
samisen
sen
seppuku
soya (et al.)
Tendai
tycoon
yen
Zen
[Robert Devereux, Falls Church, Virginia]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Charles Dicken’s The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.” [from the title artwork of the television special sponsored by the Mobil Corporation, January 10-13, 1983. Submitted by Robert J. Powers, Shreveport, Louisiana.]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Child grows into sweater.” [From a headline in the New York Daily News, 30 November 1982. Submitted by Bernard Witlieb, White Plains, New York, who comments, “Perhaps his bones began to knit.”]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Slow Down … Children Playing Sleeping Drunks on Road.” [From a road sign in Newnes, Australia, in the National Enquirer, 5 October 1982. Submitted by Fairfax Stephenson, Seal Beach, California.]
Philip Howard on English English
Philip Howard
Etymology is a notorious minefield for amateur enthusiasts: and not just amateurs. The great Dr. Johnson perpetrated some spectacularly false derivations in his Dictionary. He derived curmudgeon as “a vitious manner of pronouncing coeur méchant;” but took the prudent precaution of blaming an unknown correspondent for the false etymology. He blamed Skinner for his etymology for helter-skelter from the Anglo-Saxon words for the darkness of hell: “Hell, says he, being a place of confusion.” Samuel Whyte, a young Irishman staying in London, walked rather abruptly into the drawing room one day and found his host and Thomas Sheridan and two other men “with large folios on the table between them; Johnson’s Dictionary, then but lately published.” One of the volumes was lying open, and the first word that caught Whyte’s eye was helter-skelter. The Irishman was not convinced by Johnson’s explanation, and called out: “That’s a very far-fetched etymology.” The other three men looked thunderstruck, and “staring at him for a moment, cast a significant glance towards the window, where stood an odd looking figure, which he had not before noticed, observing the boats passing on the Thames.” This was the great man himself. His host, “again casting an eye towards the window,” asked Whyte, “Well, young sir! I suppose you can give a better derivation.” To which Whyte replied: “O yes, sir! from the Latin; hilariter celeriter, ‘merrily and swiftly’; won’t that do?” The older men made no reply, “but they hustled him out of the room as fast as they could, after some judicious animadversions on his temerity.” They thought it was lucky that Johnson had been completely absorbed in his own contemplations, and the young man had avoided “what perhaps he deserved, a good rap over the knuckles.”
Alas and dammit, Sam Whyte’s ingenious derivation is as bogus as Sam Johnson’s. The best authorities agree that helter-skelter is sixteenth-century rhyming jingle like harum-scarum and hurry-scurry. It may be ultimately based on the Middle English verb skelte, ‘to hasten.’ You can find analogies in Low German hulter bulter and Dutch holderdebolder.
A more recent and very popular British false etymology has just been shot down in flames by Robert Burchfield in his latest volume of the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary. This derives posh, meaning ‘smart,’ or, as you lot might say on the other side of the fish-pond, ‘classy,’ as an acronym from the initials of “port outward, starboard home,” referring to the shady, and therefore more expensive side for cabins on ships formerly traveling between Britain and its Indian Empire. A few years ago I wrote and delivered a radio program lasting 45 minutes on the BBC (about an anniversary of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company) which was actually called “Port Outward, Starboard Home.” I blush to remember it. We all blush when we commit a false etymology. And we all go on doing it. There is an ingrained didactic instinct to show off and make jokes. Resist it, Philip, resist it.
Burchfield dismisses the folk etymology as lacking foundation: and those are devastating words from that mild scholar. He says that the pronunciation of posh to rhyme with “push,” as a supposedly posh or facetious way of saying the word, may exemplify a different word. I have never come across this facetious pronunciation, though I have sometimes heard middle-aged and elderly upper-class men pronounce it with a long “o” as in “poached egg.”
The matter is further confused by the fact that posh has at least three other meanings in British English. Fortunately all of them are rare, and possibly obsolescent. Posh is thieves' slang for a coin of small value, particularly the old duodecimal halfpenny, which was at least a coin you could get your fingers round and buy something with. The tiny new decimal halfpenny, apart from being worthless, is so small that it slips through cracks in the trouser pocket and into the socks. This posh probably comes from the Romany word posh meaning ‘half.’
Then there is the Edwardian slang word posh meaning a ‘dandy or regular swell.’ I have never met this posh, but he occurs in respectable writers around the turn of the century.
Finally there is posh meaning ‘balderdash or rubbish.’ Again the etymology is unknown; but it is probably just a facetious or ignorant British variant pronunciation of bosh.
It all just shows that in matters of scholarship, particularly etymology, we ought to mind our Ps and Qs (and for Sam Johnson’s sake don’t let us go into them). But I don’t suppose that we shall. Folk etymology is fun. Floreat.
The following item is reprinted in full from the EFL Gazette.
In Memoriam
On November the 17th, 1982, a memorial service was held at the English Speaking Union in London, in remembrance of the English language.
The service, or the fourth Sotheby lecture as it was called in the press, was attended by academics, linguists and other friends of the deceased. The address was given by Mr Bernard Levin.
Mr Levin recalled the past glories of the language: from its birth in Chaucerian England, to the coming of age in Shakespearian times…
After that, Mr Levin seemed to feel, it was downhill all the way. To be sure, attempts were made to revive the failing language—themes were reworked, styles embroidered—but to no avail. By the twentieth century it was all over.
On the 28th July 1961 the English Language finally succumbed. Its passing was marked by a Dr Burchfield (believed to be some kind of lexicographer), when, in an article published that day, he uttered the fateful words: “Aleotoric music.”
Mr Levin did not seem surprised by this tragic turn of events. In his opinion, it merely reflected the state of a society where artists in every field had forsaken the forms of their ancestors, a society where the uneducated mimicked the speech of the educated and where the educated had become almost entirely illiterate.
The outcome, he felt, was inevitable. “There is something in the sulphurous air of our time that adds up to disintegration,” he said.
And there are some things in Mr Levin’s speech that add up to bad English. For a start, you need at least two things before you can add up to anything at all. Perhaps, though, Mr Levin was using the term “add up” in the current “sloppy” meaning of “is indicative of.” Mr Levin? Sloppy? Never! But then, as he went on to point out, the English language now lies “dead in the mouths of its users.”
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: A Feast of Creatures: Anglo-Saxon Riddle-Songs
Trans., intr., notes, and commentary by Craig Williamson, (The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), xii + 230 pp.
Craig Williamson, who provided a text edition of The Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book (Chapel Hill, 1977), here furnishes his own translations of the originals (91 in number, ranging from 3 to 84 lines each, with an average length of 12 lines). He tells us that he deals with the problem of rendering Old English verse in modern English by adopting a compromise that “represents a cross between the traditional Anglo-Saxon meter and a looser form used by Aelfric, sometimes called rhythmical prose” (47). A comparison of his renditions with the Old English originals seems to reveal him as a successful and skilled translator. His task was far from easy, for he had to take into account alliteration, stress, assonance, verbal repetition, play on words, and the involved multiple meanings of the Old English vocabulary, the semantic fields of which rarely match those of modern English words.
