Redundancy in Natural Languages
In this fast-paced age when information is digitized,
faxed, uplinked, and downloaded, it is appropriate
to consider natural languages from the
point of view of information theory. That is, we examine
the information content of text or messages
and the efficiency with which that information is
represented. The idea here is not to convert language
into some sort of highly efficient, but inhuman,
stream of ones and zeroes! That type of efficiency
is fine for computers, but not for human
beings. In fact, as we shall see, natural languages
contain a fair amount of redundancy. While this
does not provide us with the most concise form of
communication possible, it is a form that is ideally
suited to human experience, which, after all, is why
it came to be as it is.
It cannot be denied that some words are simply
longer than they strictly need to be. This is perhaps
more noticeable in German than in English. In German,
as new words are needed, they are often
formed from smaller words already existing. Thus,
we have the words Haupthandelsartikel , meaning
`staple,' and Autoreparaturwerkstatt , meaning `garage.'
If we were to construct a new vocabulary
from scratch from the point of view of an extremely
orderly, but over-zealous, cataloguer, we might
have as the first two words in our dictionary AAAA
and AAAB. We would continue in this manner until
we reached our last two words, ZZZY and ZZZZ .
Our dictionary would contain 456,976 words. This
lexicon is of sufficient size to form a rich written
language, such as German or English. In fact, we
could associate to each English word one of our new
words. Thus, the phrase To be, or not to be ? might
become THJL BDMN, OQRA NOOP THJL BDMN?
(So much for pronounceability!) Of course, in this
example, our two-letter words become four-letter
words, which hasn't helped keep things concise. But
now there is no word longer than four letters. This
game of re-cataloguing all our words undoes a natural
process which occurs as languages evolve. This is
the tendency to shorten frequently used words and
to allow less frequently used words to become
longer. This trend, known as Zipf's Law , causes
common words such as to, in, a , and it to be as short
as they are. It would be unthinkable to replace
these with ten-letter variants! In this way, language
at least attempts to follow a path of least resistance,
in which the effort expended in writing or speech is
lessened.
Despite the economies of effort introduced by
Zipf's Law, natural languages nonetheless contain
redundancies. One example is the indefinite article
a in English. Many languages are inflected, which is
also a form of redundancy, since English gets by
nicely with little inflection. In English, the function
of words within sentences is typically signaled by
word order. The sentences I threw the dog the ball
and I threw the ball the dog are not equivalent.
Here, some of the semantic information is provided
by word order, and not simply from the words themselves.
In an inflected language, endings affixed to
the words for dog and ball indicate which object is
direct and which is indirect. Thus, it is possible to
rearrange words as in the example above. The result
may not always be idiomatic, but it will probably get
the point across. Such flexibility allows for a greater
degree of expression in poetry, for example. Thus,
one has a romantic poem written in Latin in which
the first line contains the words for man and woman
on opposite ends of the line. By the end of the
poem, the words have gravitated toward the middle
of the line. It can even be argued that word forms
used to show tense are superfluous, since Chinese
has no notion of tense. A sentence may be in the
past, present, or future, depending on context. One
wonders how a person translating into Chinese
would deal with unexpected or unpredictable tense
shifts: Veni, video, vincam!
Not only does the degree of redundancy vary
from language to language, but also from one writing
style to another. One author might have a more loquacious
bent than another. Neither author can be
said to have the better style. A lengthy passage, if
written well, can be more expressive and have
greater effect than a simple, one-line statement of
fact. On the other hand, brevity is what gives a pithy
aphorism its strength. This is true of both poetry
and prose. More so than prose, however, poetry
tends to explore both extremes--the concise and
the protracted. Poe, for example, used repetition in
his poem The Bells to convey to the reader a sense of
actually hearing the tolling of the bells, as though
the sounds themselves were imprinted on the page.
Somehow, it would not have been the same had Poe
written simply that “The bells rang a lot.” Or
“bells, bells, et cetera.” At the other extreme, some
poets attempt to carefully choose words in such a
way that the poem expresses a great deal in very
little space. Thus, we have a verse form like haiku,
in which the totality of the poem is condensed into
only seventeen syllables. If only certain genres of
prose could be as succinct! A never-ending meeting
at the office could be completed in plenty of time for
a coffee break. Presidential debates could begin and
end with the introductory niceties, since very little
of substance is ever said. The civilized world would
be grateful indeed if lengthy advertising pitches
were instead given in haiku:
Sudzo detergent
Clean white garments full of fluff
Buy many boxes
Notwithstanding certain benefits arising from
compactness, redundancy actually plays an important
role in the communication process. One is reminded
of an experiment in which two subjects
were placed in separate rooms and allowed to communicate
only through a teletype. One person was
given a box of parts to a wheelbarrow, as provided
from the factory (“some assembly required”). The
other was given the assembly instructions. The object
was to successfully assemble the wheelbarrow.
Sentences transmitted usually read something like
Put bolt into L-shaped part. Such an imperative
might elicit the response Which bolt? or Which L?
Or perhaps the recipient of the message would insert
some bolt into some part, only to find later that
a needed part had already been attached. When the
test is modified to allow phone conversation, the
time required for assembly decreases dramatically.
Phrases become more verbose and more redundant,
but more communicative. With very little effort, it
is possible to utter a terrific run-on sentence like,
“Put the medium-sized brass bolt--not the one with
the little black top, but the other one--into the sort
of oblong L-shaped part with the green paint on one
end, but first make sure that you have the axle
pointed towards the side with the sort of wooden
handle.” A person would not be inclined to type out
such a message verbatim. More likely, he would remove
occasional words deemed to be redundant.
But in the process, the sentence would become less
colloquial and less intelligible.
The presence of redundancy in language is perhaps
best observed when the communication process
breaks down. The fact that a deaf person can
determine a spoken phrase by reading lips demonstrates
that the information is simultaneously being
conveyed in two different ways. Those with normal
hearing can use visual clues to assist during the listening
process. Thus, it is possible to pick out the
necessary morsels of information in noisy surroundings,
if facial expressions, gestures and other contextual
clues are taken into account. But even in the
absence of visual clues, the very sounds of human
speech are overflowing with many times the volume
of data strictly required to convey the message. Examining
a graph of a simple speech component, such
as the sound of a vowel, one sees a complex pattern
of superimposed waves, having myriad peaks and
valleys. When such a pattern is recorded and stored
in computer-readable (“digitized”) form, it occupies
an inordinately large amount of storage. This seems
all the more wasteful, considering that the only useful
information being conveyed in our example is a
single vowel sound. This apparent redundancy,
once again, proves to be beneficial. Conversing over
a noisy telephone line would be impossible were it
not for the complexity of speech sounds. When one
of a hundred “sound peaks” is altered by an electrical
pop or crackle, the sound of an E does not suddenly
change to that of a U; it simply sounds like a
“noisy E.” If, on the other hand, speech contained
“just enough” data, but no more, then the alteration
of just one peak (or bit) would change the sound (or
character) entirely. A moderately noisy phone line
would render messages as unintelligible gibberish
(even those messages that did not start out that
way!). For this reason, when computers “talk” to
one another over communication lines in their
highly efficient system of beeps, conventional phone
lines are seldom used, owing to the high error rate
that would result. In any event, computers must use
an elaborate method of double-checking transmitted
data, to ensure that no error is made. In other
words, computers must introduce redundancy
where none previously existed in order to communicate
effectively.
Predictability is closely related to redundancy.
If the recipient of a message (such as the reader of
text) is able to predict the next word before seeing
it, the word is apparently not conveying any additional
information. In the following transmission, it
is easy to predict the concluding letter: WITH LIBERTY
AND JUSTICE FOR AL . (The transmission has almost
certainly not ended there!) On the other hand, only
the most avid trivia buff could complete the sentence
HARRY TRUMAN'S HAT SIZE WAS ..... While it is
very unlikely that the final word is giraffe, the correct
completion of the sentence requires somewhat
more insight. Similarly, the ability to infer the existence
of an omitted letter or word (such as the indefinite
article) is a form of prediction. It is hard to
ascertain the missing word in the sentence After
crash-landing on the planet Zartok, I saw the most
enormous -- I had ever seen! The word in question
is probably not portfolio. But lack of familiarity with
the planet Zartok precludes a more accurate guess.
Although these examples deal with predictability
based on semantic content, it is also possible to base
predictions on patterns within the text itself. In English,
a Q is almost never followed by anything but a
U . Also, the letter E is the most frequently used letter
in English. So if one had no other information
whatsoever about an omitted letter, guessing that
the letter might be E would probably be more reasonable
than guessing X. And if the missing letter
seemed to function as a vowel, the odds would be
greater still. This is the type of predictability studied
in information theory.
Effective communication must contain the
“right blend” of redundancy (predictability) and
new information (unpredictability). If a message is
too redundant, it becomes tiresome. (This calls to
mind a British comedy sketch in which an announcer
speaks on behalf of the Society for People Who Say
Things Twice Things Twice .) But as we have seen, if a
communiqué has been compacted to maximize efficiency,
the listener must strive to receive each and
every morsel, a process which leaves no room for
error. An analogy might be made with music. If, on
first hearing, a piece of music is entirely predictable,
droning on in endless clichés, then it lacks a certain
creative spark, and is not enjoyable. Conversely, if
the listener continually finds himself disoriented
with each new note, unable to identify any underlying
pattern or theme, then the piece seems merely
a random collection of sounds and is equally uninteresting.
