Word Law
I saw an ad once in the back of a magazine promising
that if I sent in some money, I could have a star
in the firmament named after me. For the same low
price I would receive a certificate and a photograph of
the galaxy where my star was located. I might even be
able to see that star if I possessed suitable magnifying
equipment. I was not tempted by the offer, but it did
occur to me that while I would not like to have a star,
as a wordsmith I might like to own my own word.
Is it possible to own your very own word? The
English language may belong to all of us, but some of
its words are the property of individuals or, in most
cases of lexical ownership, of corporations. I am referring
to the registered trademarks and service marks
protected under federal law from the infringement of
unscrupulous competitors. Now, I am a language professional,
not a manufacturer or a lawyer, so if you
want competent advice in the latter areas you should
supplement the summary of the complex trademark
picture that follows.
The law of trademarks, which fills more than two
volumes of the Annotated U.S. Code in the local law
library--the source of the following information--gives
us some guidance as to what words can
and cannot be staked out as private property and what
that notion of privacy really means when it comes to
the use of language.
For one thing, you cannot simply coin a word and
lay claim to it. You must also sell the goods named by
your trademark or perform services named by your
service mark. In law, a trademark is a name, logotype,
design, or any combination thereof adopted and used
by a manufacturer to identify its goods and distinguish
them from articles sold by others. A service mark identifies
you as a provider of specific services rather than
of vendable articles. For example, Kodak is a trademark,
Fotomat , a service mark. Your trademark or
service mark may be registered, but you may have
rights to the mark even if you have not registered it,
The symbol you choose for your mark may be pictorial,
as the bearded representation of the Smith Brothers
of cough-drop fame, who, as some would have it,
are named, respectively, Trade and Mark. But a trademark
may also be a word or a group of words.
Sounds simple, really. You come up with a no-nonsense
product designed to remove widgets, patent it,
and market it under the straightforward name Widget
Terminator. Maybe the Widget Terminator does its job
well, finds a niche in the market, and over the years
even makes a little money for you. Only now your
brother-in-law decides he is going to get into the act
and beat your price. Of course he calls his knock-off the
WidgetBuster, a much snappier moniker, and he packages
the product behind a picture of a widget inside a
barred red circle. Since his product works differently
from yours, you cannot get him for violating patent
law, so you haul him into court and sue the pants off
him for infringing on the implied trademark you have
established with your Widget Terminator.
Keeping it all in the family, you get your cousin
Benny, fresh out of law school and eager for work, to
argue that the public has come to love and trust the
Widget Terminator and that people will be confused
and deceived by the similarity of the name of the rival
WidgetBuster. As a result of this confusion of products,
your reputation will be damaged and your sales hurt.
You ask that the WidgetBuster be withdrawn from the
market and that your brother-in-law pay you treble
damages and that he pay your cousin Benny, as well.
Do you think you will win? That depends on how
well Benny did in his Intellectual Property Law
course. The law recognizes two basic kinds of trademark,
though it allows for a measure of degree in their
definition: a “strong trademark” is one used only in a
fictitious or fanciful manner, while a “weak trademark”
is a meaningful word in common usage that
doubles as a suggestive or descriptive trademark. Weak
trademarks are more difficult to establish, and they
are entitled to narrower protection than strong ones.
Your brother-in-law's counsel will argue that you may
have an invention, but its name is not a trademark,
because a trademark cannot be an ordinary word, particularly
a descriptive one, if that word is used in its
ordinary sense. Both widget and terminator are common
English words--a widget is a `gadget, or gizmo,'
in case you did not know--and they literally describe
the function of the product, which is to remove pesky
widgets, so you cannot claim them as your own or
prevent others from using them.
Of course, if you have ever talked to a lawyer you
know that things are never what they appear when it
comes to the law. There have been trademarks that
were fairly literal, for example, Coca-Cola . Coca-Cola ,
which is a trademark of long standing, originally
contained both cocaine and an extract from the
cola nut. The cocaine went out when it was declared a
controlled substance early in this century. Interestingly,
the makers of Coke (which is also a registered mark)
once sought to prohibit the marketing of something
called Tacola-Cola , as well as any other drink with the
word cola in its name. But the courts ruled that because
cola was a common word describing what was in
the beverage, any soda containing cola derivatives
could be called a cola . Coke's trademark was upheld
against Chero-Cola, Clio-Cola, Coca and Cola , and
El-Cola ; ruled to be non-infringing were Koke, Dope,
Cherry-Cola, Roxa-Cola , and Dixie-Cola . As for other
sodas, Moxie won its case against Noxie , but Pepsi-Cola
lost against Pep , as did Seven-Up against Cheer Up .
On the other hand, if the name of your product is
a common word which is applied in an arbitrary or
fanciful sense, you should be able to claim it as a
trademark. The courts have ruled that Cyclone , when
naming a fence, and Innocent , as a brand of hair
coloring (suggesting, as the ruling noted, “the very
antithesis of innocence”) are legitimate trademarks;
but while Yellow Pages was found to be a trademark
although it is clearly descriptive, raisin bran and
spearmint were not granted exclusive status.
Manufacturers are fond of deforming the spelling
of an ordinary word to make it distinctive, for example
NU for new, KWIK for quick , or Bonz for bones (unfortunately,
this last, a dog food lacking the so-called
silent e, is frequently mispronounced). But a clever or
phonetic spelling of a common descriptive word does
not entitle you to own it as a trademark. Rather, a
common word can become a trademark only if it acquires
a “secondary meaning,” if, in other words, it is
used so long and so exclusively by one producer that it
has come to signal to the general public that the product
in question is made by that producer, and that
producer alone. (The courts have insisted repeatedly
that to be a trademark, a word or symbol must call up
not the product or service but its source, the producer
or provider.)
If your brother-in-law can afford to wait, time
may be on his side in the battle against widgets. If you
stop selling a product for two or more years, you may
lose the right to its trademark. The courts frown on
manufacturers who pretend to sell a few samples of a
product each year just to hold on to the name for
future use. But you may be able to withhold the product
from the market while you experiment with ways
to improve it, and you can change the product significantly
and still retain possession of its name, as the
makers of Tabasco did when they altered the formula
of their hot sauce but successfully defended their right
to exclusive use of the trademark.
Under the former trademark law, shredded wheat
was considered a generic term and, hence, not registrable.
But because the process for making it was patented,
no other company could produce it, hence the
patent holder had exclusive rights to the name of a
unique product. When the patent expired, new manufacturers
simply used shredded wheat as a descriptive
term. And although dictionary maker Noah Webster
was instrumental in passing our first federal copyright
laws to protect an author's intellectual property, the
name Webster ceased to function as an exclusive trademark
when the original Webster's copyright ran out.
As early as 1904, G. & C. Merriam, of Springfield,
Massachusetts, who claimed to be the literal publishing
descendants of Noah Webster's lexicographical
projects, attempted to restrain the sale of other dictionaries
with Webster in the title. In a series of decisions-- Merriam
v. Ogilvie (170 F 167), Merriam V.
Saalfield (190 F 927; 198 F 369)--the U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals ruled partly for Merriam, partly for
the competition: Merriam lost its right to the exclusive
use of the name Webster , but since that company had
become known to the public as the publisher of Noah
Webster's dictionaries, would-be Websters were ordered
to disclaim on their title pages any connection
with the original word book. In the early 1940s, World
Publishing Company, producer of Webster's New
World dictionaries, obtained a ruling to quash the disclaimer
requirement. In a more recent action, initiated
by Merriam in 1981, the Court of Appeals again
affirmed the right of other publishers to use Webster in
dictionary titles and enjoined the defendants from
using any variation or combination of the words
world-famous, authentic, original, genuine , or renowned
to suggest a connection between their product
and the Merriam-Webster line of dictionaries (Merriam
v. Webster Dictionary Co . 639 F 2d 29). It is clear
that for many, Webster's has become a generic word.
Despite the fact that this synonymy is one that the
courts have repeatedly upheld, no dictionary is willing
to define Webster's simply as `dictionary.'
Normally, a title cannot function as a trademark,
which is why different books can have the same title,
as long as their contents are different and there is no
intent to deceive the public. Two manufacturers may
be allowed access to the same trademark if their products
are so different that their markets will not overlap
and if there is no indication that the public will be
confused by the names. Thus Condé-Nast, the publishers
of the magazine Vogue , which is a trademark, were
unsuccessful in a suit to force the owners of the Vogue
School of Fashion Modeling to change its name. And
VERBATIM, the language quarterly, registered as a
trademark in 1974, failed in its suit against the manufacturer
of Verbatim floppy disks, introduced in 1977,
though the Verbatim (disk) company agreed never to
produce anything but blank recording media, while
VERBATIM is enjoined only from producing blank media.
The owners of the popular 1984 movie title
Ghostbusters have extended the range of their trademark
with a television show, toys, and other licensed
products bearing its name and distinctive logo, and
VERBATIM, the language quarterly, is free to do likewise.
Ironically, success can sometimes weaken your
right to a trademark, particularly if your product
name has become a generic term. Cellophane failed to
protect itself in an infringement suit when the defense
attorney asked the Cellophane representative for the
generic name of the product. Unable to come up with
a synonym for cellophane, the manufacturer lost its
trademark. Celluloid remained a trademark much
longer, though it too has now become a generic term.
Thermos and Zipper were both originally trademarks.
But both products became so popular that
their names began to function as generics in the public
mind, and because of that the courts have ruled that
other companies could use these words, uncapitalized,
so long as they did not attempt to confuse or deceive
the public. However, a design or distinctive style of
typography can be a trademark, and the distinctive
manner of printing Thermos as a symbol remains
protected.
Federal law regulates only in the broadest sense
what words can or cannot serve as trademarks. Prior
decisions have little value in trademark claims, and
each case must be argued on its own merits. As a
result, trademark rulings may seem idiosyncratic or
contradictory. The law clearly specifies, though, that a
trademark cannot be immoral, deceptive, scandalous,
or disparaging. Glass Wax , a glass cleaner which contains
no wax, successfully defended its trademark
against a charge that the name was deceptive, but in
the early 1900s the courts refused to recognize Madonna
as a trademark for wine because it was ruled
scandalous. (The soft drink Old Monk , which was not
perceived to threaten public morality, was permitted.)
Tastes change of course, in wines as well as scandals,
and though Old Monk is gone from the shelves, today's
courts seem not to be offended by the brand of wine
known as Blue Nun .
Foreign words can serve as trademarks in the
United States, but their legal status is determined the
same way as that of English words. Thus Selchow &
Righter, makers of the game Parcheesi , could not prohibit
other manufacturers from selling games under
such names as Pachisi, Parchisi , or Parchesi , variant
spellings of the common Hindi word for the old Indian
pastime. Similarly, Duncan was unable to retain exclusive
rights to the name yo-yo because the toy is called
that in the Philippines, where it originated, and because
it has no synonyms. On the other hand, both
Scrabble and Monopoly are trademarks for games. Despite
the fact that both are ordinary English words,
they meet the secondary meaning test, being easily
recognized as exclusive product names, although the
court also upheld the trademark rights of a game
called Anti-Monopoly over the objection of Monopoly-
owner, Parker Brothers. That decision remains
confused.
