Gunning for the English Language
At the very end of the last century, there was a
crisis at the Barnum and Bailey Circus. The
man who was shot out of the cannon during each show
was asked by his wife to quit his high-risk job, much to
the distress of the great P.T. Barnum. Barnum, whose
wit was equal to his showmanship, summoned the fellow
to him and said, “I beg you to reconsider. Men of
your caliber are hard to find.”
Without fully realizing it, all of us speak the language
of guns and cannons in our everyday conversation,
and many words and phrases we spark forth date
back to the era of black powder and muzzleloading.
Take the words shot, shoot , and shooting . Sure as
shooting, some hotshot big shot is bound to shoot the
breeze and shoot this big mouth off about taking a
cheap shot potshot at some troubleshooting competitor.
Then he shoots his bolt and wad by taking a long
shot at some one-shot deal that will win him the whole
shooting match. It is not always easy to ascertain
whether the underlying metaphor in such expressions
is the bow and arrow or the gun and cannon (see Peter
A. Douglas's “The Bows' Stratagem,” VERBATIM VI,3),
but we can be fairly certain that the wad in shooting
one's wad refers to the wad that held the powder and
shot in position to be fired from early guns and that
the pot in potshot signifies the dinner pot to be filled
with an animal that was shot close up without any
regard for rules.
Or take two of the most popular verbs we use to
describe somebody who has been dismissed from the
job— fired and discharged . Both are metaphors that
compare the unfortunate victim to a projectile shot out
of a gun or cannon. Hand guns of the fourteenth century
were equipped with touchholes; in order to discharge
such a weapon it was necessary to touch it with
a torch.
I am feeling quick on the trigger, quick on the
draw, hot as a pistol, and loaded for bear, so I am
going to get the drop on you and let you have it with
both barrels. Here is a small arsenal of words and
expressions that turn out to be figurative spark-offs
from the language of guns and cannons.
bite the bullet If you visit a Revolutionary
War battle site, like Fort Ticonderoga, you may see
some gruesome artifacts in its museum—bullets with
teeth marks in them. Having no real anesthesia to ease
the agony of amputation or surgery, a surgeon of two
centuries ago offered wounded soldiers the only pain
reducer available—a bullet to bite on. The whole idea
of such a procedure is enough to make one sweat bullets.
After anesthesia was introduced in the U.S. in
1844, the phrase came flguratively to mean to `deal
with a bad situation resolutely,' as in Rudyard Kipling's
lines “Bite the bullet, old man,/ And don't let them
think you're afraid.”
flash in the pan This phrase sounds as if it
derives from the way that prospectors pan rivers for
gold. In truth, though, flash in the pan refers to the
occasional misfiring of the old flintlock muskets when
the flash of the primer in the pan of the rifle failed to
ignite the explosion of the charge. The estimates of
misfirings like this run as high as fifteen percent by
those who fire flintlocks these days, when the expression
signifies an intense but short-lived success or a
person who fails to live up to his or her early promise.
go off half cocked Muzzleloaders, then as
now, had a half cock, or safety position, for a gun's
hammer that partially back-locked the trigger mechanism
so that the weapon could not be fired. Half cock
does not give enough power to generate sparks and fire
the pistol, so it is a futile gesture. Thus, in modern
parlance, when a person goes off half cocked (or at
half cock ), he or she is not in control of the situation.
skinflint In many parts of early America, necessities
such as flint were scarce. When one side of a
flint used in a flintlock weapon had worn away, it lost
proper contact with the frizzen and caused inadequate
sparking to set off the powder charge. Faced with this
problem, some gun toters would skin, or sharpen the
flint with a knife, creating a bevel in the flint, which
could then make full contact and generate an adequate
shower of sparks. A fellow who “skinned his flint” was
looked upon as being a parsimonious, penny-pinching,
stingy cheapskate—a veritable skinflint.
ramrod A ramrod is a rod of wood or metal
for ramming the ball and patch down the barrel of a
muzzleloading firearm and setting them against the
main powder charge. Eventually ramrod became personified,
taking on the added meaning of `one marked
by rigidity, stiffness, and severity,' even though the
original ramrods, which were straight, were rather
flexible.
point-blank In ballistics, a weapon fired
point-blank is one whose sights are aimed directly at a
target so that the projectile speeds to its destination in
a flat trajectory. By extension, a point-blank question
or accusation is one that is direct and straightforward
—right to the mark. The opposite of point-blank is
hanging fire , `undecided, up in the air.' In munitions,
hanging fire describes the delay in the explosion or
charge in a firearm.
heavens to Betsy! Digging up the roots of this
exclamation has given many a scholar calluses and a
bent back. In his introduction to Heavens to Betsy and
Other Curious Sayings (Harper & Row, 1955), Charles
Earle Funk said that the very title of his book “turned
out eventually to be completely unsolvable.” Funk dismisses
Queen Elizabeth I and Betsy Ross as possible
eponymous sources and concludes, “It is much more
likely to have been derived in some way from the frontiersman's
rifle or gun which, for some unknown reason,
he always fondly called Betsy. However, despite
exhaustive research, I am reluctantly forced to resort
to the familiar lexical locution, `Source unknown.' ”
Discussion with my gun-loving friends supports Funk's
penultimate etymology. The smooth-bore muskets used
during colonial, revolutionary, and frontier days were
known as Brown Besses, hence the nickname Betsy .
cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass
monkey Before you cancel your subscription,
please read on. In nautical jargon, the monkey was a
tray-like metal casting with round indentations arranged
in a square pattern. These “monkeys” held
pyramids of cannonballs for each gun in a muzzleloading
battery on a battleship. Soon iron monkeys gave
way to more expensive but corrosion-resistant brass
monkeys. But because the iron balls and the brass
holders had markedly different coefficients of expansion,
the pyramids of cannonballs had a tendency to
collapse during cold snaps—weather that was cold
enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.
As further ammunition to support my bulletproof
contention that our language is loaded with guns
and cannons, I'll conclude by gunning for items that
have the word gun in them.
go great guns The word great used to mean
`big,' and great guns referred to cannons and other
large firearms, as opposed to “small guns” or musket
rifles. By the late nineteenth century, these uses of
great and small became obsolete, but to go great guns
continued to allude to the loudness, forcefulness, and
large size of long-ago cannons and still means to `proceed
with considerable momentum, to go full steam
ahead, at full bore.'
son of a gun This expression is frequently employed
as a euphemism for another phrase that begins
with the same three words, but the question remains
why gun has been elected as the surrogate word. The
Sailor's Wordbook , published more than a hundred
years ago, offers this explanation: “ `Son of a gun' is an
epithet conveying contempt in a slight degree and was
originally applied to boys born afloat. One admiral
declares that he was literally thus cradled, under the
breast of a gun-carriage.” Taking this clue, word detectives
suggest that son of a gun originated during the
eighteenth century, when nonmilitary women were
permitted to live aboard naval ships. When one of
these women gave birth to a child without knowing
which sailor had fathered it, the paternity was logged
as “gun,” perhaps alluding to the midship gun, which
was often located near the makeshift maternity room.
stick to one's guns When we stick to our guns,
we hold adamantly to our position. To stand and continue
firing when under heavy attack on the battlefield
took courage because artillerymen usually lacked infantry
weapons. When an artilleryman broke and ran,
the enemy could turn the guns to their own use. Thus,
many a soldier was actually chained to his gun to ensure
bravery.
spike one's guns If an army had to fall back
and abandon its field artillery, the simplest way to
render its guns useless was to jam a spike into the fuse
hole. Gradually, spike one's guns came to mean `frustrate
the enemy by blocking his intended plan of
action.'
give it the gun While giving their airplane engines
all the gas they could handle, World War I combat
pilots would open fire on the enemy with their
machine guns. This led to the association of rapid
acceleration with “gunning,” and to give it the gun
was soon extended to automobiles, speedboats, and
objects and matters nonmechanical.
Sure as shootin', I've just shot my wad—lock,
stock, and barrel—demonstrating how guns and cannons
echo through our language. Please don't think me
a trigger-happy son of a gun if I shoot the breeze with
one last pistol-packing explanation. The lock, stock,
and barrel are the three main components of a gun
that together compose essentially the entire weapon.
Thus, lock, stock, and barrel has come to mean the
entirety of something—the whole shooting match.
Duende: Gypsy Soul and Something More
Besides going to Valencia for paella, the compleat
traveler in Spain should experience duende . This
is not easy to arrange, however, for duende , unlike
paella, cannot be made to order. All the ingredients
may be present—the music, the singers, the dancers,
the setting, and costumes—but, alas, duende itself
fails to show up and the production fizzles.
As the cognoscenti define it, duende (pronounced
DWEHN-deh) is a `magical quality, of a peculiarly Spanish
nature, that raises a performance to peaks of enthrallment.'
The occasions when duende grips a singer,
dancer or torero are punctuated with cries of “Olé!”
from the audience. When a performer is inspired, it is
said that he, or she, “tiene duende” (`has it').
The Spanishness of duende is underlined by the
absence of a look-alike word in the sister Romance
languages, Italian and French. Like Italian, Spanish
has estro , from the Latin oestrus `gadfly' (English estrus )
to denote artistic inspiration (and female sexual
heat), but duende goes further. It is something like the
zone of current sports lingo in which a tennis player,
say, enters a trance-like state, putting him on a roll
where he can't miss a shot. But duende has deeper
vibrations, evoking for its disciples the very ethos of
Spain. Soul , from the black culture, is perhaps closest
in English.
Duende meant `hobgoblin,' `sprite,' or `ghost' in
Spanish for a long time, but it is not known when it
acquired its artistic coloration. It did not become a
buzzword, at any rate, until fairly recently. In his Iberia
(Random House, 1968), James A. Michener said
duende “now dominates Spanish conversation” and
“seems to have become the sine qua non of Spanish
existence,” whereas in previous visits to Spain he had
not heard it at all. At the time he was writing, Michener
noted that dictionaries had not caught up with the
current meaning. It does appear now, however, in dictionaries
and the English-language media. A New York
Times story by Hubert Saal on flamenco (March 22,
1987) speaks of the “mysterious duende ” as “a kind of
gypsy soul, which flies only on the wings of spontaneity
and improvisation.” I have seen a calendar (Workman
Publishing Co., New York) which defined it as
“personal magnetism and charm,” and said, “Given
today's extensive TV coverage, political candidates
need duende if they hope to be accepted by the
public.”
Etymologists say it originally meant dueño de una
casa `lord, or master, of a house' and is a contraction of
duen de casa . Duen is the apocopated (cut-off) form of
dueño , which stems from the Latin dominus . As the
Spanish word evolved, the de was suffixed to the duen ,
the casa was omitted altogether, and el duende thus
became “the lord of the house.” But its plural form
duendes also signified `household gods,' like the Roman
Lares and Penates, and took on even broader, pantheistic
overtones in duendes de las montañas y de las
cuevas `spirits of the mountains and caves.'