Such a composition would no doubt leave
the impression that the string section had suddenly
caught fire.
Redundancy is itself a phenomenon worthy of
study, independent of the study of language or music.
The physicist studies redundancy in the context
of order and disorder of physical systems. The disorder
of a system is called its entropy . The laws of
thermodynamics tell us that closed systems tend to
become more disorderly over time. One such closed
system is the universe itself. We find that pockets of
heat in the form of stars and galaxies are spreading
out and cooling down over time. Thus, we can imagine
a time in the distant future when the universe
will become almost uniformly cold, and very few
temperature gradients will exist which could serve
to provide a source of usable energy, such as the
sun. Without being drawn into these difficult questions,
which require many concepts and tools developed
in information theory, suffice it to say that redundancy
plays a central role in nature itself, and
not just in language. As we have seen, redundancy
is not the evil one might imagine it to be at first
glance. Indeed, it is necessary for the very existence
of language. But I repeat myself.
“And as for that better mousetrap, the X-terminator
($1) is humane--the mouse is trapped, not killed--and
can be reused.” [From the Philadelphia Inquirer, . Submitted by ]
“Suspected extremists bomb shop in India.” [Headline
from the Philadelphia Inquirer, . Submitted
by ]
Little Waterloos on
Europe's Language Frontiers
The unification of Europe is a noble thought,
but what are you going to do about the language
frontiers? However bravely you sweep away
customs barriers and encourage Europeans to move
freely over the face of their continent, they will continue
to come terrible and humiliating croppers at
these invisible boundaries. My own experience
bears this out only too painfully.
The first time I ever ventured onto the Continent
from my home in the depths of Britain was
when I went to work as a teacher on the Zugerberg,
a hilltop in Switzerland, many years ago. I got out of
the train at Zug, still half-dazed from a night trip
across France, and what did I see in the sleepy
square but a small tram in the window of which was
a placard reading--unmistakably-- Zugerberg hell .
I very nearly turned tail and fled without further
investigation. I even entertained the thought that
the placard might have been put there by the diabolical
pupils of the school I was going to, who were not
at all keen on having a new English teacher. I was
not to know that, since hell in German means
`bright,' this was merely an intimation to the townsfolk
that although the town itself was plunged in fog,
the sun was shining on the nearby heights.
Other travelers have no doubt suffered similar
shocks. Those who travel to St. Moritz by rail, for
instance, may well be shaken when, just before arriving
in their dream resort, they stop in a station
where a big sign tells them: St. Moritz Bad! Of
course, everyone knows that St. Moritz isn't really
so bad, so they probably conquer their apprehensions
and go ahead. But what about Bad Ragaz or
even Bad Endbach? Many of those who visit country
towns in German-speaking parts will be proudly
shown the local Rathaus . They may well shudder at
the thought that such a fine old building (actually a
town hall) is rodent-infested. I feel even more
deeply for those expectant mothers who, turning a
corner on a small Swiss station in search of a public
convenience, have been faced by that one brutal,
laconic word: Abort! After all, wouldn't WC serve
the purpose just as well?
At this point the reader will notice that we are
here on delicate ground, straight among words that
may offend our most intimate sensibilities. When we
meet them at a certain distance, we can usually manage
to take the sting out of them. For instance, if a
German botánist called Fuchs gave his name to a
flower, which is therefore known as a fuchsia , we
can elegantly get round the issue in English by pronouncing
it “FEW-sha.” Or if there is a well-known
pianist by the name of Kunz , we can avoid cataclysms
in Yorkshire by calling him “KOONDS.” But
when you run into such things in real life, head-on
and with no warning, there is really no remedy: all
you can do is face the inevitable with whatever fortitude
you can summon. An evil fate of this kind befell
a friend of mine from Gloucestershire who went
to live in Germany near a town called Scheidt , the
pronunciation of which proved to substantiate his
worst misgivings. In the early days of his sojourn
in the area, he tells me, his voice used to break
with shame every time he went to a railway ticket
counter to ask for a return to Scheidt.
But to get to my own experience. I had not been
on the Continent long when I wanted to buy some
nylons for a girl friend. The German word for silk
stockings escaped me, but the English word hose
promptly suggested itself to my mind. So I went into
a shop selling ladies' lingerie and asked for Damenhosen .
The girl behind the counter seemed slightly
taken aback, and when she came and dangled some
lacy panties before my eyes, I was taken aback too.
Perhaps she thought I was a transvestite and had to
be humored. In fact, I was seriously embarrassed, for
I was still young enough to have a sense of shame.
On another occasion I was in town with two
young Englishmen who had just arrived on the scene
and did not speak a word of German between them.
We were feeling peckish although it was only mid
afternoon, so we decided to go and have a snack in a
restaurant. The waitress, who spoke a little English,
recommended a dish which happened to be in season.
It turned out to be a paste made from sweet
chestnuts which looked rather like a dish of worms.
We were somewhat intimidated by the look of it, but
we ate it--without enthusiasm, but with the stiff upper
lip we had imbibed, so to speak, with our
mothers' milk. An hour or so later we still felt peckish,
so we tried another establishment. We decided
that this time we did not want anything sweet, but
rather something a little more substantial. As a precautionary
measure I consulted the menu, and there
my eye fell on the vermicelles . I explained to my
companions that this must be pasta, a kind of Continental
macaroni (in those days macaroni was about
the only kind of pasta you ever saw in England, if
we mercifully forget the incredible invention of
spaghetti on toast). They were all in favor, and five
minutes later we got our snack: it was that chestnut
paste again, looking more like worms than ever.
We felt that we had been tricked by a malicious fate.
We sat there, unable to start on the stuff, wishing
that we were in Timbuktoo, where we could at least
have had camels' eyes.
The same malevolent powers also operate in the
opposite direction. An Austrian lady of my acquaintance
was interned in Yorkshire during the Second
World War. One day she and her companions were
allowed to go to the cinema in a nearby town. When
they came out, they needed to go to the toilet, so
they began to look round for a public convenience.
They had hardly turned into the high street when
their search appeared to be successful, for they
found a door that bore the sign Closed . That, they
thought, could only be the English for the German
word Klosett . But they were disappointed--the
door simply did not open. It must have been a
Thursday afternoon, for all down the street there
were Closed signs--but no means of getting in anywhere.
They even began to suspect that the townspeople
were playing a mean practical joke on them.
By now they were nearly bursting--with indignation,
of course--but there was nothing for it: they
had to wait till they got back to their internment
quarters. Continence, after all, is a virtue, or so say
those who do not have it imposed on them.
Fortunately these linguistic snares land us in
trouble only for a brief moment, ignominious as that
moment may occasionally be. Being saddled with a
wrong name is a more lasting curse. I was once
called in to help a man whose brother had died in
the United States, so that as next of kin he had to
handle the correspondence. Knowing no English, he
obviously needed assistance. He was called Schittli ,
which, believe it or not, is an absolutely good Swiss
name. His brother, strangely enough, was not called
Schittli. Having emigrated to the USA, he had discovered
that the family monicker, however respectable
in Appenzell, would never do in Pittsburgh. He
had therefore had it changed to Hittli , which involved
the sacrifice of only two consonants. Alas, it
was not long before the shadow of a certain Adolf
fell over Europe: Hittli was so near to Hitler that the
likeness became, for an immigrant, decidedly uncomfortable.
Poor Hittli took the only course open
to him, and sacrificed a vowel. He died a Hattli .
The slings and arrows of the spoken language
may prove even more perfidious in writing. When I
took my first office job in Switzerland, I had a secretary
who knew no French or English, so that I had to
write letters in these languages by hand for her to
type. One of the first happened to be to a French
VIP, and she opened with full diapason: Nous avons
l'horreur d'accuser réception de votre lettre... .
Honour and horror are evidently very close in
France. Another opening gambit read like this: Nous
vous remercions de vos linges du 24 juillet .... On
yet another occasion I had to write to a colleague by
the name of Robert who had had the effrontery to
criticize me, and I wanted to do so in a firm but
studiedly polite tone. Once again, the catastrophe
came pat at the very outset: Dead Bob ....
Only too often the pitfalls awaiting the unsuspecting
on the language frontiers are downright
scatological. Why is it that the Dutch wince when
first informed of the location of Zurich Airport?
Why do the Italians almost choke with mirth when
they overhear an American calling his girl friend
“My pet”? And why did a German acquaintance of
mine break into such coarse guffaws when he came
across a passage in an English novel in which lovers
were described as “lying among the furze”? Persons
not conversant with the languages involved will
probably have no answers to these rhetorical questions,
but I feel sure they will prefer to be spared the
obnoxious truth.
Sometimes, however, the obnoxious truth just
cannot be suppressed, being explicit and official.
Thus the inhabitants of one Swiss canton drive round
with VD written in large letters on their number
plates, leaving you to believe it or not. Similarly,
fine-feeling English-speaking visitors to the Locarno
region will freeze with horror when they see the
initials of the Ferrovie Autolinee Regionali Ticinesi--the
Ticinese Regional Railways and Bus Services--brazenly
displayed on the local buses, and I
once heard an Australian murmur that he had never
seen anything quite as big and blue as that in his own
country. Then there was the young man who had
come over from Yorkshire to serve an apprenticeship
on the Continent. On the day of his departure,
he proudly showed me a ticket issued by a Swiss
mountain railway. It indicated the price of a single
trip: 1 Fahrt Fr. 9.50. He was taking it home to
Yorkshire to prove to the locals just how high the
cost of living is in Switzerland.