A trademark can be longer than a word, or even a
pair of words. You can lay claim to an entire slogan if
it has become widely enough identified with your
product, but the courts do not let you monopolize the
language. They will limit your power to control sentences
similar to yours, just as they stymied Anheuser-Busch,
the owners of the slogan, “Where there's life,
there's Bud,” who failed in their attempt to prevent use
of all slogans beginning, “Where there's life...” including,
as far as I know, the age-old proverb, “Where
there's life, there's hope.”
At any rate, it seems that where there's a trademark,
there's hope for a lawsuit. The Xerox Corporation,
recognizing the potential danger of success, has
in the past gone out of its way to protect its right to the
words it owns. Though I have found no reference to
any trademark suits brought by Xerox against other
manufacturers, the company has tried to regulate the
use of its trademark in ordinary English. For example,
some years ago the xerography pioneer took out half-page
ads in the New York Times to remind us that
Xerox is a trademark to be used only as a proper noun,
as in Xerox machine , or a proper adjective, as in Xerox
copy . In either case, warned the ad, we must capitalize
Xerox . Despite such entreaties, the word xerox seems
to have become generic, if not according to the courts,
then at least according to current American usage,
where it occurs freely as noun, adjective, and even
verb, with or without capitalization. Xerox persists
because unregulated use by others may cause a trademark
to be deemed abandoned.
Many publishers, either fearing litigation or simply
because they are sensitive to questions of ownership
of the printed word, prefer to take a cautions approach
to trademarks, capitalizing words like Xerox, Coke ,
and Formica in print, though at least one major dictionary
recognizes the uncapitalized form of xerox ,
and allows it to function as a verb. But no contemporary
lexicon, either desk-sized or unabridged, records
for Webster's the commonly-found meaning `an English
dictionary, even one not actually attributable to
the lexicographer Noah Webster.'
But back to the hypothetical case of Widget Remover
Mfg. Co. of North America v. WidgetBuster,
S.A . While you may not be able to restrain your
brother-in-law's trade, you can hope that his market
share will become so large as to draw the attention of
the owners of the Ghostbusters trademark and that
their battery of high-priced studio lawyers might be
able to get the injunction that your cousin could not.
Clearly, owning a trademark can be worth so
much that a manufacturer will object willy-nilly to
any and every use of it by another. In one case the
court told a manufacturer that there can be no monopoly
on love : “No one may preempt the field with
respect to marks having `love' as a portion thereof and
thus exclude all others from the use of any mark composed
in part of such word.” But owning a word can do
little for a writer like me, except perhaps in the ego
department, since according to the law, a word can be
a trademark only if such status does not deprive others
of their right to the normal use of the English language.
So if you were planning to give someone a word
for his birthday, think again. Words that do not fit
cannot be returned. And owning a word is not like
owning a ball: even if the game is not going the way
you planned, you cannot just pick up your word and
go home.
“The family said they would try to bury him again
tomorrow.” [Dan Rather, CBS Evening News,
Submitted by ]
At 7:35 a.m., Ron Steelman of National Public Radio
said: “For the second time in two weeks a Galena Park school
teacher was found murdered.” At 8:26 a.m., Sam Saucedo of
Channel 11 News said, “For the second time in two weeks a
Galena Park school teacher has been murdered.” [Submitted
by ]
THE STRANGE CASE OF DOCTOR ROTCOD
Some people are destined for greatness, some for
mediocrity. Otto Rotcod was born to become the
palindrome made flesh.
The date of Rotcod's nativity was September 3,
1939--9/3/39, an arrangement of figures that read the
same left to right and right to left--in Danbury, New
Hampshire, the only area of the state with a self-reflecting
zip code--03230. His palindromic dad, Bob,
and palindromic mom, Ava, named their tot Otto.
When Rotcod was a student in junior high school,
he wrote a history paper on the career of George W.
Goethals, the U.S. engineer who masterminded the
building of the Panama Canal. At the end of his report,
young Otto summarized Goethals' achievement
by writing: A man! A plan! A canal! Panama! Rotcod
surveyed his sentence with considerable pride, and discovered
that the statement was a palindrome, causing
him to exclaim: “ ` A man! A plan! A canal! Panama!'
sides reversed is `A man! A plan! A canal! Panama!”'
On a hunch, Rotcod wrote down that exclamation and
saw that it too was palindromic. At that epiphanous
moment of fearful symmetry, Rotcod became a lifelong
cainamaniac--a ciloholic who spoke and wrote only in
palindromes. “Ah ha!” he yelled. Years later, Rotcod
became a doctor to realize the unfulfilled potential of
his surname. Naturally he married a woman called
Hannah, and from their marriage issued five well-balanced
daughters--Ada, Anna, Eve, Lil, and Nan.
Having heard about this strange case of linguistic
behavior, I visited the good doctor in his office and
conducted an interview.
LEDERER: Dr. Rotcod, I'll begin by asking you
about your preferences in life? Whom
do you prefer, your father Bob, or your
mother, Ava?
ROTCOD: Pa's a sap .
L: So you like your mother better?
R: Ma is as selfless as I am .
L: What about your choice between Coke and
Pepsi?
R: Pepsi is pep .
L: Between Japanese and American cars?
R: A Toyota .
L: And your second choice?
R: Civic .
L: Is golf your favorite sport?
R: Golf? No sir! Prefer prison-flog .
L: Which do you like better, math or science?
R: I prefer pi .
L: Odd or even numbers?
R: Never odd or even .
L: Would you rather go to a movie or stay home
and watch TV?
R: Same nice cinemas .
L: I'd like to explore your political preferences.
What did you do this past November?
R: Rise to vote, sir .
L: And whom did you want to be president?
R: Name now one man .
L: All right. Michael Dukakis.
R: Tut-tut. Star comedy by Democrats. Tut-tut .
L: Then you voted for George Bush?
R: Hey, yeh .
L: Let's move on to your career in medicine. What
would you do first for a student who came to
you with inflammed gums?
R: Draw pupil's lip upward .
L: And what tranquilizer would you recommend?
R: Xanax .
L: And what do you tell patients who are sexually
worn out?
R: Sex at noon taxes .
L: Is it true that you apply straw to warts?
R: Straw? No. Too stupid a fad. I put soot on
warts .
L: I understand that you were recently visited by a
hermit with stomach problems.
R: Recluse's ulcer?
L: Yes, what kind of diet did you recommend?
R: Stressed desserts .
L: You emphasized desserts in that diet?
R: I saw desserts; I'd no lemons, alas, no melon;
distressed was I .
L: And it is true that you encouraged the patient
to consume alcoholic beverages?
R: Yo! Bottoms up--U.S. motto. Boy!
L: Did you recommend lager or red rum?
R: Peel's lager, red rum did murder regal sleep .
L: I understand that, when none of these ideas
worked, you recommended that the patient try
to lose weight by fasting. What did he say?
R: “Doc, note, I dissent. A fast never prevents a
fatness. I diet on cod.”
L: Doctor Rotcod, in addition to your fame in
medical circles, you are well-known for your
passionate hatred of evil.
R: Evil is a name of foeman, as I live .
L: Then what is your advice to those who seek the
good life?
R: Live not on evil .
L: How can one do that?
R: Repel evil as a live leper .
L: Do you then wish to stamp out all lies?
R: Live on evasions? No! I save no evil .
L: How should one treat a liar?
R: Rail at a liar .
L: Can good and evil exist together in this world?
R: No, it is opposition .
L: Did evil always exist?
R: O, stone me! Not so!
L: Then where did evil begin?
R: Eve .
L: And Adam, too?
R: Mad Adam .
L: What did Adam say when he met Eve?
R: Madam in Eden, I'm Adam .
L: And what did Eve say?
R: Eve, maiden name. Both sad in Eden? I dash to
be manned. I am Eve .
L: What happened when Eve saw that jewel of a
forbidden fruit?
R: Eve saw diamond, erred. No maid was Eve .
L: And what happened when Eve offered the fruit
to Adam?
R: Won't lovers revolt now?
L: So they sinned together?
R: Named under a ban--a bared, nude man .
L: And the result was...?
R: Eve damned Eden, mad Eve .
L: Can we ever escape the influence of that act?
R: Her Eve's noose we soon sever, eh?
L: Well, can we?
R: No, evils live on .
L: Did you yourself ever sin, Doctor?
R: Lived as a devil .
L: How so?
R: Evil did I dwell, lewd I did live .
L: And what was the result of that life?
R: Reviled did I live; evil I did deliver .
L: Apparently, you began to despair of ever overcoming
evil. What did you think?
R: Do good's deeds live on? No, evil's deeds do, O
God .
L: I imagine that this state of affairs made you
quite miserable.
R: Egad, a base life defiles a bad age .
L: Did you ever despair that evil could be conquered?
R: No, it can--action!
L: So you dedicated your life to fighting evil?
R: Now do I repay a period won .
L: And you have fought evil with good?
R: Did I do, O God, did I as I said I'd do? Good, I
did!
L: Have you finally won your battle against sin?
R: Now, sir, a war is won .
L: Do you feel good about all this?
R: Revered now I live on. O, did I do no evil, I
wonder, ever?
L: I understand that your colleagues in virtue have
no doubts that they will have their reward in
heaven.
R: Nor I, fool, ah no! We won halo--of iron!
L: And what will happen to you few who have
seen the light?
R: Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward
to new era?
L: Doctor Rotcod, I thank you for this two-way
interview. But how do you do it? How are you
able to speak in palindromes so skillfully?
R: Because if I didn't, I'd sound something like
this: “sihte kilg niht emos dnuos ditn didifie
suaceb.”
Another Grammatical Game: The Foregone Conclusion
The Foregone Conclusion --I claim the capital letters
because I invented it, having beaten Fowler
to it--is one of the trickiest little imps of social intercourse.
Sometimes it is the sneakiest, too. Its legerdemain
can come close to infiltrating sexual intercourse
as well, you might say, as in the following tricky,
sneaky example:
Do you think a girl should go to his or to her
apartment on a first date? Not many girls, liberated
or not, would fail to see through that Foregone
Conclusion, I am sure; who said she should
go to any apartment with a man?
There are far more ingratiating Foregone Conclusions
than in such transparent ploys. How often have
we heard or read statements to the effect that:
It is quicker and cheaper to ride the city transit
system so why do you drive your car in the city?
If you start explaining that you are going somewhere
other than home after work or...then you
have fallen into the trap. To say that it is quicker or
cheaper...may or may not be true. You should just
be sure that you recognize the Foregone Conclusion .
Note well, though, that a Foregone Conclusion is
not the same as a false premise. They are indeed quite
similar but the difference is that a false premise can
stand on its own: “It is essential that the government
run the Post Office.” “All men are the same!” “All
women are the same!” (We must give Judy and the
colonel equal time.) And the parenthetical comment is
not intended to be an example of a false premise! You
see it is the element of persuasion that distinguishes the
Foregone Conclusion from the false premise.
Foregone Conclusions are easy to spot once you
know they may be lurking out there in the verbal
jungle. Let us go hunting. Look out--here's one!
Our brand has double the pain killer of brand X.
Conclude carefully here: medically a double dose of
pain killer does not always kill any more pain than
does a posological dose.
Which dress do you think you prefer then, madam
...?
In the trade I believe they call this a “trial closing” and
it can be a powerful FC --who said she would prefer
any of the dresses?
It is only right that companies making excess profits
should be....
Don't the little (italicized) blighters slip in smoothly?
All men are created equal....
And women? Equal? To one another? They are born
equally strong? Or of the same color? Of course, silly
of me, equal under law is what it means. But laws
differ from place to place, nation to nation.
