The Language of the Law
The thesis of this work is that most legal communication
can and should be expressed in ordinary
words; the sub-text is that, although “the law is
a profession of words,’ most lawyers do not know
much about them and very few are interested in
learning more. After a short introductory section,
half the book is devoted to a history of legal
language .
and the other half to a critical analysis of its
usage. The latter half will have more appeal to the
average lawyer, unscholarly primate that he is; but
the language-loving lawyer, which many are and all
ought to be, will be entertained as much as edified
by the eventful chronicle of the forging and tempering
of the tools of his trade. Of all specialized vocabularies,
that of the law is not only the most commonly
used but by far the most eloquent and
alluring. For that reason, and because they will relish
the author's excoriating criticism of the shamanistic
rhetoric employed by lawyers to intimidate
them, lay people who are addicted to the lore of
words will find the book as a whole not less fascinating
than do the practitioners.
The first half is a piece of scholarship par excellence,
so closely packed and fully realized that no
summary can begin to do it justice. I shall try to
reduce its gist to a few paragraphs of my own words.
The history of the legal language of the English-speaking
common law countries and the history of
the English language are indissoluble. The Celts,
those ancient invaders from the continent who managed
to survive the Roman occupation and resist the
Latin tongue, contributed one word-- whiskey --
having legal significance but were driven, along with
their reverse-order speech, into the nooks and corners
of the British Isles and France by the fierce Angles,
Saxons, and Jutes, wielding their broadswords
and brutish monosyllables. The Law impressed a
special meaning on many Anglo-Saxon words-- manslaughter,
sheriff, theft, hearsay, bench (judge's),
strike (motion to), landlord, freehold (in land), and
herein --which they retain to this day. From the
Viking raids and settlements a few Norse words of
Teutonic ancestry survive with technical legal definitions:
gift, loan, sale, bond , and law itself.
When, in about the year 596, King Æthelbert
promulgated a written Anglo-Saxon code of law, a
little cloud of Latin was rising from the sea. The
Celtic tongue, later to be overwhelmed by Anglo-Saxon,
contained only a few Latin words, most of
them place names and none of legal import, outlived
the occupation. But the speech of the Anglo-Saxons
themselves had brought to England a sprinkling of
Latin words picked up in their trade with the Romans.
At almost the same time that Æthelbert pro
claimed his code, St. Augustine and his followers arrived
in England bringing Christianity and Latin,
and within a hundred years the conversation was
complete. Latin, through the clergy, was widely introduced
to the native idiom and took a strong position
in the law well before the Conquest. After the
Conquest English remained robustly alive during a
period of bi- and trilingualism: the invading
Normans spoke a French dialect which became for a
time the language of the kings and the nobility,
while contemporary English was spoken by the indigenous
population; Latin was the language of record
and of the law in general, and so it remained for
about two centuries after the Conquest, with English
as a close second. English fastened upon foreign
words with gusto, transforming and anglicizing them
to lend grandeur and subtlety to the vernacular. The
upper classes were familiar with both French and
English, the cultivated classes with Latin as well. Although
a statute of 1362 required pleadings to be in
English and records in Latin, French became the
principal language of the law and of legal education,
and so continued for 200 years, although Latin remained
the standard for the “all-important’ writs.
“There was nothing written in English of immediate
practical value to the practising common lawyer or
law student.’ But the use of English spread and, by
the end of the 14th century, knowledge of French
was “an accomplishment.’ Indeed, the hallmark of
authenticity was put on it by Chaucer, who seemed
to be preparing it for Spenser, Bacon, Shakespeare,
and the other Elizabethans, and for Donne, Milton,
and Dryden. Still, French words in vast numbers,
both of the law and of common speech, continued to
be embraced by English and, by 1800, the law itself
joined that embrace, retaining French and Latin
only for technical terms.
With the advance of literacy that came with
printing and the use of Latin as a scholarly lingua
franca, Bacon and Milton wrote in Latin as well as in
English. The lawyers, already educated in Latin as
the learned tongue, incorporated it almost completely
into their writing and in large part into their
oral usage. To this day, long after Latin has ceased to
be the principal medium of written legal documents
and records, lawyers cling to and defend against all
comers unnumbered words and phrases in that ancient
tongue, under the persuasion, justified or not,
that they enrich the legal vocabulary with precision,
permanence, and dignity.
Anticipating our contemporary Plain English
laws, strong voices were raised in the 17th century
against the use of foreign tongues as a kind of black
art to mystify the uneducated and cheat them of
their rights. Every man, they said, ought to be able
to understand the law and act on his own behalf. In
1650 and again in 1713 Parliament passed laws
(written almost entirely in derivatives of French or
Latin) requiring that all court proceedings be in
English. Both laws were bitterly resisted by the
bench and bar, and because of such pressure the
later one was eviscerated before it went into effect
by an amendment allowing the continued use of customary
words. This was an age of exiguous technicality
in English as well as Latin and French, an age
when the failure of a syllable lost the cause. “The
land law was on the move--in a solemn progression
of rules and technical evasions. This was the day of
the ingenious conveyance, the computers of the infinite,
logical word slicers, dealers in metaphysical
wraiths....’ The law was “encased in a hard shell
of fixed pattern, its language determined by forms
and the deadweight of precedent.’
American colonists, particularly hostile to lawyers
and their mumbo-jumbo, tried at first simply to
eliminate the profession. When that failed, they
turned to the do-it-yourself approach, creating a
lively demand for self-instruction books of the
Everyman His Own Lawyer kind, foreshadowing the
present-day will- and estate-planning kits. Despite
lawyers' renunciations of such efforts as “chimeras
of ignorance and folly,’ the public continued--and
continues to this day--to yearn for simplicity.
Law language, it is generally agreed among lay
people (with a few eccentric lawyers concurring), is
verbose, pompous, archaic, and obscure. Applying
his premise that it should agree with ordinary
speech, Professor Mellinkoff examines the reasons
lawyers rely on for the difference.
The lawyer's first line of defence is precision , his
bounden duty to lay down his words so that they
may never be misunderstood. For this he must use
the finely turned jeweler's tools of his craft, not the
carpenter's saws and hatchets of common idiom.
But, says the author, the steeling grip of lawyers on
their stilted language is in fact the result of fear.
“ `Leave us alone. Don't change. Here we stay till
death or disbarment.' ’ When lawyers say precision
they think they are saying exact meaning ; but what
they are in truth saying most of the time is exactly-the-same-way --that
is, the traditional way (to have
and to hold) , the way of precedent (“cause of action’),
and the required way (as by statute). Such
usages may also be exact meanings , and thus, truly
precise , but they are not necessarily so. Lawyers'
stand-bys such as aforesaid, forthwith, hereafter,
hereby, herein, hereinafter , and even the ubiquitous
said are condemned by the author as “tricky, ducking,
bobbing words,’ “flabby words,’ whose only
claim to precision is their traditional use, not worth
saving. He also takes whacks at those old chestnuts
and/or and ss . Under the heaviest duress, such as the
threat of boiling in ink, lawyers might relinquish all
these; but they will fight to the bitter end and finally
die at the barricades before surrendering their
whereases . Never mind that, the author says;
Whereas is consistently vague, meaning variously
`the fact is,' `although,' `considering that,' `on the
contrary,' and `that being the case,' with many shadings
in between. Generally appearing as the final
whereas is the most fatuous and utterly redundant
one of all: “WHEREAS the parties have orally agreed
to the terms of such sale and desire to reduce
their agreement to writing, Now THEREFORE...’
The lawyer is also habituated to doublets and triplets
like fit and proper; force and effect; give, bequeath
and devise; null and void , and rest, residue,
and remainder . These seem to me among the less
reprehensible, for they are understandable to ordinary
people and are objectionable mainly on the
grounds of repetition rather than obscurity. More
legal documents than ever before contain laundry
list of such terms, many from the computer's memory
bank, often imparting false profundity and reassurance
to the client like the chant of the auctioneer
but under cold analysis shriveling to redundancy and
confusion. Never mind all this, the lawyer will cling
to them like the drunkard to his bottle.
The reader is told that there was once justification
for the term natural life --e.g., “...sentenced
to serve for the rest of his natural life...,’ “...to
my wife Nancy for and during her natural life’--
based on the civil death of a felon and also upon the
state of civil death assumed by a monk upon his abnegation
of all worldly concerns, but that the phrase
as now applied is “outrageously redundant.’ These
words are so universally employed in deeds and wills
that the absence of natural might cause a reviewing
lawyer to question the authorship. The criticism is
nonetheless valid, though this rejected phrase might
come again into play where some sort of life, as after
brain death , is prolonged by totally artificial means.
In targeting esoteric words used by lawyers in
place of ordinary ones under the pretense of precision,
it seems to me that the author is wasting ammunition
on words like reasonable, substantial , and satisfactory .
They are words of ordinary speech, with
which juries are quite comfortable, and lawyers are
as aware as everybody else that they are imprecise.
The law's reasonable man , from the tribal wisdom of
a person who is honest and sensible, is an image that
can be called forth in the mind of every man. Substantial
performance is something a great deal more
than driving the first nail and a little less than driving
the last one, and it survives as a useful tool to prevent
injustice by technicality. Reasonable doubt may
be a “sow's ear,’ but the jury understands that the
judge is telling them to be damned sure the defendant
is guilty before they hang him. These words
express concepts that cannot be drawn with straightedge
and compass: their flexibility is essential to
their function. The subjective satisfactory , and ordinary
word rather than a legal one, is a trouble-maker
and should be avoided.