The title of this volume is more felicitous, perhaps, than that of the text edition, for “Riddle-Songs” leads us to expect something quite different from “Old English Riddles.” Hence, we do not have a collection of the Why-is-grass-like-a-mouse type of riddle, with a single banal solution for each one. The translator gives us solutions at the end of the volume (225-228). But 10 out of the 91 are marked “uncertain,” i.e., they have several possible solutions, varying in number from four to ten. Apparently none of the variants is favored over the others, unless the order in which they are presented implies some kind of ranking; usually it seems not to. For riddle No. 91, the final one, the following multiplicity of solutions is suggested: Book, Wandering Singer, Moon, Quill Pen, Dream, Riddle [!], Prostitute, Soul. The last two lines of that riddle song, while regarded by Williamson as probably alluding to the unknown or unknowable parentage of riddles and cited by him in that connection in his treatment of “origins” (Introduction, p. 5), may just as well refer to the intricate task of “solving” the riddles themselves:
Though the children of earth eagerly seek
To trace my trail, sometimes my tracks are dim. (p. 154)
(And something entirely different could be intended simultaneously.)
In addition to the ten solutions designated as uncertain, there are sixteen other riddle songs for which there are multiple solutions, but the author evidently believes that the favored solutions are fairly certain. Readers may, of course, have their own ideas about the validity of any given choice, and it is quite possible that the original was at times meant to permit more than one “correct” answer. In fact, as Williamson so deftly puts it in his note on riddle 23 (177), there are “several Old English double-entendre riddles with a sexual solution for the bawdy and a plain solution for the prim.” It is, however, a rare riddle song that permits of no more than two solutions, although many of them contain an invitation to the reader to find “the solution,” cf.:
Weird riddle-craft riding the drift of words—
Now sing the solution to what you’ve heard. (p. 94)
We may have some trouble in assuring ourselves that we are on the same wavelength as the Anglo-Saxon riddler, but that is a problem often encountered by those trying to fathom the literature of older periods, especially when cryptic features are intentional.
Since the author perceives a “riddle connection” in Zen koans and, to demonstrate the claimed affinity, even quotes one, a pertinent caveat may be called to our attention here: “The koan is not a conundrum to be solved by a nimble wit. It is not a verbal psychiatric device for shocking the disintegrated ego of a student into some kind of stability. Nor, in my opinion, is it ever a paradoxical statement except to those who view it from the outside.” [The Zen Koan, by Ruth Fuller Sasaki, New York, 1965, p. xi.] Those who view it “from the inside” need, of course, to be immersed in certain Buddhist doctrines, and that sort of religious requirement is hardly involved in understanding the riddle-songs. (That any of them reflect ancient Germanic religious beliefs is highly dubious, although not completely impossible.)
Williamson says, cogently it seems, “The Old English riddles are a metaphoric and a metamorphic celebration of life in the age of the Anglo-Saxon. Metaphoric because each riddle creature takes on the guise of another… Metamorphic because … all creatures shift shapes.”
The book offers far more than a review of this scope can indicate, for there are treatments of Latin riddles (compared and contrasted with the Old English ones), of parallels in Old Icelandic, of systems of analysis and classification of riddles, of kennings and their special role in riddle-songs, of the translation procedure followed by the author (with some reference to that of other translators), etc.
Before looking at the answers, a reader will perhaps want to try to solve the riddles. If he is no more adept at this than the reviewer, he will succeed in only a few instances. But then he will need to read them all at least once again, and he will then relish everything he missed in the frantic task of trying to hit upon the right solution. For the book is, as is implied in part of its title, a veritable “feast.”
[Robert A. Fowkes, Professor Emeritus, New York University]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Where a hundred tapping feet thunder like one.” [From a television commercial for 42nd Street. Submitted by Herbert B. Turkington, Somers Point, New Jersey, who comments, … as Captain Ahab or Long John Silver would thunder were he in the cast.]
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Room’s Classical Dictionary, the Origins of the Names of Characters in Classical Mythology
Adrian Room, (Routledge & Kegan Paul), 341pp.
Now that they are no longer a compulsory part of the syllabus for our brightest children, there are silly trendies and neophiliacs who consider Latin and Ancient Greek obsolescent, elitist, and, most wounding of epithets, irrelevant. They are, of course, daft. Greek and Latin are ineradicable roots of our literature and art. Imagine trying to read James Joyce or Auden, to understand the paintings of Picasso or Michael Ayrton, to enjoy the music of Berlioz, without knowing about the myths in the background. Try to have a conversation or read a newspaper without frequent classical references to such things as halcyon days, or Scylla and Charybdis, or to somebody being saturnine. The last is frequently misunderstood and misapplied these days.
If you drive our classical heritage out with a pitchfork, it will soon find a way back. The classics are the ancestors of the culture and literature of Western Europe and, ergo, the United States, and you cannot disinherit your ancestors. What we need are good new books to introduce and explain the classics to the new generation, most of whom have little Latin and less Greek. This is not one of them.
It concentrates on the least interesting, least important, and most inexplicable aspect of mythology: the etymology of its nomenclature. Folk etymology is a notorious King Charles’s head for amateurs. The ancient authorities from Homer to the Byzantine “grammarians” occasionally succumbed to the itch and offered explanations and derivations of the names of their characters; and jolly silly they often were, in the class of the etymology that was offered by sixteenth-century antiquarians for the origin of the name of the town of Windsor on the Thames: “Because the wind bloweth sore there.” But at least the ancient etymologies can be illuminating about the development of the myth or the growth of the language or the dottiness of the commentator. We can use them without taking them seriously.
There are a number of interesting things one can say about the Greek God of the North Wind, called Boreas. One can note his fertilizing part in the creation myth of the world and recall Pliny’s account of mares turning their hind-quarters to the wind and breeding foals without the help of a stallion. One can remember how the Athenians invoked Boreas to destroy the Persian fleet, and thereafter regarded him as their brother-in-law, and built him a temple on the banks of the river Ilissus. One can compare his cult in Athens with that in Sparta.
About the least interesting thing one can say about Boreas is “His name may derive from boros, ‘devouring,’ or possibly from oros, ‘mountain,’ since it was from the mountains that the harsh north wind blew.” It depends on where you were standing, baby. The Boreas cult seems to have originated in Libya, where there are not a lot of mountains to the north in the knowledge of the inhabitants. The etymologies are flatulent or built on wind.
This dictionary assembles in alphabetical order between one and two thousand of the best-known names of classical mythology and gives a very brief explanation of who or what they were—in one of their mythological forms anyway—followed by an etymology of their names. Some of them are obvious. We need no oracle to tell us that Arachne is the Greek for ‘spider.’ It might be more interesting to consider whether the story of the girl who was too good at weaving for her own good reflects ancient commercial rivalry between the Athenian textile industry and Asia Minor, where Arachne is said to have come from.
Take Odysseus, one of the most famous names in mythology. Room gives Homer’s implausible account of how the little boy’s grandfather, Autolycus, named him Odysseus, from the Greek word meaning ‘to be angry,’ either because he had collected so many enemies during the course of his life or because he himself hated so many men. We are told that Odysseus may be connected with the Greek word for a road, because he was a great traveler. We are even given the grotesque story of its origin in the phrase “Zeus rained on the road,” because he was born in a storm of rain.