The connotation of gifted artistic performance,
however, might stem from the gypsy culture in Andalusia
whose dialect, caló , has words like duquende
(possibly from the Russian dook ) meaning `spirit or
ghost,' and duquendio , meaning `maestro.' One
scholar, Allen Josephs of the University of West Florida,
surmised that “from duquendio or duquende to
duende is a short step, especially in Andalusia, where
gypsy mastery would be precisely flamenco mastery.”
Whatever its derivation, duende as artistic inspiration
found its apostle and guru in Andalusian-born
Federico García Lorca, lyric poet and dramatist who
was murdered in 1936, at age 38, in the early days of
the Spanish Civil War. His empathy with the gypsies of
his native region is reflected in many of his poems. In
1933 García Lorca gave a lecture in Buenos Aires on
the Teoría y Juego del Duende (`Theory and Play of
Duende '), which has become the bible of the initiates.
The address (Obras Completas, Aguilar, Madrid,
1963) is a 5,000-word virtuoso performance in which
he describes duende variously as “the spirit of the
earth,” with Dionysian roots, and as “the mysterious
spirit of sorrowful Spain.” He quotes an Andalusian
artist, Manuel Torres, as having exclaimed of composer
Manuel de Falla's Nocturno del Generalife ,
“Todo lo que tiene sonidos negros tiene duende” (`All
that has black sounds has duende '). García Lorca recalls
a Spanish girl street singer and dancer transforming
“the horrendous” Italian song, O Marí into an artistic
gem by virtue of her “rhythms, silences and
intention.”
But García Lorca also finds duende to be intimately
linked with death and hence achieving its most
striking manifestation in the bullfight. “At the moment
of the kill,” he says, “the help of duende is needed to
bring it off with artistic truth.”
The Expanding Lexicon of One-letter Words
One-letter words are proliferating despite the limits
of our alphabet and the possibility of misunderstandings
arising from multiple meanings.
Below are the words and meanings noted since an
earlier account of new one-letter words in the Summer,
1987, issue of VERBATIM.
WORD MEANING SOURCE
A-word adultery Cleveland Plain Dealer,
Dec. 29, 1987
Variants:
Big A Life, Oct. 1987
A-question New York Times Maga-
zine, Jan. 17, 1988
B-word bimbo Wall Street Journal, Nov.
5, 1987
bitch? Oprah Winfrey Program,
ABC-TV, Oct. 2, 1987
C-word cancer Cleveland Plain Dealer,
Nov. 3, 1987
challenge Cleveland Plain Dealer,
Nov. 3, 1987
courage Cleveland Plain Dealer,
Nov. 3, 1987
D-word detente New York Times Maga-
zine, Jan. 17, 1988
F-word fart USA Today, May 22,
1987
M-word merger New York Times Maga-
zine, Jan. 17, 1988
mind “Murder, She Wrote,”
CBS-TV, Dec. 20, 1987
Variant:
M-question marijuana New York Times Maga-
zine, Jan. 17, 1988
K-word kids (generic) “A Year in the Life,”
NBC-TV, Sept. 7, 1987
O-word Olympics Nude O-word, CNN
Daywatch, Feb. 16, 1988
(Sign in front of girlie
show in Calgary,
Canada. Olympics
copyrighted.)
Variant:
standing O standing ESPN, July 20, 1987
ovation
R-word recession Joan Lunden, ABC-TV,
Oct. 27, 1987
Variant:
dirty R Reagan Mike Royko, Columbus
Dispatch, Dec. 15, 1987
T-word taxes New York Times Maga-
zine, Jan. 17, 1987
U-word unemploy- New York Times Maga-
ment zine, Jan. 17, 1987
W-word woman? Mother Jones, Oct. 1987
Y-word yuppie (previously recorded)
Variants:
dirty Y-word Esquire, Feb. 1988
Y-people New Republic, Jan. 25,
1988
Y-person Doonesbury cartoon,
July 6, 1987
Y-worders USA Today, Sept. 29,
1987
As the above citations indicate, the distribution of
one-letter words is quite broad, extending from The
New York Times to Mother Jones , from the print world
to cartoon country and TV land. Its domain is clearly
more extensive than the range of argot or slang.
Noteworthy, too, are the strategies that have been
devised to cope with the limits of our twenty-six letter
alphabet. Users are apparently willing to risk being
misunderstood by giving new meanings to a single letter,
as the citations show. How much context can clarify
meaning is difficult to determine, but it may help
to recall that the three letter set has a multitude of
meanings. (The Oxford English Dictionary devotes
twenty-one pages to set ). Another strategy often used
to assure comprehension is to use a one-letter word
and then to follow it with the meaning intended. Thus
Joan Lunden on ABC-TV said to Steve Crowley, “Are
you ready to use the R-word recession ?” Many words
like recession could be called semi-taboo words or limited
taboos, for scarcely anyone would be shocked or
offended to encounter them, though some people avoid
using them.
Perhaps most promising in expanding the range of
meanings for one-letter words are variant forms. Thus
we now have the big A as well as the A-word and the
M-question as well as the M-word . Perhaps we shall see
such forms as the little A , the new A , or the A-option .
If these variants prove productive, the lexicon of one-letter
words could “spread like wild flowers,” as Sam
Goldwyn once said. We could then stop asking the L-question :
what is the future of the one-letter word?
“I hope the committee recognizes ad homonym [personalized]
arguments are the weakest kind of arguments....”
[John Banzhaf, as quoted in Smoking and Health Review ,
. Submitted by
.]
“We serve a classic Tuscan meal that includes a Florentine
terrine made with dick and chicken livers....” [Sirio
Maccioni as quoted in the New York Post, .
Submitted by .]
“By the year 2000...Let's Overcome Literacy.” [A
message to businessmen from the Pasco County (Fla.) school
district, quoted in The Orlando Sentinel , .
Submitted by .]
The Joy of Scottish English: Chambers 20th Century Dictionary
O ne cannot but admire a standard dictionary
that defines middle-aged as “between youth
and old age, variously reckoned to suit the reckoner”
and says that the verb perpetrate means “to execute
or commit (esp. an offence, a poem, or a pun).”
These definitions are given in the most recent
(1983) edition of Chambers 20th Century Dictionary ,
which was edited and published in Edinburgh. For a
desk dictionary (or college dictionary, as Americans
like to call them) it is rather pricey at $36.95 in Canada—but
I do not think that the ghost of my Scottish
father glowered (good Scots word, that) at me when I
bought my copy of it. Incidentally, it is now the reference
dictionary for the National Scrabble Championship
in Britain.
This edition when published was said to give more
word definitions than any other British desk dictionary;
including its main competitor, The Concise Oxford .
But in 1986 it was moved into second place by the
second edition of Collins Dictionary of the English
Language . ( Webster's New World Dictionary of the
American Language seems about the same size as the
Oxford ; the Gage Canadian Dictionary is slightly
smaller.) The first edition of Chambers was issued in
1898: Bernard Shaw said of it, “my favorite of half a
dozen.”
The Scots who edit and publish Chambers do not
accept what most English and Americans and Canadians
do when they say some Scottish words that have
become standard English on both sides of the Atlantic.
For instance it gives “played” as the proper pronunciation
for plaid —although, with delicate condescension,
it parenthetically notes, “by the English also `plad.' ”
The Concise Oxford allows both pronunciations. It is
shameful that the Gage Canadian allows only “plad.”
as does Webster's New World . According to Chambers ,
a plaid is “a long piece of woollen cloth, worn over the
shoulder”—and it need not be of checked material,
which is “plad,” as we generally think of it. In Scotland
the checked material, of course, is tartan .
In June 1984 I moved from Ottawa to Victoria, on
Vancouver Island, where I now enjoy genteel retirement.
Not long after settling here I asked for a raisin
scone in one of the city's tonier tea-rooms. I pronounced
scone to rhyme with John , and I was upset a little when
the waitress brought it to me and said, in a pleasant
English accent, “Your scone sir,” rhyming it with Joan . I
wondered if I should switch to the Joan-pronunciation
now that I am living in veddy English Victoria. But
then, the Scots played the dominant role in early Victoria,
and there are many oatmeal accents to be heard
here these days. Collins allows the Scots pronunciation,
but, I am sorry to report, favors the English. Chambers
gave me warm feelings of assurance when I consulted it
later that day. “Skohn,” as in John , is given as the proper
pronunciation, but it reports that “in the south of England
often (it is) pronounced `skoan.' ” The definition
given has nice rhetorical balance, almost Johnsonian: “a
flattish, usually round or quadrant-shaped plain cake of
dough without much butter, with or without currants,
baked on a griddle or in an oven.” Wisdom on the scone -pronunciation
issue was shown by Sir Ernest Gowers in
his 1965 revision of H.W. Fowler's A Dictionary of
Modern English Usage . He moved on from Fowler's following
of the big Oxford English Dictionary in allowing
both pronunciations but with preference for “skoan.”
Gowers, himself an Englishman, said that “in Scotland,
its land of origin, the pronunciation is skawn , and English
people who know this so pronounce it.”
Dictionary buffs have long been attracted to
Chambers because its editors have not scrupled against
a little editorializing in some of the definitions they
offer, such as those already mentioned. The user is
offered a choice with man-eater: “a cannibal: a tiger
or other animal that has acquired the habit of eating
men: a woman given to chasing, catching and devouring
men.” An eclair is “a cake, long in shape but short
in duration, with cream filling and chocolate or other
icing.” A picture-restorer is “one who cleans and restores
and sometimes ruins old pictures.” That kind of
pawkiness is fitting in a dictionary edited and published
in Edinburgh and which defines pawky as a
Scots word meaning “drily or slyly humorous.”
Feckless —“spiritless, helpless, futile”—is given in
all my desk dictionaries, but only Chambers has feck
(nice to see a lost positive found), which comes from
effect through vowel-loss and is defined as “efficacy” or
“quality.”
The pronunciations given in Chambers are not
those of the Received Pronunciation—the BBC or Oxonian
accent—as they are in all the other British
dictionaries I have consulted. It is quite firm about the
r -sound when it follows a vowel-sound or is at the ends
of words, not dropping it as is usual with the RP but
insisting that it be given full value, in various ways, as
it is in Scots and Irish and, generally but not always, in
the speech of most Americans except for those in New
England and the South. (And of us Canadians too,
except for a few who like to toff-up their speech just
ever so.)
An English authority on dictionaries, James Root
Hulbert, says that The Concise Oxford is the best for
literary use in Britain and Chambers the best “for general
British use.” I must assume that he did not take
into account Chambers's pronunciation principles.
That assessment was made before the new Collins a
peared on the dictionary scene. I do not know how he
would rate it, but I must confess that for general use I
am inclined to put it just a little ahead of Chambers .
But I haven't found it quite as much fun to browse in.