You have published a number of letters refuting
the idea that the difference in coefficient of thermal
expansion between brass and iron is responsible for
the balls/brass/monkey saying [e.g., EPISTOLA from
James T. Herron, XVI,2]. May I as a humble physicist
and, above all, a certified gas fitter, stir up a little
mud in this matter?
All the arguments put forward assume an ideal
fit in the original pile and one temperature change,
with detailed calculations based thereon: therein, I
suggest, lies the rub. The radius of curvature of the
depressions in the monkey must have been greater
than that of the balls or they would not pile in the
first place. Given this, the bottom layer of balls
would be pushed apart as far as possible by the
weight of those above. The temperature rises; the
brass expands more than the bottom balls, which are
again pushed apart by the weight of those above.
The temperature drops, but the weight of those
above would prevent those in the bottom layer from
returning to their original positions. Repeat this a
number of times, even from day to night and back,
and the pile becomes more and more unstable until
possibly one cold spell causes collapse.
Milestones, Footrocks,
and Inchpebbles in the
Historical Development
of Formal Logic
The study of formal logic was begun in ancient
Grease, in order to make the machinery of
reasoning operate more smoothly. The principal figure
in this development was Dr. `Arris Toddle, who
invented the Syllogism in Barbara, as well as those in
Betsy, Patricia, and Harriet. This form of reasoning
runs essentially as follows:
All men are mortal.
Socrates was a man.
∴Socrates was mortal.
However, since Socrates was mortal, he must have
died by now, so he is no longer alive and thus is no
longer a man. It follows that he is now no longer
mortal and thus will live forever. This establishes
the immortality of the sole, as well as that of the
heel, calf, ankle, and toe. A similar argument can be
carried out for anyone at all, except, of course, for
Barbara herself, who was not a man to begin with.
A refinement of this form of argument, worked
out by Dr. Ross C. Knee, is the Barbara of Seville,
which underlies much of the Seville Rites legislation
of the 1960's. These important practices grew out
of a popular mass movement composed by King
Martin Luther, the only man ever to be awarded
ninety-five masters degrees, after writing as many
theses, and were inspired by the Seville Shepherds,
who were led by Seville herself, a woman with six
hundred ninety-three distinct personalities, all but
at most a very few of which were entirely unaware
of the existence of most but not nearly all of the
remaining others. As in the case of Barbara, Seville's
reasoning can also be stated in the form of a
syllogism:
All men are mortal.
At least two hundred ninety-five of Sevilles' distinct
personalities are men.
∴Seville is suffering from a severe identity crisis.
However, since the men are mortal, the proportion
of Seville that comprises them will gradually decrease,
leading to here ventual recovery, just in time
to die from other causes. This leaves Socrates the
sole survivor, again establishing the immortality of
the sole.
The next great development in logic was carried
out by the Muddyville School, also known as The
Skull Ass-ticks, when they played rock music on the
side to make a living.
These logicians specialized in
the counting of angels, which they found more effective
than sheep in anesthetizing their students. It is
to these great minds that we owe the Fundamental
Theorem of Formal Logic, which reads as follows:
Fundamental Theorem of Formal Logic:
(a) Exactly 2973 angels can dance on the head
of a pin.
(b) Exactly 3874 angels can dance on the head
of a needle.
(c) Exactly 264 angels can dance on the head
of a two-penny nail.
Since angels tend to be of uncertain gender, neither
Barbara nor Seville will have anything to do
with them, so their status vis-à-vis mortality remains
an open question. This is, in fact, the most important
unresolved issue in all of formal logic, because of
greatly inflated land values and a rapidly increasing
angel population, both of which place dancing space
at a premium.
Logic lay dormant for many centuries after being
worked over so brilliantly by The Skull Ass-ticks,
but it was finally rescued from angelic oblivion by
Herr Professor Gottlob der Friggin', who proved
that the morning star is not the same as the evening
star, even though both are Venus. This invalidated
the previously unquestioned Principle of the Substitutability
of Identicals, which had been formulated
by Leibniz in his battle with Figby Newton for recognition
as the original discoverer of the infinitesimal
calculus. This principle can be formulated as a
syllogism, as follows:
Leibniz discovered the calculus.
Newton is not Leibniz.
∴Newton did not discover the calculus.
However, Gottlob's figgin' work showed that this argument
was invalid, since Leibniz worked in the
morning, Newton worked in the evening, and it was
really Galileo that discovered the calculus while
looking at Jupiter, not Venus, through his telescope.
Galileo also disproved the principle that heavier objects
fall faster than lighter ones, by dropping an apple
and a watermelon off the top of a tower. It was
this apple that gave Newton the idea of Universal
Gravitation, when it landed conveniently on his
head, and it was Universal Gravitation that suggested
to Newton the concepts of the infinitesimal
calculus. Exactly the same thing happened to
Leibniz, except that he got hit by the watermelon
and so was unconscious for several hours. This gave
Newton time to get to the patent office and file his
claim for calculus, before Leibniz could figure out
what had happened.
Gottlob's discoveries laid the foundation for a
tremendous spurt of work in formal logic from the
beginning of this century to the present day. First,
Russell N. Whitehead managed to derive all known
mathematics from logical principles, in contrast to
previous mathematicians, who had derived it from
illogical principles. This led to the famous Gödel
theorem, which says that all mathematics cannot be
derived from logical principles. Gödel proved this
theorem by showing that every sentence in a logical
language can be encoded as a statement about positive
numbers. Since English is not a logical language,
it follows that sentences in English can be
encoded only in non-positive numbers and thus that
English can make only negative statements about
mathematics. Since the same is true of every natural
language, it follows that mathematics makes no
sense whatsoever and thus that it can be ignored
for all practical purposes. This led Al Tarski to the
discovery that logic itself depends only on the
weather, as indicated in the following syllogism:
Snow is white.
Snow is white.
∴Snow is white.
Since “snow is white” is true if and only if snow is
white, and since “snow is white” is true if
and only if “snow is white” is true, it follows that
“ ` “snow is white” is true' is true” is true if and only
if “ `snow is white' is true” is true. These discoveries
resulted in the theory of models, the clothing worn
by whom gradually shrank to zero, thereby enabling
Abe Robinson to prove the existence of infinitesimals,
with predictable consequences in the physiognomy
of certain members of the audience. This reestablished
the intersubstitutability of Newton and
Leibniz, as long as it not snowing and Venus is still
visible.
The most recent and, in many ways, the most
exciting development in formal logic is the new field
of fuzzy logic, in which precision is replaced with
vagueness and truth with maybe and perhaps. This
was invented by Lofty Zappa, who is also known,
frankly, as the father of invention, because of his
work on the logic of necessity. Rather than taking
statements to be either true or false, fuzzy logic assumes
that statements are true or false to some
degree, so the Syllogism in Barbara, for example,
would be reformulated as follows:
Socrates was more or less a man.
Most men are usually mortal.
∴Socrates was most likely mortal to degree
.86539.
Since the average lifespan in ancient Athens was
51.86 years, it follows that Socrates would have
lived until he was 44.8791254 years old, if he had
not developed a taste for hemlock. Unfortunately,
his addiction to this controlled substance led eventually
to his arrest on charges of drug abuse, thereby
enabling Play-dough to counterfeit all of his ideas. It
was in critiquing Play-dough that Toddle developed
the Syllogism in Barbara, but this was where we
started.
Preparation of this essay was supported, in part, by a grant from
the International Society for Skeptical Humorism. I would like to
thank Richard Trudeau, Sherlock Holmes, and Attila the Hun for
helpful comments on an earlier draft.
See A. Toddle, “Never Metaphysic I Didn't Like,” Chapter 1 of
Physics: Friends or Enemas ?, Athens: Slavers Free Press, for full
descriptions and telephone numbers.
See K.M. Luther et al., Reformation and Information: Prolegomena
to a Theology of Computational Processes , Wittenberg:
Church Publishers (very) Ltd., for a complete list of Theses, with
Index.
See S. Cushing, Quantifier Meanings: A Study in the Dimensions of
Semantic Competence , Amsterdam: North-Holland, if you are having
difficulty deciphering the sentence to which this footnote is
attached.
See T. Aquinas, “Talking Heads and Ticking--s,” Rolling Stone ,
-842: 45-97, for relevant commentary.
See C. Ogden and I. Richards, The Meaning of Meaning . New
York: Harcourt Brace & Co. Also see C.C. Ogden and I.I. Richards,
The Meaning of the Meaning of Meaning , New New York:
Harharcourt Brace & Co. Also also see C.C.C. Ogden and I.I.I.
Richards, The Meaning of the Meaning of the Meaning of Meaning .
New New New York: Harharharcourt Brace and Co. Also also
also see S. Cushing, “Not only only , but also also ,” Linguistic
Inquiry , 9:127-132.
See N. Abisco, Was Leibniz Crackers ?, Cambridge, UK: Oxon, for
a tasteful discussion of this topic.