Folk etymology and bullshit to all of those derivations, including Homer’s. Robert Graves in The Greek Myths goes for the “angry” etymology but gives fourteen chapters to comparative study of the different Odysseus stories, explanations, etymologies, and parallels. Some of it may be moonshine, or rather Moon-Goddess-Shine, but there is a formidable display of material and original thought. Crowell’s Handbook of Classical Mythology gives nineteen pages to the Odysseus myth, setting out the various strands and knots of the story, with copious references. Even dear old Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary gives two columns, with references ranging from Homer to Tzetz ad Lyc. [Who he? —Ed.] Room just gives three dubious etymologies, and suggests that we settle for Odysseus meaning ‘trouble-maker,’ adding, “which is incidentally supported by the fact that Odysseus is traditionally described as having red hair.” There are no references for entries or pictures.
The origin of his name is the last thing we need to know about Odysseus. It is a matter of considerable interest to a few specialists and of minor interest to those who know the myth well. Those ignorant of the mythology, who are the only people at whom this book can be aimed, will find the entries jejune and off-putting. They would be far better off with a translation of Homer, or Ovid, or any of the great myth-makers.
Philip Howard
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Word City: A New Language Tool
Originated and comp. Marvin Morrison, (Pilot Light, 1982), xxi + 352pp.
Although I once lost—placed second, which is the same thing—a spelling bee by leaving the second e out of immediately, I am a pretty good speller. Occasionally, I might check a dictionary to determine which óf a number of variants is “preferred,” but most of the time I know the correct spelling of a word. One of my classmates when I lost the spelling bee—I was nine at the time—was such a poor speller that we speculated on his ability to spell his own name correctly. Perhaps today he might be classified as dyslexic, but
In those good old antediluvian days,
In those good old days of yore,
When all the beasts were elephants
And the water H\?\2SO\?\4,
he was simply known as a lousy speller.
I think he might have been helped by this book, which is the cleverest method I have yet seen for showing the correct spelling of words that one cannot spell—even those to which you may not have a clue. “How can I look it up if I can’t spell it?” —the logical cry of the bad speller—is the very theme of Word City. I am not familiar enough with every approach to the bad speller’s problem to know whether the technique developed by Morrison is unique, but I can say it works. It is much to be preferred, too, to the solutions offered by other “bad speller’s” dictionaries I have seen: they tend to list words in their incorrect spellings, following the entry with the correct spelling. That is not a good practice because it shows the wrong spelling in print and may help to fix it in the mind of the user.
Morrison’s approach is to strip a work of its vowels (the culprits that cause most of the spelling problems) and to merge the consonant sounds together. Sounds, that is: forget that you know that philosophy begins with a ph-, and “respell” it FLSF; ignore your recollection that psychology likewise begins with a p-, and render it SKLJ. To do this, you must follow Morrison’s phonetic rules (the first g in gauge is G, the second is J). The compressed clusters of consonants are arranged in alphabetical order throughout the book, which means that you do have to know the alphabet. The front matter provides an exceptionally clear set of instructions, quickly learned, on how to use the book.
I checked a few words that I see misspelled quite often. Misspell is certainly one, and I found it readily enough under MSPL, along with misapply, misapplied, misapplies, and its inflections, misspelt or misspelled. Another gem is accommodate, which I found under KMDT, along with accommodated, accommodating, commodity, and commodities, but without accommodation. GJ yields gage ‘pledge,’ gauge ‘measure,’ and gouge, with their inflected forms. (I found an alphabetical hiccup here: GHD and GHT are out of order, but why complain?) RT covers right, rite, wright and right, each with its own gloss.
Included are more than 45,000 words (and inflected forms), which ought to be enough for a beginning. I am not sure I would have listed which under HWCH without showing it, along with witch and watch, under WCH, since in the speech of many the initial sounds by w- and wh- are homophonic, but Morrison can take care of such matters in a later edition.
As a simple answer to a problem that besets many people, Word City stands out as a useful and elegant solution. As Pilot Light books might not be readily available in (or through) a bookshop, order it directly from Direct Purchase/Pilot Light/ P.O. Box 305/Stone Mountain, GA 30086. The prices quoted in the book are $5.45 for one copy, $11.95 for three. Special quantity rates are available on application.
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Style and Communication in the English Language
Randolph Quirk, (Edward Arnold, 1982. Dist. in the U.S. by University Park Press, Baltimore.), viii + 136pp.
Forgiving one heinous error—my given name misspelled as “Lawrence”—this is an extremely worthwhile book, written by one of the foremost linguists of our day, who recently became Vice Chancellor of London University. Most of the articles published in this small volume have appeared elsewhere—many as reviews in journals that few people read, in newspapers and their supplements that almost no one keeps, and in books of less than bestseller distribution. Only the chapter entitled “Dictionaries” seems to be entirely original to the book, though the other material does not necessarily appear here in its original published form.
Quirk, before acceding to the throne at London University, was Quain Professor of English there; for many years, he has enjoyed a worldwide reputation as a highly articulate, outspoken, versatile, imaginative, lucid, accurate, lively, well-informed, tolerant, productive, sympathetic, friendly, indefatigable, humane scholar. His incisive comments on a number of aspects of style make interesting reading and awaken the reader to ideas and opinions not often expressed in matter readily accessible to lay readers. The subjects covered range from the general (“Speaking into the Air,” which deals with the language of radio and television) to the specifically academic (“Grammatical and Pragmatic Aspects of Countability,” which would seem to be too technical for inclusion with the other articles). The final piece in the book, “Focus, Scope and Lyrical Beginnings,” is also not likely to be as readable and interesting to the uninitiated as the other articles. Yet that leaves nine excellent essays to be savored by the casual observer of the language as well as the professional.
It should be clear from the foregoing that this is not a “style manual” but a collection of writings on English style. The term “communication” in the title, a buzzword of this generation, pertains most specifically to the chapter “International Communication and the Concept of Nuclear English.” Otherwise, one might rationalize that all language is “communication,” thus rendering that an empty word.
Quirk’s knowledge of language (and linguistics) is vast, and his opinions and comments are inspiring. Those who are unfamiliar with his ideas and writings should grasp this opportunity to acquaint themselves with this outstanding and important contemporary scholar.
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Sea Jargon: A Dictionary of the Unwritten Language of the Sea
Lew Lind, (Kangaroo Press, 1982), 160pp.
The South Seas are ineluctably associated with nautical lingo, though before the settlement of Australia, most of the language of sailors was imported from England till the American whalers joined the hunt. Although this dictionary contains much material that is universal, it also lists entries that are of Aboriginal origin. Each entry is carefully labeled as to its source: Aboriginal (A.), Fleet Air Arm (F.A.A.), Merchant Service (M.S.), Navy (N.), or Waterfront (W.).
