(Dia)critic's Corner A letter writer once accused The [Toronto] Globe and Mail , Canada's newspaper of record, of setting a new record for splitting an infinitive. A front-page article ended in the phrase, Premier Peterson said that in order to after which the notice SEE P. A16 was inserted, and on page A16 the sentence was indeed completed as promised: balance the budget, expectations would have to be lowered. That is some split! However, writing letters to editors to complain about split infinitives is child's play for the truly obsessed. As a self-confessed obsessive when it comes to newspapers' errors, my own pet peeve—one which all the North American news services and most of its major news magazines seem to be guilty of—is leaving diacritical marks off foreign words. To their credit, British news services (e.g., Reuters) and publications like the Observer, Guardian , and Economist , are usually quite careful to get it right. Sometimes these omissions are genuinely trivial. Montreal is quite acceptable; Montréal would be pretentious except perhaps in Canada. But sometimes they are not trivial at all, because a diacritical mark can change the pronunciation, the spelling and therefore even the meaning of a word. In general, diacritical marks are all those little jots and tittles that appear over, under, and even through various letters. We don't have many in English; the only common one I can think of offhand is the diaeresis (as in the two dots over naïve ). where it indicates that two vowels side by side are not a diphthong but separate, distinct vowels. Israël is an example which is not seen much any more; Zaïre is seen occasionally; Haïti is common in French, where it is pronounced as three syllables, but the English standard seems to be Haiti (two syllables). The New Yorker still insists on coöperate . Related to diacritical marks are two constructs, the ligature , which is a character resulting from tying together two or more standard letters, and the digraph , which is a special case of the ligature . The term ligature is usually reserved for printer's conventions (that is, where combinations like fi, ffi, fl , and ffl are linked together to form a single character), whereas the digraph . while graphically tying together two characters, actually represents two diphthongs which were common in Latin: after the invention of printing, the Latin/Romance ae became æ, and oe became œ. These are almost never seen in the US today, but they are still occasionally encountered in British and other varieties of English influenced by British practice, although it is usually the unligated form that one encounters, not the digraphs. The most common example used to be US encyclopedia vs. traditional non-US encyclopaedia (encyclopædia ). However, as even the British spell this word the US way now, the best examples of current US/non-US dichotomies in the use of the digraphs can be gleaned from the world of medicine and science, as in gynœcology/gynecology, hœmatology/hematology, œsophagus/esophagus, œstrogen/ estrogen, cœsium/cesium, œdema/edema, œstrus/estrus, pœdiatrics/pediatrics . In Canada, one rarely encounters in common usage the British spellings listed, but, while they continue to be widely used by medical professionals, even that practice has come under US influence. Diacritical marks can be broken down into two types: accents, which affect, roughly speaking, pronunciation only; and umlauts, which affect spelling as well as pronunciation. As already mentioned, English is relatively sterile when it comes to diacritical marks; true gold can best be struck in foreign fields, where the accent grave, accent aigu , and the circonflexe . The two accents are used in French to change the value of e , which is the most common vowel in French (as in English) and which comes in as many varieties as Campbell's soup—hence the need for some kind of regulation by diacritical marks. The circonflexe , on the other hand, is really a sign of orthography , not pronunciation, being a reminder of a dropped s—it is usually there for historical reasons but connoting a reason which has long since ceased to make sense and which modern French speakers have probably been blithely unaware of. Thus the French île reminds us that the word was once spelled isle , from Latin insula; the name of the eight month, Août , reminds us that it came from the Latin augustus; and être betrays its origins as Latin esse with the same orthographical scar. French, being a Latin-derived language, is also very rich in digraphs, which are often still retained today in France, but are dying out in Quebec: cœur and œuvre are common examples. German has no pure accents that I can think of (other than the occasional diaeresis in foreign proper nouns, such as Israël ), but it has one very common ligature and, of course, the umlaut which is much like a digraph—in fact, these characters are essential to proper spelling, and it is for that reason that a dropped umlaut may be seen as an offense. The common ligature in German orthography is the esszet (β, β) and there are three vowels which can take the umlaut (ä, ö, and ü ). The esszet (pronounced ess-tset) was formed when mediæval (for US read medieval) humanists got carried away and tried to force German into the Græco-Latin mould of grammar and spelling (a disease that spread to the British Isles, too). In Greek, the sigma that is written in the middle of a word (σ, called medial sigma) is different from the sigma at the end of a word (ς, called final, or terminal sigma). In mediæval Latin the two s's were also differentiated: ∫ was the medial s, and s the terminal s. This convention persisted until recently. In microfilms of the 1881 Canadian census, I have come across names like Agne∫s, who was sometimes noted as being a dre∫smaker. In German, this double-s, ∫s, eventually evolved into β. The diphthongs ae, oe, and ue appear so often in German that mediæval scribes started writing the e above the first vowel, something like this: \?\. As they were writing with flat-pointed pens, which tended to emphasize the vertical strokes (especially in Fraktur, the so-called gothie script of old German) the little superior e came to be represented by two short, vertical strokes, which then became two square dots. Then, when Germany adopted Latin letters during the pre-World War II era, they became two round dots. I have always thought that the ü was a perky little character—draw a circle around it and you get that ubiquitous Californianism, \?\. The convention in English is to transcribe the umlaut—to restore, as it were, the lost e. Hence, the Hanseatic port of Lübeck is properly Luebeck in English Similarly, the esszet should be transcribed as ss, never as B, which I see often. The Scandinavian languages also have characters similar to the German umlauts: besides the ä and ö (Swedish), Norwegian and Danish have œ (a + e as in English), Norwegian and Danish also have θ (o + e) and all three use a (a + a). The rules for transcription are similar to those for German words: Alborg=Aalborg; Kθbenhavn= Koebenhavn (of course, in this case there's a perfectly acceptable English equivalent, Copenhagen). As an interesting aside, German alphabetizes words as if the umlauts were transcribed (so Köln would come before Kohl, for instance), but the Scandinavian languages treat their umlauts as trans-z characters (so in Swedish phone books, Ödlund would come after Zetterström). News services that drop umlauts might deserve some sympathy; given the isolation of North Americans, the assumption is easily made here that the umlaut is an extraneous character that can be dropped—as accents in French often are when French words are transcribed into English—without doing bodily harm to the word in