The Past As Prologue
The diary that Samuel Pepys kept from the the first
day of 1660 till he thought he was losing his
eyesight eight and a half years later can tell us a lot
about how the English language has changed or remained
more or less constant over the last three and a
half centuries. There may be other sources equally
rich in examples for comparison, but there can hardly
be another that is at the same time so much fun to read
and accessible. Moreover, the Restoration period
when Pepys kept his diary is a good time to compare
with ours, because by then the basis of modern English
had been laid down by the Elizabethans.
For a mechanical and therefore objective lexical
comparison I did a spelling check with my Q&A software
on the first two paragraphs of Time's August 7,
1989, cover story on anchor woman Diane Sawyer
and on the slightly longer first entry in Pepys's Diary ,
dated January 1, 1660. Except for proper
names, the spelling checker stopped on two words
in the Time paragraphs that were not in its lexicon:
show- biz and credentialed . Likewise two words in
Pepys's entry gave pause to the checker, though
they are not so much lost words as obsolete forms of
words: hath and doth . I should add that where Pepys
phonetically wrote then he meant than and that he
used the adjective handsome to describe his financial
condition, as we would rarely do today. Nevertheless,
the spelling-check test provides some indication
that English vocabulary has not discarded as
many words over the past three centuries as one
might expect. Our vocabulary has rather been
swollen by these centuries of technological breakthroughs
and social and political revolutions.
Though such words as betimes and whither and
such forms as doth and hath have dropped out of
ordinary usage, today's English-speaking reader of
average education can read most of the Diary without
encountering any word that would send him to
his dictionary. In fact, so rapidly does our vocabulary
continue to expand by the addition of such technical
neologisms as AIDS or star wars and such borrowings
as zaftig and ayatollah that a reader of our
day could well be more taxed to know the meanings
of all the words in yesterday's newspaper than to
understand all of the Diary .
Besides the lexicon, grammar--especially syntax--has
changed somewhat, too, though again not
so much as to be incomprehensible to the average
modern reader. On the one hand, Pepys's English
may seem slightly stilted or Biblical by modern standards,
with frequent absolute constructions and the
use of do as an auxiliary for affirmative verbs where
no emphasis is intended, as, for example, in his entry
for August 31, 1662, where he thanks “Almighty
God, who doth most manifestly bless me in my endeavors
to do the duty of my office--I now saving
money, and my expenses being very little.” This casual
use of the auxiliary do seems to be creeping back
into English usage, especially among waiters for
some reason, who are increasingly wont to announce,
“As the catch of the day, we do have red
snapper....” Ordinarily, though, in American
speech the auxiliary do is reserved for negative or
interrogative statements as in Don't do it or Do you
do it? or for emphasis, particularly in rebuttal, as in
But I do do it ! We have gained a handy distinction
here. On the other hand, Pepys's English, while familiar
enough to us, may sound slightly nonstandard,
as where past-tense forms and past participles are
coalesced. Pepys writes, just as we might say but
ought not write, “... running up and down...
with their arses bare... being beat by the watch.”
(October 23, 1668)
The progressive tense occurs in Pepys's Diary ,
as for example in his entry for February 3, 1665:
“She was dressing herself by the fire...and there
took occasion to show me her leg”; but he uses it
much less than we do. For us it has practically replaced
the future tense, as when we say, “I'm going
to town tomorrow.” Contractions are even rarer in
the Diary but do occur, for example in his entry for
September 9, 1667: “Says that Knepp won't take
pains enough...”
More surprising than evident but relatively insignificant
differences between the language in
Pepys's Diary and our everyday language are the
words and expressions that have persisted in English
for more than three centuries without having ever
gained full acceptance. For instance, take I when
compounded with another pronoun or a noun in the
objective case, as in: Between you and I .... Even
educated speakers nowadays often use I in combinations
where me is prescribed. There is an academic
legend that this solecism is a hypercorrection forced
into our American English when generations of
schoolmarms pounded into the heads of generations
of schoolchildren that they must not say me in such
combinations as me and Johnny done it . Not so. Samuel
Pepys, never confused by an American schoolmarm,
invariably, so far as I have found, used I instead
of me when the pronoun was combined with
another pronoun or noun as the object of a verb or
preposition. To cite a few examples: “... did take
my wife and I to the Queenes presence-Chamber
...” (November 22, 1660); “... who pleased my
wife and I ...” (December 27, 1660); “... Mrs.
Sarah talking with my wife and I...” (October 20,
1663); “... if God send my wife and I to live ...”
(May 8, 1667); and “This morning up, with mighty
kind words between my poor wife and I” (November
20, 1668). Pepys does not use they and its inflected
forms as an indefinite singular pronoun
nearly as commonly as we do in such constructions
as “Everyone on their feet!”, but in his entry for
March 20, 1668, he writes “... everybody endeavouring
to excuse themselfs.” And in his entry
for October 14, 1667, we find “... till they send
for me” where the subject is no one in particular.
Similarly, who in the objective case appears to have
been on the threshold of acceptance into standard
English for more than three hundred years. Pepys
repeatedly uses the pronoun so, for instance: “...
Burroughs, who I took in and drank with” (August 6,
1667). However, in his entry for August 7, 1668, we
find: “... whom I was pleased with all the day....
”As for lay for lie , whose force of usage has by now
almost won acceptance into the standard language,
we find in Pepys's entry for June 22, 1667:
“... found not a man on board her [a ship] (and her
laying so near them was a main temptation to them
to come on).” (Compare this with Kipling's “Where
the old Flotilla lay” where lay is the past tense of
lie .)
There are also in Pepys's Diary words and
phrases that have been admitted to our standard language
but that still sound a bit colloquial. This is me,
which we find in his entry for October 31, 1667, has
finally been accepted into standard English, though
it took three centuries and Winston Churchill's fiat
to do it. When Pepys writes mad, usually he means
angry, just as Americans do today: “... which
makes our merchants mad” (February 9, 1664). Telling
of annoyances on October 10, 1667, he twice
writes: “... which did make me mad,” as well as:
“I begun heartily to sweat and be angry ...” Today
this meaning of mad is more at home in American
than in British English. The same can be said of certain
other of Pepys's locutions, for example the past
participle gotten instead of got: “... who were by
this time gotten most of them drunk” (June 2,
1666).
In general, one tends to find confirmed in the
language of the Diary the relative conservatism of
American as contrasted with British standard English.
So far as dialects are concerned, I know British
dialects too little to say. But there is in the Diary a
locution that I have encountered only there, I believe
in Shakespeare, and commonly, though less
and less, in the speech of West Texas farmers: like(d)
to ... as in “That ol' boy like to of killed hisself” or
in Pepys's entry for April 14, 1660:“... the purser
... had like to have been drowned had it not been
for a rope.”
In the three hundred years since Pepys the general
drift of English has been towards a Chinese kind
of grammer with loss and confusion of inflection and
with phrases used as words. A carelessness about inflection
in Pepys's day is shown above with the examples
of the objective I and who . Rarer back then
was the use of whole phrases as single words as, for
instance: to quickly and efficiently do this job, where
the verb and two adverbs are treated together as a
so-called split infinitive marked by to, instead of the
prescribed to do this job quickly and efficiently,
where only do is the infinitive marked as such by to
and modified by two adverbs. So it comes as something
of a surprise to find a clause in the 1662 Diary
that sounds like wording in a television commercial:
“I saw the so much by me desired picture of my
Lady Castlemayne....” (October 20). Pepys also
has a tendency to omit subject pronouns, reminding
one of television commercials: “Had a bowl of
Whamo this morning. Feel great!” a trim, muscular
type in a TV commercial might exclaim, sounding
rather like Pepys when he wrote over three centuries
ago, “Dined with Mr. Stephens...” (July 3,
1660) or “Lay long in bed...” (July 15, 1660).
Pepys's Diary owes its eventual status as a classic
to its candor and the author's privileged position
as an observer of Restoration England. But he did
have a style of his own that should be taken into
consideration in any evaluation of the language of
his Diary . His English, as suits the dairy of so exuberant
and impatient a man and a stenographer
among other things, strikes us as almost telegraphic
in its compression. It is doubtful that in conversation
he would ever remark, “Up early ...” or “Up betimes...,”
the phrases with which he so often begins
his dairy entries. But allowing that the language
is well adapted to a stenographer's very private diary
and of its particular time and place, we find little
that is obscurely archaic in its style. Despite such
interesting differences as are noted above, the language
of Pepys's journal, however dated, is not generically
unlike what we might expect to find in a
secret journal kept by a yuppie bureaucrat of our
times.
[Reference throughout this essay is to The Diary
of Samuel Pepys , edited by Robert Latham and William
Matthews, University of California Press,
Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1970.]
A Few Words (235 To Be Exact) About the 1980s
Abortion, Acquisition. Ayatollah. Acid rain. Air
Jordans. Arbitragers. ALF. Arafat. Arms control.
Andrew Lloyd Webber. AIDS. AARP. Bud
Light. Blush wine. B1. Billy Ball. Bran. Bimbos.
Baby boomer. Bailouts. “Big.” Brat Pack. Bernhard
Goetz.
Crocodile Dundee. Charles and Di. Corazon.
“Cats.” Calvins. Camcorder. Classic Coke. Crack.
Contras. CW. Chernobyl. Compact discs. Car
phones. Colorization. Challenger. Couch potatoes.
Deal. Donald Trump. Deregulation. Deficit
spending. Drugs. Everett Koop. ERA. E.T. Ewoks.
Falkland Islands. Ferdinand and Imelda. Fitness.
Fax. Fergie. Gene mapping. Grenada. Geraldo.
Glasnost. Gorbachev. Gretzky. Greenpeace. Greenmail.
Global warming. Ghostbusters.
Handguns. Hacker. Hostile takeovers, Home
equity loans. Homeless. Hyundai. IRA. Indiana
Jones. Iacocca. IBM compatible. Ivan Boesky. Junk
bonds. Jim and Tammy. Jarvik heart. Joe Isuzu.
Kitaro. Laptops. Larry Bird. Leveraged buyout.
Luke Skywalker. Lech Walesa. “Les Misérables.”
MTV. Mujahedeen. Mike Milken. Muesli.
Meese. Miami Vice. Magic Johnson. Merger. Michael
J. Fox. Magnetic resonance scanner. Morton
Downey, Jr. New Age. Noriega. NRA. National
debt. Oprah. Ollie North. Ozone depletion. Prince.
PC. Poison pill. “Phantom of the Opera.” Poindexter.
PTL Club. Qadhafi.
Reaganomics. Rust belt. Range Rover. Rambo,
John. Robin & Mike. “Read my lips.” Roseanne.
Steroids. Stealth. Short Round. Sound bite. Star
Wars. Stephen King. Steinbrenner. Significant
Other. SDI. Tax reform. Thatcher. Tom Clancy.
Tofu. Taipan. Terrorism. Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles. USA Today. Umberto Eco. Vanna. Willie
Horton. Windham Hill. “Where's the beef?” Yugo.
Yeager.
Lest We Forget
“And now,” announced the quizmaster, “for the
grand prize, including wealth beyond description,
just three more questions. Remember you must
answer promptly. First, explain E=mc².”
--“This is the equivalence of mass and energy,
with c the speed of light. Simple ....”
“Correct. Now, what is the Hegelian absolute?”
--“The all-inclusive totality of reality. One must,
of course, mention the schema of immediacy--
negation--negation of negation....”
“Quite so. Now, the final question. How many
days are there in May?” ... [pause] ... [BUZZ!]
“... Time is up. I'm sorry. You lose.”
What happended? The unfortunate contestant
simply knew his physics and philosophy,
and recall was immediate. Since there is no logic to
the lengths of months, he had facilitated memory of
them with a mnemonic device. Before the answer
could be given, he had to summon up a variation on
the venerable theme--
Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
All the rest have thirty-one,
Excepting February alone,
And that has twenty-eight days clear
And twenty-nine in each leap year.Stevins MS (c. 1555), quoted in Oxford Dictionary
of Quotations, 3rd, ed., Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford,
1979.
--and time expired while the verse was internally
recited.
My wife, probably to be difficult, points out a
visual mnemonic for month lengths--something involving
knuckles. Indeed, visual mnemonics were
used by classical orators so they could speak without
notes. Points to be made were assigned to various
loci in a house. The speaker then mentally toured
the structure while delivering the speech. Our use
of “in the first (second, etc.) place” is an offshoot of
this method. Because this is “The Language Quarterly,”
further discussion will be limited to mnemonics
using language.
Mnemonics actually are codes for associated,
random facts. Their techniques of encryption may
be divided into: reduction coding, which minimizes
data to be stored (e.g., acronyms: reducing words
to single letters); and elaboration coding, which
strengthens weakly linked memory structures by
adding material (e.g., rhymes, and epi-acronyms: in
which initial letters of words in phrases are the
code). Having a mnemonic is no panacea. For example,
to recover the Great Lakes one must first remember
a mnemonic (HOMES, or, going west to east,
“Sergeant- M ajor H ates E ating O nions” ), and then
decrypt it. Alas, if Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie,
and Superior are nowhere in the brain, HOMES will
not put them there.
Poetry is an ancient mnemonic device. The Biblical
psalmist undoubtedly used the combination of
the verse form and an abecedarius to remember
Psalm 119, each of whose twenty-two octaves begins
with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
Though it is no Iliad , all young spellers know the
rhyme mnemonic
I before E
Except after C
Or when pronounced A
As in neighbour and weigh
so well that they are destined chronically to misspell
seizure . Ogden Nash's orthographist's mnemonic, of
more limited utility, at least has no exceptions--
The one-l lama,
He's a priest.
The two-l llama,
He's a beast.
And I will bet
A silk pajama
There isn't any
Three-l lllama.“The Lama” in Ogden Nash, Free Wheeling, Simon
and Schuster, New York, 1931.
Mnemonics were life-preservers in the stormtossed
educational seas of my youth. They rescued
me in spelling (“The princi pal is your pal.”), physics
( Roy G. Biv , or maybe Richard Of York Gains Battles
In Vain
, for the order of the spectrum's colors--
Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet),
and mathematics. (A quarter century after high
school trigonometry, about all I can remember of it
is the benevolent Indian “Soh-Cah-Toa”: Sine = o pposite/ hy potenuse,
C osine = a djacent/ hy potenuse,
T angent= o pposite/ a djacent, relating the lengths of
the right triangle's sides to the functions of its angles).
In science class I learned the planets, by distance
from the sun (“ M ary V ery E arly M ade J ane
S ome U nusually N ice P ies”--Mercury, Venus,
Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune,
Pluto ), and the functions of living things (“Sensible
M otorists R efrain F rom D riving A utomobiles A t E xcessive
R ates”--sensation, movement, respiration,
food-taking, digestion, absorption, assimilation, excretion,
reproduction). On a good day I could recite
the hills of Rome (and would have suffered less had I
known “ C an Q ueen V ictoria E at C old A pple
P ie?” --Capitoline, Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline,
Caelian, Aventine, Palatine), and after four years of
Latin could deal with calends (first of the month,
right?). As for nones and ides , forget it. Had I but
learned the rhyme--
In March, July, October, May,
The Ides are on the fifteenth day,
The Nones the seventh; all other months besides
Have two days less for Nones and IdesJohn Barlett, Familiar Quotations, 13th ed., Little,
Brown, Boston, 1955.
