Women on Language; Women in Language
Poet Muriel Rukeyser envisions Oedipus “old and
blinded” asking the Sphinx why he hadn't recognized
his own mother. It was, the Sphinx explains, his
answer to the riddle: “Man.”
“... You didn't say anything about woman.”
“When you say Man,” said Oedipus, “you include
woman too. Everyone knows that.” She said,
“That's what you think.”
Were Oedipus alive today he might offer the same
solution to the riddle. But he would indeed be feigning
naïveté to claim that generic man is now understood to
include woman. Even the most casual observers of social
movements and language changes are conscious of what
some might call the crusade for nonsexist language.
(Careful feminist writers avoid unthinking use of imagery
redolent of colonialism and militarism.) Though the Seneca
Falls convention of 1848 noted and deplored the silence
about women in the Declaration of Independence
and though nonfeminists have worked toward removing
sexism from English, most current activity stems from
the women's movement that began in the 1960s.
Feminists concerned about language relentlessly
reveal language's capacity to discriminate against
women or to render them invisible. Poking and prodding
at contemporary speech and writing, feminists
condemn the use of a term identified with one sex or
gender to designate all humanity. (“Gender” is preferred
to “sex” in designating the cultural construct
rather than the purely biological. However, some recent
studies explore the connection between development
of linguistic gender and sex/gender, and the
question of anatomically determined language is fashionable.)
Mankind tacitly imposes male values on all of
humanity; manhours denies women's work as a measure;
manpower effaces women. So, too, feminists
lobby for gender-neutral terms when appropriate. A
familiar example: reasoning that in terms of job duties
the sex or gender of the person who passes peanuts on
an airplane is unimportant, editors of the Handbook of
Nonsexist Language propose flight attendant rather
than steward/stewardess and oppose gratuitous regendering
of job titles ( female flight attendant ). (A
court case notes a male purser and a female stewardess
with identical job descriptions, but different salary
scales.) Similarly, feminists discourage titles that identify
women's (but not men's) marital status (though
many users mistakenly assume Ms . a synonym for
Miss ).
More generally, feminists reveal and question implied
norms in language and hence in our consciousness,
ranging from the application form's unmarried
which suggests that marriage is the normal state (as
parents of twins imply double births expected, referring
to non-twins as singletons ) to more complex issues,
such as those associated with terms like masculine
and feminine . Anomalies in language become
evidence. What to make of the fact that one may be
henpecked but not cockpecked? That some of us are
cleaning ladies , but none of us is a “garbage gentleman”?
That girls , a term suggesting youth but not
dignity, have been females of any age, but the call on
television's Electric Company, “Hey, you guys,” summons
boys and girls alike?
The hypothetical modern Oedipus might join
some humans of both genders who carp at the most
radical-seeming alterations of the language. Opponents
of nonsexist language show passionate loyalty to
principles of etymology and tradition and unexpected
respect for grace and style (admittedly frequent victims
of inclusion of the feminine pronoun). More subtle
and less readily articulated objections probably exist.
But few proponents of nonsexist language are
ignorant of the claims of etymology, of custom, of
aesthetics, or even of the inappropriateness of gender-neutral
terms in a nongender neutral world. For them,
as for most feminists, political considerations are primary.
This explains support of “herstory” or “`wim-min,”
terms that finesse etymology to emphasize the
male-orientation of conventional history and to eliminate
the man in the word woman . (When etymology
serves political concerns etymology is honored. For example,
one writer cites a preference for cunt over vagina ,
because of the latter's derivation from a Latin
word meaning `sheath,' often sheath for a sword.) The
feminist position recognizes the power of language.
Language is viewed not only as the product but the
shaper of culture and as such is able to perpetuate or
discourage discrimination or oppression. (In spite of
symphony auditions of barefoot, screened musicians,
church hymnals laced with maternal imagery for God,
commencement addresses to “Women and men of
Yale,” affirmative action and the resulting tokenism,
few feminists think the cause won. Attitudes toward
women, often assumed to be natural and hence sacred,
are not easily changed.) Nonsexist language is no universal
antidote. But most feminists, even recognizing
the influence of preverbal and nonverbal forces and
various sexist institutions, see acceptance of sexist language
as an insidious poison.
This retreading of English, this adjusting of it,
altering it, bandaging, and plastering it to promote a
particular vision of society is the most widely perceived
activity of feminists interested in language. But
it is arguably the simplest philosophically and, though
this is relatively unimportant, the least attractive. (A
familiar but irrelevant complaint against feminists is
that they lack charm, as though an unappealing style
negates the justice of a cause. Rukeyser's Sphinx was
not very affable, either.) After all, those who undertake
this dirty work are necessarily naysayers, rule-givers,
censors of the word rather than bringers of it.
Generally anti-elitist and anti-authoritarian by declaration,
feminist alterers of language find themselves
corralled with prescriptive grammarians and linguists.
The issue of nonsexist language envisions men and
women as subject (or object) of language. Yet this is
but one aspect of gender and linguistics, a subject that
has its own conferences, bibliographies, and college
courses. As literary critics, feminists look not only at
images of women in literature but at women as writers
and readers. So those interested in language look at
women not only as writers and readers, but also as
speakers and listeners. Such inquiry is less direct and
more exploratory than nonsexist language promotion,
but is no less political. Some theorists describe women's
relation to language as primarily a product of patriarchal
oppression; others, usually acknowledging oppression,
focus on women's strengths.
Most investigators, feminist and nonfeminist alike,
agree that women's vernacular differs from men's: Jespersen
listed adjectives favored by women, noted
women's use of “little” intensifiers. Feminists ponder
causes, implications. Does the close adherence of British
women of all classes to accepted proper norms suggest
women's repression? Their conservatism? Their
upward mobility? What attitude should feminists take
to women's suggested more frequent use of tag endings
(“It's a nice day, isn't it?” “We'll vote Democratic,
won't we?”)? Identified by early feminist linguist Robin
Lakoff, women's frequent use of tag endings has been
both discounted by some but not all empirical studies
and re-examined by other studies that distinguish different
kinds of tag endings used by men and women.
Those feminists who emphasize success within the
world as we know it tend to encourage women to
purge their speech of tag endings and to retrain themselves
to speak in what is perceived as a more masculine,
more assertive way. Others, emphasizing women's
particular values, urge retention of this and other features
of women's talk (for example, women frequently
assume noncompetitive roles in conversation), suggesting
that women's talk encourages participation and
the likelihood of consensus.
Such analyses of language pass as traditional in
form if not in content. They echo the old question,
posed regularly by missionaries, anthropologists, and
linguists, as to whether women speak (or “chatter,” a
word used only for females and nonhumans) a different
language, a dialect, a “genderlect” with each other
and with men, whether they can, do, or should speak
what the title of Dale Spender's book calls Man Made
Language . The answers often appear in measured, academic
prose. When offered by feminists, the answers
frequently appear in a style that is marked by word
play dependent on written forms; a style that is unconventional,
mannered, at its best witty; a style that
suggests alternatives to those styles that feminists
would designate male-influenced. For it is no praise
for most feminists to be included within the best accepted
(for which, read “male-endorsed”) tradition.
(Admittedly, no party completely purges its rhetoric of
terms like phallologocentric, however.) Such a style
marks both a reference work, A Feminist Dictionary ,
and the writings of theologian Mary Daly.
A Feminist Dictionary , edited by influential
Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler along with Ann
Russo, suggests the style and the substance of some
recent feminist discourse. The editors disclaim objectivity.
Yet, they imply, conventional lexicographers are
not objective, though they neither recognize nor admit
it. For example, in lexicographers' frequent reliance on
“best authors” as a source, dictionaries draw evidence
from men, more frequently published and admired,
and not women. Other significant editorial practices:
the Feminist Dictionary lexicogaphers refuse to label a
word like herstory a coinage. All words are coinages,
the editors claim, and they resist charting relations
between their entries and an “authorized” or canonized
list of words. A Feminist Dictionary includes new
words and new definitions; words from utopian literature
suggest “what might be”; definitions are elaborate,
the stated aim to stimulate research or theoretical
development.
Under “A,” for example, the lexicographers provide
entries for Adam, Ad feminam, ageism, “Ain't I a
Woman” (Sojourner Truth's speech), and amniocentesis .
“Z” is limited to three entries: Zamani Soweto sisters,
Zeitgeist (`Spirit of liberty, equality, and sorority'),
and Zugassent (a term for male continence as
practised by the Oneida utopian community). Under
“L,” entries include Latin/Greek , defined by Aphra
Behn, cited in Dale Spender's book, as `Secret codes
supplied through an education traditionally denied
women.' Another entry under L is Laadan , a language
constructed by linguist Suzette Hayden Elgin and first
used in her science fiction novel Native Tongue , a language
which is designed to contain many “woman
function” words not included in English. (British linguist
Deborah Cameron in Feminism and Linguistic
Theory doubts these lacunae, suggesting that English
is flexible, and that women are disadvantaged primarily
by alienation from high language.)
The energetic defining and developing of a
woman's language, the inevitable doubting and questioning
of it, is energized by the work of French feminists,
and is displayed in the verbal acrobatics of radical
feminist theologian Mary Daly. For example, Daly
describes the title of one of her early books,
Gyn/Ecology , as saying “exactly what I mean to say.” It
is “a way of wrenching back some wordpower,” and in
a way not “a-mazing” (a typical Daly twirl of language
to make the reader re-examine words) to our “fore-sisters
who/were the Great Hags,” terms used in unconventional
ways. Tacitly, Daly, like most feminists,
invokes an earlier, quieter voice, that of Virginia
Woolf. Woolf identified but did not describe “a
woman's sentence” and, in the same text, wrote of
women ancestors (for example, Shakespeare's putative
sister) who was silent, silenced by a society dominated
by men. Women's language is often metonymy for
women's literary style. Woolf here suggests two lines of
thought currently pursued by feminist linguists; feminists
both seek to describe women's language and to
explore the cluster of related conditions summarized
under the rubric “silence.” The discussion by women
about women's language is lively; the discussion of the
related and complementary topic, women's silence, is
elaborate, complex, and a bit sad. Tillie Olsen identifies
silent periods when women are diverted from their
work by needs of their families; Spender talks of “silence
upon silence” that has kept women's experience
from being encoded; Adrienne Rich, in On Lies,
Secrets and Silences , sees women's struggle for self-determination
“muffled or silenced over and over”;
most recently, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar chart
women authors' apparent alienation from language,
their frequent use of pseudonyms an attempt at renaming
or, really, naming themselves. Feminists have
much to say about men's claim that women talk too
much. To many, it is significant that the privilege of
naming, granted to Adam, was denied to Eve.
Modern feminists interested in language may be
sisters to Rukeyser's Sphinx. The Sphinx may be silent,
as in many traditions, or not, but she and Oedipus,
who did not recognize parents of either gender, probably
do not understand the same language.
