VOL17_4.txt

   
      
         
            The Niceness Principle



            This is an essay about language and false recall.
I am interested particularly in how recall distorts
to smooth things out, to alter the old, harsh
meanings into new, pleasant forms reminiscent of
Hallmark greeting cards.  I call it the Niceness Principle.
Let me illustrate.

            Last year, I taught an introductory literature
course in which I assigned E.E. Cummings's poem
“next to of course god america i.”  It is a short pastiche
and parody of jingoist sentiment, swatches
from a patriotic after-dinner speech at the local Elks
Club, perhaps.  I pointed out how Cummings was
making fun of super-patriotism and saber-rattling,
and we discussed the split between Cummings's and
the speaker's point of view.  I got some intelligent
responses, as well as some incredulity.  Some of the
students could not accept that Cummings was impugning
the flag.  When it came time for the midterm,
several identified the poem as “God Bless
America.”

            This is a good case in point, I think, because it
exposes how the Niceness Principle works: people
find a particular meaning unpleasant, so they unconsciously
change it to something more comfortable.
They make it nice --just as nice itself has changed
from a word meaning `niggling' to a word meaning
`pleasant' and applied to everything from ice cream
to sexual partners.  Unfortunately, this is hardly just
a foible of youth; rather, it seems endemic to cultures
that have shied away from the abattoir and the
baseness of human behavior.  In certain cases, the
new meanings have become so ingrained in the language
that the old ones have been totally effaced.
Here are some nasty examples:

            The Greek myth of Pandora's box is one that
most of us recall vaguely: though Pandora was told
not to open that box, of course she did--at which
point all manner of evils flew out, making our world
one of pestilence, famine, death, and destruction.
The consolation for all this lay at the bottom of the
box: hope, the precious quality that would help
mankind through it all.  Or so I had been taught.  It
was not until I took a classics course in college that I
was told the original reading: the worst evil of all
was at the bottom--hope, which feeds men illusions,
which renders them blind to reality, which thrives
on lies.  And, in fact, this reading is far more in keeping
with the ancient Greek temperament.  So much
for historical accuracy.

            Our culture seems to like taming the Greeks.
Rough edges are planed away; disturbing elements
are omitted.  Readers of Plato's Symposium , for example,
may recall Aristophanes' absurd myth of creation:
men and women were originally egglike creatures
with eight limbs, and one head but two faces.
They were quite powerful, and in order to nullify
any threat they might pose to the gods, Zeus cut
them in two.  From then on, concludes Aristophanes,
people sadly roamed the earth, looking for their lost
halves.  When the two halves meet, they embrace,
and this is love.

            Ask any nonclassicist who has read the Symposium ,
and you will get this basic recollection.  But in
Aristophanes' description, only one type was cloven
into male and female, the original hermaphrodites.
The two other types were male-male and female-female,
and they account for homosexual love.  This
is no coincidence, since the Symposium portrays homosexuality
as useful and ennobling.  How curious,
then, that nine out of ten readers of this work happen
to forget this part of Aristophanes' myth.

            The Romans provide more fodder for the Niceness
Principle through Vergil, who wrote in his Eclogues ,
“Omnia vincit amor” `Love conquers all.'
Generations of romantics (including the wife of
Bath) have interpreted this to mean that love will
triumph over war and poverty, even over strict parents
and curfews, but this is a fuzzy reading of the
military metaphor Vergil intended.  The image Vergil
pursues is that of a commander forced to surrender,
beaten by an all-powerful passion.  Take a normal,
clear-eyed individual, Vergil implies, subject
him to love, and it will transform him into a physical
wreck who cannot sleep and cannot eat because of
his obsession.  The ancients had a point.

            There is an etiology behind all this.  In Freudian
terms, the Niceness Principle is often equivalent to
the defense mechanism of reversal, in which the individual
transforms the situation into its opposite,
usually as a retreat from unpleasant emotions.  Other
defense mechanisms, such as repression and selective
forgetting, may also take part.  The question remains:
is this simply a human foible, or have we as a
culture grown ever more fond of sanitizing and
sweeping under the carpet?  Freud's Civilization and
Its Discontents suggests an answer: as civilization
“progresses,” it removes itself further and further
from harshness and crude emotions.  The emotions
still exist, however, and the psychological price we
pay for the repression is in neurosis and other civilized
ills.

            The Greco-Roman tradition is not the only
happy hunting ground for the Niceness Principle.
The Bible provides a wealth of material for misinterpretation
and faulty recall, though it often requires
nice readers for this to happen.  In Genesis 19, for
instance, most believers see Lot as a pious man living
in the midst of the wicked city of Sodom.  When
two angels come down to see him, he protects them
against the evil crowd of men who wish to molest
them sexually.  Lot is thus the good host, who will
allow no harm to come to anyone under his roof.
What many people forget, or omit, or simply never
heard of, is that Lot offers a sop to the crowd: his
two virgin daughters.  Take them, he begs, instead of
his guests.  Whether this reflects the inviolable rule
of hospitality, the undeniable misogyny in the Old
Testament, or that angels have higher standing than
humans is open to question.  But the question cannot
even be asked when the details are mislaid.

            This is not to say that the Western tradition has
a monopoly on Niceness.  The Japanese proverb
“Inu ga arukeba, bo ni ataru” `A dog that walks
around will find a stick' illustrates this nicely.  Modern
sources translate the proverb as something like
“Seek and ye shall find,” with the stick as a bone or
reward.  The original meaning is harsher and more
in keeping with traditional Japanese culture: the
stick is used to beat the dog, who should not have
poked around.  In other words, “Curiosity killed
the cat.”

            Fairy tales have also come in for their share of
Niceness.  The folklore the Grimm Brothers unearthed
was full of beheadings and torture; the stories
were both amusements and cautionary tales.
They certainly did not all end happily ever after.
The classic “Little Red Riding Hood,” for instance,
was told to me as a child in the Nice version: after
the wolf swallowed the grandmother, he got into
bed and waited for Little Red Riding Hood to come.
When he sprang out at her, she fled screaming.  A
nearby woodsman came and cut open the wolf with
a hatchet, freeing the grandmother.  Not so in the
original: “What big teeth you have,” says Little Red
Riding Hood.  “The better to eat you with,” says the
wolf, and gobbles her up.  End of tale.

            Shakespeare, at a remove of four centuries, provides
a hapless hunting ground for nice misinterpretations,
either through misquotation or quoting out
of context.  A typical example is the often-repeated
“One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”
The pleasant drift is nature reminding us that we are
all in this world together--but this was not what
Shakespeare intended, especially in his most satirical
and pessimistic play, Troilus and Cressida.  The
line itself is spoken by the wily Ulysses attempting to
persuade Achilles to return to battle.  The argument
he uses is that people tend to praise what is recent:
“That all with one consent praise new-born gauds”
is the line that follows, and the implication is clear--
that this is what links mankind, this tendency to focus
only on the new and conveniently forget the
past.  It may be merely a coincidence that this is
what quoters of Shakespeare are doing when they
use this line incorrectly.

            Other examples abound.  To choose one from
the movies: in Casablanca, there is the famous line,
“Play it, Sam,” as Rick tells the piano man to play
what Ilsa remembers as their song.  Not only is the
line usually misquoted as “Play it again, Sam,” but
the sentiment itself is misunderstood as a nostalgic
glow.  In fact, it is painful for Rick to hear the music
now, and the only reason he tells Sam to play it is for
Ilsa's sake.  An etymological analogy is useful here:
nostalgia really means the ache or pain of return, but
most people think of nostalgia as pleasurable recollection.

            Transmutation of tales, legends, and sayings are
not the only effects of the Niceness Principle.  It
sweeps words in its passage, as well.  Awesome once
meant `terrible'; now it means `great,' and terrible is
reserved to describe airline cuisine.  Whatever happened
to a terrible strength?  Great was also once a
frightening word.  Even bad means `good' nowadays.
It is worth noting that some good words over time
have acquired a bad reputation, such as square (going
from `honest' to `dull') and criticism (moving
from `appraisal' to `denigration').  But in general we
seem to lighten up meanings rather than darken
them.

            I do not mean to sound like a hidebound traditionalist.
Language is a living, changing phenomenon,
and it is no use railing against shifts in meaning,
which are bound to occur.  And avoiding unpleasantness
is often a reasonable aim.  But as an English professor
who tries to teach the spirit of literature, I
have a vested interest in accuracy.  I cannot help
lamenting what I see as distortion.  And memory is
important.  Fuzzy recall indicates a disregard for history.
Or, as my uncle once said, “Those who cannot
remember the past are condemned to misquote
Santayana.”
         
         
            
“That is a mute point now, of course, with Holyfield's
victory over Douglas.”  [From the Las Vegas Review-Journal/Sun,
:1C.  Submitted by ]
         
         
            
Coming in on a wing and a prayer: “One observer in
Nevada was quoted as saying the shape of the aircraft was
`like a mantra ray.' ”  [From the San Bernardino Sun ,
.  Submitted by ]
         
         
            English Know-how, No Problem



            In Stockholm there is a chain of fast-food restaurants
where you can get, along with a fairly high
risk of heartburn, what must rank as the ultimate in
culinary oxymorons: a hamburger called a Mini Big .
If that sounds a trifle too indecisive, you may choose
from such offerings as a Cheeseburgare , a Baconburgare ,
a Big Dream , or something called a Big Clock .
All these names are English, more or less.  It appears
that in Sweden these days, as in the world generally,
people not only increasingly speak English but also
eat it.

            And they wear it.  Anyone who has traveled almost
anywhere in the world in the past couple of
years will have noticed that young people everywhere
sport T-shirts, sweatshirts, and warm-up jackets
bearing messages that are invariably (1) in English
and (2) gloriously meaningless.  Recently in
Hamburg I saw a young man in a bomber jacket that
stated on its back: “Full-O-Pep Laying Mash.”  In
slightly smaller letters, it added: “Made by Taverniti
Oats Company Chicago USA 1091DS.”  In Tokyo, a
correspondent for The Economist sighted a T-shirt
proclaiming: “O D on Bourgeoisie Milk Boy Milk.”
The words, one supposes, were chosen from an unabridged
dictionary by a parrot with a stick in its
beak.  What is even more alarming is that these bewilderingly
vague sentiments have begun appearing
in the English-speaking world.  In a store on Oxford
Street in London I saw a jacket, made in Britain, that
announced in large letters: “Rodeo--100 per cent
Boys for Atomic Atlas.”

            What do these strange messages mean?  In the
literal sense, nothing, of course.  But in a more metaphoric
way they do rather underscore the huge, almost
compulsive appeal of English in the world.  It is
an odd fact that almost everywhere on the planet
products are deemed more appealing and sentiments
more powerful if they are expressed in English,
even if they make next to no sense.

