Politicking with Words: On Ideology and Dictionary Meaning To Polonius' query, What do you read, my lord?, my answer would have been Words, words and their final meanings if I had played Hamlet in the latter half of the 18th century, with Samuel Johnson's Dictionary in my hand. I would have taken in good earnest the definitions of those entries that people usually quote for gratuitous pleasure but dismiss as crotchety. In the mid-19th century, however, I should have replied, Words, words and their provisional meanings, with reference to the opposite and, at times, equally crotchety definitions of the same entries, reading Noah Webster's An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) on the stage. On the second occasion I would have grown somewhat circumspect about dictionary meaning not simply because Johnson and Webster diverge so widely, but because meaning per se is determined by relative historical and ideological conditions. It is a commonplace that dictionary is the mark of authority and the standard. That the standard is collectively agreed upon through convention and practice is another truism. But collectivity can be a problematic concept since it does not cover all in society as far as fixing the linguistic standard is concerned. Given that society is heavily stratified into classes and ranks, all those living in it do not have a uniform level of literacy and the same degree of access to the process of linguistic standardization. As this process is controlled by the culturally and politically dominant group or class, the ideology of dictionary adapts itself to the dominant ideology at all points of time. Since wide acceptability is the goal of ideology, it makes its cultural and political agenda invisible and makes itself look natural and objective. The giant publishing houses in England and America turning out hundreds of dictionaries of various sizes and kinds always regard objectivity and fidelity to actual usage as ideals and marketability as the end. In practice, indiscreet lapses from objectivity do occur nonetheless, and the market suffers occasional setbacks. A few years ago, an edition of Longman's English dictionary had included in its definition of Bangkok , a city with a lot of prostitutes. Provoked by this, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok and the leading bookstores there decided to boycott the dictionary. Another event that clearly illustrates how ideological conditions determine meanings of words in a dictionary occurred when the twentieth edition of the Duden dictionary came out. This was the first all-German dictionary to be published after the unification of the two Germanys. In those days, the definition of capitalism , among many others, read in conflicting ways in the Duden dictionaries in East and West Germany, which was natural considering their opposed political and ideological dispositions. In English translation they are as follows: a social formation based upon exploitation of the labourers through private property and production means [East German Duden Dictionary] Then Webster goes on to hint at the notoriety of the Tories by tracing the word Tory back to an Irish word meaning robber or bandit. As for Johnson, he believed it to be a cant term, derived...from an Irish word signifying a savage. Here Johnson confers on the Tories the distinction of being the true representatives of English politics and religion, although one should not forget that the Whigs, too, believed in the constitution of the state equally well and used the same rhetoric for their own publicity. But Webster's role in this context was only to tarnish the image of the Tories and brighten that of the Whigs. Johnson dismissively defines Whig as the name of a faction and spitefully remarks that the term derives from whigamore denoting people from south-west counties of Scotland, whose poverty drove them to rise against the court and Scottish royal authority etc. Webster, on the contrary, stubbornly maintains that the origin of the word is unknown and shows the Whigs in a favourable light by presenting them as the advocates of popular rights during the English Civil War and as the friends and supporters of the war and principles of revolution during the revolution in the United States. In 18th century England, Tories and Whigs were engaged in a battle of rhetoric, each group claiming monopoly of the custodianship of constitutional democracy and national tradition. In America, similarly, the Federalist party and the Republican Democratic party were contesting with each other for the exclusive title of friends to the constitution of the United States in the 19th century. Thus polarization in politics had led to proliferation of partisan political meanings. Claims and denials as well as vilification of the opponents and self-glorification