Lawyers are mad folk in general, but their madness
crescendos, according to Professor Mellinkoff,
in their “consuming passion for precedent .’ Mesmerized
by the “ritual phrase’ stare decisis , they
delve into that shelf-devouring monster of confusion
known as Words and Phrases and come forth with
“language that the profession accepts as precedent,’
thus investing such terms as accident and proximate
cause with a false precision. Accident is indeed elusive
of enduring definition, but a lawyer may find it
very useful to discover a purported definition in a
case of his own jurisdiction decided upon facts resembling
those at hand. Most lawyers accept proximate
cause as a necessary term of art and will consider
the author's treatment of it as “concise
gibberish’ for which you can “get a definition at any
supermarket’ as rather severe. It embodies a concept
difficult to define: the necessary nexus between
the act and the injury. We cannot go back to Adam's
Fall (where we sinned all), certainly; neither can we
require that the safe fall directly on the plaintiff's
head. Foreseeability , unmentioned by the author but
indispensable in the application of proximate cause ,
narrows but does not close the gap. The jurors,
again, are free to move within a fenced area. Lawyers
will understand that the author is inveighing
against precedent only as a false pretense for fake
precision, but an innocent layman straying into
these pages might well take it from the broad-gauged
blasts that the whole doctrine of precedent
is a grand illusion, a sort of pseudo-science like astrology,
in which lawyers and judges count the angels
dancing on the point of a needle:
From faltering beginnings in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries... [t]he heaped-up precedents
of the substantive [my italics] law swarm
with trivia, with differences without substantive
distinction, with repetitions that centuries ago attained
the rank of platitude.
For the benefit of the uninitiated let me say that
lawyers, deluded or not, overwhelmingly believe
that with the exception of constitutions and of statutes
enacted by legislatures (and rules under them),
precedent is what the law is made of in the United
States; that the law existed before written language
in the tradition of “customs that runneth not to the
contrary’ and continues to thrive in the printed decisions;
that the statutes themselves remain unsettled
until rounded out by precedent; that precedents may
become so venerable as to become platitudes but
may also be as fresh as the undried ink on today's
appellate court decision; and that when a lawyer
searches for as recent a decision as he can find, in a
jurisdiction as near as possible, on facts as close to his
client's case as possible, never overruled or modified,
and pronouncing the law as clearly as possible,
he is doing what he should be doing and might well
be guilty of malpractice for failing to do so.
As an instance of the gross imprecision of precedent
the author cites a Kentucky case in which, despite
the heavy-drinking insured's answer, “Never,’
to a question in a life insurance application as to the
use of spirits, the court held the policy valid. But as I
read the quoted extracts from the opinion, the
court's reasoning was not at all based on a definition
of the word never but on a well-established precedent
holding that to void the policy the misrepresentation
must be such that had the company known the
truth it would not have issued the policy. “No insurance
company would have rejected the risk on this
ground,’ said the court. An effete northerner might
challenge the court's finding that the insured's frequent
use of alcohol was not material to the risk, but
this was in Kentucky, where bourbon was invented
and is regarded as considerably less harmful than
iced tea.
The witness's oath as required by statute and as
everybody knows is the sing-song “to tell the truth,
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.’ Redundant
and imprecise, says the author; the whole truth
is a “metaphysical distinction,’ and he cites the
much-derided Words and Phrases . Well, perhaps.
But consider this:
“Did you write the letter?’
“No.’ [His secretary typed the letter and signed
his name to it.]
“Did the policeman stop the car?’
“No.’ [The policeman held up his hand and
blew his whistle and the driver then stopped the
car.]
Unless a skillful cross-examiner brings out all
the facts, a lying witness may avoid a perjury conviction.
If legal language were to be stripped of ordinary
English, repetition, tradition, precedent, and requirement,
there would still remain, Professor Mellinkoff
begrudgingly concedes, “a nubbin of precision’
from its terms of art . These “technical terms
with specific meanings’ are a “mere sprinkling,’ as
seldom found as “nuggets in a salted gold field.’ A
neat metaphor, but I would have added, “also as
precious.’ In addition to the author's examples of
lease, landlord, tenant , and surrender , I would submit
escrow, holograph, joint tenancy, tenancy in common,
precatory subrogation (none of which is mentioned
in the book), and the invaluable per stirpes ,
all terms of art far more precise than any ready
equivalent in backyard English. Phrases like mutually
agreed and were intermarried are plainly pompous
rather than precise, as are removed for `moved,'
determine for `terminate,' and many more.
“As precision is the loudest virtue of the law, so
wordiness is its noisiest vice.’
Brevity is a saving grace, but only if it coincides
with precision and intelligibility. Voir dire is short
and precise and intelligible; in my opinion, this distinction
can be claimed by many other terms of art,
including tort, fee simple, easement, mens rea , and
prima facie case. And/or is short but confusing, and
proximate cause (according to the author) is short
but unintelligible.
How truly does the author say that “every mechanical
aid the law has seized upon to make itself
more available has increased its bulk’! And this
mushroom cloud has expanded at least a hundredfold
since the book was written. The Frankenstein
computer with its handmaiden word processor have
spread before the lawyer a feast of gustatory delights
beyond the dreams of his voracity. Luscious
paragraphs of whereases, corporate powers, trustees
duties , and events of default can be mined from these
monster quarries to be fitted, with no other purpose
than to encumber lean documents that already perform
their function. These machines are pampered
by de-personalizing everything they are fed, converting
Carl or Clara to husband or wife or simply to
spouse, my son Frank and daughter Kate to my children ,
and Lewis and Clark to the Lessor (the singular
of course including the plural and the masculine the
feminine or even the neuter, should a party be of
undetermined sex).
Professor Mellinkoff traces the verbosity of lawyers
to the historical influences of primitive ritual,
bilingual duplication, and payment by the word; certainly
their Latin and French gave them a running
start over competing professions. But some would
say that, spurred by their own vanity and their clients'
impressionability, they would have reached
the pinnacles of pomposity without having to resort
to these ancient rites. As “wholesale dealers in
words,’ the author maintains, lawyers are masters of
“planned confusion.’ Witness the lawyer's addiction
to it would seem, it may well be , and the like.
But I should have thought that lawyers could have
learned these and other “one-legged subjunctives’
from congressmen, cabinet ministers, and television
talk-show guests who demonstrate extraordinary
proficiency in such equivocations.
In the beginning the law was the word itself, not
the abstraction that gave it birth. Therefore, words
must be durable, it was believed, lest a change in a
word change the meaning of the law. A subtle concept,
convincingly explained by the author. To be
durable without writing the law had to be rememberable,
and the lawyer's penchant for repetition
comes from an outmoded attachment to mnemonic
devices. Assurance of rememberability in written
law rests in the artful remarks (usually witty and
nearly always metaphoric) of such rare jurists as
Lord Bowen and Justice Holmes: “...the state of a
man's mind is as much of a fact as the state of his
digestion’; “A word is not a crystal, transparent and
unchanged: it is the skin of a living thought....’
In the office as in the courtroom legal language
is intended to impress laymen. Sometimes expectations
must be met. “Sir Leicester,’ the author
quotes from Bleak House , “appears to have a stately
liking for the legal repetitions and prolixities as
ranging among the national bulwarks.’ If the contract
prepared for the client lacks the usual flourishes,
he may feel that he is paying for something he
could have written himself. On the other hand,
many clients appreciate plain wording.
Also, legal language endures to “unite the
priesthood,’ that the “discipline [may] not be made
common among the vulgar.’
Three more reasons might have been added in
support of a language of the law distinct from common
speech. First, “To Impress the Client,’ discussed
under Durability , should not be limited to
that category.
Second is “To Persuade the Judge or Jury.’ The
good lawyer, always mindful of Holmes's definition
of the law as “the prophecies of what the court will
do in fact and nothing more pretentious,’ will ask
himself when drafting any instrument, “How will
this hold up in court?’ Indeed, this reason overrides
all others. The judge is but another lawyer, seldom
one of the more erudite, and he might be more amenable
to the old familiar tunes than to start minimalism,
however pure or precise. In jury trials in most
states the complaints and answers stating the parties'
claims and denials are read to the jury as part of the
instructions, can be quoted by the lawyers in argument,
and may be sent to the jury room. The lawyer
serves his client by employing his most impressive
language: the collision was one of “great force and
violence,’ the injuries “severe,’ the pain “excruciating,’
and the mental anguish “extreme.’ He is being
paid for persuasion, not simplification.
The third addition would be “Style,’ pure style.
Surely lawyers, no less than other artisans, are entitled
to their little conceits, a grace note here, a furbelow
there. When I was young at the bar I heard
with delight an old lawyer, who could have played
Dickens's Mr. Tulkinghorn, speak grandly of the
court of nisi prius (pronouncing it NICEY PRY-US), an
utterly obsolete Latinism for the simple trial court .
Just as any speaker may, for the sake of euphony (or
vanity) flourish an occasional eminence grise or mirabile
dictu , may not a lawyer plume himself now and
then with an ab initio or even a mutatis mutandis ,
not to “unite the priesthood’ but to savor his own
sonority, as a bird sings also for itself?
The book as a whole is most praiseworthy. The
first half, unique and unfaultable, will fill a huge gap
in the knowledge of all lawyers who are not far more
scholarly than any I have ever known. The writing in
0both halves, though lean and muscular--the author
falls prey to none of the ills of turgidity that he so
lavishly dispraises--is polished and witty, spiced
with revealing anecdotes and sparkling detail. In
those few cases with which I have ventured to disagree,
I have felt that the author's argument was unworthy
of his art.
As for the impact on the profession, one must,
with a sigh, agree with Professor Mellinkoff that
“gratuitous literary advice ... is received with profound
indifference’ and that “the hardest words of
lay critics from Swift to date ... have been ignored
with aplomb.’ In this era of lawyers unprecedented
wealth and power, few of them will expend many of
their precious minutes listening to admonitions on
their language. Still, there are always the “ `passionate
few,' a stray lawyer here and there’ according to
the author, who will fight on in the courtrooms and
in the ivory towers, at the bar and in the barrooms,
in the law journals and reviews for the good word,
and they will never surrender.