It is indeed a lively work, with brief, well-written definitions, some of which reflect a measure of informality that, if copied by other lexicographic works, would make them infinitely more interesting and readable. For instance:
International Club N. & M.S. The only facility for sailor’s recreation in the ports of Murmansk and Archangel during World War II. The entertainment and fraternisation was [sic] so strictly policed by the Russian Secret Police that one visit satisfied most sailors.
Fly the blue pigeon N. To swing the lead when taking soundings. A vigorous swing made the lead ‘coo’ like a pigeon.
Some of these explanations are, as can be seen, quite revealing and therefore very useful.
Focusing on what is in the book rather than criticizing it for what it omits, one finds not only the familiar—Eye of the wind; Factory ship; Slinging hash—but the picturesque—Ecclesiastical bricks ‘holystones’; Everyone gets kicked and the cabin boy kicks the cat; Tonsil varnish—and the mysterious— Number Ten N. “A punishment introduced by Winston Churchill in 1912.” If this last is so called because of Number Ten Downing Street, the reference for 1912 is elusive; if it refers to ‘ten lashes’ or some other punishment, that is not expressed. It would be interesting to know why ‘A recoverable test vehicle used in aircraft carriers to test the aircraft launching catapult’ is called a Chloe.
Not all of the entries are nautical: Gefuffle (more commonly kerfuffle or kafuffle); Bottoms up; Clap; etc. To make up for those, one finds a fair number of entries that trace their origins to old sea shanties and ditties, and these are quoted through (usually) a full stanza and, if appropriate, a chorus.
Lew Lind is identified as a “New Public Relations Officer and Foundation National President of The Naval Historical Society of Australia,” though the precise import of the latter title I cannot fathom. He writes interestingly and, to be sure, has here gathered a useful, anecdotal log of entries for sailor and landlubber alike.
The book contains some drawings and halftones; some of these illustrate entries, others are—or seem to be—purely decorative in purpose. My only adverse criticism is of the style of the main entry, which is always shown with an initial capital letter, but that might well have been the publisher’s unfortunate error. Anyone who couldn’t appreciate and enjoy this book for what it is couldn’t see a hole through a ladder.
Laurence Urdang
BIBLIOGRAPHIA: Dictionary of American Pop/Rock: Slang and Shop Talk, Styles and Sounds, Fads and Fashions, People and Places, Dances and Diversions
Arnold Shaw, (Schirmer Books (A Division of Macmillan Publishing Co.), 1982) vii + 440pp.
My own taste in music is far more eclectic than my taste in dictionaries: as a lexicographer, I confess to a tendency toward hypercriticism of the latter. After all, there ought to be some standards of how to write definitions (with a stylistic consistency) and delineate the finer points of the trade (which, among its practitioners, is privately referred to as an “art”). All the more refreshing, then, to find through this book one of the most literate and interesting writers around who has deigned to enter the ranks.
And most welcome he is! This is, without exception, the most readable dictionary I have come across in many a moon. Totally unqualified to comment on the accuracy and completeness of the content, I can give it only my unqualified endorsement. It contains all of those categories listed in the subtitle— really the cover blurb, but I could not resist—as well as rock, pop, rhythm and blues, folk, country, blues, gospel, jazz, films, musical theater, recording and music business terms (cadged from the title page). It is a work to be read, then put on the shelf for reference. It is not only a dictionary but a valuable documentation of music (chiefly in America) since the early 1930s. The information in each entry is astonishing; the reader is left with the ineluctable conviction that Arnold Shaw knows everyone and everything having anything to do with modern music. Whether that is so (or possible) or not, he certainly is adept at articulating information in a most palatable form.
Two minor distractions: there appears to be no rationale behind the capitalization of terms like Rock, Rhythm & Blues, Jazz, etc.; the only typo I caught is in the entry for Greenwich Village, where is is written that “… Richie Havens … eeked out a living by drawing portraits of tourists…” One must assume that they were screamingly funny drawings.
Forget those hiccups. Get the book.
Laureance Urdang
OBITER DICTA
There is an apocryphal story I heard many years ago about a drug company that had programmed a computer to generate trade names for their myriad products by combining various word segments which had been stored in the computer’s memory. Everything went quite well till there was a close call: the sales department one day realized that the company was about to market a drug called “Damitol.”
There is, however, a genuine drug on the market (Don’t you just love the sound of that?) is Triaminicin, which has all the overtones of an invitation to a roll in the hay.
Can readers come up with more such ambiguities? Only real ones, please.
OBITER DICTA: Ye Olde “The”
Henry M. Truby, Language and Linguistics Res. Lab. South Miami, Florida
The Ye of, for example, Ye Olde Tea Shoppe, has never been anything else in English but ‘The,’ and properly so pronounced. As a definite article already in the English of 600 to 1100 A.D., the ye in question was never confused, before the end of the fifteenth century, with the also now archaic pronoun ye. The present mispronunciation “YEE” for the definite article is owing to an alphabetic character change. The Anglo-Saxon (or Old English) writing system had five letters which vanished from our alphabet centuries ago. Two of these characters, known as thorn and eth (or edh), were used interchangeably for the contrasting voiced/voiceless consonant sounds today represented by the th- digraph, as in thy/thigh, either/ether, thou/ thousand, this/thistle, them/theme, bathe/bath, etc.; the consistently voiced sound of they, their, these, those, that, then, though, etc.; or the consistently voiceless sound of thin, think, thank, thirst, three, third, thirty, etc.
Thus, one of the ways to spell Old English ‘the’ was: “þe.” Written carelessly, sans serifs, “þe” became “þe.” Written even more carelessly the result was “þe,” which resembled “ye,” and when, in the earliest days of printing, printers substituted the type character nearest to the thorn, namely “y,” people soon forgot why the almost-look-alike y appeared on signboards and the like and began mispronouncing words with this substitution.
Take a look, for example, at William Shakespeare’s famous auto-epitaph:
GOOD FREND FOR IESVS SAKE FORBEARE,
TO DIGG THE DVST ENCLOASED \?\:
BLESS BE \?\ MAN \?\ SPARES \?\S STONES
AND CVRST BE HE \?\ MOVES MY BONES.
In the custom of the times (W.S. died in 1616), the above two lines would have normally appeared as:
Blest be \?\ man \?\ spares \?\ stones,
And cvrst be he \?\ moves my bones.
Nowadays, the only public exposure the old “Y-thorn” gets is in authentic inn signs and the like… and in countless quasi-antique misusages of “Ye” by those seeking quaintness.
The coalesced \?\ of “BLESE” and of “\?\”; the superscribed E of “\?\” and T of “\?\”; and the V for U of “CVRST” are all regular for the times, as are the elevated and underscored lower-case fonts in the normal form.
And while we’re examining the orthography of this epitaph, note:
FREND — This spelling of c. 1600 would have given us 382 years of peace had it stuck.
IESVS — Note V, for later U, in those days, and the overlarge capital I, with divine overtones; “J” also came later.
FORBEARE HEARE — The spelling and rhyming of these two words is quite accurate for c. 1600; the rhyme was closer to today’s hair.
DIGG — The Ormulum, by 1300, had set the style for doubling the consonant letter following certain vowel letters miscalled “short.”
DVST — Another V—for its successor, U—standard for the times.