characterized political discourse both in England and America at different times. Johnson and Webster took up political positions that turned out to be antagonistic irrespective of the gap in space and time. For each one of them the dictionary was a site of political struggle clearly signifying ideological underpinnings. Ideology surely informs meaning. If meaning appears neutral, as it does in the modern dictionaries, it is only so following the dictates of objectivity, an ideology in itself, and the politics of invisibility. economic and social order whose driving force is the individual earning profit [West German Duden Dictionary] After the unification, the West German definition predictably featured in the new dictionary, displacing the East German counterpart. Also, many words and usages exiled from East Germany now found a place as free citizens in the world of linguistic glasnost, which this dictionary represented. A few of them are Republikflucht leaving the country illegally, meinungs freiheit freedom of opinion, Wettreise journey around the world, Freizeit leisure time, and Stasi secret police. Indeed, the changing socio-political and historical conditions determine origin, currency, and extinctions of words as well as their meanings. Conversely, the words and meanings determine these conditions. To return to Johnson and Webster, we may cite pension, Tory , and Whig as illustrative samples of a good many politically charged entries. In Johnson's Dictionary, pension is defined thus: In England it is generally given to a state hireling for treason to his country. In Webster's American Dictionary , it reads: An annual allowance of a sum of money to a person by government in consideration of the past services, civil or military. Men often receive pensions for eminent services on retiring from office. But in particular, officers, soldiers and sea men receive pension when they are disabled for further services. Johnson's terse and narrow definition reveals his Tory opposition to the Whigs, who normally were the government. In his time they were seen as arms of a growing and ever more intrusive governmental institution, to quote Robert De Maria, Jr.'s The Politics of Johnson's Dictionary, [ PMLA , Vol. 104, No. 1 (Jan. 1989) p. 65]. But Webster's elaborate and labored definition is an argument for pension. In the 1780s there had been a nation-wide protest against grant of pension by the Congress to officers who had served in the Continental Army during the American War of Independence. The Convention of the protesters at Middletown, Connecticut, demanded repeal of pension. Webster rose to its defense and contended that the social unrest had been caused by a misrepresentation of the word. People did not distinguish between pension granted as a provision for old officers and pension granted for the purpose of bribery for favor and support. He maintained that pension was half pay for ex-officers. Tory is defined in Johnson's Dictionary as One who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the Church of England. It contrasts sharply with Webster's definition: The name given to an adherent to the ancient constitution of England and to the apostolical hierarchy. The tories form a party which are [sic] charged with supporting more arbitrary principles in government than the Whigs, their opponents. In America during the revolution, those who opposed the war, and favored the claims of Great Britain were called tories. Horse Words in a Motor Age The replacement of animal power by motors has vastly changed social life in many ways; yet language is conservative, and horse words have survived the loss of horses very well, remaining in the general vocabulary to be widely used without horsey associations even among people who have nothing to do with horses. Many of these words are used figuratively, and others have simply transferred their meanings to modern objects and conditions, especially those having to do with rail and motor transport. Our most basic expressions for transportation are traceable to horse imagery. We drive motor vehicles as we once drove horses; indeed, until 1900, the very question Can you drive? meant Do you know how to drive horses? We ride in vehicles as we ride horses -- even the word road is rooted in ride. Street is from the Latin via strata , a paved road, a phrase whose own history mirrors the relation of ride and road: via road is cognate not only with our way , but with a whole set of Latinate words suggesting movement: vehement, convey , and even vehicle itself; just as way is related to wag and wagon . We can scarcely talk about motor vehicles without using words that originally applied to horse-drawn ones. Vehicle itself is Latin vehiculum a carriage; and even the early automobilist heard his machine called a horseless carriage , just as the early railroader heard his called an Iron Horse , which of course drew carriages of its own. (Apt names, actually: a chuffing steam train starting or stopping really does sound like an excited horse; and the earliest railway carriages, like the earliest motorcars, looked very much like their horse-drawn counterparts, having been built by the same craftsmen.) Train recalls the image of a pack-train , a string of the packhorses who carried much of Europe's freight before good roads; and the very strength of machinery has long been measured in horsepower , significantly shortened simply to horses . Car , the plainest of our motor-vehicle words, has a complicated history. Originally Celtic for wagon , it was borrowed into Latin and thence Norman French as carre , yielding not only the verb carry and its abstract carriage , but also cargo, charge, chariot. (Cart and coach are not related to it, the first being Anglo-Saxon and the second named for the Hungarian city of Kocs , an early manufactory.) Early modern English used car poetically for the chariots of the sun and planets, as in Milton's image of a maritime sunset in Comus: And the gilded car of day / His glowing axle doth allay / In the steep Atlantic stream. In Victorian America, car was quickly applied to railway carriages, whence boxcars and passenger-cars , and also to tramways, first to horsecars and then to electric-cars , otherwise known as trolley cars , or streetcars , or simply cars (whence carfare ). Until the early 1900s, to ride the cars meant to take a tram, and the man in the cars was used as sobriquet for an average person, like the man in the street . When automobiles were introduced, someone coined motorcar . When this in turn shortened to car , the word assumed its modern sense, which soon overtook all the others. Most other vehicle words transferred their meanings from horse to motor with less fuss. Rig once applied to wagons; so did truck and its British counterpart lorry . Farming implements like plow and hayrake have kept their old horse-drawn names, and so have most utility vehicles, like fire engine, Black Maria, paddy wagon, ambulance , and delivery van --the last clipped from caravan living wagon, which survives in full in England to mean a camping trailer. Bus is clipped from omnibus , which means for everybody in Latin: it was a slang term for the horse-drawn public transport of the early 1800s. The cab of taxicab is from cabriolet , a light passenger cart; and hack is hackney coach , a coach for hire, hackney or hack being a hired horse and by extension anything shoddy and overused, whence hack-word and hackneyed phrases. Liberal generous yielded livery stables , which hired out horses as to-day's livery services hire out taxis and limousines. In describing mechanical contrivances, the Germans continue to use their word Wagen to mean car, as in Volkswagen ; and American English has the compound station wagon , originally a horse vehicle for fetching people at train stations. The British call station wagons estate cars , but they refer to freight cars on a train as goods wagons (borrowed into French as plain wagon , also used in wagons-lits , the sleeping cars on old trains like the Orient Express). Carriage and coach are also rail terms now; but the British still use dual carriageway for the kind of road Americans call a divided highway , and coach remains in use both as a euphemism for a longdistance bus and somewhat bizarrely as the name for the cheap seats on an airplane. French gives us porte-cochère , originally a porch under which one entered a coach. We modernize this in the loan-translation carport . With horses, wagons carry freight and have four wheels; carts may carry anything but have two wheels. A passenger vehicle is a carriage ; if it has four wheels and is light and cheap it is also a buggy , and if heavy and enclosed, a coach. (Sleds are wagons with runners, and sleighs are carriages with runners, though the British use sledge for both.) Two points stand out about these words. First, many are still used in their own right, but in trivialized senses: little red wagons for kids, go-carts and golf carts and shopping carts (all more than two-wheeled, though, called shopping trolleys in Britain), Olympic bobsleds and sleds for coasting down hills, dune buggies for zooming around beaches, and even baby carriages and baby buggies . Second, the suggestion of towing has vanished in the modern uses of these words, except in the train senses, for we call anything towed behind a motor vehicle a trailer . We even have horse trailers for transporting horses -- putting the car before the horse, so to speak, though I have never heard anyone mention the irony in this. Most of the old names for vehicles' constituent parts persist in our newer machines too: wheels and