The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing
The Nonsexist Word Finder
The subject of nonsexist language is a matter of
genuine concern, not only to women [see page 1 of this
issue] but to everyone. It ill behooves us to be unfair to
any segment of the population, and it is not only immoral
but illegal to discriminate against people on
virtually any basis. In recent decades, certain changes
have taken place in the language that reflect voluntary
choices of the words used to characterize people; these
have focused largely on the conscious and conscientious
substitution of neutral, sexless words like individual(s),
person , and people for terms that normally denote
only males. Journalists and other commentators have
sometimes taken a facetious view of the situation, suggesting
that person , itself, is sexist because -son denotes
`male offspring,' that words like manhole are sexist,
and that even woman ( wo + man ) is sexist. By this
time the humor, if there was any there to begin with,
has worn very thin, indeed, and the end of it would be
welcome. Then, too, there have been the campaigners
who have gone to what some regard as opposite extremes:
if the head of a committee is known to be a
man or a woman, then chairman or chairwoman must
surely be the proper denotation; if the sex of the person
is not known, then chairperson , though awkward-sounding,
is the preferred form. But it is patently ridiculous
to refer to someone whose sex is known as a
chairperson . Chair should be reserved for the office of
the chairperson, not the person holding the office. Yet,
many prefer chair to chairperson on the grounds of
brevity and because it avoids the awkwardness of the
longer alternative. Miller and Swift [M&S] treat this
problem and seem to believe that it has been solved:
The lexicographer Alma Graham points out that
chair has been recognized, in the sense of “the occupant
of the chair ... as invested with its dignity,”
since the seventeenth century just as the
Crown has been used for the monarch, or the Oval
Office has come to stand for the President of the
United States. “Address your remarks to the chair”
illustrates metonymy, a figure of speech in which
something is called by the name of something else
associated with it. Nobody understands an injunction
to “address the chair” as an order to talk to a
piece of furniture. [pp. 33-34]
The final sentence is about as valid as would be the
comment that nobody understands such an injunction
as an order to write the address of the chairperson on a
dozen envelopes, either. But there are other specious
arguments in the above statement:
1) Recognized ? By whom? The fact that Graham
has found that citations for such usage exist (how old
they may be is of little consequence) is not to be construed
as evidence that they (necessarily) existed in
sufficient profusion to warrant acceptance by the English-speaking
populations. Moreover, what are the contexts
in which the citations were found? There are
many difficulties inherent in adducing citational evidence
unsupported by frequency. There are many
other instances of the misuses of citational evidence,
not only by users of dictionaries but by lexicographers
themselves: there is no way, using the citational materials
at present appearing in dictionaries as prima facie
evidence, that one would be justified in assuming that
a broad statistical segment of English speakers is
thereby represented; even the most cursory examination
of entries in the OED (which I assume to be the
source of Graham's information) will rapidly, ineluctably
lead the observer to realize that
a) the evidence in the published work is quite thin,
and
b) the conclusions drawn by the OED's definers
and commentators often cannot be supported by
citational evidence—at least, not the citational
evidence that appears in the published work.
2) That chair is used metonymically in the same
way as the Crown and the Oval Office is true, but to
refer to the office, not to the person occupying it.
Certainly, in the case of the Crown , as ample evidence
will show, reference is so made specifically to avoid
mentioning a particular regent and not as a figure of
speech employed for rhetorical effect. As for the Oval
Office , it is mostly used when the referent is `authority
of the executive branch of the government' to avoid
identifying the (incumbent) president personally and
to indicate official policy. In both cases, the point is
exactly opposite that identified by Graham: it is the
position, institution, authority, etc. being referred to
and not “the occupant.” By the same token, when people
address the chair , they address the office, whoever
might hold it, and not the incumbent individual.
I find little to dispute with M&S in the matter of
principle. But there are two elements of their argument
that merit further comment. The first is that I
find their interpretation of the evidence often skewed;
the second is that while adjustment to lexicon, which
they have always strongly advocated, is one thing,
modification of grammar is another.
In referring to an item in The New York Times in
which youth is used to refer to a young woman, M&S
write:
Though the term may once have been anomalous
when used of a young woman, today it is a recognized
common-gender noun, and the next round of
dictionaries will no doubt add their authority to
the change. [p. 6]
The First Edition of The Random House Dictionary of
the English Language lists youth with a definition, “a
young person, esp. a young man”; the Second Edition,
published after the M&S Handbook and, presumably,
in the “next round” they refer to, defines the word as
“a young person, esp. a young man or male adolescent.”
Thus the evidence at the RHD offices indicated
the need for reinforcement of the notion of maleness
associated with the word, not, as M&S suggest, a trend
toward epicenism. I am not entirely in agreement with
the RHD treatment, for, personally, I believe that
youth has lately appeared more and more often in
context like youth center, youth rehabilitation , etc.,
where the context is clearly common-gender, and the
foregoing is merely set out as a warning to those who
try to predict what lexicographers are likely to do. On
the other hand, I do not have the hard evidence at
hand and assume that the RHD does.
The following appears, in bold italics, on page 8:
To go on using in its former sense a word whose
meaning has changed is counterproductive. The
point is not that we should recognize semantic
change, but that in order to be precise, in order to
be understood, we must.
I am not sure that I should have characterized the
perpetuation of obsolete or archaic meanings as “counterproductive”:
perhaps “wrong,” “misleading,” “ambiguous,”
or “old-fashioned” would have been closer to
the mark; phrased another way, I must agree that people
ought to use words in their current senses if they
expect to be understood. Most do, of course, use them
that way. When will people learn that dictionaries are
not the product of the collective imaginations of those
who prepare them or the manifestations of the dreams
of a single lexicographer but the result of lengthy,
painstaking research to determine how the language is
being used, the analysis and codification of the results,
and then their organization into a usable reference
source? What is “counterproductive” is the notion that
speakers of a language have to recognize semantic
change: they don't “recognize” it, they create it. Of
course, if a researcher tampers with the evidence,
making a unilateral, unsupported claim or assumption
that a word means something that it does not, then
that does not constitute semantic change: it is what is
known as dirty work at the crossroads, and M&S are
indulging in a bit of mischief by suggesting that semantic
change either has taken place or is taking place
because they have some evidence that a certain change
in usage had crept in. Notwithstanding the unfortunate
fact that the gathering and assessment of citational
evidence is not what it should (or might) be, I
should still put my money on professional lexicographers
and their resources rather than on M&S.
In Chapter 1, “ Man as a False Generic,” M&S
question whether the definitions “2. the creature,
Homo sapiens , at the highest level of animal development,
characterized esp. by a highly developed brain.
3. the human race; mankind ...” [from the 1984
College Edition of the RHD ] are “still fully operative
or whether the first, limited meaning [`an adult male
person, as distinguished from a boy or woman.'] has,
in effect, become the only valid one in modern English.”
I trust that this is a fillip of propaganda and not
a serious query. To be sure, it is the most common
meaning, which is why it is listed first. But one must
contend not only with the way the word might be used
today but with the evidence of centuries of culture
reflected in billions upon billions upon billions of
words of text all of which shape the way we think and
speak. There is nothing wrong with trying to change
that shape, and advocates of nonsexist English have
worked miracles in the short time since they have succeeded
in making their concerns known. But to deny
that the oblique senses of man are still very much with
us is mere optimistic folly. And there is no gainsaying
the fact that the first sense of man (`male human')
tends to contaminate (if that is the right word) the
oblique senses. But grammar enters the picture here,
too, and dictionaries are remiss in syntactic description
of how the language works in comparison with what
its words mean, how they are spelled and pronounced,
and where they came from. To put it differently, it is
not (yet) the function of the dictionary to show that
articles (definite or indefinite) are not usually found
preceding man in senses 2 and 3 but are invariably
present before sense 1 uses. No normal speaker of English
encountering Man wants but little here below
wonders—except facetiously—why women have been
ignored. More likely, they read wants as meaning
`desires' rather than `lacks,' but that might well be a
deliberate, facetious ambiguity. We use terms like Neanderthal
Man, Peking Man , etc., without believing
for a moment that there were no Neanderthal or Peking
women (leaving aside Peking Toms). Cartoonists
might depict a child asking a parent about Neanderthal
women, but that is recognizably a joke that depends
for its humor on the characterization of the
questioner as a fool: that it is a child is irrelevant; it
might be Edith Bunker. Perhaps the most significant
comment on the failure to distinguish between man
generic and man `male human' appears on page 25:
When Edith Bunker, on the television series “All
in the Family,” quoted Sam Walter Foss's
“Let me live in my house by the side of the
road
And be a friend of man,”
Archie's response was, “Yeah, I heard about them
kind of houses in the army.”
Is it possible that M&S are serious in invoking Archie
Bunker, the archbigot of all time, as a model of understanding
and a paragon of modern English usage?
There are many thousands of such jokes in every language,
for they depend for their humor on polysemy or
homonymy, which exists in all languages. Yet, this
nonsense is compounded.
Lexicographers appear to agree. Although they
do not label the supposedly generic meaning of
man obsolete, they write some definitions as
though we all know it is. For example, Webster's
Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (1986) defines a
man-about-town as a “wordly and socially active
man.” But if man sometimes means “any human
being,” should not the definition of man-about-town
read “a wordly and socially active person of
the male sex”? How can the definers be sure we
will know without being told that a man-about-town
is never a woman? [p. 8]
On the face of it, one might dismiss this question as
just so much rubbish and wonder how people of the
intelligence of M&S could possibly have come to frame
it. The answer has nothing to do with their cause,
however, but with the simple fact that dictionaries are
not exercises in bi-unique substitutability; in other
words, if one of the senses of run is `operate' (as in She
runs an engine factory ), that does not make it valid to
assume that one can substitute operate for run in We
run in the marathon every year . Although recognizing
this as a shortcoming of dictionaries and assigning it
arbitrarily to what, for lack of a better term, we might
call the “genius” of the language, might seem trivial to
the casual observer, it is a valid matter for concern in
the realm of lexicology. Using it to bolster an argument
is plainly a mistake. Unfortunately, the mistake is compounded
and perpetuated by dragging in expressions
like man in the street, the average working man , and
others, and, as a result, the entire argument degenerates.
Perhaps we ought to be saying street person for
the first and working stiff for the second, but the first
has been pre-empted and it seems a little incongruous
to find anyone actively seeking to be called a “stiff.”
There are actually two things at work in the
Handbook : one is a genuine concern, when a generalized
statement about people is to be made, about being
unfair to women through the use of references
which, though denotatively neutral, carry the strong
scent of maleness. That is, if you are going to say
something about people, then avoid using the word
man (for example) because, regardless of the ancillary
definitions one might find in the dictionary, in its most
common meaning and use it denotes `male' and the
strong connotations of that denotation are carried over
to all other applications of the word: it is not, in fact,
as neutral as some believe it to be. If that is what M&S
mean, why don't they just say so? The other thing is
that generalized statements employing reference to
males constitute a not-so-subtle form of propaganda
interpretable either as pro-male, anti-female, or both.