I am not trying to make contentious points here
but merely showing how ubiquitous our persuasive
Foregone Conclusions can be. How persuasive is the
Declaration of Independence!
Watch for more Favorite Grammatical Games in
following issues of VERBATIM.
Word Droppings
Cannon tabulated an attrition rate of 1.5% for
new meanings and new items originally admitted
to the Merriam Addenda Sections which were cumulatively
included in reprints of Webster's Third New
International Dictionary of the English Language
(1961) at five-year intervals in the 1966-81 period, but
then were excluded from Merriam's 9,000 Words
(1983). Thus a surprisingly high 98.5% of the main
entries were retained in the four Addenda Sections in
question. These evidently possessed whatever qualities
of viability are required for an item to survive in at
least written English once it has experienced adequate
quantity and variety of printed occurrence to justify
initial listing in the first place. Of the 111 items that
were dropped, 61 vanished in just two to five years,
suggesting that the early years of a word's temporary
admission to the English lexicon are the most critical.
During this period, two hardcover versions of the
Addenda Sections were published-- 6,000 Words (1976)
and 9,000 Words . Now the hardcover version of the
7873-main-entry 1986 Addenda Section, appearing simultaneously
as 12,000 Words (1986), permits an updating
of the statistics. Only 164 previously listed main
entries did not appear in the 1986 Addenda Section,
some of which had first been listed as long ago as 1966,
but a high 39 of which were first listed in 1981 and so
continue to indicate the critical quality of a new word's
first five years in the lexicon. If we compare these 164
deletions to the retained 7873 entries, we find that the
updated 2% attrition rate only trivially raises the earlier
1.5% rate. With the thought that word lovers will
be interested in these 164 apparently unviable words,
we will list them below. Since the word-formation
process by which they came into the vocabulary may
provide crucial information, the list is organized according
to that process. Thus, we can see at a glance
that, for example, the highest mortality again appeared
in the new noun compounds, where 28% of
the deletions were noun compounds, whereas the only
variant form was tabbouli . The deletions consisted of
134 nouns, 16 adjectives, 12 verbs, and 2 affixes. The
taxonomy is that determined by the 13,683-item corpus
described in Cannon (1987).
NEW MEANINGS periselenium aposelene
(25) scree aposelenium
analyst ABBREVIATIONS biotron
bob (4) quadriphony
butter pat ADP reticulosis
delocalize, v. BAL technopolis
derrick, v. EEC INITIAL AFFIX-
digger IDDD ATIONS (20)
fat ACRONYM antienviron-
gate KWOC ment
immune, adj. UNABBREVIATED antimissile
laggard SHORTENINGS (6) antirheu-
lagger detox, v. matic, adj.
meson gox antisexist,
microelec- hydro adj.
trode immuno-, audiotypist
mu-meson comb. bioelectro-
muon form genesis
-on, suffix jetavator cryochemis-
paging youthcult try
plasma SHORTENING + cytoecology
poach, v. BOUND FORM (7)
receptor acrasin dehydrotes-
reduplicate, antiscientism tosterone
v. apholate geoprobe
spinner astrionics heliborne
standoff emulsible, adj.
station adj. helilift, v.
zone Ovonic helispost
VARIANT FORM xenate hexa-
tabbouli SHORTENING + methylene-
FUNCTIONAL WORD (8) tetramine
SHIFT (6) ambisextrous, magneto-
decorative adj. fluid-
diplotene, autodrome mechanic,
adj. birdyback adj.
dirty colorcaster neurokinin
dustoff gravisphere parapolitical,
punch-up moonfall adj.
skim parakite protoconti-
BORROWINGS (6) resistojet nent
beef Bourgui- BLENDS (2) telecture
gnon gayola xenobiology
dynapolis plench TERMINAL AFFIX-
incendive, BOUND-MOR- ATIONS (18)
adj. PHEME ITEMS (7) Africanity
macchinetta Afrophile audiophile
channery, air battery kill ratio
adj. Aquarian lepton num-
computerite Age ber
Dolbyized, arcjet lip-gloss
adj. arc-jet engine media mix
ductibility Bering time memory
electro- bitch box trace
hydraulics bodyclothes new issue
fluidonics broken home offtrack bet-
fluoridizer Colourpoint ting
incapacitator Longhair pump jockey
Mosleyite computerized
mysterium aerial to- rap session
oceanologic, mography slack-fill
adj. core city special situa-
projectual cyclic group tion
psychedeli- death control speed freak
cize, v. dunk shot surfer's knot
quadriphon- eye doctor teaching ma-
ics fly-cruise chine
quantized, fractional or- T-time
adj. bital bom- up quark
restartable, bardment wake surfing
adj. system water tooth-
MIXED AFFIX- gamma decay pick
ATIONS heat pollu- xenic acid
antinatalist tion ADJ. COMPOUND
NOUN COM- hemoglobin S air-cushion
POUNDS (46) imitation VERB COM-
ABC art milk POUNDS (5)
adenosine ionic propul- clock in
3',5'-mono- sion clock off
phosphate isolated cam- clock on
Age of era clock out
Aquarius juice man fuck around
Cannon, Garland. 1987. Historical Change and English
Word-Formation: Recent Vocabulary , 340pp. Peter Lang.
“Knowing the Fervor with Which You Speak...”
--Senator Warren Rudman, July 13, 1987
The Iran-contra hearings drenched us in a stunning
array of colorful words. For several weeks
an august group of intelligent men and women met in
the Senate Caucus Room on the third floor of the Capitol's
Office Building. During those several weeks of
early summer the world could listen to articulate
speakers of English who have the ability to manipulate
our minds and twist our emotions with word-images.
Through the clever and sometimes masterful use of
language, the same activity or event was made to
sound logical, or patriotic, or it could appear to be
sordid and bordering on treason. For example, consider
this clever exchange between Senate committee
counsel Arthur Liman and Lieutenant Colonel North:
Liman: And, you therefore were told to get rid of
the memoranda that reflected that?
North: I was told to clean up the files.
One statement suggests concealing or hiding something;
the other implies good sound bookkeeping, running
a tidy ship. The participants wanted to convey the
notion that they were not concerned with language.
Rather, they were only concerned with getting at the
facts. They wished to bring the message of what actually
happened and show a concerned world that truth
and justice would triumph. Still, for this to happen, all
participants recognized that language was important
to ensure that the public would understand acts and
events as the speakers wished them to be understood.
During the hearings, we watched unfold before us
a variety of words and phrases to indicate the concept
of not telling the truth. Seldom did anyone admit to
lying, but statements were often couched in terms colorfully
indicating that the speaker had abandoned verity.
For example, John Nields, Jr., the House committee's
majority counsel, asked, “...Are you saying
that he told you to write down a different version of
the facts?” And moments later he continued, “Are you
saying that you decided it was appropriate to put out a
false version of the facts?” In Lieutenant Colonel
North's response he used the words a version of the
chronology that was inaccurate . Later, Nields used the
phrase the chronology with the false version in it . He
then followed with a question, staying with this
stronger phrase false version . North's response contained
the clause this version of the document was
wrong, intentionally misleading . Earlier he had used
this version was incorrect . Once Nields had used false
version , he stayed with that for a while. Then he used
false story . This word story presents interesting possibilities.
Used in a straight forward positive sentence, it
carries a favorable connotation: “We want to get out
the whole story,” or “Col. North will tell his story to
the committee.” But used with words with unfavorable
connotations, it assumes a pernicious meaning of
make-believe, for example, “Is that still his story?” or
“What is his story now?”
Other euphemisms for lying that were used included
excessive statements, outright misrepresentation,
dissembled, prudent to change those chronologies ,
and radically different from the facts . The
concept of “plausible deniability” is a variation on the
theme of avoiding the recognition or the admission of
lying. Implicit in the term is the idea that one has
chosen to do something that one may want to deny
later. One must then consider if such a denial is reasonable,
that is, believable. If one denies something, is
it possible that the denial, that is, the lie, could be
exposed? It might be possible to establish an equation
to determine the Plausible Deniability Factor (PDF) of
any statement. Psychologists and social scientists could
do a lot with that.
The deleteriously loaded term elaborate scheme
popped into the hearings with Representative Jack
Brooks' words, “...this elaborate scheme was to
carry out these activities...” In American English
scheme strongly implies `craftiness, secret intent';
while not as strong as plot , it certainly lacks the neutral
qualities of plan and conveys a meaning far beyond
its dictionary definition.
Near the close of the session Wednesday, July 8th,
there arose a clever word game after Mr. Nields characterized
some of Col. North's responses as several
speeches . Mr. Brendan Sullivan, Jr., Col. North's counsel,
objected to the term, declaring it to be pejorative.
Chairman Senator Daniel Inouye said, “...some
people consider lengthy statements to be speeches.” Mr.
Nields replied, “I'm perfectly happy to use the expression
`lengthy statements.”' And Mr. Sullivan came
back with, “How about using lengthy answer...?”
Speeches in this context carries with it too much of the
idea of pontificating, which Mr. Sullivan did not want.
While statement is better, answer gives the mental picture
of completion. Someone who knows can give an
answer; we are left with a positive image. Response
would have been a good neutral word, but neither side
was thinking neturality that late in the afternoon.
Another classic example of a loaded word jumped
up several days later when Mr. Liman asked a question
that began, “And after you became involved, linked
with...” This word linked is a sneaky little devil.
While it means simply to `couple or connect,' the connotation
is always negative. No one is linked to the
American Red Cross or the Humane Society, but people
may be linked to the Communist Party or the Mafia.
When we hear that someone is linked to an organization
or cause of which we have never heard, we feel
ominously that this must be bad.
Early in the proceedings we saw a cat-and-mouse
game develop over what to call `money that is excess
over expenses in a business transaction.' Mr. Nields
asked, “...what did the President know about the
diversion of the proceeds of the Iranian arms sale to
the Contras?” North responded, “I never personally
discussed the use of the residuals or profits from the
sale....” This was one of the few times Col. North
used profit , choosing to stay with the more charming
residuals , as used here, meaning `remainder.'
When Mr. Nields used diversion again, Col. North
responded with “Well, you insist on referring to it as
`diversion.'... my use of Webster...leads me to believe
that those were `residuals' and not diverted--the
only thing we did was divert money out...and put it
to better use....” Nields countered with “I'm not
asking about words, now, Colonel. I'm asking you
whether you didn't continue to send memoranda seeking
approval of diversions or residuals, whatever the
word....” While Nields seemed uninterested in
words, he, nevertheless, stayed with diversion
throughout the questioning, and North continued with
residuals. Divert means to `change from one course or
use to another or to turn aside.' In some contexts the
word can connote `secrecy and deception,' a diversion
tactic , for example. Used in another context, it is perfectly
harmless: waters of a river, for instance, may be
diverted to prevent flooding.
The words profit and proceeds are almost equal in
meaning. When Nields used proceeds , he was passing
up a chance to irritate or challenge North, for the
connotations are completely different. It is much better
to refer to the proceeds of a raffle rather than the
profits. Profit is deeply rooted in the world of business
and too often associated with money-grubbing and
greed. Later, Representative Jenkins referred to a
profit-making business , which sounds harsher than if
he had chosen to say profit-making enterprise . But
“proceed-producing enterprise” would have sounded
even more innocuous. Shortly after this, North used
the terms revenue producers and deserving of fair just
reasonable compensation . These phrases are two more
synonyms for profit that alter our perception a little.