--I might be a classicist today.
Instead, I proceeded to that hotbed of mnemonics,
medical school. [I wish to assure non-physician
readers that their doctors do not, as a rule, think of
patients' problems as word games. When memory
fails, doctors actually look things up.] Suffice it to
say, after the first thousand pages or so, the plot of
Gray's Anatomy wears thin, even for the most avid
reader, and thence emerges the insight--“I can't remember
all this stuff.” In desperation, I learned
such acrostics as novel (Nerve, Artery, Vein, Empty
space, Lymphatic--inguinal structures, from lateral
to medical) and bitem (appropriately, the muscles of
mastication--Buccinator, Internal pterygoid,
Temporalis, External pterygoid, Masseter); the
abecedarius of lead poisoning (Anemia, Basophilic
stippling, Colic, Dementia, Encephalopathy, Foot
drop, Gingival pigmentation ); and two (What a
waste of precious brain space!) epi-acronyms for the
cranial nerves--the ancient “ O n O ld O lympus'
T owering T op A F inn A nd G erman V iewed S ome
H ops” (Olfactory, Optic, Oculomotor, Trochlear,
Trigeminal, Abducens, Facial, Glossopharyngeal, Vagus,
Spinal accessory, Hypoglossal), and the more
popular “ O h O h O h T o T ouch A nd F eel A
G irl's V agina-- AH
!” [Having passed anatomy, practising
physicians usually refer to these nerves as I-XII.]
Lively, preferably lewd, imagery was appreciated by
students who kept company with cadavers all day.
The bones of the wrist (Navicular, Lunate, Trique-trum,
Pisiform, greater Multangular, lesser Multangular,
Capitate, Hamate) were brought to mind by
“ N ever L ower T illie's P ants, M amma M ight C ome
H ome.” For those classmates with severe anatomy
burnout (“I can't remember anything !”) we devised
the acronyms teon (Two Eyes, One Nose), and, for
the joints of the arm, sew (Shoulder-Elbow-Wrist).
It is the consensus of mnemonists that the more
bizarre, sharp, or humorous the image, the more effective
the mnemonic. How can one forget Ohm's
Law, volts=Amps × Resistance, given “ V irgins A re
R are.” ? Heteronyms, absent extraneous verbiage,
reinforce the standard-daylight time changer,
“Spring ahead, fall back.” Conversely, who remembers
the bass clef lines and spaces (with, respectively,
the insipid “ G reat B ig D ogs F ight A nimals”
and “ A ll C ars E at G as” )? The treble clef lines
are only a bit more memorable (“ E very G ood B oy
D oes F ine” or “ E very G rizzly B ear D igs F igs” ); its spaces' notes, at least, crisply spell face . Who
knows how many musical aspirations have been
dashed against the bass clef, for want of adequate
mnemonics?
Coherent, grammatical sentences can make effective
mnemonics because language structure is already
in place in our minds. Witness, for the taxonomic
division of living things, “ King
Phi lip C ame
O ver F or G ene's Special Variety ” (kingdom, phylum,
class, order, family, genus, species, variety). On the
other hand, I find this one for pi, coding digits by
word lengths,
Now I sing a silly roundelay
Of radial roots, and utter, “Lackaday!
Euclidean results imperfect are, my boy...
Mnemonic arts employ!”Willard Espy, An Almanac of Words at Play,
Clarkson N. Potter, New York, 1975.
more difficult to remember, with its tortured word
order, than the twenty-one places of pi it yields.
Even the best mnemonics are not free of drawbacks.
Rules or lists may change, thus rendering the
mnemonics obsolete. A key religious figure in American
history-- st. dapiacl --gave us the presidential
cabinet posts in order of their creation (State, Treasury,
Defense, Attorney General, Postmaster General,
Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor), critical
to answering “According to the Presidential
Succession Act, who is ninth in line to the presidency?”
Subsequent deletions and additions (Postmaster
General, out; Health and Human Services,
Housing and Urban Development, Transportation,
Energy, Education, in) would yield stdaiaclhhtee ,
not really the most pronounceable acronym, at least
to speakers of English. Nevertheless, the good St. D.,
retired, is still occupying a good number of my cerebral
neurons and synapses.
Worse is the half-recalled mnemonic. One may
remember homes is a mnemonic, but forget what it is
a mnemonic for. My personal albatross is the couplet
“Eight ever/Nine never” which has to do with taking
a fitnesse in bridge, and how many cards my side
has in the suit; to my partners' distress, I forget the
finesse--against the king, or against the queen--to
which the rule applies.
Can we ever discard a good, though unnecessary,
mnemonic, or are we forever doomed to have
delayed responses as these jingles, on cue, run
through our heads? Does a sea captain think “port,”
or, rather, “ port --four letters--same as left ”?
When he enters a harbor, does he know the red nun
buoys mark the right side of the channel, or must the
alliterative “Red right returning” come to mind
first? Can property lawyers forget on each ( O pen,
N otorious, E xclusive, A ctual, C ontinuous, H ostile)
when recalling the requisites for adverse possession
(squatter's rights, to us not of the bar)? Do speleologists
remember which of those things in caves is
which, without having to hear that little internal
voice chant “stala c tite--c--ceiling; stala g mite--
g--ground”?
We collect and preserve mnemonics, however
redundant, as insurance against embarrassing lapsus
memoriae . They are not foolproof. According to Sir
Edward Coke, “It is ... necessary that memorable
things should be committed to writing, (the witness
of times, the light and the life of truth) and not
wholly betaken to slippery memory which seldom
yields a certain reckoning.” For those of us who
forget to take the shopping list to the supermarket,
let alone calendars and rosters of planets and cabinet
posts, memory will have to do. Forsan et haec olim
meminisse iuvabit.
Stevins MS (c. 1555), quoted in Oxford Dictionary
of Quotations, 3rd, ed., Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford,
1979.
Alan D. Baddeley, The Psychology of Learning, Basic
Books, New York, 1976.
Willard Espy, Another Almanac of Words at Play,
Clarkson N. Potter, New York, 1980.
“The Lama” in Ogden Nash, Free Wheeling, Simon
and Schuster, New York, 1931.
Alan D. Baddeley, The Psychology of Learning, Basic
Books, New York, 1976.
My son provides “ M y V ery E ducated M other J ust
Served U s N ine P ickles.” From 1979 to 1999
Pluto is closer to the sun than is Neptune.
Willard Espy, Another Almanac of Words at Play,
Clarkson N. Potter, New York, 1980.
John Barlett, Familiar Quotations, 13th ed., Little,
Brown, Boston, 1955.
Robert Bloomfield and E. Ted Chandler, Pocket
Mnemonics for Practitioners, Harbinger Medical
Press, Winston-Salem, N.C., 1983.
Gyles Brandreth, The Joy of Lex, Quill, New York,
1983.
John W. Schaum Note Speller Book One, Belwyn,
New York, 1945.
David Grambs, Words About Words, McGraw-Hill,
New York, 1984.
Willard Espy, An Almanac of Words at Play,
Clarkson N. Potter, New York, 1975.
Les Reports de Edward Coke, Vol. 1,p. 3 (1660) as
quoted in Respectfully Quoted, Suzy, Platt, ed.
Library of Congress, Washington, 1989.
Lacking a mnemonic for it, I had to look up this
quote from Virgil's Aeneid, but perhaps some
day it will be pleasant to remember even these
things.
Stuff and Nonsense
One of the wonders of the English language is
that it contains so many words about words
themselves. Among the most colorful and intriguing
are those that describe the piffle, prattle, twaddle,
and flapdoodle that people in all talks of life tend to
spew forth. Here is a small start on a glossary of glossolalia,
a demidictionary of drivel that lists the varieties
of verbal obfuscation and explains the etymologies
of these often playful terms.
Applesauce (an American variant is apple sass ),
which has come to designate a `camouflage of flattery,'
is excessively sweet, mushy, pulpy and insubstantial,
and thrifty boarding houses serve an abundance
of the stuff to divert awareness from the
scarcity of more nourishing fare. A similar connection
is made between senseless banter and baloney,
eponymously descended from Bologna, the Italian
city where workers turned out a type of sausage
crammed with odds and ends from slaughter, including,
some say, assmeat. It is but a short step from the
cheapest ground cold cuts to cheap talk, and the
same steps takes up from tripe, the walks of the first
and second stomachs of ruminants,' to `worthless,
foolish speech.' Adding to the pile of verbal garbage
is balderdash, which reaches back to the late 16th
century and originally meant a `hodgepodge of liquors,
such as wine mixed with beer,' perfect for
washing down a mishmash of pretentious and frivolous
blather. Bosh looks as typically British as balderdash,
yet it actually descends from the Turkish
adjective bos `empty, useless.' The word became
popular in England in the early 19th century
through the oriental romances and memories of James
Morier, who enhanced his exotic tales with Turkish
terms.
Spook etymology misinforms us that babble is a
Biblical reference to Genesis 11.17, in which the
people of Babel (Babylon) built a tower reaching to
heaven and incited God to confound their language.
The less romantic truth is that babble descends from
the Middle English babelon and is probably of imitative
origin, echoing the ba ba sounds typically made
by infants in their repetitive chatter. Blarney and
bunk, on the other hand, do hail from the names of
actual places. Blarney refers to the Blarney stone,
located in Blarney Castle, a few miles north of Cork,
Ireland. Those who kiss the Blarney stone are reputed
to be able to charm the pants off everyone
ever after. Bunk is a shortening of bunkum, itself a
respelling for Buncomber County, North Carolina,
whose congressional representative once remarked
that he was “only talking for Buncombe.”
Claptrap turns out to be a show biz metaphor
for high-sounding but empty language. The word
was originally a theatrical term for a showy trick or
patch of high-flown, grandiose language that actors
would use to attract (`trap') applause (`claps') from
their audiences. Another rhyming reduplication,
mumbo jumbo, is probably borrowed from a word in
African Mandingo: Mama Dyumbo was a deity who
helped husbands to bewilder wives whom they suspected
of talking too much.
The poet William Cowper once wrote “philologists
who trace/A panting syllable through time and
space,/Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark/To
Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's ark.” Almost always,
an etymological safari into any subject bags at
least a few animals. A cock and bull story, for example,
derives from ancient fables and medieval bestiaries
in which cocks moralized, bulls expostulated,
and a menagerie of other animals discoursed in human
language. Cockamamie has nothing whatever to
do with roosters, talking or otherwise. In 19th-century
France, fashionable ladies applied increasingly
elaborate beauty spots to their upper cheeks. This
craze became known as décalcomanie, from décalc-
(from décalquer `transfer a tracing' + - o - + manie
`mania,' whence we get decalcomania ( decal for
short for the transfers), and the adjective cockamamie
some say echoes the sense of florid but superficial
embellishment. Hogwash, of course, is a designation
for language as `worthless, disgusting, and unfit
for human consumption, as pig slops.'
Puffy, bureaucratic verbiage if often called gobbledygook,
a word credited to Texas congressman
Maury Maverick, who compared the tortuous (and
torturous) prose of Washington bureaucrats to the
senseless gobbling of turkeys. Maverick made the
word famous with a World War II memorandum denouncing
the bloated language found in government
reports: “Be short and say what you're talking
about. Stop `pointing up' programs. No more `finalizing,'
`effectuating,' or `dynamics.' Anyone caught
using the words `activation' or `implementation' will
be shot.” Closely related to gobbledygook, but more
malicious, is doublespeak . In 1973, the National
Council of Teachers of English established a Committee
on Public Doublespeak to help identify and
stamp out evasive and obfuscating terminology slithering
out of public sources, such as “uncontrolled
contact with the ground” for “airplane crash” and
“inoperative statement” for “lie.” Doublespeak is a
blending of Double-talk and Newspeak, the insidious
language of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four .
A number of loopily echoic words resonate with
the nonsense of non-sense. Folderol (or falderal ) is
drawn from the meaningless syllables sung in the refrains
of many English folksongs, “fol-de-rol-deray.”
Tommyrot compounds tommy, `simpleton, fool'
(as in tomfoolery ) and rot, `worthless matter.' In his
Second Browser's Dictionary, John Ciardi suggests
that “ tommy is a variant of tummy, the sense shift
having been from `stomach garbage' to `brain garbage.'
” And poppycock comes from the Danish pappekak,
literally `soft poop' or `baby poop,' an appropriately
scatological etymology for logorrhea.
That we have been able to come up with so
many words to describe forked-tongued and muddle-headed
language indicates that we may one day
not just speak but communicate. That we have been
so intelligent about identifying unintelligible persiflage
gives hope that we may learn not just to talk
but to say something.
“It's Detroit sometime in the recent future, a city
beleaguered by the sleaziest of criminals and defended by
a police department that's the subsidiary of a big corporation.”
[From a movie listing for Robocop in TV Guide ,
Western Washington State edition, . Submitted
by ]
The Communication Ravine
For nearly eight years my husband and I worked
in Papua New Guinea as teachers in a church
school. (Call us “missionaries” to make it simple.) Of
the 750 different languages in the country, we
learned two. One was Melanesian Pidgin, which, besides
English and Hiri Motu, is one of the official
languages of the country. The second language we
learned was Kâte (pronounced kaw-tay), an area language
spoken by only several thousand people. Living
and working overseas with people of another
culture and language made us realize how complicated
communication can be.
Speech is the most obvious form of communication.
But using speech to communicate is more than
“I said,” “he said,” or “they said.” Sometimes the
words we use are the sounds of the communicating:
whispering, cackling, prattling, chuckling, chortling,
mumbling, grumbling. Other words suggest motives
behind the speech: lying, gossiping, negotiating,
plotting. Speech is certainly more than plugging in
vocabulary words to express a thought. We had to
learn nuances of meaning which were not found in
dictionaries.
The Pidgin word tok by itself means “talk” and
its synonyms, in both verb and noun forms. Whereas
in English there are totally different words to express
different aspects of speech, the word tok combines
with other words to define various kinds of
communication: tokaut `speak out,' tok baksait `gossip,'
toktok `converse,' tok mama `advise,' tok hait
`secret,' tok tru `truth,' tok nogut `foul language,' tok
giaman `lying,' tok pait `argue,' tok ples `local language,'
tok tasol `idea,' tok nating `nonsense,' tok isi
`comfort,' tok pani `joke,' tok strong `emphasize.'
Voice intonation and body language complicate
the communication process further. Using no words
at all, you can express joy, sorrow, anger, disgust,
skepticism, ridicule, criticism, fear, and many other
emotions. Tone of voice, facial expressions, placement
of arms, and body stance all contribute to nonverbal
communication of feelings. In practical terms,
we had to learn not only to choose our words very
carefully, but to be aware of what we said in nonverbal
ways. We occasionally used in English as a “safe”
language for discussion or making decisions when
there were no English speakers around. We were
aware that they were reading the cues of intonation
and body language to get an idea about how the discussion
was going. We only hoped they would not
misread the cues. We, too, tried to read their nonverbal
cues when they spoke too quickly for us to
understand or when they used an uncommon language
with which they alone were familiar.