Shocking as it may seem, Whitehead actually plagiarized the title
of his major work, Principia Mathematica, from Newton, whose
major work was also entitled Principia Mathematica . Newton,
however, plagiarized his title from Machiavelli, whose major
work, II Principe Mathematice , laid the groundwork for all future
studies in quantitative political science. It was Machiavelli, in
fact, who invented the notion of disinformation , on which all contemporary
politics crucially depends. See note 3 for relevant discussion.
See A. Tarski and B. Dylan, Don't Need a Weatherman to Know
Which Way the Wind Blows , Berkeley: Snow White & Dwarfs.
Publishers.
See A. Robinson and E. Zakon, “A Set-theoretical Characterization
of Enlargements,” in W.A.J. Luxemburg (ed.), Applications
of Model Theory to Algebra, Analysis, and Probability Theory .
New York: Holt Rinehart & Winston.
See B.R. Gaines, “Foundations of Fuzzy Reasoning,” in M.M.
Gupta, G.N. Saradis, and B.R. Gaines (eds.), Fuzzy Automata and
Decision Processes , New York: Elsevier North-Holland. Also see S.
E. Robertson, “Nature of Fuzz: A Diatribe,” Journal of the American
Society of Information Science , 29:304-307.
See J. Fonda, Barbarella: Queen of the Gal Axis , Hollywood, CA:
Sexist Press, Inc., for the cosmic significance of all this.
I should like to correct three arithmetic errors
in the article, “To Abbrev, or not to Abbreviate,” by
Don Sharp [XVII,2].
First, a change from twenty-one letters ( master
of ceremonies ) to two letters ( M.C. ) is a reduction of
91.5%, not 300%. A 100% reduction, incidentally,
is a change from any positive quantity to zero.
Second, a change from two letters ( M.C. ) to five
letters ( emcee ) is a growth of 150%, not 125%.
Finally, a change from thirteen letters ( vice president )
to two letters ( VP ) is a reduction of 84.6%, not
250%.
Words matter, but so do numbers.
Mr. Sharp's arithmetic is painful to behold. Reducing
the twenty-one letters of master of ceremonies
to the two-letter M.C. in no way represents a
300% reduction in letter-load. It's actually 90.47%,
give or take. Similarly, reducing Vice President to
VP is a reduction of 84.62%.
...If from thirteen ( Vice President ) to two
( VP ), the reduction would be 85%.
...Reducing master of ceremonies to M.C. represents
an 88% reduction, and reducing Vice President
to VP represents an 85% reduction.
[I knew all that.... -- Editor ]
Leslie Dunkling writes [XVII,1], “In many Jewish
families [belief that use of a living person's name
would deprive him of his soul] prevents the use of a
relation's name if the person concerned is still
alive.” The belief is that giving a living person's
name would deprive him of his full life. It is found
among all orthodox Ashkenazim and many of their
descendants.
French Leave
The title of Louis Malle's movie Au Revoir les
Enfants is usually untranslated in reviews and
advertisements in the United States. When it is
translated (as when an English translation follows
the French title) it is rendered as “Goodbye, Children.”
This translation is as good as any, but quite
unsatisfactory. For that reason and because English
is closely related to French (lexically anyhow, having
borrowed a great portion of its vocabulary from
French), the title can be left in the original as a title
in Danish or Polish could not be.
Snob appeal may be involved here. It is wondrous
the way French is able to maintain its position
as the language of style and status, at least throughout
the Western world. In such magazines as The
New Yorker and Time French words and phrases appear
with much greater frequency than bits of any
other foreign language. The issue of The New Yorker
for July 25, 1988, taken at random, had in its “Dancing”
section on page 79 two whole sentences in
French, untranslated. The issue of Town & Country
for September, 1988, had a full-page advertisement
for Sea Island Cotton entrely in French except for
the American name of the company. John Updike's
novel S. has two or three brief business letters in
likewise untranslated French. I suspect that American
and British readers with some claim to international
sophistication are flattered by the assumption
of some ad writers and authors that a little French
will not be Greek to them.
However, the short phrase Au revoir les enfants
would resist translation even if it were desirable to
put it into English. Only the first of its four words
slips easily enough into English, as till . But English
is the only European language I know that has no
calque for the expression au revoir , probably because
we have adopted this French phrase, like
many others, intact, while other languages have the
phrase calqued as: hasta la vista, a rivederci, do
svidaniya, do widzenia, auf Wiedersehen, etc. At any
rate, goodbye really does not translate au revoir,
Adieu, also borrowed intact into English, would do
as the French equivalent of goodbye , and vice versa;
but that equivalence gets us nowhere with au revoir ,
except to point up the fact that goodbye does not
mean au revoir .
I once heard a Frenchman in Madrid tell a couple
of Spanish shop clerks a joke that illustrates the
difference between adieu `goodbye' and au revoir :
At the Rio de Janeiro airport the planes of various
countries were taking off one after another, and the
terminal was crowded with passengers and with
friends and relatives seeing loved ones off. An Air
France jet took off, and the loved ones on the
ground waved and shouted, “Au revoir! Au revoir!”
Then an Iberia plane taxied away to shouts of “Hasta
la vista!” And then it was the turn of a jet flown by a
Brazilian airline with a notoriously poor safety record.
As it taxied away to take off, the crowd more
intoned than shouted, “Adeus! Adeus!” (Portuguese
for adieu ).
Since English lacks a calque for au revoir , it
would be technically possible to make one, perhaps
on the model of Joyce's (or his Stephen Dedalus')
“agenbite (of inwit)” for remorse: till the agenseeing .
But of course such bitterly pedantic wordplay would
be unthinkable on the lips of the plain-spoken priest
whose words give the Malle film its title and some of
its poignancy. And if agenseeing is too far-fetched
and pedantic, so long is a shade too informal, slangy.
And what about the simple definite article in the
title? Surely it should pose no problem. Au contraire ,
I suspect it is the most meaningful and untranslatable
word in the four-word phrase. It is not
strictly standard French before a common noun in
the vocative case, but seems borrowed from the
folksy language of camaraderie, the slang of street,
barracks, and campus. One does not sing, “Allons,
les enfants de la patrie....” In modern French
novels about military experiences, however, one
may find a soldier proposing to his buddies, “Allons,
les gars....” In such usage the plural definit article
seems to imply a sense of solidarity, of togetherness,
of addressing not just any or all boys or kids or
whatever but of specifying a particular group. Further,
since les in this special usage has its origin in
boyish slang, it implies masculinity, as guys might in
English. In the title in question les might be translated
by the pronoun you and the whole title as: “So
long, you guys.” This translation conveys the meaning
of the French title, all right, but is nevertheless
unacceptable because such jaunty informality would
be totally out of character for the priest whose warm
yet solemn farewell at a tragic parting gives the
movie its title.
Nor does enfants always mean `children,' exactly.
The New Cassell's French Dictionary defines
enfant in English as: “Child, infant, baby; son or
daughter; descendant; citizen, native; ( Law ) offspring,
issue.” Then some of the following examples
given in the dictionary show that in some contexts
the word does not mean `child' at all: c'est un bon
enfant `he is a good fellow'; l'enfant prodigue `the
prodigal son.' Moreover, some of the older students
addressed by the priest in the movie are past childhood,
though in priestly parlance anyone, even a nonagenarian,
may be called a child. So perhaps children
will do here, though arguably boys might be a
nuance better.
It may be that French, because it so rich in connotation
and nuance, is harder to translate than most
languages. English has a much larger vocabulary, a
fact that has been adduced to support the argument
that French is inferior to English. But the larger vocabulary
of English is irrelevant in two respects:
much of this larger vocabulary is esoteric, exotic,
pedantic, or otherwise as foreign to everyday English
usage as Chinese; and whereas vocabulary is
quantified by words, the expressive units of French
tend to be phrases, such as chemin de fer, joie de
vivre , and raton laveur . By the usual lexical reckoning
one could say that French has no word for rail-road
or raccoon .
Phrases, being more semantically complex than
single words, are usually harder to translate. English
too has its untranslatable phrases composed of words
that are individually translatable. For instance, try
turning these two into French or Russian: Is you is, or
is you ain't my baby? and Why'd you bring that old
book I didn't want to be read to out of up for? Generally
speaking, a phrase or clause is difficult to translate
in proportion as it diverges from the standard, or as
some would say, as it is ungrammatical. To paraphrase
Tolstoy paraphrasing Pushkin: All grammatical expressions
resemble each other; each ungrammatical expression
is ungrammatical in its own way.
“If I were king...” I'd be in a subjunctive mood
We shall have to wait and see if the changes of
Margaret Thatcher's political fortunes are reflected
in the language as spoken in Britain, for one might
be tempted to infer that the assertiveness of her tenure
was partly responsible for the demise of the subjunctive
in contrary-to-fact constructions--at least
in those perceived by her to be contrary to what she
perceived as fact. Although it is not impossible to
find a subjunctive in British writing of today, it is
becoming increasingly difficult; indeed, in a book I
recently completed for Oxford University Press, virtually
all subjunctives were replaced by indicatives
(which, because of the solecisms created in American
English, occasioned my rewriting of the text to
avoid the problem). British writers (among whom I
number journalists, who, after all, probably write
more English than most people) sometimes go to
great lengths to avoid using the subjunctive, resulting
in writing that jars what poor sensibilities might
remain to Americans:
...[S]he cancelled all his interviews after two
days and insisted he flew home... Cape dared
suggest he travelled by train. [From “Books,”
The Sunday Times, 28 October 90:8:9.]