tires and axles and brakes and springs , of course; but also the collective name for all this stuff, the under-carriage now applied to cars and trains and even airplanes! (The undercarriage was also called the gear , whence landing gear .) Steering wheels and steering itself were originally boat words, and hubs and spokes persist in metaphors and bicycles more than in cars (except for hubcaps ). But cartwheel was kept as a nickname for a silver dollar, and it also charmingly describes a playful whirling jump. Many names also survive from the body of a carriage. Many carriages had folding tops , exactly like convertibles. The oldest enclosed coaches originally had two passenger seats facing each other, an arrangement preserved in the compartments of European trains; but later coaches often had only one enclosed seat, as if the coach had been cut -- or in French, coupé . Coachwork still means bodywork; and at least in America the luggage compartment at the rear is still called a trunk (it once really was a trunk, as you can see in pictures of old coaches and even old motorcars). The horn is the literal and figurative descendant of the post horn , the spiral horn that was carried by a mail coach to announce its arrival in a village and whose image is still the post office symbol in much of Europe. The strangest survival is dashboard : on an open carriage this is a small vertical shield by the driver's feet, and like the fenders over the wheels, it keeps mud from being dashed up as the horses go. When we say that luxurious little stores serve the carriage trade , we commemorate the coachmen who waited in the cold while the very rich shopped, for only the very rich could afford to come in carriages of their own. If the public wished to travel, they could take stagecoaches, which employed an extra man besides the driver called a guard , who was armed to protect the vehicle from bandits. In England the office survives figuratively on trains, where the guard corresponds to the American conductor or trainman . In America we retain the notion more colorfully when we say someone is riding shotgun on a project, acting as a troubleshooter. Coach in the artistic or sports sense is an abstraction of the vehicle sense; for as the OED explains, an instructor was thought to convey his students toward mastery. Team , now also a sports word, is rooted in tow , and originally referred to the set of horses used to draw a vehicle. A four-horse team is called a four-in-hand , and this has given its name to a necktie knot (the narrow kind, not the wide Windsor knot). A man who drives team is a teamster , a word preserved in the name of the American truckers' union. Following a trend we hop on the bandwagon , the gaudiest wagon in a circus parade. Giving up alcohol, we are simply on the wagon , the water wagon that sprinkled down dusty dirt roads in summertime. You can't do business from an empty wagon -- an empty peddler's wagon--and if you heed the advice of the other Ralph Emerson, you will hitch your wagon to a star . Fixing someone's wagon is teaching them a lesson, and pipe up about grievances: the squeaky wheel gets the grease , because a wagon's hubs rotate directly on the axletrees and squeak if they are not greased constantly. Taking something away, we cart it off; and scandals fester until the tumbrels roll, the executioner's carts of the French Revolution. The ordinary French cart, the charette , bedevils architects, who charette when they finish drafting in a great hurry at the very last minute. An office doing this is said to be on charette -- literally on the cart, as if everyone were stuffed in and frantically working away till the very moment they clattered up to the client's door! Leaning into the collar is working hard: imagine a horse straining against the collar to pull a heavy load. The leather eye-patches sewn to the sides of the halter ( blinders in America and blinkers in England) keep a horse from shying by narrowing vision to the road directly ahead, the sense implied when we say that someone does something with blinders on or has a blinkered viewpoint. In tandem is often used to mean simultaneously or even side-by-side, but a tandem hitch is actually one or two horses ranged one in front of the other, in a single line, with tandem originally going back to a Latin pun. On the other hand, a troika -- three political powers working together -- harks back to a Russian hitch of three horses abreast. We coax balking people like reluctant draft animals with carrot and stick , get them back into harness after a holiday, yoke them to co-workers like oxen, drive them hard as part of a team . Companies even keep stables of lawyers or designers or whatnot. Marrying, we get hitched , like harnessed horses; and we even try to harness wind and sun and people's enthusiasm. We