(A third possibility, though naturally not treated
by M&S, is out-and-out misanthropy vs. misogyny, for
the notion of simple man-hating should not be ruled
out entirely. As a male reader, I get strong vibrations
from this book that the authors advocate the paranoid
view that everything in the language that is not exactly
as they would like it to be is the result of a gigantic
hate program against women. In that context, one is
given to wonder about the circumstances in languages
that have grammatical, not sex gender.)
The remainder of Chapter 1 is mainly a catalogue
of misinterpretations, aberrations, and plain errors regarding
the use of man as a generic. A number of
excellent suggestions to help people avoid the inadvertent
expression of prejudice are offered, albeit interspersed
among excoriating, castigatory comments that
are entirely irrelevant to The Cause, hence diminish
the impact and strength of purpose of both. It is indeed
a pity that the authors persist in expressing their
ideas as they do, for were they more practical and not
so aggressively all-inclusive in their condemnation of
the slightest hint of maleness, they would probably
serve their cause more successfully.
Curiously, British English (of all things!) has provided
a solution of sorts to the perennial ancillary
problem of the “neutral he ” as the pronoun of reference
in the language. In British English it is no longer
considered a solecism to use the plurals they, their,
them, theirs as a generalized pronoun for words like
eyeryone, everybody, anyone, anybody , etc. Thus, it
has become standard (British) English to say or write,
Everyone can get their copy at the bookshop, Everybody
should make certain to take their own coat , etc. I
don't know about Canada, Australia, etc., but in the
U.S. this kind of referent usage is considered a heinous
illiteracy (by those who consider such matters), and
those who wish to appear educated would be wise to
avoid it. It scarcely needs pointing out that the British
usage was not brought about by any sense of justice
toward women but by the apparent fact that the people
in Britain are not quite as uptight about usage as
the Americans. The second chapter of the Handbook is
devoted in its entirety to The Pronoun Problem, mercifully
concluding with the expression of some doubt
that an artificial generic pronoun, like hir, thon, per ,
and other abominations, is likely to take hold.
Chapter 3, Generalizations, treats with good
sense methods that can be employed to avoid sexism in
a wide variety of constructions. Alas, M&S continue to
take up the cudgel, carping against writing which, in
some cases, antedates recognition of a problem: it is
like nattering on about how awful the Romans were
because they condoned slavery; rather a waste of
space, time, and motion, Wot? Much that might have
been offered with sober good advice here is contaminated
by an obsessive concern with the identification
of the sex of the perpetrator of past injustices. The
approach is vindictive and castigatory. Other libertarian
movements advocate similar policies: it is not
enough that wrongs be righted; the discrimination and
other injustices suffered by past generations, back
through the ages, must be avenged, and the descendants
of those responsible must be made to pay for
those crimes and somehow to compensate the descendants
of the sufferers. Such policies are not only
asinine, they are—and here I have found another appropriate
place for the buzz word of the decade—
counterproductive: the energies expended on vengeance
are entirely wasted and should be channeled to
changing the present system to ensure that they are not
continued. Although we continue to track down
criminals who did their dirt in WWII, we do business
with and carry on other normal relations with the
descendants of the Nazis and of those who bombed
Pearl Harbor. The sins of our forebears should not be
visited upon us. In the same way, those who support
equal rights for women would be well advised to concentrate
on the issues at hand and not contaminate
their cause with trivia, like whether Romeo and Juliet
or Antony and Cleopatra ought to have the order of
the names reversed in odd-numbered years so that
women get top billing. While that has not been literally
proposed (as far as I know), the fact that the men's
names appear first has been used by some feminists to
illustrate the manifestation of an attitude that women
have had to put up with all these centuries.
Seeing Women and Girls as People, Chapter 4,
settles down to some good advice, describing what
might be offensive to women and how to get around it
through paraphrase. M&S also go out of their way to
praise usages that neatly sidestep offensive usage. Specific
cliches— working wife, working mother, house-wife ,
etc.—are discussed, with sober explanations of
why they are offensive and with suggestions for suitable
alternatives.
Chapter 5 covers Parallel Treatment, quite properly
bearing down on descriptions in which “a man
and his petite blonde wife” appear. They go too far,
though, when they attack “I lost my job” in place of
“They fired me” on the grounds that such phrasing
contributes to “the harmful stereotype of `woman as
victim.' ” What unmitigated nonsense! Men say that,
too, of course. To be fair, M&S also criticize identifications
(mainly from news stories) of women as “mother
of five” and other gratuitous characterizations that are
not only irrelevant to the item's newsworthiness but are
rarely offered about men.
Chapter 6 discusses, under A Few More Words, a
number of suffixes ( -trix, -ess , etc.) and words ( hero/
heroine, alumnus/alumna/alumni/alumnae , etc.) that
apparently offend the authors: they campaign for the
elimination of la différence . My own attitude is that I
find such terms not in the least denigrating: Why
should a woman object to being called a heroine, a
divorcée, or an actress any more than being called a
female or a woman? I see the rather boring point
about using alumni to cover both men and women,
and I quite agree that the use of relatively newer and
less widely used terms like authoress, aviatrix , and
poetess seems to be a deliberate, unwarranted attempt
to identify someone as a female; but a graduate of the
feminine gender is a `woman graduate' = alumna , the
`first woman dancer in a ballet company' is a prima
ballerina (I've never heard of a “prime ballerino”), and
a `woman opera star' is a diva or prima donna . I
hesitate to point out that we use prima donna of men,
too, because my critics will say that they disapprove of
the term's second life as designating a “temperamental
person of either sex.' These, of course, are loanwords
borrowed from languages that have (or had) grammatical
gender. The same is true of heroine and thousands
of other words. What are we to do? The answer is not
clear unless we accept a policy of drawing up a (very)
long list of taboo words. A short list is not impossible,
for it would join words like nigger, kike, mackerelsnapper ,
and others.
The book concludes with A Brief Thesaurus,
which lists a few offending words and their suggested
alternatives. If this were indeed to have been a handbook ,
users would have found a longer list more useful.
There follows a desexing section on maxims (for “He
who laughs last laughs best” read “The last laugh is the
best”: not only does it not say the same thing but the
second is totally lacking in the rhetorical devices
packed into the first), and a two-page bibliography,
reference notes to chapters, and an index. On the last
page is a short biographical note about the authors in
which, through pronoun references, we learn that
both are women.
The Nonsexist Word Finder , subtitled A Dictionary
of Gender-Free Usage , opens with a foreword by
Miller and Swift. Most of the book is an A-Z listing of
words that are, for the most part, sexist, but, as the
author sets forth in the User's Guide, “Some words are
included here because they are ambiguous: Is a belly
dancer always a woman? Is a Canadian Mountie always
a man?” Odd question, that; I had to phone the
Canadian consulate to find out that there have been
female Mounties since 1975, though one might question
their approval of being so designated. As for belly
dancers, not only have I never heard of a male belly
dancer but find the very idea more exotic than erotic.
Put on what, in the military, they like to call a “need-to-know”
basis, then why not distinguish between
belly dancer and belly danseuse ?—though I daresay
the author, Rosalie Maggio, would scarcely approve of
danseuse . Put another way, are not these very questions
sexist? In one sense they are, but if people were to
pay hard cash to watch a belly dancer only to find that
it was a man, I think they might have some justification
in asking for their money back. I would feel the
same way if I paid to see the Rockettes only find that
they were “Rockets.” There would probably be little
chance of a refund if the place were run by a feminist.
Is a men's room attendant always a man? Any
man who has traveled in Europe knows the answer to
be No.
The entries themselves are more or less helpful,
depending on the information one is seeking. The
treatment ranges from an explanation of a term to a
list of alternatives. Here are two typical entries:
according to Hoyle according to/by the book, according
to/playing by the rules, absolutely correct,
cricket, in point of honor, on the square,
proper/correct way to do things. See Appendix A
for the rationale on avoiding sex-linked metaphors,
expressions and figures.
acolyte usage of this word varies from one time,
culture, and religion to another. In the Roman
Catholic Church, for example, women can function
as acolytes (one of the minor orders of the diaconate)
but may not be officially installed as acolytes.
Insofar as it means “attendant,” an acolyte can be
either a man or a woman.
Reference to the designated section in Appendix A
reveals a brief discussion of the subject of sex-linked
metaphors which quite correctly points out that many
common metaphors, metonyms, and allusions refer to
males— Achilles' heel, before you can say Jack Robinson,
Bluebeard, David and Goliath , and many more.
(Why should one assume Hoyle to be a man?) Maggio
does not get bent out of shape about these, providing
the following advice:
There is nothing wrong with any of [these
images] in themselves. However, their cumulative
effect tends to be overpowering. This dictionary
lists alternatives for many of these expressions, not
so that they can be removed from the language,
but so that you can attempt to balance your writing
and speaking with both female and male
images or use alternatives when gender-fairness is
not possible. In addition, there are times when it is
awkward and illogical to use a male metaphor for
a woman. There is nothing ungrammatical or
wrong about saying “She's a real Johnny-comelately,”
but it grates.
It is hard to imagine anyone, regardless of sex, enjoying
being referred to as a Johnny-come-lately . The
self-styled humorists could have a field day with this
one, too, suggesting “She's a Jacquelyn of all trades” or
the sexless Robin Crusoe . I looked up in the dictionary
section a few of the allusions that cannot really be
paraphrased. At Bluebeard , advice is given to avoid
reference to him completely, which is understandable
on nonlinguistic grounds, too. Superman (the character)
is not in, nor is there an entry for Mutt and Jeff.
Don Quixote is listed in the Appendix, but I could not
find him in the dictionary, nor could I find quixotic,
Queen of Sheba, Jeeves, Venus, Einstein (for `genius'),
Hitler (for `demagogue, tryant'), Attila the Hun (for
`barbarian'), Robinson Crusoe (for `castaway; lonely
person')—but man Friday is in— Horatio Alger, Narcissus ,
etc. But what are we to do about eponyms?
Were the two Washingtons (state and D.C.) named for
George or Martha? Some people (mistakenly) think
that the slang term for a commode was named for
Thomas Crapper , English plumber. Leotards and daguerreotypes
will have to go.
For the most part, as might be expected, Maggio's
alternatives and equivalents are phrasal definitions
which, if assiduously applied, would effectively sterilize
all writing. The interesting and useful entries are
those in which the author explains, without the frenetic
anguish that pervades the M&S book, why the
term is offensive. I cannot say that I agree with everything
she says nor with every item selected for inclusion,
but, on the whole, the book comes off as a very
good treatment of the subject.