            English words are everywhere.  Germans speak
of die Teenagers and das Walkout and German politicians
snarl “ No comment ” at German journalists.
Italian women coat their faces with col cream ,
Romanians ride the trolleybus , and Spaniards, when
they feel chilly, don a sueter .  Almost everyone in the
world speaks on the telephone or the telefoon or
even, in China, the te le fung .  And almost everywhere
you can find nightclubs and television .

            In 1986, The Economist assembled a list of English
terms that had become more or less universal.
They were airport, passport, hotel, telephone, bar,
soda, cigarette, sport, gold, tennis, stop, OK, weekend,
jeans, know-how, sex appeal, and no problem .
As The Economist put it, “The presence of so many
words to do with travel, consumables, and sport attests
to the real source of these exports--America.”

            There is no denying that the English language,
quite apart from its utilitarian purposes, holds an
odd, almost quaint fascination for many foreign
speakers.  I have before me a Japanese eraser that
says, “Mr Friendly Quality Eraser.  Mr. Friendly Arrived
!!  He always stay near you, and steals in your
mind to lead you a good situation.”  It is a product
made in Japan solely for Japanese consumers, yet
there is not a word of Japanese on it.  Coke cans in
Japan come with the slogan, “I feel Coke & Sound
Special,” while until recently a Japanese company
called Cream Soda marketed a range of products
with the exquisitely inane slogan, “Too old to die,
too young to happy.”  Some of these products betray
a rather comforting lack of geographical precision.
A Japanese carrier bag showing yachts on a blue sea
had the message, “Switzerland: Seaside City.”  Another
carried a picture of a dancing elephants above
the legend, “Elephant Family Are Happy With Us.
Their Humming Makes Us Feel Happy.”  In Naples,
there is a sporting goods store called Snoopy's Dribbling ,
while just off the Grand Place in Brussels you
can find a boutique called Big Nuts , where a sign in
the window intriguingly offers, “Sweat, 690 francs.”
Closer inspection reveals this to be merely a Belgian
truncation of the English sweatshirt .

            Usually English words are taken just as they are,
but sometimes they are adapted to local needs, often
in quite striking ways.  The Serbo-Croatians, for instance,
picked up the English word nylon , but took it
to mean a kind of shabby and disreputable variation,
so that a nylon hotel is a `brothel' while a nylon beach
is where nudists frolic.  Other nations have left the
words largely intact but given the spelling a novel
twist.  Thus the Ukrainian herkot might seem wholly
foreign to you until you realize that it is what a
Ukrainian goes to his barber for.  Similarly, unless
you heard them spoken you might not recognize ajskrym,
erebeta , and kontaklinser as, respectively, Polish
for ice cream , Japanese for elevator , and Swedish
for contact lenses .  The champion of this dissembling
process must surely be the Italian sciacchenze , which
is simply a literal rendering of the English shake
hands , although the Swahili word for a traffic island,
kiplefti ( keep left ) runs it a close second.

            This practice of taking English words and hacking
away at them until they emerge as something
more like native products is particularly rampant
among the Japanese, who have borrowed no fewer
than 20,000 English words--at least ten per cent of
all the words in common use there.  (It has been
said, not altogether jokingly, that if the Japanese
were required to pay a license fee for every English
word they used, their trade surplus would vanish.)

            Occasionally, the Japanese stretch the borrowed
words to fit more comfortably to their pronunciation--as
with productivity , which became in
Japanese purodakuchibichi --but for the most part
they use the same sort of ingenuity miniaturizing
English words as they do in miniaturizing tape recorders
and video cameras.  So word processor in
Japan become wa-pro, personal computer becomes
masu-komi , and commercial is unceremoniously
shorn of its troublesome consonant clusters and
shrunk to a terse monosyllable: cm.  No-pan , short
for no-panties , is a description for bottomless waitresses,
while the English words touch and game have
been fused to make tatchi geimu , a euphemism for
sexual petting.

            Sometimes, English words are given not only
new spellings but also entirely new meanings.  In the
last century the Russians, for reasons that no one
now seems quite sure of, took the name of a London
railway station, Vauxhall, and made it their generic
word for all railroad stations: vagzal .  In much the
same way, the Japanese word for a fashionable cut
suit, sebiro , is a corruption of Savile Row .  More recently,
the French borrowed the English slang
words jerk and egghead but gave them largely contrary
meanings--namely, an egghead in France is
not a brainy person but a dimwit, while jerk is a term
of praise for an accomplished dancer--though at
least they respect the spellings.

            Occasionally borrowers of English words use
them to create new words.  The Japanese have lately
appropriated the English word mansion , respelled it
manshon , and used it to signify not a large single
dwelling but a high-rise apartment building.  But because
the syllable man also means `ten thousand' in
Japanese, they have coined a further word, okushon ,
based on their word for `one hundred million' oku ,
because that implies greater luxury still.

            This practice of adopting an English word and
then using it as the basis for forming other words
quite unknown in English is more common than you
might expect.  The Germans, in particular, are adept
at taking things a step further than ever occurred to
anyone in English.  In Germany a young person goes
from being in his teens to being in his twens , a book
that doesn't quite become a bestseller is instead ein
steadyseller , and a person who is more relaxed than
another is relaxter .

            A final curiosity of borrowing is that the words
sometimes lose their emotional charge when conveyed
overseas.  The Dutch, most notably, have
adopted an English expletive too coarse to reproduce
here (though if I say, “hits the fan” I expect
you'll be with me), but they use it as a mild and
largely meaningless epithet, roughly equivalent to
our gosh or golly or even just hmmmm --to such an
extent, I am told that they must now take special
care not to startle English-speaking visitors.  Oddly
enough, a century ago we did much the same thing
with a rude Dutch term, pappekak , which we anglicized
into the anodyne poppycock .

            Of course, not all these borrowings are free of
charge.  The English language has become a very big
business indeed.  Globally, the teaching of English is
worth ¥6 billion a year; in Britain alone it is the sixth
largest source of invisible earnings, worth ¥500 million
a year.

            Some people are naturally better at mastering
English than others.  In the 1970s, according to Time
magazine, Soviet diplomats were issued with a
Russian-English phrase-book that included such
memorable phrases as this instruction to a waiter:
“Please give me curds, sower cream, fried chicks,
pulled bread and one jellyfish.”  When shopping,
the well-versed Soviet emissary was told to order “a
ladies' worsted-nylon swimming pants.”

            If there is one thing we should be worried about
in the English-speaking world it is not that we are
doing poorly at learning other people's languages--
though that is worrisome enough--but that we increasingly
pay so little attention to the competent
use of our own.  Sir Randolph Quirk put it succinctly
when he wrote, “It would be ironic indeed if the
millions of children in Germany, Japan, and China
who are diligently learning the language of Shakespeare
and Eliot took more care in their use of English
and showed more pride in their achievement
than those for whom it is the native tongue.”

            We might sometimes wonder if we are the most
responsible custodians of our own tongue, when we
reflect that the Oxford University Press sells as many
copies of the Oxford English Dictionary in Japan as it
does in America, and a third more than in Britain.
         
         
            Ethnic Slurs and the Avoidance Thereof



            Back in 1978, when Dick Cavett had his talk
show on PBS, I heard him interview Alfred
Kazin on his program.  Kazin had just had published
an autobiography titled New York Jew , and was probably
on television to plug the book, apropos of
which he and Cavett had more or less this to say:


D.C.: Why did you call the book `New York Jew'?  I
mean, some people might consider that title...
uh, a little provocative.

A.K., smiling, amused: Well, the title pretty well
sums me up.  I happen to be a Jew who has identified
himself in the New York intellectual environment.

            

            To my mind Dick Cavett's question remained
intriguing, not so much because Kazin failed to answer
it fully as because I wondered why the question
had occurred to Cavett in the first place.  Indeed,
New York Jew does somehow seem to have an
almost hostile overtone.  Why?  Are we so imbued
with anti-Semitism or hypersensitivity to it that any
direct reference to Jews, particularly culturally intensive
New York Jews, touches a raw nerve?  Some
months after the interview I asked a friend of mine, a
Jewish professor emeritus of English who was originally
from New York (albeit the state, not the city),
what he thought about the matter.  He replied something
like this: “Hmm, well, yes, but isn't it a little
blunt, a little hostile to call anyone by a bare ethnic
noun?  Suppose we saw a German we knew walking
toward us.  And then what if one of us said to the
other, `Here comes that German.'  There's a nuance
of put-down, almost hostility there.  If we liked the
guy and had nothing against Germans generally,
we'd probably say something like `Say, here comes
that German fellow... that young German guy...
that old German gentleman.' ”

            I have tested my professorial friend's observation
in a number of real and imagined situations involving
several ethnic or national categories and
have found it to be correct.  The unmodified noun
for an ethnic group or nationality does imply a certain
hostility or contempt or, especially on the lips of
a member of that group, a nuance of defiance, as in
Kazin's case.  Prouder or more arrogant people are
apt to fling the bare noun at you, almost as if to add,
“And you'd better believe it!”  A snooty Brit may
staunchly declare,  “I am an Englishman,” where a
more modest denizen of England would be more
likely say, “I'm English,” employing the adjective
rather than the noun.  There seems to be a kind of
semantic quality that makes adjectives softer and
gentler than nouns and makes of them softening
agents.

            In some cases the adjectives and nouns for ethnic
groups are formally identical, as for example
German, Swiss, or Russian .  But to soften the ethnic
term in such cases it can still be used adjectivally, as
in the example already given or in: “A Russian guy
once told me...”  Perhaps particularly where the
noun and adjective are identical in form, if not function,
colloquially a blunt noun is invented, such as
Dutchman for German (n.), Russky for Russian (n.),
Jap for Japanese , or Chinaman for Chinese (n.).  Conversely,
plain nouns for ethnic groups or nationalities
are sometimes replaced with adjectivally softened
terms like Colored Folks, African Americans , or
Native Americans .

            If adjectives soften ethnic terms, nouns can
harden them.  This function can be demonstrated by
comparing the noun Jew with the adjective Jewish in
context.  When someone says, “That Jew business is
new here,” he isn't saying quite the same thing as
“That Jewish business is new here.”  Because of the
abomination and shame of anti-Semitism, you tend
to respond more sensitively to language reflecting
attitudes toward Jews, which is why jew down is
both derogatory and offensive while gyp or welch on
are relatively innocuous.  But the hardening effect of
plain nouns can be detected with regard to other
peoples.  “That Swede church” isn't quite the same
as “That Swedish church.”

            The ethnic terms that seem bluntest or most indelicate
are sometimes simply what people call
themselves.  Chinaman is nothing but a calque of
zhongguo ren , morpheme for morpheme Chinaman ,
and Polak is simply Pole in Polish.  And sometimes
ironically or defiantly people will call themselves by
names intended to be pejorative or downright insulting,
as when African Americans call each other
nigger or Jews of Odessa call one of their folk heroes
Poltorazhida `Yid-and-a-half.'