This is not impossible to say, but it means `She
insisted that he had already flown home [though it
is unlikely that he had].' “She insisted that he fly
home” means `She wanted him to fly home,' though
whether he actually did or not would be revealed in
a later chapter. Cape dared suggest he travelled by
train conjures up an image of Cape (“his” publisher)
having the effrontery to put forward the theory that
the absent “he” absconded by rail. Had the subjunctive
been invoked, these mysterious motives
would have vanished in a trice.
Because we were an alien family, dad and mum
were very keen that we learnt how to compose
ourselves in this new society. [From an article by
Magnus Magnusson in “Saturday Review,” The
Times, 20 October 90:70.]
We advise that the above items are not used
until the retailer or the company has been contacted.
[Customer Safety Warning Advt. by
Leisuretime Products Ltd, Sundial House, 89-93
Goldsworth Road, Woking, Surrey GU21 1LT, in
The Sunday Times, 29 May 1988, B2.]
The practice is neither consistent nor universal:
It failed to be manufactured because she insisted
it be made in Britain... [From an article
by Joseph Connolly, The Times, 7 November
90:19]
Someone on the Isle of Wight complains that
you couldn't get the children off to bed if it were
still light at midnight,... [From the op-ed column,
“...and moreover,” The Times, 29 October
90:12.]
Although it has nothing to do with subjunctives,
I cannot resist the temptation to reproduce the following
sentence from an article by Sir Roy Strong,
presumed aesthete and literatus, yet evidently victim
of the universal virus that afflicts many users of
English when they scent the proximity of like :
The paper used to smell in the same way that
books from Eastern Europe still do today. [From
the “Saturday Review,” The Times, 13 October
90.]
Whatever consolation it might afford Americans,
the British are with them in their ignorance of
the difference between fewer and less:
Maher points out that his Dillons flagship in
Gower Street carries no less than 250,000 titles
and his other bookshops average 25,000. [From
“Books,” The Sunday Times, 21 October 90:8:9.]
And some have trouble with the sequence of
tenses (not a trivial problem, I admit), yielding in
this instance what might be called the “son-for-a-day”
syndrome:
I now know them to have been Mr and Mrs
Powrie-Smith, and a chap I take to have been
their son. [From the op-ed column, “...and
moreover,” by Matthew Parris, The Times, 27
October 90:12.]
Several Types of Ambiguity: Minimalist Language
Ted Bernstein, when he was assistant managing
editor of The New York Times , published a house organ,
“Winners and Sinners,” that offered kudos for
the occasional “bright passage” or deft metaphor
and cited questionable and nonstandard grammar
and usage that appeared in the newspaper. Among
the items that he enjoyed catching were the ambiguous
headlines, which he dubbed “two-faced heads.”
These are not very hard to find in newspapers (as
of the headline writer (who is not, usually,
the writer of the article) is to come up with something
that is a telegraphically brief inkling of the
substance of the article. Headline writers are often
given to paronomasia (which they would probably
call punning, as paronomasia , which would not fit
into most headlines, is not in their vocabulary).
Gleaned from the current collection:
1. Cost of food scares mounts. [The Times, 11 October
90:5]
I was not under the impression that horses worried
much about the price of fodder.
2. PLO may supply Arabs with arms. [Ibid.:14]
Arms is always ripe for ambiguity.
3. Children taken on ¥500 raid. [Ibid., 12 October
90:7]
The children were not captured on the raid: the
story was about a father who had his children (and,
as I recall, his wife) wait in the family car while he
went off to commit a robery.
4. Students filmed in secret. [Ibid., 13 October 90:7]
Filmed is here a past participle, not the past of an
active verb. This grammatical ambiguity is a frequent
source of confusion, one cleverly exploited
by those who write clues for crosswords.
5. Prices fear as oil shortage puts pressure on refining.
[Ibid., 11 October 90, p.31]
Prices is an unusual noun to find in attrubutive position
before a word like fear (in contrast to noun/
verb ambiguities like drop, rise, increase, decline,
etc.). In any event, it is still not clear why an oil
shortage should put pressure on refining (one
would expect the reverse) and why the prices resulting
ought to rise (for fear would scarcely suggest
`reduction' except in a petroleum trade
journal or oil company annual report).
6. Why You Want Sex Changes as You Age. [San
Francisco Chronicle, 13 January 1990. Submitted
by Randy Alfred, San Francisco]
Self-evident problem in which sex rears its head.
That is not to say that ambiguity is confined to
headlines. In the following quotation, the reader
may have difficulty in determining how far from his
wife this ideal husband lives, why he isn't bankrupt
from feeding parking meters, and what circumstance
might have afflicted him with muteness:
[Odette] lives in Walton-on-Thames with
Geoffrey [Hallowes], a tall, courteous gentlemen
retired from the wine business who seems content
to write her letters, listen while she tells her
stories, feed one's parking meter, and altogether
to be as attentive as a wife could wish. [The Sunday
Times, 14 October 90:3:3]
“Lithium was not effective in either depressed or
non-depressed alcoholics in significantly reducing the
numbers of subjects who were not abstinent, number of
days of reported drinking, number of alcohol-related hospitalizations,
severity of alcoholism, or severity of depression.”
[From Drug Therapy, . Submitted
by ]
“There is no residency requirement for US Senate
other than that the candidate be a resident of the state he
is running from at the time of his election.” [From the
Boston Globe, . Submitted by ]
“The Brundtland report celebrated by many at Globe
'90, while hard-hitting in its analysis of the global environmental
crisis, is profoundly shallow in its prescriptions.”
[From comments by Frank Tester, professor at University
of British Columbia and York University, quoted in the
Daily Oil Bulletin, . Submitted by ]
Instant Welsh
I broke imaginary eggs on the rim of a non-existent
frying pan and made sizzling noises. I pretended
to fill tumblers of ice-cold milk and to drink
them with apparent delight. I beat the air with my
arms and clucked like a hen and mooed deep and
long. But the features of the old, old woman who
had opened the door of the farmhouse half way up
the mountain and who had answered my polite request
for a few eggs and some milk with a steady
flow of Welsh, remained blank. As blank as mine
had been when she had been speaking Welsh. My
miming must have been wanting as I got neither egg
nor milk. But the humiliating thing was that I, relatively
bilingual and with a smattering of a few other
languages, have been able to make myself understood
in most part of western Europe, but was thoroughly
checkmated not sixty miles as the crow flies
from Manchester... I decided to learn Welsh
forthwith, there and then, without more ado.
Of course, it was not going to be plain sailing. I
knew that. We--my wife, our three children, and
I--had been invited to spend ten blissful days in an
idyllic white cottage in the middle of a field near a
couple of lakes in the depth of Caernarvonshire.
The nearest village was a couple of valleys away; our
neighbors were sheep and lambs. It was definitely
known that a road-mender did sleep in a one-room
cabin near the abandoned slate quarry. These were
perhaps not the best conditions in which to learn the
Welsh language, but what I lacked in amenities I
thought I would make up in “ambiance” for there
we would be for ten days, practically incommunicado.
My only tutor was one of those paper napkins
on which are printed some hundred brightly colored
pictures of objects and things in common use, such
as bread, cheese, house, sea, sun, chair, etc., with
the Welsh name above and the English underneath.
You know the sort of thing. Very useful in its way no
doubt, but rather limiting to someone of scholarly
disposition.
It was then that Chance took a hand. Would
you believe that I found in the rafters of our host's
cottage a dusty Welsh-English Dictionary compiled
by W. Richards, L1.D., in 1890...? It was like
reaching that peak in Darien. A whole new world
was about to be revealed to me. And into this unknown
land, this strangely melodious language, with
its roots dating back to the time when the world was
young, I set forth, with my paper napkin and my
pocket dictionary compiled in 1890.
As I read on, picking out a word here and a
phrase there, the personality of Dr. Richards began
to appear. The aims of a lexicographer, these days,
is undoubtedly to be as objective and exact as possible
when dealing with concepts as intangible as
the meanings of words. Dr. Johnson himself was
roundly criticized for letting his prejudices interfere
with his definitions. We do not go to a dictionary for
opinions or for subjective judgment, and the more
remote the personality of the compiler, the better.
Dr. Richards obviously entertained a different idea
of his mission.
His interests quickly became clear. That he was
a theologian there can be little doubt, and anyone
would have been able with the help of his dictionary
to plough through a sermon on predestination or a
debate on the difference between transubstantiation
and consubstantiation. This in a POCKET dictionary,
you understand. Dr. Richards must also have been
interested in demonology, witchcraft, familiars,
rhabdomancy. (You wish to know the Welsh for
rhabdomancy ? Well, another time perhaps.) Then
there was Dr. Richard's interest in diseases. Far
from simply giving us the Welsh for rheumatism , he
goes into details of the symptoms and I will spare
you a five-line description of the scabs in a case of
blue jaundice . If you should catch blue jaundice in
Wales, I strongly advise you to have Dr. Richards's
dictionary at hand. (Incidentally, since jaundice
means the `yellow disease,' how can it be blue? But
let it pass.)