whip up enthusiasm too, as a horseman whips up his team to get them going. And horsewhipping once settled many public arguments, since whips were commonly carried on errands so they would not be stolen from the parked buggies. An old catalogue from the Wadsworth Atheneum Gallery in Hartford even read: Umbrellas, Parasols, Canes and Whips to be left at the head of the stairs. Of course, the buggy whip is rare enough today to be a byword for anything hopelessly outmoded -- the buggy-whip industry being singled out with a particular chuckle -- and horse-and-buggy days has become the byword for a whole lost era. The city streets are being decimated,' by illegal dumpers, DiClaudio told the judge. [From The Philadelphia Daily News, page 10, n.d. Submitted by .] The goods on garlic:...Garlic shots are a vicious measure of garlic-flavoured liquor. [From The Globe and Mail, . Submitted by .] Chunnel Vision The desultory dialogue recorded below is a verbatim rendering of the sort of conversation one might overhear on Eurostar as it chunders towards London. As well as their duty-free plus, the two English speakers have a selection of French vocabulary to declare. Many of these words and phrases are here, even as we speak, but largely confined to literary/academic circles. With the advent of the Channel Tunnel, however, we may expect a Gallic idiom to enter common usage as the century itself chunders towards the year 2000... Scene - A Eurostar coach. ARTHUR sits next to TIMOTHY, who looks rough. ARTHUR: Not quite the rendezvous with Destiny the brochure claims, perhaps, but still--where once there was a watery impasse, now there's Anglo-French rapport and a Eurotunnel. And very fin de siècle it is, too. The train pulls out of La Gare du Nord. ARTHUR: (sighing) I'm always sad to leave. No matter how prodigious your joie de vivre, partir c'est mourir un peu, don't you think? TIMOTHY: (blinking) Pardon? ARTHUR: Ça ne fait rien. One too many nuits blanches, eh? The spirit is always willing, but for the flesh -- especially under the eyes -- they can be something of a bête noire...I bet you'll miss the grub, though. TIMOTHY: Only the bread. Those baguettes are real bargain-stretchers -- and you can use them as bâtons on the Métro, too. ARTHUR: But what about cordon bleu? Didn't you dine out while you were over? TIMOTHY: Burger King on the Champs Elysées, mostly. ARTHUR: I'm talking about haute cuisine, not les bas fonds! I think you're missing something. I had myself some amazing blowouts...I particularly remember some pâté de foie gras I sampled. It made all the pâté de foie gras I'd tasted previously seem mere pastiche. It was a tour de force. Shame the wine -- a parvenu Chardonnay -- proved to be a weak link. TIMOTHY: I'm strictly a snacker at the best of times -- I prefer vignettes to full-coursers. I did try a crêpe suzette once, but it tasted like paper. I'd rather spend money on a film than -- ARTHUR: Ah, a film buff. Tell me: when is a director simply a director and when an auteur? TIMOTHY: Hey, I'm just a filmgoer. Call me passé, but if a movie has a decent plot and credible characters I go home happy. ARTHUR: But after Godard's riposte to the raconteur, no rapprochement is possible between -- TIMOTHY: To be honest, a lot of the films recommended by the critics make me feel more like a voyeur than a spectator -- ARTHUR: Of course -- a contemporary film narrative (if it can properly be called a narrative) puts voyeurism under surveillance. TIMOTHY: I see... They're never short of a nude or two, that's for sure, but for my money there are too many longueurs. But I'd sooner a film than an art gallery any day. You never know what might turn up as an objet d'art, do you? ...Or maybe you do. ARTHUR: If you mean that succès de scandale where the artist showcased a border-control barrier with a Cupid's arrow and Naomi Campbell 4 The Elephant Man scrawled on it -- TIMOTHY: No, it's just that I find all those objets trouvés so recherchés. The attitude behind them -- ça me fait chien. ARTHUR: Are you au fait with Jeff Koons? TIMOTHY: Koons? The name rings a bell... Yes, I'm nearly sure somebody answering to that name tried to flog me a vacuum cleaner once. I remember because the price he was asking was so outré. ARTHUR: Funny you should say that because there are those who consider him a traveling salesman manqué. But for others he's vital link with a tradition of impertinence dating back to dada in general and Duchamp's urinal in particular. Like yourself, I have reservations about objets trouvés: I don't think they become aesthetic simply because they cease to be functional. For me, Koons is the latest manifestation of je m'en foutisme. In short, so much blague. Duchamp's urinal was a pis aller after which there should have been silence, broken only by the occasional gurgle from the