            When a people has been dealt with shamefully,
there is reason to dissociate it from its former identity
by giving it a new name.  The niggers and
darkies (where again the primarily adjectival word is
the less offensive) of slavery became the Negroes and
Coloreds of Jim Crow and are the African Americans
and blacks of today.  Blacks, of course, are usually no
more black than whites are white.  The misnomer
must be acceptable because the parallelism implies
equality between the folks so designated by adjectives
of color.

            Newcomers to the American Southwest where
there is a large population of Latin Americans often
ask, “What do you call these people?”  Hispanic ,
though currently the best answer, isn't entirely satisfactory
because the term lumps together people who
are about as alike as, say, Tahitians and Haitians.
Forty years ago, before a sizable emigration from
Mexico into New Mexico, in this state the Spanish-speaking
element of the population carelessly called
itself mexicano , as some of the older Hispanics still
do, though New Mexico had not been part of Mexico
for more than a century and then for only about a
quarter of a century after New Spain became the
Mexican Republic.  Anglos usually referred to the
Spanish-speaking element as native or, again in a
kind of leveling parallelism, as Spanish , never as
Spaniards , on the model, probably unconscious, of
Anglo , short for Anglo-American .  Hispanics who
prefer to emphasize cultural ties with Mexico, especially
la Republica Azteca, as most in New Mexico
definitely do not, may prefer to go by the name of
Chicano , which implies political as much as national
or ethnic identity.

            There are nationalities and ethnic groups so
confident, so satisfied with themselves that ethnic
epithets either bounce off them like pebbles off an
elephant or are adopted as amusing or even ornamental.
What do you call an American or Australian
to insult him?  Yank and Aussie have been tried but
to no avail.  WASP started off with a pejorative nuance,
it seems to me, but has been accepted so
smugly by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants that the
term has been appropriated by some people it
doesn't fit, for instance Americans of German or
Irish descent who may be agnostics of Catholic background.
Where Americans are called gringo , they
tend to be more amused than offended by the epithet.

            Then there are peoples too alien or exotic to the
mainstream of the dominant culture to have
prompted an attitude expressed in language.  American
Indian tribes seem to fall into this category.  One
says indifferently, “He's Navaho,” or “He's a
Navaho” as most people do not say indifferently,
“He's Jewish,” or “He's a Jew,” though in the case
of the Indian the noun seems somehow more natural
and no less friendly.  This indifference does not,
however, extend to particular kinds of Indians.
Squaw, papoose , and maybe even brave are no
longer used, except humorously (Smile when you
say that!) or, again, defiantly.  The boys' basketball
team of the Indian School in Santa Fe call themselves
the Braves, and the girls' team is called the
Lady Braves.  There is likely a touch of humor here.
In my experience the most endearing characteristic
of American Indians generally is their keen sense of
humor.

            When it comes to sensitivity to ethnic or national
designations, the bulk of Americans seem to
be indifferent to nuance.  We as soon say, “I'm an
American” as “I'm American” or jauntily “I'm a
gringo” or proudly “I'm a Yank.”  Are we made impervious
by a shell of arrogance, numb by self-satisfaction,
or tolerant by the wild ethnic diversity in
which most of us live?
         
         
            
“The suit was filed by two men and a woman who
said it was unfair and illegal to allow women in skirts into
the Florentine Gardens nightclub for free on certain
nights while forcing men and women without skirts to pay
a cover charge.”  [From the Los Angeles Times , :B-2.  Submitted by 
and by several other readers.]
         
         
            You Say Tomato...



            Yesterday a friend rang to say that she had just
got back from Majorca, only she didn't say
Majorca, she said “MEEYORCA.”  I asked her how
MADGE-ORCA was, and she said MEEYORCA was
lovely, and so the conversation went on.  Neither of
us mentioned the discrepancy in pronunciation, but
equally neither of us would budge from what we
knew to be right.  In an open court, I would have
explained that my great-aunt lived there for twenty
years and never stopped calling it MADGE-ORCA, and
even if I gave up calling it MADGE-ORCA I would instead
call it MALLYORCA, and not the odd in-betweeny
MEEYORCA.  But our conversation never
reached the open court, so she must have replaced
her receiver thinking me hopelessly ignorant.

            Pronunciation today makes fools of us all.  One
only has to listen to MPs, particularly on the Conservative
benches, to note what a squidgy state it is in.
Recently David Waddington pronounced a particularly
grim terrorist act “D'STAARDLY.”  I had imagined
the pronunciation of dastardly was restricted to
two choices: either a long or else a sharp first a .  Yet
here was the Home Secretary offering a third.

            Such oddities emanate largely from Tories who
are midway through performing their own plastic
surgery on their vowel sounds.  I always felt sorry for
Cecil Parkinson when he was Trade and Industry
Secretary as “inDUStry”--the “DUS” rhyming with
bus --was one of the few words that gave him away.
Mrs. Thatcher, too, pronounces various words in an
idiosyncratic manner.  “M-gnificent” she says, perhaps
over-compensating for fears that her “a” will
be too northern by removing it entirely.

            Things were not always so.  A regional accent
has only recently come to be seen as a bar to advancement
in politics.  Many of the statesmen in history
to whom actors ascribe smart southern accents
were in fact proudly northern.  The memoirist Richard
Monckton Milnes recalled a dinner at which Mr.
Gladstone sat in the place of honor.  Gladstone liked
to chew everything thirty-two times, so he spent the
meal largely in silence.  At last, he seemed ready to
say something, and his fellow guests leant forward in
anticipation.  Picking up a nut, he said, “It is many
years since I ate a Brazilian NOT or indeed a NOT of
any kind.”  Similarly, the posh long “a” in grass (and
indeed class ) was originally an affectation by courtiers
in imitation of George IV: until then everyone in
the country had pronounced class to rhyme with lass .

            Nowadays, the shifting sands of pronunciation
claim many a victim.  As a Catholic, I was brought up
to say Mass with a long “a”--“MAARSS”--but I have
recently been finding myself in such a minority that
I am at present attempting a Waddingtonian transition
towards Mass with a short “a.”  At the moment,
I am stranded awkwardly in between, and I'm sorely
tempted to struggle back to my original point of embarkation.

            There is a successful pop ballad called “Lady in
Red” that worries me every time I hear it because
the singer, Mr. de Burgh, has to struggle through
three lines ending with the words chance, dance , and
romance .  As far as I can recall, he pronounces
chance with a sharp “a,” and dance with a long “a,”
and then he finds himself in the disastrous position
of having to pronounce romance with a long “a,” too.
These are troubled times.

            Those at the top of society have not helped matters
by their tendency to inverted snobbery.  Princess
Anne says “EETHER.”  King Edward VIII used to
irritate his father, George V, by pronouncing lady as
“LIDY” (to rhyme with tidy ), and when he became
Duke of Windsor he further upset everyone by following
his wife's pronunciation of Duke as “DOOK.”

            A week or two ago, I heard Lord Carrington
pronounce graph as “GRAFF,” with a sharp “a.”  Presumably
Lord Carrington knows what he's up to, but
let us hope that Mr. Waddington did not hear him.
Having spent most of his working life trying to graduate
from “GRAFF” to “GRAFF,” it would be awful if
he now had to make the arduous journey back to
square one.
         
         
            The Feminist Critique of Language
            This is the book that gives you chapter and
verse to refute all those linguistic reactionaries who
cannot see why there is all that fuss about using he
and man to mean a `person of either sex.' The debates
that Deborah Cameron illustrates are fundamental
to everyone's use of language whether they
be female or male--how it is used, how it is perceived
and received by speakers and readers of both
sexes, how it can on the one hand bolster and on the
other break down attitudes and prejudices, and how
it can create new awarenesses.

            
               The Feminist Critique of Language brings together
a wide range of views and approaches to its
subject, ranging from the conservative linguist Otto
Jespersen and the author Virginia Woolf writing in
the 1920s to contemporary critics.  One of the main
strengths of the collection is that it does not just put
forward one view, it maps out the debate allowing
different views to be stated and then criticized or
revised.  The eighteen essays and extracts and the
perceptive introduction reveal the range and depth
of the debate about feminism and language.

            Cameron divides the book into three main sections.
The first, “Speech and Silence,” has Woolf as
its starting point and includes Cora Kaplan on “Language
and gender” as well as two French extracts
from Annie Leclerc on “Woman's word” and an interview
with the leading French psychologist Luce
Irigary entitled “Woman's exile.”  These essays explore
the notion of women's “silence” and the utopian
quest for a specifically female voice in culture.
Much of the real meat of the book comes in Part
Two, “ `Naming' and Representation.”  Dale
Spender's quasi-Worfian views on “man made language,”
published in 1980, are counterbalanced by
the perceptive 1981 review of Spender's book by
Maria Black and Rosalind Coward.  Muriel R.
Schulz's 1975 essay on the semantic derogation of
women leads into a discussion of compiling a Feminist
Dictionary against the grain of the authors' view
in predominantly male lexicography.

            One of the main strengths of this collection is
that it makes available to specialists--students of literature
for instance--material which would otherwise
have been extremely difficult to get hold of.
This applies in particular to essays such as Anne Bodine's
on “Androcentrism in prescriptive grammar:
singular `they,' sex-indefinite `he,' and `he or she.' ”
First published in 1975, this dryly written paper
provides much of the analytical information needed
to counter the stereotypical “hysterical fuss” reaction.
Bodine analyzes the ways in which (male)
grammarians (both descriptive and prescriptive)
have since the seventeenth century sought to establish
he as the sex-indefinite pronoun despite evidence
that actual usage consistently contradicts that.
It is a pity that the most recent material in the collection
appeared in the mid 1980s.  In answer to
Anne Bodine's point, both the Longman Dictionary
of Contemporary English and the Collins Cobuild
Dictionary use they and their as the non-gender-specific
pronoun/adjective (which the reader probably
noted also in the first paragraph of this review).

            The Critique has an amusing slant, too.  One of
the most telling and effective exposés of the entrenched
nature of sexism in language is Douglas
Hofstaedter's pseudonymous parody “A person paper
on purity in language,” written as a supposed
debunking of “silly prattle” about racist language.
He uses white and black in the place of man and
woman in examples such as chairwhite, Frenchwhite,
whitepower, whitehandle, oneupwhiteship , and so on.
Through such strategies and telling adaptations of
quotations like “All whites are created equal,” “One
small step for a white, one giant step for whitekind”
Hofstaedter's short piece becomes a cutting revelation
of just how deep-seated are not only sexist but
racial prejudices in language.

            The final part of the book, “Dominance and Difference
in Women's Linguistic Behaviour,” examines
how women actually use language, tackling
such areas as gossip, “tag” questions, and conversational
gambits.  I found this the least satisfactory section
in that the necessarily short extracts could not
provide sufficient detail.