Recently in Chambers I came across the adjective
perjink , a Scots word given also in Collins , but not in
any of the other desk dictionaries I use: it means
“prim: finical.” A more emphatic adjective is
perjinkety ; and it has the noun perjinkity , defined as
“a nicety.” It also gives pernickety as another Scots
word with a similar meaning: this is found in the other
dictionaries. I am inclined to prefer perjink and its
derivatives.
Word-fanciers, and not only those with some sort
of Scottish bias, might enjoy dipping into another
Chambers dictionary, Chambers Scots Dictionary ,
which was first issued in 1911 and most recently reprinted
in 1984. It is specifically a dictionary of Scots,
or Lallans, which some scholars consider merely a dialect
of English and others a distinct language rooted in
Old English. A good book for browsing in, giving
many Scots words which have come into use in other
parts of the English-speaking world and others which
could perhaps add a little color (or colour) to English
vocabulary here and there.
Re Sam Hinton's The Meaning of Scientific Names
[XI,1], I have had an experience which, in true biological
tradition, will probably make me mildly notorious
in perpetuity. I collected, in northeastern Colorado, a
very large (ca. 1 inch) species of robber fly (family
Asilidae ). This I turned over to a friend who was an
expert in that family of the Diptera , for study, identification,
and naming. He found the species to be unnamed,
and did me the real honor of naming it
rodecki , meaning “of Rodeck.” The result of his well-meant
and highly-appreciated gesture is that there is
now in the deathless literature of entomology a robber
fly species named Proctacanthus rodecki James, which
is roughly translated “Rodeck's thorny anus.”
Thank you ever so much for having communicated
a reader's objection to my transliteration of
tadachi with two is . It was indeed a mistake. I might
have been influenced by the preceding double is in
tadashii . But I find that tadachi ni is frequently written
and printed in two words, ni meaning `in,' so that
tadachi ni just might be equivalent to something like
`in the immediate.' The Kenkyusha dictionary has even
three signs for it, -chi and -ni in Hiragana, following
the Chinese character which in my naive innocence I
would pronounce tadachi by itself. The Chinese do
pronounce it chih , meaning `directly, at once.'
I cannot however be compared to Japanese schoolboys:
I have never been to Japan, and I am self-taught;
I can read and write Japanese (slowly) for I did learn
both the Katakana and Hiragana syllabaries (47 signs
each) as well as a few thousand Chinese characters.
My speech, of course, is very hesitant and often discouraging.
There is nobody around I could practise
with.
Maledicta 9,
Since 1977, Dr. Reinhold Aman has been publishing
Maledicta , subtitled The International Journal of
Verbal Aggression , from his bivouac in Waukesha, Wisconsin.
Maledicta is not for everyone's taste, and some
may even go so far as to maintain that the subject of its
attention is not a valid one for investigation. There is
no arguing with taste, but even those who support the
second tenet must admit that if researchers felt that
way about cancer, syphilis, and AIDS, there would not
be much point to research at all. It is unlike Dr. Aman
to cloak his subject—dirty language—under the euphemism
“verbal aggression”: he and most of the authors
of the articles appearing in Maledicta let it all
hang out; some, however, tuck it away neatly and
write under a pseudonym. (And everyone should now
take a few minutes to ponder the meaning of it in the
preceding sentence.)
Not all of verbal aggression is concerned with
four-letter words; much of it (and many of the four-letter
words) involves insults, racist and other prejudicial
language, and other parts of the nether reaches of
language formerly represented largely by asterisks. (I
have often wondered why the publishers did not have
the nerve to call themselves “F**k and Wagnalls.”) To
ignore it is plainly wrong; all the reasons that can be
adduced for ignoring it are compelling testimony to its
impact, and anything with such impact cannot—must
not—be dismissed as unimportant. Contrary to popular
belief, the point of studying verbal aggression is not
to modify or ameliorate or eliminate it—serious scholars
consider it bad form to tamper with the evidence—but
to describe and codify it, much as investigators
have tried to do with all other available
phenomena, whether natural or artificial, whether in
pure or physical or social science. To quote in part
from what may be termed its “statement of purpose,”
“ Maledicta specializes in uncensored studies and glossaries
of offensive and negatively valued words and
expressions, from all languages and cultures, past and
present.”
The present volume, only one year in arrears,
includes an interview by Aman with Lillian Mermin
Feinsilver, an authority on Yiddish and author of The
Taste of Yiddish . At the end of the interview is a good
bibliography of Feinsilver's work. It should be noted
that interviews are quite rare in such journals, and it is
certainly unusual to find a linguist humanized by such
a device. Although the interview suffers from a number
of faults—for instance, it is not penetrating or
thorough enough, probably because Aman is a better
scholar, writer, and editor than interviewer, and it
contains gratuitous information about the interviewer
who cannot resist blowing his own horn—it is at least
an attempt at documenting that has not, to my knowledge,
been done before in the field of linguistics. Perhaps
Aman will sharpen his perspective and techniques
and institute such interviews as a regular
feature of Maledicta .
Mrs. Feinsilver has an interesting article in this
volume, too, “Comment on Aman's `A Yiddish Minnie-Legend'
and the Romanization of Yiddish.” Other articles
include “Is George Bush a Wimp ?,” “The Moving
Spray Can” (on graffiti in England), “On the Pronunciation
of Cunnilingus in Dictionaries,” and numerous
others on a wide variety of subjects; these are interspersed
with short bits and pieces, cartoons, and asides
generally attributed to “Folklore” and, presumably,
gathered by the editor. Although the subject matter
might be viewed as an area of legitimate investigation,
I am not sure I see the point in employing the subject
style of language in the descriptive text, which would
be far more telling were it restricted to the language of
the linguistic clinician. Aman evidently disagrees, for
his writing is peppered (salted?) with references like
“every asshole with access to a typewriter.” It is many
years since my contemporaries and I got a kick out of
seeing even the bowdlerized f**k in print (in Partridge's
Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English ,
1935), and fug in Mailer's The Naked and the
Dead allowed prudery to mock itself. But the power of
words is such that I contend their impact is totally lost
if not treated clinically: somehow, there is a difference
between “Someone had written shit on the wall” and
“Some asshole had written shit on the wall”: the writer
of the former has more credibility; the writer of the
latter was, very likely, the very asshole who had written
shit on the wall.
These are minor quibbles. Maledicta is instructive,
funny, gross, informative, vulgar, impolite, and
sometimes well written. I am afraid that an adjective
like penetrating is not only a bit strong but would be
likely to be adopted as a slogan by the editor. I do
think that Aman contributes something important to
the linguistic literature, and I think he ought to view a
bit more seriously (and less rancorously) the opportunities
accorded him by his experience with these powerful,
private parts of the language to pursue a theme
of analysis of its impact and why and how it carries so
much weight, both denotatively and connotatively.
Laurence Urdang
[Note: Maledicta is available by annual subscription
from Maledicta Press, 331 South Greenfield Avenue,
Waukesha, WI 53186, USA. It costs US$25 a year; back
issues are available as are several books, none expensive.]
According to a report in The Times [30 October
1987], “Nearly 3,000 people have signed a petition urging
Mr Kenneth Baker, Secretary of State for Education
and Science, to make grammar, including syntax,
compulsory to `encourage the clear and accurate expression
of meaning.' Among the signatories are...
Iris Murdoch, William Golding, Anthony Powell, Ted
Hughes, Roy Fuller, Kingsley Amis, Anita Brookner,
Malcolm Muggeridge, Brigid Brophy, Sir John
Gielgud, Sir Michael Hordern, Auberon Waugh and
Lord Scarman.” This was accompanied by the (usual)
lamentations over the “murder of a fine language,” the
generally poor standard of English encountered in the
newspapers and on radio and TV, and the observation
that “children cannot spell or use the right tenses.” All
this activity is being carried on by the Queen's English
Society, characterized by The Times as “a pressure
group with fewer than 300 members.” On October
29th, a BBC Radio Scotland program was running a
competition in which people calling in were asked to
spell ventriloquist and kibbutz (among other words,
presumably); several callers with “older” voices—they
certainly were not children—were unable to do so;
does that mean that the Scots are to be excepted from
the QES campaign “to compel all children to study
formal grammar up to the age of 16” or that the rot set
in long ago? It may be interesting to note that the very
same evening one could hear (and watch) a rebroadcast
of Malcolm Muggeridge's 1984 interview with centenarian
Catherine Bramwell-Booth whose uses of the
subjunctive rang forth like a battle cry for the freedom
of the English language. Letters in support or condemnation
of the QES program (though one may assume
they will insist on programme ) should be addressed to
Mrs Anne Shelley, Secretary, Queen's English Society, 3
Manor Crescent, Guildford GU2 6NF, England. (And
you had best not put a period—oops! full stop —after
the Mrs or you'll be drummed out of the corps.)
“Stiff Prices at Auction of Erotic Art.” [Headline in the
New York Post , . Submitted by .]
Do Mistake—Learn Better
To a Western ear, the most predictable of language
traits, perhaps, is the well-advertised Japanese
use of r for our l . Indeed, in my travels about
Honshu during a three-month visit, I did hear “coinrocker,”
“see you rater,” “Adurt Graphics” (dirty books),
“blackwrrants” (hit-and-miss rendering of black walnuts),
“Coffee Corombia” (a chain of coffee shops), and
“Coconut Glove.” The Japanese spell and pronounce
what they hear and are accustomed to pronounce,
much as Americans are inclined to say “Kindagarden,”
“ekscape,” “lawnjeray,” “asterik,” and “ekcetera.” Such
spellings and soundings are hardly surprising, however
delightful. They may at least begin to suggest the considerable
language barrier between my hosts and me.
Latin may provide a good analogy to what I experienced
in Japan. We are not taught to speak Latin (a
“dead” language), and the Japanese are not taught to
speak English. Thus I met any number of expressions
which I could work out, given their contexts, and
which have in common both a valiant attempt to use
English and an unfamiliarity with idiom. Among
these are: “Get Back” (a sign flashed on TV to invite or
command the viewer to return after the commercial,
or maybe promising that the production will return
then); “Pants 50% Down” (ad for a sale); “in my side”
(for my part; on my side of the argument); “Step the
Pedal — Water Will Flow” (sign in a train lavatory);
“Drive-Thru Window” (at the bank); “How do you
doing?” (“How do you do?” wed to “How are your
doing?”); “Let's Sports!” (ad for an athletic club)'
“Tasty Menu” (printed on a menu); “Big Heights
Tahiragi” (the Tahiragi high-rise apartment building);
“Build Saito” (the Saito Building); “pair glass” (a pair
of drinking glasses); “Arrange Ball” (Pachinko or pinball);
“History and Future Pavilion” (Pavilion of Past
and Future); “fillet of minion” (entanglement perhaps
not so simple); “Extra Interior” (factory-printed sign
on a car: roomier? better-equipped and -furnished?);
“My Life, My Gas” (ad for Tokyo Gas Co.); “Make
Mens” (placard over a men's tailoring shop); “Hot Coffee—Endless
Service” (all the hot coffee you can
drink); “Mons. Kamiya—Close” (the Franco-Japanese
hairdresser is out to lunch). Into this category fall
three additional items which, because I never ordered
them from the menu, I cannot recommend—or even
reliably identify: “Steak Bites Teriyaki Sauce,” “Lunch
of Junior,” and “Lady's Salad with Whipped Cream.”