cistern. TIMOTHY: I'm partial to water-colors myself and a bit dubious about anything since the Impressionists, who might justifiably have prophesied, Aprés nous, le déluge... ARTHUR: I share your wariness, to a point. Too many modern artists have a penchant for leaning over backwards to tease critics, but forget all about I'homme moyen sensuel who, more often than not, likes his pictures in comics. TIMOTHY: Bien sûr. Where are the punchlines in painting? ARTHUR: Well, Picasso's work combines austere geometry with ebullient jocularity: even his most tormented images can seem like jeux d'esprit. Contours are broken and illogical simultaneous viewpoints gleefully entertained. But see the way he negotiates the crévasses and avalanches of the image's fragmentation -- quel éclat! His was a brush with lawlessness on its side; a brush as sure-footed as a chamois-- TIMOTHY: But a bit of a bounder in his private life, by all accounts. Revenons à nos moutons, however -- ARTHUR: Revenons à nos moutons, if it's punchlines you're after, look no further than that quiff on Picasso's La Femme dans le jardin or the sculptures in -- TIMOTHY: Maybe au fond I'm just a philistine, but I can never quite convince myself that artists obsessed with the naked human form aren't pornographers, by any other nom de plume. I know loose morals are de rigeur for la vie de Bohème, but -- ARTHUR: Pornography may be risqué, but it takes no chances, aesthetically speaking. It's a question of style -- He raises a hand to quell TIMOTHY'S protests. ARTHUR: I know -- but what is style? Bon ton? Flair? Panache? Aplomb? Verve? Chic? Élan? The trouble with all those terms is they associate style with élégance and ignore its jolie-laide dimension. Any discussion of what constitutes style must encompass tributaries as diverse as the lavatory humor found in Gargantua & Pantagruel and the exquisite diction presiding over Belinda's toilette in The Rape of the Lock . À propos of this diversity of styles, it might be remarked that diversifiers have often been discriminated against by critics, who would have would-be Renaissance-men specialize; they throw a cordon sanitaire around respective artistic endeavors with a rapidity and thoroughness that is most unhealthy. Any genre-hopping is strongly discouraged. And if these pogo-stickers are acknowledged at all, it's their fate to be fêted in one medium and disparaged in others, although they may (like Wyndham Lewis, say) have been accomplished in more than one. In this way, first-rate peripatetic artists are consigned to the pantheon's banlieux rather than its 7th arrondissement. TIMOTHY: I wouldn't know about that, but I think the work should speak for itself. Any critiques are de trop. ARTHUR: Certainly the work should speak for itself, ç a va sans dire. Despite the plethora of synonyms for it, style continues to elude definitions with finesse. It's maybe three-fifths savoir-faire douched with two-fifths je ne sais quoi--if that's the mot juste. I'd say, le style, c'est l'homme, but look at Eric Cantona -- TIMOTHY: What, you mean the Manchester United ace given to contretemps with footballing authorities and fits of Gallic pique? ARTHUR: I was thinking more of the Rimbaud scholar whose arabesques cause defenses to wobble like blancmanges. How can we reconcile the boorish drop-kick aimed at the Crystal Palace fan in the stands with Eric's suave skills on the pitch? He's been banned till October so the rest of the season will be a real saison en enfer for him -- he'll have plenty of time to write a dissertation on everybody's favorite poète maudit. For me, Rimbaud never graduated from being an enfant terrible to become a major poet; he only compounded the cliché inaugurated by Villon, that is, combining absinthe-fueled dissipation on slender means with a vacillating devotion to his art. He wound up trading it in for gunrunning and died of a gangrenous tumor, but chacun à son goût, as one amputee said to another. ARTHUR's monologues are taking effect; TIMOTHY feels quite drained. TIMOTHY: I think I'll nip out to the buffet-car-- ARTHUR: I'd approach the French onion soup with a soupçon of distrust, if I were you. TIMOTHY: Thanks for the warning. It was nice listening to you...Adieu. ARTHUR: Pas du tout -- we must do it again sometime. But next time TIMOTHY resolves to fly. OK, so on a good day Chunnel is faster than flying on a bad day, but the monologues on Air Liberté are shorter. No Boys Named Sue, But... The most popular name in my (all-female) class at school was Ann/Anne. There were four or five of them. Also two Susans and one Suzanne. To even think of using any of the variations for a boy would have raised both a laugh and an eyebrow. Which is the whole point of the song A Boy Named Sue. Yet some centuries before there was a boy named Anne : the full-bearded