            Cameron deliberately excludes some of the
more familiar work which is available elsewhere.  So
this collection contains texts that are more marginal
than would he ideal for students who may read nothing
else on the subject.  It also means that some important
names, such as Julia Kristeva and Toril Moi,
are omitted.  Her thematic structure also slightly defuses
the impact of the debate.  By beginning with
Virginia Woolf instead of some of the more linguistically
oriented material (Bodine, Lakoff, and so on),
she does not immediately establish the ground to be
broken.  A chronological structure would have directly
juxtaposed Jespersen with Woolf and then enabled
the reader to find a way through the developments
in the debate, giving a more coherent picture
of the broadening issues.

            A stimulating and entertaining collection, The
Feminist Critique of Language acknowledges and reflects
the range of the debates about women and language,
not only today but since the 1920s.  It should
be included in student reading lists, but it also deserves
to be prescribed reading for those who feel
themselves to be concerned with language--across
the spectrum from the (hopefully diminishing) ranks
of the “hysterical fuss” brigade to already committed
feminists.

            Kathy Rooney

         
         
            Bloomsbury Dictionary of Dedications
            There are those who collect all sorts of collectables,
including, apparently, dedications.  Adrian
Room, a well-known and proficient lexicographer
and compiler of all sorts of collectables has produced
a book that some might find enormously
entertaining, or useful, or both, but which I find
somewhat tedious.  I find nothing interesting, entertaining,
or useful about any of the following, which
are fairly typical of the fare:


To Love and Courage.--Margot Fonteyn, Autobiography,
1975.

To the unsinkable Dolly, who has a big brain
under that big yellow wig, and a big heart under
that big chest, this book is respectfully dedicated.--Leonore
Fleischer, Dolly, 1987.

I dedicate this book to my friends.--Mary
Storr, Before I Go..., 1985.

To Mary, without whose constant encouragement
and advice this book would have been finished
in half the time.--Geoffrey Payton, Payton's
Proper Names, 1969.

Dedicated to those who gaze out of windows
when they should be paying attention.--Roger
McGough, In the Classroom, 1976.

            

            These seem to me neither funny nor clever, but
there are so many of the type that I get the feeling
that I may be the odd man out, the one person in the
world who finds Thomas Hardy excruciatingly boring:
I have a sneaking suspicion that there are many
like me but they are too embarrassed to admit it.

            I have had a book dedicated to me by my sister.
I haven't looked, but I would guess that it just says
something like “For Larry,” which seems just right.
There are some interesting older dedications, like
Machiavelli's 32-line toadying exordium to Lorenzo
the Magnificent in The Prince .  (In Italian it probably
ran longer.)  But not all of the oldies are goodies:
Edmund Spenser's dedications of his (nine) books
vary from one-liners to some very sleepy sycophancies
many times that length.  It must be remembered
that many successful authors of yore were supported
by patrons, and praising a wealthy and powerful individual
in the days before democracy became popular
was simply a matter of expediency.  Besides,
only the worst ingrate would fail to acknowledge to
largesse provided.  Today, when commercial considerations
put the publisher into the role of the patron--despite
the fact that advances are repayable,
risks are taken--acknowledgment of an editor's (artistic)
contribution may be relegated to the closing
lines of the author's foreword, which often grudgingly
suggests that the work was produced in spite of
rather than because of the person cited.  But such
acknowledgments do not qualify as dedications in
the sense generally understood and in the book at
hand in particular.

            Occasionally, the identity of a dedicatee has remained
a mystery for years, with speculation bandied
back and forth endlessly in Notes and Queries .
Evidently, Bram Stoker's dedication of Dracula
(1897) was such a one:


To my dear friend, Hommy-Beg.

            

            Had I ever noticed that, I cannot say that it
would have kept me awake nights wondering and
worrying who Hommy-Beg might be: I would assume
it was a nickname for someone close to Stoker,
possibly a private nickname known only to the two
of them, and I would have continued to nod off.  It
turns out to have been Sir Thomas Henry Hall
Caine, Stoker's friend; although the significance of
that revelation eludes me completely, it might well
have won some bookworm a beer.

            Dedication-collecting may be like stamp-collecting
(which I never understood, either).  If one
likes this sort of thing, there is no keeping him
down, I suppose, and if one must have a collection of
dedications, I suppose it ought to be Adrian Room's.

            Laurence Urdang

         
         
            Bloomsbury Dictionary of First Names
            This is a well-written, though fairly standard alphabetically
arranged reference book on given, or
first, or, as they like to call them in Britain, regardless
of the religion of their possessors, Christian
names.  It seems to be the product of a publisher's
decision that such a book should be on every well-rounded
reference list, but as a work viewed in the
larger context of onomasiology, it breaks no new
ground as far as I can tell and offers nothing not already
covered by the works of Leslie A.  Dunkling
(for one).  Which is to say that if you already have a
fairly comprehensive dictionary of first names--this
one claims 1500 “names defined”--you do not need
this one; on the other hand, if you have none and
want a good one, this one is likely to be as good as
the best and better than most.

            Laurence Urdang

         
         
            A Dictionary of SurnamesA Dictionary of First Names
            Both of these books will find a place on the
shelves of any good reference library.  They contain
a great deal of information that has been intelligently
collated.  The surname dictionary, in particular,
becomes the best available work on the subject;
the chief value of the first name dictionary, for me,
lies in the Supplements, which deal with Arabic
names (by Mona Baker) and with the given names of
the Indian Subcontinent (by Ramesh Krishnamurthy).

            The awkward fact about the surname dictionary
is that a great many people will consult it in vain for
information about their own names.  It contains entries,
says the Introduction, “for most major surnames
of European origin, as well as for many rarer
ones.”  “Major” in this context means names like
Smith and Jones , frequently found in any telephone
directory.  Such names must of course be included,
though the people most anxious to discover something
about the original meaning of their surnames
are invariably those who bear the rarer names.  The
authors say that if they came across reliable information
about rarer names, they wrote entries.  In other
words, if someone else had done the research in
what appeared to be a scholarly way, they took advantage
of it.  That seems to me to be a sensible approach,
since the only way properly to investigate a
surname is to go back through the male line as far as
possible, noting the various spellings of the name,
where the family was living in past centuries, and so
on.  Being asked to make a judgment about a surname
merely on the basis of its modern spelling is
rather like being asked to give the meaning of a
word such as pain without being told whether the
word is English or French and without knowing
whether the word should really be spelled pane .

            I have been using the surname dictionary regularly
and usually feel satisfied with the information
presented; but there are criticisms to be made.  Recently,
for instance, I was wondering about Boffin , a
name that obviously appealed to Charles Dickens.
Hanks and Hodges say that it is an English name of
unknown origin but hint that it may be an anglicization
of Welsh Baughan (found also as Vaughan ), a
diminutive of Baugh , ultimately from bach `little.'  A
general comment on the treatment of the Welsh ch
sound in English would have been useful, but I personally
accept that theory.  I wonder, though, why
the Baughan (and Vaughan ) entries do not mention
that bach was an epithet that distinguished a son and
father, a kind of Welsh equivalent of junior .  I also
have my doubts about how ordinary users of this dictionary
will cope with its metalanguage.  Linguistic
boffins have no problems with a statement like “dim.
of BAUGH, from W bychan , hypocoristic form of bach
little.”  But try that on an ordinary member of the
public, the kind of person who will presumably consult
this book in a library, and add in for good measure
the last line of the Baughan entry which reads:
“Cogn. (of 1): Corn.: BEAN.”  Acting on that last
hint, I looked at the Bean entry.  I found suggestions
that it is a “metonymic occupational name,” an English
nickname or an anglicized form of a Gaelic personal
name meaning `life.'  There was no cross reference
to Baughan , however, nor a mention of Cornish
byhan/vyhan `little.'

            Genealogical information is occasionally added
to the surname entries, but only when the families
concerned are “important” according to a very traditional
definition of that word.  People well-known
in the entertainment world, such as Frankie
Vaughan, are definitely not mentioned.  Under the
entry for Howard , therefore, we are given notes on
the noble house of that name, along with the possible
derivations of the surname.  The “noble” theme
is continued in the first-name dictionary.  Readers
are there told that Howard represents “transferred
use of the surname of an English noble family.”

            Entries like that for Howard in the Dictionary of
First Names hardly encourage me to take the main
body of the book seriously.  The absence of hard
statistical evidence about the use of first names in
the English-speaking world is also very worrying.
Such evidence is vital for many reasons.  It enables
sensible decisions to be made about which names
should be included in a work of this kind.  Hanks and
Hodges include Hrothgar , for instance, because it
occurs in Beowulf and was borne by a vice-chancellor
of Oxford University at the turn of the century.  I
do not consider that a sensible inclusion, especially
when they choose to ignore Hugo , which has been
regularly if infrequently used in Britain and the US
since the 1860s.

            Statistical evidence also indicates the reason for
a name's use.  It is absurd to suggest that Howard has
been used in modern times because it is the surname
of an aristocratic British family.  The popular use of
the name in the US in the 1870s must have been in
honor of Oliver Otis Howard (1830-1909), since
the surnames of Civil War officers were often used in
baptism.  American bearers of the name, such as
Howard Hughes and Howard Keel , later made the
name well known to British parents.  Hanks and
Hodges totally ignore such American influence,
though the evidence for it is overwhelming.

            The authors' respective treatment of Howard as
a surname and Howard as a first name is perhaps
symbolic of the different qualities of these two dictionaries.
Surname interpretation mainly requires
good philological skills, which Hanks and Hodges
supply.  First names call for a frequent delving into
areas of nonacademic, popular culture and recent
social history, as well as a certain amount of linguistic
judgment.  The student of first names needs an
enthusiastic and genuine interest in the behavior of
ordinary human beings.  Whatever else is in this Oxford
Dictionary of First Names , it lacks that basic
enthusiasm.  It is much the poorer for it.

            Leslie Dunkling

            Thames Ditton, Surrey
         
         



            Five Postscripts to “The Scandalous
Yiddish Guide of the Census Bureau”

            1.  William Safire published an entire column
under the title “Counting Census Mistakes” (“On
Language,” The New York Times Magazine , April 15,
1990) in which he enumerated a number of errors in
both the Census Bureau instructional Guide and in
the census form itself.  He found misplacement
problems, mistakes in parallel structures, improper
use of commas, wrong or missing prepositions, incorrect
use of reflexive verbs, etc.  “The Census Bureau,”
he wrote, “has had 10 long years to get its
forms straight.”  And all this about its English !

            2.  Yoysef Mlotek, Cultural Director of the fraternal
Jewish organization, the Workmen's Circle
(“ der arbeter ring ”), published in the New York Yiddish
weekly Forverts a sharp attack on the outrageous
illiteracy of the Yiddish translation of the Census
Bureau Guide (April 20, 1990, p. 16).  In a letter
to the Census Bureau he asked “whether other foreign
language translations of the Guide were similarly
entrusted in such incompetent hands.”