ENCLOASED — Note both the spelling of the vowel-sound and the trisyllabicity.
BLESE — The “final-e” question was far from resolved in 1600; likewise the consonant-letter doubling, or voiceless -ed matter.
THES — Here there were all sorts of conflicts: the single-consonant letter following the vowel- letter miscalled “long”; the marking with a final -e of such vowel sounds; the voicing of the monosyllable-final sound spelled with a single -s, whether followed by final -e or not. This so-called silent -e question has yet to be resolved, witness: geese, goose, loose, moose, noose, dose, close adj., use n., etc.
Just accept antique Ye (pronounced THE, and so “translated”), and add it to your list of English spelling curios… like the f of of; the o of woman, women, or of choir (or choir on other counts); or ewe, or eye, or who, or two; or one, once, ouija (WEEJY), and bologna (BALONEY)… and remember that the language is still changing all the time, now as “in days of yore,” tho some knights are just tougher to unhorse.
OBITER DICTA
Gertrude Block, University of Florida
When President Reagan exhorted Senators and Congressmen to stay the course, the actual meaning of his words was the opposite of his intended meaning. What President Reagan intended to say—and the American public no doubt understood him to mean—was that Congress should remain steady on the course it had set for itself. But what he actually said was that Congress should halt its course. For the transitive verb stay means stop, postpone, or delay,' as in the locution to stay the execution.
The intransitive verb stay does carry the meaning President Reagan intended, but like its synonym remain, it must be followed by an adverbial, not a direct object. No one would use remain as a transitive verb (e.g., “to remain the course”). To convey his intended meaning, President Reagan would have had to tell Congress to “stay on the course,” just as he would have had to say “remain on the course.”
President Reagan was probably complying with the seeming tendency of users to change intransitive verbs of motion to transitive verbs by using them with direct objects instead of adverbial phrases. In airports today, one regularly hears stewardesses admonish passengers to use care when they “exit the aircraft.” (One used to exit from an aircraft.) That use of exit seems to be confined to aircraft; have you recently exited a car? Having exited the aircraft, passengers duly depart the airport, another transitive verb having recently been created from an intransitive verb. English speakers seem more ready to change intransitive verbs into transitive verbs than, for example, the French, who still use the verb entrer as an intransitive verb, the necessary form being entrer dans.
President Reagan is probably entitled to coin the use of stay as a transitive verb. The only problem is that his use of the verb in stay the course contradicts the meaning of the already available intransitive verb stay and therefore not only contributes to the ambiguity of his pronouncement but speeds the demise of a perfectly good intransitive verb meaning ‘stop.’
A Word About Word Processing—Reminiscences
Laurence Urdang, Editor, VERBATIM
By this time, everyone ought to be familiar with the term word processing, notwithstanding the fact that linguists have been struggling for a century to define word. From the standpoint of those in the computer biz, word (in this context) means ‘any collection of characters preceded and followed by a space.’ In technical computerese, word (or machine word) is “a standard unit of information consisting of a fixed number of bits and treated as a single unit by the computer.” [RHD]. Computers have been processing words for many years; only recently have they been called upon to do word processing. If there is no confusion in the reader’s mind between the two definitions, he should note the critical phrase “consisting of a fixed number of bits” in the second: words in natural language and in word processing do not, of course, consist of a fixed number of bits—or, for that matter, bytes ‘a unit of information consisting of eight bits.’
If all this is somewhat confusing, one must bear in mind that these terms were given to us by that great gang of illiterati who gave us programming (with two ms, where, for American spellers, one would have sufficed), exciting advertising copy that includes gems like “The enormity of Santa’s job…” [from a Silicon Valley Systems advertisement in Creative Computing, February 1983], and, to choose a brief sampling, fertile ground for onomasticians who have run out of given names, surnames, placenames, and streetnames, and would like to record names of programs like Chomper, Snakman, Trashman, Money Munchers, Bug Battle, Laser Bounce, Monster Mash, Pig Pen, Laf Pak, Phaser Fire, Tunnel Terror, Crisis Mountain, and Crazey Mazey, all reviewed in Creative Computing, February 1983. If that list isn’t long enough, consider Fort Apocalypse, Reptilian, Claim Jumper, Shamus, Worm War I, and Escape from Vulcan’s Isle in which you are “shipwrecked on an uncharted island,… attacked by winged demons, threatened by an explosive volcano, and hunted by flesh-eating monsters” —all courtesy of your Atari, Apple—or whatever— microcomputer. Today, everyone in England, where program is normally spelt programme, has been learning to spell it program when referring to computers. The paucity of imagination in that computer crowd has also disturbed the senses of language. God knows we had enough metaphors for that word but have now had the sense added that includes COBOL, FORTRAN, and so forth to further addle our brains. At least we have seen some serious comments, by those familiar with computers, aimed at disabusing us of the term electronic brain, pointing out that the analogy between the human brain and the computer is a totally false one: although computers can sort and organize and generally process information at incredible speeds, they cannot (yet) think for themselves (and it is unlikely that they will be able to do so for some time to come, Hal notwithstanding). The analogy is not false for certain functions that the human brain performs; for the other functions, like exercising judgment and imagination, people still outperform machines, though one is bound to add that it depends on which people.
Considering the recent encroachments by computers into the sphere of publishing, chiefly through word processing, it is a great pity that those who prepare the programs and who write the manuals are not more literate and more careful in their exposition. It is rapidly becoming apparent to many (though it was quite obvious to me more than twenty years ago) that programming is better done by idiot savants (or twelve-year-olds): their minds are relatively unencumbered by a predisposition to the distracted, creative thinking, born of intelligence and experience, that characterizes the reasoning adult. However good the programs may be, using them is quite another matter: since the manual is usually written by the programmer, more often than not it omits important information because it is so “obvious” to the writer. What is invariably overlooked is the fact that an enormous number of people now owning microcomputers (also called “personal computers”) have no experience or training in computers at all. They really do not need any to make those devices behave, but they do need guidance, comfort, and redundancy to help them through novel experiences with new programs. One manual accompanying a microcomputer that was introduced in 1982 had no index. Thus, though I was aware that the program could perform a particular function because I recalled having seen it when reading the manual, I had to reread the manual to discover the proper command, as there was no way to look it up in an index. Happily, that shortcoming was rectified in a more recent edition (which, curiously, has Appendix Q following Appendix R, an arrangement I have still been unable to fathom).
As for word processing itself, it is scarcely “new”: using systems I designed, we did word processing as long ago as 1960, when I first started organizing the compilation of the Random House Unabridged. Because the keyboards and other paraphernalia now available for keyboarding text into machine-readable form were not yet available, we used typewriterlike machines that produced a continuous punched paper tape, each key depression producing a discrete code. This tape—we eventually produced 750,000 feet of it in the course of preparing the RHD, all in all some 65 million characters—was converted to magnetic tape by a special device. The magnetic tape could then be processed by a computer.
In addition to allowing for the sorting of data by computer, the advantage of having the text in machine-readable form was greatly enhanced by the prospect of being able to feed a specially prepared version of the tape into an automatic typesetting machine, thus saving the cost of keyboarding the text all over again (and, of course, of proofreading it again).