There can be, however, a danger in relying on a
language for secrecy. One missionary told of the
time his family went home to Germany on furlough.
Their children did not realize others spoke German,
but rather thought it was their family's personal, private
language. So one of the children, standing in a
customs line in Frankfurt, shouted, “Look, Dad, see
that great big FAT lady!?”
Even if you become skilled at controlling nonverbal
means of communication, there are still other
cultural assumptions and traditions you cannot know
about without proper briefing. We had heard from
missionaries in other countries that American ways
of doing things may be insulting to the nationals. In
India, for example, it is a great insult to offer your
left hand in any way, even handing a clerk your
money to pay for something. The left hand is considered
the “dirty” hand, the right hand the “clean”
hand. In Thailand, showing the bottom of your foot
is an insult. This sounds easy enough to avoid until
you consider how many times you cross your legs
when sitting at meetings, on a bus, or in a restaurant.
In Papua New Guinea [PNG] women hiss and
boo at other women who step across rows of food
spread on the ground at the marketplace, for women
are “unclean” and must take proper steps to insure
the purity of the food being handled. Even symbolic
contamination is taken very seriously. Boys at one of
the high schools refused to eat the rice prepared for
their meal: because one of them had seen some girls
sitting on the bales of rice stacked in the school pantry,
they considered the rice unclean and therefore
inedible.
Much of what is appropriate in one country is
not in another, and vice versa. In the U.S. the first
questions we ask small children with whom we are
confronted are: “What's your name?” and “How old
are you?” In PNG those two questions are the wrong
questions to ask. The first question is inappropriate
because names are private. The people believe that
evil spirits can control you if they know your name.
Most Papua New Guineans, therefore, have several
extra names, depending on who needs to know
(school, government, or church). But they have one
private, hidden name which remains a family secret.
The second question, “How old are you?” is one
which might get you a puzzled look or a blank stare.
Most adults, and nearly all children, neither know
nor care when they were born. The parent might be
able to tell you, “Now let's see...she was born the
year we had that big flood.” But as a practical consideration,
age in years has nothing to do with anything.
Children go to school when the parents and
village elders feel they are ready for it. The passing
of each year of one's life is celebrated generally for
everyone as Christmas finishes and the New Year
arrives. The language even reflects this, for the Pidgin
word for `birthday' is Krismas. Besides, their
concept of time is circular, not linear, so marking the
passage of time is not as important as celebrating the
return of seasonal events.
The phrase “communication gap” takes on new
meanings in another culture. Our views about how
well we are communicating are often misleading; a
better phrase might be “communication ravine.”
There is a classic case (and true, we are told) of a
misunderstanding between a missionary and his
cook. The missionary told the cook what to prepare
for dinner: “Go out and catch that old rooster, pluck
it, and put it in the refrigerator. We'll cook it later.”
Several hours later the missionary opened the refrigerator
door only to find one very angry, naked
rooster staring at him: he hadn't told the cook to kill
it first. Meanwhile, what do you suppose the cook
told his family that night when they asked why he
was so tattered and scratched: “You'll never guess
what that crazy missionary asked me to do today!”
Symbols are still another form of communication.
Drivers use symbols all the time to know how
and where to drive. Olympic games participants
must identify symbols in order to find everything
from locker rooms to Telex machines. Despite the
growing use of internationally recognized symbols,
each country has its own unique cultural and artistic
symbols, which are baffling to outsiders. Many
Papua New Guineans can look at the face of another
Papua New Guinean--on the street or in a picture
book--and tell you which part of the country that
person is from. They know by style of face-painting
and headdress where a singsing dancer is from, and
they can look at designs on carvings or woven string
bags and say where the work originated. Many of
these designs and symbols tell stories of their people,
and have meanings which are unknown to Westerners.
One missionary, who for years had lived and
worked in a city on the north coast, told us of one
enormous mistake made for just that reason. A
group of expatriate engineers was called in to design
and build a high school. The designers decided that
the local people would like the school better if it had
designs with which the people were familiar. So
they chose from a “story board” (an elaborate carving
showing the history of the people in that area) a
symbol which was--to them--abstract. This symbol
became the logo for the school, and was used on
everything from school letterhead to the sign in
front of the building. When the school opened, none
of the students came. The designers were baffled
and asked for advice from this long-time missionary.
He took the problem back to the local village elders,
who explained why the school was being boycotted:
the logo chosen was from that part of the village
history which described an enemy arriving to rape
all the young women of the tribe. That symbol was
the most repugnant part of their whole history, and
it was an embarrassment to have it plastered on signs
and papers all over town. To Westerners, it was a
“neat” design; to the people, it was a symbol of
great shame.
Conversely, we saw T-shirts imported, bought,
and worn by people who had no idea what the symbols
or words meant. One young girl wore a shirt
with “MILK MILK” printed on it corresponding to
the appropriate part of her anatomy beneath the
shirt. A church elder who stood up to read the lesson
in the church service wore a shirt that read “I do
it every night.” Even had they known English, milk
would seem a tame enough word; and it might likely
refer to something as innocent as brushing one's
teeth or going to sleep.
Being a native speaker is still not enough in the
game of communication. Because of historical, political,
and economic ties between Australia and Papua
New Guinea, there are many Australians living and
working in PNG, and many Papua New Guineans
who learn English as Australians speak it. So in shops
and offices all over the country we encountered
English, but not as we were accustomed to hearing it
spoken. What would you buy if your neighbor gave
you a shopping list asking for “capsicum, silver beet,
mince, and jelly?” (She would expect green peppers,
Swiss chard, hamburger, and Jell-O.) Or what
if she offered your child a “cordial”? (All she would
be giving him is Kool-Aid.) Or what would you think
if the gentleman down the street said, “What a
lovely baby! May I nurse him?” (He would only be
asking to hold the baby.) If you were invited out for
“supper” your hostess would serve cake and coffee,
while an invitation to “tea” would be for the evening
meal.
Translating can be a treacherous means of communication,
too. Although we did not translate more
than our own class notes or study materials for the
students, we could sympathize with people whose
sole job was translation. Literal translations have
been troublesome to missionaries for years. In Chinese,
the Biblical phrase, “Your sins were as scarlet;
they shall be white as snow” simply does not work.
Red is the color for weddings and celebrations;
white is the color of death and mourning. Interestingly,
the word for “white” [person] and “corpse”
are nearly identical in the Kâte language: qangqang
and \?\âng \?\âng, respectively.
Key words presented some of the worst
problems. “Grace” is almost impossible to translate
because their cultural assumptions allow no possibility
for a truly free gift. There is a basic suspicion that
no kind of gift, earthly or heavenly, can possibly
come without strings attached. The Kâte words
mang jaung (literally `care from the heart/belly') are
not too bad a translation for `love.' However, there
are only two possibilities for translating `love' in Pidgin,
neither of which is satisfactory. One is laikim, as
in “I love (i.e., `like') cucumbers.” The other is
givim bel, which literally means `give the heart/
belly,' but which commonly means `to make pregnant.”
Believe it or not, it is the latter phrase which
has been chosen to translate the word `love' as found
in the Bible. Those sorts of translation difficulties
leave room for a lot of explaining!
While we worked in Papua New Guinea the
chances for miscommunication were myriad. Hard
work, combined with luck, eventually bridged the
ravines. We derived great pleasure from attempting
to unravel the languages and their cultures, and we
found that the desire to understand and to be understood
comes early in life, remains long, and seems to
be universal.
The difference between the two ways of writing the “q”
reflects a slight variation in pronunciation: “q” being an explosive
kp sound, “\?\” being a voiced gb sound.
Don't Get Your Titles In A Twist!
I don't know about you, but I tend to get a touch
irritated by book titles, encountered in the media
and elsewhere, that seem slightly “deviant.” Deviant,
that is, from standard English, or from what
one is expecting. Some titles are catchy, and easy to
remember, like H.G. Well's Kipps (1905), or Paul
Theroux's The Old Patagonian Express (1978), and
some are less memorable, such as Frank Moor-house's
Tales of Mystery and Romance (1977), or
Carlyle's On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic
in History (1841). But at least they are reasonably
straightforward and comprehensible.
What I am getting at are titles with skew spellings,
rogue punctuation, and “weird and wonderful”
names and words that are difficult to relate to anything
meaningful.
Why, for example, does Bruce Chatwin's highly
readable collection of anecdotes and aperçus, What
Am I doing Here (1989), have no question mark? Or
come to that, why didn't he call it What I Am Doing
Here? What is the significance, if any, of this small
deviation from the norm? And what was Stephen
King up to, calling his novel Pet Semetary (1983)?
Even Garrison Keillor's lovely Lake Wobegon Days
(1985) had me worried. Why should I make an extra
effort to remember that the name of the “1001st
lake in Minnesota,” as he describes it, is a twisted
version of woebegone? The trouble with such “off”
spellings and punctuations is that you really need to
remember two extra things, on top of the little itself:
first, that the title is “deviant,” and second, how it is
deviant.
However, the fact remains that all through literrary
titles in English there are such irritants, and I
thought I might as well tackle the issue head on and
see where the longstanding and popularly perpetrated
snags lay. I offer my findings in the hopes that
fellow readers and media followers will be able to
see some light in this particular thicket, as I think I
can myself discern now.
Let us take the matter of name spellings first,
whether personal names or place names, real names
or fictitious ones. Here are some classics: Smollett's
novel is Humphry Clinker (1771), not “Humphrey”;
Richardson's is Clarissa Harlowe (1748), not “Harlow”;
Defoe's is Robinson Crusoe (1719), not
“Cruso”; Rider Haggard's is Allan Quatermain
(1887), not “Quartermain” or “Quatermaine.” (A
slap on the wrist here to William Rose Benét's The
Reader's Encyclopedia and Kenneth McLeish's
Bloomsbury Good Reading Guide, which respectively
give the latter misspellings.) Also in this
group, I would say, are Emily Brontë's Wuthering
Heights (1846), not “Weathering,” “Withering,” or
any similar fancy, and, admittedly more trickily, Aldous
Huxley's Crome Yellow (1921), not `Chrome,”
although of course the pun on this word is intentional.
(Crome is the name of a house, just as
Wuthering Heights is.) And we can conveniently
add a couple of pause-causing poetic titles here, too:
Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh (1817), and not a jot
otherwise, and Tennyson's The Lady of Shalott
(1832), not “Shallot,” which makes the lady smack
strongly of veganism.
It is only one small step from such pitfalls to
those holding punctuational and related snares, the
latter often involving the problem of whether a title
is one word or two. The apostrophe has much to
answer for here, as it does in everyday English. So
let us note: James Joyce's novel is Finnegans Wake
(1939), not “Finnegan's,” E. M. Forster's is
Howards End (1910) (another house name, by the
way), not “Howard's,” and, a potential double delusion,
Shakespeare's famous play is Love's Labour's
Lost (1598), with two apostrophes. The first of these
is the possessive, the second represents the vowel of
is . (The Joyce title is typical of the author's linguistically
inventive but allusive style, and is actually a
compound of two proper names: that of Finn
MaCool, the Irish folk-hero, and Tim Finnegan, the
hero of a music-hall ballad, who sprang to life in the
middle of his own wake.)
Hyphens can cause difficulties, too. So Melville
wrote Moby-Dick (1851) and John Buchan's autobiography
was called Memory Hold-the-Door (1940),
but Robertson Davies wrote Tempest Tost (1951),
with no hyphen. As for the “one-or-two-word”
problem, Walter Scott wrote Redgauntlet (1824) and
John Buchan (again) named his novel of Scottish adventure
Huntingtower (1922).
While we're about it, we should not overlook
Coleridge's poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
(1798), not “Rhyme,” or Byron's Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage (1811), not “Child,” or Ruskin's Arrows
of the Chace (1880), not “Chase.” Both Byron's and
Ruskin's wayward words are directly related to their
modern equivalents but have essentially historic
spellings.
And there we have another whole river to cross,
since some of the best-known literary works have
retained their historic titles, complete with outmoded
spellings and punctuations. Spenser is notoriously
troublesome here, with The Shepheardes Calender
(1579), The Faerie Queene (1590) and Mother
Hubberds Tale (1591) among the greatest hazards.
In a sense, it seems illogical that we have retained
the historic spellings for Spenser's works yet use
modern spellings for the titles of plays by his contemporary,
William Shakespeare. But perhaps it is
just as well that we have A Midsummer Night's
Dream (1600), not A Midsommer nights dream , as it
originally was when first published, and Henry the
Fifth (or Henry V ) (1600), not Henry the fift . A later
title, but still with “olde-worlde” spelling, is Izaak
Walton's The Compleat Angler (1653), which oddly
enough, seems to present little problem.
What can cause a bout of head-scratching is deciding
whether the definite or indefinite article is
involved. One Shakespeare play that quite often
goes wrong is The Winter's Tale (1611)--“The,” not
“A,”--while Jerome K. Jerome, giving no trouble at
all with Three Men in a Boat (1889), followed it up
by taking the same characters on a tour of Germany
in Three Men on the Bummel (1900). The last word
of this is the name of a river, so “A” is quite out of
order. (Kenneth McLeish, once again hold your
hand out!)
A sort of juvenile one-off here, spellingwise, is
Daisy Ashford's charming novel, written when she
was only nine. The Young Visiters (1919). The authoress
may be excused her youthful slip, but once
she has made it, we are obliged to preserve it!
Among the true deviants, the titles that are neither
immediately nor even sometimes ever really meaningful
(although they may become so during the
reading of the book), are the mini-minefields of such
as Lisa Alther's Kinflicks (1976), Mervyn Peake's
Gormenghast (1950), and Peter Carey's Illywhacker
(1985).
Of course, similar titular problems occur in areas
outside literature, too. Vaughan Williams's chilly
symphony that developed out of his music for the
“British hero” movie Scott of the Antarctic (1948)
was actually entitled Sinfonia Antartica (1953),
which seems rather perverse. And John Gay's greatest
but much more light-hearted work was called
The Beggar's Opera (1728), singular, not plural.
Even more obviously in the world of musical (and
visual) entertainment, it is worth noting that the Folies
Bergè are spelled with the first word plural,
but the second singular. (Editor of Everyman's Encyclopxdia ,
write it out a hundred times!).
Well, I'm off to bed now, for good re-read of
Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1962). At
least, I think it's “A”....
“The truck now has over 191,000 miles on it and has never
had a major problem until recently. The timing gear broke in the
front yard after coming home from the orthodontist.” [From the
Letters column, Friends , . Submitted by ]
“That dive was right on the edge of new exploration and
new technology. Taking new technology into unexplored realsm
of the earth is a once in a lifetime opportunity that I hope to
repeat many times.” [From Underwater USA , . Submitted
by ]
The Writing Systems of the World
[Note: This book may be ordered form any bookstore
that has the wit to look up the publisher in
Books in Print .]