As with the myriad words surrounding profit ,
there was a plethora of words surrounding the Boland
Amendment. Col. North used the phrases complying
with those Boland Proscriptions, the constraints and
proscriptions of Boland , and working around the
problem that Boland would have created . Mr. Liman
responded to this last phrase with, “Well, another
word for working around, for people who have had
some Latin, is `circumvent.”' Circumvent does mean
to `work around' and implies ingenuity and strategy.
Circumvent is much more precise than the term work
around and suggests a planned detour to avoid the
law. North's statement that he “sought a means of complying
with...Boland” and his work around remark
mean essentially the same, but complying sounds
much nicer, conveying the idea of adhering to regulations.
On the other hand, circumvent suggests avoiding
what is mandatory and at the same time returns a
more formal, legalistic atmosphere to the questioning.
Two terms that surfaced during Mr. Liman's questioning
were fall guy and scapegoat , both terms introduced
by him and not Col. North. Webster's Ninth
Collegiate Dictionary tells us that a fall guy is `one
who is easily duped.' A second definition reveals it to
be synonymous with scapegoat . But fall guy is a less
formal term and suggests ignorance. Many of us recall
the old gangster movies of Humphrey Bogart and
James Cagney. Either Bogart or Cagney must have
said, “You ain't gonna pin this rap on me! I ain't no
fall guy!” Scapegoat , on the other hand, means `one
who bears the blame for others'; it is a political word
that carries with it a certain nobility and martyrdom
that fall guy doesn't imply.
The rich and rewarding, and often necessary,
sport of quibbling over words arose early in the questioning
when Col. North, responding to a question
from Mr. Nields, replied, “...the word `investigation'
wasn't used... Mr. Meese had been asked to do
a fact-finding inquiry....” Later during the attorney
general's appearance before the committee, those two
words came up often. Those who tended to be favorable
to the colonel used inquiry while those distrustful
of him were inclined to use investigation . Meese contended
that his actions took just a few days, and investigation
implies a thoroughness that is missing in inquiry.
While some were prone to use the phrase
extensive or complete investigation , others used brief
or informal inquiry .
Somewhere, sometime, speakers of English must
bestow upon Representative Brooks a special commendation
for his creation of a description of a planned
government agency that would be “a more or less off-the-shelf
independent, stand-alone, self-supporting
operation for covert operations.” He used a noun, two
prepositional phrases and a string of adjectives that
would make anyone proud.
So the hearings have come and gone, but the
repercussions will remain for some time. Our judgments
may hinge on a well-turned phrase, a beautifully
nuanced sentence, a word-image that flashes
across our gray matter reminding us of childhood. A
position that seemed logical a while ago now becomes
irrational. A strong conviction is suddenly an indefensible
belief. Some of us will hold to an idea or concept
regardless of the evidence; others will change positions.
Still others will simply marvel at the use of language
and wonder just where our analytical side ends
and our emotional side begins. We may never know for
sure if our conclusions are based on cold, hard logic or
pure sentiment.
Does Accent Matter?
This interesting, readable book is probably the
most sensible work on the pronunciation of English
ever published. Professor Honey, an English linguist
now on assignment in Bophuthatswana, one of the less
easily pronounceable places in the world, writes in a
straightforward, simple, casual, friendly style totally
devoid of the off-putting symbols and technical jargon
that usually mark writing on pronunciation. That is
not to say that the book's theme is casual, for Honey
comes to grips with social aspects of language that are
seldom treated, even in a clinical manner, by linguists.
A notable exception in the United States is William
Labov; but, despite his open, readable style, Labov's
work is known mainly to academics because it appears
in scholarly journals and in books distributed largely to
the academic market. For all that, Does Accent Matter ?
is not a whit less scholarly, and Faber must be
congratulated for perceiving it as a work that deserves
a wider readership. The biggest concessions to make
the presentation more palatable for the general reader
is the elimination of footnote references within the
text: even superior numbers do not appear in the text,
and those who demand footnotes must refer to a brief
Appendix where they are arranged, chapter by chapter,
with clear page references. As one who understands
the importance of footnotes but loathes them
because of their continual, unsightly interruption of
normal reading, I applaud this treatment: they are
there if you want them, but they do not intrude. The
index is quite thin on the ground: after reading such a
book, one naturally puts it aside till it is wanted for
reference to certain points, and the paucity of the index
will make the location of information something of
a chore at a later date. I have always felt that every
book on language should include, either in its index or
in a separate listing, all of the words and word elements
discussed in the text, for they often provide the
point of reference for a researcher.
Honey explains the distinction between dialiect
and accent :
If a regional speaker also uses the grammer, vocabularly,
and idiom that are distinctive of his region,
then we say he is speaking dialect. But if he uses the
grammer, vocabularly, and idiom of the standard
English found in newspapers, books, magazines, and
news bulletins, then all we notice about his speech is
his accent--and possibly his intonation.
Most of this book is understandably concerned with
accent in the United Kingdom, though other varieties
of English are discussed. To better understand attitudes
toward the English spoken in the UK one must
be familiar with the term Received Pronunciation
(RP), which the author describes as:
The accent most obviously associated with the standard
English dialect..., [RP] echoes the rather
old-fashioned sense of `received' as meaning `generally
accepted' as in the terms `received opinion' and
`received wisdom,' especially by those who are
qualified to know.
Among speakers of English worldwide, either as a native
or an acquired language, RP is the most highly
regarded accent--indeed, some might well regard RP
as standing for `Revealed Pronunciation'--so it behooves
one to pay attention to Professor Honey's comments
about it, favorable and adverse. The chapter
titles give a good indication of the subject matter
covered:
ONE What is `an accent'?
TWO Where did RP come from?
THREE Talking proper and talking posh
FOUR Are some accents better than others?
FIVE What is happening to RP?
SIX Accent variety and the mass media
SEVEN The accents of politics
EIGHT Changing patterns
NINE Accents and the future
In the course of his treatment of these topics, the
author provides a wealth of information that answers
numerous questions (and confronts many of the prejudices)
that many people have about language:
Increasing literacy and pressures towards `correctness'
led in England to spelling-pronunciations
which caused speakers to restore a whole range of
sounds which earlier generations had dropped, like
the l in fault, vault, and soldier; the second w in
awkward and the sole w in Edward; the t at the
end of pageant, respect, and strict; and the d in
the middle of the word London and at the end of
husband. Over the same period speakers of the
standard English accent learned to drop the final d
0which for centuries had been attached when ordinary
folk talked of a scholard and his gownd.
We all know about language prejudice, but it is nonetheless
interesting to read that:
...an RP accent was one of the foremost criteria
for being an officer in the First World War. In Birmingham
in 1918 it was possible to buy a manual
designed to enable local speakers to correct their
accents, since, as its author claimed, “to no one is
the absence of local dialect more important than to
the young officer in the army”. Carnage at the
front forced that specification to be relaxed in
many cases, and men had to be commissioned
whose voices betrayed their promotion from the
ranks. When one such officer inspected the cadets
at a public school (Lancing) in 1919, the sixteen-year-old
Evelyn Waugh helped to organize the
dropping of rifles as a demonstration against the
man's accent....
[In the Second World War] the public-school-educated
actor Dirk Bogarde (born in 1921) claims
that in that war the sole reason for his promotion
from the ranks to officer status was his accent.
And we know that Professor Honey has it right when
he writes about
...the tendency, which now pervades the whole
of our society, for us to attach to particular accents
certain generalized assumptions about the values
and attributes considered typical of certain social
groups. In other words, we judge accents by
stereotypes which we already have about their
speakers.... One US observer has claimed that
non-standard features (grammer and vocabulary as
well as accent) have the power to close off a conversation
among strangers, bring job interviews to an
abrupt end and, when used on the telephone, to
render a flat advertised as vacant that morning suddenly
to be declared “already let”.
A curious aspect of RP was (or is) its continual
shifting: as soon as some of its characteristics are
adopted by speakers of a different social or educational
class, RP speakers, by consent that could
scarcely be tacit, change the rules of the game, coming
up with shootin' and huntin'. For example, American
readers of S.S. Van Dine's detective novels of the
1930s might have been mystified by the insertion into
the dialogue of its lordly hero expressions like
don'tcher know and the anathematized ain't .
Americans may be pleased (or relieved) to learn
that
The American accent--any American accent--can
expect a favourable reception in Britain, for three
reasons. First, its speaker is perceived as standing
outside the social-class hierarchy which partly explains
the scale of evaluation of our own British accents.
Secondly, we are not able to judge, on accent
alone, the features of `educatedness' which might
be apparent to native American listeners, so we
give the speaker the benefit of the doubt. Thirdly,
the American accent is to some extent glamorized
by the film industry and by the number of American
programmes shown on British television. Canadian
English accents, which in Britain cannot normally
be distinguished from American, share the
same generally favourable evaluation.... If the
greatest single influence on the current evolution of
English RP and of many non-standard accents in
Britain today is the `popular' London accent, it is
also true that the greatest single influence on the
grammar, vocabulary, and idiom of English as spoken
and written in Britain is American English.
Those who are not intimately familiar, from listening
to them on radio and television, with how specific
British politicians and entertainers of the decades
since WWII sound may find themselves at sea in the
rather detailed descriptions (chapters six and seven) of
their pronunciations and their effects, good and bad,
on the British public. Despite that, Honey's treatment
is virtually self-explanatory, and anyone contemplating
a work on American accents would do well to be
guided by the principles he has established.
Inevitably, there are some slips regarding American
pronunciation and accent, most if not all of which
can be charged to the failure to identify specific dialects
or the absence of a restrictive modifier like most
or many to precede American speakers . For example,
American English removes the y- from the yu-
sound when it turns new and duke into noo and
dook...
That is a pattern characteristic of only certain
American dialects (as a check in any good modern
dictionary would reveal). The same is true for Honey's
assumptions about Buddha , which he implies is universally
pronounced in AE with the vowel of boot ;
about Moscow , the second syllable of which is not
always rhymed in AE with cow ; about Nepal , which is
pronounced identically to the British (RP) way by
many AE speakers; and about Vietnam , the -nam of
which, contrary to the author's information, is pronounced
by many AE speakers to rhyme with dam , not
palm . As for Pakistan , Americans tend to give both a
sounds the same quality, whether they rhyme them
with that in father or in man . On the other hand, the
pronunciation of Afghanistan in Britain follows either
the pattern of Pakistan , which has the a of man in the
first syllable and that of father in the last, or, as in
America, is heard with the a of man in both positions.
Again:
Americans pronounce a strong r in card, port, and
similar contexts...,
an observation that does not apply to New Yorkers or
New Englanders. And the author has been misled to
infer that all Americans say deTAIL, baTON, INquiry
adverTISEment, haRASS, and REsearch: both occur.
I, for one, say deTAIL, baTON, inQUIry or INquiry
(depending on the day), adVERtisement, HARass, and
reSEARCH, which leads me to think that these stress
patterns are not necessarily distributed along dialectal
lines.
...Britons get the impression that large numbers
of Americans go through their whole lives unable
to make confident distinction between a positive
and a negative statement of possibility, between `I
can do it' and `I can't do it'.
It may not come as much of a revelation to Professor
Honey to learn that even I, a native speaker of AE,
often have to ask whether an American speaker meant
to say can or can't when the word receives any emphasis;
but in normal, unstressed speech the former is
usually reduced to `k'n' while the latter is of longer
duration, even, than that of the noun can . To be sure,
the RP practice of rhyming can with man and the a of
can't with that of father does neaten things up a bit.