question. However, dropping umlauts is less forgivable than dropping accents, because accents describe pronunciation, and anyone who is familiar with the word will know how it is supposed to be pronounced, regardless of the accent. If you have heard the name of Canada's prime minister (Jean Chrétien) pronounced correctly, or if you are sufficiently acquainted with French to know this fairly common name (which means Christian), you do not need to know that an acute accent is usually put over an e to indicate that it is a long e in an unstressed syllable. Hence, its omission will probably not stop you from pronouncing Chrétien correctly (that is, with the emphasis on the second syllable). Umlauts are not simply accents, however: they are fundamental to the spelling of a word and should always be transcribed as ae/oe/ue (or aa in the case of the Scandinavian a) in character sets that do not provide umlauts. In any case, many German and Scandinavian place names have English equivalents: Munich for München, Cologne for Köln, the aforementioned Copenhagen for Kθbenhavn, Gothenburg for Göteborg, and so on. However, I recently read an Associated Press account of a neo-Nazi demonstration in a place called Nurnberg. The problem here is that this is neither fish nor fowl. It is not the correct English name for this city, which is Nuremberg, and it is not the correct German name, which is Nürnberg, or Nuernberg. One strongly suspects that the writer simply did not know the English name for Nürnberg. Yet more confirming evidence to the pessimists amongst us who lament the deterioriation of standards by the users and abusers of the Mother Tongue, especially cis-Atlantic journalists. If there are any questions, comments, that arise from any edition of this newsletter, please feel free to contact me (Ron Shaw) at—. I'm also open to suggestive topics for next trimester's edition. [From a newsletter, Total Quality Management, published by OAO Corporation, . Submitted by .] Galling Gallicisms of Quebec English The Oxford Companion to the English Language (OCEL ) is missing an s at the end of its title, for it has headings for more than four hundred varieties of our multivaried mother tongue—Australian English, Singapore English, Indian English, Black Vernacular English, etc. Some of the varieties are unfamiliar, like Babu English, a mode of address and reference in several Indo-Aryan languages, including Hindi, for officials working forrajahs, landlords, etc. My mother tongue is one of the mutants listed in OCEL , and I am constantly being reminded of the peculiarities of my usage. After giving an American telephone receptionist my phone number, I added, My local is 222. Your what? she retorted. I quickly corrected myself: My extension is 222. I left a Newfoundland customer perplexed when I told him that I would try to find an item at one of our filials , instead of subsidiaries . I am guilty of speaking Quebec English. In Quebec, it is taken for granted that English affects French. One hears expressions like le snack bar, chequer (instead of verifier ), and un towing a tow truck. In the business world one encounters a myriad of Anglicisms like meeting, cash flow, down-size , and business itself. The presence of these borrowings make some Quebecois feel that their language is under threat. More and more, however, the flow is not unidirectional: most English-speaking monolingual Quebecer will use metro for subway, dépanneur for convenience store , and caisse populaire instead of cooperative bank . The following demonstrates the French influence on Quebecois English: The professor (teacher) at the polyvalent (high school) believed that scholarity (education) was being affected by students consecrating (devoting) more time to manifestations (demonstrations) about the dress code than to their notes (grades). During his conferences (lectures), their inattention was hurting their apprenticeship (learning of the subject matter). He also felt he was getting collaboration (cooperation) from his confreres, Anglophone (English speakers), Francophone (French speakers), and Allophone (speakers of neither English nor French) in better serving the collectivity (community). He thus had a rendezvous (meeting) with the Director-General (principal), Monsieur Gendron, and stated that it was a primordial (essential) consideration that some teachers be let go before they reached permanence (tenure) under the syndicate (union) agreement. Monsieur Gendron wrote back saying that he had requested a subvention (grant) in the annex (appendix) to his planification (policy) budget to the confessional (denominational) school board in order that formation modalities (training methods) could be created to make teachers more dynamic animators (group leaders). Although terms like collaboration, rendezvous , and annex might be used in non-Quebec English contexts, they read like inappropriate choices from a synonym dictionary, and cooperation, meeting , and appendix seem more natural. The trend towards the Gallicization of English in Quebec coincides with the introduction of pro-French legislation around twenty years ago, and the use of French has gained in prestige as a result, making it more likely for Gallic loanwords to appear in English. Anglophones are speaking French to a greater extent at home and at work, creating a situation in which the French term becomes more familiar than the English. Thus, an Anglophone might use the word demand when he means ask, reparations when he means repairs, and remark when he means notice, because he is constantly employing demander, réparations , and remarquer when speaking French. These faux amis (false friends), as they are called, are confused both by Anglophones speaking French and Francophones speaking English. They are also among many of the words likely to have their meanings changed in Quebec English. For example, résumer does not mean to resume but, as Americans know from their adoption of résumé for curriculum vitae, to summarize; and decevoir means to disappoint, not to deceive. Not many Anglophones in Quebec today use resume and deceive in the French sense, but over time I suspect that such usages will increase. It is often hard to know where English and French begin and end. Franglais includes such classics as hot-dog steamé all dressed , and a rock music review which declared that a group's appeal was to male white trash de vieille souche. Vieille souche is a term that refers to old stock Quebecers. To those who bemoan the loss of the chastity of the French language, all I can say is that the lady never was a virgin: French is essentially mutated Latin corrupted by Arabic, Gaulish, and Germanic, to name a few of the seducers. Even the name of the country, France , owes its name (as does England ) to a Germanic tribe. Language purity is a myth. The reality is that English and French have been borrowing from one another since at least 1066. Ironically, some of the dreaded Anglicisms, like rosbif and club , were originally Gallicisms that had penetrated English in the 18th century. The King of Wordsmiths John Updike remarked that language has bloomed from the infinite fumblings of anonymous men. We meddle constantly with our linguistic roots, grafing suffixes and slang with equal abandon, and toss the resulting hybrids about us with the carelessness of toddlers flinging pablum. Thus are new words born, whether as engineer's lingo or the wino's mutterings. But new language blooms also from the not-so-careless utterances of certain individual writers, particularly in the field of speculative fiction. At least since Lewis Carroll intrigued his readers with Jabberwocky, there have been writers—Robert Heinlein and Dr. Seuss, to name two—who deliberately minted new words. In