For me, all of these expressions convey a plucky willingness
to learn a foreign language and to use it in
everyday situations. In the words of a newspaper ad
for a language school, “Do Mistake—Learn Better.”
When my students and I approached the heart of
the course—talking the English language—nothing
seemed to work for me until I closed all the books and
compelled two or three students at a time to put themselves
in commonplace situations in which they had to
speak English. Going to the game, shopping, making
plans to take the train, giving directions to one another
or to me—these little situations created high
drama more often than not, but they also brought
about utterances, sounds on which we could at least
start to work. Incidentally, I startled them one day
with Victor Borge's punctuation system, which instructed
and delighted them with its differentiated
popping and spitting. I think we made modest progress
in three months.
On the other hand, of course, I had to swallow
my own pedagogy in my trips to the store and in my
efforts to buy train tickets to the right places. Sometimes
I gave up, as when pointing to my temples
(white) brought shampoo rather than the desired
bleach. At other times I won because I could eventually
dig out the desired object from the shelf (no help
at the train station). Sometimes I engaged in pantomime
of undoubtedly ludicrous dimensions. This had
the effect of puzzling some clerks, of occasionally leading
to communication (finger-pinching for clothespins
worked, for example), and most often of bringing out
the clerks' sense of humor, expressed in good-natured if
frustrated laughter. I found that by pointing to beer in
a refrigerator, pulling up my collar, slapping my sides,
and frowning—and by then throwing open my coat,
mopping my brow, and smiling—I could get the desired
unchilled beer (“hotto beeru”). It was impossible
not to remain humble in these circumstances. My students
were waging a linguistic battle, whereas I was
merely doing a bad job of imitating Marcel Marceau.
Japanese English is a great joy and a wondrous
thing, as I have indicated. What a pleasure, for example,
to discover that one who has been tagged out at
home plate is the victim of an “out-throw.” How reassuring
to be told by one's smiling, hooded, middleaged
woman caddy that one's drive is “safe-o”—that is,
not unfindable; or that one's next shot will require a
“nine-o” or an “eight-o” or a “wedgie” (if one is in the
“sand-o”). What a surprise to hear, first, an American
commentator on a televised golf tourney describe a
reverse-necked putter colloquially, and then to hear
the Japanese broadcaster translate that description
into a terse sentence or two ending with the expression
“bassackawad putta.” What a curious sensation to have
a cabaret girl stop her professional smiling and knee-patting,
forget about passing scotch and veggies while
carrying on in rudimentary English (“What is your
hobby?”), and run into the back room for her textbook
in order to ask how to pronounce “banal.”
Other experiences are linguistic only in reverse, or
only as one thinks of what the language ought to be.
For example, James Garner's Rockford dubbed as a
Japanese tenor is a reminder of one's firm awareness of
Garner's American tone and timbre. Better yet, the
dubbed Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Marlon
Brando, and company made me conscious of how I
had originally “heard” Superman I , and of how I commonly
ignore what pitch and range (apart from diction
and idiom) contribute to any language. Best of
all, probably, was the unintentional but unavoidable
hilarity roused by Hattie McDaniels, Butterfly McQueen,
and Vivien Leigh as they jabbered and
squeaked in Japanese about Ashley Wilkes, Mista
Rhett, and the fall of Atlanta. A perennial language
puzzler is the famous “yes” in response to very nearly
all questions and declarations. To be able to distinguish
among types of “yes”—to be able to discern
when that word means “no” or “perhaps” or “yes, I
don't think so”—that would mean that one had become
intimately Japanese.
My marginally linguistic education merits some
corollary mention. A local factory, I soon discovered,
pipes the strains of “Goin' Home” at noon and at quitting
time. When a baseball player is removed by the
manager, the organist plays “Auld Lang Syne.” What
was I to do in the men's community bath at a Japanese
hotel (a ryokan ), besides wash? Obviously, I could not
say much. I sat soaking at about 100°F, while an exuberant
gentleman on my left, who was wearing his
washcloth draped over his head, gave me his four words
of English: New York, Broadway, Niagara Falls, Grand
Canyon . The real cultural joy, however, lay in just immersing
myself in this aura, evoking Dante and 8½,
and watching the occupants through the steamy haze as
they lathered, rinsed, and squatted on little plastic
stools to shave before low-hung misted mirrors against
the walls—all this before I slap-slapped back to my
room to enjoy dinner on the floor. Finally, in this context,
I think back on what I derived from different kinds
of theatre: Bunraku, Kyogen, Noh , and Kabuki . Never
before had I been required to see and soak up that
drama which depends on a whole array of techniques
that have nothing intrinsically to do with words. Here
was the proof. I was compelled to pay strict attention
(for four or five hours at a time) to setting, lighting,
music, gesture, singing, pace of over-all presentation; to
this or that role's performance, costume, formal distancing
from the audience (Noh) or Globe-like intimacy
with the audience (Kabuki); to traditional methods of
men's playing women's parts, audience's anticipation
and shouted recognition of favorite plays and actors and
moments, tone of voice, etc.
I find it difficult to imagine a people more hospitable,
more generous with their time, than the Japanese
who took care of me. The nation is renowned for
its gift-giving, as we all know. My hosts were always
calm and kind in putting up with the odd foreigner
who was bound to find larger signals gross and yet to
miss nuances altogether, coming across as deaf, dumb,
and functionally illiterate. A final instance will make
my point. In late October a young woman librarian at
the college took me to a flower-arranging exhibition.
In early December I received under my office door a
note from this young woman containing the following
excerpts: “How are you? It is almost one month I
haven't met you...and I'm worried whether you are
fine or not, or you are very busy...And only one month
is left. Only one month! I want to know much of you.
So if there are something interesting or something worried,
please give me a call at any time. I should worry.
I have no knowledge to tell you about Japan. But I try
to help you.” That's what I miss: language and more.
As his writings always do, Richard Lederer's item
on “American Slurvian” [XIV, 2] delighted me. But his
“typically American exchange,” beginning with Jeet
jet? , is incomplete. The coda is Nose twirly . And Mr.
Lederer will be happy to learn of a student of mine
who defined sanguine as `an American penitentiary'
and of another who wrote of the peddle of a rose.
Slurvian, however, is not confined to English. To
prove its dissemination, I offer the following from the
announcing system of the railroad station in Toronto:
Le train de Montreal eh pret ass voir lay pass J
Since Slurvian thus exists in both a Germanic language
(English) and a Romance language (French), must it
not therefore follow that Slurvian has its origin in the
common ancestor of both tongues, that is in the Indo-stage?
That is to say, beside Indo-European and Indo-Hittite,
there must have existed an Indo-Slurvian. As
for Allah K. Swit, he must have been one of their
tribal deities.
“June has privy to what's going on today in sex research.”
[Sally Jessy Raphael introducing Dr. June Reinisch
on ABC-TV, . Submitted by .]
“We hope the events of the near future will not...
disrupt or inconvenience our customers.... It is time for
Onomatoplazia
Deine de klagge geneto argureoiou bioiou .
Quadrupedante putrem sonitu guatit ungula
campum .
Declaim that line of transliterated Greek, and
you can listen to Homer's cunning selection of
words and genitive case capture the twanging release
of Ulysses' silver bow. Try the Latin aloud, the way it
was meant to be read, and the hollow thump of a
horse's gallop is in the sound as well as the meaning of
Virgil's words.
Onomatopoeia has a long, honorable, and pleasurable
history—from Aristophanes' brek-ke-kex ko-ax
ko-ax to Kermit's ribbet, ribbet —from majestic lines in
ancient epic poetry to simple, homey words like plop,
splash , and murmur . In every language and time, the
sound and look of some words have given clues to their
meaning: their sound has suggested their sense.
I have been intrigued now and again, starting as a
small boy, by words which seem to act in exactly the
opposite fashion, words which point away from their
meaning, words which seem almost mischievously to
mislead. They suggest something other than what they
mean and in some instances do so all the more effectively
the more one knows about words and etymology.
Very often, of course, the misdirection lasts only for a
second, until training and traditional knowledge take
over. The initial deception is no less real, and it is
precisely this that fascinates. In parallel with the roots
of onomatopoeia (onoma `name' + poiein `to make or
do') I have christened the effect onomatoplazia: onoma
again + pladzein `to mislead or deceive.' A fellow
word-lover, flakier and less classically educated, suggested
“offomatopoeia,” and my own pragmatic bent
led at first toward “anti-onomatopoeia.” But it seemed
finally better to be analogous rather than cleverly
whimsical or totally derivative. Thus, onomatoplazia .
I offer the following as a sampler of words that
delightfully and sometimes disconcertingly confuse.
They certainly did me when first I came across them. I
usually hazard a guess in such first encounters, àla the
game of “Dictionary.” In all the following cases, the
spelling, (apparent) roots, or sound of the word actively
suggest a meaning different from the true one.
noisome Has nothing to do with sound or
decibel level, but means simply unpleasant or
disgusting. This was the word that first caught
my eye as the obverse of onomatopoeia.
highbinder Not a hip-length legging nor a
Rocky Mountain farm implement, but incredibly
enough a swindler or crook, especially of the
Chinese variety.
macaronic Does not refer to pasta; it is a
text which is half Latin and half vernacular.
(The computer age term, “spaghetti code,”
derives from the same pasta-related idea as
macaronic, but more obviously so.)
polymath Does not describe my brownstone
partner, who is in fact a Ph.D. in mathematics
and who does indeed seem, at least to this
philosophy major, to know many kinds of
arithmetic. The word, however, accurately
describes him as a person of much and varied
learning.
lowing Has no reference to height or the lack
of it, but is the sound commonly made by Oliver
Goldsmith's herd. Admittedly, lowing is also
onomatopoeic. Nonetheless, the initial trompe
l'oeil is there.
gingerly Neither denotes nor connotes spice
or snap or red hair, rather just their opposites:
cautious, careful, wary.
bosom pressers, breast buffers, chick
sexers Not names for denizens of Manhattan's
42nd Street, although the functions suggested
doubtless occur there if the price is right. These
are job titles for, respectively:
a) A clothing presser in the garment or dry-cleaning
industry who specializes.
b) A worker in a shoe factory who smooths and
polishes the forepart of the heel, called the
“breast” of the shoe in the trade.
c) An employee of a poultry farm who identifles
the gender of baby chicks so as to keep males
and females apart (using a light!).
crepuscular Has always evoked for me images
of muscles or funereal trimmings or infected
tissue, instead of twilight or evening.
crapulous, crapulent What this suggests
would, of course, only occur to pre-pubescent
boys and has nothing to do with the real
meaning of drunkenness, overeating.
farthingale Neither a singing, nocturnal
coin, nor a storm of flatulence, but the light
wooden frame that puffed out milady's 16th-century
skirt.
pediculosis Not as foot disease nor the bad
breath of children, but just plain (and literally)
lousiness.
impregnable Non-English speakers have been
known to think this means inconceivable.
hydrox It is wildly improbable that this is
the name of a cookie and not a many-headed,
bovine monster.
catamite Neither a light, fun sailboat, nor a
small, feline bug, but a young boy used for
unnatural purposes.
newsprint As a young boy I found it
unnatural that this means merely paper.
metapsychosis One of the finest of traps for
the knowledgeable logophile: it has nothing to
do with some over-arching, society-wide
psychological illness like alcoholism or jogging.