Does Accent Matter? has a sprinkling of amusing
anecdotes, this being one of my favorities:
Around 1980 a senior French political figure was
made the subject of a BBC radio profile. The programme
was the more interesting because of the
politician's admirable fluency in English. Listeners
were diverted to hear him explain, in answer to a
question about his personal life, that his pastimes
included “middle-aged antics,” and they must have
wondered what innocent japes--or perhaps amorous
frolics--the old boy got up to, until they
worked out that middle-aged was his very reasonable
attempt at translating du moyen age (medieval),
and that antics was his Gallic stress pattern
for `antiques'.
As a speaker of AE sojourning for several months
each year in Britain during the past twenty years, I
have been struck by the creeping changes I have perceived
in the RP pronunciation of some ordinary words
(controversy, disciplinary) and of proper names: news-readers
on BBC Radio 4 and World Service tend to
stress Afghanistan and Khomeini on the last syllable
where formerly one heard it stressed on the sound.
I had best curb my temptation to reproduce the
entire book here by stopping now, leaving readers with
a great deal to look forward to. In the unlikely event
that my message has not come across, allow me to
repeat that VERBATIM readers are sure to find it as
engaging as I did.
Laurence Urdang
The Longman Register of New Words
John Ayto has drawn on a world of English-language
newspapers and magazines for the citations
in this interesting and useful book. Most of the 130-odd
sources are, quite naturally, UK in origin and persuasion,
with a fair sprinkling of US periodicals; others
looked at include Australia, Canada, Malaysia, Turkey,
Hong Kong, and France (for The International
Herald Tribune ). Ayto writes well, and his Introduction
(actually, to get fussy about it, Foreword or Preface)
sets forth clearly the aims and purposes of this
collection of neologisms. The selection of 1200 entries
for inclusion seems a bit esoteric, but the general structure
of the work--entry word, part of speech, definition,
citation(s), and, in many cases, an explanatory
comment on the origin of the term, its etymology, and
other information--is straightforward.
Rather than skip through, picking up “showcase”
entries throughout the book, I chose to read thoroughly
the first quarter (A-C) and remark on specific
entries. I have not commented on entries that are either
entirely satisfactory or out of my ken.
advance man The definition given, `someone who
makes arrangements for visits and appearances
by an eminent person, and goes in advance to
ensure that they proceed smoothly...A word
of US origin.'
This seems too specific to American English [AE]
speakers who associate the designation with the circus
and other entertainments.
amicus brief `American a legal submission by someone
who is not party to a case but has an interest
in its outcome...Amicus is Latin for “friend.” '
This shortened form may be rare in British English
[BE], but the term amicus curiae , literally `friend
of the court,' is well established in Britain, and the
etymological note could be misunderstood.
appeal `noun an act of appealing against something
The U.S. Ski Association board Sunday rejected
Mike Brown's appeal of his exclusion from the
U.S. Ski Team. USA Today
The..verb appeal..is very well established in
AE...Not so widely recorded is the consequence
of this..with the preposition of..
where in BE one would expect against.'
One would expect against in AE also for this
sense, and the of can be attributed to journalese or
some other aberrant style. Appeal of is used in standard
AE in: `The appeal of children and kittens is
universal.'
arrestee `American a person who has been arrested'
The citation is from the Roanoke Times and
World-News , undoubtedly a redoubtable newspaper
but scarcely one I should have selected as typifying
AE. It sounded like a nonce usage to me till I found it
in The Random House Unabridged, Second Edition
[RHDII] with a date of 1840-50. Notwithstanding, I
should not think it common enough to warrant occupying
space in this book.
autocondimentation `seasoning one's own food with
pepper and salt at table'
Very likely a facetious coinage, this appeared in
quotation marks (attributing an AE source) in New
Scientist , a British journal. Like many of the entries,
both AE and BE-- autohagiography, awfulize, babushkaphobia,
babynap, bimbette , etc.--this strikes
me as a nonce word, not likely to be found around the
house.
boffo The only speculation about its etymology
cited is Merriam-Webster's 12,000 Words: “from
boffola, a `belly-laugh,' which in turn comes
from boff, a `belly-laugh,' `gag,' `hit,' perhaps
based on `box office.'”
I prefer the suggestion in RHDII that it might
come from Italian buffo , French bouffe `comic.'
bump `(of an airline) to exclude (a passenger with
a booking) from an overbooked flight'
This might be new to BE but this sense of bump
and, alas, the practice have been common in AE for
years and ought to have been so indicated.
cherry pick `verb, informal to cream off the choicest
items .. The metaphor of “cherries” as the
most desirable elements of something may be
reminiscent of the “bowl of cherries” which life is
proverbially not.'
Close, but no cigar. In America as well as in England,
a sweet (like ice cream) is often topped with
whipped cream on which is placed a maraschino
cherry. Some (younger) people often save the cherry to
eat last; people more advanced in age may be seen to
eat the cherry first, presumably on the theory that they
might not last long enough to finish the sweet. To
many, the cherry is, indeed, the choicest part. But the
image is colored, too, by the existence, in both AE and
BE, of a type of light, mobile hydraulic crane provided
with a basket or platform enabling one to approach a
tall structure (like an American ice-cream sundae)
from above to pluck the cherry from the top.
coconut or coconut head `noun, derogatory slang a
black person who adopts white cultural characteristics
.. The metaphor is based on the coconut's
brown exterior and white interior.'
This is an interesting one: the term in AE is oreo ,
after the tradename of a dark double chocolate cookie
with white cream between, a confection not encountered
(by me) in Britain.
creative `adjective, euphemistic going beyond conventional
scope or legal limits .. This new meaning
of creative, with its implication of imaginative
rule-bending for possibly disreputable
purposes, appears to have been coined in the
field of accountancy .. , but has since widened
its area of application considerably.'
I should have thought that `innovative' might have
been a better gloss, and one must take account, too,
that it was originally (and still is for those who have
any sensitivity for the word) cynically facetious.
Aside from these comments, which are intended
to be helpful, there is a great deal of interest to be
found in this book, considerably enhanced by Ayto's
comments. For example,
-cred combining form, slang popular acceptance
among the stated group
This form started its career in the mid 1980s in
street-cred, an abbreviation of street credibility
--popular approval in urban working class culture--but
now is beginning to show signs of developing
into a buzz-suffix in its own right:
force-cred
All these qualities make him [Peter Imbert, Metropolitan
Police Commissioner] a copper's copper.
He has force-cred, and therefore is as well placed
as anyone could be to make the Newman structural
reforms actually work in practice.
Guardian 18 Mar 1988
Ayto's style is lively: in his comment on cathart he
offers:
This curiously curt coinage, based on cathartic, at
least has the merit of getting out of the usual humdrum
-ize rut.
There are (other) entries whose validity seems questionable
on the grounds that they, like some I have
mentioned, are not likely to have sufficient frequency
in the language to merit inclusion-- aestheticienne, affluenza,
agitpop [sic] , to mention a few. The citations
are shown to add explanatory information to the definitions
as well as context, not, as in the OED , as attempts
at establishing earliest recorded evidence.
Compilers (and publishers) of such works would be
well advised to have any AE material thoroughly
checked by those in the know, for it is almost impossible
to derive accurate information about a given dialect
save from those who are steeped in it.
Laurence Urdang
Fascinating Toponymics--Geographical Names and the Stories They Tell:
Settlement was much more rapid in the United
States than it had been in Europe, and this has
affected the place-naming patterns. In Europe people
had time to contemplate the area before settling on an
appropriate name; in the United States, where settlement
was more rapid, names often had to be chosen
without delay. This haste has quickened the creative
juices, and has sometimes resulted in innovative and
intriguing place names. As George Stewart wrote,
In a period of rapid expansion, towns and counties
were being established every day...the demand
for names outran the supply, and the result was
both monotony and confusion.
The problem of having to create a large number of
place names in a relatively short period is illustrated in
a true story told by Mark Wexler:
A store owner [in Missouri] applied for a postal
listing under the name Excelsior, but was turned
down because the title was already claimed in Missouri.
In response, he wrote back saying that any
name would do, as long as it was “different and peculiar.”
A few weeks later, federal officials notified
him that he was the postmaster of Peculiar, Missouri.
In the confusion of finding a name quickly, practical
problems sometimes emerged. Morrow , Kansas,
was first named after a state senator, but this name
had to be changed to Morrowville “because of semantic
confusion when juxtaposed with a common preposition.
The railroad claimed that its ticket sellers were
becoming confused when passengers requested tickets
“to Morrow.”
At the December, 1987, meeting of the American
Names Society in San Francisco, Lewis McArthur recited
a poem about another Moro , in Sherman County,
Oregon. The passenger agent for the Union Pacific
Railroad in that particular town was named Mr. Bassinger,
and an often recited poem in the town was:
Oh! Mr. Bassinger
I want to be a passenger
I want to go to Moro
And I want to go today.
Well, the train that goes to Moro
Is now upon its way
And you cannot go to Moro
Any more today.
Frank Remington indicates that on the official
form for post office name selection there is a blank for
“Name of Town” and the directions, “Please write in
ink.” The residents of a particular town in Arkansas
took this information literally as they were voting for
the town name, and so many of them wrote in “Ink,”
that Ink became the name of the town.
Railroads preceded settlers into many parts of the
United States, and every few miles a siding had to be
built so that trains could pull off the track and wait for
others to pass. Each siding was given a name. Francis
Stupey of Amarillo, Texas, a lifelong employee of the
Santa Fe Railway, has collected stories which he shares
in a slide-show about the railroad sidings. Names were
used because they were easier to remember than numbers.
Frequently a name was chosen on the basis of a
topographical feature, resulting in such names as
Bluffdale (dale near a bluff), Clifton (town near a
cliff), Shopton near a repair shop, and Coalinga near a
coal shed. Meridian was on the 98th meridian, Justin
was “just inside” the county line, and Haswel was at a
place in Colorado that had dry wells. Stupey points
out that there were so many sidings needing names
that the railroaders were forced to be creative. Spanish
and Indian names were precedents to other non-English-sounding
names. For example, casual observers
probably think such words as Calgro, Rioca , and
Mopeco are Spanish. Actually, in an early example of
shrewd public relations, the names were taken from
the names of shippers. Naming a siding after a company
flattered the company and increased its loyalty to
the particular railroad. Calgro was named for “California
Growers,” Rioco for the “Richfield Oil Company,”
Mopeco for the “Mobile Petroleum Company,”
Hepoco for the “Hercules Powder Company,” Stoil for
“Standard Oil,” Biola for the “Bible Institute of Los
Angeles,” and Calwa for the “California Wine Association.”
Because Indians had lived in the areas first and
given names to certain places that were fairly well
known, it is to be expected that some of their names
would be used: Cucamonga means `many waters,'
Supai `blue water,' Navasota `muddy water,' and Wichita
`many lodges.' A siding named O'Keene began as
the Indian word Cheyenne but an Irishman working
for the railroad decided to make it look Irish and so he
changed it and added an apostrophe.
Twenty-seven of the fifty states have names taken
from the 300 different Indian languages that were spoken
on this continent when the first European settlers
arrived. Sometimes a place or state name was borrowed
directly as was Asingsing , which became Sing
Sing , and Messatossec which became Massachusetts.