In his Preface the author disarmingly tells us that
“the footnotes are for reference only’ and that
“anything worth saying has been said in the body of
the text.’ But so provocative is the text itself that I
found myself irresistibly drawn to those generally
annoying tag-alongs in search of the sources. I shall
indulge in only this one footnote. In this writing,
legal means `pertaining to the law,' rather than `lawful';
layman means `non-lawyer' (including the feminine);
he, him and his include the feminine; and
Anglo-Saxon means `Old English.' All quotations are
from the author unless otherwise indicated
The Language of the Law
[Submitted by ]
Longman Pronunciation Dictionary
This long-needed book will be welcomed by the
linguistic community and by learners of English.
General dictionaries show pronunciations, it is true,
but not in the depth displayed in this work [ LPD ],
rarely with its precision, and almost never with both
American and British pronunciations side by side.
The immediate questions that arise are Which
American? Which British? The dialect selected for
American English is General American, that spoken
by the largest number of speakers (those who do not
distinguish among Mary, marry , and merry ); that selected
for British English, as one might expect, RP
[Received Pronunciation], “widely regarded as a
model for correct pronunciation ... what is used by
BBC news readers (hence the alternative name, BBC
pronunciation ).’ As far as the first is concerned, it
does not bear the same relationship to American
English that RP bears to British English: the pronunciation
pattern of the educated speaker in the northeastern
US probably retains much of its former status
and prestige. Having listened to BBC news
readers for many years, I am inclined to regard BBC
pronunciation as an archaic or obsolescent term (unless
one restricts the designation to news readers on
BBC World Service). Certainly, the majority of British
English speakers do not pronounce English in the
RP pattern, and there is increasing evidence that if
they aspire to do so, they are meeting with little
success. But this is not a book of descriptive phonetics;
it is for the learner who aspires to speak the
“best’ English he can, and the selection of these two
dialects would be hard to fault.
The pronunciation system used by Wells is
“broad IPA,’ with a few modifications. It is largely
phonemic, but there are enough refinements to
make it unique. Wells calls it “LPD.’ I found only
one transcription to quarrel with: by showing \?\ as
the symbol for the General American sound in both
lot/odd and start/father , Wells leads one to conclude
that General American (like RP) drops r -sounds in
syllable-final position. But that is not the case in
General American, as the entry for start start bears
out. There is some confusion in the key, where the
spelled characters represented by the phonetic transcription
are underscored, and the form for General
American start should have been start, not start.
Moreover, most American dictionaries make a deliberate
distinction between the sounds in odd/lot and
start/father , with the former often displaying some
rounding or, at worst, closer to \?\ than to \?\. The
treatment of nurse and stir , which show \?\ for RP and
\?\ for General American is closer to the mark.
When I worked on the setting up of the pronunciation
system for the Random House dictionaries, I
examined sound spectrograms of words that middle,
total, sudden, servant, father, standard , etc., that
some phoneticians transcribed using syllabic \?\, \?\, and
\?\. What I found was that the syllabics occurred only
when the preceding sound was a dental or alveolar
(d or t); when it was a velar (k or g), there was
enough time for a speaker to release a sound which
was more like a full schwa than a syllabic. Indeed,
though it is a matter of degree, I find it difficult to
pronounce a word like organism with a syllabic Z\?\ at
end rather than a z\?\m. This is the way organism
is transcribed in the key; but the text itself shows a
full schwa, which indicates that perhaps Wells vacillated
on this point himself.
LPD lists more than 75,000 words, including
proper names. The boldface headwords, alas in sansserif
type (making it difficult to read words like Pilling,
pillion, pilliwinkle, Illinois , etc., because the
lower-case i resembles lower-case l , which is hard to
distinguish from capital I ), are followed by
pronunciations printed in blue, with variants in
black, an expensive but worthwhile idea that works
if you are not reading in a dim light. General American
pronunciations are easy to find because they
are separated from RP by double vertical bars.
Pronunciations that are considered incorrect (like
“fith’ for fifth ) are preceded by an exclamation
point in a triangle; (!) indicates that a pronunciation
so marked is different from what the spelling might
lead one to expect (as in Beaulieu `bju\?\li and Beauchamp
\?\bi\?\t\?\\?\\?\m); (*) is `a warning that the British and
American pronunciations are different in an important
and unpredictable way' (e.g., baton \?\bætan - \?\n ¦¦
b\?\\?\ta\?\n). Useful notes abound, e.g., at Mercedes , “The
pl of the tdmk is pronounced the same as the sing, or
with -i\?\z’; and, passim throughout, results of a poll
taken among 275 British English speakers, e.g. “ casual \?\kæzu\?\l
-ju; \?\kæzju; \?\kæ\?\\?\l-- BrE poll panel preference :
\?\kæ3- 77%, kæz- 23%.’ Separate treatment is
given, in situ , to prefixed and suffixes, and detailed
discussions of compounds and phrases, connected
speech, neutralization, and other phonetic matters
and language environments that affect pronunciation
appear in their appropriate alphabetic places. Each
spelled sound is discussed at the beginning of its alphabetic
section, digraphs being treated at the beginnings
of the sections for their first letter.
In sum, there is a wealth of information succinctly
presented in the pages of LPD which learners,
linguists, and lexicographers will be mining for
many years to come, including the pronunciation of
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllandysiliogogogoch .
Laurence Urdang
“...EXTERMINATING: We are trained to kill all
pets ...’ [From an ad in TV Hi-Lites (Flushing, New
York), . Submitted by ]
What's In A Name?
This is a general book about names, in scope if
not in style reflecting the varied articles that appear
in Names , the journal of the American Name Society.
Those articles are normally written in language
meant to demonstrate to the world that the writer is
an academic; this book reflects more the style of a
classroom teacher, a mixture of objective and subjective
comment. For those who know their name
books, it falls somewhere between Basil Cottle's
Names (1983) and my own Guinness Book of Names
(4th edition 1989).
I mention the latter merely to make it clear that
I am the author of a rival book which covers very
similar ground, and that any comments I make must
be judged against that background. Like Professor
Ashley, I have also been immersed in name studies
for at least twenty years. His book has not been written
for people like me, and its real impact will have
to be judged when it gets into the hands of those
intended readers who are not already onomastic
freaks. Presumably, much of the book's contents will
be as fresh to such readers as it is familiar to anyone
who already knows his names. That is not meant to
be a sneer. Anyone writing a book of this kind is
obliged to go over certain common territory. It is
how you go over it that matters--how entertainingly,
how clearly, how elegantly, how accurately.
In the present case I have some worries about
three of those criteria. Having come across reviewers
who quite clearly did no more than glance at the
book concerned--one of them once wondered in
the pages of VERBATIM why I had called two chapters
of a book “What's In A Name?’ though the second
chapter was actually “What Is A Name?’--I decided
to give this book a careful reading. Perhaps it
is not meant to be read in that way. Consider Professor
Ashley's opening paragraph, traditionally the
one which an author reads and corrects most often.
He begins: “From the beginning people had to have
names to identify themselves. At first, one was
enough. There are cultures in which one is still
enough, but generally, with increases in population
and refinements in civilization, there arose a need
for additional designations to identify the members
of a society. To a given name like John or Mary was
appended a second name, usually an inherited
family name. With the advent of this `last name,'
which came to be known as a surname (from the
French surnom ), given names came to be called `first
names,' or, because we can have more than one,
`forenames.' ’
The casual reader might let that pass: I find it
difficult to do so. Surely that opening sentence, as it
stands, is ambiguous? “Had to have a name’ rather
than “names’ would have been better, and “in order
to identify and refer to one another’ would have
avoided the ambiguity of “themselves.’ People usually
know who they themselves are. The need for an
additional personal name (in Europe rather than
“generally,’ and not before the tenth century) arose
more because of the spread of a particular kind of
naming philosophy than an increase in population or
a refinement in civilization. The Anglo-Saxons did
not allow the duplication of personal names within a
group. There may have been superstitious reasons
for this, connected with name-magic beliefs
whereby the use of a living person's name would
deprive him of his soul, but the practical result was
that everyone was conveniently identified by a single
name.
When the Normans conquered England they introduced
their own philosophy of allowing the same
name to be borne simultaneously by many members
of a group. This was not necessarily a more refined
philosophy, merely a different one. The name-magic
belief in this case was that a child named after an
admired figure might cause some of that person's
qualities to be passed on to the child. That belief is
of course still common today, though for that matter
so is the other theory. In many Jewish families it
prevents the use of a relation's name if the person
concerned is still alive.
For at least three hundred years the “additional
designations’ that the Norman philosophy made
necessary were not “inherited family names,’ but
by-names, which applied only to those who bore
them. Thus a John Smith in the Middle Ages really
was a smith by trade. His son might be a Johnson , his
grandson a Large because he happened to be a generous
fellow. When surnames did become hereditary
they were always, not “usually,’ the second
names that went with the given names.
Professor Ashley implies that “last name’ was
the early term “which came to be known as a surname.’
Surname was the original word: last name is
decidedly modern. Surname was indeed an adaptation
of French surnom , but the Normans called it
that because in Latin it was a super nomen , an `extra
name.' Without this explanation, the information
that surname is from French surnom seems to me to
be of very little interest.
The term forenames is to be preferred to given
names or first names , says Professor Ashley. But it
isn't. Given name is clearly preferable if one wishes
to distinguish between a name bestowed by the parents
in any culture and one automatically inherited.
Forename fails to help with the problem of those
countries where the given name is always placed
last. First name is useful when discussing western
cultures, since it is usually the “call-name,’ as some
languages would describe it. As for the statement
that we should use forenames “because we can have
more than one,’ what on earth is wrong with “given
names,’ or “first name and middle names’?