Such books are an education. Were I in a position—say
as editor of a newspaper—in which I was
responsible for treating the kinds of subjects that might
be construed as sensitive to antiwoman prejudice, I
should find The Nonsexist Word Finder the sanest of
the lot and the easiest to understand and use. Compared
with The Handbook of Nonsexist Writing , it
covers much more territory and readers are made to
feel that the author is cueing them in to the information
she thinks they ought to have. The Handbook is a
polemical work; despite its title, it is not organized the
way a handbook for writers, editors, etc., normally
would be. It might have been more useful as a handbook
had it cleaved more closely to the structural
model of standard style manuals. My greatest objection
to it is its argumentative, disputatious tone, which
frequently borders on the vituperative. It is as if you
looked up, say, infer/imply in a usage manual and the
author's treatment, in place of an explanation and
sound advice, were an unpleasant diatribe against anyone
so dense and rude as to have had to look up the
entry to begin with. M&S are testy—which they may
have every right to be in light of the trials and tribulations
of women—but their moody petulance does not
lead to a winning, let alone diplomatic style, and their
purpose is accordingly ill served.
As for me, I do my utmost to avoid language that
may offend people, including men. I refuse, out of
conservatism and sheer curmudgeonliness to give up
English grammar (like the “neutral” pronouns of reference)
when I cannot paraphrase without losing what
little elegance there may be in my writing, and I refuse
to sacrifice metonyms, metaphors, allusions, and
other figures of speech that contain male referents,
substituting “big liar” for Baron Munchhausen and
“Peeping Thomasina” for Peeping Tom or trying to get
around saying or writing Pollyanna, say uncle, raise
Cain , or Jesus Christ !
Laurence Urdang
“Punch Ross to Stop Child Abuse.” [Campaign poster for
Anna Mae Ross, Miami, Florida. Submitted by .]
How Big Is Your Dictionary?
Britain and North America are not only literate,
but “dictionarate.” In Britain, the dictionary's
“success is shown by the fact that more than 90 percent
of households possess at least one, making the dictionary
far more popular than cookery books (about 70
percent) and indeed significantly more widespread
than the Bible (which was to be found in 80 percent of
households in England in 1983, according to the Bible
Society”). In North America, “It was established some
years ago that there are more dictionaries than television
sets ...” (Preface, American Heritage Illustrated
Encyclopedic Dictionary , 1987).
So you, dear reader, probably own a dictionary.
But how big is it? Let us consider two recent British
dictionaries. The Collins COBUILD English Language
Dictionary of 1987 ( Cobuild ) boasts xxiv plus
1703 pages. The Collins English Dictionary of 1986
( CED ) has xxvii plus 1771. Looking at these figures, or
at the books themselves, one would assume that the
two dictionaries are of roughly the same size. And in
one sense they are. But between water and watt there
are fifty-four main entries in Cobuild and 148 in CED .
They share such entries as water biscuit and waterworks .
But in addition CED alone enters water measurer
(a `bug'), Watford (a `town north of London'),
etc. On the other hand, the shared main entry for
watershed has twenty-three words in CED but 93 in
Cobuild . And the word waterless is a main entry
in Cobuild , explained in twenty words, whereas in
CED it is naught but a so-called “undefined runon”—merely
mentioned, but not explained explicitly,
as a sub-entry at water . So CED enters more items
than Cobuild , but devotes less space to explaining
them. And that is probably as it should be. CED is
intended for the adult native speaker of English, whose
main concern is with understanding a large number of
unfamiliar items (including proper names) encountered
in reading and listening. Cobuild is intended for
the foreign learner of English, whose dual concern is
with understanding and using the core vocabulary of
English, and who, having achieved that aim, can
“graduate” to a dictionary for native speakers—like
CED .
More generally, the size of a dictionary is a function
of two variables: the number of items entered (its
“macrostructure”), and the amount of information
given about them (its “microstructure”). In Charles
McGregor's words, a dictionary that says “a lot about a
little” and one that says “a little about a lot” can end
up roughly the same size. Cobuild and CED are far
from being such polar opposites, but they exemplify
this general point.
In measuring dictionaries, how far can we rely on
the dictionaries' own estimates of their size? Let us
consider the dust-jacket blurbs of Cobuild, CED , and
two other native-speaker dictionaries: the British
Longman Dictionary of the English Language (Longman ,
1984) and the American Webster's Ninth New
Collegiate Dictionary ( W9 , 1983). Here is what they
say :
Cobuild: over 70,000 references
CED: 170,000 references
Longman: Over 225,000 definitions and
more than 90,000 headwords
W9: Almost 160,000 entries and 200,000
definitions
Both Longman and W9 estimate their macrostructure
( headwords/entries ) and their microstructure ( definitions ).
But what of Cobuild and CED ? What do they
mean by references ? In CED the relevant definition of
reference seems to be “a book or passage referred to,” or
perhaps “a mention or allusion”; in Cobuild , “something
such as a number or name that tells you where
you can obtain the information that you want, for example
from a book, list, or map....” We are none the
wiser. It is only from an article about CED that we
learn it has “171,000 entries,” which suggests that Collins
means by references what Merriam-Webster means by
entries . But CED and Cobuild certainly do not say so!
And what about Longman's headwords ? Their
relevant definition of headword is “a word or term
placed at the beginning (e.g. of a chapter or an entry
in a dictionary).” Does that mean that the number of
headwords equals the number of entries? And that
therefore Longman's macrostructure (number of entries )
is much smaller than that of W9 or CED ? We
need to look more closely at the meaning of entry .
For entry our four dictionaries have this to say in
their relevant definitions:
Cobuild: a short article about someone or something
in a dictionary or encyclopedia,...
CED: an item recorded, as in a diary, dictionary,
or account.
Longman: a dictionary headword [!], often together
with its definition.
W9: “4b ... (3): HEADWORD (4): a headword
with its definition or identification (5): VOCABULARY
ENTRY”
W9's relevant definition of headword does not
even mention dictionaries: “a word or term placed at
the beginning (as of a chapter or an entry in an encyclopedia)”.
But its definition of vocabulary entry is
about dictionaries only:
a word (as the noun book), hyphened or open compound
(as the verb book-match or the noun book
review), word element (as the affix pro-), abbreviation
(as agt), verbalized symbol (as Na), or term
(as man in the street) entered alphabetically in a
dictionary for the purpose of definition or identification
or expressly included as an inflected form
(as the noun mice or the verb saw) or as a derived
form (as the noun godlessness or the adverb globally)
or related phrase (as one for the book) run on
at its base word and usu. set in a type (as boldface)
readily distinguishable from that of the lightface
running text which defines, explains, or identifies
the entry
If we can sort out all the details here—no mean
task—it emerges that W9 's vocabulary entries include
both what I earlier called main entries (like watershed )
and what I called subentries (like waterless in
CED ). But it appears that Longman's headwords are
only those that are, or introduce, main entries. So we
still have no way of knowing whether Longman's macrostructure
is smaller or larger than W9 's! Nor do our
troubles end here. For in its Explanatory Notes (p.12),
W9 not only calls our attention “to the definition of
vocabulary entry in this book,” but also introduces us
to a wholly new notion, that of dictionary entry :
The term dictionary entry includes all vocabulary
entries as well as all boldface entries in the separate
sections of the back matter headed
“Abbreviations and Symbols for Chemical
Elements,” “Foreign Words and Phrases,”
“Biographical Names,” “Geographical Names,”
and “Colleges and Universities.”
No sooner have we assumed that W9's macrostructure
of “Almost 160,000 entries” means vocabulary entries ,
than we must face the possibility that it includes
such other dictionary entries as Harvard U., McGill
U ., and Abilene Christian U . Have they been counted
in? We simply do not know. But, as a British journalist
might say, we should be told. For W9's exemplary precision
in telling us what vocabulary entries and dictionary
entries are is offset by its vagueness about
which type of entry its PR-wallahs have counted for
their blurb.
Furthermore, our gratitude to Longman and W9
for saying something about the size of their microstructures
is offset by our sorrowful recognition of how
little they say. Counting definitions is a start. But a
definition can range from a single-word synonym ( entry
4b(3) : HEADWORD) to the 117 words of W9's definition
of vocabulary entry —and beyond! And the microstructure
of dictionaries includes more than just
definitions: it can embrace examples, illustrations,
synonym essays, usage essays, etymologies, and all
sorts of other information. Everyone talks nowadays
about making dictionaries user-friendlier. How about
making their publicity buyer-friendlier as well?
Aux armes, citoyens ! Let us strive to get dictionary
publishers to cry their wares in ways that allow us to
compare them. But, citoyens , let us not forget that the
value of a dictionary resideth not in size alone. The
best dictionary for me is the one that gives about the
word or phrase that puzzles me the information I need
at the moment I need it. People have different reference
needs at different times. The standardization of
the way dictionaries estimate how much they contain
need not, and should not, entail the standardization of
what they contain.
Those who have driven along the New York State
Thruway west of Albany encounter a string of town
names that (presumably) reflect the nationalities of
their original settlers. Amsterdam was settled by the
Dutch, Geneva by the Swiss, etc., till one passes by a
town apparently settled by the British—Sodus.
The Other Picture [caption]
A painting (1988) by Andrew Festing of about 156
of the 290 Members of Parliament who had earlier
been omitted from a portrait of Members, drawn by
lot, who had been immortalized in 1987 by June Mendoza.
The painting, which includes seven scenes on a
canvas 52 in. by 116 in., is entitled, “The Other Picture:
A view of the smoking room and library of the
House of Commons in March 1987, commissioned for
the House by 156 of the members of Parliament who
were not included in the Official Painting.”— The
Times , 7 May 1988, p.3.
The Fifth Estate
It began in medieval Europe, and in the late 20th
century it is everywhere in the world. Its overall
influence is profound but undiscussed, although aspects
of that influence are discussed constantly, under
headings like “language,” “education,” “standards,”
“literacy,” “literature,” “science,” and “medicine.”
There is little that it does not touch, being physically
present in the architecture of schools, psychologically
present when we talk and think about what makes us
civilized, linguistically present in much of modern
communication and in what we call educated usage.
Yet is has no name.
Let me therefore give it a name: “the scholarly
guild.” The phrase is a reminder of its medieval provenance,
its academic focus, and its corporate style. This
guild of scholars is one of the most successful enterprises
in the history of our species. Indeed, some of its
18th-century members gave our species the elevated
title Homo sapiens , as if thinking of themselves while
labeling all the birds, beasts, and bugs in creation.
The guild takes many forms now, but it retains much
of the Middle Ages, of the ecclesiastical Schoolmen,
who gathered together in quasi-monastic “colleges,”
behind walls that marked them off from the rest of the
world (a phenomenon that in England is still called
“town and gown”).