Rather, it means mind-to-mind communication
without any observable intermediary—ESP.
metaschizotherium Not an over-arching,
society-wide split personality, but mind
blowingly enough an extinct rhino with a fivetoed
foot.
over-determined A misleading term in
psychoanalytic jargon used to describe a
condition with many causes (thus, “multi-determined”
would be better). This would
logically appear to be a technical psychological
coinage useful for referring to a personality or
condition that is excessively rigid or stubborn.
analysand Another term from psychoanalese:
one of its words for `patient.' This 19th-century
neologism was obviously derived directly from
the -nd marker of the active gerund in Latin,
which suggests the therapist (active agent) rather
than the patient (the recipient, the one the
treatment acts upon). This doubtless reflects
psychoanalytic theory's cherished insistence that
the patient actually does the analyzing in the
long run and thus is more truly the active
partner.
pogonip Another sure-fire dictionary winner:
not a quick drink snatched while riding a
bouncy stick, but a fog laden with particles of
ice. This charmer is Shoshonean in origin, an
example of the onomatoplazia which readily
occurs when the etymology in question is not
from your usual, garden variety, linguistic roots.
bosky I was positive this was a new kind of
dance or maybe a Pollyannaish feeling, until I
looked it up to find it means simply `woodsy.'
benthos Neither an English social
philosopher nor a petit bourgeois weepy feeling,
but the bottom of the sea and by extension its
flora and fauna.
swimmingly Has nothing to do with the
sea—its bottom, its top, or its sports. It just
means `well.'
titmouse Not any kind of rodent, noticeably
mammalian or otherwise, but merely a small
bird.
Note: this is an example of a “HobsonJobson”—foreign
words or expressions
twisted into a more familiar configuration
by the pervasive influence of linguistic
chauvinism, a rich source of
onomatoplazia. “The Elephant and
Castle,” “nitwit,” and “big cheese” are
other examples. See Willard Espy's
delicious An Almanac of Words at Play,
pp. 21 and 203.
oxymoron Not a name for dumb cattle, but a
rhetorical device that couples opposites into
descriptions effective for their irony: cold as hell,
honest as a politician.
bar code Not the ethics of the legal
profession nor the law that interferes with the
corner conviviality, but the small rectangle of
stripes (bars) on store merchandise that provides
coded pricing and inventory information to
electronic scanners.
These examples of onomatoplazia are a personal
set, words that have led me astray. There may be others
who have had the same experience with them.
There may also be additional examples which others
might like to drop into this intriguing piggin of words.
David Galef has coined the term morox [XIV, 2] to
designate unintentional, inelegant oxymorons such as
many fewer problems, largely insignificant , and
barely clothed . I collect solecisms of all sorts that I
hear on television broadcasts. In a handful of slips
taken from the top of my stack, I found at least one
clear-cut morox: Nevada is “much more sparsely populated”
than eastern states, according to Robin MacNeil
(MacNeil/Lehrer News Report, PBS, 29 May 1986).
And in several of these random instances of pleonasm,
truism, kinky syntax, malapropos metaphor, and just
plain dumb things to say, I perceived the moroxonic
spirit at work. They did not, however, conform to the
letter of Galef's definition—conjunct words of contradictory
literal meaning.
Consider, for instance, the assertion, by a woman
being interviewed on the NBC Today program, that
losing 45 pounds “has caused my life to turn around
360 degrees.” The newly svelte lady surely had in mind
an about-face, not a pirouette, and was lithely (as she
might say) unaware that her expanded metaphor had
canceled the sense of her loss (a moroxish pun?). Substantively,
if not literally, she made a morox.
Now consider the lament of an NBC Today guest
that an undertaking had been frustrated “and now
we're back to ground zero.” The inadvertent substitution
of ground zero for square one , while luminously
ludicrous, is not self-canceling and hence does not convey
the empty sense of morox.
But what about a reference by MacNeil's partner,
Jim Lehrer, to “some ten thousand black gold and
diamond miners [on strike in South Africa].” The ambiguity
resulting from the conjunction of black and
gold is akin to the distraction caused by optical illusions:
Lehrer's phrase is both literally correct and literally
nonsense. Is it at heart a morox? It does not seem
to qualify as double entendre.
The onus for double entendre, particularly if risqué,
properly lies with the perceiver. But who can
resist a smirk when a female network broadcaster observes
that with respect to celibacy in the priesthood,
“the pontiff remains firm.” The howlers in my collection
that I most cherish, however, depend for their
charm on skewed syntax.
My prize example was uttered by the incomparable
Cher, during a morning-show interview. “It took
me really a long time to sort what was going on in my
mind out,” she said. Her interviewer didn't bat an eye.
Cher's gem stood unrivaled until I recently heard
a Monday Night Football savant announce to the nation
that despite confusion among the officials on the
field, a touchdown had indeed been scored, because
“the plane of the ball broke the goal line.” Technically,
it is not a spoonerism. Have such transpositions a
name?
And as I look at the last slip in my random handful,
again I encounter a classificatory conundrum:
No government can go against [the laws of economics]
with impunity and get away with it.
In Richard Conniff's urbane account of travelers'
putdowns of some of the great and not so great cities of
the world [XIV,3], he quotes a splendid passage from
Dr. Samuel Johnson's poem on London, which culminates
with the words, “Here falling houses thunder on
your head, / And here a female atheist talks you dead.”
This, while perhaps not strictly an example of a traveler's
denunciation, is certainly appropriate to the article
as a choice description of one of the Babylons of the
world. While Mr. Conniff is doubtless aware of the
connection, he does not mention the fact that Johnson's
poem is throughout a very close and respectful pastiche
of the Latin poet Juvenal's Satire III, on the city
of Rome. (It should be noted that Johnson made the
same kind of adaptation of another poem by Juvenal,
Satire X, calling it The Vanity of Human Wishes. )
Juvenal wrote his satire on Rome in the early years of
the second century, during the reign of the Emperor
Trajan. Among the subjects he touches on in his poem
are street crime, unemployment, the degradation of
the welfare system, tacky urban renewal projects,
overcrowding, high rents and unscrupulous landlords,
noise, vehicular traffic, congestion, even problems of
immigration and integration. Under this last heading,
among the many alleged undesirables in Juvenal's
Rome is what he calls in a memorable phrase Graeculus
esuriens , the “hungry little Greek.” In Johnson's
poem this becomes a “fasting Mounseer.” Of the despised
and wily but accommodating Greek, Juvenal
says In caelum iusseris, ibit: “Tell him to go to the sky,
and he will be off.” For Johnson's Frenchie this becomes,
“Bid him go to hell, to hell he goes.”
The passage in Juvenal's poem which corresponds
most closely to the one quoted by Mr. Conniff is near
the beginning (lines 7-9), where Juvenal, building up
to an ironic crescendo, shudders at the thought of:
...incendia, lapsus
tectorum adsiduos ac mille pericula saevae
urbis et Augusto recitantes mense poetas.
...fires, the constant collapse of buildings,
and the thousand perils of the savage city — and
poets reciting in the month of August.
Johnson had no trouble finding fairly exact counterparts
in his London of the eighteenth century for
many of the blights of Juvenal's ancient Rome, but
there was really nothing to match the horror of the
amateur poetry reading in Trajan's time; the closest
analogy Johnson could come up with, an elegant one
under the circumstances, is his “female atheist.”
Henry Henn gets a linguistic maggie's drawers for
“'Nam, Gook, Gung-ho: Nonsense” [XIV,2]. Taking
aim at military slang because it is “itinerant and erroneous”
misses the mark completely. Slang is slang precisely
because it does not adhere to the well-defined
meanings of standard usage. Far from being “mindless
and infantile,” slang in its wonderful vigor and versatility
allows us to express how we really feel about
persons, places, and things.
Military slang is first spoken by soldiers, who then
carry it into civilian life. When enough Americans
serve in uniform or when their slang is picked up by
the news media as it was in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam,
it spreads to the general slang lexicon. Examples
of this type of linguistic osmosis as GI , poop , honcho ,
gook , and gung-ho , all of which are now understood
by a substantial number of Americans who have never
been in the military service. The slang of one military
generation passes on to the next, so the Marines who
called the Koreans gooks in the '50s and the Vietnamese
gooks in the '60s and '70s were the linguistic heirs
of the Marines who called the Nicaraguans gooks in
1912.
I agree with Mr. Henn that the origins of slang
words are hard to pinpoint. To call a brown-skinned
person a gook may be reinforced by words in his own
language, Chinese Mee Gook for “beautiful country,”
or Korean Myguk (My = “America” + guk = “country”),
but the word is extraordinarily derogatory, reinforced
by, if not derived from the common English
slang gobbledegook (the brown man's language) and
gook (his food).
Gung-ho , which once had a positive connotation,
is now used derisively among servicemen to describe
`individuals or organizations in a state of active and
zealous military enthusiasm,' and usually modifies
other words such as “sonofabitch,” etc. If today among
civilians it has come to mean a go-getter or a standout,
then it has undergone another permutation and that is
just additional proof of the language's dynamism.
Gung-ho was popularized in WWII by Lt. Col. Evans
Fordyce Carlson, USMC, who picked it up from the
Red Chinese when he was an observer to the 8th Route
Army in 1937-38. It is a contraction of gung-yeh ho-dzo ,
`industrial cooperation, 'and it caught on because
it is easy to pronounce, as in 'Nam or the States . 'Nam
by itself is no more derogatory or misleading than
shortening airplane or telephone or gung-ho .
The nuances of Vietnamese history, which Mr.
Henn finds so fascinating, were as useful to the men
who fought Ho Chi Minh's military machine as the
facts of the Meiji Restoration to anyone who fought the
Japanese Empire in WWII.
Finally, I would remind Mr. Henn that the point
of the Vietnam war has nothing to do with whether we
called the country 'Nam or Vietnam . It is that today
Russian military personnel operate their ships and
planes out of our former base complex at Cam Ranh
Bay while the political language Ho Chi Minh imported
from Moscow is now current through all of
Indo-China .