I know that Professor Ashley's intended reader
will not nit-pick in this way, but I can only react to
his book (and to each page) as I find it. To me it
matters that in his second paragraph, for example,
he says that “to John, Mary, Peter, Matthew and
Christopher the Puritans added, for girls, Prudence,
Constance, and Charity, and for boys, Increase, Preserved
and Learned.’ That misses the point entirely.
The Puritans substituted such names for the others
because they did not believe in honoring, as they
would have put it, Popish saints. In a very general
sense the Puritans can be said to have added a few
names to the stock which modern parents draw
upon, but the author obviously did not mean that.
He was not trying to tell us that names like Increase,
Constance , and Learned are now in general use
thanks to the Puritans.
In paragraph three we are told that “the Dare
family named the first white baby born in Virginia
Virginia, not a conventional name in the late sixteenth
century but hardly daring considering the
religious association. Indeed along with a slew of native
British names that the English colonists transported
to America, the traditional biblical names
would dominate US birth registers well into the
twentieth century.’ As Professor Ashley knows, the
state was named in honor of Elizabeth I, the Virgin
Queen, and not for the Virgin Mary. As for the “daring’
aspect, had the child been named Virginia in a
Puritan community, it would certainly have been
very provocative. The Puritans would definitely
have seen the name as having religious associations,
or Roman Catholic associations at least, and would
have objected to it strongly. Finally, the names
which dominated US birth registers until fairly recent
times were specifically Old Testament rather
than merely “biblical’ names. It is that which characterizes
Abraham Lincoln, Noah Webster, and the
like.
One does not necessarily expect literary elegance
in a book written by an academic, but there is
no need to be clumsy. Professor Ashley writes: “I
cannot pretend to do justice in one section here to a
subject that George R. Stewart almost failed to cover
adequately in his Names on the Globe .’ That turns
out to be a backhanded compliment, but Professor
Stewart himself, an author who showed us all what
could be done by way of literary style in his Names
on the Land , would never have written such a sentence.
Another Ashleyism, a few pages later: “The
book was rendered pretty useless pretty soon by
name changes.’ That's pretty awful, I'm afraid.
There is no index to What's in a Name ?, which is
as extraordinary as it is infuriating. The thinking behind
that may be the same as that of another author I
recently came across, responsible for a little Dictionary
of House Names . When I pointed out mildly that
it was usual for a dictionary to be in alphabetical
order, she said that with such an arrangement readers
would merely look for their own house name in
the bookshop, and then not bother to buy the book.
Even she, however, did not have an entry saying
something like: “There's a house on the corner of
Aragon Avenue with an interesting name, but I'm
not going to tell you what it is.’ On page 218 Professor
Ashley writes: “There's an old formula for finding
out the name of your personal angel but I won't
trouble you with it. In addition, I'll wager your
priest won't give it to you.’ To that I can only say, as
they do on this side of the Atlantic: “Thanks a
bunch, professor.’
Leslie Dunkling
Thames Ditton, Surrey
The reference to Slurvian [XVI, 2] was the first I
had ever heard of it, and as the word is not to be
found in my 1966 Webster I assume that it is of
rather recent origin. On the evidence of the examples
quoted, I also wonder whether it is necessary to
construct an artificial sublanguage out of the garbled
forms that inevitably arise when a language is
used by lazy, slipshod, and semi-literate speakers.
These forms are not restricted to America, they
come into being wherever English is used--or
rather abused--as some of the following comments
will show.
Not far from where I grew up in the English
Midlands there were villages in which “air’ sounds
were regularly replaced by “err.’ A local preacher
who came to our chapel greatly amused us by describing
the encounter of a prophet with a “burr,’ a
word that kept recurring in his sermon. This was
simply a bear , but the pronunciation was different in
the Bloxwich area, as it is in other English dialects.
If a Bloxwich boy wanted to ask “Where did he
go?,’ he would say “Whir-dee-go?,’ just like the
“Whirred ego’ quoted, with a little word-window-dressing,
by Virginia Howard. Yet you could hardly
call a Bloxwich boy a Slurvian.
Some of the other examples Virginia Howard
cites are simply misunderstandings of the sounds
heard, something that inevitably occurs, especially
among children and semi-literates, wherever words
are spoken. “Taking it for granite’ is a case in point.
This is the same mechanism as is operative in the
famous case of the child who heard the hymn
“Gladly the cross I'd bear’ and thought the adults
were singing about “Gladly, the cross-eyed bear’.
When as a little boy I listened to my parents talking
about breeds of hens, I would certainly have written
“Rhode Island Red’ as “Row-Dylan-dread.’
Another category is formed by the replacement
of unfamiliar-sounding names by something more familiar.
Thus a Dame Jeanne (a big fat-bellied bottle)
became a demi-john in English, “God encompasseth
us’ became the Goat and Compasses , and the girasole
(sunflower) artichoke became the Jerusalem artichoke .
The “sparrow grass’ Virginia Howard mentions
used to be--and probably still is--common
usage in the English Midlands for asparagus .
Other examples cited are probably owing to foreign
influences. “Forced’ for forest would hardly be
surprising among German settlers, for Forst is a German
word for forest . More intriguing is “meowk’ for
milk . In the Bernese dialect of Swiss-German, the l is
replaced by a rather indistinct u sound, so that the
German Milch becomes Miuch (with “ch’ as in
“loch’). About the nearest American equivalent
would be “meowk,’ so it would be interesting to
ascertain whether Bernese farmers might not have
settled in Georgia at some time.
Garblings and imbroglios are going on all the
time in English, not only in America or in Slurvian
but wherever the lingo is spoken. This reminds me
of the worst pun I ever heard. I was sitting with a
friend in a restaurant when he noticed another
friend at the far end of the room. He wanted to convey
a message to him, and as there was too much
background noise to do so by shouting, he tried to
mouth his message. But the other failed to get the
gist of it. After he had tried three times in vain, I
suggested in my usual helpful way: “Why don't you
try it in Hindustani?’ My friend shook his head and
replied: “He wouldn't Hindustanit if I did.’
I am beginning to find it irksome to have to
point out every few years that Thomas Crapper did
indeed live and that the company he founded lasted
until about 1928. He was the subject of a biography
entitled (I regret to say), Flushed with Pride . On the
wall of my bathroom is a page reproduced from The
Contractor's Compendium of 1892 which illustrates
and describes three products of Crapper & Co.'s
works, situated in Marlborough Road, Chelsea. This
reproduction is sold at the Gladstone Pottery Museum,
Stoke-on-Trent. Marlborough Road is now, I
suspect, a street, to distinguish it from its namesake
by St. James's Palace.
The word crap , however, is derived from the
Old Dutch Krappe , according to Chambers Dictionary .
One authority attributes the invention of the
flushing WC to Joseph Bramah, in 1782; it is said
that the quality of his work made his name a symbol
of excellence and I have heard the expression,
“That's a bramah,’ so used. On the other hand, Eric
Partridge derives this usage from the Hindu deity
via British army slang.
In this town there are two drain covers bearing
the words “T. Crapper & Co., Sanitary Engineers,
Marlborough Works, Chelsea.’ Cast-iron evidence.
I was puzzled by Rebecca Christian's mention
in “Blessed Be the Words That Bind’ [XVI,3] of
“Vikki Carr's song, `Is That All There Is?' ’ I have
never appreciated the popular tendency to credit
songs automatically to performers or recording artists
or both, not all of whom are composers or lyricists
and not all of whom perform exclusively songs
of their own composition.
“Is That All There Is?’ was written by Jerry
Leiber and Mike Stoller and made famous in a late
'60s recording by Peggy Lee. Thus it is correct to
refer to the Leiber and Stoller song, “Is That All
There Is?’ or to the Peggy Lee recording of “Is That
All There Is?’, but not to “the Peggy Lee song, `Is
That All There Is?' ’
Vikki Carr's most popular record (also in the
'60s) was of a song whose refrain began, “Let it
please be him.’ Unless she wrote it, however, it was
not her most popular song.
“One thousand marijuana plants have been seized in
a joint police investigation near here Monday.’ [From the
Kitchener-Waterloo (Canada) Record ,
Submitted by ]
Anglish-Yinglish
Yiddish has found a cozy niche in English during
this century. A slew of words like mavin and
chutzpa , phrases like the bottom line and the whole
megillah , idioms like eat one's heart out and need it
like a hole in the head , formative elements like shm-(fancy/shmancy,
value/shmalue) and -nik (spynik,
noshnik) have become common coin in colloquial
English, especially in the United States. No book on
current English is complete without some account of
Yiddishisms. The popularity of the subject seems to
have generated a cottage industry in publishing: I
would venture a guess that apart from dictionaries
and grammers, more books about Yiddish have been
published in the United States in the past twenty-five
years than about any other minority language
used in this country.
A recent products of the Yiddish mill in Gene
Bluestein's Anglish-Yinglish: Yiddish in American
Life and Literature , a title that misleadingly suggests
a scholarly work. This impression is reinforced not
only by the publisher's being a university press but
by the declaration in the Introduction that “This
study is concerned with the function of Yiddish in
American life and literature.’ No such study, however,
appears in the book. Instead, following the
Introduction and constituting the book's main text is
a glossary of some 335 terms entitled “Anglish-Yinglish
Dictionary.’ This, clearly, should have
been the book's title. On the other hand, perhaps
the author deliberately refrained from using this title,
since he is not a professional lexicographer and
his “dictionary’ has every mark of an amateurish
piece of work.