Literacy and numeracy have come to the fore in
recent years as major issues, not only (or even so
much) in the Third World as in the industrialized
nations. Leaving numeracy aside for the moment,
those of us who have studied linguistics have usually
been told that as language is essentially spoken, its
written form is of lesser (or no) importance for the
analysis of language. That is patent rubbish, of
course, for it can easily be demonstrated that written
language cannot be ignored for a variety of reasons:
the more formalized versions of language that are
reflected there, the relatively complex constructions
that are accepted as normal to writing but would be
difficult to construct viva voce and difficult to assimilate
unless read, the preservation of fossilized
forms--both words and grammar--made possible
by written records, and so on. These and other features
of writing have an undeniable effect on language,
and it would be foolish to ignore them just
because language is, at bottom, an oral means of
communication. That is not to say that writing and
speech should be measured by the same yardsticks,
only that writing cannot be ignored in a proper
treatment of language.
Writing has not been ignored entirely by writers
on language, but its role has been consistently
underplayed. Coulmas's clear exposition of the history
of writing systems traces the development of
various kinds of writing systems--ideographic, pictographic,
morphemic, syllabic, phonemic, and phonetic--through
history, discussing them individually,
describing how certain ancient scripts were
deciphered, and presenting his cogent arguments for
regarding at least some aspects of language through
the analysis of writing. It is only through their written
forms that we know anything at all about certain
languages, and the written forms of others serve to
confirm the findings of diachronic linguistics in positing
the pronunciation and sources of long-dead
tongues.
It is generally conceded that writing was invented
because of the need to keep records as civilizations
became more complex. Scholars generally
agree that the use of a numerical marking system
preceded attempts at developing methods for transcribing
language per se ; I find in accepting that fact
some interesting implications for theories about how
the mind works and, in particular, its capacity for
abstracting. It must be emphasized, of course, that
language preceded numeracy, but it is interesting to
see how very early in man's acculturation the ability
to deal with the abstract notion of counting manifested
itself and was then transferred into an encodable
form. In its most primitive form, a record might
consist of bits of clay similar in shape to those of the
items being counted (for identification), the quantity
of bits being equal to the number of items counted.
Subsequently, the clay bits were replaced by marks
(even as we make them today: \?\) with a picture of
what was being counted (pots or sheaves of grain)
incised alongside the count. Much later, to save
space, the `\?\' was to be replaced by a single symbol,
say, `5.' Meanwhile, the picture of the grain sheaf
was itself to be replaced by a shorthand version, and
that is where things begin to get complicated. I have
already simplified Coulmas's description out of all
sensible recognition for the sake of brevity, but,
while the time compression has been severe, I do
not think I have distorted the facts.
For us who can read and count and take such matters
so much for granted, it seems impossible to believe
that it took more than 500 years (2500-2000 BC)
for the Sumerians to reduce their cuneiform character
inventory from 800 to about 500. As they were overrun
and absorbed by the Akkadians by 1900 BC, even
that might be viewed as a bootless economy. While it
must be noted that the cuneiform system, based on a
pattern of wedge-like signs impressed in clay by a specially
cut reed stylus, served several Mesopotamian
cultures for about 3000 years, it was used for writing
several languages of diverse structures: Sumerian was
an agglutinative language, in structure of the type of
American Indian languages, Hungarian, etc.; Akkadian
was a Semitic language, similar in structure to Hebrew;
the Elamites spoke a language of which we
know little, but it is interesting to note that about
1500 BC they changed from the script writing system
they had been using to cuneiform, and in the “short”
time of less than 500 years had reduced the number of
symbols to 113. The Hittites, who spoke a language
with some Indo-European characteristics, also wrote
in cuneiform, as did the speakers of Old Persian, a true
Indo-European language. Indeed, it was the trilingual
(Old Persian, Elamite, and Neo-Baby lonian)
inscription of Darius that provided the key for the
decipherment of several ancient writings. Ugaritic, another
Semitic language, was also written in cuneiform.
Cuneiform writing thus served different functions;
that is, from its original use for pictograms, it
became stylized to the point where the images were
unrecognizable without decoding. As the speakers
of various languages applied it to their needs, it became
somewhat more sophisticated; the Elamites,
for example, were able to economize on the number
of symbols by assigning to most of them syllabic
identity, a major step toward the development of
alphabetic writing. In his description of writing systems
Coulmas adopts the designations applied by W.
Haas, namely, pleremic to describe the lexemic/morphemic
level and cenemic to describe the syllabic/
phonetic/phonemic level. Although the author is
quick to point out that these classifications are not
mutually exclusive, even in the oldest extant writing
that has been interpreted, they provide a convenient
point of departure for descriptions of what is going
on in a writing system. Thus, we might conclude that
Egyptian hieroglyphics are largely pleremic, while
our modern alphabetic system is largely cenemic,
though neither is exclusively so.
One of the more fascinating subjects dealt with
in this book is the decipherment of written languages.
Those who have read the books by Leonard
Cottrell and Michael Ventris and know about Champollion's
decipherment of the Rosetta Stone will find
this chapter extremely interesting. It is worth noting
that decipherment of such archaeological materials
differs from modern code decipherment because for
the latter we can assume that a modern language was
encoded, while in the former there are often no
clues to the nature of the language, to what extent it
is pleremic or cenemic, where “word breaks” occur
(if, indeed, the language had words as we know
them in English), and, in many instances, even the
order in which the symbols were recorded.
There is much in this book to inspire the reader.
Those who advocate spelling reform are referred to
the chapter on the alphabet, from which the following
is quoted:
Etymological Spelling
In many orthographies purely phonemic representations
of words are corrupted for the sake of
graphically preserving their etymologies. For example,
breakfast continues to be spelled with
<ea> although the first vowel of the word is [\?\],
because it is etymologically related to the verb to
break. The <w> in acknowledge points to its etymological
relation with to know. “Silent” letters
such as <l> in folk, <k> in knife, or <w> in wrestle
are etymological remnants rather than representations
of phonological units. Silent <e> in
English occurs in many affixes of Latin and
French origin such as, for instance, -able, -age,
-ance, -ate and -ative, and is therefore statistically
associated with words originating from these languages.
Etymological spelling is common in learned
words, especially words of Latin origin. Sign- in
signal and paradigm- in paradigmatic are spelled
phonemically, but as isolated words they contain
a letter, <g>, which has no counterpart in the
phonemic representation. Medicine-medical and
righteous-right are similar pairs where the rationale
for the spelling of the first lies in the relation
with the second. In this way, the spelling of a
word often relates to that of other words belonging
to the same paradigm, or to its own history.
The h-muet in many French words such as
honeur, humeur, hôpital, humide, hiver, etc., is
etymological, testifying to their Latin origin. In
English, too, the spelling of the corresponding
words can be regarded as etymological with the
added peculiarity that they also exemplify the
mechanism of spelling pronunciation, because
they were borrowed for English from French
rather than from Latin at a time when the
<h> was no longer pronounced in French.
[pp. 170-71]
There are other arguments for preserving spelling
mentioned by Coulmas, among them: paradigmatic
similarity (e.g., for preserving the relationship
between anxious and, anxiety and, in German, between
Tag [tak] and Tage [tag\?\]); word representation
(e.g., liaison in French); homograph avoidance
in English (e.g., bear/bare, hair/hare ) and in German
(e.g., Wagen `car'/ wagen `dare,' Arm `arm'/ arm
`poor'); loanword identification (e.g., writing of
words of Greek origin with <ch>, as in chronology,
psychology , rather than <k> and with <ph>, as in
philosophy, sophisticate , rather than <f>. If spelling
reformers had their way, and spelling matched pronunciation,
then the spelling would have to be different
for each dialect of English. Such a situation
did prevail in the earliest beginnings of the writing
of Greek, in which can be seen the truest forerunner
of the modern alphabet: as an artifact it is valuable
to us as a key to studying ancient Greek dialects;
applied to modern English it would contribute nothing
more than utter confusion. Moreover, if such an
approach were adopted, could we expect to see
spellings change, periodically, as pronunciations
changed?
Today, albeit with certain adjustments, we can
read the writings of Shakespeare and, with somewhat
more sophisticated adaptation, those of Chaucer,
though they are, respectively, 400 and 550
years old. (We cannot always be sure we understand
what we are reading, but that is another matter.) If
we were to adopt a phonetic system of spelling, it is
unlikely that our great-grandchildren would be able
to read anything written in the 20th century. It
might be argued that the writing should be phonemic,
not phonetic, but phonemes change, too,
though more slowly. As Coulmas points out, the alphabet
is far from perfect; but were we to institute a
“simplified” spelling system we would be destroying
the very unity that the written language accords
to the many millions around the globe who can read
English.
Purists always seem bent on the preservation of
an older stage of the language. Were that undertaken,
we should soon find that the traditional form
would become frozen in writing (and on the tongues
of purists and pedants), while the continuously
changing language of the marketplace moved onward.
The term applied to this rather unhealthy situation
is diglossia , which does exist in Sinhalese, spoken
in Sri Lanka. Professor Coulmas:
Literary Sinhalese obtained its standard in the
fourteenth century AD, and this standard is respected
by the whole speech community. `The
belief that [the] Literary [language] is superior,
more beautiful, more logical and more correct
prevails at every level of the society.'... This attitude
is typical of diglossia. It implies that in a
speech community where illiteracy is widespread
a large part of the population has very little esteem
for the only variety they speak.... [p. 195]
[The quotation is from one of Coulmas's many
sources.]
There is, of course, no final word on this subject,
but I should like to add one more brief quotation
that strikes at the heart of the matter:
[W]riting is not, and never was, a means of
transcribing speech sounds, but is rather an instrument
of visually representing language by
means of relating visual signs in various different
ways which are more or less faithful to the
speech sounds of a given language at a given
time.
This review is not the place to take up the cudgel
against purism or spelling reform, but I could not
resist adducing such apt comments as can be found
in this work.
I have seldom seen so clear an exposition of any
complex subject as that presented by Coulmas. The
text is punctuated here and there by tables showing
the progressive development of selected symbols
(as, for example, in Sumerian), the Devanagari syllabary
(in which several modern and ancient Indian
languages are written), the Hebrew, Arabic, and
other alphabets, Chinese and Japanese writing, and
attractive drawings showing the hieroglyphic (with
sound values in English orthography). This is not to
say that readers will be come away from The Writing
Systems of the World with the ability to read the
Bhagavad-Gita , the Analects of Confucius , the Koran ,
the Talmud , or the Book of the Dead , but they will
certainly have a much better understanding of what
it is they do not know, and pursuit of the available
material cited in the fifteen-page Bibliography could
prove very worthwhile.
Laurence Urdang
“Iranian Mutes Calls for Revenge Against U.S.”
[Headline in The New York Times , . Submitted
by ]
Blessed Be The Words That Bind
Tolstoy had something when he said that all
happy families are alike, while every unhappy
family is unhappy in its own way. It seems to me that
every happy family, like every pair of lovers, has a
language all its own.
Little do some of the acquaintances who have
had walk-on parts in the little dramas of my sister's
life and mine know that their names are a permanent
part of our language. I was a gullible child, and so I
was often befriended by major league liars. Try as
my mother might to reason with me, I steadfastly
believed that Betty Kurlinski had four million dollars
to spend on Christmas presents. She also told me
that each member of her family drank directly from
his or her own half-gallon milk carton at meals, each
personalized with a name in crayon. Thus, we call a
whopper a kurlinski , which can also be used as a
verb, as in, “He told me he had to work late--
again--but I think he kurlinskied.”
I come by my gullibility naturally. My maternal
grandmother had two childhood friends, Dovey and
Lena, who fibbed continually. Granny's parents had
a chant I now use with my own credulous daughter:
“Tis so if 'tain't so, if Dovey and Lena say so.”
From the neighborhood we grew up in comes
the term a Billy Groves , used to describe a glutton,
in remembrance of a fat boy who could be heard
squealing for a second hamburger or another scoop
of ice cream on summer nights when the windows
were open.
A Bro Purvis is a libidinous clergyman, named
after an evangelist who once whipped both of our
husbands into a frenzy of desire when we were visiting
a fundamentalist church with relatives. Brother
Purvis strained the buttons on his vest as his face
purpled and he growled (as Samson vainly resisting
Delilah), “She tempts me, Lord! Oh, how she tempts
me!” When the news about Jim Bakker hit the
stands, we concluded he was a real Bro Purvis .
We call a rah-rah sort of person, stirred by maniacal
devotion to a trivial cause, a Hawkeye Toilet
Seat , a term that requires considerable explanation.
My sister once dated a strapping young man who
was a diehard booster of the University of Iowa, the
sports teams of which are called the Hawkeyes. He
picked her up clad head to toe in the school colors of
black and gold, looking like a giant bumblebee. Such
a rabid fan was he that his car horn played the
Hawkeye Fight Song. When my sister's husband
heard this tale, he speculated that the old beau's toilet
seat played the same tune when he lifted it. You
see, my brother-in-law Bill “gets it,” my sister's
words for the litmus test one uses for prospective
friends. A person who gets it has humor, purpose, a
sense of the absurd, and a strong world view. One of
the gems Bill has added to our language is the
phrase, “I wonder what the Sharps and the Ushkrats
are doing tonight.” One rares back and uses this
phrase when one finds himself in surroundings of unaccustomed
elegance, such as sipping an aperitif in
an elegant restaurant with a bevy of tuxedoed waiters
dancing attendance. When my brother-in-law
was a newspaper editor in a small town, there were
two notorious families, feuding but frequently intermarrying,
who often turned up in the police news.
They were the Sharps and the Ushkrats, and once, a
Sharp hanged himself in the county jail. Bill--a
young editor torn between taste and sensation--decided
to run a photo of the cell, complete with the
Sharp's dangling noose and a kicked-over chair. He
thought the better of his decision when the papers
hit the streets, and a contingent of Sharps marched
into the newspaper office. Turned out they weren't
angry but proud, and had come in to buy out the rest
of the day's papers.
My sister's marriage to Bill has “taken,” as she
puts it; her first never did. I sensed that when I stood
beside her in the receiving line at her first wedding,
and she muttered under her breath, “This is a bluebird
fly-up.” When my sister was a bluebird , about
to fly up to become a Campfire Girl, she was beside
herself with anticipation. Of course, the ceremony
was not the transfiguring experience she had hoped.
Thus arose the term bluebird fly-up for a disappointing
experience. Vikki Carr's song, “Is That All
There Is?,” pretty much dismisses all of life as a
bluebird fly-up .
Sissy's first husband never got it, but he did
leave her with a useful term, the big bubble , which
he used--rather bitterly--to describe our sheltered
upbringing. Now, at holiday family gatherings, my
parents greet us gaily at the door with shouts of
“Welcome back to the big bubble!”
Clotheshorses all three, my mother, sister, and I
often use these occasions as an opportunity for a
shopping spree. We refer to a garment that is both
distinctive and frequently worn as a uni , short for
both unique and uniform . Rare is the uni that can be
bought off the rack; most are created from a mix of
patterns by my mother's clever needle. “I have vision,”
she admits modestly as she selects sleeves
from one pattern envelope and cuffs from another.
Sometimes she'll whip up a Brontë sister , which is an
essentially somber dress with some feminine furbelow--a
row of tiny covered buttons, perhaps--to
hint that the wearer has hidden fires banked beneath
her peplum. A slinky garment, on the other hand--
the kind one might wear to a New Year's Eve
party--is called a Satan bow-dice . This colorful
phrase we picked up at a fashion show narrated by a
gentleman who was obviously unfamiliar with the
pronunciation of satin bodice .