“Can we not reverse the approbation in which lawyers
are held by the public today?” [From a column by John R.
Tomlinson in the issue of Litigation News , published
by the American Bar Association, Chicago. Submitted
by .]
“...characteristics of secular humanism are:...
Defication of humankind as supreme.” [From SLATE (Support
for the Learning and Teaching of English), ,
published by the National Council of Teachers of English.
Submitted by .]
“Afterwards, the Bishop walked among the crowds,
eating their picnic lunches.” [From the Southwark (England)
News, . Submitted by .]
The Times [20 February 1988] reports that the
restoration of a 400-year-old statue of Fame, at Wilton
House, Wiltshire, “may include the replacement of her
famous trumpets, weathered away from each hand but
not before prompting the expression `blowing your
own trumpet.' ” To the best of our recollection, this
may be the only instance in which the origin of an
expression has been traced to a statue. Corroboration
is not readily forthcoming from the OED, unless we
accept a citation from Lydgate, dated c 1450: Pryd
gothe beforen And schame comythe aftyr, and
blawythe horne.
A perfume called Poison has appeared on the market.
Poison? Who would want to wear such a scent?
Perfumes are supposed to attract, not repel (or so their
makers would have us believe), and the name scarcely
evokes the image of an attractant. The naming of perfumes
is a sensitive business: one assumes that Equipage
is supposed to invite associations with foxhunting in
Devon (or Virginia), not with the odor of sweaty saddles
and bridles or bits redolent with horse's saliva. The
first reaction was that Poison was another misspelling
(like Elizabeth Arden's Millenium) and should have
been Poisson; but, on reflection, the salability of a scent
promising the smell of fish seems a little remote. Coco,
named for Mme. Chanel, does not smell from cocoa; I
haven't tried opium, but cannot imagine that Opium
smells much like an opium den; and it is impossible to
guess at what the millennium will smell like. Charles
Jourdan has now introduced L'insolent—“Half invitation.
Half challenge.”—and that sounds like good ad
copy to me. Lady Stetson, though, I should expect to
smell like stained hatbands on sweaty cowpokes. The
old standby, Nuit de Paris, is all right (provided you hit
the right nuit). Maybe we'll soon have Heroin (or Heroine,
or Heroine), Smack, and Coke, (though we can be
sure that the company coming up with the last of these
will hear from you-know-who). Grass, on the other
hand, might make sense for Chanel, for many of the
flowers used in Chanel perfumes are cultivated at
Grasse, a town in southern France. Lancôme has begun
to market a line of cosmetics called Niosôme, which
lexics (opposite of dyslexics) may read as Noisôme, a
singularly unimaginative name for a product: it ranks
with product names like Anusol (regardless of its pronunciation
in commercials). I cannot wait to see a new
perfume marketed under the name Mephitis, Osmatique,
or Puanteur. But don't hold your breath—just
your nose.
“This is absolutely putting the horse before the cart.”
[Alexander Haig on ABC News, . Submitted
by .]
“The hospital counsels the women... to have a tubal
litigation.” [From St. Petersburg Times (n.d.). Submitted by
.]
Word Droppings
Cannon tabulated an attrition rate of 1.5% for
new meanings and new items originally admitted
to the Merriam Addenda Sections which were cumulatively
included in reprints of Webster's Third New
International Dictionary of the English Language
(1961) at five-year intervals in the 1966-81 period, but
then were excluded from Merriam's 9,000 Words
(1983). Thus a surprisingly high 98.5% of the main
entries were retained in the four Addenda Sections in
question. These evidently possessed whatever qualities
of viability are required for an item to survive in at
least written English once it has experienced adequate
quantity and variety of printed occurrence to justify
initial listing in the first place. Of the 111 items that
were dropped, 61 vanished in just two to five years,
suggesting that the early years of a word's temporary
admission to the English lexicon are the most critical.
During this period, two hardcover versions of the
Addenda Sections were published— 6,000 Words (1976)
and 9,000 Words . Now the hardcover version of the
7873-main-entry 1986 Addenda Section, appearing simultaneously
as 12,000 Words (1986), permits an updating
of the statistics. Only 164 previously listed main
entries did not appear in the 1986 Addenda Section,
some of which had first been listed as long ago as 1966,
but a high 39 of which were first listed in 1981 and so
continue to indicate the critical quality of a new word's
first five years in the lexicon. If we compare these 164
deletions to the retained 7873 entries, we find that the
updated 2% attrition rate only trivially raises the earlier
1.5% rate. With the thought that word lovers will
be interested in these 164 apparently unviable words,
we will list them below. Since the word-formation
process by which they came into the vocabulary may
provide crucial information, the list is organized according
to that process. Thus, we can see at a glance
that, for example, the highest mortality again appeared
in the new noun compounds, where 28% of
the deletions were noun compounds, whereas the only
variant form was tabbouli . The deletions consisted of
134 nouns, 16 adjectives, 12 verbs, and 2 affixes. The
taxonomy is that determined by the 13,683-item corpus
described in Cannon (1987).
NEW MEANINGS
(25)
analyst gate mu-meson
bob immune, adj. muonon,
butter pat laggard suffix
delocalize, v. lagger paging
derrick, v. meson plasma
digger microelectrode poach, v.
fat receptor
reduplicate, gravisphere ductibility
v. moonfall electrohydraulic
spinner parakite
standoff resistojet fluidonics
station BLENDS (2) fluoridizer
zone gayola incapacitator
VARIANT FORM plench Mosleyite
tabbouli BOUND-MORPHEME mysterium
FUNCTIONAL ITEMS (7) oceanologic,
SHIFT (6) Afrophile adj.
decorative aposelene projectual
diplotene, aposelenium psychedelicize,
adj. biotron v.
dirty quadriphony quadriphonics
dustoff reticulosis
punch-up technopolis quantized,
skim INITIAL AFFIXATIONS (20) adj.
BORROWINGS (6) restartable,
beef Bourguignon antienvironment adj.
MIXED AFFIXATIONS
dynapolis antimissile
incendive, antirheumatic, antinatalist
adj. adj. NOUN COMPOUNDS (46)
macchinetta antisexist,
periselenium adj. ABC art
scree audiotypist adenosine
ABBREVIATIONS (4) bioelectrogenesis 3',5'-monophosphate
ADP cryochemistry Age of
BAL Aquarius
EEC cytoecology air battery
IDDD dehydrotestosterone Aquarian
ACRONYM Age
KWOC geoprobe arcjet
UNABBREVIATED heliborne, are-jet engine
SHORTENINGS (6) adj. Bering time
detox, v. helilift, v. bitch box
gox helispot bodyclothes
hydro hexamethylene broken home
immuno-, Colourpoint
comb. tetramine Longhair
form magnetofluidmechanic, computerized
jetavator aerial tomography
youthcult
SHORTENING + adj. core city
BOUND FORM (7) neurokinin cyclic group
acrasin parapolitical, death control
antiscientism adj. dunk shot
apholate protocontinent eye doctor
astrionics fly-cruise
emulsible, telelecture fractional orbital
adj. xenobiology bombardment
Ovonic TERMINAL AFFIXATIONS (18)
xenate system
SHORTENING + Africanity gamma decay
WORD (8) audiophile heat pollution
ambisextrous, channery,
adj. adj. hemoglobin S
autodrome computerite imitation
birdyback Dolbyized, milk
colorcaster adj. ionic propulwake surfing
sion offtrack betting
isolated camera water toothpick
pump jockey juice man
rap session xenic acid
kill ratio slack-fill ADJ. COMPOUND
lepton number special situation air-cushion
VERB COMPOUNDS (5)
lip-gloss speed freak
media mix surfer's knot clock in
memory teaching machine clock off
trace clock on
new issue T-time clock out
up quark fuck around
Cannon, Garland. 1987.
Historical Change and English
Word-Formation: Recent Vocabulary , 340pp. Peter Lang.
Longman Dictionary of the English Language
This is a curious work. I was under the impression
it was based on Webster's Ninth Collegiate Dictionary ,
and indeed it was; but there are so many improvements
and changes that the absence both of a Longman
copyright notice and of any identification of a
specific editorial director are a bit mysterious. One is
drawn to conclude that the work is the product of
some disembodied corporate entity. To be sure, four
names—Heather Gay, Brian O'Kill, Katherine Seed,
and Janet Whitcut—appear on the Acknowledgements
page, but so do names of a lot of other people (like
Frank Kermode, Melvin Bragg, Clement Freud, Germaine
Greer, Clive Jenkins, and Janet Street-Porter)
whose direct connection with the book at hand would
seem to be much more remote. Having myself dealt
with consultant linguists and specialists in other fields
who contribute something to the preparation of accurate
structure and definitions to a dictionary, I think I
can safely say that such people are only indirectly responsible
for the quality of a dictionary, and the major
responsibility for a book of such complexity rests with
the editors. But only four editors for such a massive
work? I suppose it is possible. In any event, it seems
unfair not to have listed them on the title page, assuning
(as I presume we must) that their contributions
were more or less equal.
Webster's Ninth Collegiate Dictionary [hereafter
W], despite many improvements over its forebears, still
suffers from shortcomings ultimately traceable to the
aberrational lexicography reflected in Webster's Third
Unabridged . Although direct comparison between the
Longman Dictionary of the English Language [hereafter
L] and the W reveals many similarities, there are
many differences, too. One gets the impression that
the editors of L used the good stuff from the W and
substituted their own, much better material when
they encountered some of the bad stuff.
The L was based on the W , but a comparison,
albeit superficial, reveals a number of differences,
to wit:
1. The headword is syllabified in W , not in L . In
older dictionaries the words are syllabified mainly to
help in pronouncing them; latterly, syllabication has
been used largely to find where a word can be hyphenated
at the end of a line of text, though, judging by
today's newspapers and magazines, one would be sore
put to believe that a dictionary had ever been within
the grasp of their editors, proofreaders, or the programmers
who wrote the hyphenation programs for
the automatic typesetting many of them now employ.
The syllabication of headwords is not an important
feature in British dictionaries: the Collins English Dictionary ,
which offered an elaborate system in its first
edition (1979), set the words solid in its second edition
(1986), but I am informed that the major portion of
the correspondence received at Collins Publishing concerning
the dictionary concerns this change and is critical
of it.
2. The pronounciation systems differ. L 's set of
symbols is somewhat closer to that of the International
Phonetic Alphabet; W follows the system used in the
Third Unabridged , which is too complicated for my
taste, being replete with diacritics. L uses a version of
what I call the “Moo Goo Gai Pan” or “Ah-oo-gah”
system, favored by newspapers because, though primitive,
it is virtually transparent: unlike the W system,
which requires even a casual user to deal with distinctions
between a ā, \?\, ä and a\?\; (rendered in L as a , ay ,
o , ah , and ow , respectively). The description of the
pronunciation of English is much fuller in the front
matter of the W , but, as the only people who read the
front matter of dictionaries seem to be students (who
are enjoined to under pain of death) and other lexicographers,
the absence of comprehensive coverage of the
subject in L would not appear to be a serious omission.