Quemessourit became Missouri, Ookannasa Arkansas,
Uneaukara Niagara, Machihaganing Michigan , and
Potawanmeac Potomac . English speakers changed the
pronunciations because the sound patterns in the Indian
languages were so different from those of English
that they could not hear, much less imitate, the exact
words the Indians were using.
Some of the names have interesting stories behind
them. Kalamazoo , Michigan, is supposed to have got
its name from the Potawatomi tribe in which Ke-ke-kala-kala-mazoo
means something like `where the water
boils (or steams) in the pot.' Supposedly a man bet
his friends that he could run to the river and back
before they could get a pot of water to boil. Ten Sleep ,
Wyoming, got its name because it was ten days' travel
by foot from Yellowstone. Chugwater , Wyoming, is at
the bottom of a high bluff over which the Indians
would stampede buffalo to kill them. When the bodies
of the buffalo his into the stream, they would make a
“chug”-like noise, hence the name. Thunderbolt ,
Georgia, got its name hundreds of years ago when a
bolt of lightning hit near the village. When the people
ran to see what had happened, they found a mineral
spring. Believing that the lightning had created the
spring, they named the area after the miraculous
event.
American English , by Albert H. Marckwardt,
contains the information that Chicago comes from an
Algonquian word meaning `garlic field.' It is further
pointed out that words coming from Indian languages
frequently undergo semantic change:
Mackinaw, the name of the island at the junction
of Lakes Huron and Michigan, according to one
explanation at least, was a shortening of Michili-mackinac,
meaning `great turtle.' The reason for
this application is clear enough to anyone who has
suddenly come upon the pine-wooded hills of the
island projecting from the water.
Mistranslations from the American Indian languages
were also common. In his Illustrated Dictionary
of Place Names: United States and Canada , Kelsie
Harder points out that when the explorers asked the
Indians what a place was called, they responded
“Canada.” The Indians meant `village.' but the whites
took it to mean the name of the area.
Often a name which appears to be Indian is something
very different. According to George R. Stewart,
in American Place Names, Wewanta , West Virginia is
derived from the persistent plea in English of “We
want a post office.” Stewart also reports that Itasca ,
Minnesota is a manufactured name: “Coined in 1832
by W.T. Boutwell and H.R. Schoolcraft, who believed
it to be the `true source' of the Mississippi. Boutwell
rendered this in crude Latin as Veritas Caput ; Schoolcraft
joined the tail of the first word with the head of
the second.”
A different type of mistranslation can result in a
strange kind of doublet. Mahoning/Licking came to us
partly as a transliteration, and partly as a translation.
According to Jean L. Mutter, Arizona State University
(Tempe),
Upon learning that mahon-meant `salt-lick,' the
name was partially translated into English as Lick-ing,
the -ing being added by phonetic transfer and
probably some morphological influence, as well.
Sometimes the borrowing of Indian words was
complicated by going through a middle language, often
French. For example, the Sioux Indians (they
spoke Omaha) called a river in the central part of the
United States Niboapka . Thomas Gasque, editor of
Names points out that this word comes from ni `water'
and bthaska `flat (like a board), spreading out.' When
French explorers came upon the name, they knew
enough Sioux to know the name meant `board,' so they
used a translated version of the Indian name and
called it la Riviére Platte . English speakers adopted
the French name and talked about the Platte River .
They named one of the towns on its banks North
Platte . But when the state applied for admission to the
Union in 1867, it was under the original Indian name
which they spelled Nebraska .
In addition to Indian sources, United States place
names have come from fifty different languages, but as
with the Indian names, most of the pronunciations
have been anglicized and many of the words have been
translated. The stress pattern of a place-name expression
can sometimes differentiate between two meanings,
but this clue can be lost if names alternate between
languages. In a 1977 article in Onoma , Henri
Dorion gives an example from French. The name
Grande Riviére de la Baleine became anglicized into
Great Whale River , but this is ambiguous in English
since the Great can modify either Whale or River .
When it was translated back into French, the wrong
sense was used, and it became Riviére de la Grande
Baleine rather than the original Grande Riviére de la
Baleine .
Another often-mistaken etymology is the name
Ajo in Arizona. This is thought by many people to be
the Spanish word for `garlic,' but Jean Multer points
out that an indigenous language has a similar-sounding
word meaning `paint,' and this might be the correct
origin of the town's name:
The first documented source of the name was almost
certainly not written Papago. Formerly, more
importance was placed on written sources than on
the oral ones. The surroundings supported both
derivations; the ores from the mines supplied red
paint, and a type of onion, akin to garlic, grew
there.
Multer adds that these conflicting bits of evidence
make the etymology of Ajo difficult to confirm.
According to Stupey, similar but less commercial
names include Chanesa named after the three children
of a railroad man, Charlie, Nellie , and Sarah ; and
Edruvera , also named after three children, Edwin,
Ruth , and Vera . Three adult sisters, Daisy, Cora , and
Nora , were honored at Dacono. Anna S. Wilson was
honored at Anness and Ellen Woods at Lenwood,
Glendora and Evadale were named to honour early
husband-and-wife settlers, Glen and Dora and Eva
and Dale .
Sometimes names were reversed. Yewed is Dewey ,
and Corum is Muroc backwards. Enon is none, Saxet
is Texas , and Reklaw is Walker : there was already a
siding named Walker and so when the same name was
again suggested, the clerk in the office just reversed it.
The main reason for the reversals was that they allowed
a man to name a siding after himself without
appearing to be egocentric. One man was too humble
to have a siding named after him. He was a popular
rancher in California. When he declined the offer, the
workers said he was “mucho modesto,” and they decided
to honor him indirectly by naming the siding
Modesto , now the name of a good-sized city.
Tenino was named for the number “1090,” but
there is disagreement on its significance. One story is
that locomotive Number 1090 was wrecked nearby.
Another is that the elevation is 1,090 feet, and still
another is that 1,090 people lived there when the siding
was built. There is an unconfirmed story that Laredo ,
Texas, was named for the sounds made by the
chimes in the Catholic church: la, re , and do . Another
folk etymology has it that the Snake River was so
named because it coiled back and forth so much. The
truth is, however, that it was named after the Snake
Indians of that area; and it is further true that the
Snake Indians got their name from their habit of eating
snakes: that part of the United States was very
poor, and snakes were often the only food available.
Some names do not tell false stories; they tell no stories
at all. Azusa for example is euphonious, but it does not
immediately suggest its own history. In fact, Azusa was
made from the first and last letters of the alphabet,
followed by “USA.” Ding Dong was chosen as the
whimsical name for a siding in Bell County, Texas.
Wish fulfillment is seen in the midst of California's
Death Valley, where sidings were given such coolsounding
names as Klondike and Siberia . These exotic
names also provided opportunities for playful statements
like, “We're really sailing today. We've come
from Cuba to Alaska in fifteen minutes.”
The story is told that six railroad men met near
San Bernardino, California. The last item on the
agenda was to find a name for a new siding. They had
each been instructed to bring a suggestion--perhaps a
Spanish-sounding name, but one that was short and
easy to say. Each man's suggestion was rejected by the
others, hence they were surprised when the supervisor
ended the meeting saying they had made a unanimous
decision. When questioned, he replied, “Well, you all
said, `On, no!' so Ono is what we'll use.”
The most common way for settlers to honor their
native lands and languages as they spread out over the
continent was to bring old names from home to their
new towns. Moscow , Idaho, was called Paradise until
its Russian postmaster decided to change it. This is
especially interesting in view of recent place-name
changes in Russia, whereby Tsaritsyn was changed to
Stalingrad , then again to Volgograd . Likewise St.
Petersburg became Petrograd and later Leningrad .
Even in America, politics change, and people go in
and out of favor. In “From Hero to Celebrity,” Daniel
Boorstin points out that soon after Charles Lindbergh
acquired a reputation as a pro-Nazi and accepted a
decoration from Hitler, the Lindbergh Beacon atop a
Chicago skyscraper was renamed the Palmolive Beacon ,
and high in the Colorado Rockies Lindbergh Peak
was given the more obscure name of Lone Eagle Peak .
Many names were brought over from the Old
World, including Holland , Michigan; Shamrock ,
Texas; Lebanon , Indiana; Toledo , Ohio; Waterloo ,
Iowa; Amsterdam , Ohio; Paris , Texas; Copenhagen ,
New York; Rome , Georgia, and Mexico , New York.
There is a Gulf Service Station in the city of Mexico,
New York, so this is called, “the Gulf of Mexico.”
Staten Island , New York was named after the legislative
governing body of the Netherlands, the Staten-General ,
perhaps because a meeting was held there in
1776 in which American and British representatives
tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a peaceful end to the
American Revolution.
Picturesque images are often captured in names,
as in Bridal Veil Falls in Utah, or Teapot Dome in
Wyoming. In addition to these there is Shiprock , a
rock resembling a ship in New Mexico, the Finger
Lakes in New York, and the Sawtooth Mountain Range
in Idaho. The “sawtooth” metaphor occurs also in
Spanish, since Sierra Nevada in Spanish means “Snowcovered
Saw.” In Utah, the Big Rock Candy Mountain
looks good enough to eat, and the nearby Lemonade
Springs makes a person thirsty. The Chocolate Mountains
of California are brown; the Painted Desert in
Arizona and Flaming Gorge in Wyoming are multicolored.
Some American cities are named after animals.
There is Wolf Lake and White Pigeon in Michigan,
Deer Isle in Maine, Elk Run Heights in Iowa, and
Deerfield and Raven in Virginia. One city that had a
unique animal name decided that the uniqueness was
not worth the bother. The town was Ptarmigan ,
Alaska, named after a wild bird common to the area.
However, people had such a hard time remembering
how to spell Ptarmigan that they just began calling the
town Chicken , Alaska.
Many city names express hope, as in New Hope ,
and New Freedom , Pennsylvania, New Era , Michigan,
and the dozens of cities named Paradise . Once in a
while, however, a place gets a dysphemistic name,
such as the Badlands in South Dakota, or Great Dismal
Swamp , which is a 1500-square-mile section of
Virginia and North Carolina.
It is just for amusement that the residents of Ann
Arbor, Michigan write “A²” instead of Ann Arbor in
their return addresses; or people in New Hampshire
joke about the towns named Orange, Lebanon , and
Lyme ; or a motel owner in Comfort, Texas, which
happens to be near two towns named Alice and Louise ,
puts up a billboard saying, “Sleep here in Comfort
between Alice and Louise.”
Arizonans are amused at how Showlow and Why
were named. Showlow started out as a cattle ranch
and got its name when it was won by a gambler who
showed the low card in a game of seven-up. Why was a
winter campground in the desert where people would
bring their mobile homes and campers and stay during
the cold months. When friends would arrive, many of
them would ask, “Why here?” The residents decided to
take the words right out of their friends' mouths by
naming the town Why, Arizona. Truth or Consequences ,
New Mexico, used to be named Hot Springs ,
but in 1950 the residents voted to change its name
when the host of a popular radio show promised free
publicity to any town that would do such a thing.
Some names sound more appealing than they are.
Lovers Retreat , Texas has a violent rather than a romantic
history. It is a rocky area where a rancher
named Lover hid among the boulders from people intent
on killing him.