In 1968, I attended the Fall Joint Computer Conference, held someplace out west, possibly in Las Vegas. There, I visited the booths of a large number of equipment manufacturers, asking their engineers (when they were available) to build for me a device that consisted of a keyboard, a CRT (cathode-ray tube = TV screen), and a mechanism that would allow for the storage of data on magnetic tape. (There were no “floppy” or “hard” discs generally available at that time; moreover, an earlier device, called the Unityper, was supposed to enable the user to record bits on magnetic tape, but it did not work.) One after another, the engineers I spoke with looked at me as if I were daft, then offered to sell me the components they manufactured—keyboards, CRTs, etc.—and said I should put them together in my own laboratory. When I explained that I had no laboratory (except in my head), they turned away to talk with someone enquiring about a more immediate and practical application of their products. Four years later, such devices (now known as microcomputers, word processors, etc.) made their debut, as did “hard” discs, and, naturally, no one remembered the mad fellow who had accosted people at the FJCC.
The keyboarding device I modified in 1960 was a Remington Rand Synchrotape machine. Soon, Remington was to be replaced by Sperry and the manufacture of Synchrotapes was to cease, requiring me to use Flexowriters, a similar (but less versatile) device made by Friden. The original Synchrotape, when modified, allowed us to keyboard 160 discrete characters in sixteen fonts of type (plus superior and inferior characters)— and to read them from typescript with only an hour’s training, a degree of versatility not yet equaled by today’s equipment. [As I was enjoined from discussing these matters prior to the publication of the RHD, the first revelations were made at the 1966 annual meeting of the American Documentation Institute (now the American Society for Information Sciences) in a paper entitled “The Use of Typographic Coding for Information Retrieval.” That may seem an odd way of approaching the subject, but at the time I felt it was the only approach I could use that would hold any meaning or interest for the members of the ADI. Offprints of that paper are available on request from me at VERBATIM.]
Since those days, we have been using computers and computer-driven typesetting machines extensively in the preparation of dictionaries and other reference books—more than 100 since 1969. There are many applications for computers in publishing (aside from their use at the business end). For instance, we are no longer restricted to working in strict alphabetical order, because the computers are so fast that they can sort large files into “dictionary order” in a few hours. The advantages of being able to define all together words dealing with a given subject category yield better, more consistently styled definitions. With the text in machine-readable form, we can search for particular kinds of information and list them separately (e.g., individuals in a biographical work that are still living so that we can insert a death date when necessary); we can make certain that every word used in the defining vocabulary is an entry in the dictionary; we can check the consistency of definition vocabulary in dictionaries that make use of a restricted list of words; we can check cross references (and variants) automatically; the computer can be relied upon to alphabetize entries with greater accuracy (and speed) than one can expect from people; for some reference books, we can extract indexes automatically, relieving human indexers of routine work and leaving for them the “content” indexing they can do so much better than computers. There are many other functions that can be performed by computers far more quickly, accurately, and less expensively than people. Typographically, an entire book (which may run to too many pages) can be reset in a slightly smaller type size, with less leading between the lines in order to make it fit to specified dimensions. Modern computer-driven composing machines not only set fully made-up pages, with page numbers and headings ready for printing, but can also vary the size of the type by as little as one tenth of a point, vertically and horizontally—that is 1/72 of an inch—and can vary interlinear spacing by increments of 1/1000 of an inch. An entire book can now be typeset in a matter of hours. Since the advantages of such speed may not be immediately apparent, it would be worthwhile to point out that while formerly a publisher might have had to tie up a substantial investment in a large, complex manuscript for several months during which it was being typeset and proofread, today the manuscript can be keyboarded and proofread while it is being written, so that the entire book is in machine-readable form virtually at the same time it is being completed, reducing considerably the gap between completion of the writing and the date when books are available for sale.
Obviously, the benefits of applying these techniques to the publication of fiction are somewhat limited. Yet, the publisher of a paperback edition of a hardcover work need only reset it automatically (and cheaply) for his edition, which, again, may then appear in fewer pages, less expensively, than the original. The resetting is a matter of hours and does not require a new proofreading effort.
Complicated textbooks also present special problems of page composition as well as comprehensive content indexing, and the application of computers to their preparation and typesetting may not be feasible or economical on a broad scale. Nonetheless, when computers are used judiciously and properly in performing the functions they can do better than people— especially the routine jobs—they have proved outstandingly successful and profitable. In this regard, it is important to note that one would be foolish to use computers to do things they are unsuited for, just as one would scarcely use a Jumbo Jet to go crosstown or, for that matter, take any kind of airplane to travel a distance covered by a car in an hour or so: it takes that long just to get to the airport. Like most machines, computers do very well those things they are suited for, and it is silly to use them inappropriately.
Microcomputers and the word processing programs available for them offer writers and publishers the opportunity for lower cost, reduced time from concept to publication, and greater efficiency. For documents and other publications that need not be graphic-arts quality, the “daisy-wheel” printers that can be driven by microcomputers to produce justified text are quite adequate, despite the slower operating speeds—about 40 to 50 characters per second—of such machines. For quicker, proof-quality output, inexpensive matrix devices are available that print at speeds in excess of 250 characters per second. In our operations we employ many free-lance writers, and we have found it economical to provide many of them—depending on their assignments—with microcomputers; they keyboard text directly onto diskettes and send them to us for printing and processing, their typewriters having fallen into disuse.
For those who fear or despise computers, there may be no answer, for they were born into the wrong century. Yet, I wonder if they still write on vellum using a quill they have plucked from a passing goose or if they use paper and a fountain pen or ballpoint. It is not easy to change one’s habits and prejudices, and for many it may not be necessary. Learning to use a microcomputer is no more difficult than changing from a mechanical typewriter to an electric or from a stick shift to an automatic transmission. The “hands-on” sensation is somewhat mitigated, it is true, but then consider the number of times you have retyped a page because you wished (or had) to change one word.
It must also be said that one must change ingrained attitudes toward information and how it has been processed traditionally. One favorable advantage of old-fashioned methods, that of browsing, is sacrificed to a certain extent. But against that loss must be weighed the benefit of time and energy saved by being able to key a short command to a microcomputer word-processing program that will, in a matter of seconds, find every instance of a given character or word in a long, machine-readable document. Many of the newer, “personal” microcomputers are “user-friendly,” a term becoming more and more popular in the trade. As I mentioned at the start of this article, the novice must tread carefully because the programmers and manufacturers who prepare what they consider to be “user-friendly” manuals often fall far short of their goals. Perhaps the best advice for a beginner is to suggest a subscription to one or more of the several periodicals published for users of microcomputers. These, now available in many libraries, will help to acquaint the novice with the many devices and programs that can be bought from local shops and through mail order.
This is not a “plea” to urge everyone to buy a microcomputer, any more than I would try to convince an apartment-dweller to buy a lawn mower. But there are many who might benefit from the many time-saving uses of a computer, and for them I can only hope that these comments have helped remove some of the apprehensions and misapprehensions with which we all face the unknown.
Pairing Pairs No. 11
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). Febrile cerebral.