W follows the (useful) practice of listing a shortened
pronunciation key on each right-hand page; L 's failure
to do so is a disadvantage, notwithstanding the simplicity
of their system, for the user must ferret about to
find the description given on page xxii to clarify any
question. L would be well advised, in future printings,
to give a complete pronunciation key on the inside
(front) cover of the book, an easily accessible place that
is at present unused.
3. W lists etymologies near the beginning of those
entries that have them, directly following the inflected
forms (if any); L places them at the end of the entry.
As surveys have shown that etymological information
is the least often sought after, making the average user
wade through the etymology before getting to the definition
has always seemed pointless and irritating to
me; besides, it is unlikely that the serious, consistent
seeker of etymological information is likely to use anything
but the OED or a major etymological dictionary.
W lists the “date of the earliest recorded use in English
...of the sense which the date precedes.” The Second
Edition of the Random House Unabridged follows a
similar practice, and I find it speculative, spurious,
and specious except for the documentation of relatively
recent coinages. Such information is very likely to be
misinterpreted by the average user, who does not approach
a dictionary with a critical eye. For example,
W shows for leeway the date 1669; from my experience
with even above-average users, that is usually taken to
mean that 1669 was the first time that leeway appeared
in English: one day it did not exist; the next,
Presto! Change-O!, it sprang into view on a printed
page. That is nonsense, of course; but even if the users
remain keenly aware that 1669 is the date only of the
earliest written evidence, of what use or importance is
that to them? Moreover, as we in the dictionary biz are
only too well aware, an earlier citation might be found
today or tomorrow, making the information obsolete.
I feel less strongly about a designation like “17c” which
seems usefully vague. To give “1604” as the date for
lemonade after giving “15c” as the date for lemon
might give one the impression that it took Englishmen
about 200 years to find out how to make lemonade (or
what to name what they got when they squeezed a
lemon and mixed the juice with water and sugar).
Even the Scots are likely to give them more credit than
that. Also, the date given for the adjective lemon (as in
lemon flavor, lemon color ) would draw one to the conclusion
that those retarded speakers of the language
needed some 300 years to use the noun as a modifier.
Mercifully, L has omitted such dating.
4. Another odd thing in the W etymologies, carried
over into the L, is the practice of using “more
at—” as a cross reference indicator. For example, at
lento , after showing it to have come, via Italian, from
Latin lentus `slow,' one reads “more at LITHE.” But if
you look up the etymology for lithe you discover only
that the original form of that word ( lithe in Old English)
is “akin to... Latin lentus slow.” My objection
to the form of the reference is that its wording suggests,
“there is more information about the etymology
of lento to be found under lithe ,” but that does not
actually turn out to be the case: all the user has
learned is that lento and lithe are (or might be) cognates.
In the event, why not just say “cogn: lithe ”
under lento and the reverse under lithe ? (This latter
piece of information is unaccountably lacking.)
5. Compare the entries for literally in the two
dictionaries:
W 1: in a literal sense or manner: ACTUALLY
< took the remark ˜ > < was ˜ insane > 2 : in
effect: VIRTUALLY < will ˜ turn the world upside
down to combat cruelty or injustice—Norman
Cousins >
usage Since sense 2 is the opposite in meaning
of sense 1, it has been frequently criticized as a
misuse. Instead, the use is pure hyperbole intended
to gain emphasis, but it often appears
in contexts where no additional emphasis is
necessary.
L 1 in the literal sense; without metaphor or
exaggeration 2 with exact equivalence; verbatim
< follow the instructions ˜ > 3 — used to intensify
a metaphorical or hyperbolic expression
< she was ˜ — tearing her hair out >; disapproved
of by some speakers
To be sure, the W usage note, even with its verbosity
and the oxymoron “pure hyperbole,” is more
helpful than L 's cryptic “disapproved of by some
speakers”; but the definitions are better in L because
they assume that if a user does not know the meaning
of literally , then that of literal is unlikely to be that
obvious. On the other hand, “figurative or exaggerated
expression” would probably have been a simplified improvement
over “metaphorical or hyperbolic expression,”
which might be tough going for someone who
had to look up literally to begin with.
Users of the L will be far better off if spared the
technique of defining in the W , carried over from the
Third Unabridged , in which the full explanatory definition
is abandoned in favor of a scattering of synonyms
set in SMALL CAPITALS, which, more often than
not, are likely to lead the user who has the paitence to
pursue them to other words defined in the same inept
manner. There is a difference between using a word
in a phrasal definition and suggesting it as a—
presumably substitutable—synonym. In the present
case, ACTUALLY is such a loosely used “filler” word in
the language (like really , I mean , y'know , etc.) as to be
almost useless as a substitute (except “literally”).
In general, the definitions in W have been clarified,
simplified, and made more precise in L . Also, the
citations in W have either been omitted, where unnecessary,
or paraphrased, and sources are not given. I
have never understood why, in a dictionary of this size,
W ever thought it useful to give the sources of citations,
especially inconsistently: who among the general,
college-dictionary-using population of today
knows the identity of Norman Cousins? Is H. G. Rickover
being held up to the user as a paragon of English
usage? What is the significance in citing anonymous
writers, Longfellow, L. P. Smith, or giving no citation
at all? The treatment in W is erratic, to say the least.
6. The entry list in L seems to be fuller than in W ,
but a quick direct comparison is not easily done. In
one interval checked, W reveals Montague (Romeo's
family name), Montmorency (a kind of cherry), Montrachet
(wine), monuron (a herbicide), moon-eye (a
fish), moon-eyed (open-eyed), and moonflower , as
headwords not in L ; the same interval in L reveals
montbretia (a plant), Montessorian (teaching method),
month of Sundays , Montilla , -mony (suffix) Moog synthesizer ,
moon daisy (the oxeye), moon-faced , moonglow ,
and moonrat , which do not appear in W . Leaving
aside the plants and animals, which are differently
distributed for American and British users, the only
significant omission from L is Montrachet , while the
important words omitted from W are Montessorian ,
month of Sundays , -mony , Moog synthesizer , moon-faced ,
and moonglow . The last word is not in the RHD
II , but it should be, for the L citation is from Henry
Miller and the word also appears in the lyrics written
for the popularized rendition of Tchaikovsky's 5th
symphony. It should also be noted that idiomatic expressions
(e.g., once in a blue moon , listed under
moon in L ) may be listed elsewhere (under blue moon
in W ) and that others (e.g., over the moon `elated') are
not much used in American English.
On the whole, readers can draw their own conclusions
about the breadth of coverage; as for me,
I should (regrettably) sacrifice Montrachet to gain
others.
7. There are lengthy usage notes and synonym
studies in W that do not appear in L at all or in greatly
abbreviated form, sometimes mercifully so, for W
occasionally succumbs to prolixity. Notwithstanding,
such features are valued by users and cutting them
could be a disadvantage.
8. W has illustrations (better than those in the
Third Unabridged ); L has none, but it must be noted
that other British dictionaries lack them also, so L
need not have included them purely for competitive
reasons in the main market it is intended to serve.
9. Both dictionaries list abbreviations and biographical
and geographical entries in separate sections
at the back, a practice I have never liked. Experience
(and a moment's thought) shows that names of people
and places occur with equal, sometimes greater frequency
in the language than a very large percentage of
the words listed in dictionaries of almost any size (except
the smallest), and on that ground they should not
be treated as nonwords or as being outside the pale of
lexicon. Also, it is awkward to find Glasgow or Shake-speare
in one part of the dictionary and Glaswegian or
Shakespearian in another. Finally, fictional people and
places are listed in the main body of those dictionaries
that include them, but real people and places appear
in the appendices; as it may be assumed that users look
up things they do not know, the immediate assumption
is that they ought to come to a reference book
already aware that Homer was a real person (despite
speculation to the contrary) and that Jesus was both
real and, as “the Jewish religious teacher,” fictional;
fundamentalists will be disturbed to discover that most
of the characters in the Bible are treated as fictional.
It seems silly to separate Gruyère the cheese from
Gruyère the place in Switzerland whence it comes—
indeed, the latter is not even an entry in the geographical
sections of either dictionary. Of the two, the W
geographical listings seem more complete: W lists
Aylesbury , which, through some grievous, egregious
fault, is not in the geographical section of the L but
does appear in the A-Z section (because of the ducks).
10. Although L has, in addition to the names,
abbreviations, and only a few pages of miscellaneous
materials—Handbook of Style, Ten Vexed points in
English grammar—and some tables of moneys,
weights and measures, etc., W has short sections on
Foreign Words and Phrases (most of which are dispensable),
Signs and Symbols, and Style, as well as one
of those interminably boring listings of Colleges and
Universities that clutter up most American college
dictionaries.
11. L has 1876 pages, W 1562 pages. A rough comparison
yields the following:
Longman Webster
depth of column 50 picas 52 picas
width of column 67mm 72mm
characters/line 70
lines/column 104
characters total (approx.) 18 million 22 million
No allowance has been made in the above calculations
for the pronunciation key appearing on each odd-numbered
page of the W .
12. L is, of course, a British dictionary, W American.
But for other reasons they are not directly comparable.
The entry for Boolean in L reads as follows:
adj of or being a type of algebra in which logical
symbols are used to represent relations between
sets, and which is used entensively in the
theory of computer programming < ˜ expression
Under Boolean algebra , W has the following:
a set that is closed under the two commutative
binary operations and that can be described by
any of various systems of postulates all of which
can be deduced from the postulates that an
identity element exists for each operation, that
each operation is distributive over the other, and
that for every element in the set there is another
element which when combined with the first
under one of the operations yields the identity
element of the other operation<under the operations
of taking intersections and unions, the
subsets of a given set form a Boolean algebra
The definition in the Third Unabridged was a model
of clarity compared with that. Focusing on these two
definitions, it must be conceded that naive users who
did not know the meaning of Boolean or of Boolean
algebra before going to either dictionary are unlikely
to come away any the wiser. But the second reads like
gobbledygook while the first tries to provide some basic
notion of what is involved and where it is applied
while, at the same time, gently notifying users that
they are going to have to seek elsewhere for a proper
definition, the understanding of which requires far
more backgound in mathematics and logic than can be
assumed in the average user.
Lexicographers constantly face problems of defining
terms that, in some instances, might require a
brief essay to explain and far more specialized knowledge
than can reasonably be expected from the user.