A Clockwork Orange Anthony Burgess invented an entire dialect (Nadsat, a Russified version of English): I could sort of slooshy myself making special sort of shoms and govoreeting slovos like Dear dead idlewilds, rot not in variform guises and all that cal. Frank Herbert was also no slouch at wordvention: chaumurky, sietch , and heighliner are examples from Dune . Much of it is fresh, serviceable language, not merely humdrum technical derivatives or the names of gadgets and aliens, and has certifiable potential to enter the English language. Grok , for example. But for sheer variety, quantity, and above all charm of his neologisms, I submit that none compare with Jack Vance, a.k.a. John Holbrook Vance. As Jack Rawlins said, ...to make up words that carry just the right scent, that strike the reader as new and familiar simultaneously, is extremely challenging, and Vance is a master at it. It is not unusual for a single novel to have fifty or more newly created words; in The Face there are almost a hundred. In Showboat World , Apollon Zamp advertises for musicians who ...play instruments of the following categories: belp-horn, screedle, cadenciver, variboom, elf-pipe, tympany, guitar, dulciole, heptagong, zinfonella . In Galactic Effectuator , Vance tosses off gangee, sprugge, cardenil bush, raptap , and shatterbone in two orgiastic paragraphs. Most of Vance's neologisms are nouns, the majority of them plants, animals and/or foods. Others designate musical instruments or weapons, denote magical spells, crystallize cultural concepts or rituals, or express metaphors. Some, like skak and merrihew , are footnoted with lengthy explanations about the sociology of magical creatures. Terms like Monomantic Syntoraxis and Tempofluxion Dogma reflect his droll skepticism toward religion. Some are wonderfully playful, such as pinky-panky-poo, or simply wonderful, such as scurch and dreuwhy (the latter alleged to have been drawn from the ancient Welsh). The adjectives are always vivid: the colors rawn and pallow and smaudre (which also function as nouns), and squalmaceous or halcositic. He also gives us verbs (disturgle, skirkling), a few articles and cardinal numbers, and even a sprinkling of interjections and appellatives. The words may also be categorized according to whether they are intended to be English. Clearly most of them are; we are expected to read them without recoiling, though we may grope for a dictionary. Others are implicitly or expressly taken from an imaginary tongue such as Paonese or the idiom of the Dirdir, or that of the Water-folk (e.g., the shibbolethic brga skth gz). But the most interesting method of analyzing Vance's neologisms is by etymological speculation, which falls into roughly five categories that shade into one another like colors in the spectrum. I list these divisions in order of decreasing distance from English: 1. Those that appear to have come into the world de novo, from stem to suffix. We can think of no corollary, and feel little or no resonance with known words—dyssac (an herb liquor), thawn (a bearded cave-dweller), bgrassik (translation uncertain). 2. Those that tantalize us with faint echoes of known words. The morphemes are rather familiar, but overall we cannot place them: harquisade (a variety of tree with glass foliage), marathaxus (a scale from the body of the demon Sadlark). Some of these are ... hauntingly familiar growths, like catafalque trees and hangman trees, as Terry Dowling put it. Submulgery, ensqualm, bifaulgulate—the reader runs to the dictionary and is surprised to find them absent. Some sound so real that they flit past like butterflies or called strikes, only to awaken us in the middle of the night with the realization that they cannot be: halcoid, subuculate, Chief Manciple. Close cousins of such words float unbidden into our consciousness. We think of subterfuge and skulduggery to explain submulgery; coaxed by ensqualm, we recall ensnare, qualm, and squall; for bifaulgulate, ungulate and a host of words beginning with the prefix bi- come to mind. We are crowded with conjecture. 3. Portmanteau words, the most fascinating and treacherous. Here the stems are reasonably certain, but they ignite an extended metaphor. Thasdrubal's Laganetic Transfer was the spell used by the magician Iucounu to banish Cugel on his search for the euphoriant cusps in The Eyes of the Overworld. One might easily overlook the hidden word lagan goods thrown into the sea with a buoy attached. This is certainly a reference to Firx, the painful parasite installed in Cugel's liver to keep his mind on his task. Moreover, the phrase is a reminder of Vance's love of sailing. Another example is gleft, a kind of phantom, one of which stole part of Guyal's brain while his mother was in labor. Surely this word arose from glia, a class of brain cells, and theft. An especially intriguing case is pleurmalion, the tubeshaped device used by the sorcerer Rhialto to discern the location of a precious textual prism, even from great distances in space and time. We cannot avoid recognition of the Latin pleura side or rib. And mustn't the -malion fragment refer to Pygmalion, the legendary king who fell in love with his sculpture of a woman and persuaded Aphrodite to bring it to life? We are struck by the insight that the pleurmalion relates to the lost prism as the biblical rib to a woman, bringing it (her) into view and thus to hand. They must be reunited. Any doubts that Vance actually thinks along these lines are dispelled by a revealing footnote to the word murst in Chapter 16 of the last book in his Demon Prince series: The meaning of this word, like others in The Book of Dreams [the villain's childhood notebook can only be conjectured. (Must: urgency? With verst: in Old Russia, a league? Farfetched, but who knows?) 4. In this group are words that draw clearly from identifiable roots and appendages and combine them according to traditional rules: calligynics, malepsy, Gynodyne, photochrometz. These are mix-'n'-match suits of clothes. The Latin, Greek, or Old English roots are readily discernible (though I cannot explain the -etz in the last case), and generate few if any metaphorical overtones. 5. Compounds, straightforward alloys of real words, sturdily welded or hyphenated: sagmaw, trapperfish, sadapple, bumbuster, and the delightfully macabre ghostclutch. He has even been known to do this in French: garde-nez nose-protector is a logical amalgam of garder to guard and pince-nez: An extravagant garde-nez of gold filigree clung to the ridge of his nose. Such compounds can seduce us into spurious assumptions. The term elving-platform—a birthing station for the species hyrcan major—implies the existence of the verb to elve, give birth to an elf! Vance can indeed be master of the ridiculous. (Meanwhile we should not overlook that hyrcan major is also a fine portmanteau word, with its references to Hyrcania, a province of the ancient Persian and Parthian empires, and Ursa Major, the Great Bear constellation.) Even some of Vance's proper nouns hint strongly at the existence of daily words: Universal Pancomium, the name of a large boat, suggests a more generalized category of encomium; reading Dylas Extranuator (a spaceship) compels us to ask what extranuate might mean—perhaps strain in wonder? A building called the Catademnon (pungent gust of ancient Greek syllables!) is certainly not merely a confection, reminding us as it does of condemn, Agamenmon, and Parthenon, all of which relate directly to Vance's hero Emphyrio and his tragic fate. Vance has achieved something extraordinary: the invention of nearly 1700 interesting new words, a number sufficient to justify his own dictionary. In contrast, the Burroughs Dictionary and The Dune Encyclopedia include many characters and places and are thus actually concordances or encyclopedias rather than true dictionaries. And Vance is still busily, incorrigibly at work. Most neologisms remain in their literary greenhouses, to be enjoyed only by visitors. But some have escaped and spread like weeds to become part of the language: Heinlein's grok, for example. How many of Vance's coinings will infiltrate our daily gab? Will we send our enemies skirkling, or drink skull-busters at the corner bar? Will our windows be made of translux? In The Languages of Pao, Vance explored the notion of using created languages as instruments of social engineering. Let us hope that his whimsical words—Whimsicant—are already doing just that. Rawlins, Jack, Demon Prince: The Dissonant Worlds of Jack Vance, Borgo Press, San Bernardino, California, 1986. 