face of Anne de Montmorency 1493-1567, soldier, courtier, Constable of France, gazes from his portrait with supreme aristocratic confidence. Head of a powerful clan, winner of wars, adviser to kings, father of five (legitimate) sons, he was also, reproves the Encyclopaedia Britannica , irascible and a ruthless authoritarian. It deplores his scorched earth policy and ruthless crushing of a peasants rebellion. Just the ungentle times in which he lived? Or something to do with his name? Did he, like the mythical Boy Named Sue, continually have to prove himself? His godmother was Anne, Duchesse of Brittany and Queen of France (twice). Anne, from the Hebrew Hannah God-favored and reputedly the name of the Blessed Virgin's Mother, has always been popular with European royalty. The derivative Nancy , although used for girls at least since the time of Queen Anne (d. 1714), is not found for catamite until (says Partridge) about 1810. It therefore seems unlikely to be in any way connected with the excessively macho Constable. We had no female Michaels nor even a Michal , although they were not unknown. John Barrymore's long-suffering wife was Michael Strange. Miss Michael Learned delighted TV viewers in The Waltons . Did she have to battle with her agent in the early stages of her career? Also high in the female popularity stakes in 1940s' England were Shirley and Alison : Shirley Temple reigned supreme and Charlotte Bronte's heroine gave intellectual respectability. Originally a Yorkshire place and surname, it had mainly masculine associations for centuries. Alison , the Gaelic form of Alice , actually means son of Alice. The only other Gaelic name widely acceptable to the middle classes that I remember was Deirdre. Fiona lay in the future, together with Karen, Sinead , and a host of others, all unequivocally female. In the school were two red-headed sisters, Carol and Noel (not Carol e or Noel le ). Were they the daughters of a clergyman who surely admired neither Carole the Cad one-time King of Romania, nor Noël Coward; but perhaps yearned for sons? There was a Vivien who could be comforted by sharing her confusing name with a major star, Vivien Leigh. Some boys carried the fanciful variant Vyvian . The Leslies were more fortunate, for their sex was distinguished by the spelling. This was before Humphrey Bogart muddied the waters by calling his daughter Lesley after Lesley Howard. It has been suggested to me that this name has lost a great deal of its popularity for girls due to its diminutive, Les , too easily confused with lez (for lesbian ), which seems a pity. It has a pleasing sound once used by the poet Burns with his Bonnie Lesley , and its French form is immortalized by the delightful Leslie Caron. Howard's character Ashley in Gone With The Wind is now unisex. In 1989 it was recorded as the second most common girl's name in the US. Indeed, in the less tradition-bound atmosphere of the New World, dual-purpose Kellys, Caseys, Beverleys, Madisons , and Dales abound. It seems that just as English spelling in general became more formalized with the spread of literacy, so the gendering of names also became more defined. For example, I have an 18th-century ancestress shown in contemporary records as both Christian and Christina -- never, until an inaccurate 1920s' copy of the family tree, as Christine . The use of surnames as given names is worthy of note. The patronymics of powerful tribes such as Howard, Clarence, Cecil, Percy, Douglas, Bruce, Tudor , and Stuart are all seen as masculine. Yet Cecil was initially a girl's name. One of the poet Edmund Spenser's (d.1599) most poignant elegies commemorates Douglas Howard Georges , the wife of Arthur Georges. Similarly, the mystic, Lady Julian of Norwich (1342-post 1416) took her masculine name from the Chapel of St. Julian where she had her Hermitage. (Surely not from the apostate emperor?) It is true that from the earliest times she was also known as Juliana , and all variants of this great Roman clan name have always been popular, from a former Queen of the Netherlands to the delicious Julienne soup, named after a female cook. The apparently straightforward transference of clan names can, however, lead to confusion. The Irish practice of bestowing a maternal grandparent's surname upon a first-born son, gives us Joyce Carey (the male writer). Joyce Carey (the actress) more likely got her name from an adaptation of joyeuse . Much the same thing occurs with Lucy (often Latinized to Lucius ), another surname, but when used for girls more likely to be from the popular saint, or for its meaning, light. This ambiguity could have extended to Rose , coming either from the flower or from the Teutonic for horse. Yet the only male Rose I can discover is the nickname of the unlovely villain, Rose Noble , in Dornford Yates's 1930s' thriller