People without lexicographic training who undertake
to compile a dictionary run the risk of committing
innumerable blunders of the kind that only
the seasoned professional knows how to avoid. In
tackling the field of Yiddish. the compiler runs the
additional risk of plunging into a discipline that requires
extensive knowledge of Yiddish, Hebrew, and
English linguistics, etymology, and lexicology. According
to the description on the book's cover, Gene
Bluestein is a musician, folklorist, and literary critic
who teaches English at California State University at
Fresno. A lexicographer and Yiddish scholar he is
not. That he is, indeed, a literary critic and folklorist
is demonstrated not only in the generally intelligent
and informative Introduction, but in two short appendices,
one of which, subtitled “The Jew as American,’
analyzes rather well Philip Roth's novel,
Portnoy's Complaint , while the other, titled “The
Revival of KLEZmer Music,’ discusses lucidly a contemporary
aspect of Yiddish folk music. It is regrettable
that these fine pieces are marred by the intrusion
of an inferior “Anglish-Yinglish Dictionary.’
In the brief Preface, Bluestein defines Anglish as
“Anglicized Yiddish... which turns Yiddish words
into colloquial English (as in shmo ),’ and Yinglish as
“Yiddishized English, ... which gives English
words and expressions the qualities of Yiddish syntax
and intonation (as in `a Heifetz he isn't').’ Even if
one were to accept this peculiar nomenclature, the
distinction it is supposed to draw is hardly significant,
since these types of formations are only two of
the many characteristics of Jewish English (the collective
terms for all the varieties of English used by
Jews). The very terms Anglish and Yinglish invite
scholarly derision as being both facetious and inaccurate.
To worsen things, the author is not even consistent
within the framework of this distinction. Most
of the entries in the “dictionary’ are not labeled
either Yinglish or Anglish, and for good reason, as
they do not fit into either category. For example,
adeSHEM , defined as “a Hebrew euphemism for the
Tetragrammaton’; kakuh-MAYmee , about which the
author says “not Yiddish but it sounds like it,’ misspelling
the actual English word as cockamaimy .
The entries are a mishmash run riot. They include
formal Jewish-interest terms (Ladino, YHVH) ,
irrelevant non-Jewish names ( Prufrock --yes, T.S.
Eliot's--an entry that runs on for two and a half
pages), the name of just one Yiddish theatrical figure,
Boris Tomashefsky , Hebrew literary works ( Zohar ),
nonce formations ( money/shmoney , which
takes up two pages), misspelled place names to indicate
mispronunciation ( BRANzvil , for Brownsville , a
section of Brooklyn), Yiddish words that are never
used in English ( FUHLKStimlech `folksy,' guht `God,'
ich starb `I'm dying'), encyclopedic terms ( black
Jews ), and nonexistent words ( who-er “defined’ by
the author as “Not exactly Yiddish, but the New
Yorkish pronunciation of whore’).
The equally whimsical nature of the “definitions’
defies description. A nonce word, aKOOSHerke , is defined
as “Friddish for midwife,’ from which one is to
gather that “Friddish’ (which is nowhere explained)
stands for a French-Yiddish mixture. Under bris `circumcision'
sixteen lines are quoted from Genesis 17
where a simple reference would have sufficed. The
Yiddish word KETSele (not used in English), meaning
`pussycat,' is cryptically “explained’ as a “term of endearment
and the source of all the current pussycat
titles with their sexy connotations.’ Go figure.
The pronunciations are indicated in a confusing
and inconsistent “newspaper-style’ key. For example,
the symbol “uh’ is shown in the key as representing
schwa, yet throughout the book it is used to
represent the vowel sound in English ball or raw
(BUHbe `grandmother,' puhGRUHM `pogrom'). An
English word like allrightnik is rendered as allRAITnik
to make it seem Yiddish. And so on.
The “dictionary’ has one saving grace: many of
the entries are illustrated by citations from the
works of writers like Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, Allen
Ginsberg, Bernard Malamud, Chaim Potok,
Philip Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. It is a pity
that the author (and his publishers) had not enough
good sense to submit a draft of the “dictionary’ to
one or several Yiddish scholars for scrutiny and criticism.
A fine collection of citations using Yiddish-origin
words is buried under a rubble of dross.
Sol Steinmetz
What's the Word That Means ...?
I once told myself that I would not look any further
into a book or article that quoted Lewis Carroll's
tired old Humpty Dumpty quotation about
words meaning what he wants them to mean. Such a
policy is unfair, of course: one should not be prejudiced
against a person's magnum opus just because
he has a tiresome taste in quotations. People are forever
discovering such quotations for the first time
and should not be excoriated for it by a dyspeptic,
curmudgeonly reviewer. Reviewers are supposed to
have--or pretend to have--open, inquiring minds,
and a boring quotation maketh not a boring book--
necessarily. Alas, I should learn to follow my instincts.
I suppose that there is a category of reference
book called the reverse dictionary . There is no denying
that such a work, which would enable a user to
find the word or phrase he is seeking by looking up a
meaning, would be quite useful. I have a number of
ideas for preparing one in machine-readable form
for use in a computer, but I shall not reveal them
here. The way printed versions of such books function
is for the user to look up associated information.
The main problem with them is that they rely on the
compiler's ability to anticipate with some accuracy
the associative contextual framework of the user.
Within the relatively limited amount of information
a bound volume of 320 pages can provide, it would
be difficult to anticipate the user's mind set with sufficient
allowance for elaboration. The books of this
kind that I have tried to use have frustrated me: I
never can find what I am looking for.
But I am sufficiently open-minded to forget
what I might be looking for--some bit of lexicographic
esoterica, no doubt--and settle for something
I consider to be much simpler and not readily
derivable from an ordinary dictionary. As we all
know, if we knew the word we were looking for (and
knew how to spell it) we should not have to resort to
reverse dictionaries. Trying to be fair, I cooked up a
test or two. The first (to which most of us know the
answer, I suppose, but that makes it no less legitimate)
is, What is the nautical term for the left and
right sides of a boat? One cannot discover the answer
by looking up left or right in an ordinary dictionary,
of course. Unfortunately, neither left nor
right (nor port nor starboard ) is in, and I should have
to hang around yacht clubs to get the answer. I had
spotted some obscure terms (like widdershins under
counterclockwise ) when skimming through the
book, so I thought Dr. Welsh might have concentrated
on those. He did to some extent, (though deasil
was not in, so I sought in vain under shadow for
antiscian , which is about as obscure as one can get.
The other day I had a letter from someone who
wanted to know the name for the accent over the r
in Dvořak , which happens to be among the two or
three things I know. As Welsh's book has a list under
PRONUNCIATION, I looked there, to no avail. (It is
called a haček or hachek or haček , pronounced
HOTchek.)
I cannot find it in my heart to fault Dr. Welsh for
his failure: he probably tried out his ideas on friends
who might well have been able to find what they
were looking for. I am convinced that there is a way
to do this kind of thing, but a book is not it: the kind
of associative information required to find even the
simplest thing is likely to vary considerably from
user to user, depending on orientation, education,
age, and other factors; including a large variety of
ways to access the same information would be very
uneconomical in book form, especially when high-speed
computers with large memories are so readily
available. The problem is less one of simple (!) lexicology
as one of information theory and psychology.
I might add artificial intelligence just to make it
harder, but why make the issue more confused than
it is already? This book does not work for me.
Laurence Urdang
Punching the Clock
This is the idiom book for kids from 8 to 12
years of age. Clarion is an imprint of Houghton Mifflin,
publishers of The American Heritage Dictionary
[AHD] , so there is some responsibility behind the
book.
The illustrations are colorful (green and black,
to be specific) and invariably illustrate the literal
senses of idioms, which are by nature figurative: in
other words, the illustration for raise the roof shows
someone lifting the roof off a house. Get it? Pretty
puerile stuff, you might say, but don't lose sight of
the fact that it is intended for puerō and puellās .
Terban, who appears to be Henny Youngman's
nephew (“Take this book--Away!’) but could
scarcely be blamed for that, teaches at Columbia
Grammar School, a prep school in New York City.
According to the evidence offered, he has been using
materials like those in the book to teach children
about idioms. I find it odd that children need to be
taught about idioms, but that is another matter.
If anyone from the staff of the AHD had a look at
this material I should be disappointed, for there are
some ambiguities. For instance, (28) throwing her
hat into the ring has: “In America in the early
1800s, a man challenged another man by throwing
his hat into a ring.’ What ring? What king of ring? If
a boxing ring, why not say so? (47) batting a thousand:
“Baseball players have batting averages based
on the number of times they hit the ball when
they're up at bat.’ It seems to me that if you are
going to explain something, explain it all: doesn't hit
require the modifier “safely’? And how is thousand
explained? If an average is the total number of times
a batter hits a ball safely divided by the number of
times he is at bat, even if he gets a hit each time, that
average is 1, not 1000, and some kids might need an
explanation. (51) punch the clock: “Some business
have time clocks by their front door.’ Do they?
I am being pedantic and hypercritical, but it
does seem that a book of only 63 pages could have
been done a little more carefully. the book is pleasant
enough, would certainly not do any harm, and
might very well encourage youngsters to think about
language.
Laurence Urdang
Michel P. Richard's article, “A Taxonomy of Epigrams’
[XV,2], strummed a responsive chord. With
the aid of the Random House Dictionary I have compiled
the following diagram indicating the definitions
for combinations of pairs of words, each with a
different meaning, involving variations in spelling
and pronunciation.
PRONOUNCE SPELL MEAN
heteronym different same different
homograph
homonym same same different
homophone
same different different
Examples: heteronym--Lead me to your lead mine.
homonym--I cannot bear to see a bear in my bed.
homophone--(Exclusive of a homonym) A well-liked
doctor has both patience and patients.
In the November 1988 issue of Smithsonian , Felicia
Lamport held forth on the delights of heteronyms.
She also had the temerity to state that at 49 the list
was close to a close. Challenged by her article, I
started my pursuit, enlisting my wife Phyllis, her
friends Mickey and George Ann Garms, their friend
Cosme Harmon, Cosme's friend, George H. Warfel,
his daughter Ann D. Halsted, and Ann's sixth-grade
class. Below is the list of heteronyms compiled by
Mickey as of August 11, 1989, including my later
additions, quart, proceeds, comfort , and axes ; Cosme
has come up with entrance , and George Warfel suggested
wicked , and contract .