Dr. Richards never stops astonishing us. You
would think that the word bye-laws was not one
which in a pocket dictionary would be given much
space. But wrong you would be. Dr. Richards gives
us a mini-treatise on the application of bye-laws in
Scotland in the 14th century, which is not particularly
useful if you are lost in a fog and, on knocking
at the door of an isolated Welsh cottage, you are
faced by an aged gentleman who has no English.
I fear that Dr. Richards did not have us in mind
when he set to work, for he omitted to include such
words as tomato, bathroom, cutlet, cauliflower , and
railway station . Yet let no one say he was not a mundane
man, for he gives us the Welsh for port, sherry,
whisky, brandy, burgundy, claret , and even Rhenish
wine . And do you know that there are ten words in
Welsh for fashion ? But none, apparently, for tomato,
bathroom, cutlet , etc.
It quickly appeared, on perusing the Welsh-English
section, that Dr. Richards's English was
somewhat idiosyncratic, for he gives us an English
translation of a Welsh word, `to render prospective.'
I have pondered on this phrase, and the only person
I can imagine using it is the secretary of the local
branch of a political party who, having handed the
Committee members a short list of would-be candidates,
asks: “Which of these people shall we render
prospective?”
Then there is the word arfogwl which apparently
means `a dried skin on a post with pebbles in
it,' with no further explanations as to why it should
be hanging on a post and why, in heaven's name, it
should contain pebbles. I therefore went out to try
to find one in the hope that the object might reveal
its raison d'être. I was not successful and I must
warn would-be searchers that I very much doubt
whether there is a dried skin with pebbles in it hanging
on a post within three miles from Llanrust. They
had better look elsewhere.
A closer study of the English-Welsh section soon
brought to light the fact that not only did Dr. Richards
know a large number of English words which do
not appear in recognized dictionaries I consulted
but that, clever man that he was, he was able to
translate them into Welsh. Words like dishersion, extillation,
restagnate, claricord, contramure , and, of
course, discubitory . All these words look as if they
meant something. The word discubitory took my
fancy; neither Chambers nor Webster having been
able to enlighten me, I consulted Dr. Richards himself,
by the simple process of looking up in the
Welsh-English section the Welsh word which Dr.
Richards had given as the translation of discubitory
in the English-Welsh section. I looked up therefore
the word lledorweddle and was informed that it
meant... `discubitory.' However, there was an alternative
definition: `partly lying down.' This I took
to mean `in a semi-recumbent position.' I had it
now, of course. Discubitory means `lying down
whilst propping oneself on one's elbow.' This word
has now taken its place in my vocabulary and I use it
now and then nonchalantly in conversation. To date,
no one has asked me what it meant.
To mark the centenary of this remarkable book
and help revive interest in its author, I hereby undertake
to hand over a prize of ¥100 to the first
person who challenges me with the words: “You are
Michel Vercambre the eminent scholar who discovered
the meaning of the word discubitory and I
claim the prize of ¥100.” The challenger must be
carrying at the time a copy of Dr. Richards's Welsh-English
pocket dictionary. The 1890 edition.
Bloomsbury Dictionary of Word Origins,
Although one might be led to believe that all
dictionaries of etymology are alike, the truth is that
they differ in a number of respects, and it is useful
for those interested in language to have several
types available. The OED , for example, has very
long and elaborate etymologies, some of which
might have been superseded (presumably in
OED2e ), which means you have to have the latest
edition. Then, too, the OED does not always transliterate
foreign scripts, which might put those who
cannot read Chinese, Arabic, Cyrillic, Thai, etc., at a
disadvantage when examining cognates or loanwords.
Some of the smaller dictionaries, from the
MW-III and the Random House Unabridged on down
through the college and desk sizes, contain etymologies
reflecting up-to-date scholarship but these
works may not be particularly user-friendly: after all,
surveys have shown that etymological information is
that least frequently sought by dictionary users, so it
ill behooves publishers to devote a great deal of expensive
space to it. In contrast to these standard
works, John Ayto has compiled a very commendable,
user-friendly book which is eminently readable
(as is all of Ayto's writing).
I do have a few reservations--(naturally! How
could a reader identify an Urdang review if it did not
have reservations?) First, I found the system of cross
references inconsistent. In the front matter we are
told that if “a related word is mentioned but no date
is shown for it,...the word has its own article....”
That is not consistently the case, though it would be
too boring to cite examples. Second, (in the entry
for albatross ), Alcatraz ought to have been identified
as the “former” prison-island (it is still an island, of
course), and the generalization that ail is “virtually
obsolete except in the metaphorical use of its present
participial adjective ailing ....” fails to take account
of the common expression, What ails you/
him/her/it/them?, and fails to explain what is metaphorical
about She is ailing . Third--though here
we might not be dealing with Ayto's decision as
much as the publisher's--it is simply not convenient
to have a dictionary of etymology that excludes all
bound prefixes and suffixes, though these are
glossed, as required, when they are part of an entry.
Fourth, I think it a mistake to merge under one
headword words of distinctly different provenances
(that is, homographs), as in gloss . And, finally, there
are far too many typographical errors for a book of
this sort: under absent : “4nt”; after: “millenium”;
loo: “existance.”
Notwithstanding, there are many cogent observations,
among them:
glitz... “Its fortuitous resemblance to a blend of
glamour and Ritz contributes to its expressiveness.”
glass [The entire entry is a gem.]
know [A well-constructed short essay on its cognates.]
The chief virtue of the book is that it presents a
great deal of information about word origins in
highly readable form. Indeed, there is so much information
buried in the entries that the publisher
would have been well advised to prepare an index to
afford users better access to the nether reaches of
the language. Perhaps in a second edition...?
People often think that--at least by now--all
the words in the language have been successfully
and accurately etymologized. While that is true
about the majority of words, it does not obtain for all
the words and certainly not for many of the colorful
parts of the language, notably slang and idiomatic
expressions. For those words of doubtful origin (like
dive `disreputable bar,' jingo, rag `taunt,' toy , etc.),
Ayto presents the current wisdom, where available,
and lets the user decide for himself from among the
theories proffered.
For those seeking a well-written, up-to-date,
etymological dictionary that sets forth its information
in understandable English and is not riddled
with the cryptic symbols and abbreviations found in
the more ponderous, scholarly works, the Dictionary
of Word Origins would be a good choice.
Laurence Urdang
Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang
Tony Thorne is described (in Bloomsbury's publicity
blurb) as “former punk and hippie now turned
academic,” which is all we know about him. His
purpose in this compiulation “as well as reflecting
current speech accurately... was to represent a
fresh approach to the material itself.” [p. iv]
The slang described is of the period 1950 to
1990. That does not, of course, preclude slang of an
earlier time if it is still in use, but it does eliminate
obsolete slang, leaving about 5000 terms to be covered
in about 15,000 definitions. The Introduction
is businesslike, brief, and to the point, avoiding
much of the repetitious academic maundering that
often accompanies such works.
As Thorne is an Englishman, I trust him on British,
Irish, Scots, and even Australian slang (though
Australians may take exception). The real question
is, How accurate is his coverage of American slang?
He says he relied on four people, though whether
they were informants or advisors or drinking companions
(or all of the above) is not made clear.
Compared with American slang, which is
strongly under the influence of New York and other
big cities, Hollywood and showbiz in general, there
is little British slang that comes from Yiddish. The
other day I used the word megillah in conversation
with an editor from Oxford University Press and he
at once asked me what it meant. My instantaneous
synonym (appropriate for the context in which I had
used it) was screed , which he of course understood; I
had to explain that megillah is Hebrew and probably
entered (American) English via Yiddish. If an American
had asked me what the word meant I would
probably have accused him of being a hypocrite for
pretending that he knew no Yiddish/Hebrew. So
when I see an entry in shtuk/shtook/stook/schtuk labeled
“British” in Thorne's book, I at once get suspicious,
especially when it is defined as `in trouble,'
shtuk “in its various spellings” is described as Yiddish
for `difficulties,' and there is a (good) entry for
shtick , besides. The OED2e confirms my suspicions
by offering “App. not a Yiddish word.” (My suspicions
are that it comes from German Stück `play,
act,' leading to `thing, business, affair, what occupies
one, problem,...trouble.') At in the bag , labeled
“American,” one definition is
2a ruined, botched. The original image evoked
is either of a corpse zipped up in a body bag
or a gamebird in a poacher's sack.
b demoted, in American police jargon. This is
probably an extension of sense 2a.
The most common American sense of in the bag
is `completed, done, consummated,' and, while it ill
behooves one to state categorically that `ruined,
botched' is not a viable definition, I have never encountered
the expression used in that sense on either
side of the Atlantic. Although I have no knowledge
of it, sense 2a might be correct; if so, it is
certainly based on body bags and not poachers, who
are not the normal prey of American police.
Unfortunate is the omission of a comma to set
apart daddy as a term of address in the illustration
for heinie (American for `bottom'):
He hit me daddy--and then he kicked me
in the heinie.
After reading `my' for dialectal me , I was sent to
look up daddy , defined as `a dominant inmate among
prisoners' and `an older and/or dominant male homosexual...,'
making a balls-up (which should
have been labeled British) of the entry. Then we are
told that heinie is “spelled as if it were Yiddish,”
which shows how much Thorne knows about German
spelling and pronunciation; the variant hinie is
not shown (the word is, after all, a diminutive of behind:
the heinie spelling probably cropped up during
WWI in confusion with the similarly pronounced
Heinie , a synonym for Bosch or Kraut , short for Hein-rich ).