            3.  I sent a copy of my article [XVII, 2] to the
Census Bureau.  After a delay of more than seven
weeks I received a reply from Mr. Allan A. Stephenson,
Assistant Division Chief for Outreach and Program
Information, Decennial Planning Division.  He
wrote:


... To find a contractor to translate Assistance
Guides in 32 languages, we required the foreign
language expertise to be at least at the 3/3 level
as rated by the Foreign Service Institute or a recognized
equivalent.  Communication Technical
Applications, Inc. [which no longer exists] provided
the translator for the Yiddish Guide... a
native Yiddish speaker with expertise rated at the
5/5 level.


            

            Mr. Stephenson further apologized for any inadvertent
offense that the Yiddish translation may have
caused, assured me that “in light of your comments”
the Guide will no longer be distributed--an empty
assurance since the count is over--and that the Bureau
will be interested in my views about materials
prepared in Yiddish for the year 2000 Census.

            One may seriously question his characterization
of the translator of the Yiddish Guide as a “native
Yiddish speaker” (see below).  Besides, it is axiomatic
that there is a basic difference between spoken
language and written language, and it is highly fallacious
to assume that a native speaker, even with a
fluent command of his language, can ipso facto intelligently
write in it, let alone translate from or into it.

            4.  I spoke twice on the telephone with the
translator of the Yiddish Guide .  He was born in the
United States and received his education in public
schools.  In his childhood a Hebrew teacher would
come to his home for several hours a week.  He
never went to a secular Yiddish school where Yiddish
was taught as a basic subject and where other
subjects as well were taught in Yiddish.  I had
guessed correctly that his parents spoke Yiddish,
and that that was the main source of his knowledge
of the language.  In the course of our lengthy telephone
conversations I could not detect a sense of
informed literacy about Yiddish as a language.  It
also became clear that the Yiddish of his parents was
not standard Yiddish.  He never wrote or published
anything in Yiddish, and he seemed to have used as
aids in translating the Guide Alexander Harkavy's
Yiddish-English Dictionary and Uriel Weinreich's
Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary .
Needless to say, translation by dictionary is the
crudest and, if one may say, the cruelest form of
translation.

            5.  Maurice Samuel introduced to the English-reading
public, in his book The World of Sholem
Aleichem , the quintessential Yiddish-speaking
Tevye, the dairyman who addresses himself even to
God in Yiddish.  (He is the main character of the
musical “Fiddler on the Roof.”)  And in his book In
Praise of Yiddish (p. xiii), Samuel wrote about the
presumed absence of any rules in the language:


It is gratuitously assumed that Yiddish ... can
dispense with strict forms and usages, that part of
its appeal is supposed to lie in a happy-go-lucky
grammatical and syntactical laxity which makes
error impossible and everyone knowledgeable.
Nothing could be further from the truth.  [italics
added]


            

         
         


            In connection with Dr. Zellig Bach's article,
“The Scandalous Yiddish Guide of the Census Bureau”
[XVII,2], I thought your readers might like to
know that in mid December of 1990 I received a call
from an official of the Census Bureau asking me
whether I concurred with Dr. Bach's negative comments
on the Yiddish Guide .  Having seen the Guide ,
I replied that I indeed agreed fully with Dr. Bach's
assessment.  I explained that the Guide was riddled
with atrocious spelling, syntactic, and semantic errors.
Though printed in the traditional Yiddish/
Hebrew alphabet, most of the words were misspelled,
as though the writer had never seen a Yiddish
dictionary; the syntax was garbled almost beyond
recognition; the lexical content made little
sense.

            The Census Bureau official informed me that
the translator had been approved by Communications
Technical Applications, Inc., a private contractor,
whose word on the expertise of the translator
the Census Bureau tacitly accepted.  The official admitted
that at least in the case of Yiddish the Census
Bureau had erred in relying on this contractor.  He
added that in the light of Dr. Bach's and my comments
“we will no longer distribute this Guide .”  In
a subsequent letter he added that “we will keep ...
your name on file for the year 2000 census.  If we
prepare materials in the Yiddish language, we would
be interested in your comments.”

            I hope to live to the year 2000 to help with the
Yiddish Guide .  I am sure that Yiddish will still be
around, surviving its detractors, as it has for a thousand
years.





         
         


            I must take issue with both of the BIBIOGRAPHIA
by Alan S. Kaye [XVI, 4].  In his review of Words
That Make a Difference , he praises a sentence from
The New York Times describing the miscellaneous
junk in a harbor as “eclectic bounty.”  If these items
were in a collection that I put in my front yard, eclectic
might be the word; but what is missing from
the harbor's variety is the element of choice: eclectic
come from the Greek legein `to choose or pick.'

            In the same piece, he traces savvy to Portuguese,
which might be correct, but Mencken's American
Language derives it from the Spanish sabe .  Professor
Kaye's nuance word is, at a guess, a suggestion from a
word-processor's spelling checker which was derailed
by nonce word .

            His review of Bernstein's Reverse Dictionary indicates
that he (and whoever revised Bernstein's book)
are behind the times on boxing weight classes: featherweight
should precede lightweight , [and other principal
divisions have been ignored].





         
         


            Is monotheism an inadequate word to describe
basic beliefs set forth in the Old Testament?  Recently,
while browsing through the dictionary, I
came across the word henotheism , defined as “the
worship of one of a group of gods, in contrast with
monotheism, which teaches that only one god exists.”
If many of the people of the covenant believed
that Jehovah was the supreme god among
lesser gods, were they henotheists, rather than
monotheists?  Harper's Bible Dictionary suggests,
“Even Moses, whom we may regard as the founder
of the religion of Israel, was more probably a henotheist
than a monotheist.”

            The distinction is a neat and illuminating one.  I
wonder why henotheism is not as common a philosophical
designation as monotheism.  It seems to be
a way station between polytheism and monotheism,
a useful concept that provides a missing link in the
evolutionary process.

            The root hen `one' is found in hendiadys , a rhetorical
figure labeling expressions like nice and
warm , instead of “nicely warm.”  It is also found in
hendecasyllable, hendecagon , and hendecahedron .





         
         


            Milton Horowitz wrote about a mistranslation of
a word in the Bible which was ostensibly responsible
for Michelangelo's putting horns on his sculpture of
Moses [XVI,2].  Another mistranslation which has
probably had a much greater influence on the Western
world is that of the Hebrew word almah , which
means `young woman' but was translated as `virgin.'
The King James version of Isaiah 7:14 reads “Therefore
the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold a
virgin shall conceive, and bear a son....”  Matthew
1:22-23, in the New Testament, describes the birth
of Jesus, referring it back to Isaish, saying, “Now all
this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was
spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Behold
a virgin shall be with child and shall bring forth a
son....”

            The Hebrew word for virgin is bethulah , which
would have been used in the original had the young
woman been a virgin.

            In the New English Bible, which was the subject
of another article in the same issue of VERBATIM, the
passage from Isaiah reads, “Therefore the Lord himself
shall give you a sign.  A young woman is with
child and she will bear a son....”  In the translation
of the Holy Bible according to the traditional
Hebrew text, published by the Jewish Publication
Society of America, Isaiah 7:14 reads, “Assuredly,
my Lord will give you a sign of His own accord!
Look, the young woman is with child and about to
give birth to a son....”

            These 20th-century corrections of the original
mistranslation cannot, of course, undo the implications
that have resulted from translating almah as
`virgin' instead of `young woman.'





         
         
            American Grammar
            Although this is essentially a textbook, it is lucidly
written and presented and can be commended
to those who have been less than satisfied by earlier
attempts to provide a clear exposition of Chomskyan
grammar.  It is readable, but that compliment must
be taken in the context in which it appears: a grammar
could scarcely be classified as a “good read” in
the same sense as a novel.  Also, it should be understood
that American Grammar , while it happens to
deal with illustrations from American English, describes
the grammar of most of English: the title derives
from the association with America of the particular
kind of grammatical analysis described:
except for a few anomalous differences, the grammars
of the major dialects of English are, of course,
uniform.

            This is not the place to launch a commentary on
the shortcomings and virtues of the various theories
of grammar (or grammatical theories) that have been
proposed; suffice it to say that no one of them provides
all the answers to all the myriad questions
raised by language.  Certainly, Chomsky's theory,
which denies behaviorism, makes one wonder if
there cannot be certain aspects of language that depend
on behavior (without requiring one to accept
all facets of behaviorism).  “Traditional” grammar,
with its eight parts of speech, has proved woefully
inadequate to the task of describing how language
works, so something is clearly needed.  Much of
Chomskyan grammar is very boring and mechanistic,
with its transformational rules and deterministic
reflexes.

            For me, some questions about grammar are still
more comfortably answered by traditional theory,
though I draw on transformational grammar when it
suits me--any port in a storm.  To hold that psychology--even
physiology--has no relationship to
grammar seems overbearing to me, for experience
has a great deal to do with how we use and understand
language, which I consider highly associative.

            However, I should not enter the argument here:
all theories have their strong and weak points, and
transformational grammar appears to have fewer
weak ones.  I am interested in meaning, which is
treated as badly by Chomsky and his followers as it
was by the structuralists who preceded them.  As
Carl Mills writes, linguistic competence includes
knowledge of phonology and syntax but not semantics,
a view of Leonard Bioomfield's that created
many difficulties:


At the other extreme, some linguists in the late
1960s and early 1970s argued that almost all aspects
of meaning in language ought to be explained
by semantic rules in the grammar.  Not
only the meanings of words and the meanings of
sentences, as most linguists define sentence
meanings, but also the appropriateness of the
uses of sentences, the functions carried out by
sentences, and numerous other facets of what we
call “meaning” have been proposed as part of the
native speaker's linguistic knowledge....  [W]e
... note that adopting this view ... ultimately
may be equivalent to Bloomfield's view that no
aspects of meaning belong in grammar.  [p. 363]


            

            I think it patently silly to waste time trying to
decide whether the Lexicon (note the capital L) of
English is conceived of as a list of words or as a list of
morphemes (meaningful elements that may stand
alone or combine to form words) with a set of rules
governing how the elements operate.  The question
is trivial, for the systems need not be mutually exclusive,
nor need they exclude phrasal sets like Shut up!
and kick the bucket and red herring which do not
yield to immediate constituent analysis.  It may be
hard to believe, but in the 1960s some linguists advocated
a stochastic approach to grammatical analysis--that
is, one in which each word was analyzed
on its own, without reference to what preceded or
followed--an approach that even the merest intelligence
ought to have rejected.

            Grammar is a formidable term to many, largely
because of their associations with it from their
schooling, either in learning a foreign language or in
learning more about their own.  It is far from an easy
subject, but it can be an interesting one, particularly
to those who enjoy seeing how such an extremely
complicated phenomenon as language is (and can
be) put together to work.  Carl Mills has written a
useful, understandable, understanding, and informative
introduction to the subject.