A Quasi Modo is a dress with the big shoulder
pads that are currently ultra chic, but have an unfortunate
tendency to slip, giving one a hunchbacked
appearance. When we try a Quasi Modo on, we can't
resist drooling a little in the dressing room, and calling
out “Sanctuary!”
Since my sister and I share a poor sense of direction
as well as an intense interest in fashion, we have
a tendency to get lost on the way home from our
treasure hunts. We grew up west-siders who might
as well have been in Paris when we crossed over to
the east side of our city.
“What am I doing wrong?” I asked once when
Sissy and Mom were chattering obliviously in the
back seat on the way home from a shopping expedition.
“Oh,” Sissy answered with a certain irrefutable
logic, “you're coming the going way.”
I knew she meant I was headed away from our
side of town. We still refer to a person who is lost,
either literally or spiritually, as coming the going
way . As one might suspect, this tendency to lose
one's bearings at the wheel can have unhappy results.
Much to Bill's consternation, the word collision
isn't part of Sissy's vocabulary. Her car didn't
really hit that nasty old Cadillac, it just “nudged” it
a little. Thus, dents are called nudgies , and major
dents--the ones that require more than $500 to repair--
are owies .
Dad would feel as if he were coming the going
way on our shopping expeditions, but he manages to
put a flair all his own in our family lingo. He loves
having his daughters fetch for him. “Would ye bring
me a cup of coffee with two cubes of sugar?” he'll
ask. Or, “Would ye bring me a toothpick?” Since all
his requests begin that way, we've come to call people
who work in the service sector--waiters, hotel
bellmen, maids-- wouldyes .
Dad's also responsible for making General Custer
a synonym for a transvestite. Once on a family
vacation, he insisted on driving through a thunderstorm
for 80 miles to reach a wax museum in Deadwood,
South Dakota. Apparently there was a shortage
of male dummies, because General Custer had
red lips, boobs, and a luxurious, long blonde wig.
Much to dad's dismay, we got the giggles as a guide
provided highlights of Custer's Last Stand.
When we started dating, a whole new jargon
arose. Dad, who often dismissed our boyfriends as
immature, called a good many of them pot-ringers,
because in his estimation, they still had pot rings on
their behinds. When a pot-ringer got one of us upset
enough to weep and gnash our teeth, the storm that
betook us was called a head-banger, from the unforgettable
episode when I was stood up on prom
night and banged my carefully coiffed head against
the wall.
Now my own children are providing me with
new linguistic seeds to plant. My parents make up
for all the years of avoiding dental bills by putting
dishes of candy on every available surface in their
house when I bring my children back to the big bubble.
Round, hard candies that a child could choke on
are called choke babies, because when they were
toddlers, my mother admonished my two older children
that those could choke the baby. My six-year-old,
Nicholas, recently gave a choke baby to baby
George, watched him for a moment, and reported in
some disgruntlement that choke babies don't work.
Because Nicholas collects everything from spent
batteries to flattened fauna, his nickname is junk
Man, while baby George is called Wee Geordie after
a character in a Welsh novel my father read. Kate,
because of her la-di-da air, is Miss Fine Thing . Once
we took Miss Fine Thing on a Sunday outing to the
historic little town of Mantorville, Minnesota. We
didn't know until later that during the entire drive
up, she trembled in fear of the unfamiliar destination.
So now, an experience one regards with foreboding
is a Mantorville . Not certain which direction
I'll be heading, I think of the afterlife as a
Mantorville .
We always call Cedar Rapids, Iowa, See the Rabbits,
because once, on my return from a business trip
there, Junk Man asked with great excitement, “Did
you see the rabbits?”
As we leave our little town to visit the city my
folks live in, we pass a big green factory. Since the
drive gives just enough time for the children to get a
good nap and for my husband, Jeff, and me to talk or
just think our own thoughts for a change, we always
have the kids play silence when we get to the factory.
Thus it is known not as Wellman Dynamics, but
as the shut-up place .
And what a fertile field for new jargon potty
training has been! Jeff's term for a child in the awkward
stage between needing diapers and being reliable
in big boys or big girls (real underpants) is a time
bomb . When accidents happen, the victim never admits
being soaking wet, but will concede to feeling
the “least little bit dampish.” Our couch, fortunately
upholstered in gold, has been the scene of
many such accidents and is thus called Forever Amber .
A deep reclining chair we bought at an estate
sale his children held after an elderly gent's death is
called Dead Man's Gulch . The dead part has a double
meaning as the chair has unpredictable springs,
and the mere shift of a haunch can project like a
missile the visitor we have forgotten to warn.
In our family, scatalogical humor seems to
bridge the generations. Perhaps the best time had
by all was on an outing to the Minnesota Zoo, where
a gorilla was eating vast handfuls of his own bright
yellow feces. “Look, mother!” called an excited
child. “That gorilla's eating mustard!” When the
kids refer to the results of a new recipe I've tried as
gorilla mustard, I know it's best to retire it. One
mealtime chant the children are seldom allowed to
make is “Eat every bean and pea on your plate.”
This comes from a friend whose innocent grandma
made that declaration every Sunday, not knowing
what occasioned the sniggering from her grandchildren.
Discipline gives rise to even more lexicon. Jeff,
a rebel of the sixties, calls kids who go limp in public
by way of passive resistance war protestors . He also
warns darkly that the child who does what another
child has already been reprimanded for is in double
trouble .
Though our family language is like a little tribal
dialect--useless outside of its narrow confines--its
value is inestimable to us. Every happy family's language
is different, but they all translate into love.
“Hidden in the dining room breakfront, in a blueenameled
box bedecked with handpainted flowers, Molly
Darrah keeps the keys to 18 neighbors' houses.” [From
The San Francisco Chronicle , ]
“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 ]
A Concise Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional
English
This is an abridgment of the eighth edition of A
Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, by
Eric Partridge, edited by Paul Beale and published
in 1984. Born in 1884, Partridge died in 1979; Paul
Beale has picked up the reins in an able manner and
continues to charge ahead. This edition, though
abridged, is said to contain much material not included
in the 1984 edition, published in the US by
Macmillan. Moreover, “it contains only terms
known to have arisen in the Twentieth Century,”
according to the Preface, but omits the military
slang of the earlier 20th century. I am inclined to
question the accuracy about the terms known to
have arisen in the 20th century, for I found quite a
few of much earlier date, but that can scarcely be an
adverse criticism.
As in the case of most of Partridge's books, the
exception being Catch Phrases, which I didn't think
much of, this dictionary [ CDS ] makes good browsing
fodder and resembles the earlier books in style sufficiently
to satisfy those familiar with the format. Personally,
I find it irritating to find entries with several
definitions in which numbers are given to 2 and onward
but not to I, a practice I simply cannot understand.
Readers ought not be put off by the number
of pages, for this is a large-format book with a fair
amount of text.
The CDS, however, will not fill the needs of
those looking for American slang, unless they are interested
in those British slang terms that were borrowed
from America (and elsewhere). With experience,
one becomes accustomed to the arrogance of
the British who consider the term English to be proprietary,
with the understood meaning `British English,'
presumably implying that all other Englishes
should carry a label, the only place where ( real )
English is spoken being Britain. As it happens, of
course, there are more distinctive dialects of English
in Britain than in North America, and anyone who
has spent any time listening to them knows that
some are mutually unintelligible. Linguistic chauvinism
might be understandable were we discussing
RP (that is, the Received Pronunciation of the prestige
southern British dialect), but, if that is the case,
in the present instance we must then be looking at a
dictionary of “RP Slang,” whatever that might be.
The value of the book is not diminished by its being
about British slang, but, considering the percentage
of the content that is attributable to American, Australian,
and Canadian slang (mostly), that part of native
British slang that does not emerge as derivative
has an old-fashioned ring to it. It is, at worst, cruelly
deceptive not to make it clear from the title (or a
subtitle) that the book's focus is British slang.
That having been said, let us turn to the content,
at which point prudish readers might wish to
turn to another page.
Without laboring the point (nudge! nudge!), the
first entry one turns to is fuck, which, in keeping
with the length and depth of the CDS , is what one
might call a quickie entry (nudge! nudge!, though
that sense appears under the entry quick one ). I cannot
claim proficiency in slang, but I do know that in
addition to the `Scram!' sense of fuck off , a common
(US) sense is `gold-brick,' which is missing (though
covered here under fucking the dog ). Is it missing
because it is not used in that sense in Britain or because
it was cut, and, if the latter, because it went
the way of earlier 20th-century military slang? Unfortunately,
there is no way one can determine the
answer without having the 1984 edition to hand. If
one had the 1984 edition, he might well resent having
to buy this book rather than a briefer (and less
expensive) Supplement.
One gets the strong impression that for those
entries that are acknowledged as being of US, Canadian,
or other origin the editor has very few, if any,
citations, for most of the words and expressions are
not traced back very far. For example, puddle-jumper
is defined as RAF (1942) slang for a small
communications aircraft; that might be coincidence,
but it surely is of American origin, traceable back to
the gear in which Uncle Don was wont to arrive for
his radio program on rainy days in the early 1930s.
On the cuff and off the cuff are in, with no American
provenance mentioned and dated far too late (“since
1920s”): the term arose well before 1900, from
the time when men wore (detachable) Celluloid
shirtcuffs on which memos were conveniently penciled
because they could be wiped off with a damp
cloth. Without this explanation, Beale's cryptic “Ex
note scribbled on stiff shirtcuff” would give a laundryman
nightmares.
Expressions like blow it out your ear (inaccurately
described as “widespread in West N. Am.”)
ought to be marked as “minced oaths” (for ear read
ass ). Disregard or ignorance of US slang has led to
the treatment of Honkie as “since (?) mid-1960s in
UK,” which tells little. Although the modern slang
hickey means a ` “suction” kiss that leaves a mark,'
and not, thank God, as CDS has it, “raises a blister,”
its original meaning was `skin blemish,' and cosmetic
makers in the US in the 1930s regularly used the
word in their advertising (often with the implied
sense `pimple'). And the expression gone with the
wind antedated Margaret Mitchell's book--indeed,
she so named the book because of the cliché, not the
other way round; a cursory check of my Bloomsbury
Thematic Dictionary of Quotations (1988--nudge!
nudge!) reveals its appearance in a poem by the British
lyric poet, Ernest Dowson (1867-1900).
Golden handshake is in but not golden parachute .
Gofer is said to have been current in the US
“since ca. 1970: Barnhart.” Beale can scarcely be
held accountable for Barnhart's scholarship, but I
can say that I personally know the term to have been
used in the early 1950s, and I did not then get the
impression that it had been coined for my benefit.
I was pleased to see that Beale accepts the etymology
of (British) po-faced as coming from po
`chamber pot,' disagreeing with Collins English Dictionary
[Editorial Director: L. Urdang] which traces
it to a modification of poor-faced . I never cared for
that, on the grounds that I know of no British dialect
that pronounces poor as [pou].
I had never noticed it before, but the reason
that the old-fashioned bicycle was named the penny-farthing
was that the large front wheel bore the
same proportion to the tiny one at the rear as a (British)
penny bore to a farthing. Apparently, everyone
knew that but me.
Rhyming slang, of course, provides some of the
best fun: it is a mystery to me how anyone who is
unfamiliar with the origin of a given bit of rhyming
slang can ever divine what it means. Bexley Heath,
Hounslow Heath, and Hampstead Heath are all rhyming
slang for `teeth,' with the last often shortened to
just Hampsteads . I suppose it has to be in your
blood. One of my favorites (till I find another) is
Chart and Evans for `knees.' Beale writes:
RN. (Granville.) A rationalised form of chart an'
'eavens, itself incorrect for chart in 'eavens. The
semantic key is supplied by s. benders, knees--
what you get down upon to say the Lord's
Prayer. `Our Father, which art in Heaven'--and
strengthened by the second verb in the predominant
construction and usage, `Get down on your
chart `n 'eavens and holystone the deck.'
The “RN” stands for `Royal Navy,' the “s.” for
`slang' (but perhaps everyone knew that already).
After such an exposition it is small wonder to me
when I occasionally see, beneath The [London] Times
crossword puzzle, “This puzzle was completed by
80 per cent of the contestants in 22 minutes” in a
recent competition. Such a message is particularly
dismaying when one is able to fill in only one or two
words after an hour.
I suggest only that Beale stop at the point where
he has identified the origin of a given expression as
American and eschew the information found in some
of the secondary sources he resorted to, for they are
inconsistent in their accuracy. Despite my criticism
of the inaccuracies of the US slang source material, if
one focuses on the British material and takes the
American with a pinch of salt, this book is very engaging
and can provide anyone with many hours of
happy, entertaining, and informative browsing.
Laurence Urdang
“25 feared dead in Turkey attack.” [Headline in The
Herald , New Britain, Connecticut, .
Submitted by ]
The Cassell Concise English Dictionary
In September, 1989, preceding what has come
to be known as the Waterloo Conference on the
OED (because its first four annual meetings were
held at the University of Waterloo, Ontario), members
of the European Association for Lexicography
(EURALEX) held a symposium on dictionary reviewing.
By the time I decided to attend, the meeting
was overbooked, and I could not get in. Besides Tom
McArthur, editor of English Today, and Robert Ilson,
editor of The Oxford Journal of Lexicography, I am
not sure who of those attending were reviewers of
dictionaries, but I think that I can probably say,
without fear of contradiction, that I have probably
written and continue to write more reviews of English
dictionaries (and of other reference books and
books on language) than most other people. Quantity,
of course, does not make up for quality; yet,
something might be said for experience. I am sure
that I would have learnt something and regret having
been turned away.
As I did not attend, I cannot say exactly what
went on at the symposium, but I got the impression
that one of its results was to be the issuance of
guidelines for reviewers. Ha! --Well, maybe not
“Ha!” I think that what the symposiasts might have
discussed were criteria for assessing a dictionary,
which they would like to see adopted by the media
and given to reviewers assigned or invited to write
about such books. There is no doubt that the quality
of such reviews varies enormously. When assigning a
book for review in other subjects, editors are usually
rather careful to try to find someone who knows
something about the subject of the book: it would be
unusual to find a book on, say, archaeology reviewed
by a rock musician and one on rock music reviewed
by an archaeologist. But when it comes to dictionaries,
editors appear to consider them fair game for
almost anyone, and they often assign novelists to
write the review.
There are novelists and there are novelists. I, for
one, would not object to a dictionary review being
written by an Anthony Burgess or a Kurt Vonnegut.
On the other hand, a novelist is, presumably, `anyone
who has had a novel published'; as we know,
some of the most prolific novelists write as if they
know little about the language, and it would be ridiculously
unfair to have such a person review a dictionary.
Dictionaries ought to be reviewed by professional
lexicographers. Today, many professional
lexicographers are seen to have axes to grind (because
they work for competing publishers) and editors
are reluctant to select them as reviewers because,
for obvious reasons, they are seeking to
publish unbiased reviews. Some of the dictionary reviews
that have been published in the popular press
have been bad--not unfavourable, just reflective of a
lack of sufficient linguistic sophistication. It may be
assumed that the reason for giving such writers dictionaries
to review is that they are regarded as end
users. But the same editors do not select ordinary
readers to review novels, they pick other novelists
or professional literary critics, in other words, reviewers
who are competent to assess the work because
they have a broad background in the literature
and are recognized as knowledgeable about the
genre.