At Hicksville it might have been fun to mention
that it is a placename in New York (Nassau
County) and in several other states. Honk, n. and
vb ., in all senses is not American in use or provenance,
nor are honked, hoolie (also Irish?), hoover
(up), horrorball, hum, hurl, and hurry up van/wagon ,
to list a number of words in a twelve-page interval.
It may be consoling but scarcely exonerating for
Thorne to learn that he is not alone in failing to label
such matter accurately: some American informants
are evidently not to be trusted or have become too
sophisticated from traveling abroad or by associating
with speakers of other dialects of English. The same
kinds of inaccuracies occur in the opposite direction:
that is, hook it for `play hookey' is not British, and,
because of its organization, humdinger is misleading:
humdinger n Australian a spectacular fart. This
vulgarism is a specific usage of the well-known
colloquialism denoting anything resounding or
impressive.
The inference is that the colloquialism is Australian,
which it is not. The entry also emphasizes the
lack of uniformity of style of the book, with the dialect
locales of some entries shown as italicized labels
alongside the headword, of others associated with
specific senses, and of others buried somewhere in
the text. Style in dictionaries is not a nasty little detail:
it is a quick way of categorizing information,
and if a label appears in an unfamiliar place, its
placement ought to convey to the user some special
piece of information, not the fact that the book was
carelessly compiled. In another example, goof vb,
goofball n, goof off vb, goof-off n , and goof up vb are
all labeled “American,” but not goof n or goofy , the
latter of which could hardly be a “back formation”
from goof , and is probably reinforced (if it is universal)
by the Disney character. One can see how complex
the information can become. I doubt that it is
accurate to define gunsel as a `callow youth,' a sense
that probably rubbed off from the character played
by Elisha Cook, Jr. in The Maltese Falcon: though he
was referred to (by Bogart, as I recall) as a `punk'
and `gunsel' and was portrayed as ineffectual, that
does not justify a transferred definition: gunsel ,
probably from Yiddish, is a less common, old-fashioned
term for `gunman, body guard, torpedo,
hit man,' and the like, simply a `criminal who carries
a gun,' and needs no (additional) pejorative treatment.
There are other infelicities in references to
American culture and usage (e.g., what is “multi-coloured
chewing gum” under gumballs ?) and in
narrowing the usage of lech/letch after/for/over/on
to Britain. The latter reminds me of an exchange I
once witnessed. In a context that was appropriate
but not worth describing, a refined American lady
was heard to exclaim with some surprise, “I didn't
know they had prostitutes in Poland!” In high dudgeon,
the sophisticated Polish lady thus addressed
replied, indignantly, “Did you think it an underprivileged
country?!”
Bloomsbury have been publishing some very
good language and reference books (including one
by me) under the direction of Dr. Kathy Rooney,
who deserves much credit for the over-all quality of
the list. Thorne's book contains some interesting
and useful information, including much that cannot
be found elsewhere (No, no, I don't mean the inaccurate
material). I fear that the author has trusted
the advice and information provided by others,
which were not always accurate. That, coupled with
his inexperience in compiling so rigidly styled a
work as a dictionary, has detracted from the quality
of the work.
Laurence Urdang
Mother Tongue
Bill Bryson, an American who lives in Yorkshire,
has written a spirited, engaging book about English.
His style is light and entertaining, and I should be
nitpicking at trifles were I to cavil at his rare sacrifices
of accuracy for the sake of simplification. One
example, not the author's fault, is the comment,
“The editors of the Random House Dictionary of
1966 decided, after considerable agonizing, not to
insert any four-letter words.” As I was in charge of
that edition, let me set the matter straight. There
was no agonizing whatsoever on the part of the editors:
every editor associated with the book wanted
those words in. Jess Stein and I attended the meetings
at which these sensitive matters were discussed
and were invited to put our case, though we were
fully aware that the ultimate decision rested with
(particularly) the sales department. The sales director
at the time (1965) was Lew Miller, as wise and
experienced a marketing man as one could find in
publishing; Bob Bernstein was president; Bennett
Cerf was chairman of the board, and the other important
directors were Donald Klopfer and Tony
Wimpfheimer. After Jess and I presented our case,
Lew Miller said he needed a week or so to think
about the matter. Bennett was going out of town on
one of his many lecture tours, while the final stages
of reading proof proceeded in the reference department,
of which I was director. Whichever way it
was to go, we were ready to abide by Lew's decision.
About ten days later, Bennett returned and,
encountering Bob in the corridor, asked him about
the “four-letter decision”; “ Shit and piss are in,” replied
Bob, “ Fuck and cunt are out.” Lew Miller's
decision had been a practical one: he felt it foolish to
sacrifice the sales of many thousands of copies of the
dictionary in the Bible Belt and other puritanical
bastions of conservatism like Texas and California
merely for the sake of a “couple of four-letter
words.” (Those who think of California as a paragon
of avant-garde thought may need reminding that the
school-marms there succeeded in banning the sale of
the Dictionary of American Slang , by Wentworth and
Flexner, in the 1970s, by which time one might
have thought that their moral fiber would have
caught up with their professed modernity.)
John Ayto, editor of the Bloomsbury Dictionary
of Word Origins , reviewed elsewhere in this issue,
will not be happy to see his name misspelled
“Ayton.” Also, in a section best described as
“Webster-bashing,” Bryson fails to mention Joseph
Emerson Worcester and his competing dictionaries,
in some ways superior to Webster's, and I cannot
agree with the comment [p.150] that the simplified
spellings advocated by Webster “would probably
have happened anyway”--they didn't happen “anyway”
in Britain, where, despite the fact that many of
the forms cannot be justified etymologically or any
other way, the conservatives continue to heap scorn
on American spelling. I think it misleading to describe
the section A to Ant of The New English Dictionary
on Historical Principles (the original title of
the Oxford English Dictionary ) as “a slim paperback
book”: it was the first fascicle to be published and
was not the “first of twelve volumes.” (The OED
was originally published over a number of years in
fascicles of various lengths which were sold by subscription,
a method that is, alas, no longer practised.)
These are details, I know, but that is no excuse
for not getting them right, especially when the
accurate information is so easily accessible.
I am willing to take Bryson's word for many of
the bits of information with which this book
abounds, to wit, “Among the Xoxa tribe of South
Africa the most provocative remark is hlebeshako --
`your mother's ears,' ” the wisdom that “Some cultures
don't swear at all,” and the revelation that in
Finland, “When you stub your toe getting up to answer
the wrong number at 2.00 a.m.,” you mutter
(shout?) “Ravintolassa!,” which means `in the restaurant.'
One hesitates to consider what the restaurants
might be like in Finland, or, indeed, what the waiters
say when they drop a tray, perhaps “Hlebe-shako
!”
There is much to interest and amuse the reader
in Mother Tongue , and I find it a pity that teachers do
not use books like this to introduce students to the
wonders and humor of language to reinforce what I
hope is their own enthusiasm for the subject in place
of the turgid texts they are stuck with.
Laurence Urdang
I sympathize with Dr. Zellig Bach's tale of the
horrible Yiddish rendition of the Census Bureau
form [XVII,2, “The Scandalous Yiddish Guide of the
Census Bureau”], and I wouldn't be a bit surprised if
many of the other foreign-language versions were
equally awful. But I suspect that Bach's imaginary
scenario of how such a mess came to pass is probably
off the mark. Judging by our own frequent experience
with government agencies, federal, state, and
local, the most common cause of bad foreign language
publications is simply the practice of considering
translation and foreign-language typesetting as
if they were commodities and awarding the work to
the lowest bidder--who is often incompetent.
Then, of course, since the agency has no capability
to judge the quality of the work, the bad stuff
gets printed and circulated. Fortunately, some government
units (certain of which we are privileged to
count among our clients) are smart enough to know
better and do produce first-class work in foreign languages
by engaging reputable suppliers.
I noted the references to tweeter and boomer or
wow and hum in Harry Cohen's article, “Jingo
Lingo” [XVI,4]. I had expected to find tweeter followed
by woofer and wow followed by flutter . I
have no dictionary that records boomer as an audio
electronics term but two that record woofer . I suspect
that hum is used by those of us who can't tell
wow from flutter .
While reading OBITER DICTA in the same issue, I
found myself in total agreement about the poor
quality of the manuals that accompany computer
hardware and software. But while improving manuals
would reduce the number of telephone calls, the
assertion that reduction by a factor of 10 could be
achieved assumes that the users could actually be
induced into looking at the manuals! Those who
have actually answered telephone calls from users
can tell you that if patriotism is the last refuge of a
scoundrel, then the manual is the last refuge of the
computer user. A call to customer support comes
well ahead of reading the manual, even when it's
good and well indexed. We often have to bite our
tongues to lkeep from shouting, “f*****
manual!”
Your assumption that your program's spelling
checker contains about 37,000 words because it
contains about 223,000 characters is mistaken.
Computer programmers are cleverer than that. The
first spelling checker that I bought had a word list
file of approximately 30,000 characters. It used a
“hashing” technique, storing word roots, suffixes,
and prefixes. In operation it would strip recognized
suffixes and prefixes from words, check for the word
root, and use rules stored in the program to determine
whether the suffixes and prefixes were added
correctly. According to the manual, the file compression
techniques used the 30,000 character dictionary
to list about 18,500 root words. When
checked against a 42,000-word dictionary, the program
was said to have achieved a 96% recognition
rate.