            Laurence Urdang

         
         
            One for the Road



            Words are, generally speaking, old.  Roads--
or, at least roads with motor traffic on
them--are relatively new.  Hannibal's elephants did
not have to give way to oncoming traffic (there was
none) and cries of “Mush, mush” are presumably
all that has ever been required on polar ice-caps to
urge on Eskimo dogs.  Words on road signs, though,
have the worst of both worlds, and the old certainly
does not redress the balance of the new.

            Today's travelers on today's roads have to make
do with a sort of compressed-speak where speed is
of the essence and brevity the soul of economy.  Or
should it, perhaps, be that the essence is of speed
because if the road sign cannot be seen and understood
at a distance of a hundred yards at a speed of
80 miles per hour then it might as well not exist?
The message has to be short and simple, like STOP.
Expand this to STOP CHILDREN and the first ambiguity
creeps in.  (In France this sign--showing two
small children hand-in-hand--reads with Gallic simplicity
PRUDENCE.)  As it happens, the opposite of
STOP isn't GIVE WAY nor, as Americans advise even
more seductively, YIELD.  A visiting Englishman I
know told me that the road sign he enjoyed the most
in New York State was the one that advised him to
SQUEEZE SOFT SHOULDER.  No trouble at all, he said.
As for LAY-BY ... it was a pleasure, especially after
FAST LANE: or should it have been the SLIP ROAD?  It
would be as well to avoid LOOSE CHIPPINGS anyway.

            It is undoubtedly the single words that leave
most to the imagination: DIVERSION (Watch the
birdie?), CROSS (Buns, hot?) and RAMP (If you can't
beat them, join them?); but it is the CROSSINGS which
bring their own crop of double meanings.  HEAVY
PLANT CROSSING must surely mean `the biggest aspidistra
in the world' while FARM CROSSING recalls the
sad pre-war dust bowl joke of the American prairie:

            “Seen Farmer Brown lately?”

            “No, but his farm went by about an hour ago.”
Ironically enough, a LEVEL CROSSING is usually quite
bumpy but PASSENGERS MUST NOT CROSS THE LINES is
more important (it takes hours to unravel them.)

            Needless to say, the law comes into all this although
the police don't CAUTION AIR BRAKES very
much and BEWARE SLEEPING POLICEMEN hardly raises
a “Ho! Ho!” down at the station any more.  On the
other hand, POLICE PATROL VEHICLES ONLY is something
motorists have long suspected, and POLICE
SLOW purely a matter of opinion.  PEEL OFF is very
dated now though.

            Was it, perhaps, the early use of the word CIRCUS
that led to the involvement of the animal word
in the naming of pedestrain crossings?  ROUNDABOUT
with its fairground connotations has superseded CIRCUS
but ZEBRAS, PANDAS, and PELICANS still have their
CROSSINGS.  To confuse matters still further there are
road signs in Africa marked ELEPHANT and HIPPOPOTAMUS
CROSSING which mean just that.  There is one
in a busy American street which reads TURTLES
CROSSING--they are on their way to lay their eggs.
Those English naturalists who help roads cross motorways
are no doubt even now awaiting the scrivener.
Watched, I daresay, by CAT'S EYES.

            DISABLED PARKING PLACES conjure up a nice version
of a handicapped car park while MOTORCYCLE
BAY SUSPENDED has overtones of the Hanging Gardens
of Babylon.  DECEPTIVE BENDS is open to any
construction you care to put upon it (“Don't forget
the diver, sir, don't forget the diver” as they used to
say in ITMA all those years ago).  The only new verb
to emerge would seem to be CONING (“ices, chocolates,
cigarettes”?) which must take quite a bit of
translating into the vernacular of friendly countries--perhaps
the LOLLIPOP LADY will help, especially
if it's a case of a ROUTE MAUVAIS as the French
have it.

            GRIDIRON isn't torture any more but some sympathy
must be felt for the London clergyman whose
route from church to crematorium takes each funeral
cortege through a road junction conspiciously
marked DO NOT ENTER BOX UNTIL YOUR EXIT IS CLEAR.
I am told he has never yet felt able to point the
moral.  (Perhaps he's the same vicar who labeled the
way to his church BRIDAL PATH.)

            ROAD WORKS usually crop up immediately before
an obstruction--and the road does not work at
all; while FLOOD is presumably just the place to see a
stream of traffic.  Then there is the sign ONE IN SEVEN
at the top of the hill.  Can there be only six more like
it, or is that just auto-suggestion?

            Perhaps the best sign of all, though, is the one
with no words at all, universally known as “Mae
West Ahead.”
         
         
            
“He says when he first became vicar of Trinity
Church, its congregation was `very elderly and old-fashioned'
but now it was an active all aged congregation.”
[From the Henley Standard , :15.  Submitted
by ]
         
         
            
“Other planned features of the store:...  About 100
more employees, on top of the 125 to 150 new sales consultants
hired in August.”  [From the St. Paul Pioneer Press
Dispatch , .  Submitted by ]
         
         
            
“ARE YOUR TALENTS BEING WASTED? ... You could be
selected to manage small tasks, make beds, pass water,
wrap silverware, call games, read, decorate, do craft projects....”
[From the Post-Tribune , :17.
Submitted by ]
         
         
            Bad Language and Big Bucks



            Words that, barely a quarter of a century ago,would have resulted in instant arrest for insulting
behaviour can now be overheard any time in
Knightsbridge, Oxford Street, and any school playground
in the country.  On stage and screen they are
even harder to escape.

            This week a reader wrote, noting that out of a
dozen plays he had seen which are currently running
in London, he had been startled by language
that he rated “obscene” in no fewer than ten.  Here
is a profound change from the time, not so long ago,
when the Lord Chamberlain, the British Board of
Film Censors, and the American Production Code
ensured that the language of entertainment was far
more purified than that spoken by most of its audiences.

            In the silent-film era, language did not concern
the censors, apart from occasional complaints at
some vulgarity in subtitles.  Talking pictures led to
precise provisions in the American Production
Code: “Pointed profanity [this includes the words
God, Lord, Jesus, Christ --unless used reverently--
Hell, damn, Gawd ], or every other profane or vulgar
expression, however used, is banned.”

            For four decades the ruling was strictly followed
on both sides of the Atlantic.  It was a major sensation
throughout the English-speaking world when,
in 1939, David Selznick exceptionally prevailed
upon Will Hays, the architect of Hollywood censorship,
to permit Clark Gable in Gone With The Wind
to utter his famous valediction to Scarlett O'Hara,
“Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.”  Selznick
pleaded to Hays, with a touch of irony, perhaps, “I
do not feel that your giving me permission to use
`damn' in this one sentence will open up the floodgates.”
He was right: as late as 1955 the expressions
Good Lord and damn were forbidden in the James
Dean film, Giant .  Yet proscription is ever the
mother of invention.  W. C. Fields fooled the Production
Code with imprecations of his own devising,
such as “Godfrey Daniel!”

            In literature, the liberation of language began
earlier than in films.  In 1949 Norman Mailer's The
Naked and the Dead narrowly escaped prosecution
in this country because of its persistent use of the
word “fugging.”  Throughout the fifties the word
which Mailer only suggested made more and more
appearances in American novels, though it was regularly
cut out of the English editions until 1959.  In
that year, the Obscene Publications Act first introduced
a defense of artistic merit.  The next year the
trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover brought four-letter
words into public debate.  Meanwhile, the Lord
Chamberlain's Office finally gave up its centuries-long
censorship of the stage.  On television, Alf Garnett
(the original of America's Archie Bunker) gave
bloody such currency that the British Board of Film
Censors allowed the word in Billy Liar (1963), with
an A certificate.

            The X certificate gave the Board new latitude.
In 1967, bugger was permitted in Up the Junction .  In
the early 1970s, certification of the films of Andy
Warhol introduced a truly comprehensive vocabulary.
Today it is hard to think of an expression that
has not been heard on the screen.

            The modern vocabulary marks a singular linguistic
revolution.  The words proscribed by the old
production codes were swearing or profanity in the
true sense, with purely spiritual connotations in
their reference to the Deity.  While this form of
searing has lost the force it once had, the essence
of all the new words of emphasis is physical.  They
divide roughly into three groups.  One, generally
the mildest, includes rectal/excretory expressions.

            The second comprises synonyms for the male
and female genitalia.  These--apart (in Britain) from
the more infantile words such as dick and prick --
retain the greatest power to offend and are the least
used.  In most common use are the words in the
third group that originally define sexual acts.  It is
not uncommon for the word fuck and its derivatives
to appear thirty or forty times in a police movie; in
GoodFellas , the count would certainly be well over
one hundred.

            The anomaly of this prodigal use of language
that would once have been generally regarded as
unacceptably obscene is that, even today, it in no
way coincides with the usage of the great majority of
the audience--any more than did the excessive
puritanism of the old production code.  Thus, many
people who go to the cinema encounter language to
which they are not accustomed in daily life.  Even
though such language is much more a feature of
American than British films, in the United States
there is a majority to whom this mode of speech is
quite alien.

            Is all the language necessary, then?  The American
film trade would argue that it is.  The bourgeoisie
and the Bible Belt are not after all the most profitable
audience; the public that is wants strong
sensation, which they will to an extent measure by
the language in which the films are couched.  Moreover,
since the public tends to prejudge movies by
their classification, the film distributors aim for those
classifications that promise the strongest fare while
admitting the largest age range.  In Britain this is the
15 certificate; in the US the PG13.  Often there is a
contractual obligation on film-makers to achieve a
PG13, for which the minimum requirement is one
use of the obscenity fuck .  It is perhaps significant
that even in the supremely “family” film Memphis
Belle an attentive ear will detect the single requisite
usage.

            The level of language affects the extra-theatrical
careers of films.  Airline versions must have all the
strong language excised.  In this country, video versions,
likely to be viewed at home, are sometimes
more stringently classified by the BBFC than the
original films.  American television is generally much
more puritanical than Britain's in reediting films for
transmission.  British television has its own rules.
BBC 1 and ITV will generally show films uncut after
10 pm; BBC 2 and Channel 4 after 9.  When films
are shown before those hours there is a danger that
the viewer might be confused by abrupt cuts and
bleeps.  For the first time on Christmas Day the BBC
censored a film classified as U by the British board,
when a shit was removed from E.T. , which followed
the Queen's speech.

            Does language matter?  James Ferman, Secretary
of the BBFC, points out that it is only in the
English-speaking world that such strong taboos have
been built up around dictionary words and that this
country shares with South Africa alone its extreme
anxiety about “bad” language.

            The most serious result of the proliferation of
this comparatively restricted vocabulary is the impoverishment
of writing.  For hack screenwriters,
sexually based words have become a kind of shorthand
to represent insult or anger, while rectal/
excretory words more generally are used to get an
easy laugh.  As inevitably as Pow!! or Wham!! in
comic strips, a comedy crash or fall has to be accompanied
by a cry of Shee-it!
            