The men (and increasingly the women) who have
inherited the mantle of the Schoolmen have no trouble
recognizing each other. They live similar lives, conduct
similar courses, and with similar subventions go to
similar conferences and give similar papers on every
continent (much as David Lodge describes them in
Small World ). They are not as tightly knit as other
fraternities, past and present (Knights Templar,
Freemasons, Jesuits, Mafia, Ancient and Mystical Order
of the Rosy Cross, corporate executives of Coca-Cola
or Chrysler, or managers of labor unions). The
guild's gentler cohesion and lack of obvious international
hierarchies have contributed to its marked success
and curious anonymity. Its institutions take many
forms and survive under many different political
regimes. They possess neither a Vatican nor a Vicar-General
to report to, and, although the guild can at
times be arcane (with Latin charters and capping
ceremonies), by and large its doings are overt and benign.
Historically, the bulk of the human race has never
known a classroom, let alone a cloister or an ivory
tower, or met up with teachers empowered by letters
after their names. Nowadays, however, there are few
people who have not come across colleges and college
graduates or (at the periphery of things) been invited
to learn to read and write. That is a physical and
social measure of the guild's success. Its continuance
seems assured. Working in its favor is a social contract
with a three-part system established in every country
in the world:
Bottom-up progression: the young being inducted
into school at an early age and proceeding,
level by level, to institutions of ever “higher” learning,
stopping off for various reasons at various
levels, usually marked by tests and the distribution
of certificates providing a social grade. These processes
are often reinforced with such comments
from parents and teachers as, “You'll never get anywhere
nowadays without a college education.”
There are even league tables among nations, showing
the percentages of those who stay in the system
longer.
Top-down rank: an apex of professors and doctors
buttressed by the holders of college degrees
(many of them lower-level administrators, teachers,
and researchers within the system). These are in
turn surrounded and supported by holders of
school certificates and other qualifications. Spreading
out from the base of the pyramid are those
who have less suitably certified educations or no
formal education at all, people who may have
mixed feelings about “book learning,” “big words,”
“fancy degrees,” “eggheads,” “highbrows,” and “absent-minded
professors,” as well as the perils of
scholarship, science, and technology. Within the
system, there are others with similar mixed feelings,
but by and large the system remains intact.
We all send our kids to school.
Language appropriate to level: a basic ability to
read and write, followed by the capacity to handle
abstract usage, and, at a higher level, to be at ease
with what Philip Gove in Webster's Third called
ISV, `international scientific vocabulary.' For English,
this means a capacity to add the Latinate
onto the vernacular, then Greek onto the Latinate,
so that you can eat a hearty breakfast, and be cordial
afterwards without suffering from cardiac arrest.
Beyond English, entry into the guild may
mean acquiring a special language of education
(such as French in Senegal and English in Kenya),
because many of the world's tongues are not yet
(and may not ever be) part of the circle of standardized
print languages in which the work of the
guild can be conducted.
You and I, gentle reader, are accredited members
of the guild. This is demonstrated in a variety of ways:
a shared literacy and the assumptions and biases that
go with it; an awareness of what books are for; consciousness
and use of innumerable cultural allusions
and educated idioms; and a relative ease in reading a
periodical called VERBATIM, with sections called OBITER
DICTA and EPISTOLAE. We are generally capable of
conducting ourselves in the company of others who
have been group-educated to college level.
In school, college, and university, people have for
some six centuries been receiving diplomas and titles to
prove that, in varying degrees (a loaded word), they
are educated. Oftener than not, use of language establishes
membership and social-cum-educational rank as
clearly as any parchment. One of the less pleasant
ways in which such rank can be pulled is to label the
linguistically less secure “illiterate.” They, too, can
read and write, of course, but their “solecisms,” “barbarisms,”
and “vulgarisms” call for rebuke, and what
better rebuke than to treat them as if they did not
belong at all—to condemn them figuratively to the
outer darkness of the unlettered? Subtler still is the
label “self-educated” applied to people who have little
formal learning. Thomas Hardy described an extreme
case in Jude the Obscure .
The scholarly guild has always interested itself in
language, its standards and usage, its literature and
classics, its mediums/media of manuscript and print,
its academic apparatus and Latin tags. It places a high
value on success with such things. Its members have
tended to place a lower value on rural and urban dialect,
popular culture, and folklore. These are only accepted
into the canon of good usage and literature
after a long and vigorous rearguard action. Only now,
for example, is the soap opera (with its enormous social
impact) beginning to be recognized as a fit topic
for academic analysis. Movies and soaps attain respectability
when there are enough papers in learned journals
and theses in bound volumes to elevate them beyond
being “merely” popular. It is similar with
members low on the ladder of rank. Once upon a time
there was a playwright who knew little Latin and less
Greek. Much of his skill was acquired in the hurly-burly
of life, but his works had a certain merit. With
the passage of time he was canonized by the guild, and
his Complete Works have been annotated and organized
by folk with doctorates in Shakespearian Studies.
He made it to the top. It can be done, but it is rare.
The guild's institutions have, in their unobtrusively
ubiquitous way, become more powerful than
both the Catholic Christianity which gave them birth
and the regimes of Europe that scattered them round
the world. Their diaspora has been so successful that
most of us unreflectingly see schools as the natural
dispensers, controllers, instruments, and structures of
education—and of educated discourse—everywhere
on earth. It is another measure of the guild's success
that we can hardly imagine an alternative to it. The
utopian communes of anarchists, socialists, and hippies,
for example, have not even dented it.
After centuries of social and cultural direction
from the guild's leaders (the professorial elite, the academic,
scientific, and medical establishments), it is
hardly possible for anyone in the Western or Westernizing
world today to be reckoned (or to feel) educated
without having been to school—and the more school
the better. It may be possible to imagine alternatives
(or significant adaptations, if we wish them) only after
we have found the right label for the subject. Societies
seldom see what is central in their own cultures, having
much less trouble identifying it in the cultures of
others.
Historians have often discussed the “three estates”
of the Western world—nobility, church, and commons.
Many of us also from time to time talk about a
“fourth estate”—the media. The idea of social estates
can be taken one stage further, to the global agglomeration
of educational and scientific communities. They
constitute a “fifth estate,” an entity as worthy of anthropological
investigation as the Yanomama of the
Amazon or the Dinka of the Sudan. Unfortunately, just
as we find it hard to imagine the guild as a whole and
to envisage alternatives to it, so no organization exists
outside this fifth estate that could investigate it. Anthropology
is one of its own more recent subdivisions.
So who might assess these diplomaed assessors?
There appears to be only one solution. A traditional
aim of the guild is the quest for truth. If that
aim is sincere (and, by and large, it seems to be), the
fifth estate may yet turn the bright light of science and
scholarship on itself. That would be an interesting day.
Texican
English is a mongrel tongue. It is basically composed
of 29 percent Anglo-Saxon and 60 percent
Romance (including Latin and Greek) words. The remaining
20 percent are either invented ( laser, bogus,
splurge ) or have been borrowed from more than 200
other languages or dialects from Arabic to Zulu. No
other national language even comes close to that. One
reason for this diversity is the custom of English-speaking
explorers and pioneers in a new land to adopt the
native name for unfamiliar plants, animals, and
things. Other cultures do not follow this custom.
When the Greeks first saw a huge animal in Egypt,
they called it hippopotamus , the Greek word for `water
horse.' When the Boers first saw a strange animal in
South Africa, they called it aardvark , a Dutch word
for `earth pig.' The English, however, seeing a large
bearlike animal in Indo-China, adopted the Nepalese
name panda ; and a strange water mammal was given
its Javanese name dugong .
When two peoples speaking different languages
share a common border, there is an infiltration of
words from one language to the other. The north border
of the United States is with Canada, most of whose
people share our common English speech. True, the
official language of the province of Quebec is French;
and true, we have borrowed a few words from there;
lacrosse , for example. But the south border is another
matter. For more than 160 years, since the Anglos arrived
in Texas, there has been a culture transfer back
and forth across the Rio Grande. The process is still
going on. Fifteen years ago, few people north of San
Antonio had heard of burritos, fajitas, flautas , or
chalupas . Today, thanks to franchise Mexican restaurants,
they have become a part of America's vocabulary.
Other food names that have passed through the
Texas pipeline into common usage are chile, enchilada,
taco, tamale, tortilla, fríjol, frito, picante,
jalapeño, nacho, mescal, tequila , and margarita . It
may be interesting to note the Spanish borrowed chile,
tamale, mescal , and mesquite from the indigenous Indians
before passing them on to us.
Let us now pass on to the names of some clothing
items that Texans borrowed and then passed on to the
rest of the country: sombrero, mantilla, poncho, rebozo,
serape , and huarache . A number of animals and
vegetables followed the same route: avocado from
aguacate; mesquite; sapodilla from zapote; guayule;
coyote; armadillo; ocelot from ocelote; chaparral ; and
javalina from jabalina . Since cattle ranching is common
to both sides of the border, it should come as no
surprise that there has been an exchange of ranch-related
words: lariat from la reata; bronco; lasso from
lazo; rodeo; chaps from chaparreras; charro; hackamore
from jáquima; mustang from mestengo ; and
quirt from cuerda or cuarta .
Finally, there is a miscellaneous group of words.
Alamo , the site of the Texas defeat by Santa Ana;
hoosegow from juzgado `court'; dinero `money,' a
Spanish corruption of the Latin denarius; macho ,
from the same root as machete : he who wields a machete
must be skillful and powerful, hence the word
has come to mean `virile' and its associated noun, machismo ,
`virility.' A gringo , from griego `Greek,' is one
whose speech “sounds like Greek to me.” The story that
it comes from the song “Green Grow the Lilacs,” said
to have been sung at San Jacinto, is an example of folk
etymology. Let us not forget marijuana which is simply
`Mary Jane' in Mexico, or cucaracha , the `cockroach'
that entered English via a popular song.
Some time ago, Texans picked up a speech habit
that is being acquired by the rest of the country. When
Texans, in particular South Texans, want to emphasize
a statement, they often use a Spanish word. If they
want to be emphatic about a large undertaking, they
might say, “I'm going to do it all! The entire thing! The
whole enchilada! ” About someone who is in complete
charge of a project, they could say, “He runs things
completely! He's the boss! Número uno! ” Then there is
negation: “I had nothing to do with that! Nothing at
all! Nada! ” And to request confirmation, they might
well say “You do it exactly this way! You'd better do it
right! Comprende ?”
Texas has contributed a few good words to the
English language without any help from Spanish or
Mexican. During the 1850s, a Texas lawyer acquired a
small herd of cattle on Matagorda Island. Because he
knew little about the cattle business and cared less, he
never got around to branding his stock. That man was
Samuel Maverick. As time passed, cattlemen began
calling all unbranded cattle mavericks . The word
spread throughout Texas and into English generally.
And its meaning expanded to mean any nonconformist.
Then there are the cattalo and the beefalo , crosses
between cattle and buffalo, first attempted in Texas. A
jackalope is an imaginary horned rabbit, reputedly
inhabiting West Texas.