The source of the problem lies in the fact that there is
no law forbidding ordinary mortals to bandy about
terms like theory of relativity which only a few people
in the world truly understand: to be sure, it is impossible
to conceive of writing a definition for it that would
fit into a dictionary's procrustean requirements. The
dilemma can be resolved either by attempting a definition
(which no one will understand) or by providing a
superficial pass at a definition couched in language
suggesting that the user can find no succor in the work
in hand. I prefer the latter approach, though I have
of ten thought it might be only fair to mark such entries
with some symbol (like a death's head).
Conclusion? I think the Longman is a fine dictionary,
superior to the Webster , but I have been careful
not to compare it with the Collins , which remains
my favorite British English dictionary for reasons that
modesty forbids my detailing here.
Laurence Urdang
Computational Lexicography
I recently purchased a new computer, and, because
it operated on a system different from the one of
my old computer, I asked a few friends to recommend
a word-processing package that I might.find useful. I
was particularly interested in one that would allow me
to designate a variety of typestyles during keyboard-ing,
ideally one that showed the styles on the monitor
as the text was being typed.
Those who are familiar with computers or do not
want to know about them should skip to the next paragraph.
For those who are unfamiliar with computers
and the need for a word-processing package, I should
explain that when you buy what is fondly call a “personal”
computer, you get three pieces of equipment
(though they may be combined in some models or
makes): a rectangular box with some slots in the front
and sockets in the back, a monitor, which is nothing but
a small TV set, and a keyboard, which looks like an
ordinary typewriter keyboard but, in many models sold
today, has a number of additional keys alongside those
for the familiar alphanumeric characters: on mine, nestled
among some control keys on the right side is what is
called a “number pad,” which resembles the key arrangement
one sees on a small adding machine or calculator;
on the left side is a double bank of five keys
marked “F1” through “F10” which, when pressed alone
or in combination with another key, perform certain
functions, some of which are useful, others of which are
evidently thought useful by the manufacturer but
which I never use. These boxes come with wires (called
cables for some reason) that allow them to be connected
to one another and into a power source. The trick is
that they will not do anything unless and until you have
installed what is called a Disk Operating System, which
comes with the machine. After it has been installed, the
DOS, as it is called (once identified, nothing in computerese
is ever called by its full name again: a Personal
Computer becomes a PC; a Disk Operating System
becomes a DOS; if it is made by a company called
MicroSoft, it is called MS/DOS), performs certain functions,
though rarely any that anyone but a computer
specialist would want to perform. In order to do something
useful, you have to buy a program, which is a
package consisting of a number of diskettes and a manual.
A diskette is also called a “floppy”; the reason for
the name is not immediately apparent (nor why the
item is called a “diskette”, for that matter), but all
becomes clear. The so-called diskette is a flat black
square of rather tough plastic with a hole in the middle
and an oblong slot on each of the flat sides; it is said to
be 5¼ inches square, but that is a lie: as the only person
who probably ever measured one of these things, I can
tell you it is 5 3/16 inches square; that may seem irrelevant,
but it is only the beginning of the Great Deception.
Inside this square plastic casing (which you should
never open) is a flimsy flat black plastic papadum. If
the diskette is placed in the slot of the machine, a motor
engages the center of the disk inside and spins it around
at a great speed so that portions of it are exposed as they
pass by the oblong slot, allowing them to be “written
on” or “read” by some device inside the box. The diskettes
that contain programs have information on them
that the computer “understands” and translates into a
number of commands that make the machine do certain
things. The things done depend on what kind of
program is on the diskette.
I bought a word-processing program called Framework
II. It is quite versatile and, as I required, allows
me to create certain kinds of files in which I am able to
style the text as I wish, but I shall not go into that here.
Framework is sold by Ashton-Tate, a Silicon-Valley concern
that makes quite good programs but, like most of
the “software” companies, produces such abominable
manuals with directions for using the programs that
they have to maintain a staff of several dozen “technical
personnel” who are on duty about 12 hours a day beginning
at six in the morning (California time) merely in
order to answer the questions of confused customers.
This failing appears to be endemic to the industry: I
recently spoke with an executive of Okidata, a manufacturer
of a very good computer (laser) printer, who
told me that his technical staff answers 60,000 telephone
queries a month. I pointed out to him that if they
made available a proper manual the number of calls
could probably be reduced to 6,000. Only the telephone
company was profiting from such ineptitude.
But the foregoing is all preliminary and background
to the main theme. One of the services performed
by Framework is in a program subroutine
called Spelling Check. I do not need a spelling checker,
but I have found it extremeely useful as a means for
proofreading text that has been keyboarded into storage
in the Framework program. The way it works is
this: after completing an article, chapter of a book, or
whatever it is that I am working on, I press a few keys
and the program automatically scans every word of
text, comparing each with a “dictionary” contained in
the program. It is not really a dictionary, of course, in
the sense that is lacks definitions; it is merely a word
list. I have not seen the word list, but, from the directory
of programs I can invoke on the monitor, I know it
contains about 223,000 characters, or about 37,000
words. Being a computer, the machine performs this
comparison checking very, very rapidly: it takes only a
minute to “proofread” a file containing about 7,000
words. The proofreading is slightly moronic, for the
program cannot alert the user to an error like “an” for
“and,” because “an” is a valid word in its memory; still,
it is better than nothing. If it encounters a word that is
not in its repertoire, it offers a choice of actions: at the
stroke of a key or two you can ADD the word to the list;
GO ON and ignore the word entirely; or EDIT the questionable
item (by correcting a typo, for instance).
There is another option called, SUGGEST, which, if invoked,
lists up to seven or eight words that you might
have had in mind when you wrote the one that offended
the machine, and this brings me to the point of
this article.
It seems unnecessary to point out that Framework
cannot have a very sophisticated list of words if it has
only 37,000 in its memory, but I thought it might be
interesting to see what substitutions were evoked by
SUGGEST. In each listing below, the boldface word is
the word at which Framework stopped, offering to
SUGGEST a substitute; the words following are the substitutions
it suggested. Where ellipses occur, I have not
bothered to copy down the entire list of offerings, selecting
only those that struck me as odd, either because
of the incongruity of the choice or because I could not,
in the wildest flights of dyslexic, schizophrenic-fancy,
imagine the criteria employed in arriving at the selections.
I am fully aware that some of the words in my
text are not everyday items you find about the house,
but I included those anyway; attention is drawn, particularly,
to the suggestions for the more common
words.
arthropods - arthropod, arthritis, arthritides, Orthodox,
arthritic
gallium - galling, gleam, galleon, gulling, gallon,
gelling, gullying, gamily
thermionic - sermonic, thorniness, sermonize,
thermoset, theorematic, thermometer
interstellar - interstate, interstitial, interstice, interceder,
underscore, understate
q.v. - TV
caecum - chicane, cocaine, cocoon, caucus,
caching, cactus, coaching
Myriapoda - moribund, morbidly, marriageable,
marigolds, moratoria, marauding
vermiform - forevermore, Vermonter, verifiers,
vermicular, formicary, forefinger
neuromuscular - murmurously
nucleic - nucleate, nutlike, neglect, knuckled,
nutlet, nickeled, niggled
streptococcus - stereopticons, scrupulosities, stroboscopes
staphylococcus - sycophantically, sycophantishly
lakeside-lattice, legislate, legalized, localized,
leakiest, ladyship, regicide
Algonquian - Eglantine, Halogenating, Accounting,
Eglantines, Ugandans, Accountant
yellowjackets - illogicality, illogicalities
unmanageable - unimaginable, manageable, inimitable,
manageably, amendable
breastfeeding - breathtaking
horseracing - resurfacing, reassuring
childbearing - ...chalkboards
unemotional - ...emanational, unmentionable,
unanimously
nonflammable - mentionable, nonviolently, monosyllable,
nonvolatile
reawakens - weakens, wakens, reddens, rattans,
weaklings, walk-ins, walk-ons
Beaujolais - beguiles, bobtails, beauteous, bodiless,
beauties, bellicose
Bordeaux - burdocks, bureaux, broadax, paradox,
birdseed, bordellos, birdhouse
...Well, you get the idea. I had some fun substituting
the program's words in my sentences and in simple
sentences, too. For instance,
All arachnids and insects are arthritic.
Scientists at NASA are developing an interstate
rocket that will take 20 light-years to complete
its journey.
They removed his formicary appendix. (No wonder
he acted as if he had ants in his pants!)
Some children are unimaginable at the age of
five.
Why is she still breathtaking when her child is
already four?
Steve Cauthens has devoted his life to resurfacing.
The prisoner was unmentionable when the verdict
was read out.
I certainly do enjoy some bordellos or beauties
with my steak.
As if the preceding were not enough, I also noticed,
assuming that the program did not stop and
offer choices if the word was in its memory, that oligopsony
is in, but psychoneurotic is not; Winston is in,
Churchill is not; isosceles is in, scalene is not.
It is a good thing that the technical staff at
MicroSoft is not being asked to field questions about its
Spelling Check; I am not sure I would want to hear the
answers.
Finally, it might be worth mentioning that the
program has the capacity to store in a temporary
memory buffer about 100 words (proper names, for
instance) that it has identified as not stored in its dictionary.
The first time such a word is encountered, if
the operator chooses GO ON, the program stores it and
will recognize it when it recurs, obviating the need to
repeat the GO ON command. For example, if you are
writing an article on Churchill , not listed in the
37,000-entry dictionary, the program will stop at the
first encounter; but once you have signaled it to GO ON,
it will pass over any further repetitions of Churchill .
When the temporary memory has been filled, the following
message appears on the screen, which makes
me wonder why I am relying on the program at all:
NO FURTHER WORDS CAN BE REMEMBERED FOR CORRECT
MULTIPLE OCCURRANCES OR FOR GO ON.
Spelling check, check thyself!
“In court, a prime CBS objective will be to refute characterizations
of Adams by Westmoreland's witnesses as a
rouge elephant within the CIA.” [From The Philadelphia
Inquirer , . Submitted by
.]
“John James Audubon led an extraordinary life and
enjoyed making cryptic comments about rumors that he
was, in fact, the Lost Dolphin.” [From an exhibition catalog,
Florida Painters: Past and Present , produced by the St.
Petersburg Historical Society, . Submitted by
.]
“How to protect your neighborhood against crime and
Jennifer Beals, star of `The Bride.' Live at Five.” [From a
tease on CBS-TV (New York), . Submitted by
.]
“We're going to need community cooperation so we can
strive for parody. If you use it, you pay for it.” [From
an article by Charles Moore, Albuquerque Journal , . Submitted by .]
“An owner of a Greenwich Village barbershop survived
being shot in the neck as he slept by a gunman who broke
into his house....” [From The New York Times , . Submitted by .]
“A crowd of only 22,449, including 7,613 no-shows,
watched as the Cardinals broke a three-game losing streak.”
[ Newsday , . Submitted by .]
“Last weekend, the Welcome Society, composed of original
Penn colony settlers, held its annual meeting....” [ The
Philadelphia Inquirer , . Submitted by .]