            With use, the words have rapidly lost most of
the shock value they once had.  To be effective, writers
will soon have to start looking for imaginative
alternatives.  Perhaps we will one day be startled
again by Godfrey Daniel! or even the kind of creative
flights to which linguistic prohibition could inspire
O'Casey.
         
         
            Accuracy in Quotations



            The style manuals are explicit in their directions
regarding the citing of others' writings.  But I have
been unable to find any recommendations regarding
the quotations of oral material, though such quotations
are very common in newspapers and other
periodicals that deal with current affairs and, especially,
with “the world of” entertainment and
“celebrities.”  (The quotations marks are intended
to emphasize criticism of the practice of all the media
to devote an inordinate amount of time and
space to the interviewing and promotion of actors,
singers, and other entertainers, most of whom have
nothing to say and who make their living uttering
words created by others.  Articulate artists, writers,
musicians, lawyers, scientists, teachers, historians,
etc. are almost totally ignored by the media unless
they can be identified as “newsmakers.”)

            The style problem is fairly simple to describe.  If
an American writer quotes a British speaker as saying,
“Honor thy father,” it would be arrant nonsense
for some pedant to say, “If he is British, he did not
say that.  He said, `Honour thy father.' ”  And, in a
recent article by Peter Stothard in The Times Saturday
Review [27 October 1990:11] about Dianne
Feinstein, the California politician, she is quoted as
saying, “California does not want to swap one grey
pinstripe suit for another grey pinstripe suit,” in
which it would be silly to point out that, as an American,
she would have said “gray,” not “grey.”  On
the other hand, the same article quoted George
Bush as having said, “I kicked some arse last night”
in his debate against Geraldine Ferraro in the 1984
campaign for vice president, and we all know that
Bush does not say arse .  In reference to Feinstein's
adversary in the recent campaign, Pete Wilson, an
anonymous taunt is quoted as “And what about Wilson's
new blue Paul Newman contact lenses?  And
his stepped-up shoes?”  As the taunter was an American,
why is he using the Briticism stepped-up shoes ?
Admittedly, its meaning is transparent, but Americans
do not use expressions like stepped-up shoes .

            Some idioms do need translating.  If such an idiom
occurs in a direct quotation it ought to be left
the way it was, then explained, even though the
rhythm of the writing be disturbed.  In live interviews
that is not always easily done, especially when
the interviewer is unfamiliar with an expression and
is too embarrassed to admit it.  In a recent television
interview a British actor was recounting an anecdote
in which he used the idiom the penny dropped ,
which means `I saw the light, came the dawn.'  A
momentary flicker of perplexity on the interviewer's
face showed that he had not the slightest idea of
what the speaker had said, but he blandly continued
without missing a stroke.

            I am reminded of an incident that took place
some twenty years ago, when I first began visiting
Britain regularly and was unfamiliar with nonliterary
Briticisms.  Several of us were locked in a long and
tiring discussion of a project's costs, which I considered
to be realistic and the others thought expensive.
Finally, a bit exasperated, I blurted out what I
thought would be the metaphor that would settle
the issue, saying, “If you want to make a penny,
you've got to spend a penny!”  Although those present
were too polite to split their sides and roll about
in hysterics, they were obviously amused, for, as was
explained to me, I had picked the wrong metaphor:
spend a penny is a Briticism for `go to the loo,' or, as
they say in America, `the bathroom.'  (It might not
be inappropriate here to point out that, in addition
to this British idiom, the only other major contribution
made to culture by pay toilets was the invention,
in Scotland, I understand, of limbo dancing.)

            Struggling back to the subject, I should suggest
that in quoting spoken material, mere spelling of the
order of honor/honour, traveler/traveller, paneling/
panelling should follow the style of the medium,
wherever it is published.  The speaker's words
should never be changed; that is, arse ought not be
substituted for ass or vice versa and, if an explanation
of an unfamiliar word or phrase is required, it
ought to be supplied, even if this must be relegated
to a footnote.  In this particular case, it is doubtful
that anyone reading The Times is unaware of the
meaning of American ass .  Another alternative, not
always possible, is to avoid entirely the passage containing
the problem word or phrase.  Perhaps the
best choice is to use indirect discourse: Bush said
that he had kicked some arse in his debate against ...
Almost anything is preferable to putting into people's
mouths things they did not say.

         
         
            Dictionnaire de Franglais
            There has come into my possession the above
book from which all sorts of interesting information
may be gleaned--information, moreover, not to be
had from any other source.  Most readers of VERBATIM
would, I am sure, have been as intrigued as I was
to discover that a yeoman is “an English landowner
often having municipal functions”; that in tennis a
ball is net “when it touches the top of the summit
[ sic ] of the net separating the two sides”; that a starting
block has “compartments in which race-horses
are put before the off so they can all leave simultaneously”;
and that brick is the English for “a sailing-ship
with two masts” --taking part, maybe, in a lofing
match: “in a sailing-boat regatta, the action of
one of the participants consisting in an attempt to
bring one of his rivals head to the wind.”

            We are, of course, in the magical domain of
Franglais, where it is virtually impossible to tell
whether the given definitions accurately represent
the way English words and phrases are employed by
the French or merely reflect one person's valiant but
ill-founded guesswork: in other words, whether such
massive incomprehension is individual or collective.
Let us explore further and see if we can decide.

            After the regatta one would presumably adjourn
to a bostel “a hotel built on the water's edge, intended
for amateurs of navigation,” otherwise ship
lovers .  Fans of sport in general might then bet on a
favored hurole-racer or watch a bout at walter --“in
boxing, medium weight about 65 kg.”--or visit a
skating-ring , conceivably in the company of a
W.A.S.P. “a female auxiliary in the army”; or play at
horse shop “a game that consists in trying to place,
by throwing it from about ten meters, a horseshoe
around a post,” clad (if female) in something suitable,
like a mode smash “a type of light feminine
costume, specially intended for tennis-players and
easily permitting all movements”; or simply relax at
gin-rommy .

            Data concerning transport abound.  One may
travel in a break “a car of which the rear can be
opened to load goods” or in an airliner affected by
the jet-stremon which is “found at a great height in
the stratosphere,” presumably by members of jetsociety
“a group of socially prominent personalities.”
If one is not too old one can enjoy a railway
scenic “a little train used as an attraction for young
people.”  (If one is too old, one must beware of lying
“spontaneous and inexplicable recollection of
youthful memories forgotten since long ago, above
all involving elderly persons.”)  On returning to base
one parks one's car in a motor-home--where else?

            Questions of business and commerce are not neglected
in this guide, from the most basic rural matters
( pick-up “agricultural equipment for the collection
and storage of lucerne, hay, etc.”--the hay
being made, no doubt, from ray-grass “a sort of English
turf”) to the abstractions of high finance.  A
tresaurer will doubtless be interested to hear of a
High-Flyer “a stock of the future,” even though he
must beware of being misled by a racketter , involved
in “the possibility of obtaining money by means that
are often illegal.”  He would be better off joining
Dinner's Club “an association whose members have
a certain economic solidarity.”

            Clothing and fashion receive due attention, as
well.  Given the figure, one might don slooghies
“tight-fitting trousers and loose jacket of imitation
leather worn by up-to-date young people or young
girls” and baskets “sports shoes of cloth with rubber
soles.”  A man, naturally, could also get himself a
hair clean “a man's haircut exposing the ears and
nape,” while a woman might prefer a Catogan “a
small bun ending in a tuft of hair.”

            The conclusion is inescapable.  Franglais is a collective
phenomenon, like fog or an epidemic, but
the person who compiled this volume has made a
noteworthy individual contribution, epitomized by
his assertion that Union jack means “the different
countries composing the British community.”  So
much for my publishable opinion; save for a few
closing remarks the rest must be on the records ,
which is here defined as “part of an interview, a
speech or report of a meeting not made available to
the public and retained in the archives.”

            One suspects that this volume must be the work
of its publisher, Guy Le Prat... concerning whom I
am obliged to assume that, as they, say in the vermouth
advertisements, you do pronounce the t .  At
any rate he has dropped more than one brick .  The
grand tradition of Pedro Carolino is not dead.

            John Brunner

            
               South Petherton, Somerset
            

            *On the other hand, this is not Franglais, either: according to
Petit Robert it has been standard French since 1782.
         
         
            Word Power Made Easy
            Why is it that I seem to be able to find typographical
errors in others' works but seldom in my
own?  The first thing I spotted in this British edition
of a book that has enjoyed enormous success in
North America for some forty years, was “opthalmologist,”
a common enough spelling error but, because
it is spelt correctly elsewhere, merely a typo.
I started looking for signs that it has been suitably
Briticized.  Sure enough, gynaecologist and paediatrician
were so spelt in a section called “How to talk
about doctors.”

            As the book has been around for a long time, it
probably works for many people, despite the fact
that it violates my principle that the only legitimate
way of increasing a person's vocabulary is through
reading, reading, reading (and then writing, writing,
writing).  There is no doubt that the book is very
well presented, well written, and well organized;
moreover, it offers good, sound, accurate information
about the lexicon of English.  Whether one can
put that information to the appropriate use of building
up vocabulary is moot; indubitably, some can,
and one never knows till one tries.

            Laurence Urdang

         
         


            Unbeknownst to many but historians and other
researchers, librarians, older Britishers, those who
rummage about among antiquarian books, and other
eccentrics are the periodicals published in Great
Britain and, to some extent, in America from the seventeenth
century onward.  We all know about The
Tatler and one or two others and might even have
read essays from them by Addison and Steele.  But
many people interested in such things have never
heard of Gentleman's Magazine, Notes and Queries,
The Edinburgh Review, Century Magazine , and others
that provided intellectuals with a worldwide
communications network on such diverse subjects as
Shakespeariana, Danteiana, the origin of visiting
cards, the etymologies of words like punch, noyade,
and ha-ha , amendments and emendations to the Dictionary
of National Biography , showers of frogs, pub
names, usage and grammar, ancient customs, superstitions,
law, dialecticisms, rhyming slang,
and the longevity of horses.  Notes and Queries (then
a weekly, more recently a quarterly published by
Oxford University Press) carried, appropriately
enough, a department called Queries and another
called Replies, and the perseverance and loyalty of
readers can be judged by the fact that in some instances,
the interval between a Reply and a Query
might be more than a quarter century.  One of
these--indeed, it might be able to claim credit for
having the longest record of continuous publication
anywhere in the world--was Gentleman's Magazine,
a monthly, published from 1747 till early in the
twentieth century.  I derive enormous enjoyment
from reading through back issues of such periodicals,
a rather formidable prospect when you consider
that each year makes up two volumes of about
400-odd pages each.  Let me give you some idea of
the content in the following extracts:

            In the issue for February 1822 there appeared
the obituary of Thomas Coutts, aged 87, “the well-known
banker in the Strand.  In the next issue, under
“Anecdotes of the Late Thomas Coutts, Esq.,”
appeared the following:


The late Mr. Coutts was the youngest of four
sons of John Coutts, esq. merchant at Edinburgh.
... The following account of Mr. John Coutts
and his family were [sic] communicated by the
earl of Dundonald to the editor of the Morning
Post, in refutation of anecdotes published in a
pamphlet, entitled “Life of Thomas Coutts,” &c.