On the same grounds, it is incumbent on editors
to engage as reviewers of dictionaries lexicographers
who are knowledgeable about the genre, not amateurs
who occasionally look up one word to see how
it is spelt or another to find out what it means. Because
anyone writing a review of any book ought to
be required to delineate the reasons for his approval
or disapproval of its style and content, so any editor
worth his salt should be able to detect in a properly
written, professional review of a dictionary by a lexicographer
any untoward bias and to reject such a
review (or parts of it) out of hand.
There are many specialist fields represented in a
dictionary--phonetics, semantics, morphology,
phonemics, diachronic and comparative linguistics,
symbology, typography, etc.--and the average dictionary
user, whether he be a novelist or not is ill
equipped academically to pass judgment on how a
given dictionary has dealt with such areas. As I was
not at the symposium, I can only assume that the
symposiasts concerned themselves less (if at all) with
the problem of trying to urge editors to engage professional
lexicographers as reviewers than with the
effort of trying to ensure that editors be provided
with certain guidelines on How To Review A Dictionary,
which they fondly expect would be passed
on to the selected amateur reviewers thereby making
them competent, professional reviewers, a forlorn
hope at best.
The foregoing is not entirely irrelevant to my
comments on the book at hand, for it would be unfair
to review it as a dictionary, comparing it with
other dictionaries. Rather, it constitutes what publishers
call a “package,” that is, it contains a fair
amount of lexicographic material but little or nothing
that is original. Such books are derivatives of
larger dictionaries in a publisher's line, pared down
to make them smaller and not directly competitive
and priced lower. Oxford publishes a slightly smaller
version which they call their Pocket English Dictionary,
though one is likely to find himself in deep disagreement
with his tailor if he wanted a pocket large
enough to hold the book. Most major dictionary
publishers put out Concise, Compact, Pocket, Vest
Pocket, and other editions, grabbing for markets
that are price-more than content-oriented. Generally
speaking, the smallest general dictionary in
which one can expect to find fairly thorough treatment
of etymology, pronunciation, definitions, and a
good coverage of the language in a wide assortment
of entires is the so-called College or Desk dictionary.
A bigger book usually needs a stand or its own
spot on a desk or table, for it is too big and heavy to
drag out of a bookcase every time it is needed. The
two larger one-volume works available are The Random
House Unabridged (with 315,000 entries) and
the Merriam-Webstar Unabridged, Third Edition
(with about 460,000 entries). I cannot properly
count the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition,
because of its cost (about $2500) and its size (16
volumes); besides, it is not a work for everyday use
but for scholarly application, being historical in
nature.
In the context of the large number of dictionaries
available (including all their different editions),
the CCE is a serviceable work provided that one is
satisfied with brief definitions of no great depth,
and, essentially, a dictionary than can be used as a
spelling checker. These days, spelling checkers are
available to those who use personal computers,
hence a dictionary for that purpose is of limited usefulness.
One useful function of dictionaries till recently
was that they showed syllabic breaks, enabling
letter- and novel-writers alike to discover
where to hyphenate words. Some word processing
programs now offer such a feature--the one I use
Framework III (Ashton-Tate), is not bad at all--and
writers as well as compositors and publishers seem
to care less and less whether a word is hypenated in
an acceptable manner. The CCE does have price to
recommend it, coming in at about half of what a college-or
desk-sized dictionary would cost.
Inevitably, there are the inconveniences and the
oddities: the pronunciation of masochistic or masochistically ,
thus depriving the user of the information
that the stresses have shifted. To those who
maintain, “Everybody knows that,” I reply that if
that is the case, then why bother buying or publishing
dictionaries--or, for that matter, anything
else--at all?
Among the (odder) oddities: under make appears
the expression to make water, defined as `to
urinate; (Naut.) to leak.” These are both quite correct,
of course, but their juxtaposition could create a
curious confusion.
The general production of the book is poor: the
paper has too much “see-through,” causing the type
on the back of a page to interfere with the legibility;
the type is too gray; the definitions are run into one
another, with semicolons in place of definition numbers,
making it difficult to distinguish senses and requiring
one to read through a long entry before
coming to the sense sought; it is almost impossible to
discover where a new part of speech begins; subentries
of idiomatic phrases and phrasal verbs are given
the same prominence as headwords, making them
easy to find but detracting from the headword treatment;
and the substandard typography has created
many loose lines which poor proofreading has failed
to catch.
As the explanatory notes are rather thin on the
ground, I am unsure what to make of the insertion of
“ n.pl. ” into the middle of a definition:
golden...golden balls, n. the three balls, n.pl.
displayed as the emblem of a pawn broker.
The entry golden handcuff,
n. ...a payment or benefit given to an employee
as an inducement to continue working for
the same company.
raises the ludicrous (?) image of such a payment
or benefit being paid by someone other than the
employer.
The entry for golden-syrup give a cross-reference
to syrup, where it is not mentioned; as I understand
the style, this means that the two are to be
construed as synonyms, which is not the case. Indeed,
I believe that Golden Syrup [ sic : no hyphen] is
a trademark owned by Tate & Lyle for a uniquely
treacly mixture.
The pages containing the un - words are a compositor's
nightmare version of a designer's aberration.
The etymologies are too brief to be of any use.
One wonders what goes on in publishers' minds:
it seems quite obvious to me that if this were a good
and serviceable inexpensive version of the dictionary
on which it is said to be based, Cassell's English
Dictionary , then the publisher might well expect
that after a time the user would feel himself ready
for the larger book and would buy the larger
Cassell's . In the event, it seems unlikely that such an
event would take place, for this book is a sad disappointment.
Laurence Urdang
Français ou plutôt à la française
The French have long complained about the pollution
of their language by English. The following
story shows how bad this pollution is:
The heroine of our nouvelle is Marie, a petite
femme fatale from Paris. Her father was a parvenu
who used to be a bon vivant and the enfant terrible
of his clique but became a laissez-faire entrepreneur
in the entrepôt business and then accepted a post as
a chargé d'affaires, which entitled him to a UN laissez-passer,
(working to improve detente, and rapprochement
with the ancien régime), though he remained
a bit of a roué, having an affaire with the au
pair. Her mother, née Capet, was a grande dame,
full of savoir faire and joie de vivre, who later became
a clairvoyant and spent her time in séances and
collecting naïf gouaches and objets d'art. For a
while, they lived in a ménage á trois with the valet
de chambre, but the valet was arrested as an agent
provocateur, following a coup d'état manqué, which
turned out to be a débacle. This became a cause cé-lébre
among the émigré élite. His body was later
found in a cul-de-sac and dumped in the morgue. An
exposé in a newspaper revealed that he was the beau
of a svelte coquette he had met aprés-ski and she
gave him the coup de grâce by poisoning his créme
caramel in a crime passionnel. Marie recently made
her début as an ingénue in a risqué, avant-garde cinéma-vérité
movie which used advanced montage
techniques, was hailed as a tour de force and became
a succés de scandale. Because of her parents' character
traits, she was brought up in a recherché milieu
and spent most of her childhood in a crèche, playing
with papier-mâché toys.
Her fiancé is going to take her to a discothéque
and then onto a cafe, though she would rather go to
a thé dansant. She waits for him in her boudoir, en
deshabillé, wearing a negligée, through which her
toile d'or lingerie, particularly her brassiére, can be
seen. She is listening to a Chopin nocturne, while
lying on a beige chaise lounge, sipping cointreau,
eating canapés and reading a roman à thèse, currently
in vogue. Her fiancé, François, a petit bourgeois
in behavior, though considering himself the
crème de la créme, is aide-de-camp to a general and
has the rank of lieutenant, fancies himself as a raconteur
and littérateur (having published a pastiche of
vers libres and a catalogue raisonné of the works of
Oliver North, which was hailed as a chef d'oeuvre),
though his ambition is to be a Grand Prix driver. He
is brought by his chauffeur, who acts as chaperon
but they decide that he will be de trop and he takes
French leave. François lets himself into the bijou
little pied-á-terre with a passe-partout.
“Chéri, can't we go to the premiere of that finde-siècle
tableau vivant about clandestine intrigue
in a commune?” Marie asks François, eyeing him
through her pince-nez.
“I would rather go to the ballet and see that
dancer do pas-de-deux and entrechats. Then down
the boulevard to chez Georges. He serves delicious
champagne and vol-au-vents and has a fine art nouveau
collection.”
“But art nouveau is so passé. It is art déco that is
à la mode.”
“That's only for the nouveaux riches.”
“You have an idée fixe about art déco. Though,
entre nous, I must agree it is mainly bric-á-brac.”
“En passant, how about a little divertissement?”
“None of your double entendres, please. It
shows lack of etiquette. Perhaps we could go to a bal
masqué?”
They finally decide to have a meal á deux at a
chic cordon bleu restaurant. She puts on a crochet
blouse she had bought at the boutique and a haute
couture culotte skirt, decorated with moiré appliqués,
which is the dernier cri, a suede coat and a
beret, though François had asked her to wear her
décolleté dress. She dabs some rouge on her cheeks
and eau de toilette on her neck. They start off with
an apéritif and some crudités. They decide to have
the à la carte meal, following the recommendations
of the maître d' hôtel. She has pâté for hors
d'oeuvre, while he has the soupe du jour with croûtons.
For entrée she has the spécialité de la maison,
coq au vin with pommes frites and aubergines and
he has filet mignon aux fines herbes with courgettes
and purée de tomate. They drink a carafe of Bordeaux
with the meal. For dessert she has gâteau and
a sorbet and he has marrons glacés, though, as he is
rather guache, he commits a gaffe by eating them
with his fingers and then spills most of them on his
serviette. They finish the meal with gruyère and
camembert. They conclude with a pousse-café for
her and a cognac for him.
Afterwards they go to a son-et-lumière show at a
nearby château, noted for its bas-reliefs, though
spend most of the time in a tête-à-tête.
“Vis-à-vis our forthcoming marriage, you take it
as a fait accompli,” she says, “but I feel our dalliance
has reached an impasse. It is nothing but a charade.”
“My dear, you are merely troubled by ennui.”
“I give you carte blanche to do as you like and
you go off and play the cor anglais with the concièrge.
What a faux pas!”
“But you could almost say it was force majeure
that drove me. A letter I collected from the poste
restante contained a dossier about a précis of a roman
à clef she had written, showing she was au fait
with my manoeuvres in Iran which, if published,
would ruin me. I had to keep up a good rapport with
her.”
“I am sorry, François, our relationship is a
farce.”
“Do you mean that this is adieu?”
“I do. I shall sell my trousseau tomorrow.”
“Have some nougat, then.”
“You are being very blasé about it.”
“It's just that one has to handle these things
with aplomb.”
“But, à propos, I thought I was your raison
d'être, ever since you saw me au naturel. And all
those billets doux you sent me.”
“You were, but since you started speaking in
such awful clichés, à la française, I knew it would
never work.”
“Oh, you and your witty repartees and bons
mots. So, it's no souvenirs?”
“Sans everything.”
“No more soirées?”
“No.”
“Oh, what a fête worse than death.”
It was her final cri de coeur.
“...more allegations of improper misconduct...”
[From the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal , .
Submitted by ]
Professor Norman Shapiro [XIV,2] makes a remark
in his letter that I have often thought about, “the
vagaries of eponymous celebrity.” Fine, indeed, for
those whose names we now associate with useful,
beautiful, or beneficial items. Perhaps nowhere are the
vagaries of such namings more obvious than in the
medical profession. Herein, names are most often associated
with disease rather than deliverance. It may be
argued that more diseases have been discovered than
cures (It could hardly be the other way around, could
it?) and that for this reason these gentlemen have,
nominally, cocci for cousins and germs for germans.
Perhaps. But could we not, for that very reason, more
rigorously associate cures or treatments with their discoverers?
Why must children be vaccinated? Why
can't they be Jennerated (ah, that devilish imp, Paronomasia,
intrudes again). In reference to Mr. Shapiro's
vespasiennes . I wonder how many common, ordinary,
garden-variety Frenchmen would associate
these as tinkling symbols of a Roman Emperor. Anthony
Burgess, in his Kingdom of the Wicked , remarks
that Vespasian's own contemporaries designated street
urinals as “vespasians,” certainly a much more ignominous
affront because of its timeliness. With reference
to an analogous matter, I have seen references to a real
Mr. Thomas Crapper, who was supposed to have designed
our modern day lavatory. I have also read an
equal number of disclaimers that pooh-pooh (as it
were) the idea of such a named person ever having had
anything to do with the creation of this necessary convenience
(unorthodoxymoron).
I know I'm a bit tardy in my response to Helen W.
Power's mistaken feminist assumption in “Women
on Language; Women in Language” [XV, 2]. But now
that I'm once again a father in spring training with
my daughter Jessica, who is insistent on continuing to
integrate the Shaker Baseball League (SBL--formerly
the Shaker Boys League), a hardball little league that
will include her 10-year-old-male, and some female,
equals, I find that I must correct Power's mistake,
caused by an obviously uniformed conjecture concerning
our language as it is used in what was formerly
an all-male game.
Chatter is indeed not a word used only to characterize
what “females or nonhumans” speak (although
some might have accused Yogi Berra of having the
latter status in jest). Anyone who has ever spent any
length of time in the field for any minimal amount of
innings in the game of baseball, or along the bench in
the dugout next to the baseball field--and that now
includes my daughter Jessica and those like her who
insist on playing hardball rather than what is still designated
“ girls' softball”--has heard that unique baseball
language designed to get the goat of the opposition
and/or to encourage the players on your own side.
It is called “chatter” by Jessica's manager (male), who
attempts to teach his grade-school “persons of summer”
the finer points of the game, and who often exhorts
them from the sidelines, “Let's hear a little bit of
chatter, now,” to which Jessica and the males on the
team readily and rapidly respond “Alright, keed,
knock it down his (or her, when applicable, and the
pitcher for the opposing team is also female) throat” in
support of a teammate at bat, or “Hit it to me,” “Make
him hit it onna ground,” “Punch him out (current jargon
for exhorting one's own pitcher to put out the
opposing batter on strikes, known as a strikeout)” and
suchlike.
Feminine word play? Try telling that to Jessica's
current favorite Cleveland Indian, third baseman
Brook Jacoby. Chatter? Jessica understands that as part
of the language of baseball, the all-American game for
all Americans.
Verbal Analogies III—Measures
D.A. Pomfrit, Manchester
For centuries, people have been taking the measure of
things. Here is a sampling of the things measured and
the names for the process. See if you can make the
Verbal Analogy by selecting the appropriate term or
description from among the Answers provided. The
solution appears on page 24.
1. free acid: acidimetry :: distance/line length by a staff: ?
2. chorometry : land surveying :: atmidometry : ?
3. universe : cosmometry :: time: ?
4. cyclometry : circles :: halometry : ?
5. fluid pressure : kymography :: altitude : ?
6. heliometry : distances between stars :: osteometry : ?
7. red blood cells : crythrocytometry :: low temperatures: ?