These fifty words that have entered English after a
brief sojourn in Texas can be found in almost any dictionary.
That is to say, about one of every thousand
English words came into the language via Texas. If the
average American uses from three to five thousand
different words each day, the chances are everybody in
this country will use three or more Texican words.
Hidden Compounds
The compounding process is a simple, economical
system of word formation is modern English.
Compounding native English words or elements produces
all classes of combinations—noun: farmhouse ;
verb: understand ; adjective: twenty-one ; adverb: herewith ;
preposition: into ; pronoun: someone ; conjunction:
because ; interjection: good grief . It is also a
gradual process, as evidenced by the sequence of to
day, to-day, today .
Of much more interest, however, are the common
words used in English that were once compounds but
are not easily recognized as such today. Let us reveal
their dual disposition:
Alone , in Middle English, is al `all' + one `one'. If
one is by himself, he, she, or it is alone. The word is
generally associated with being lonely.
Atom is from the Greek a- `not' + temnein `cut.'
The atom was named before it was split. Around 400
B.C., Democritus theorized that a thing could be divided
and divided until it became so small it could no
longer be divided. The theory was largely shelved for
two thousand years until several physicists produced
theories which led to the fact that the atom could be
split. Because of this, atom is a misnomer today.
Atone comes from the Middle English at `at' + on
`one.' The term is used largely in the Christian sense of
Jesus dying to atone for the sins of man; his death
reconciled, “made one,” God and man.
Barn is compounded from the Old English words
beren `barley' + ern `house.' The barn was the building
for storing barley. Since Anglo-Saxon times, the word
has gone through a process of generalization, whereby
it has taken on a wider range of meaning.
Chair is a Greek compound of kata `down' +
hedra `sit, seat.' An appropriate name it is for the
object in which we sit ourselves down to rest.
Copy is a blend of the prefix, co `with' + Latin
opia `abundance.' Before the invention of the printing
press, manuscripts had to be copied by hand. Since a
second copy exceeded the first by one hundred percent,
it was considered an abundance.
Daisy is a combination of the Old English words,
dæges `day's' + ēage `eye.' Perhaps it was so called
because it opens in morning and closes at night, or
because of its eyelike shape.
Denim is a French compound. In the older days of
France, several towns produced serge, a material for
making clothing. Of all the towns, the serge de Nîmes
was the finest. Denim is from de `from' + Nîmes , the
town.
Dozen is a mathematically compounded word
from the Latin duo `two' + decem `ten.' Two plus ten
equals twelve in any language.
Enemy is a combination of the Latin in `not' +
amicus `friend,' and is thus a doublet with inimical .
That enemy could be related to amiable , is more than
a little ironic.
Garlic is compounded from the Old English gar
`spear,' and lêac `leek.' Garlic is a member of the family
of leeks which is related to the onion. Its blades are its
“spears.”
The Old English hlāf , `loaf' + dige or diīge , variants
of dæge `kneader,' combine to make lady . Apparently,
the first kneaders of bread were ladies.
Lariat is compounded from the Spanish la `the' +
reata `lasso.' Even though lariat contains its own Spanish
article, when we imported it into English, we
added another, the English the , to create a literal the
la reata , `the the lasso,' and we never think of it as
redundancy.
None is the combined Old English ne `not' + ān
`one.'
Obese is a compound of two Latin words, the
prefix, ob - `over' + ēdere `eat.' Overating is a prerequisite
for becoming obese.
Two Greek elements, ō `the letter “o” '+ mêga
`large, great,' combine to make omega . It contrasts
with ō + micron `small' which form omicron , the
“smaller” o of the Greek alphabet.
Stirrup has been compounded from the Old English
stige `ascent' + rāp .' Anglo-Saxon stirrups
were made of rope and were probably used for ascending
objects other than horses.
Windows is compounded from the Icelandic words
vindr `wind' + auga `eye,' a window being the eye of a
house.
Because they are short—some reduced to only one
syllable—such words are not immediately apparent as
compounds, and their true nature is exposed only by
word archaeology.
Richard Bauerls writes interestingly about the recent
proliferation of “one-letter words” [XIV, 1; XV, 1].
One hopes he will continue his annual chronicle.
Although he didn't draw the conclusion explicitly,
real life and his examples, make it clear that OLWs are
used mainly as surrogates for romance and (where
there's a difference that matters) sex. For example, in
the OLW lexicon, when two people—sometimes but
not always a man and a woman—agree that they Lword
one another, they often enter into one of the Cwords ,
which leads perhaps eventually to the M-word ,
which in turn authorizes them to F-word with the
sanction of church and state....
But the implication that OLWs are new—just because
they now appear routinely in comic strips and on
television—is misguided. Thirty-one years ago, in a
song for The Music Man called “The Sadder-But-Wiser
Girl,” Meredith Willson wrote the lyric: “I hope and I
pray/For Hester to win just one more `A.' ” We knew
exactly what it meant. In fact, I bet they even knew
what it meant in 1850 when The Scarlet Letter hit the
streets.
Maxwell Bodenheim's Harlem Slang
Maxwell Bodenheim is no longer the cat's pajamas.
If he was once something of a cult figure
in Chicago and, later, in New York City's Greenwich
Village, he is no longer of much interest to any
reader—except perhaps to some stray dissertation student
or to some crime reporter dredging up the gruesome
details surrounding his violent death. So much
for the vicissitudes of poetic fame.
Back in 1931, however, when Bodenheim was coming
into his own as a literary maverick, New York publisher
Horace Liveright issued his novel— Naked on
Roller Skates . The title is a grabber, but the book itself
would be anathema to feminists since it features a
heroine who wishes to be beaten and degraded:
“Listen, Terry—any man can beat up a girl's
body. That's no trick. I want an A number one,
guaranteed bastard. I want him to beat my heart
and beat my brain. I want him to hurt me so I'll
get wise. I want him to lug me everywhere. All the
lowest dives, the phoniest ginmills ... I want him
to throw me up against everybody—the crummiest
woodchucks... the worst fourflushers... everybody.
I want to meet the coldest women—the
women who get their diamonds and cars and then
start to bawl about how sad and unlucky they've
been... I want to run into everybody just once
...They say a girl can't do it. They say she runs
into a smashup every time. Well, believe me, she'll
smash up in a village cupboard too, if she can't
hide herself and settle down. That's a lot of newspaper
hokum....
Today, Bodenheim's novel might be of interest to
students of the English language because of its use of
slang. Indeed, Bodenheim appends to his book a short
glossary of Harlem words used in the course of the
novel. I take the liberty of reprinting the glossary here,
because some of the terms are far from common
( chippy, hootch , and century are perhaps the more
familiar) and many are not included in standard dictionaries
of slang:
acecray outcray putting the ace on the
bottom of the deck,
where the dealer can
abstract it
bah-bah negligible object
cake-slashing assault and mayhem
century hundred dollars
chippy dissolate girl
chivvy unpleasant odor
clip your tongue be silent
cram the paper cheat at cards
cut your chops mind your own business
five hard a fist, or a punch
frill girl, woman
glued their traps remained silent
going to the timbers retreating
grand thousands dollars
grease it pay bribe money, or
blackmail
hamburger down take it easy
hock your skin make a difficult promise
hootch liquor
hotsprat trival but agreeable en-
tertainment
in the hole out of money
lame your foot deprive you of assistance
leathered kicked unfairly
lippy-chaser a negro who prefers
whites
payman, a a cadet
pinktail white person
scrub face
slide them into the eject them to the
concrete sidewalk
spreadeagle to knock down
stick it capture something
stick-stick defeated by the previous
capture
stretch jail term
three-nine sexual variant
thumb use the thumb to displace
cards in a poker-game
trip his muscle over-reach himself
wraps, or skins, or
strips dollars
Bodenheim adds a note: “Most of the above-listed
terms are peculiar to Harlem, but some of them are
also used by whites in other sections.” Only a third of
the terms have found their way into The Dictionary of
American Slang , compiled and edited by Harold
Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner (Thomas Y. Crowell,
1967) or Robert Chapman's New Dictionary of
American Slang (Harper & Row, 1986). Also Went-worth/Flexner
and Chapman both cite the term the
leather as meaning a kick, but they date the term from
1946, citing a passage from Damon Runyon: “he
would give his fallen foe what we called `the leather,'
meaning a few boots abaft the ears...and spareribs.”
Bodenheim's glossary indicates the term was
popular long before 1946.
As for hamburger down , meaning to `take it easy,'
could there be any relationship between that term and
the hamburger cited by both Chapman and Went-worth/Flexner?
Hamburger means a `prize-fighter who
is badly beaten' or a `bum'—both persons who are
“taking it easy.” Indeed, Bodenheim's list might be a
source of enlightenment and delight to curators of
American slang and is commended to their attention.
Of Course, Cuthbert
Recently I found in one of those files in which for
many years I have been systematically losing
things a magazine clipping from many years ago
which points out that the formal language of a century
and more past can lead to misunderstandings today. It
offers a case in point from one of the 17 volumes of The
Lives of the Saints , a massive work written between
1872 and 1889 by Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924),
the English clergyman who is best remembered as the
author of the hymn, “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”
Here is what he had to say about Saint Cuthbert, an
English monk who became Bishop of Lindisfarne and
who died in the year 687:
No saint of his time or country had more frequent
or affectionate intercourse than Cuthbert with the
nuns, whose numbers and influence were daily increasing
among the Anglo-saxons, and especially in
Northumberland.
I wasn't quite sure about the clipping, so I checked the
work itself in our public library—and that's what it
gives. (Bearing-Gould, a compulsive writer, was a man
of Victorian delicacy. In one of his novels he mentioned
“certain heavily-frilled cotton investitures of the lower
limbs” and elsewhere referred to “the bloomer arrangement
in the nether latitude.”)
Anyway, this sent me to the big Oxford , where I
found about a column-and-a-half on intercourse . As a
noun it was first used of trade dealings between people
of different localities. Originally spelt entercourse , it
comes from the French entrecours `commerce,' which
is from the Latin intercursus (also `commerce').
Soon it came to denote `communion between persons'
and `that which is spiritual or unseen.' (I vaguely
remember a hymn I heard, and perhaps helped sing,
that contains the phrase “intercourse divine.”)
As early as 1806 the word was used with apparent
sexual signification by Thomas Malthus, the parson
and economist who is remembered for his Essay on the
Principle of Population: “An illicit intercourse between
the sexes.” But that use apparently was rare in those
times. I do not know when the word, standing alone,
came into common use with an explicit sexual sense.
In the 16th century the word was also a verb: `to run
through, run across. To have intercourse with .'
Now back to Cuthbert the saint. Ivor Brown, in
one of his delightful books on words, Random Words
(1971), writes that Cuthbert had been an honored
English name, but that somehow during the 1914—18
war it “ceased to be a name and became an insult” and
was used of slackers who evaded military service.