It is not always possible to document the naming
of particular places. The town of Intercourse , Pennsylvania,
gets so many questions about the origin of its
name that the city has printed a brochure offering
several explanations. The name has been traced back
as far as 1814, and one theory is that it was the local
term for a junction of two roads. Another theory is
that there used to be a race track in the area and
Intercourse was the spot where the horses entered onto
the course. Calistoga , California, is supposed to have
been accidentally named when a real estate developer
from Sarasota, Florida, rose before a crowd to give a
sales pitch for the new property he was promoting. He
was nervous and instead of saying that it was going to
be the Sarasota of California , he said it was going to be
the Calistoga of Sarifornia . People were so amused
that the name stuck. Eleva , Wisconsin, is said to have
been named by the whim of a snowstorm. It was in the
fall, and a sign painter was perched high on the side of
a newly completed grain elevator where he was to
paint the name of the grain company. He started with
the word Elevator , but by the time he had finished the
first five letters, he was forced down by the snowstorm.
Winter had come and it was nine months before the
weather was good enough and the cement dry enough
to finish the painting. But by then, the name was so
firmly established that the painter did not bother to
climb up and finish the job.
Ironic names are often given in hopes of achieving
a commercial advantage. This is easily demonstrated
in the real estate business where developers work hard
to create names that will “sell” their town. Someone
developing a town on what used to be a swamp might
put a word like Heights in the name to counteract
negative feelings or fears people might have about
leaking basements. Someone cutting up a farm into
small lots will try to communicate a feeling of spaciousness
with such words as Ranch, Estate, Manor , or
Garden . Sometimes the onomastic irony merely resulted
in two viable perceptions of the same place.
Talking about some original Indian naming patterns,
Kelsie Harder said that “At the Grassy Meadow” might
be one person's perception of a place, while “At the
Chigger-Infested Patch” might be another's.
Some of the original place names were rather
crude and had to be changed to appeal to more genteel
tastes, but such amelioration was sporadic. Whore-house
Meadows , Oregon was changed to Naughty
Girls Meadows by the federal mapmakers, and Bullshit
Springs , Oregon was changed to Bullshirt Springs . Interestingly,
the local residents were very upset about
the first change, but not about the second. Titus Canyon
is also a concealed obscenity. The original name
was “Tight Ass Canyon,” named because of the narrowness
of the pass. Robert Rennick has noted that
many local citizens were indignant that civilization
had chosen to modify the name.
Some names, although they may be objectionable,
are not changed. Paul Eschholz, Alfred Rosa, and Virginia
Clark quote an article which appeared in the
December 11, 1972 issue of Time .
Some American place names have a unique resonance
about them--places like Maggie's Nipples,
Wyoming, or Greasy Creek, Arkansas, Lickskillet,
Kentucky, or Scroungeout, Alabama. Collectors of
Americana also savor Braggadocio, Missouri, the
Humptulips River in Washington, Hen Scratch,
Florida, Dead Bastard Peak, Wyoming, Two Teats,
California, or Aswaguschwadic, Maine.
A few years ago we were volunteer readers for Frederic
G. Cassidy's Dictionary of American Regional English .
In going through an early explorer's journal we found
frequent references to some mountains called The
Teats . After investigating we found that in the 1800s
this was the common name for what we now use
French for so that we can genteelly talk about The
Grand Tetons .
Through selective editing, names can be chosen to
illustrate a desirable quality of a location. Cassidy also
found Mud Lake transformed into Silver Lake for purposes
of promotion. An the other hand, the people of
Iceland gave their own island the unappealing name of
Iceland in hopes of discouraging immigrants from
coming to what is actually a relatively warm and comfortable
place to live, since it is heated by geothermal
activity. Then they named the neighboring country
which is actually covered with ice--over 10,000 feet
deep in places-- Greenland . It might have been Eric
the Red who bestowed the verdant name “Greenland”
upon the usually snow-and-ice covered country.
This is a strange flip-flop, because in those days,
just as today, more people were interested in attracting
rather than repelling visitors and settlers. We see this
in the way that postmasters increased their fame by
naming post offices after their businesses. The first
U.S. mail service began in conjunction with stagecoach
runs. The stops were at inns or country stores.
The person who ran the business received a little extra
money to serve as postmaster and in this role could
decide on the name of the post office. At first, little
attention was paid to the post office name, but as mail
became increasingly important, it was the post office
name which often won out as the town name. This is
how towns got such names as Brown Store , Virginia;
Yellow House , Pennsylvania; Big Cabin , Oklahoma;
Willey House , New Hampshire; and Macks Inn , Idaho.
Mail for other communities was left at crossroads or
waterways, yielding the names of Moores Bridge ,
Alabama; Paris Crossing , Indiana; Tracys Landing ,
Maryland; Wells Bridge , New York; Galivants Ferry ,
South Carolina; and Harpers Ferry , West Virginia.
Let us conclude with an insightful statement
made by Isaac Taylor in Words and Places :
The words of a nation's speech are continually
clipped and worn down by constant currency, until,
like ancient coins, the legend which they bore at
first becomes effaced.
Unlike the ancient coins, however, the legends in place
names can sometimes be recovered.
The Franklin Language Master, a ¥199.95, hand-held,
electronic dictionary, offered in a mail-order catalogue
accompanying The Sunday Times [London] of
8 January 1989, is illustrated by a photograph of the
device with the following display:
1. dic.tio.nary
(noun) dic.tio.nar.ies
: reference book of words with information
about their meaning
Shouldn't that be “meaning?” The centered dots mark
hyphenation points; the standard calls for a dot between
the n and the a , not the o and the n . Little
confidence is inspired by the presence of three errors
(one appearing twice) in only 12 words of information.
As the contrivance is American, it is sold in the UK
with a card that shows the “correct Queen's English”
where spellings differ. No comment is made about differences
in hyphenation that result from differences or
variants in pronunciation. For instance, if a Brit pronounces
the word (as many do) conTROVersy, then the
hyphen ought to come after the v , not, as in standard
US pronunciation, before the v . At rates of exchange in
early January, ¥200 is equivalent to $355, which seems
a lot to spend, in pounds or dollars, to get it wrong.
On January 12th, 1989, Carole Leonard, who compiles
a chatty column for The Times of items picked up
on the Rialto in The City, reported that a “reader in
Surrey” (not, for a change, “Disgusted,” Tunbridge
Wells) received a tax form with the instruction “Send
the cheque and payslip unfolded to the Collector in the
envelope provided,” “I looked inside,” wrote the mystified
reader, “but couldn't find him.” A few pages on,
the Scots Law Report carried the headline, “Causing
death by reckless driving of person unborn at time of
accident.”
wide boy
“With his sharp suits and gold chains, good looks and
quick tongue, [Bernard Tapie, French millionaire]
brought the skills of the wide boy into the world of
business.” [ Sunday Times , 5 Feb. 1989, p.A16]
Cain was disabled.
Daniel Barenboim was disconcerted.
The Phantom of the Opera was discountenanced.
Bouncers see that obstreperous customers are
disjointed.
After years of use, Hushpuppies are dissuaded.
Evangelists are distracted.
“Our special tunic lets you breastfeel discreetly any-where....”
[From The Right Start Catalogue,
Submitted by ]
The Bound and Gagged Morpheme
For about the last century, American English has
been openly kidnapping bits of words and putting
them to work as new bound morphemes without
the least regard for their original meanings--or,
rather, lack of meanings. A morpheme is the smallest
unit of meaning in a language; a bound morpheme is
one that appears only in combination with another
morpheme, such as the suffixes and prefixes of English.
The American propensity for lexical shanghaiing has
produced a new type of morpheme, the bound and
gagged morpheme. It is a series of sounds impressed
into a kind of semantic slavery, for urltil recently the
collocations could do no semantic work on their own in
their present form.
Admittedly I have given in to temptation in coining
the term “bound and gagged morpheme”--the
temptation of wit. Many of these new morphemes
have not been gagged at all, since no part of them
meant anything in thefirst place. Still, let the term
stand. It describes in spirit, at least, how neomorphemes
like -athon, -tigue, -burger, -(a)teria,
-alator, -ercize/-icize, -ician, -aholic, -on, -capade,
-cade, -alyzer, -gate, heli-, docu- have become affixes.
The news and advertising media have introduced
most such morphemes into common usage, a spinoff of
their tiieless search for novel, titillating ways to attract
public attention. The pattern for coinage is simple and
uniform. A familiar noun provides the model for variation,
usually because it contains a memorable ending.
Everything except this memorable portion of the word
is then dropped, and a new morpheme is substituted
in an innovation; once the innovation is generally
known, it suggests a pattern for further combinations
with the neomorpheme, whose meaning generalizes
upon the model's salient contemporary import. Because
the model behind the original innovation must
be easily recognizable to provide material for a new
morpheme, most models are either placenames or
common words for locations and activities.
-Athon is the classic example, although not the
first.
Marathon provided the model after it was reintroduced
into English from Greek with the First
Olympic Games at Athens in 1896, according to the
OED . The long-distance running event honored the
warrior who in 490 B.C. ran to Athens in order to
announce the Greek victory over the Persians on the
plains of Marathon. The grueling twenty-six-mile
Olympic run has become one of the games' most popular
events, emblematic of the endurance and strength
an Olympian must have.
But marathon soon escaped the arena of Olympic
competition and sport. In 1908 the Daily Chronicle
used it figuratively to characterize a potato-peeling
contest. “The Murphy Marathon,” and in the 1920s
endurance dances were regularly called marathons
(the earliest such reference, surprisingly, comes from
dour Scotland's Glasgow Herald in 1923). But even in
these extensions of the word, - athon was only part of a
placename, even though now regularly applied to
physical activities, and had no meaning on its own in
either English or the original Greek. Then in 1949 the
San Francisco Examiner reported on a telethon , cautiously
enclosing the word in quotation marks to show
it was a neologism. It is the first citation in the OED
Supplement , Volume 4 (1986), which defines the word
as a “TV program lasting several hours, especially to
solicit contributions,” coined by analogy from marathon .
What had apparently happened was that a false
analysis had divided the Olympic event into two specious
morphemes, as if mar(a) meant `running' and
-(a)thon meant `long' as a suffix.
In any case, telethon took hold quickly. By 1952
the Baltimore Sun could use it without the quotation
marks, and so it has become an ineradicable part of
viewing terminology, admitted into Webster's Third
New International Dictionary in 1963. The OED insists
telethon is “orig. and chiefly U.S.,” but Australia
had taken it up by 1968, and there was no more appropriate
word at hand in 1982 when a journalist for
England's Listener wrote, “Perhaps we have all been
corrupted by the telethons of Vietnam television reporting.”
Perhaps we have.
Telethon seems here to stay, sanctioned by dictionaries,
but no dictionary records the next innovation
with -athon , and I can only guess that the new
suffix began attaching to other base elements in the
1950s and '60s. As it is, the last twenty years have seen
a bewildering array of applications, all in the sense of
a `long-lasting, demanding activity,' a `test of endurance,'
or an `indication of enormous capacity.' It has
appeared in such unlikely combinations as talkathon,
walkathon, aquathon, ski-a-thon, bike-athon, birdathon,
sell-athon, sale-athon, curl-a-thon (a `hairstyling
extravaganza'), and even the seemingly unnecessary
jogathon and runathon (denoting more leisurely
or shorter races than a marathon). Most usages are
self-explanatory, but not all. Toolathon is a store in
Bergen County, New Jersey, rather than a construction
contest, and roofathon was an odd sales promotion in
1984 involving bicyclists atop a 7-11 store in Reno,
Nevada. That forms like sale-athon retain the a even
after the base element's e demonstrates that the -athon
of marathon , rather than the -ethon of telethon , is
perceived as the primary form of the suffix, but the
matter has not been completely settled: consider alcothon
(which I hope was a test of abstinence rather
than indulgence).