8. algometry : pain :: konimetry : ?
9. lung capacity : pulmometry :: compressibility : ?
10. stereometry : specific gravity of liquid :: galvanometry : ?
11. radiation : dosimetry :: angles : ?
12. pyrometry : temperatures + 1500°C. :: stereometry : ?
Answers
(a) Air impurities (g) Evaporation (k) Piezometry
(b) Baculometry (in air) (l) Salt crystals
(c) Bones (h) Goniometry (m) Volume/
(d) Chronoscopy (i) Horometry Dimensions of
(e) Cryometry (j) Hypsometry a solid
(f) Electric currents
The Solution to Verbal Analogies III appears on page 32.
Lysander Kemp reminded me of a malapropism in
Spanish which I created for myself. When I was eight
my family moved from London to Buenos Aires. My
mother, who believed that childen should learn languages
as early as possible, dropped me into the local
Argentine school where I absorbed Spanish by a kind
of osmosis--except for one phrase. In school we sang a
song the first line of which was: “En los patios de la
escuela va cesando el gran rumor.” (`In the school patios
the great noise--“hubbub”--is ceasing.') I happily
sang: “En los patios de la escuela va Cesandro, el Gran
Rumor.” Who “Cesandro” was or why he was the
Great Rumor, whatever that was, I hadn't the faintest
idea but obviously he was out in the patios while we
were in class. It was very many years before, remembering
this, I realized what I had been supposed to be
singing.
Subscribers are reminded to send changes of
address and other subscription information and
orders to: VERBATIM, P.O. Box 78008, Indianapolis,
IN 46278.
Ipsissimum Verbum
“...A huge dark zawn, its great cliffs reddish
black and overhanging. On the shingle at the
back of the zawn lay a crumpled black car and a
bright pink fishing buoy, small as toys against the
boulders. I walked around the rim of the zawn.
...;”
Speaking of the one right word: three of 42
words of text, evidently zawn has no synonym?
Context makes it general meaning clear, and specifics
are not essential. But zawn isn't in my household
dictionary (Webster's Ninth New Collegiate) , or Webster's
Third New International Unabridged , or several
quite specialized ones in the public library.
The same book repeats voe another unusual
word not in my dictionary, defined by the Unabridged
as “an inlet or narrow bay of the...Shetland
Islands.” The entire book is about the
Shetlands, and I accept the need for some ethnicisms,
technicisms, and colloquialisms to establish
credibility of persons, subject, or place. Nor was its
use so overwhelming or constant, “inlet” or “bay”
sometimes being substituted.
Sometimes when a word is used frequently
something else happens too, and a real mess results
with a wrong word overused. Just such an incident a
few years ago started me collecting these verbal
oddities instead of stamps or seashells. A wrong
though somehow plausible noun, consistently and
repeatedly used throughout, distracted me from a
quite good novel. Refectory `a monastery or college
dining hall' was used for rectory `the residence of a
parish priest,' first on page 148, twice on 151, once
each on 152 and 153, thrice on 154, and so on, last
near the book's end on page 257. Eventually I concluded
even the correct word would have become
maddening from repetition, unrelieved by a synonym
or circumlocution. The poor overworked noun
was even used where neither it nor any alternate
was needed. “I'll be staying at the refectory [rectory]
at” could surely be “at the church in” since
only church mice and Quasimodo stay in the edifice
itself, or “in St. Botolph's parish,” as no one literally
stays overnight in either a mere geographical area or
a spiritual community. “The rectory gate was the
second on the left...;. But, as she hesitated, the
rectory door opened.... He led her into the rectory
parlor.” All on page 154. Why not just gate,
door, and parlor? Is a rectory so different from any
other house--one or more priests and perhaps a
housekeeper do live there!
I have no real doubt that zawn is a legitimate
and the correct word, but I question why such an
apparently obscure one is used. Not that the practice
is uncommon.
“The doctor stood back and appraised her with
a comforting smile—. `Did you sense any warning
just before the seizure—?'
`Yes...a very odd smell...I noticed it once
before. At a party the other night. No one else
smelled it.'
`An uncinate fit,' the doctor said almost under
her breath.
`There's a technical term for that too?' ”
Indeed there is, but it's again obscure, and perhaps
in a worse way. My household dictionary and
the library's Random House Dictionary of the English
Language, 2nd Ed. Unabridged both define uncinate
only as “hooked, bent at the end.” Webster's New
Int'l 2nd Ed. Unabridged finally yielded; “uncinate
gyrus... anat .; a subdivision of the hippocampal
convolution containing olfactory association centers.”
So the use was correct, but to what end?
Sometimes a word is not so obscure. “Grinning
fiercely, Jo kept his listeners...ensorceled for as
long as an hour.” My house dictionary defines ensorcel ,
matter-of-factly, “bewitch, enchant,” dates the
word from the 16th century, spells it with one “1” or
two, but doesn't say why anyone would disinter it.
One book had “a caliginous haze,” “eyot of firm
land,” and “cetaceous eye.” I had to look up two,
and checked the last. Two of three were in the house
dictionary. But why are they used in a mystery
novel?!
Occasionally an author gracefully defines a
word: “bettas--you know, Siamese fighting fish.”
But a few lines before: “syngoniums and pothos.” It
could be accounted fortuitous that I knew what bettas
were, but why choose to define that word in my
household dictionary and not the first two? Both are
in Webster's Unabridged: evidently not uncommon
plants.
Authors put in text definitions easily forgo-able
by readers. A policeman suffers tension-caused muscle
spasms his wife relieves by massage. “Nowadays
it's—his bad arm—. But formerly—it was
frequent enough for him—to feel his back had
been flogged, and she would tell him to—stretch
out flat. That's prone: supine is the other way
round.”
Which leads me to: a prig “irritates by observance
of proprieties (as of speech) in a pointed manner
or to an obnoxious degree,” while a pedant “unduly
emphasizes minutiae in the presentation of
knowledge.” What
he tells us is true, but does it
matter to his book?
Sometimes authors create words, maybe accidentally;
twice in one book seems deliberate:
“searched—across the rooves of New York” and
“red tilted rooves of a town.” The same book has “I
dreampt and I was the dream which dreampt itself.”
Unless I'm missing a classical allusion, why is it not
just dreamt ? The dictionary says “hoofs, rarely
hooves” but only “roofs”; perhaps we tend to pronounce
it as “rooves.” As indeed I can, if I choose
to, hear the “p” in “dreamt,” as in unkempt and
tempt.
Then we have “every sort of forcep.” The singular
is forceps ; the plural forceps , or rarely
forcepses . Not like some other usually plural nouns,
scissor hold or cut , a wollen trouser , maybe even a
lace-trimmed panty , but no sort of “forcep”!
Another offense is using verbs as nouns. “It's
only temporary disableds need assistance.” Scot's
speech explains the elliptical style, and the best fix
might be, “Temporary cripples.” If one can't abide
“cripples,” perhaps “the temporarily disabled”
might be both grammatical and still “in voice.”
Sometimes a writer simply uses the wrong word:
“But it's part of the character of an infinite recession
that the final box is much too small to open or even
see. And anyway, there isn't one.” Indeed not in a
recession ; try an infinite regression ! I am also dubious
of “There is a lesion between hope and recollection,
into which my spirit had slipped—.” Are lesions
between things? Can you really slip into one?
Or consider: “Kate—explained—the scars
—were the result of a car accident in which her
hands had been pinched. This she did unblushingly,
though both `accident' and `pinch' were retrospective
aggrandizements, her hands having been quite
deliberately slammed in a car door, twice each.”
Someone ought to blush, because whatever they are,
they are not aggrandizements, “things made to appear
greater.” “ Retrogressive aggrandizements,”
maybe, but that's an oxymoron of another colour entirely.
Some errors are harder to see but just as surely
mistaken: “I frowned at the coffee percolator, which
—finally began to perk. I cradled the telephone between
shoulder and ear, poured, and—took a sip of
coffee.” What should but doesn't follow is, “And then
quickly spit out the colorless, tasteless gulp of hot
water.” Coffee isn't ready to drink when it begins but
when it finishes perking. Our author evidently
doesn't make his own, or at least not using a percolator.
It is a paranoid writer who even keeps secret how
he makes coffee--shades of J.D. Salinger!
Complex situations create subtle errors. “Phyllis
stood at the far end.... When Joanna spoke her
name, she turned, reaching for a pair of hornrimmed
glasses—setting them on the bridge of
her nose—. She hurried over—then removed
the glasses--which were for farsightedness--and
plunked them back on top of her head.” And later:
“When Joanna glanced back at her friend from the
door, she saw that she had her glasses perched on
her nose and was staring after her with worried
eyes.” For implies purpose or explanation: glasses
for `to achieve' or for `because of' [farsightedness].
Used about physical vision, farsighted and nearsighted
are not gifts like quick-footedness or nightvision,
or neutral like lefthandedness, but defects,
each defined comparatively. Nearsightedness, the
ability to see near things more clearly than distant
ones, is basically defective vision of distant objects.
Farsightedness is the ability to see distant things
quite normally, but ipso facto , the inability to see
near ones well. Why then does Phyllis put her
glasses on to see things across the room and remove
them when near the objects of her scrutiny? Because
she is nearsighted, and her glasses ought to be
for nearsightedness. Her eyes looked worried because
she was wearing the wrong glasses! They were
indeed for “seeing at a distance,” but that's not what
farsightedness means.
Writers sometimes leave themselves open to inadvertent
double meaning. In a detective novel: “I
bought a Bud light to go with my sandwich and—
did some ruminating while I ate.” Since cows also
ruminate while eating, the issue is whether it is over
the toughness of the case or of the roast beef, ham
and Swiss, or pastrami sandwich.
It is even possible that sometimes the one right
word may be two or more! “Tyranny is funny; not
actual tyranny but the attempts of tyrants to cover
up their tyrannousness.” My dictionary approves tyrannicalness ,
though I wouldn't really use that word
either. How about “oppressive tendency” or even
tyranny once again?
An author may miss the mark with an expression.
“Lorimer wondered whether the Chairman
— had sent him out as a sort of stalking lamb, to see
what reaction he would stir up.” Or perhaps a tethered
parakeet, sacrificial tortoise, or Judas rabbit? It
should be “stalking horse ,” of course, of course!
“I shall simply talk quietly to old Harwell like a
Dutch nephew....” Even if youngish Tim Simpson,
the hero and speaker, could not readily speak to
old Harwell like a Dutch uncle , the usual expression,
why not just resist the temptation to make an (at
best) bad pun?
Even in word-portraits of people, authors turn
unhappy phrases: “His eyes seemed filled with spit
and vinegar.” Hard to say what that means, except
stinging eyes, and besides, using half of each of two
clichés is simply spilt milk off a duck's back on troubled
waters: isn't it “spit and polish” and “piss and
vinegar?”
To end on an uplifting note: “For an hour the
lecture was heavy with the importance of dream
state, pulse and heart rate, vaginal tumescence and
temperature change, rapid eye movement and the
size and frequency of penal erection.” The word,
clearly, is penile , from penis; penal comes from the
lantin poena `pain or punishment.' A prison riot is
not a penile, but a penal uprising; and erections, unless
some subtle word play about painfulness or punishment
is intended, are not penal but penile.
Offshore: A North Sea Journey , A. Alvarez, Houghton
Mifflin, 1986.
Cold Heaven , Brian Moore, Holt, Rinehart & Winston,
1983.
Secret Understandings , Morris Philipson, Simon &
Schuster, 1983.
Boston Boy ,
Nat Hentoff, Knopf, 1986.
The Body in Cadiz Bay , David Serafin, St. Martins,
1985.
Plain Text , Nancy Mairs, U. of Arizona Press,
1986.
Cold Iron , Nicholas Freeling, Viking, 1986.
Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary .
Fragments of Light , Charles LeBaron, St. Martin's,
1984.
Life and Death on 10 West , Eric Lax, Times Books,
1984.
The Tartan Sell , Jonathan Gash, St. Martin's 1986.
Straight Cut , Madison Smartt Bell, Ticknor &
Fields, 1986.
Friends, Russians and Countrymen , Hampton
Howard, St. Martins, 1988.
Lover and Thief , Arthur Maling, Harper & Row,
1988.
Cavalier in White , Marcia Muller, St. Martin's,
1986.
Deadfall , Bill Pronzini, St. Martin's, 1986.
“What's So Funny?” in Once More Around the
Block , Joseph Epstein, Norton, 1987.
Sandscrene , Ian Stuart, Doubleday, 1987.
Whistler in the Dark , John Malcolm, Scribners,
1986.
Treasure , Clive Cussler, Simon & Schuster, 1988.
Playing After Dark , Barbara L. Ascher, Doubleday,
1986.
What Gall
A Parisian advertising copywriter has been sentenced
to eight years in prison for an ad campaign
in which he premeditatedly employed an archaic
tense of a verb that appears on the French
Cultural Ministry's Index of Officially Proscribed
Franglaisms. He has also been sentenced to a concurrent
eight-year term for using the verb in an
anachronistic context.
Lucien Maître-Créche, a 48-year-old copywriter
specializing in fast-food accounts, was found
guilty by a jury of eight men and four women of
deliberately using the imperfect subjunctive tense of
the franglaism jumbo frankfurter in a series of ads
posted in the Paris Metro system. Jumbo Frankfurter
is a French corruption of the American expression
jumbo frankfurter , and is used in French as a verb
meaning, literally, `to eat a large hot dog.'
The expression is one of several hundred that
the French government has forbidden in all official
communications, as well as in all public advertising.
Legal penalties vary according to the context in
which the word is used, the gender (in the case of
nouns), and the tense and mood (in the case of
verbs). Thus, while it is a misdemeanor to employ
the expression jumbo frankfurter in public discourse,
to date only one person has been charged with the
offense: a Libyan terrorist who asked for a large hot
dog during his arraignment for blowing up an art
museum in Dijon. Maître-Créche, on the other
hand, was charged with a felony, punishable by a
maximum prison sentence of 25 years, because the
term was not used in “the ephemeral, innocuous
context of speech,” according to the prosecutor, but
in the “semi-non-ephemeral, culturally reverberative
context of advertising.” He will begin serving
his sentence immediately.
The cause of Maître-Créche's legal troubles was
a poster depicting Rabelais' famous comic figure
Gargantua staring forlornly at an empty hot-dog roll
and sighing, “Que j'eusse bien aimé jumbo frankfurther
aujourd'hui!” [`Boy, I could have really gone
for a big hot dog today!'] Officials at the Ministry for
Cultural Recidivism, alarmed that the proliferation
of the posters could create an unfortunate conception
in the minds of French children that the imperfect
subjunctive tense of the verb jumbo frankfurter
dated all the way back to Rabelaisian times--thus
lending the expression a certain historical pedigree--immediately
ordered the copywriter's arrest.
“Ce n'est pas une question de jumbo frankfurter
ou de ne pas jumbo frankfurter ,” said Ministry Director
Gaston-Fenelon de la Rue Saugrenue. “Ici, en
France, n'importe qui a le droit de jumbo frank-furter .