Brown does not know how that happened. This use of
the name as a derogatory noun is given in both the
1933 Supplements to the OED and in the recent one.
Seventy-two churches in Britain were named for Cuthbert.
Kirkcudbright (`Church of Cuthbert'), the name
of a small former Scottish county and its main town, is
pronounced “kir-KOO-bree”—which Brown reports is
said by the natives with a “dove-like murmur.”
Re Dan Cragg's letter [XV, 1], he should note that
while there are many different views on “the point of
the Vietnam war,” those military personnel other than
the Vietnamese operating ships and planes “out of our
former base complex at Cam Ranh Bay” are Soviet
rather than Russian. In particular, it is interesting to
wonder what percentage actually are Russian, that is,
from the state/province (S.S.R.) of Russia. The Soviet
government has the problem of balancing the widely
diverse needs and values of people from 15 states or
republics within a military bureaucracy. It is my
(wholly unsubstantiated) guess that the majority of
Soviet personnel in Vietnam are in fact not Russian.
Paula Van Gelder's “Poetic Licenses” [XIV, 4] reminded
me of the license plate a friend reported recently.
My friend, a punster, spotted the fact that the
plate nicely violated the no “offensive” plates rule. It
read, “R-SOUL.”
CORRIGENDA
A “scribal” error was responsible for printing
hidari-leiki for hidari-kiki in Robin Gill's epistola
[XIV, 4].
In response to Richard Lederer's “Gunning for the
English Language” [XV, 1], Mr. Charles Kluth, Baltimore,
points out that the difference between the coefficients
of expansion of iron and brass—a mere 1/64th
inch—would be insufficient to cause the (cannon) balls
to be dislodged from a brass “monkey” and survive as a
justification for the origin of cold enough to freeze the
balls off a brass monkey .
Mr. Thomas B. Lemann points out that the transliteration
of the opening quotation of “Onomatoplazia”
[XV, 1] contains the following errors:
κλαννη should be klange, not klagge
geneto argureolou bioiou should be
genet'argureoio bioio.
And, where the reference is made in the first paragraph
to “the twanging release of Ulysses' silver bow,”
that the bowman is not Ulysses but Apollo, shooting
into the Greek camp.
Aficionados of duende who enjoyed George Bria's
exegesis, (“Duende: Gypsy Soul and Something More”
[XV, 1], of its “magical quality,” should refer to the
works of George Frazier, another of its champions.
Frazier (1911-1974), a Boston newspaper columnist,
sometime entertainment editor of Life magazine, and
general journalistic critic and gadfly, was enamored of
the word, which he first found in a Kenneth Tynan
article (1963) in Holiday on Miles Davis:
Duende is very difficult to define. Yet when it is
there it is unmistakable, inspiring our awe, quickening
our memory—...to observe someone or
something that has it is to feel icy fingers running
down our spine.
My source for the preceding is Charles Fountain's engaging
biography of Frazier, Another Man's Poison ,
Globe Pequot Press, Chester, CT, 1984.
Duende [XV, 1] may be absent in Italian and
French, as Mr. Bria assures us, but it is alive and
prospering in Portuguese. It has the original meaning,
a `sprite or hobgoblin that plays tricks, especially at
night in people's houses; a poltergeist.'
There is a term in English for a tennis player
reaching a height, for a brief stretch or longer, when
he cannot miss, and tennis people call it zoning . I have
not heard it used in other cases, but when used it
seems to equal tener duende . I do not know whether
that use of duende has reached Portuguese speakers in
Brazil or Portugal, but if it has not, it probably will
soon, because so many Portuguese speakers are bilingual
in Spanish.
In his delightful article, “Onomatoplazia” [XV, 1],
Chester Delaney writes, “ analysand ... was obviously
derived directly from the - nd marker of the
active gerund in Latin, which suggests the therapist
(active agent) rather than the patient....”
Not so. Mr. Delaney is a victim of the confusion so
often experienced by Latin students between the gerund,
which is a neuter noun, active in meaning, and
the gerundive, which is an adjective of similar form,
but passive in meaning. Analysand , like several - nd
words in English, is derived from the gerundive, and
so means `(a person) to be analyzed.' Similarly, reverend
means `one who is to be revered,' ordinand is `one
who is to be ordained'; an old standby of crossword
compilers, deodand , is a `thing to be given to God,'
and legend is `something to be read.' We use in their
original Latin forms addenda and corrigenda meaning
`things to be added/corrected.'
An interesting example of a derivative from the
passive gerundive that has acquired a quasi-active
meaning is reprimand from reprimendus , `one who is
to be repressed.' In the course of its transfer to English
through French it has become `a severe or formal rebuke,'
i.e., the act of repressing.
Charles Delaney asks for further examples of onomatoplazia .
Here are two which misled me for years:
hogget Nothing to do with pigs. It is the term applied
to a one-year-old sheep.
passerine It ought to be a bird of passage, but it
isn't. It is a bird that perches.
An amusing example of this kind of semantic confusion
will be found in Chapter XX of Aldous Huxley's
Crome Yellow . From boyhood the romantic, poetically
inclined hero, Denis Stone, found the word carminative
particularly evocative. It suggested the warmth,
the rosiness ( carmine ) of wine and flesh, and, by association
with carmen-carminis , the idea of singing. To
find out that it meant `able to cure flatulence' was the
death of youth and innoncence. All the same, in one
respect, Denis was right. The word (like charm ) is
indeed associated with singing, and goes back to the
time when men attempted to cure the ills of the flesh
by incantation. And, to return to Mr. Delaney, swimmingly
is associated with aquatic sports: “with a
smooth gliding movement” says OED . No confusion
there, I would suggest.
Onomatoplazia struck a delightful chord for me.
When I first began to study German it took a while to
learn that Gift was not something one wanted for
Christmas, and that Mist was not cool and dewy, but
warm and smelly.
Here are a few of my favourites in English, coupled
with their deceitful meanings:
demarché a retreat
narthex a high, exalted church official
suffragan someone barely tolerated
pleonasm a rapidly growing cancer
afflatus a fart. The words “divine afflatus”
thus create an unforgettable
image
jejune like a gumdrop
A salute to Delaney for creating onomatoplazia , a
much-needed new word. Safire should take note.
Re the linguistic division in Belgium [XIV, 4],
there is a story that goes back to a time when it was
required by law that every town council have at least
one French-speaking member. When a visitor to one of
the councils asked, “Qui est-ce qui parle francais ici?”
one man rose to say, “Je.”
Two comments on articles in XV, 1:
My favorite expression from the language of guns
(“Gunning for the English Language”) is lock, stock,
and barrel . If someone gives you the lock, the stock,
and the barrel, you have pretty much the entire
musket.
The “lowing herd” (“Onomatoplazia”) wound
slowly in the first verse of “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,”
by Thomas Gray, not Oliver Goldsmith.
The onomatoplazia of inflammable is so common
that flammable , or even flamable is now commonly
substituted, especially on trucks.
Anent earlier items by Timothy Hayes [XI, 4] and
by Richard Lederer [XII, 4] on the oxymoron , I submit
some oxymora found in local advertising:
reuseable disposable plates
draft beer in a bottle
in-store warehouse sale
boneless bar-b-p ribs
In his winning essay [XIV, 4] on Shakespeare's extensive
use of legal language, Mr. D.S. Bland makes
one error for sure, and, if I read him rightly, yet another
in the same spot. He refers to those chilling lines
at the end of III.ii, where Macbeth invokes Night's
cover for the intended murder of Banquo. Bland slips
up when he states it is to “enable him to proceed on
his path to the murder of Duncan.” Your Third Prize
notwithstanding, Duncan was murdered several pages
earlier.
The serious error is in his (apparently) thinking
that Macbeth's
Cancel, and tear to pieces, that great bond
Which keeps me pale!
relates to night destroying daylight in the sense that
darkness will cancel the daylight's `bond,' whatever
that may be. No, the bond here is Banquo's lease on
life and his fatherhood, with great alluding to the
supernatural powers of the witches, especially the
Third Witch. It is she who had addressed Macbeth, in
I. ii, as “that shalt be king hereafter.” A few lines later
she confounds him by prophesying that Banquo shall
“get kings.” Macbeth harps on this mystery after the
witches vanish, muttering to Banquo in a tone of envious
wonderment, “Your children shall be kings.”
In the tyrant's mind, that great bond really means
Banquo/Fleance, both subject to the bonded prophecy
uttered by the Third Witch. The father can beget new
offspring safe from Macbeth's hand; the son is the palpable
threat. Both their lives must be snuffed out immediately,
or the usurper will remain paralyzed, kept
pale, by that unearthly promise. He views either of
them as the instrument, the bond, of his not being able
to pass on the crown to a successor of his choosing (or
of his subsequent begetting). Yes, Night will devour
Day, but Macbeth's significant meaning here is: under
cover of darkness—in reckless defiance of weird authority—he
will have his black agents eliminate the
bonded progenitor of Scottish kings, along with his
only progeny. As it turns out, Fleance escapes to fulfill
the prophecy of Banquo begetting a line of kings.
Macbeth's action to have the bond canceled becomes
null and void.
True to the terms of the indenture set forth by its
guarantors, that great bond will suffer no default.
In answer to Mr. Anson's first point I can only say
mea culpa . It is the kind of silly slip that we are all
guilty of making from time to time. Witness Chester
Delaney [XV, 1] who attributes “lowing herd” to Oliver
Goldsmith instead of to Thomas Gray.
As for Macbeth's great bond , this is a crux over
which commentators have argued for years. Mr. Anson's
interpretation is one that has been advanced before
and is dealt with, for example, in Kenneth Muir's
Arden edition. My own reading of the passage turns as
much on the word pale as on bond , but the word limit
set by the essay competition forced me to be rather
elliptical. Briefly, I interpret bond as being implicit in
God's first act of creation—the separation of night
from day. In praying for its cancellation Macbeth is
unwittingly asking that chaos should come again, as
indeed it does within the world of the tragedy until the
restoration of order through Macbeth's death and the
assumption of the crown by Malcolm.
But my main object in choosing the passage was to
illustrate the way in which Shakespeare could move
from the literal to the metaphorical or metaphysical in
his use of a legal term. From that point of view the
differing interpretations Mr. Anson and I read into the
passage are of secondary importance.
Henry Henn's “Me Gook” [XIV, 3] prompts me to
ask which Chinese language his Asians were speaking.
If we say “the Chinese language” we refer, of course, to
the written language. Chinese speak Mandarin, Cantonese,
Fukienese, Hakka, etc., tongues often so dissimilar
that verbal intercommunication is impossible.
Only written or printed Chinese provides the glue to
hold the Babel together.