2 Dowling, Terry, The Art of Xenography: Jack Vance's General Culture Novels, in Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature, Vol. 1, no. 3, December, 1978. Temianka, D., The Jack Vance Lexicon: From Ahulph to Zipangote, Underwood-Miller, 1992. McWhorter, George T., Burroughs Dictionary: An alphabetical list of proper names, words, phrases and concepts contained in the published works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, University Press, Lanham, Maryland, 1987. McNelly, W. E., The Dune Encyclopedia, G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1984. Child Safety Prevention Program Offers Little Sisters Sound Strategies. [From Reaching Out , newsletter of the Big Sister Association of Greater Boston. Submitted by .] Built of sandstone bricks and 25ft tall, Fuller's remains were placed beneath the floor of this mausoleum on his death in 1834. [From The Independent, , Section Two. Submitted by .] Has the past year brought the lowering of voices and search for common ground called for in the wake of the shootings by Cardinal Bernard Law, Gov. William Weld and others? [From the Boston Globe, , front-page article by Don Aucoin (who ought to be made to stand in the corner). Submitted by .] The Problem of Names Recently a brisk, chummy young woman whom I had just met asked me what my first name is. John, I told her. Well, now, John...,she began. Nobody calls me John, I said gently. I then explained to her that it is not so much the first-naming itself that some of us older citizens do not like but the doing it in a casual way by people we do not know. I told her that people who know me call me Jock . I have carried that label from the first week of my life. I was born in Winnipeg General Hospital. My mother was Canadian by birth; my father an immigrant from Scotland. Nurses in the hospital teased him about his accent and began referring to me as wee Jock . My mother's relatives picked it up and I have lived with it ever since. When I was in high school some of my friends took delight in referring to me as an athletic supporter. (I like the woman in Peter De Vries' novel, Forever Panting , who spoke about John Jock Rousseau.) Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, one of the better-selling gurus in pop psychology a few years ago, gave this advice in his book, Pulling Your Own Strings: Always deal with people on a first name basis unless they make it clear that they need to be addressed in some other way. Why did he use the word need with respect to those of us who prefer not be called by our first names by people who do not know us at all well? I read somewhere that a girl was given the name Camery because her uncle had served in the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, a regiment in the British army. The writer pointed out how unfortunate that was, as camery , he said, is a disease of horses in which pimples appear on the palate. I was skeptical of that. So to three or four dictionaries. No mention. That writer, I knew, liked to do a little leg-pulling in his writings. Then I went to the big Oxford: camery is an obsolete word and the writer had simply quoted that dictionary's definition. Now I worry a little about my car, a splendid secondhand Toyota Camry . H. L. Mencken, in one of his more crotchety moods, said this: The first Rotarian was the first man to call John the Baptist Jack. On the other hand, an English university teacher said this about John Milton: I would venture to assert that no human being ever called him Johnnie. In the USA an actor who appears in two roles in a play is given as his name for the second one, George Spelvin . An actress is Georgina . I understand that in England he is Walter Plinge . I do not know what name they give to a woman. P. G. Wodehouse has delighted many readers with the names he gave to characters in his wonderful humorous novels: Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, Pongo Thistleton , and many others. About the naming of characters he said this: Odd how important story names are. It always takes me about as long toget them to my satisfaction as it does to write the novel. Many years ago I found in an abandoned farmhouse a copy of a 1912 issue of The Presbyterian , a periodical published in Toronto and devoted to spiritual uplift and the sale of patent medicines and trusses. In it the editor commented briefly on a recently published pamphlet written by Bernard Shaw, On Going to Church . He gently castigated Shaw for indulging in one of the modish foibles of the day by calling himself G. Bernard Shaw rather than use, in the good old Irish manner, George B. Shaw . Then he suggested to his fellow ministers that J. Melchizedec Smith looks more impressive than either John M. Smith or J. M. Smith . A few years ago I read a brief report on some research that had been done at a California university by a team of psychologists in which they discovered that the way people sign their names and use it for public purposes tells something significant aboutthem. They said that if you use John J. Doe you probably are a very conventional person. A simple John Doe suggests that you are rather outspoken, an assertive loner. ( Bernard Shaw was the playwright's usual byline.) John James Doe tends to be rather proud, and he likes to stand in the limelight. J. Doe , on the other hand, is likely to be excessively modest. J. J. Doe is generally a person who likes to remain in the background, a shy one—like J. A. Davidson. J. James Doe is a go-getter, and likes to think himself a man of considerable importance. (H. Allen Smith, an American humorist, called this, and exemplified in his own usage, parting one's name on the side.) Some years ago I noticed a tendency among American preachers—a tendency I noticed also in Canada—to adopt the three-name pattern. This particular foible may have been initiated by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), who had been a preacher before concentrating on being an important literary man. Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878-1969)—notice that middle name, although it may not be significant—was the leading American preacher of his time. And, of course, we must not overlook Norman Vincent Peale . Would not N. Vincent Peale have given the eminent positive-thinker a bit more class? (I read somewhere that a striptease artiste in California a few years ago adopted as her stage name Norma Vincent Peel .) Turning To Nod Goodbye Cyberspeak is ubiquitous. Many cyberwords, for example, download, laptop , and modern are euphonious, enriching the language. They are not loanwords, but here in their own right. Other terminologies, especially that of metrication, are cuckoos in the nest. In turfing out the venerable words, they deprive the language of colour and warmth Arnold Bennett said that any change, albeit for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts. One regrets the inevitable parting with words that have served us since Anglo-Saxon times and were here before King Alfred. Many arrived with William the Conqueror. Others were absorbed in Shakespeare's time, often from the great literatures of Greece and Rome. Soldiers, sailors, and traders brought home idioms from distant lands. Some words die and are forgotten, but many of those which wrapped themselves about us like comfy old coats are stolen off our backs. So we don hectares, litres, and milligrams—but not, I hope, without turning to nod goodbye respectfully to the earliest form of English bequeathed by our ancestors. I like that ancient Saxon phrase, which calls The burial-ground God's-Acre! [Longfellow: God's-Acre] Only in phrases like God's-Acre and broadacre does acre still mean a field of sorts. Correctly, an acre is a measure of 4840 square yards of land, whereas Old English aecer was the field—a piece of land cleared for ploughing or grazing. An acre's precise definition varied according to time and place. A farmer was an acreman who paid a firma , or fixed rent. Later an acre was a strip of open field, large enough to be ploughed by a yoke of oxen in one day. To help the ploughman measure his 4840 square yards, a chain 22 yards long was laid along the field's headland, showing the width to be ploughed. From here he would plough furlongs (i.e., a furrow long), of 10 chains or 220 yards. Come Sunday, the ploughman might mark out the village cricket pitch, having borrowed the farmer's chain: 22 yards exactly. Persons of a certain age learned by rote that eight furlongs make a mile, and since the 9th century, a furlong has described an eighth part of an English mile, regardless of its agricultural definition. From time immemorial we have used our bodies for measuring—by foot , for example. An ell , Anglo-Saxon eln , was a rough reckoning, being the distance from the crook of the arm to the end of the longest finger, the elbow being where the bow or bend occurred. Bow is from an old verb, bugan to bend, and is at the root of rainbow, bow (tie), and bow (and arrow). Using our fingers, we counted in tens. Numbers 11 and 12 emphasize this finger-reckoning. After ten sheep had passed him, the shepherd had used up all his fingers. Many etymologists believe that endleofon is the Old English form for left after ten, one left over. Twelve in Old English was twa-lif or twelf , when two (more than ten) were left. Twa-lif represents the elements in two and leave. To tell meant to count (as in telling the beads of a rosary ); a tale was a reckoning. In L'Allegro , Milton writes: And every shepherd tells his tale Under the hawthorn in the dale. In telling his tale, every shepherd counted his sheep as they went past him. We still tell the time. A hand-span is the stretch from thumb to little finger. According to Dr. Johnson, span new was the term applied to cloth immediately after taking it off the spannans , or stretchers. A rod, pole, or perch was measured by a stick, the Old English rodd being 5½ yards. The area of an acre was standardized by Edward I as being land 40 rods long by 4 rods wide. Yard (OE gyrd, geard ) is of superior stock: the earth itself was middangeard middleyard, being the place between the abode of the gods and the abode of giants. As a suffix it survives in churchyard, dockyard , and shipyard . Until about 1150, Old English time was reckoned by nights, not by days, for the Anglo-Saxon language flourished in lands where nights were long and the days fleeting periods of light. The light of learning, notes Simeon Potter in Our Language , shone more brightly in Northumbria than anywhere else in Europe. Northumbria was then on the periphery of the civilised world. North American friends rightly regard as archaic my use of fortnight , this word being a survival of the old way of reckoning two weeks, by using fourteen-night. Shakespeare uses sevennights for week when the three weird sisters chant: Weary se'ennights, nine times nine Shall he dwindle, peak and pine. [Macbeth i, 3, 20] Reckoning by nights is a relic of the Celtic custom of starting the day at sunset. In the Book of Genesis too, evening always precedes morning: The evening and the morning were the first day.... The time between light and dark, twilight , is of the same root as two, twain, twixt , and tween , from Old English twa . A certain drama is attached to words prefixed by night -. From Old English galen to sing comes nightingale , simply the singer by night. Deadly nightshade and woody nightshade , the narcotic plants commonly known as belladonna and bittersweet, have their origins in Old English nihtscada, niht night and scada shade. Old English mare in nightmare means demon or devil. Tennyson writes of the black bat, night, Shakespeare of the foul womb of night. Better sleep might have resulted from taking a nightcap or grog (whiskey preferred) before bedtime, helped too by wearing a night cap . Small units of time— second, minute , and hour —are borrowed from Latin secundus, minuta , and hora. Year, month, week , and day are Old English gear, monao, wice , and daeg . Day has poetical overtones. The daisy flower closes its pink-tipped petals (lashes), and goes to sleep when the sun sets. In the morning the petals open to the light. Anglo-Saxon for daisy was daeges eage day's eye. The Bible uses dayspring for the beginning of the day; also for the commencement of the Messiah's reign: The dayspring from on high hath visited us. [Luke i, 78] Old English springan (German springen ) became spring , but an older word for that season marks a period of the Church Year: Lent. The Saxon's March was lencten . Lenten food being frugal and stinted, Shakespeare has lenten entertainment in Hamlet , a lenten answer in Twelfth Night , and a lenten pye in Romeo and Juliet. Lent lily is the older name for the daffodil. When daffodils begin to peer, With heigh! the doxy, over the dale, Why, then comes in the sweet o' the year, For the red blood reigns in the winter's pale. [A Winter's Tale, IV, ii, 1] Of unknown origin, doxy is variously the low term for sweetheart or mistress, female tramp or beggar, plaything or paramour [toy boy?], even a baby. In the West of England, babies were called doxies. The oldest words, for example, wife, live, fight, love, sleep , and house , relate to home and family. They also include the counting of time and measuring of space, the meeting of communities, the working of the soil and caring for beasts. The language was not called Anglo-Saxon by those who spoke it, but Englisc from Engle Angles, Anglo-Saxon being simply the earliest form of the language. William Burroughs said that words are an around-the-world, ox-cart way of doing things, awkward instruments, eventually to be laid aside. He was thinking of the space age and no doubt would have included the cyberworld. But Richard Morrison, writing in The Times in 1995, says he knows a journalist who has taken to writing his stories in longhand, revising them laboriously in ink, and only then tapping them into the computer. When Morrison asked why he did that, his friend answered, So that posterity can compare the various drafts. Shakespeare would surely have understood the need. ANTIPODEAN ENGLISH Dharuk Words In English When the first European settlers arrived in Australia in 1788, there were approximately 250 separate languages spoken by the indigenous peoples. During the 200 years of European occupation these have declined in use, to the point where not more than about twenty are active, in the sense that they are being learnt by Aboriginal children and cover aspects of the everyday life experienced by those children. These active languages tend to be those spoken in the north and the west of Australia, in those parts of the country where the