(b). B.P.O.E. fanatic wears deerstalker.
(c). Most deeply in the red.
(d). Bragging gets flimflam artist the chair.
(e). Caution! Fruity exhibitionist.
(f). Sojourn in Kennebunkport for person of substance.
(g). Illegal whispering gallery.
(h). Greek soldier has flea?
(i). Flower yields proper wine.
(j). Navigate through this network till your ship comes in.
(k). Head of Eames Company.
(l). Tyre or Sidon, e.g.
(m). Mideast delicacy draws adoring glances.
(n). Disarmament on the up-and-up.
(o). Cause of the Fall: just dessert.
(p). Restaurant investment.
(q). Slothful spirit in Islam?
(r). Lassie—are you serious?
(s). Basically revealed by tight jeans.
(t). Smell of the pitstop is rude.
(u). Tumbler of sodium or potassium silicate.
(v). Cross the line by burying the faction.
(w). Man-talk is a curse.
(x). Catafalque for a midget.
(y). Gambling spouse.
(z). Big(shot) daddy.
(1). Angel.
(2). Beer.
(3). Better.
(4). Bottom.
(5). Buoy.
(6). Cannon.
(7). Chair.
(8). Con.
(9). Diction.
(10). Dog.
(11). Easy.
(12). Elk.
(13). Eyes.
(14). Feud.
(15). Flasher.
(16). Fodder.
(17). Glass.
(18). Grub.
(19). Half.
(20). Head.
(21). Hop.
(22). Hot.
(23). Hound.
(24). Indy.
(25). Inter.
(26). Jinn.
(27). Kosher.
(28). Leader.
(29). Light.
(30). Line.
(31). Loss.
(32). Main.
(33). Male.
(34). Man.
(35). Old.
(36). Orange.
(37). Port.
(38). Prim.
(39). Rose.
(40). Salt.
(41). Scent.
(42). Seat.
(43). Sect.
(44). Sheep’s.
(45). Slow.
(46). Small.
(47). Speak.
(48). Star.
(49). Stay.
(50). Steak.
(51). Vintage.
(52). Water.
(53). Wine.
Winners will receive one of the following: the Collector’s Edition of Thomas H. Middleton’s Light Refractions (retail value, $30 or £15); English English by Norman W. Schur (retail value, $24.95 or £12.50); three copies of Wordsmanship, by Clauréne duGran (retail value, $29.85 or £14.85); twelve copies of Definitive Quotations, by John Ferguson (retail value, $35.40 or 18); Word for Word, by Edward C. Pinkerton (retail value, $39.95 or £20); four one-year subscriptions to VERBATIM (retail value, $30 or £15); any two of the following: Verbatim Volumes I & II, Verbatim Volumes III & IV, Verbatim Volumes V & VI, Verbatim Index: Volumes I-VI; or a credit of $25 or £12.50 towards the purchase of any other title or titles offered in the VERBATIM Book Club Catalogue.
Those living in the U.K., Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa should send their answers to VERBATIM, 2 Market Square, Aylesbury, Bucks, England. All others should send them to VERBATIM, Essex, CT 06426, U.S.A.
You need send only the correct solution, not the answers to all of the clues. Please indicate your choice of prize along with your answer.
N.B.: To allow for the sloth of the various postal systems and to make it fairer for those residing far from either office, we shall arrange to collect correct answers for 21 days, starting with the day the first correct answer is received, and to draw one winner from each office.
Paring Pairs No. 10 Answers
(a). Slacker is down on his luck. (15,30) Feather Merchant.
(b). Knowledge of what goes to waste. (31,22) Navel Intelligence.
(c). Early settlers first tend to these. (33,43) Old Scores.
(d). Roland choreographed this. (35,37) Petit Point.
(e). Openwork shoes. (4,24) Boot Lace.
(f). Corner the flour market. (5,21) Button Hole.
(g). Insane duvet. (9,38) Crazy Quilt.
(h). Gangster rubs out heroin dealer. (45,42) Slay Ride.
(i). Literarily, a healthy communist. (51,40) Well Read.
(j). Important dockmaster. (23,28) Key Man.
(k). Superior to the pound. (34,50) Over Weight.
(l). Nursing quadruplets. (47,1) Two Abreast.
(m). What a microcephalic, nanocerebral ninnyhammer ought to do. (17,2) Get Ahead.
(n). Huey’s son. (13,25) Ere Long.
(o). What poor, sick Achilles wasn’t. (51,18) Well Healed.
(p). Turned by inattentive one. (10,12) Deaf Ear.
(q). Tennis on the house creates judges. Nein? (20,8) High Court.
(r). Additional rendition adds to outgoing variety. (14,48) Extra Version.
(s). In this place, at present, but not in evidence. (32,19) Now Here.
(t). How to greet students in school for elite. (20,7) High Class.
(u). Woman jailor in armor. (49,11) War Dress.
(v). Crazy turnkey got away? (44,27) Screw Loose.
(w). Quarry layout. (16,36) Game Plan.
(x). Site of Huey’s seat. (6,26) Chez Longue.
(y). Haberdashery makes custom curse. (29,46) Men Swear.
(z). Lease on torture device is exorbitant. (39,41) Rack Rent.
The correct answer is (3) Baby. The solutions are given below. The winner of No. 10 was Roy K. Stevens, New York City.
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“…Mr. Simpson dies, as stated, three days later, and on Tuesday of the following week.” [From a 1932 opinion of the Washington Supreme Court, Washington Reports, vol. 169. Submitted by Mark Reutlinger, University of the Puget Sound School of Law. But what did he do for an encore?]
EPISTOLA {W.M. Woods}
Robert Devereux, in his very interesting article on words of Southern Amerind origin [IX, 3], lists papaw, pawpaw, papaya, papaia as variants of the same term. This is doubtless correct etymologically, but in present-day English papaw, pawpaw designates the common name most generally used in North America for Asimina triloba, either the tree or the fruit it bears. Papaya, on the other hand, is the common name for Carica papaya, the fruit or the tree. The distribution of A. triloba is from New Jersey west to southern Michigan, thence south to northern Florida and eastern Texas. C. papaya, on the other hand, is strictly tropical, occurring in the U.S. only in the lower peninsula of Florida and the Keys.
While papaw, pawpaw is sometimes used to designate C. papaya, and then pronounced pô-pô' (WNI-2nd marks), A. triloba is never called anything but papaw, pawpaw, pronounced pô-pô'.
This is a nice illustration of the need for scientific names in precise discussion.
[W.M. Woods, Oak Ridge, Tennessee]
EPISTOLA {Bernard Witlieb}
Donald Drury’s “A Harvest of Heteronyms” [IX, 3] pays welcome attention to this bivocal word-category. Other permutations may derive from his list.