In Mandarin the name America becomes `beautiful
nation,' as Mr. Henn says. In the Romanization
system I learned (and a pox on Peiking/Beijing for
replacing the clear with the opaque) the two characters
are transliterated as mei-kuo , disregarding the
tonal diacritical marks. A roughly approximate atonal
pronunciation is thus mā-gwō . A family resemblance,
to be sure, but far from “me gook.” So, back to my
question: In which Chinese language is America `me
gook”?
Even on so small an island as Taiwan the
Mandarin-speaking ex-mainlanders cannot converse
with the Taiwanese-born majority who have not bothered
to learn Mandarin. Older Taiwanese are usually
bilingual, but the tongues are their native Taiwanese
and Japanese, a result of the fifty years (1895-1945)
Japan ruled the island. A common sight in China (either
one) is two individuals closely observing the upturned,
outstretched palm of one while the other
“draws” ideographs on that palm with a forefinger. It's
a delight to see the smile of recognition when communication
is established.
I found Mr. Henry Henn's amphigory [XIV, 3] on
military slang interesting, but his explanation of the
meaning of Viet is at variance with my information.
Let me begin again by making two observations.
First, we must realize there is a difference between
spoken and written Chinese. Next, when looking at a
Chinese character, the symbol can be purely phonetic,
purely semantic, or a combination of both. Mr. Henn
knew that the two characters for Vietnam could be
translated individually as `extreme' and `south.' When
he looks at the map it is obvious that Vietnam is to the
extreme south of the Chinese Empire. His misconception
is thus reinforced.
Let us go back in Chinese history to the beginning
of the Warring (or Contending) States Period. At about
this time new powers were arising around the old Chinese
heartland. Among them the Ch'in (Mr. Henn's
Chin ) and the Yueh . As explained by Professor Paul W.
Kroll, Chairman of the Department of Oriental Languages
and Literature, University of Colorado (Boulder),
this new people called themselves by a name that
was very similar to the Chinese word for `extreme.'
Thus in the Chinese spoken language of that time we
have two homophones, one meant `the Viet (people or
kingdom),' the other simply `extreme, to exceed.'
When a literate Chinese had to write about this
new kingdom a problem arose as there was no charactter
for the Viet. The problem was solved simply by
using an already standard character that had a similar
sound to what the Viet called themselves.
For example, the Chinese word for Buddha is used
as the first character for the English word Florida . Let
me quote from Professor John DeFrancis's The Chinese
Language Fact and Fantasy (p. 8):
When the Chinese were confronted with the problem
of expressing foreign terms and names, as happened
on a large scale with the introduction of
Buddhism in the first century A.D., they did so by
further extending the use of Chinese characters as
phonetic symbols. The word Buddha itself came to
be represented by a character which at one time
had a pronunciation something like b'iwat and
now, after a long process of phonological change,
is pronounced fó.
It seems the character “fó” is being used phonetically a
second time around in Florida .
Let me emphasize “by further extending,” in the
quote above. My argument is not that the Chinese
pronunciation for Viet is “Yueh” but that Mr. Henn
errs when he translates the Chinese character as `extreme.'
The Chinese character is simply a phonological
rendering of a Viet word meaning `people.' The correct
translation is the “Yueh (or Viet)” of the “south” (as
opposed to the “Yueh” who used to be just beyond
present-day Shanghai).
In XIV, 3, Richard Lederer notes (p. 10) that the
idiom dressed to the nines could be from Middle English
dressed to then eynes `dressed to the eyes.' However,
similar expressions in French, Spanish, and
Judezmo, all mentioning numbers, give pause (they
are listed in Jewish Language Review 7, 1987, p. 205).
It is regrettable that Lederer uses the word “corruption”
(p. 10), which one does not expect to find in
objective writing (see p. 426 of Robert A. Hall, Jr.'s
Introductory Linguistics , Philadelphia, Chilton,
1964).
Frank Abate writes that “the recent comeback [of
Latin studies] owes much to the recognition of Latin's
pedagogical value, especially as a vocabulary builder,
something both intuitively and statistically known to
be true.... The vocabulary-building argument is a
potent one for proponents of Latin education...” (p.
15). I'm all for Latin courses, but there's an easier way
of building your English vocabulary then plowing
through the intricacies of Latin morphology and syntax.
All you need is a course in English vocabulary
which, among other things, explains Latin stems and
affixes relevant to English. This is neatly illustrated,
though with Greek, in Edward C. Echols' “Alpha
Privative = A-Negative” immediately above (pp. 14-15
of the same issue), where, without getting involved in
complicated matters, the author explains almost fifty
Greek-related English words just by nothing a prefix
and various stems. Also, since many English words and
their Classical Latin etymonds share little or no meaning,
Classical Latin can at times hinder rather than
help; for example, Classical Latin conferre has none of
the present-day meanings of English confer . (Conversely,
reading English meanings into Classical Latin
words can be misleading.) These differences are due to
semantic change somewhere on the etymological chain
(Medieval Latin, French, Italian, English, etc.). A
more convincing case for Latin studies can be made on
other grounds (if the study of ANY language requires
pleading). I am happy, by the way, that Abate did not
say that studying Latin helps you to think clearly—an
erroneous notion still often heard.
Rusine should be added to the supplement of English
words ending in - ine (p. 11). After some searching,
it can be found in Webster's Third . Rusine is not listed
in its alphabetical place, but if you look for it where it
should be, you're bound to see the entry for rusine
antler , at which rusine is etymologized as being from
New Latin rusa + English - ine . If it then occurs to you
to look up rusa , you'll find rusine as an undefined runon.
All of this is a minor irritation to the user, but
Philip Gove wanted to save space at all costs. Webster's
Third , as is well known, is not user-friendly.
“By the most conservative estimates, the church's property
in the Bay Area is worth uncountable millions.” [From
the San Francisco Examiner , . Submitted by
.]
“...the lecture was heavy with the importance of
dream state, pulse and heart rate, vaginal tumescence and
temperature change, rapid eye movement and the size and
frequency of penal erection.” [From Playing After Dark by
Barbara L. Ascher, Doubleday, . Submitted by .]
Madam, I'm Adam, and Other Palindromes
Here is a friendly, attractive picture-book. The
fact that the pictures are a full page each with captions
that seesaw across the bottoms (as palindromes
will) would be frustrating were it not for the quality
of the drawings. As for the quality of the palindromes—well,
they are rarely sheer poetry. After all,
what can one do with a language like English except
come up with things like A SLUT NIXES SEX IN TULSA or I
MAIM MAIMI? I shudder to think what a future archaeologist
might make of those or of GOD! A RED NUGGET! A
FAT EGG UNDER A DOG! As anyone can tell, I am not a
great fan of this form of amusement, and I thought
they were original till I encountered the well-known A
MAN, A PLAN, A CANAL—PANAMA. That sings. The only
other one I know (aside from ABLE...ELBA) focuses
on the rumor that the South American singer named
Yma Sumac was really a girl from the Bronx named
Army Camus; that is what might be called a “distributed
palindrome” since it operates one term at a time.
Laurence Urdang
The Facts On File Dictionary of Troublesome
Words
Under its, it's , Bryson gives, among others the following
examples from the Washington Post , “Its the
worst its been in the last five years,” “Its come full
circle,” then goes on to say “ It's , which was intended in
each of the examples above, is the contraction of it is.
That is where I happened to open this book, where I
closed it, and why this review is so brief. There seems
little point in going any further, except to say that this
is the “Revised Edition”; one shudders to think of what
might have been in the first edition.
Laurence Urdang
The Cat's Pajamas, A Fabulous Fictionary of Familiar
Phrases
The true etymologies of some words are weird and
fanciful enough—sometimes unbelievably so—and it
must be they that inspired Tuleja to compile this collection,
largely (if not entirely) out of his imagination.
The entry for get one's goat , for example, begins:
In eleventh-century Lapland, before they discovered
the nutritional value of reindeer milk, most
of the inhabitants kept goats....
It goes on to describe the `inhabitants” propensity for
“goat-rustling.” This is on a par with the attribution of
leave me be to a Celtic origin having something to do
with a warning against raiding hives or the ascription
of the origin of the name of an obscene prosthetic
device to a woman from Water Isle (the Duchess d'Île
d'eau ).
Having recently completed a (factual) book along
the same lines— The Whole Ball of Wax and Other
Colloquial Expressions , Perigee, $8.95, paper—I extend
Tuleja my sympathies. Anyone amused by well-done,
outlandish nonsense will enjoy this, a spoof-reader's
delight.
Laurence Urdang
Word Smart
If you need this book, it is probably too late—
unless you are about to take an SAT or GRE. People
should learn vocabulary from reading literature and
listening to articulate speakers, not by memorizing the
dictionary. That said, it must be acknowledged that
some may be in great difficulty if facing an examination,
and if memorizing words and meanings will pull
them through, then they need this book. The problem
lies, of course, among those who make up examinations
that purport to judge a person's intelligence or
aptitudes on his precise and proper use of words, at
bottom a thoroughly idiotic notion, clearly unrelated
to being a musical or other artistic or mechanical genius
or craftsman. Control of language may be a manifestation
of a certain kind of ability, but nobody is
quite sure how it should be characterized.
I have nothing particularly adverse to say about
the book. It would probably fulfill its function if those
impelled to study it learn what it contains—then
promptly forget it the day after the exam. How many
people need words like desiccate, didactic, innocuous,
immutable , etc., when dry up, instructive, harmless ,
and unchanging or unchangeable are around? Anyone
who doubts the impact of the proper use of simple
language should read (or reread) Knut Hamsun's
Growth of the Soil . Though a translation, it puts English
polysyllabicity to shame.
Laurence Urdang
“As a mother of an 18-month-old daughter with an
M.A. in education who has decided to stay home to raise my
child (a difficult and soul-wrenching decision), I resent the
characterizsation of the full-time mother as one who is occupied
with `laundry, shopping, preparing dinner,' to the exclusion
of one-to-one contact with my child.” [From a Letter to
the Editor of The Toronto Star , , which asserts
its right “to edit all contributions.” Submitted by
.]
“Elena Nikolaidi Gives Distinguished Rectal.” [Headline
above a review of a song recital in the Louisvile, Kentucky
Courier-Journal , quoted in Medical Economics , . Submitted by .]
“Condo living, the spread of AIDS through prostitutes
and veterinary surgery.” [From a schedule of TV interviews
in the Miami Herald , . Submitted by .]
“Suicide won't oure shyness problems.” [Headline over
Beth Winship's teen-advice column, Morning Union , Springfield,
(Massachusetts), . Submitted by .]
“On Modern Marriage' is a very badly written essay
...and the reader wants to shout, Martial your thoughts!”
[From a review by Carolyn See of Modern Marriage ...
by Isak Dineson, in the Los Angeles Times, ,
Part V, p. 4. Submitted by .]
“I do not need a spelling checker, but I have found it
extremeely useful... “[From an article by Laurence
Urdang in VERBATIM, XV,1. Submitted by , et al.]