It will not do to heap scorn on -athon and denounce
athoninators as licentious with language. A
new morpheme survives the novelty of its first innovation
(like telethon for - athon ) because it turns out to be
useful, almost as if by accident, and brings something
new into the idiom. -Athon clearly serves a purpose
when a business person or public relations representative
wants to advertise a lot of some activity with a
single, handy, distinctive term. But utility alone has
not kept -athon current. It is easy to reuse, and more
important, each new usage reflects an attempt at creativity,
however feeble. What is easy and witty is
bound to become popular. The hyphens that separate
-athon from the base morpheme is most new usages
surely are self-conscious attempts to call attention to
the wit invested in the coinage, like parsley atop a
casserole of leftovers. It is half-facetious showmanship.
Even though the American taste for plundering
placenames has provided words like telethon to other
nations, some have commited semantic thefts of their
own. The European peace movement, for example,
has taken -shima from Hiroshima to denote a site of
nuclear devastation. “Nein Euroshima” the astonished
visitor is likely to find on tee shirts and sidewalks wherever
anti-nuclear sentiments run strong. I would like to
contribute “No Amerishima” as well.
A second class of bound and gagged morphemes
comprises innovations based upon a portion of a common
term that is either not a morpheme or an incorrect
form of a morpheme used in a new sense. My
favorite is -ercise/-icise because of the notable diffidence
of its applications. America's obsession with
physical fitness has brought us specialty group calisthenics,
which we designate jazzercise, aerobicise , or
dancercise on the model exercise , depending on what
type of music is playing or degree of enthusiasm. But
-ercise/-icise cannot mean simply `group dance exercises,'
because there is also sexercise , which almost certainly
involves neither large groups or dancing.
These are only representative examples of the
bound and gagged morpheme. More neomorphemes
and their consequent neologisms exist than can be
sumupercised, spawned daily by ingenuity and the desire
to put some flash into news copy, advertising
drives, or the names of businesses. Most will disappear
as quickly as they were created. That is the way of all
flash.
The bound and gagged morpheme is in fact the
stepchild of the pun and initially is meant to be recombined
only as long as it seems clever to do so. It can
thrive because the temptation arises, so often too powerful
to resist, as was the case with this essay's title, to
throw in a little wit for good measure, even if without
much accuracy. Like the puns above, most word forms
with newly created morphemes are incidental and almost
always dismissible, but not functionless. They
make us pause to groan the groan that is nearly laughter.
Even when we scorn yet another neologism with
-athon , or ridicule a new -gate (as in Irangate ), or
wince at alcoholic becoming chocoholic , it has already
made us concentrate on language and refreshed our
interest by whetting our humor. That is a function,
that is precious.
And for all our groans to the contrary, bound and
gagged morphemes are a feature of our national disposition,
our lighthearted lack of regard for linguistic
tradition. We can dismiss them no more than we can
dismiss our euphemisms, jargons, and gobbledygook
without frustrating our sensibility. The neomorphemes
show that in public life we are in a hurry and do not
want to slow down long enough to devise an explanatory
phrase if we can pack enough of our intention into
a single word. We can get by with a coinage like laughorama
because we know -orama's affiliation with panorama
will tell our listeners enough for the moment,
even though the innovation's -orama does not clearly
mean `view,' as it does in the model.
Here lies the most engaging feature of the lay
American attitude toward language: meaning is an
advisor, but not a dictator, in usage. The people who
establish and preserve innovations are unlikely to have
the philologist's taste for etymological fidelity, but that
hardly means they are uneducated or uninterested in
language. On the contrary, their attention to meaning
must be acute, even if purists pale at the inelegance of
the many neologisms, because bound and gagged morphemes
succeed in communicating with marvelous
ease and utility. No one could scorn them if they were
meaningless; then they would simply be empty oddities.
It is the emphasis of neologists, the nature of their
interest in language, that is intriguing--an interest in
playfulness over etymology, an emphasis upon the wit
of brevity, and an ear finely tuned for useful novelty.
Teachers and other professionals are usually credited
with setting the standard for usage; but in
America, at least, theirs is not the only standard. There
is rather a double standard, first the so-called American
Standard that textbooks try to inculcate, the dignified
parlance of discourse, and then the related but divergent
American Wit, the standard of ingenuity, which
trafficks freely in analogy, pun, and portmanteau. At its
best it can enrich the American idiom with phrases,
words, and even bound morphemes.
Both -acute (execute to electrocute) and -alysis (analysis to urinalysis)
and later breathalyzer, started earlier.
“More than 2,900 dogs to flood Ryon Park during competition.”
[Headline in the Lompoc (California) Record, . Submitted by ]
“Grilled in foil or alongside a ham, turkey or chicken,
those who shied away from onions before will delight in
their new found vegetable.” [From a Waldbaums Foodmart
circular. Submitted by ]
“It's turned out to be one of those red herrings around
our necks.” [Quote from Bob Porter, director of Maintenance
and Engineering Services in Fontana, California, in the San
Bernardino Sun , . Submitted by
]
“Hidden in the dining room breakfront, in a blue-enameled
box bedecked with handpainted flowers, Molly Darrah
keeps the keys to 18 neighbors' houses.” [From the San Francisco
Chronicle , ]
Regarding the review of Family Words [XV,3],
some 30 years ago an article appeared in The Atlantic
Monthly under the title “Lady Mondagreen.” It concerned
what you refer to as “family words” or “Penn
Stations”--childhood confusions of overheard phrases.
The author opened with an account of her favorite
childhood dramatic heroine, the Lady Monda-green--who
died with her lover, the bonny Earl of
Murray: “They ha' slain the Earl of Murray, and laid
him on the green.” She went on to report a number of
other hilarious examples from her own experience.
At age 6, my daughter Margaret was overheard
pointing out her favorite constellation to a friend
--“O'Brien's Belt.” She was in a French school in Paris
that year, learning to read; the city was plastered with
campaign posters for Tixier-Vignancourt, whom she
thereafter referred to as “Monsieur Ticks-in-Vinegar.”
Incidentally, F.H.B. is known in Germany as
F.Z.H. `Familie zurück halten!'
One of the issues discussed at a BBC-sponsored
seminar attended by more than 100 people, including
many writers, was bad language (on radio and TV),
which, as American visitors become quickly aware,
seems to be used with far less inhibition in Britain than
in North America. The situation in the U.S. is “improving”--if
that is the correct word--in that some
TV films I have seen there recently have not had the
naughty bits bleeped out. In the view of David Hatch,
managing director of BBC Radio, a rude word on the
radio is not a rude word if it is sworn in context and
broadcast at the right time. A rude word is, of course,
always a rude word, and the “right time” is somewhat
arbitrary: it is not as though everyone is not familiar
with the rude words; indeed, those who object to them
the most are not likely to be in bed by nine o'clock.
The feeling, one assumes, is that broadcasting them,
regardless of context, at times when children are listening,
lends rude words a patina of approval that
inures them to the corrosive atmosphere of taboo.
Thus, when uttered by an actor whose thumb has just
been struck by a hammer or who has suffered some
frustration or other outrage, any of several four-letter
words seem as natural as in real life. When uttered in
circumstances where taboo language would seem either
gratuitous or otherwise inappropriate, rude words
are not only equally out of place in the world of make-believe
as in the real world but, worse, they interfere
(in both) with the message.
British comedians, though not quite as outspoken
as Lenny Bruce, show less restraint in their choice of
words than their American counterparts, but the better
(funnier) ones (like the Two Ronnies) are typically
more subtle than the rest. Benny Hill, whose shows
have often been seen (too often, some might be
inclined to say) in the U.S., rarely resorts to rude language,
focusing rather on what is viewed as a revival
of old burlesque routines in which there is much rolling
of the eyes, winking, and the sly aside to the audience,
all of which add up to the rudeness being in the
mind of the beholder. As many of the British comedians
either speak with thick North or West Country
accents, mumble, talk too fast, or all three, it is sometimes
difficult to understand what they (and their
audiences) are on about. They appear to revel in the
delivery of punch lines that are totally unintelligible--not,
I hasten to say, because of a culture gap or a
diminution of (this viewer's) auditory acuity but because
of essential lack of clarity of expression.
As Alan Hamilton's item in The Times [15 June
1988, 3] reminds us, the BBC guidelines of the 1940s,
since abandoned, were quite specific: “There is an absolute
ban upon the following: jokes about lavatories,
effeminacy in men, immorality of any kind, suggestive
references to honeymoon couples, chambermaids, fig
leaves, ladies' underwear, lodgers and commercial
travellers.” Observation reveals that we have been
spared the last two, but the rest are retained as mainstays
of British humor, especially knickers (American
English: panties), the mere mention of which seems to
send everyone in the U.K. in paroxysms of uncontrollable
laughter. The same reaction is guaranteed by
references to poofs (`homosexuals'), (big), boobs, lavatories,
Y-fronts (`Jockey shorts'), and, especially, incontinence.
It is not suggested that these subjects be interdicted,
merely that it is difficult, even after some
twenty years of acculturation, for an outlander to discern
much that is funny about them. To me, the funniest
comedians by far, chiefly because much of their
humor is linguistic in nature, are the Two Ronnies
(Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett), whose TV appearances
came to an end early in 1988 with Barker's
announced retirement to run a business in antiques,
for which he doubtlessly acquired a taste from Benny
Hill's jokes. Another form of humor that enjoys great
popularity in Britain is that of transvestites like Barrie
Humphreys (“Dame Edna Everage”), whom I find hilarious,
and Danny LaRue, whom I have never seen.
They do not seem to appeal to insecure men who have
a defensive macho image of themselves (even in Britain),
hence are likely to have less allure in the U.S.
Getting back to strong language, the writer of two
U.K. soap operas, Grange Hill and Brookside, defended
its use on the grounds of realism, though it was
pointed out that the audience for the latter had fallen
from 4.5 million to 500,000 because of its language. In
the U.K. that would seem an over-reaction, and I
should venture to suggest that the quality of the show
is more to blame. On the other hand, as David Wade
reports, “More people, it appears, ring or write in [to
BBC Radio] about all the effing and blinding or the
taking of the name of God in vain than about any
other single subject.” [The Times, 20 June 1988] There
is probably something to be said in favour of the occasional
use of rude language in drama for the sake of
realism; on the other hand, in the real world rude
language is often the resort of those who are unable to
articulate their thoughts and emotions, and the presence
of characters so afflicted is certainly dispensable
in drama. In the words of Howard Baker, a playwright,
“The dramatist has a responsibility to a higher
truth than mere authenticity.”
“Through the use of ultrasound, University of Washington
researcher...studies women who develop high blood
pressure during pregnancy with the assistance of AHA-WA
funds.” [From Heartlines , a Washington affiliate newsletter
of the American Heart Association, Vol. VI, No. 2, ]
“No detail is too small to overlook.” [From an advertisement
for a lawn product on KCMO-TV, Kansas City, Missouri,
. Submitted by ]
“The podium erected in front of building A was surrounded
by a semicircle of spectators on wooden chairs.”
[From Doctors by Erich Segal, p. 316. Submitted by ]