Blind Corner . Perhaps there is a Boy Called Rose somewhere in the States? There was after all, that male Carmen Cavallero, conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, whose unusual name never failed to intrigue British television interviewers. His successor as a transatlantic purveyor of popular classical music was André Previn, whose French first name is also occasionally used for girls, without a qualifying extra e . Still in America, Sydney is (according to Collins Dictionary of Babies' Names ) predominately female, though an American authority queries this. Whether it originates with the French Sidonie or the British Viscount Sydney who gave his name to the Australian capital, is problematical. Certainly Nancy Mitford's mother was so called, and in the 18th century Sid was even a generic term for girl. From the days of the heroic Sir Philip (d. 1586) Sydney (d. 1586), this has been a popular name, transcending class barriers: Dickens' Sidney Carton; the comic actor, Sid James; Sid of the huge government advertising campaign when privatizing British Gas. Privileged families are not a European prerogative: American Cabot, Lodge , and Winthrop appear to have been largely used for boys, but Lee is generously even-handed: J. Cobb; Harvey Oswald; Remick; and Radziwill. Transported by the Gulf Stream, it has even landed on my eldest grandson. Whether this widely popular use has anything to do with any close association with the General Robert E., the distinguished Virginian family, or even the foundress of the Shakers, is perhaps unlikely; it is just a very nice name. Most names seem to drift from male to female (perhaps reflecting a deeper trend). Not so Evelyn . In the form Aveline , it was introduced by the Normans. Female until the 17th century, it became a surname and was then widely, but not exclusively used for boys, generally of the upper or professional classes: Evelyn Baring the banker; Evelyn Henderson, brother of a 1930s' British ambassador, and, most famously, Evelyn Waugh. His first wife, together with the mystic Evelyn Underhill, kept up the female usage. A slightly differing pronunciation sometimes distinguishes the gender. At about the same time that Aveline/Evelyn crossed the Channel, it became acceptable to christen children Mary . Previously thought too holy for mortal use, once established, there was no stopping it: Marie; Mairi; Mair; Ria; Marise; Moira; Marietta; Marion (or Marian ). Nor, in Europe, was it confined to girls: Carl Maria von Weber; Eric Maria Remarque; Howard Marion Crawford. And, in America, (See Here Private) Marion Hargrove. Once across the Atlantic, however, doubts set in. The French Constable Anne Montmorency bestrode French history without apparent difficulty, but it was feared that no Marion could ride tall in the saddle however rugged his appearance. So the studio chiefs repackaged their discovery, Marion Wayne, as John. Could he, by the remotest chance, have been the inspiration for A Boy named Sue? Proper Words in Proper Places Latin is a language as dead as dead can be. It killed the ancient Romans -- and now it's killing me. I daresay there is truth in the rhyme we chanted at school with such feeling. In our language, dead words are continuously discarded. There is considerable replacement, mostly of high technology words and changes of meaning. As new processes are discovered, there must be a vocabulary to match. Some of these dead words are delightful. Here are a selection of measurements used when England was totally agricultural: broad and narrow oxgang the amount of land that could be cultivated by an ox, between eight and ten acres fardel (farthingdeal) 1/4 acre landyard Somerset measure for a rod math the amount of crop mowed nook corner of a square, small triangular field quarentena a furlong A furlong was an eighth of a mile and a rod four and a half yards in pre-metric times when I started school. The ancient field names are bizarre: assart land converted into arable bawn Irish dialect for fortified or cattle enclosure booly Irish: temporary enclosure where itinerant herdsmen keep their animals cockshoot/cockshut clearing through a wood pightel small enclosed plot pingle Midlands: paddock spong Midlands: narrow strip of land wong a portion of unenclosed land Even nowadays one comes across dialect words whose meaning is obscure. On coming to live in Gloucestershire, I was puzzled by tump, daps , and shrammed (hillock, gym shoes, and cold) just as, no doubt, many visiting the north are confused by skinch and clarty. Clarty is such a suitable word to describe sticky with mud. Skinch is used in childhood games to call a truce, usually with crossed fingers. There was a huge vocabulary, now dead, concerning ancient roads. Borstal was a hill path, chare an alley, chimin a legal term for a road (