Mais on n'a pas le droit d'apprendre aux enfants
que, l'époque de Rabelais, les gens auraient
jumbo frankfurter . Pas de question, Pepe.” [It's not a
question of having a big hot dog or not having a big
hot dog. Here in France, anyone has the right to eat
a big hot dog. But people do not have the right to
teach our schoolchildren that back in the days of
Rabelais people ate big hot dogs. No way, Jose.']
Sources say that Maître-Créche's unusually stiff
sentence resulted from a legal ploy that backfired.
Once it became obvious that the case was being lost,
the defendant's lawyer blamed the whole flap on a
printer's error, maintaining that his client's original
ad copy depicted Gargantua speaking in the future
tense of the verb: “Un de ces jours, on jumbo
frankfurtera dans les coins” [`One of these days,
folks around here will be eating big hot dogs.'] The
use of the future tense carries a $12,000 fine, but no
prison sentence. But the printer denied the allegation,
and as no copy of the mislaid print order was
ever found, the jury decided that the copywriter had
perjured himself.
A last ditch defense effort to portray MaîtreCrèche
as a peasant ignorant of France's tough laws
on the use of such expressions backfired when the
prosecution unveiled a book found in the defendant's
office entitled 108 Franglaish Expressions
That Can Get You Put in Jail If You Use Them In This
Country. [`108 Expressions Franglaises Qui Pourraient
Vous Poser des Problè mes Judiciaires dans Ce
Pays.']
Experts on French criminal syntax say that
Maître-Crèche was lucky that he didn't use the future
anterior tense, which is punishable by the guillotine.
The Long and the Short of It
Polysyllables abound in today's speech, and
much has been written on the subject, from euphemisms--agencies
that “facilitate” instead of give
money--to downright deceit--one knows by now
that “protective reaction strikes” are bombings. As
with so many trends spotted by the linguistic police,
however, this is hardly new. Ever since the Norman
invasion, people have preferred to use the longer
Latinate terms over the blunt Anglo-Saxon words:
the general feeling, with some small basis, is that
such diction shows a touch of class. A more puzzling
phenomenon is the use of long forms for which quite
similar shorter forms already exist. The general idea
behind this trend seems to be that in length there is
strength, even at the cost of accuracy. Examples, unfortunately,
are all too easy to provide.
The usage of these words is easy to spot: they all
have an extra syllable or two that adds little but excess
bulk (for usage , delete and substitute use ). Reporters
at The New York Times , for example, often
write of “subsidization programs,” when subsidy
will do just as well. The suffix - ization , which indicates
`process,' is often in demand, since it makes
one think something is actively being done. Other
suffixes such as - tion, -ate, and - ment are equally popular
add-ons. Thus, estimates turn into estimations,
and television anchormen these days encapsulate the
news instead of encapsule it. This is a society that
lives beyond its limitations rather than its limits.
When forced, people take preventative measures instead
of preventive ones. In some instances, the
shorter forms have all but dropped from use. The
phrase “he is in my employ ” is now considered either
old-fashioned or British: most people would automatically
change the key word to employment .
The adjectival suffix - al is often slapped on
words that already are adjectives. Why must people
be ironical instead of ironic , or satirical instead of
satiric ? The - ate suffix, originally a harmless suffix to
denote causative verbs such as substantiate from substance,
is particularly pernicious. Not too long ago,
the personnel department of a business would orient
new workers (the word originally meant to point out
where the sun rose; i.e., which way was east). Nowadays,
of course, the overbriefed newcomers are orientated ,
a longer verb that sounds suspiciously like a
back-formation from orientation . Similarly, derivate
looks like an up-and-coming contender for derive .
Proceeding analogously, a classmate of mine in junior
high school once talked of improvisating, but
somehow her neologism never caught on.
Often, such lengthening leads to subtle errors.
Many people no longer form methods , for instance,
but instead formulate methodologies . How much
more comforting to have a methodology behind one
than a mere method! The word methodology , however,
really refers to the science of method itself,
while formulate means to `reduce to a formula'
rather than to `shape.' The words are apt for scientific
testing, not for dealing with a simple problem--
though of course that's precisely the point: using
these words gives a pseudo-scientific boost, a spurious
exactitude. For this reason, perhaps, sociologists
will talk of societal needs: social may sound too soft,
too much like a bridge party. The same goes for specialty,
which has yielded over the years to specialization .
The curious point is that this trend seems to
go against Zipf's Law, which notes that syllables get
trimmed off words over the years. Here, one may
observe the opposite happening: when people wish
to spruce up an old word, they add a syllable.
Admittedly, certain groups have their particular
vocabulary. The legal profession is notorious for its
polysyllabification (a self-descriptive term). One
reads about the issuance of government regulations
in place of their issue . In these regulations, hereby
and herewith often crowd out the sufficient here; in
fact, as an honest lawyer will tell you, these words
are pro forma and could be omitted entirely. The
Marx Brothers understood legalese quite well, augmenting
“the first part” to “the first party,” which
becomes “the part of the first party,” “the first part
of the party of the first part,” and far worse in the
course of an exchange in A Night at the Opera. The
two part-icipants end, incidentally, by tearing out
everything in the contract but the place for a signature.
In all fairness, many drafters of legal documents
are probably just after terms without strongly positive
or negative connotations. The addition of suffixes
generally makes the word in question more abstract:
use can smack of exploitation, while usage
sounds more neutral. One can speak of part and
party without reference to gender, race, and so on.
Presumably, one should have a fine sense of discrimination
in language to avoid discrimination in law.
Should one wish to begin syllable-hunting, one
must also have a sensitive ear. Is aggression the same
as aggressiveness , or, on the other side of the spectrum,
is passivity the same as passiveness ? The first is
more the state, the second more the behaviour--but
how about scarcity and scarceness ? One runs into the
same problem with the - ing gerund versus the - ation
nouns: which sounds better, implementing or implementation,
ratifying or ratification? In opting for the
gerunds, one often saves a syllable or more, but the
specific, continuous action of a gerund may not be so
attractive to a society fuzzily focused on process.
Syllable-cutting, to its credit, promotes sharper
thinking and concision--not conciseness --in
speech. A word of caution, however: as with forming
palindromes or anagrams in one's head, it can
become a mania more likely to promote insomnia as
one searches for additional examples, more grist for
the linguistic mill. One oddity the syllable-cutter is
bound to come across in his explorations is the twosome
stemming from a common root. Sate and Satiate
are perhaps the most blatant instance: the two are
synonymous in most dictionaries, the form from the
Latin satiare , `to satisfy.' On the other hand, is rite
the same as ritual ? How about deprecate and depreciate ,
or cave and cavern ? In fact, a large overlap
links each twosome, or duo (or duad ). English,
which abhors a vacuum even more than Nature
does, produced a plenum here.
Finally, one must be wary of elongation that
carries with it a distinctly different meaning. The
adulterer and the adulterator may both be reprehensible
but should not otherwise be confused. Simple is
one thing, simplistic another; the same is true of the
two adjectives express and expressive . The words
economic and economical share the meaning “of
money management,” but the latter also means
`thrifty.' To shift fields: art movements, in particular,
often identify themselves through the addition of a
syllable to a word in common parlance. Formalist art
is not the same as formal art, and though Joyce is a
Modernist, he is no longer quite modern. As a syllable-cutter,
I leave alone such distinctions and go on
to easier prey, such as contest-draw versus contest-drawing.
As for challenges, I am currently looking
for a word that can be cut into two successively
smaller forms.
Syllable-cutters may even adopt a familiar
credo. Following the directive of William Strunk's
immortal “Omit needless words,” one may tape
above one's word processor, “Slash excess syllables.”
I admit, at times I think, why bother? The pay
is low to nonexistent, the number of scowls from
others enough to darken any day. But then there are
the occasional people who respond gratefully, who
may even go on to proselytize to others the virtue in
clearing away excess verbiage, token of muddled
thought. It may be a thankless task, but it can lead to
gracefulness--or rather, grace.
This example, I note, shows letter-cutting
rather than syllable-cutting.
“Moped injuries are clearly one of the top causes of
major head injuries in this area...some major fractures
require amputation. The injuries sustained in the accidents
may not permit the person to do athletics forever.”
[From the UCLA Bruin , . Submitted by
]
“STATE PER CALL RATES FOR MICRO PRODUCTS
.../HR If we go On-site to do the work. Time charged
from Porthole to Porthole.../HR If machine is brought
into State Depot like DOT or MATC. Minimum of (4) machines
needing repair before calling. Time charged from
Porthole to Porthole.” [From a company memorandum
sent to customers by Sorbus, A Bell Atlantic Company,
Madison, Wisconsin. Submitted by ]
Bumps, Grinds and Other Lewd (1389) Gestures
Language is an enduring contest for dominion
between ancient usage and demands for adequate
expression of our modern quest for novelty.
Survival of old phrases and definitions is encouraged
by poverty and social isolation, which sustain traditions,
linguistic and otherwise. Since such conditions
are not limited by geography, old speech has been
remarkably hardy in resisting as well as absorbing
the new.
Non-Southern physicians coming into the South
are often puzzled or amazed by the speech of their
patients, and some publish lists of what they hear,
without always appreciating its origin. Elaborate taxonomies
and obscure explanations such as mispronunciation
due to ignorance, malapropisms based on
both ignorance and misunderstanding, and, for the
dictated word, the technological dyslexia of typographical
errors and poor grasp of the diction of the
dictators of medical histories may be suggested.
Lists of typographical errors, collected from hospital
records, are often posted on bulletin boards and are
occasionally published. Some rather startling and
provocative associations result: Venus insufficiency ,
Phi Beta Capita, sin eruptions, positive throat structure
(`culture').
Appreciation and survival of both typos and
many common terms may be directly related to the
nature and intensity of sexual reference. Take sin
eruption and the variety of vulgar expressions for describing
the pathological consequences of sexual encounters.
The curious collector of Southern folk usages
of this type need only consult the Oxford
English Dictionary for enlightenment about the origin
and the longevity of language. In the following
paragraphs, the year of first recorded use given in
the OED is indicated in parentheses.
Grind (1000) early attained its modern definition,
to `rub against or to work into,' but by 1400 its
anatomical meaning--a `lower abdominal quadrant'--had
given way to groin , our modern usage.
Not until 1625 was groin identified as the seat of lust
(1000). Grine (1400) was then a `noose, halter, or
snare,' as well as an obsolete form of grin , perhaps a
pre-Columbian leer, and of grine as groin , a use still
prevalent in Appalachia.
While bumps (1592) as `gestures of concupiscence'
(1340) are now automatically associated with
grinds, our ancestors used many words to describe
lumps (1475) in the skin. Wen (1000), boil (1000),
and kernels (1000) as currently in “kernels in my
grine,” are the oldest, but pimple (1400), rising
(1563), bealing (1605), and gland (1692) are also
still used to designate small nonvenereal masses. Cutaneous
manifestations of venereal disease have
been variously identified, early as bubo (1398), a
`swelling in the groin or axilla.' Thus the form of
plague characterized by such regional swelling became
bubonic to distinguish it from the pneumonic
form. Later bubo came to refer almost exclusively to
the inguinal swelling of venereal disease, along the
way being corrupted to “blue balls” as in the colorful
epithet, blue-balled bastard. Balls (1352) of
course stand for `testes.' The `inguinal lesion of primary
syphilis' is usually a chancre (1605). Its most
descriptive competitor, haircut , not included in the
OED , occurs only in males, blamed on being cut by
stiff female public hair.
Since many venereal diseases, most frequently
gonorrhea (1547), result in purulent urethral drainage,
many vulgar terms for this phenomenon survive.
Gonorrhea itself was first a word for the discharge
before it came to describe the disease when
bacterial causation was determined. Left on the
street were such synonyms as gleet (1340), clap
(1587), and running ranes or raines (1588). Gleet
was originally described as a `slimy matter' (1400),
sticky or greasy, characteristically as `phlegm collected
in the stomach, especially of the hawk.'
Phlegm eventually came to refer to mucus (1662)
and to be hawked (1604) from the sinuses or lungs of
people with respiratory tract irritation or infection.
John Ray, the great English biologist and pioneer
lexicographer, author of Collection of English Proverbs
(first edition 1670, second edition 1678) and
Collection of English Words (first edition 1673, second
edition 1691), suffered severely from an ulcerative
disease of his legs. He reported in 1704 that
“part of the skin of one of my insteps by degrees has
turned black and now as with the flesh under it it is
rotted and corrupted...yet runs a copious gleet.”
Strain (1588), in the sense of `trickle,' as a painful
or slow urination came early to refer to urethral
inflammation. Its precursor was the now quite obsolete
strangury (1398) `slow and painful urination.' In
1532 strain came also to imply compulsion, manifested
in urethritis by urgency and frequency with
scant flow. Thus evolution of meanings assumed by
strain can be easily traced.
Some early words for sexual intercourse (1798)
as congress (1589) persist although considerably
modified in meaning. Service (1315) is another, although
artificial insemination is inexorably driving
the service of cows by bulls from the lea of language.
It does persist in the service of Venus and perhaps in
service stations with their birth control centers, offering
condoms for coins, on a wall of their men's
rooms. Swive (1386), to copulate (1483) with a female,
shares with swinging (1400), a sense of motion,
the former deriving from swivel (1307), a coupling
device which accounts for the swivel chair.
The OED does not include swivel hips but many
school teachers were once called, out of earshot,
“Miss Swiviel Hips” and the thought expressed, “I'd
like to have that swing on my porch.” the OED says
nothing about swivet either, but in a swivet has
meant `hot and bothered' for generations in the
South. Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary does recognize
in a swivet but neither its age nor derivation,
citing Newsweek as its source. Swing (1400) `oscillatory
or rotatory action of the body' came by 1584 to
imply `freedom of action.' Both swiving and swinging
require sexual vigor and inclination, since 1541
known as courage , so that “I got no courage ” is more
time-honored than “I'm impotent ” (1615). Some refer
to this difficulty as “losing my nature ” (1386),
and impotence recorded in the medical history often
undergoes technological transformation to “importance,”
as in “he complained of importance since he
started to take medicine for his pressure,” also
known as “the high blood.” Within the limits of
marriage courage is necessary for a satisfactory “family
life.” The OED is concerned about being in the
family way , the natural consequences of a satisfactory
family life, but not about the family life itself.
Non-Southerners struck by our quaint (1369)
speech may fail to recognize linguistic fossils when
they hear them and likewise to appreciate their
value as signs of the movement of peoples and the
viability of speech through the centuries.
VERBATIM makes an excellent gift, at any time of the
year, for mature, intelligent people interested in language.
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 University of Texas has been concerned about
the attrition rate among undergraduates. About 37 percent
of freshmen drop out of UT after four years. About
one-third graduate after four years, and about half graduate
after five years.” [From the Austin American-Statesman ,
. Submitted by
]
“German Filmmaker Leni Reifenstahl Sings With
Doubleday.” [From Publishers Weekly ,
Submitted by ]
Solution to Verbal Analogies III
1: Baculometry 5: Hypsometry 10: Electric cur-
2: Evaporation 6: Bones rents
(in air) 7: Cryometry 11: Goniometry
3: Chronoscopy/ 8: Air impuri- 12: Volume/
Horometry ties Dimensions
4: Salt crystals 9: Piezometry of a solid