To our immeasurable sorrow, Mickey died suddenly
on November 9, 1989, and we wish this letter
and his list of heteronyms to serve as a memorial to
him.
agape excise recover
ana glower release
axes hinder resort
bass intimate row
bow lead sewer
bower lineage shower
buffet lower slough
comport moped sow
compound number supply
console peaked tear
content permit tower
contract primer wicked
does proceeds wind
dove pussy wound
entrance
I am writing primarily to correct and update
Benedict Kimmelman's article on the eff-word
[XVI,2].
The “popular British film of the 1970s, with
Dirk Bogarde, I'm Allright Jack ,’ was, in fact, a popular
British film of the late 1950s, I'm All Right, Jack ,
and Dirk Bogarde, who was off in Hollywood being
Liszt in the abysmal Song Without End , wasn't
within 3000 miles of it when it was being made.
Further to Mr. Kimmelman's lexicon, I offer a
few Australian examples:
fxxxable [Anglo-Australian] Adjective . Sexually desirable.
fxxxwit [Australian] Noun . Incompetent person; nincompoop.
You'd have to be a right fxxxwit to
print almost every column filler more than
once in a small circulation magazine .
fxxxwitted [Australian] Adjective . Foolish; stupid. A
fxxxwitted attempt at scholarship without
doing thorough research .
clusterfxxx [Australo-American] Noun . Collective
incompetence, usually by those in authority,
bureaucrats, officers; esp. of
edicts and recommendations the practicality
of which is doubtful, decisions
made by committees, etc. Only a clusterfxxx
like the Joint Chiefs would approve
an invasion plan that didn't take
out the television and radio stations as
priority targets . (To which a British sympathizer
might reply, Absofxxxinglutely
!’)
Get fxxxed! [Anglo-Australian] Interjection, verb .
Negative reply to an unwelcome suggestion.
If he thinks I going to print his
fxxxwitted letter, he can get fxxxed!
In reference to Benedict Kimmelman's article,
I should like to submit a polite euphemism in frequent
use.
When people try to push ahead of a queue at a
bus stop or in a shop, one would politely say to the
person, “Get in the far queue.’
There is also the famous story of the Fukawi
Pygmy tribe who frequently got lost in the jungles of
Africa; in order to ascertain their whereabouts, they
would stand on another's shoulders to peer over the
long grass, crying, “Where the Fukawi?’
Having been a student for interminable years
(and thus having been forced to memorize a great
many quite useless facts), I enjoyed Stephen Hirschberg's
“Lest We Forget.’ He is right in saying that
the mnemonic he lists for pi is cumbersome. The one
I have always used seems easier to remember than
either his version or the numbers themselves and is
certainly less tortuous. It works as his does, coding
digits by word lengths:
Sir, I send a rhyme excelling
In sacred truth and rigid spelling.
Numerical sprites elucidate
For me the lexicon's dull weight.
I have no idea who wrote this version, which I
picked up from other students as an undergraduate
at Rice University.
Stephen Hirschberg's essay brought back to
mind a number of mnemonics from my college days
as a chemistry major. Chemists, like physicians, are
faced with learning long lists of things, in our case
trivial (that is, not systematic) nomenclature for various
homologous series of chemical compounds. In
most cases there is little in the structures of these
compounds to hang a name on, since many of the
names derive from the natural sources from which
the compounds were isolated.
We remembered the trivial names from the first
nine linear dicarboxylic acids ( oxalic, malonic, succinic,
glutaric, adipic, pimelic, suberic, azelaic, sebacic )
with the initialized mnemonic, “Oh, my sweet
green apple pie sounds absolutely swell.’
There are eight possible arrangements of the
hydrogen and hydroxy groups along the chain of a
simple, six-carbon sugar molecule. To remember
these, we had, “All altruists gladly make gum in gallon
tanks,’ yielding allose, altrose, glucose, maltose,
gulose, idose, galactose, talose . This mnemonic also
yields the correct structures, if one can manage to
remember the proper alternations of the Fischer
projections used to represent their configurations in
two dimensions.
A different kind of mnemonic is used for remembering
the difference between stalagmites and
stalactites : “Mites grow up.’
Two items caught my eye in a recent number
[XVI,2]. The first is Jonathan Bricklin's attribution to
one “Georges Louis’ of the observation that “Style
is the man himself’ (p. 18). Now, it may just be that
someone by that name--a Frenchman, one would
gather from the spelling “Georges’--uttered those
words or foreign equivalents thereof. But I think it
more than likely that Mr. Bricklin is referring to the
famous French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclere,
count de Buffon, better known to literary history
simply as “Buffon.’ The oft-quoted citation is from
the Discours sur le style , his acceptance speech delivered
before the Académie Françcaise on August
25, 1753. As here, it is usually wrenched a little out
of context. Buffon did not mean that man paints an
autobiographical portrait by his style. Rather, that of
all the things an author might describe, all are extraneous
to him except for his style, which is his alone,
and hence his only possible passport to literary immortality:
La quantité des connaissances, la singularité des
faits, la nouveauté même des découvertes, ne sont
pas de sûrs garants de l'immortalité.... Ces
choses sont hors de l'homme, le style est l'homme
même.
[The number of things known, the curiosity of the
facts, the very novelty of the discoveries are no
certain guarantors of immortality.... These
things are outside of man, while style is man
himself.]
The second item, on a lighter note, is one of
Michel P. Richard's homophonic epigrams: “I regret
that I have but one asterisk for my country’ (p.22).
It reminded me of a little jingle that I read years ago
in some college (alleged) humor magazine and
which I rescue here from a well-earned oblivion:
Mary had a little plane
In which she used to frisk.
Now wasn't she a silly girl
Her little *!?
Needless to Say
It goes without saying that the duty of the writer is
to explain. In the modern world, there's no denying
that everything can in fact be explained. The
best prose, therefore, is prose that imposes order.
Thus are readers made secure, and, more important,
thus is life made simple. Nothing, it is clear, could be
more self-evident.
Yet some writers strive instead for eloquence.
That is, they try to produce memorable work. But
they do so, unfortunately, at the risk of confusing
their readers. To start with, their writing is often
rhetorical or even evocative. It contains statements,
consequently, that allow varying interpretations; inevitably,
anything that affects a reader's feelings is
bound to produce an unpredictable response. Furthermore,
such writers at times resort to humour. Accordingly,
they display cynicism, or alas, lead the
reader into ambiguity and paradox. Worst of all,
these writers sometimes will communicate surprise
or wonder. The result is to arouse a sense of mystery.
In sum, the effect of such writing is to portray
human existence as something vague and complex.
More than that, it can actually complicate matters
further. On top of all this, we have the unhappy fact
that eloquent writing is indeed sometimes memorable,
compounding the problem.
In contrast, the effective communicator creates
certainty. He or she does this, it is evident, in two
ways. First, he rules out irrelevant or erroneous
thoughts in the reader. Second, he continually supplies
answers. In short, he maintains command, investing
his exposition with all the authority that he
can muster.
The goal, then, is omniscience. Admittedly,
most writers are in reality not omniscient. Not yet,
at any rate. But nevertheless, it is within the province
of any writer to make a definitive statement on
a specific point. This, surely, is sufficient. After all,
omniscience can be cumulative. Over time, manifestly,
a multiplicity of small omnisciences will add
up to total omniscience. It is as if in recognition of
this, perforce, that increasing numbers of writers are
looking for a way to produce airtight, irrefutable
prose. And it is no accident that the English language
provides just such a method. I refer, of
course, to syllothetics.
The syllothetic system had its origins, no doubt,
in the rule followed by the authors of university
monographs and government position papers. To
wit: first tell them what you are going to say, then
tell them what you are saying, and finally tell them
what you have said. A sound practice, unquestionably.
But it was observed that readers could be effectively
directed sentence by sentence. That is to say,
the meaning of a sentence could be signaled--and
thereby validated--by the use of a sentence adverb
such as moreover, indeed , or however . Essentially,
the thrust of the sentence was communicated in advance.
In this way readers knew what a writer was
going to say before he said it. In a sense, the readers
said it themselves.
To be sure, the technique of qualifying sentences
with modifiers is nothing new. For instance,
many writers had sorted out their expository works
with such expressions as incidentally, on one hand ,
and for example . In addition, others had followed
the practice of enumerating their sentences with
first, second , and third , or next, then , and finally , or
all of these. More noteworthy, some had reinforced
their statements with, on the one hand, such key
words as significantly, symbolically , and thankfully ,
or, on the other hand, such indispensables as unfortunately,
unhappily , and alas . Most significantly, it
should be noted, many had gone so far as to advance
statements in the form of a premise or a given, e.g.,
it need hardly be stated, obviously , and of course of
course .
Be that as it may, the foundations of modern
syllothetics were cemented, as we now know, with
the systematic use of but at the beginnings of sentences.
There can be no doubt whatever that with
this development logical exposition could thereby
become relentless. It was discovered--and this
should no longer be any cause for wonder--that a
sentence containing however could also begin with
but . Moreover, but could appear directly in front of
nevertheless . But this development reached its zenith
with the use of but as a topper conjunction (see
the beginning of this sentence); the topper but does
not in reality indicate a contradiction, for it always
appears at the start of a sentence which is, truth be,
in harmony with preceding sentences, but rather it
tops the previous statements by pointing unerringly
to that which is promised by contradiction, namely
illumination. Let's be frank. It was the logical force
of but , in the end, that began to supply the dynamism
of syllothetics, enabling it to combine, as it
does, the undeniable energy of the syllogism with
the indisputable power of the theorem.