[In the early 1960s I designed a hyphenation program
(for automatic typesetting) based on a logic of
prefix-root-suffix combined with a table look-up (for
anomalies: for instance, before analysis of a word
ending in -ing , the word would be checked against a
list including thing, bring, string , and other words
that could not be hyphenated). Examination of the
atrocious hyphenation exhibited by many typographers
today is demonstration enough of the lack of
interest in such affairs. Recently Americanizing a
British text using the American spelling checker in
my Framework III program, I discovered that the
program is ignorant of American preferred spellings,
like labeled vs labelled, traveler vs traveller, though
it catches travelling . What boots it to point out that
many Americans are likewise ignorant of those
“preferences”? It seems redundant to point out that
all offers I have made in the past to put Ashton-Tate
on the right track regarding language (and manuals)
have been ignored, though it is hard to say whether
that is out of their arrogance, their ignorance, or
their inability to read my letters.-- Editor ]
I read with interest the account of your experience
with the Ashton-Tate word-processing program
Framework III [ XVI ,4]. I was especially interested
in the results you got when invoking the SUGGEST
option in the program's spelling checker. You were
at a loss to explain the rationale for the program's
selection of rattans as an alternative for awakens .
In the late 1970s, I worked as a clerk in the
medical records department of a large medical
clinic. When I had the name of a patient but not his
chart number, I checked with the medical records
correction clerks. They sat at a computer terminals
and would key in some kind of alphanumeric code
that evoked many names. The name Wise , for example,
also evoked names like Weese, Weiss , and Weisz ,
but also such unlikely variants as Waage, Wacha,
Wahoske, Wick , and Woiak . When I became a correction
clerk myself, I learned that the system behind
this name-grouping was a filing system called
Soundex. Soundex works mostly by ignoring the
vowels in a name and assigning an alphanumeric
code to the name based on the remaining consonants.
Thus, Wise was given the Soundex code W200.
I tried applying Soundex coding to the list of
words in your article, but it was inadequate to the
task, so I created an elaboration of Soundex. Below
is [a selection from] the list of words in your article,
accompanied by a number code; as will be seen, the
words in each group have very similar codes. My
elaboration of Soundex works according to the following
rules: [ Target means `the item to be coded.']
(a) Change each d or t in the target to c.
(b) Change each ng cluster to m.
(c) If the target begins with kn, replace kn
with m.
(d) If the target begins with h, y, or a vowel,
drop it and follow these rules.
(e) If the target begins with r or w, replace it
with an l.
(f) Code the target according to Soundex rules.
(g) Replace the initial letter of the Soundex
code with the appropriate numerical code
from the Soundex code table.
Thus, for example, the target halogenating would go
through the following changes while being coded:
halogenating (target)
halogenacing (rule a)
halogenacim (rule b)
alogencim (rule d)
logenacim (rule d, again)
L252 (rule f)
4252 (rule g)
Because the system is completely based on rules
and ignores meanings, any word can be added to the
spelling checker's word list.
In Minnesota and Illinois, the first four characters
of a person's driver's license number are the
Soundex code of his surname. Not long into the
movie The Blues Brothers , Elwood Blues Illinois
driver's license is shown on a police computer
screen. It is obviously a phony, for it should begin
with the code B420, but does not.
nucleic 5242 reawakens 4252
nutlike 5242 wakens 4252
knuckled 5242 rattans 4252
nickeled 5242 weakens 4252
nucleate 5242 reddens 4252
neglect 5242 weaklings 4245
nutlet 5242 walk-ons 4425
niggled 5242 walk-ins 4425
Bordeaux 1622
paradox 1622
unmanageable 5521 burdocks 1622
manageable 5521 broadax 1622
manageably 5521 birdseed 1622
inimitable 5521 birdhouse 1622
amendable 5521 bordellos 1624
unimaginable 5525 bureaux 1624
[Mr. Wise did, indeed, include all the words in my
article, but the list is too long to repeat here. He
also enclosed information concerning the basic
rules for Soundex, which can be found in Filing and
Finding , by William Selden, Lura Lynn Straub, and
Leonard J. Porter, Prentice-Hall, 1962, pp. 95-7.
-- Editor ]
In a “melting-pot” country like the USA, we expect
our tennis stars to have names of such diverse
origin as Agassi, Capriati, Chang, Fernandez, Kirckstein,
Mayotte, Navratilova , etc. Our perception of
players from nations with more homogenous populations,
however, is more orthodox, and we are inclined
to be comfortable with the assumptions that
Leconte ought to be French, Chesnokov Russian, Sanchez
Spanish, Lindstrom Swedish, Sukova Czech,
Haarhuis Dutch, etc.
Watching the French Open Tennis Championships
in June 1990, I noted that there were players
with the following last names, and readers are invited
to guess at the country each represented:
Boetsch, Champion, Herreman, Pierce, Van Lottum ,
and Winogradsky . The one answer for all is France!
At this writing [June 1990], there is a contender
for the national leadership in West Germany with
the name La Fontaine , while the prime minister of
East Germany is De Maiziere. While these Germans
are clearly of French origin, Eiffel and possibly Mitterand
would appear to be etymologically German.
But none of this is surprising in light of the name of
the new president of Peru-- Fujimoni!
Max Peterson's review of The Language of the
Law is splendid. David Mellinkoff's criticism of lawyer
language is lamentable. Rather than adopt a cant
of guttural grunts attributable to our furry forebears,
I suggest that we drag the populace toward an
elegant tongue. Zounds! Would Mellinkoff banish
such useful words as heretofore, theretofore, hereto,
and therefor ? Would we abandon the subjunctive
mood, adverbs, Latin idioms, bon mots, and the like?
How long can we tolerate such horrors as, “It's me,”
or “How are you?”--“I'm good”?
Years ago, by statute (§767.04, Fla. Stat.), Florida
abandoned the time-honored BEWARE OF THE
DOG in favor of BAD DOG... (I favor the alliterative
CAVE CANEM, which would at least protect the literati.)
In response to Richard Lederer's call for submissions
in a “most graceful and coherent eleven-word
supersentence” contest [“The Glamour of
Grammar,” XVI,4], I offer the following:
1 However painful, try 2 helping 3 prove 4 you're
5 delighted 6 by supersentences 7 that prevail. (11
words)
1 Adverb clause
2 Gerund phrase
3 Infinitive phrase
4 Noun clause
5 Participial phrase
6 Prepositional phrase
7 Adjective clause
Using the same constituent-specifying numbers
as above (to make it easier to verify my analysis), I
offer the following, which would disprove Lederer's
claim that eleven words is the minimum:
1 Painful, try 2 helping 3 prove 4 supersentences
7 you're 5 discusted 6 by prevail. (9 words)
The two objections I see with this would-be super-short
supersentence are, first, the highly elliptical
and not terribly idiomatic omission of any overt
identification of the clausal status of the word painful ,
and second, the analysis of the thoroughly idiomatic
three-word phrase, you're disgusted by as an
adjective clause containing a participial phrase and a
rather elliptical prepositional phrase. Although I
would defend this entry on the grounds that intelligible
ellipsis lies at the core of the challenge, I could
avoid the fairly strong first objection by restoring
the clause-signaling however of my first entry:
However painful, try helping prove supersentences
you're disgusted by prevail. (10 words)
Those who find the second objection stronger
than the first might accept another 10-word entry:
...Painful, try helping prove you're delighted
by supersentences that prevail. (10 words)
[I am not at all sure that counting a contraction
( you're ) as one word is fair.-- Editor ]
“...[B]ack around 1776, German missed being
the official American language by one vote.”
[EPISTOLA, XVII,2:21] I am not a historian, but I had
the impression that that idea had been laid to rest
long ago. Has some historian recently discovered
that the story is true, after all?
...I heard this many years ago on at least one
other occasion from a very knowledgeable South African
friend who explained that he could not cite a
reference but regarded it as common knowledge.
Occasionally I have asked historians and others
about this without success, confirmation or denial.
Two reference librarians were at a loss as to how to
begin a search. It now occurs to me that perhaps
you know the story or, at least, that you could give
me a lead as to its origin.
[A definite citation, of course, can be used to verify a
fact. Not all facts are verified or verifiable. Because
events that never occurred are, naturally, not documented,
it is almost impossible to verify that something
did not take place. Yet, rumors and “common
knowledge,” however inaccurate, are sometimes a
misinterpretation of an event that actually occurred
and, therefore, can be traced to a fact, even though
distorted; the best that can be wished for is to turn
up something that might have given rise to the story
(like the identification of the Parson Weems tale
about George Washington's honesty and the cherry
tree).-- Editor ]
“ALL EQUIPMENT is permanently marked for identification.
IF CAUGHT STEALING, WE WILL PROSECUTE!” [Sign in
the audio-visuals materials section of the Norlin Library
on the Boulder campus of the University of Colorado.
Submitted by ]
“The Kings Mountain Volunteers were the first to arrive
at the home in the 12000 block of Skyline Boulevard
at 12:50 p.m. and although three engines and 16 firefighters
were called to the scene there were no injuries.”
[From The Peninsula Times Tribune, Palo Alto, . Submitted by ]