Aborigines have been most able to retain their traditional way of life. The first languages that the Europeans encountered, those once spoken on the east coast of Australia, survive only as they were recorded by the settlers and have been reconstructed in the light of later acquired knowledge of the family of Aboriginal languages as a whole. Paradoxically, it is these languages that have contributed most to the lexicon of Australian English. Not more than about 400 words have been borrowed altogether, and yet of these some 60 come from Dharuk, the language which was spoken on the site now occupied by the city of Sydney and not much beyond it, which existed in an inland and a coastal dialect. Although there are still a few Dharuk descendants in the vicinity of Sydney, and these may still use a handful of Dharuk words, Dharuk effectively ceased to function as a language by the mid-19th century. What then survives? Names of flora and fauna, names of implements, especially weapons, a few miscellaneous names of dwellings, ceremonies, people identified by sex or activity, striking features of the environment, and a handful of pidgin terms suggestive of an only rudimentary communicative exchange. The flora and fauna are characterised by their distinctiveness. The Great South Land was to prove extraordinarily rich in new species, some of which, like the kangaroo, had an irresistible novelty about them; at the same time they were as numerous as sheep in England and as useful to man. The wallaby and the wallaroo were, like the kangaroo, large marsupials which the Aborigines hunted; the koala was also a marsupial but arboreal in habit and sufficiently unique in appearance to have had the settlers liken it to a bear, a sloth, or a monkey in their naming of it; the wombat was a heavy, thickset marsupial sometimes known as a badger because of its burrowing habit. The only animal immediately recognisable to European eyes was the native dog or dingo , and the distinction was early made between the domesticated dog, or dingo , and the wild dog, or warrigal . Two of the small number of birds identified were the boobook , an omnipresent owl, and the currawong , a large, crowlike bird whose curiosity would have brought it to notice. The name of a good eating fish, the wollami or snapper, on which the early settlers were frequently dependent, was again an understandable borrowing. When it came to plants, the same sort of criteria were observed: the waratah, a strikingly beautiful red flower which has become the floral emblem of New South Wales, was soon identified, as were the burrawang , a palmlike plant very common in the coastal forests, and the kurrajong , a plant that yields a useful fibre. The name of the dance ceremony corroboree , probably the most immediately observable characteristic of peoples regarded as savages, which had both a religious and an informal social form, was readily adopted, as was koradji a wise elder or, as he was often described, a witch doctor. Weapons like the boomerang, the hielamon (a wooden shield), the nulla nulla (a club), the waddy (ditto), and the woomera (a spear-thrower), were identifiable to the earliest settlers as were also gin woman, myall , which distinguished a wild Aborigine from his civilised or tame brother, gibber a stone, and gunyah a dwelling. But the largest group of words that characterise the early period are those that clearly formed part of a language used for the limited communication that took place between the two peoples: cobra head, mundowie foot, bogie to bathe or a bathing place, crammer to steal, nangry to sleep, patter to eat, budgeree good, cabon big, cooler angry, jerron afraid, narangy little, muny very, baal a negative, and cooee a call or to call. Of the several word lists compiled by officers of the First Fleet, as the first group of convict-laden ships was known, that of Lieut. William Dawes is the most ambitious, attempting a grammar of Dharuk as well as a vocabulary. But such a resource is more an indication of what was available to the settlers than a record of what they actually used. For that we must turn to their accounts of life in the colony and to the words which they adopted, which they use more or less unselfconsciously as part of their language as colonists. And here there are three observations to be made. First, the words used by the Aborigines were seldom as attractive to the colonists as descriptive English names that emphasised the perceived resemblance between the new and the known and familiar, and so made for more certain communication. Thus, distinguishing epithets like colonial, native, wild, black, brown, green , and gray qualify names of common Old World species like apple, ash, oak , and pine to build a considerable and understandable vocabulary. Second, a positive effort needed to be made to ascertain the Aboriginal name, and experience showed that the geographical range of Dharuk was extremely limited: the fact that a new set of names came into use as one crossed the boundary of another Aboriginal language must have mitigated against borrowing. Third, the Aborigines were widely thought of as backward and uncivilised and, while this attitude persisted, their nomenclature carried no great recommendation. Royal Thoughts on Collective Nouns Could the thoughts of the estranged Royal Couple occasionally turn to an interesting series of collective nouns that apply to their circumstances? Princess Diana's musings, in her sea of troubles , could go back to her association with a nayful of knaves , particularly one, one of an execution of officers who have betrayed her confidences. She has encountered a threatening of courtiers and an abandonment of confidantes . The publication of a beribboned bundle of love letters would entertain a company of gossips and a knot of adversaries for ever, much to the embarrassment of her eloquence of lawyers . Outdoors she is harassed by cassettes of photographers and a worship of writers , all of whom are employed by a cluster of publishers . At school her children are surrounded by a rascal of boys and, on occasions, a flock of girls . The young boys have to endure a kissing of aunts and suffer a slew of uncles . Charles's reflections are of a non-patience of wives (both his own and others') and an incredibility of cuck-olds . He is one of a state of princes who are shod by a drunkship of cobblers and clothed by a disguising of tailors . During his sporting activities he is accompanied by a stalk of foresters while shooting at a column of wildfowl or riding with a blast of huntsmen who are escorted by a kennel of hounds . His estates are managed by a provision of stewards . At home he is surrounded by a farrago of toadies, a draught of butlers , and a temperance of cooks . Charles's affairs are the concern of a caucus of politicians, a noble crew of lords , and a bench of bishops , all of whom are kept informed by a diligence of messengers . Finally, he is devoted to his maternal grandmother, a descendant of a dishworship of Scots . Cyberspace and Khyber Pass The language of the information superhighway is English—more accurately, a sub-species thereof with its own grammar and semantics. Since it has come into being with a sudden and persistent rush, reflecting the burgeoning and undisciplined information system it conveys,, it has not been amply recorded, much less described, in standard reference works or lexicons. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1993) and reprinted with corrections in the same year, does not even include internet . To fill the gap, specialized glossaries have emerged, the best naturally in computerized form (like The Jargon File, Version 2.9.6, 16 August 1991), where entries can be quickly and efficiently updated, a process which in itself reflects the hasty transience of much of the vocabulary. Although a complete linguistic description will have to wait until the dust settles—if it does at all, given the volatility of the technology and the ever-increasing number of the participants-certain features, destined to remain, are already apparent. As far as grammar is concerned, the simplistic syntax and the exceptional preponderance of nouns and verbs (with an accompanying heavy reliance on conversion) are obvious and enduring. The vocabulary, like the grammar, is determined to a large extent by the medium of computers and the operation of networking. But their insistence on speed is not entirely the message. Nor would it be correct simply to draw comparisons with newspeak or some other centrally decreed and regulated system. For although the vocabulary does make important use of computer terminology, and although it does share with newspeak a penchant for blends and acronyms and an avoidance of adjectives and adverbs, it reflects a manner and an environment greater than both computerese and newspeak. Within a strictly controlled computer system, in which accuracy is absolute, the vocabulary as a whole is programmatically casual. Its salient characteristic is its playful primitivism. It is laid back: one talks, chats, browses. Stress (evident in terms like prowler, skulker, lurker , as well as Trojan horse, worm, vulture, leech ) is soothed with (or disguised by) a variety of linguistic palliatives: generous helpings from pop culture ( cookie monster, Kermit ) and science fiction ( cyberpunk, core wars, cosmic rays, emoticon ); chummy diminutives ( archie, newbie, smiley ); and jingly rhymes ( snail mail ). The iconic word is surfing: a sociolinguistic cornucopia of connotations of sport, vigor, youth, individuality, speed, independence, leisure, health, and middle-to-upper-class education and affluence. The vocabulary is jocular in its easy mixture of the casual (in slang or coinages or abbreviations), the learned (in avatar, baroque, catatonic, synchronous ), the visual (in hieroglyphics or emoticons), and even the aural (in the fondness for explosives, like bang , common spoken name for !) or onomatopoeia ( bletch, glitch, gonk ). The vocabulary is suffisant in its wordplay ( AIDS , A* Infected Disk Syndrome, sex , Software EXchange) as in the nonchalance of its central and mixed metaphor: surfing the web , borrowed from scanning television channels for a watchable program. The vocabulary is mischievous in the mixture—and not just in the ways just mentioned. One prominent phenomenon is the flaunting use of homographs: words that appear in conventional dictionaries are given a meaning which is not to be derived logically or figuratively from the customary one. Leaving aside blends and acronyms, a few representative examples (with definitions from various sources) should be sufficient: advent the prototypical compute adventure game. arc to create a compressed (archive) from a group of files using SEA ARC, PKWare, PICARC, or a compatible program. biff to notify someone of incoming mail [named after the implementor's dog barked whenever the mailman came]. bum to make highly efficient, either in time or space, often at the expense of clarity. chemist someone who wastes computer time on number crunching when you'd far rather the machine were doing something more productive. flag a piece of information that is either TRUE or FALSE. flame an ill-considered, insulting e-mail or Usenet retort. jughead an index of high-level gopher menus. lynx an excellent, text-based, UNIX browser for the Web. pretzel command key. strudel common (spoken) name for the circumflex character. tin a threaded newsreader for UNIX. troll to deliberately post egregiously false information to a newsgroup in hopes of tricking dense know-it-alls into correcting you. It may be argued that such personal semantics are more than mischievous. But it would be going too far to assert that they are critical of existing structures. Jargon or slang and standard have always coexisted and over the years have grown more mutually tolerant. What is clear, in any case, is that a private and exclusive language is evolving and engaging ever larger numbers of participants in a linguistic process which is destined to become more and more public as computer technology itself becomes the dominant force in communication and other social activities. From the point of view of language, what is interesting is the coincidence, be it mischievous or critical or accidental, of the ideal and the real. For the examples of semantic noncompliance—along with features as widely disparate as computerese or the variety of registers—begin to reflect a world-view, the crystallization of a special sphere. Real , as in realtime 6 the time it takes real people to communicate, as on a telephone' is set against virtual: 1. common alternative to logical. 2. simulated; performing the function of something that isn't really there. For netizens , cyberspace is the shared imaginary reality of the computer networks. For citizens, shared reality is the existence in space and time of Khyber Pass. Atmosphere English As a guest in a Thai household I was drying my hands on a towel when, glancing down, I noticed some writing on it. I think my hosts were a little disconcerted to see me emerging from their bathroom laughing roundly a couple of minutes later. I hastily told them what it said on the towel: THE SUN WAS SHINING AND THE DUDE'S FAMILY WENT ON A PICNIC. This is an example of what Western advertising agencies in Asia call atmosphere English. In Japan, particularly, manufacturers feel that English-sounding names and writing on products add prestige to goods marketed there, and it is certainly true that atmosphere English has reached its apogee. This has resulted in such products as a brand of jeans called Trim Pecker , lawn fertilizer called Green Piles, Cow Brand shampoo, Shot Vision TV sets, Carap candy, Pocky candy, Pocket Wetty pre-moistened towelettes, and a nail-polish remover called Fingernail Remover . Two top beverages are named Calpis and Pocari Sweat , and a coffee creamer is called Creap . Slogans, too, are sometimes in English, like this one on a deodorant container: Sweet Medica—it frees you completely from the smell of your underarm sweat . Or this, on a bottle of nose drops: Nazal—for stuffed nose and snot . But let us return to for a moment The Sun Was Shining and the Dude's Family Went on a Picnic . It turned out this towel had been made in Thailand. As is already well established, the Japanese are the undisputed masters of putting largely meaningless English on their products. Here, however, was an example of Thai efforts in the same direction and, as a long-term resident here, I am pleased to note that it is grammatically irreproachable and makes some sort of sense! My hosts had one other towel in the same series which they eagerly dug out; it read: In the Evening the Sheep Was Praying to the Twinkling Stars in the Dark Sky . I plucked disconsolately at this towel. Not at all contemporary, maybe it wasn't the simple-minded nonsense it seemed, maybe a parody of Wordsworth perpetrated by a disillusioned towel copy writer à la J.K. Stephens' celebrated parody of that poet: Two Voices are there: One is of the deep/And one is of an old half-witted sheep.... But in the end I decided it was the simple-minded nonsense it seemed. I work with many Japanese in Thailand, often outside office hours in their apartments. So, intrigued by the Dude towel, I furtively began to case their kids' T-shirts (all of which, it turned out, had been bought in Japan). In four weeks I came across the following, starting with the simplest: SNOB HOUSE YOUR OWN FEELING PAPP BABY