In consequence we have, in syllothetics, a veritable
arsenal of instruments that serve to produce
coherence and logic in modern prose. For example,
there is not only affirmation by demonstration (ergo,
hence, therefore, accordingly , but there is also documentation
by postulation (it can be assumed, we can
suppose) and also validation by synthesization (basically,
in truth, in a very real sense) as well as verification
by substitution (that is to say, in other words, in
short) . Similarly, there is not only confutation by disputation
(on the contrary, notwithstanding, however,
nevertheless) , but there is also negation by concession
(despite, although, allowing that) and also, not
least, refutation by capitulation (it might be argued,
it would be easy to conclude) .
Syllothetics, it can be seen, is inexorable. Either
we have corroboration by escalation (moreover, on
top of that, above all) , or we have devaluation by
declination (worse, worse still, worst of all) . On one
hand we have substantiation by association (similarly,
in the same way) ; on the other hand we have
invalidation by differentiation (quite a different matter,
we cannot compare, something else again) .
It is hardly necessary to add that syllothetics
possesses the capacity to transcend logic. Who can
deny it? We have, happily, induction by intuition,
the inference that goes beyond mere fact (one cannot
avoid the suspicion, it is difficult to shake off the conviction) ,
and also, thanks be, attestation by clarification,
the proof that is superior to mere evidence
(even so, still, in any event) . Plainly, we are in the
presence here of higher truths: look at ratification
by approximation (for the most part, as it were,
broadly speaking) ; witness the revelation of amplification
(conceivably, it may even be, it would not be
too much to say) .
This brings us, willy-nilly, to the infinite utility
of syllothetics. It is a system, broadly speaking, that
is impervious to criticism. Certainly it is no passing
fad, dependent on vogue words, for despite its infancy
it employs such age-old terms as alas, albeit,
perforce , and withal . Nor it can be taxed with pedantry,
demonstrably, for on occasion it makes use of
colloquial expressions like for starters, likewise, for
sure , and no doubt about it . Above all, though some
people might think otherwise, it definitely does not
involve clichés. On the contrary. For one thing, a
cliché can be defined as an imaginative expression
which through repetition has lost its imaginativeness.
But syllothetics, in contradistinction, shuns the
imaginations altogether. More to the point, syllothetics
deploys a vocabulary of unparalleled variety. In
fact there are well over one hundred syllothetic
modifiers. And what is more, additional ones are
coming into use every day. Hence the recent discovery,
by some writers, that it is possible to syllothesize
every sentence.
It is true that there are rational writers, seemingly
logical, who make little or no use of syllothetics.
They feel, it would seem, that coherence can be
obtained without it. They would say, undoubtedly,
that one sentence follows another. But the question
is, how closely? In syllothetics, it must be pointed
out, an expression such as naturally or in other
words not only introduces a sentence but also refers
to the previous one. The effect is that at every step
syllotheticians have their feet in two sentences, as it
were. And by looking backward at all times, it need
hardly be added, they appear to be going nowhere
of interest. Naturally, nothing is more reassuring to
a reader. Nothing, in other words, is more conducive
to acquiesence.
It can be argued, you will object, that such a
progression is slow, and that, concommitantly, very
little is being said. But this objection, however,
misses the point. True, syllotheticians aim high; in a
word, they seek not merely to persuade but to convince.
Still, the fact that their goals are essentially
modest. Let it be remembered that they make no
declarations. They restrict themselves to deductions,
basing them on references, citations, or precedents,
which is a different matter altogether. They
may, perhaps, list variables, or, on occasion, identify
options; at most, they will establish parameters. But,
it must be emphasized, they do not express anything.
They articulate, which is something else
again. Nor, what is more, do they ever describe.
They delineate, which is something entirely different.
So it should come as no surprise to be told that,
basically, syllotheticians are at bottom unconcerned
about how little they might have to say.
It would not be too much to say that it does not
at all matter what may or may not be contained in
syllothetic sentences. The content lies, rather, in the
articulation of the logical relationships between
them. But make no mistake about it, that is enough.
For, clearly, although it is the writer's duty to explain,
the very fact that everything must be explained
means, indisputably, that in due course everything
will in fact be explained. Ergo, the less said
the better.
Already, it is becoming very difficult to deny--
all available evidence points to it--that the day is
surely coming, withal, when there will remain, truly,
no mere coincidences about which one cannot avoid
a suspicion or shake off a conviction, when clearly
everything will incontrovertibly support a thesis or
conversely stand in direct contrast to it, and, overriding
all this, there will as a result be not the slightest
doubt in our minds about one inescapable conclusion,
namely the dawning realization that, there
being nothing more to say on the subject, as it were,
we therefore will no longer hesitate but rather will
necessarily feel compelled to state the obvious. Indeed,
we would be remiss in our duty if we failed to
mention it. Needless to say.
A Dictionary of Love
This is not a proper dictionary but a compilation
of 600 quotations about love, companionship, etc.
... “from the profane to the profound divided into
191 categories by more that 300 authors, philosophers
and celebrities including Kahlil Gibran, Bertrand
Russell, Erich Fromm, Mother Theresa and
Zsa Zsa Gabor,’ as the cover tells us. How can 600
quotations make up 166 pages you ask? Well, the
quotations actually make up 134 pages, with pages
137-155 devoted to an Authors' Index, 157-163 to
a Bibliography, and 164-166 to a (continued) list of
permissions acknowledgments. The front matter
contains an alphabetical listing of the 191 categories.
Perhaps the reader can tell that this is not my
kind of book, but if one is a writer of Valentine's Day
greeting cards, or eschews the “From Poopsie to
Woopsie’ approach in advertising in The Times , or
just has to collect everything that mentions love,
then order the book directly from the publisher. My
favorite: “When Woodrow proposed to me, I was so
surprised I nearly fell out of bed.’--The second
Mrs. Woodrow Wilson. Of course, we are not told
whose bed.
Laurence Urdang
Language Maven Strikes Again
It is probably safe to say that Bill Safire is the
most prolific of modern writers on American English;
it is very likely true that he is the most prolific
writer on language in general. His articles, “On
Language,’ have appeared weekly (except when he
was taking a holiday) in The New York Times Magazine
since 1979. As American language buffs
know--even those who do not take The New York
Times --he is a fearless commentator on every aspect
of English who has gathered behind him not
only an army of admires but a cadre of contributors,
dubbed “the Lexicographic Irregulars,’ who send
him citations, comments, and queries. I call him
“Bill’ partly because most people do and partly because
we have known each other since about 1967
when his New Language of Politics was edited under
my direction at Random House. Although he is not a
professional linguist, Bill knows a great deal about
language and, notwithstanding some of the comments
he makes in his column, is very sensitive to it.
He is a very good writer, too, though I sometimes
find his arch approach unnecessary and a bit annoying:
he seems in a perpetual pursuit of the pun, an
affliction not entirely unknown in these hallowed
halls. However, I have the same criticism of Philip
Howard's commentaries on language published,
from time to time, in The Times and, formerly, in
these pages, and I can only attribute attrition among
VERBATIM subscribers to that and other weaknesses
in myself.
Because of the enormous variety of the pieces
collected here, the anthology is virtually impossible
to review. It doesn't, of course, deal with every aspect
of language, but it does cover a very broad
spectrum. In fact, anyone who pretends to have an
interest in language and who has a library of worthwhile
works on the subject must have all of Safire's
language books in his library. This is the sixth, to
which must be added Words of Wisdom and Good
Advice , which he wrote with his brother, Leonard
Safir. The indexes are quite good, though not as exhaustive
as one might have wished; yet one is likely
to find what he is looking for without difficulty.
Moreover, the books are attractively set out, which
adds to their readability. Even the title design is
clever: it is shown on the jacket (over his photo,
which the wretch clearly got his son to pose for),
cover, and title page as,
William Safire
Language Maven Strikes Again.
It is a pity that the articles are not provided with
the dates of their publication, though it is not difficult
to understand why the publisher might be reluctant
to do so. Yet, when I read that a subscription
to VERBATIM costs $10.00, while I am grateful for
the plug, I realize that the piece must have appeared
quite some time ago. A certain amount of updating
might be in order, perhaps by enclosing in square
brackets subscription rates in effect at the time of
publication of the book. Occasionally wrong, not
only is Bill not reluctant to admit his errors, he may
be one of the few who literally profited from their
mistakes by compiling a book containing many of
them: called I Stand Corrected (Times Books, 1984),
it actually contains other matter, too.
To a subject that is treated in the most turgid
fashion by linguists and with unusually irresponsible
scholarship by many other commentators, Bill Safire
brings just the right, literate, human touch, often
funny, ever lively, and always friendly, informative,
and entertaining.
Laurence Urdang.
The Power and the Word
In his Preface, the author offers, “My purpose in
writing this book is quite simple: to draw together
and make accessible some of the academic and other
reading that I have done in the past few years.’ In
this aim, he has succeeded quite admirably, though
one might be given to wonder what, if anything, he
reads for amusement. There are many extremely abstruse
notions in linguistics, and if any one might find
useful a brief summarization [ sic ] of many of the linguistic
philosophies of the past 150 years, this is a
convenient, minimalist approach. I say “minimalist’
because the ideas are watered down, then doubledistilled,
then compressed, then encapsulated. Because
linguists are atrociously bad writers, in most
cases, this would be a merciful deliverance from the
agony of wading through their texts at first hand
were it not for the unfortunate fact that Andersen is
a pretty boring writer himself. Also, it would have
been useful (and not necessarily munificent) to have
provided such a book with a reasonably replete index.
Alas, that is also a barebones affair. I was unable
to find Wittgenstein in the Index, but I would
not lay odds on his having been omitted from the
text.
The book is uneven, here summarizing an important
scholar's work in a paragraph or two, there
devoting one entire chapter to women's English and
another to black English, both rather disproportionately
trivial in the general scheme of linguistic theory.