Heterophone may be coined for “a word with two different pronunciations each of which has its own homophone.” E.G.,
sheik: [shāk] → shake; [shēK] → chic
do: [dū] → dew; [dō] → doe, → dough
sow: [sō] → so, sew; [sau] → sough
bow: [bō] → beau; [bau] → bough
tear: [tīr] → tier; [tair] → tare
Acrophone may be coined for “a word with the same spelling as another but with a different pronunciation because of a capital letter.” E.G.,
polish—Polish
tangier—Tangier
[Bernard Witlieb, Bronx Community College]
EPISTOLA {Bryan A. Garner}
Mrs. Lillian Mermin Feinsilver writes [IX, 3] that I read John Simon “too hastily” in countenancing his supposed errors. I admire Mrs. Feinsilver’s keen eye, but still maintain that it is misdirected by a less keen knowledge of grammar and usage.
First, she adduces as further “proof” of Simon’s “stylistic inadequacies” “confusion of comprise with are comprised of….” Thus she misunderstands the correct use of comprise (as opposed to compose), an elementary precept well illustrated in Follett’s mnemonic ditty:
The whole comprises the parts;
The parts are comprised in the whole;
The whole is composed of its parts;
The parts compose the whole.
Second, Mrs. Feinsilver writes of my comments on Simon’s “What good is correct speech and writing…?” that I am “unaware that What good is not the subject here but a predicate nominative phrase.” Actually, what is an adjective modifying the subject good. What good is therefore the subject phrase, arguably demanding a singular verb. Evans treats the problem well in his Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage (1957). But this discussion is really supererogatory, as “correct speech and writing” may be seen as expressing a single idea.
Third, although I might better have used the subjunctive could instead of the indicative can in the sentence Mrs. Feinsilver cites, she wrongly asserts that I misused can for may here: “But one who espies these linguistic peccadilloes should not gloat over the discovery, nor can one really use such lapses to discredit exemplary writers….” This statement involves objective facts about one’s limitations in discrediting another rather than what is permissible; thus can is correct.
Mrs. Feinsilver is quite right to attempt to point out shortcomings in the prose of stylistic exemplars. (One might wish, however, that her batting average were better than .500!) Still, if she is truly interested in combatting “the decline of standards,” as all aficionados of language should be, she should recognize the worth of Simon’s writings in behalf of that cause. And she should avoid writing, “the decline of standards as exemplified by two books which should have been unrepresentative of that process…” where which should be that. And she should refrain from using spurious Timese titles such as “Man-of-letters Kingsley Amis” [VII, 4].
These tu quoques serve only to demonstrate what should need no demonstration: the fallibility of even the most careful writers. Doubtless one might quibble with usages in this very letter (the less-than-airtight thus for therefore, for example). To be sure, we must continue to fight the battle for excellence, but we must also sometimes question whether we’ve chosen the right battlefield.
[Bryan A. Garner, Austin, Texas]
EPISTOLA {Donald L. Husman}
In the penultimate paragraph of “Some Interesting Characteristics of Non-Indo-European Languages” [IX 2] the meaning of the third tone ma got my attention. I have no recollection of ma³ meaning ‘house.’ But I certainly do not say that that ‘house’ is incorrect, because if there are some 40,000 Chinese ideographs, as is often estimated, and I am familiar with only a couple of thousand, then some other ma³ could mean ‘house.’ However, I believe it is more likely that the translation was misread in the preparation of the article. The most common meaning of ma³ is ‘horse.’ Incidentally, the classifier for ma³ is \?\ \?\
[Donald L. Husman, N. Ft. Myers, Florida]
EPISTOLA {James R. Bloomfield}
Here is an addendum to “Negative Words,” by Norman W. Schur [IX, 1]: impeccable/peccable. Althoughpeccable is listed in the dictionaries, it is, I believe, quite rarely encountered.
[James R. Bloomfield, Thiel College]
EPISTOLA {Faye Levine}
I would like to reply to Mary Patterson’s epistola [IX, 2] concerning new terminology for the soon-to-be-outmoded clockwise and counterclockwise.
The answer is simplicity itself. Seen from the perspective of the South Pole, our planet appears to rotate clockwise. Seen from the perspective of the North Pole, the world turns counter- (or anti-) clockwise.
Thus, digital watch in hand, we may choose to speak, simply, of south pole rotation (CW) versus north pole rotation (CCW); for a fancier touch, and to confuse the initiated, conversio polo australeo and conversio polo borealo would also serve.
[Faye Levine, Polytechnic Institute of New York]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Actress said improved after wreck.” [From a headline for an article on the accident that injured Janet Gaynor, in the Paris (Tennessee) Post-Intelligencer, 8 September 1982. Submitted by Kirham Ford, Paris, Tennessee, who comments, “Drastic measure, but apparently effective.”]
SIC! SIC! SIC!
“Russian Satirists Exploit Chink In Chinese Armor.” [from a headline in the Baltimore Sun. Submitted by Mrs. Nathan L. Smith, Jr., Gibson Island, Maryland.]
Crossword Puzzle
Across
1. Follow the leader and lead the show at the track. (4, 6)
6. Not a brief case for lawyers. (4)
10. Did Columbus or Norsemen set record covering the New World? (8, 7)
11. Disabled Knick, not out of his tree, despite occupational handicap. (5, 4)
12. Sundial indicator, out of fashion. (5)
13. Nag in nude mess is an outrageous baggage… (7)
14. …but, of course, oddly canters around in strange dreams. (7)
16. Angered in the fog, this goes to blazes carrying wood. (7)
18. A rude cheer about poor Dad becoming even more of a piker. (7)
19. A poorer copy, made with less love. (5)
21. Control government with return to the status quo ante. (9)
23. With loose talk, coward dooms self under the classic blade. (5, 2, 8)
24. An old bordello in the Wild West. (4)
25. Note nearly garbled in the song of yesterday. (6, 4)
Down
1. Acted as a younger son. (5)
2. Let Simon rise as a disciple to spread the Gospel. (9)
3. Purtian punishment, with restraints, for the broker’s share? (6, 3, 5)
4. Wash cels in the can. (7)
5. Love in earnest. (7)
7. FYI the international set may yet move to get together. (5)
8. Incoherent one, in disturbed rest, becomes crosser! (9)
9. Pen war, sport? Yes. Read all about it right here. (9, 5)
13. Poor seed coming up in bad frost cuts the woodland growth. (9)
15. Small firm heads clumsy appeals and gains concession in court. (4, 1, 4)
17. Fig fare could boggle this fellow, though his neck has a knack for it. (7)
18. This much I can offer, a heritage from old Mexico. (7)
20. “…forty years I’ve without knowing it.” re, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. (5)
22. East of the changing sun on all sides. Follow? (5)
Crossword Puzzle Answers
Across
1. DI-A-t-R-i-BE;
5. Sconce;
9. MOON SITE;
10. HUN-G UP;
11. Intelligentsias;
13. RES-urged;
14. R-og-ER;
15. Mel-BA;
17. TRAM-car-S;
20. Foreign minister;
21. Lear-NS;
22. sIGN IT I ONly;
23. Rosary;
24. Polygamy.
Down
1. Dimwit;
2. APOSTLE;
3. Rustle up a dinner;
4. BET-ti-N-g A ten;
6. Counteractivity;
7. NAG-gin-G;
8. Exposer;
12. En-dearing-TO;
15. Muffler;
16. Lariats;
18. RETSINA;
19. Brand-Y.