THE EMPLOYMENT OF GOOD SENSE IN CLOTHING THE HAPPINESS OF BEING FASIONALBE—A POLICY OF SELF-DETERMINATION Here, meaning and grammar cannot be faulted (except for PAPP BABY: PAP BABY would be intelligible if odd— lactation, paps, pap pabulum), though, with regard to clothing, few countries can be said to conform to the extent Japan does. The salariman's uniform is well known, and all Japanese schoolgirls must wear blouses modelled on those of Portuguese mariners from the days of sail. Some have said that the Japanese even conform in rebellion: the Yakuza (Japanese Mafia) all dress alike though a little sharper, e.g. two-colour ties, mean pairs of wraparounds, tattoos, brutal crew cuts, and an attitude! Next up on the catwalk is a young fellow modelling a truly classic T-shirt: ALL KINDS OF INSECT WARMING I AM MUCH PLEASED AT YOUR HONESTY NAUGHTY KIDS BEBE CO. BEBE KIDS FAVOURITE BEBE NAUGHTY CLUB PLEASE Notice the spelling of favourite —the writer is incomprehensible in British English. Rivalling haute insect-warming couture is the last gem my research turned up, a T-shirt bearing the words: KIDS COMPANY. KIDS DREAM. BLITHE MATE. YOU OFFERED ME A GOOD PLAN, I MADE UP MY MIND THAT IT SHOULD BE DONE. IT IS VERY/ THOUGHFUL OF YOU TO DO SO. I GAIN A LOT OF KNOWLEDGE BY THIS. All these slogans are wrought in attractive designs and lettering and are not intended to be read, so I would like to express my thanks to those puzzled Japanese parents who allowed me to do so. Even so, native English-speakers confronted with this manner of stuff will have trouble not sniggering in their saké and—horror of horrors—be asked to explain wherein lies the humour. How do the Japanese manage to come up with such copy? Some have suggested the injudicious use of Japanese/English dictionaries combined with deplorable highschool English teaching. Nicholas Bornoff, in his book Pink Samurai , cites some perhaps edifying advertising copy from a catalogue for bar and club furniture: I QUENCH MY THIRST BY A HOT LIQUID OF AMBER-COLOURED THE ICE IN THE ROCK-GLASS TICKED AWAY WITH A CRASH I GET DRUNK ON MY FAVOURITE LIQOUR WITH MY CONGENIAL FRIENDS THE HOME WORLD ONLY FOR MEN More Foreign Treasures Idioms in other languages can be misleading, for there are many different and often colourful metaphoric ways of expressing the same concept. Here are a few examples from French and German. avoir du monde au balcon [Lit. to have the world on a balcony] (of a woman) to be well-endowed avoir une peur bleue [Lit. to have a blue fear.] to get the fright of one's life avoir des antennes [Lit. to have antennae] to have a sixth sense bruit de couleur [Lit. a colourful noise] a rumour casse-tête [Lit. head-breaker] brain-teaser essayer de noyer le poisson [Lit. attempt to drown a fish] to fudge the issue avaler les couleuvres [Lit. to swallow grass-snakes] to endure humiliation prendre un carton [Lit. to take a carton] to get a licking brasser de l'air [Lit. to shuffle the air] to give the impression of being busy se noyer dans un verre [Lit. to drown oneself in a glass] to make a mountain out of a molehill être haut comme trois pommes [Lit. to be three apples high] to be knee-high to a grass-hopper river son clou à quelqu'un [Lit. to fasten one's nail to somebody] to leave somebody speechless pour un oui ou un non [Lit. for a yes or a no] at the drop of a hat Impossible n'est pas français. [Lit. Impossible is not a French word.] There is no such word as can't. Ce n'est pas un aigle. [Lit. This is no eagle.] He is not the brightest. être aimable comme une porte de prison [Lit. to be as pleasant as a prison gate] to be a miserable so-and-so un jour à marquer d'une croix blanche [Lit. a day for marking with a white cross] a red-letter day jeter son bonnet par-dessus les moulins [Lit. to throw one's hat over the windmills] to throw caution to the winds Plaie d'argent n'est pas mortelle. [Lit. A wound of money is not fatal.] It is only money. ne pas savoir sur quel pied danser [Lit. not to know on which foot to dance] not to know what to do ...and some German idioms: öffentliche Hände [Lit. public hands] local authorities das horizontale Gewerbe [Lit. the horizontal trade] the oldest profession Fersengeld geben [Lit. to give heel money] to run away ein blinder Passagier [Lit. a blind passenger] a stowaway Farbe bekennen [Lit. to admit to colour] to come clean Mein Rad hat eine Acht [Lit. My bike has an eight.] My bike has a buckled wheel. seinem Affen Zucker geben [Lit. to give sugar to one's monkey] to let oneself go Stein and Bein schwören [Lit. to swear stone and leg] to swear blind Der Teufel steckt im Detail. [Lit. The devil hides in the minute.] It is the little things that cause problems Grillen im Kopf haben [Lit. to have crickets in the head] to have strange ideas jenseits von Gut und Böse sein [Lit. to be beyond good and evil] to be past it das Ei des Kolumbus [Lit. the egg of Columbus] an inspired discovery Das paβ wie die Faust ins Auge. [Lit. That goes like a first into the eye] That clashes dreadfully. Da lachen die Hühner. [Lit. This makes the chickens laugh.] You must be joking. And here are some metaphoric masterpieces: Storchschnabel [Lit. stork's beak] geranium Glühbirne [Lit. glowing pear] electric light bulb Fingerhut [Lit. hat for a finger] a thimble Eigenbrötler [Lit. one who eats his own bread] a loner Jägerlatein [Lit. huntsman's Latin] fish story ein Achtgroschenjunge [Lit. an eight-cents boy] an informer Löwenmäulchen [Lit. small lions' mouths] snapdragon Hühnerauge [Lit. chicken's eye] corn (on the foot) Indo' and Outdo' European The most important contribution to comparative linguistics was made by Sir William Jones (1746-94), a British linguist trained in the law who was appointed judge of the supreme court of judicature at Calcutta, in 1783. Convinced of the importance of consulting Hindu legal authorities in the original [ Encyc. Brit . 1963, 13, 140a], Jones, well versed in Sanskrit, became aware of the correspondences among Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Slavic, and Germanic forms, which led him to the conclusion that Sanskrit was another, older form of a parent language from which all had sprung. It was his work that formed the basis of the linguistic studies later carried on by the brothers Grimm (Jakob Ludwig Karl, 1785-1863; Wilhelm Karl, 1786-1859), which, in turn, gave foundation to the development of the comparative method. The term Indo-European cropped up first at the beginning of the 19th century; as much of the work was being done in Germany, it is not surprising that the term preferred there was Indo-Germanic , actually a translation of indogermanisch (with a small i because it is an adjective), which arose in the late 1820s; the latter survives in the literature, largely replaced by the former, especially since the discovery that Celtic is a member of the family. The reason for bringing up this bit of history is to introduce four terms with which some readers may be unfamiliar and which reflect to some small degree the poetry that once lurked in the hearts of linguists educated in literature as well as linguistics. The first is karmadharāya , a Sanskrit compound of karma fate, destiny + dharāya holding, bearing, which is used to describe a compound word in which the first member describes the second, as in highway, blackbird , (adj. + n.), steamboat, bonehead, fingerstall, fingernail, toenail (attrib. n. + n.). The second is dvandva , a Sanskrit redundant compound of dva + dva pair, couple, which is used to describe compounds in which the elements are linked as if joined by a copula, as in prince-consort, attorney-general, postmaster-general (n. + n.), bittersweet (adj. + adj.). The third is bahuvrihi , a Sanskrit compound meaning having much rice,