Missing is coverage of more important areas of
linguistics, like computational linguistics, mechanical
translation, lexicography, language analysis by
computer, and some others. But that may merely be
reflective of my own interests, or does not reflect
the author's readings, or, probably, both. Well, one
cannot have everything, and, as I sometimes maintain
but rarely believe, a book should be reviewed
for what it contains and not condemned for what it
omits.
If you are a professional linguist, you can pass
this one by, unless you teach and need a crib for
your students. If you are a student of linguistics (in
any sense of the term), you might find it convenient
to have this book to save your running to the multivolume
encyclopedia or the original text (if you have
it) in order to see what B. F. Skinner and Noam
Chomsky were on about. Had it been more complete
and better done, the book might have served
as a survey text for linguistics, a work that is sorely
needed. The linguists who write books seem invariably
to be scholars who are touting their own points
of view, some of which are recondite, to say the
least. Surely there must be a teaching linguist out
there, somewhere, capable of putting together a cogent,
readable text that discusses not only the field
of linguistics but its various theories and their interrelations.
Unfortunately, there has not been a good
(bookwriting) linguist who was also a good writer of
expository prose since Otto Jespersen, the Santayana
of linguistics, and he died in 1943.
Laurence Urdang
I admire Stephen Hirschberg's mnemonic tricks
[XVI, 3], but he has left out an important postscript
to the Ogden Nash poem about the one- I lama and
the two-l llama . When Nash gets to the three- l
lllama and concludes there isn't any, he amends
himself in a footnote: “The author's attention has
been called to a type of conflagration known as the
three-alarmer . Pooh.’ I suppose this just supports an
old adage: footnotes are forgettable.
I have recently met two phrases that I cannot
find in the sort of reference books that might be expected
to define them if they are, as the author I was
reading implied, recognized political or economic
terms. The first, sobornostic collectivism , is said to
refer to a Leninist school of thought; the second,
agathistic distributism , is called “a theory of economic
nationalism.’
Sobornost is a word used by some Russian Orthodox
theologians, and there is, or was, a philosophic
position called agathism . (The curious are directed
to OED2.) Collectivism is part of the common
vocabulary now, and distributism was a movement
that enjoyed Chesterton and Belloc as its chief advocates.
I am however, unable to see much meaning
in those two-word phrases. Can any reader of VERBATIM
offer information about them?
People often ask me how they can “improve’
their vocabularies and what books I can recommend
as aids. My invariable reply is that the only genuine
way to increase one's vocabulary is by reading, reading,
reading. It may not be an immediately obvious
fact, but it is significant that the people who ask the
question--strangers, who telephone me--are quite
articulate, from which I deduce that one must have
reached some proficiency in language before becoming
aware that there might be some deficiency.
I can get by in a couple of other languages, chiefly in
reading, not speaking them, but feel that I cannot
afford the time to improved my control of other languages
at the expense of my continuing efforts to
learn what I can about English. That is, of course, a
purely personal view and should under no circumstances
be construed as an adverse comment on the
study of foreign languages. But there is a difference
between learning about them and trying to gain fluency
in them: I think I know a fair amount about
many languages in which I have no speaking or writing
ability; however rewarding fluency in them
might be for aesthetic reasons (to read their literature,
for example), one has just so much time...;
those who need them for practical reasons, should
not be deterred or discouraged by these remarks,
nor should those who wish to study them for any
other reason. The study and acquisition of foreign
languages, living and dead, is both intellectually and
practically rewarding. By the time I graduated from
college, I had studied Latin and French for eleven
years, Greek for four, German and Old English for
two, Lithuanian and Sanskrit for one, and had established
a passing acquaintance with Swedish, Danish,
Norwegian, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Polish.
I can get by in French (after I have spoken it for
several hours), but I do not speak much Latin,
partly, perhaps, because of the paucity of conversational
companions. I bring this up not to vaunt any
great accomplishments but to emphasize that I am
the first one to encourage the study of foreign languages.
I simply draw the line between studying
them and learning them: learning a foreign language
is extremely difficult, and most of those who are
truly fluent in a second language have been brought
up in bilingual (or, sometimes, trilingual) situations.
I raise the matter of foreign languages in connection
with vocabulary partly because familiarity
with Greek and Latin and French and German is
particularly useful in establishing an intimate relationship
with the English language. I have often
been told that English is a difficult language to learn,
but, as a native speaker, I have no personal opinion
about that. I do know, however, one person who
acquired English relatively late in life and whom I
consider to have a better command of the medium
than most native speakers. That person is an exception;
indeed, she has a younger sister who acquired
English at the same time who has difficulty expressing
herself. These examples may serve to confirm
what we all already suspect, that there is a spectrum
of natural ability for language, with the gifted at one
end--presumably, our poets, writers, lawyers, politicians,
teachers, and so forth--and the less gifted at
the other. The former possess Sprachgefühl `a sensitivity
for language; language sense'; from among the
latter I exclude pathological cases. In that connection
I am constrained to express my skepticism about
the accuracy and wisdom of diagnosing everyone
who has difficulty learning to read and write as being
afflicted with dyslexia: learning is sometimes difficult--I
had terrible trouble with history when I was
a student--and it is wrong to attribute a large percentage
of failures and difficulties to some disorder
rather than to the (possible) failings of a teacher or,
more often, to a simple lack of interest and motivation
in the student.
Fortunate are those who have been raised in a
reading household or have acquired a thirst and opportunity
for reading early in life. Fortunate, too,
are those who were given the opportunities of being
exposed to teachers who were not too busy or lazy
to assign weekly essays and to mark them for style as
well as for grammar and mechanics. For the manipulation
of language as an art one must first view it as a
craft, and the acquisition of any craft cannot be accomplished
without effort: one does not become a
writer by sitting around thinking about it or by saying
he is a writer when someone asks, “What do you
do?’; one is a writer by virtue of the fact that he
writes, with no regard whatsoever to publication.
In this connection, it is not the quantity of vocabulary
that marks a good writer but the quality.
When people ask me about increasing their vocabularies,
often suggest that they read The Growth of the
Soil , by Knut Hamsun. Hamsun, a Norwegian, won
the Nobel prize in 1920 and is seldom talked about
these days, though, as far as I am aware, his books
are in print; in any event, they are available from the
library. Hamsun wrote in Norwegian, of course; I do
not know who translated Growth in the edition in
which I originally read it (which I think was Modern
Library), but as a teenager I was terribly impressed
by the writing. The story is unimportant--some bucolic
tale--but the writing is extraordinary, and I
must assume that while the art of the original remains,
no small credit is due to the translator. What
makes this book such an exemplary piece of work is
that I doubt it contains many words of more than
one syllable (so to speak). It is consequently a model
of clarity as well as of simplicity and an abiding lesson
to all who think that increasing their vocabularies
will make them more articulate.
It is interesting to note that one of the most successful
vocabulary books bears the title, It Pays to
Increase Your Word Power , that is, not something
like “It Pays to Increase Your Vocabulary.’ In other
words, memorizing a slew of arcane, recondite sesquipedalianisms
is not what gives one the edge, it is
knowing how to use the language one already possesses.
“Use a word five times and it is yours’ is a
slogan that is occasionally seen blazoned across mail-order
advertising. It conjures up the picture of
someone boning up on his “word for the day’ just
before attending a cocktail party and then awkwardly
trying to steer the conversation in such a way
that he can insert a word like paradigm, paragon , or
parameter .
Those who wish to sharpen their language skills
are best advised to read and write, and to do both as
much as possible, perhaps trying to emulate an admired
writer. If it is felt that some guidance is
needed, then they should hire a tutor--there ought
to be plenty of good ones available everywhere. Attending
writing classes is a possible alternative, but
those vary so in quality as well as purpose that an
individual's needs might not be met. Finally, they
should not view editors as their tutors, submitting
their writings in the hope of critique: however good
they might be as editors, they are not necessarily
good teachers and are usually focused very specifically
on the demands of their publication.
“An investigation found the employee occasionally slept
on duty for almost five years.’ [From the York (Pennsylvania)
Daily Record , . Submitted by ]
“No detail is too small to overlook.’ [From an advertisement
for a lawn product on KCMO-TV, Kansas City, Missouri,
. Submitted by
.]
“The podium erected in front of building A was surrounded
by a semicircle of spectators on wooden chairs.’
[From Doctors by Erich Segal, p. 316. Submitted by ]
“Asked about social needs, Burdette said, `Our safety
net has a lot of holes in it.' ’ [From the Parkersburg (West
Virginia) News , . Submitted by
.]
“Our special tunic lets you breastfeel discreetly anywhere....’
[From The Right Start Catalogue, . Submitted by ]
Verbal Analogies V--Divination
Throughout their existence on earth, people have
sought ways to predict future events. Below is a small
sampling of the strange methods employed. 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.shoulder blades: omoplatoscopy:: mice:?
2.molybdomancy: molten lead:: ichnomancy:?
3.eggs: oomancy:: snakes:?
4.gyromancy: walking in a circle:: genethlialogy :?
5.clouds: nephelognosy:: fingernails:?
6.dactyliomancy: finger rings:: astragalomancy/cleromancy:?
7.axheads: axinomancy:: keys:?
8.crithomancy: grain strewn on corpses of sacrificial animals:: empyromancy:?
9.neighboring of horses: hippomancy:: moon:?
10.scyphomancy: cup:: scatomancy:?
11.ashes: spodomancy:: coagulation of cheese:?
12.uromancy: urine:: pessomancy:?
Answers
(a) Astrology (e) Fire and (i) Ophiomancy
(b) Cleidomancy smoke (j) Pebbles
(c) Dice/Knuckle- (f) Footprints (k) Selenomancy
bones (g) Myomancy (l) Tyromancy
(d) Excrement (h) Onychomancy
“That dive was right on the edge of new exploration
and new technology. Taking new technology into unexplored
realms of the earth is a once in a lifetime opportunity
that I hope to repeat many times.’ [From Underwater
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