“Mr. Thomas Coutts married a daughter of Sir
John Stuart, of Allan Bank, in Berwickshire, and
Sir John Stuart's mother was a daughter of Mr.
Ker, of Morrison, in the same county; and Mr.
Ker's mother was Miss Grizzle Cochrane, daughter
of Sir John Cochrane, second son of William,
first Earl of Dundonald.

“A singular circumstance attended this Lady,
which may not be generally known, but deserves
to be recorded as an almost unexampled instance
of female heroism and filial affection.  I cannot exactly
ascertain whether the fact I am about to relate
happened before or after her marriage with
Mr. Ker, of Morrison--I rather think it was previous
to that event.

“Sir John Cochrane, being engaged in Argyle's
Rebellion against James the Second [of Scotland--that
is, James I of England], was taken prisoner
after a desperate resistance, and condemned
to be hanged.  His daughter having noticed that
the death-warrant was expected from London, attired
herself in men's clothes, and twice attacked
and robbed the mails (between Belford and Berwick),
which conveyed the death-warrants; thus,
by delaying the execution, giving time to Sir John
Cochrane's father, the Earl of Dundonald, to
make interest with Father Peter (a Jesuit), King
James's Confessor, who, for the sum of five thousand
pounds [something like $5 million today],
agreed to intercede with his Royal Master in favour
of Sir John Cochrane, and to procure his
pardon; which was effected.  Her great granddaughter,
Miss Stuart of Allan Bank, married the
late Mr. Thomas Coutts's father, and brought him
four sons--Peter, John, James, and Thomas.  [Mr.
John Coutts (the father) died July 29, 1761.]

[The Gentleman's Magazine, March 1822]

            

            The 1890s were marked by the publication, in
fascicles [“parts”], of what is now called The Oxford
English Dictionary but was then referred to, variously,
as The New English Dictionary [ N.E.D. ] and
The Historical English Dictionary [ H.E.D. ].  As only
the earlier letters were gradually becoming available,
it is amusing to note, in the correspondence
published in Notes and Queries , Replies evoked by
Queries that direct the questioner to stop wasting
space in N. and Q. and go look up the answer in the
N.E.D.
            

            The editor of the N.E.D. , J.A.H. Murray, often
asked readers for help, particularly for dialect information
about certain words and expressions and occasionally
commented on Queries.

            A sampling of some of the language topics considered
and debated included:


pronunciation of water, golf, iron

origin of infra dig, take the cake, blackball, sand
hog, Dutch courage, hoodlum(ism), horse latitudes,
flotsam, jetsam, apple-pie bed/apple-pie
order, jingo

whether none is singular or plural

condemnation of awful and awfully, preventative,
taxidermist, transpire, of Latin and Greek
sources for new words (e.g., telephone),
lengthy (as an Americanism)

spelling reform

mnemonics

names

nicknames (e.g., Poet of the Poor (George
Crabbe), Attic Bee (Sophocles), Madman of
the North (Charles XII of Sweden), Manchester
Poet (Charles Swain), Great Prussian Drill-sergeant
(Frederick William I), etc.)

pseudo-French (e.g., double entendre, nom de
plume, à l'outrance, en déshabille, laissezfaire,
levée)

            

            A typical exchange:


Over the entrance to the baths at Spa are the
words: “Pentru Barbati.”  Will someone tell me
what language that is?  Strange to say, they do
not know either at the baths or at the hotel.

--8th S. IV, Oct. 14, '93:308

Pentru barbati sont deux mots de la langue
roumane; ils signifient “pour hommes” (for gentlemen).

--8th S. IV, Oct, 28, '93:308

            

            Here is Murray:


As several correspondents have written to me
asking if I really wrote the words “an historical,”
as printed in my guery on `Corduroy' last week, I
hope that I shall be allowed to say that I did not.
I wrote, as I always do, “a historical,” which I
consider to be better modern English, though
many scholars prefer to retain the archaic “an
historical,” just as some preachers retain the obsolete
“an holy” and “an house,” which they find
in the Bible of 1611.

--8th S. I, Jan. 16, '92:46

            

            I could go on, but space is limited.  If readers would
(or would not) enjoy the inclusion of occasional extracts
from such sources, many of which demonstrate
that the concerns of people interested in language
more than a century ago were often the same
as those besetting us today, they should please let
the Editor know their wishes.

         
         


            “Then there was the problem a Geological Survey
fieldman had in proposing the name of a quadrangle
map in New Mexico.  Since quadrangle maps
are named for the most prominent feature on the
map, he had difficulty trying to explain his choice of
name.  He sent the following report to the office:


The Sherman quadrangle is named after the
town of Sherman.  There is no town by the name
of Sherman.  The chief center of population of the
Sherman quadrangle is called Dwyer, but the
post office at Dwyer is called Faywood Post Office.
Faywood Post Office used to be located at
Faywood, but since Faywood no longer exists, it
was moved to Dwyer.  It is not possible to name
the Sherman quadrangle the Faywood quadrangle
because there already is a Faywood Station quadrangle
adjacent to the Sherman quadrange.
Faywood Station is, of course, the station of the
town of Faywood, which no longer exists.  In the
days when it did exist it was located in the Sherman
quadrangle, about three miles east of
Faywood Station.

As was mentioned above, there is no town by
the name of Sherman.  This is because the town
of Sherman is really called San Juan.  However,
because there is another town by the name of San
Juan somewhere else in New Mexico, they had to
call the post office Sherman Post Office.  It was
named after Sherman.  San Juan is not in the Sherman
quadrangle, but about a mile north of it.”


            

            [From “The Mountain Was Wronged: The Story
of the Naming of Mt. Rainier and Other Domestic
Names Activities of the U.S. Board on Geographic
Names,” by Donald J. Orth, Names, Vol. XXXII, No.
4 (December 1984).]

         
         

            Colloqs and Infs


            Millions of people own dictionaries.  Some actually
use them.  In various surveys conducted by
dictionary publishers over the past years, it has
emerged that the main use to which people put dictionaries
is to find the correct spelling of a word; the
next most frequent use is to determine the meaning
of a word; determination of pronunciaton, etymology,
synonyms, usage notes, and any other paraphernalia
offered comes low on the list.

            As I have observed on numerous occasions in
the past, dictionaries are rarely consulted by those
who need them the most.  In order to consult a reference
book, one must first acknowledge either ignorance
or insecurity, neither of which is either a
crime or a reprehensible condition: many people are
very certain about things about which they are dead
wrong, thus never look them up to check their accuracy.
On the morning of 9 September 1990, in a
report on the Bush-Gorbachov meeting in Helsinki,
a reporter on CNN (the US Cable News Network)
referred to the conference using a term that could
only be spelled “tête-à-thé,” which might have been
some strange metaphor meaning `head in the tea'; or
perhaps it was an oblique reference to China or to
hocking a tchainik `gossiping.'  In any event, as it was
being read from a script and not delivered off the
cuff, I classified it as an illiteracy.

            Recently I was editing a manuscript of a dictionary
in which the lexicographer labeled irregardless
an illiteracy, and I suggested that a less critical,
more clinical term might be nonstandard .  Readers
might disagree, but I felt that regardless is more, so
to speak, in the public domain than an expression
like tête-à-tête , which one might classify as an “intellectualism”
and, certainly, a more pretentious term
than get-together or meeting .  If one is going to be
pretentious, one ought to get his pretences properly
in a row.  The anti-intellectual version of tête-à-tête is
its English translation, head-to-head , which sounds
somewhat vulgar to me and carries with it more the
sense of `confrontation' than `intimate encounter.'
(Another example of an anti-intellectualism is the
expression between a rock and a hard place -- that is
“a rock” and not “Iraq,” regardless of current
events -- which I take to be a corruption of between
Scylla and Charybdis , neither of which is easy to
pronounce from its spelling.  More examples of anti-intellectualisms,
while not exactly “welcome,” will
be reported on as received.)

            Linguists (and lexicographers) try to avoid
“loaded” terms in the labeling of words and senses
in dictionaries.  Taking a detached view is more “scientific”
or “clinical,” regardless of what the individual
scholar might feel: one would scarcely expect a
doctor, diagnosing a victim of some revolting affliction,
to accuse the patient of having a “disgusting
disease.”  By the same token, the sober observer of
language ought not allow his emotions to get in the
way of his cool evaluation of the facts (as he sees
them), and a label like Illiterate has pejorative overtones
and undertones inappropriate to the detached,
scholarly view.

            Years ago, lexicographers used the label Colloquial
to designate words and senses that were at a
language level somewhat below that of formal usage
but not so low down and dirty as to be considered
Vulgar or Slang .  A word like Goody!, Great!, piddling ,
or tart up would fall into this category, though
the kind and quantity of terms included depend
largely on the prudishness of the person doing the
labeling.  Vulgar , which really means no more than
`unrefined,' is rarely encountered in modern dictionaries
as a label because people have taken to
designating four-letter words as vulgar, illustrating
the semantic process known as pejoration `depreciation,'
the opposite of melioration .  Today we should
probably consider labeling Great! as Vulgar a bit
harsh.  Because dictionary users became accustomed
to seeing words and senses of which they disapproved
(in formal contexts) bearing the Colloquial
label, the word colloquial began to undergo pejoration
itself.  By the early 1960s, when the labels to be
used in The Random House Dictionary were being
reviewed and discussed, we decided to drop the Colloquial
label used in The American College Dictionary
in favor of Informal , a practice followed by most
English dictionary publishers from that time until
now.  Colloquial means nothing more than `used in
colloquy, or conversation' and is thus no more than a
high-flown term for conversational , which, as far as I
know, carries no stigma.  ( Slang is far too complex a
notion and label to discuss here and will be treated
at another time.)

            Why lexicographers have not used Conversational
or its abbreviations, Conv. or Convers ., I cannot
say: perhaps some have and I am not aware of it.
My own observation is that Informal might be undergoing
its own round of pejoration -- these things
sometimes go in cycles -- and, in a reference book I
recently completed, which will be published by Oxford
University Press in the autumn of 1991, I have
chosen to return to Colloq .  As the book is in
machine-readable form, should the publisher decide,
in a generation's time, to switch back to Informal ,
the change can be readily accommodated by
performing a simple substitution program on a computer,
and all the Colloqs will become Infs before
you know it.

         
         
            
“During our entire marriage of 44 years, plus a few
preceding years of courtship, I could count the number of
times Walt was stopped by a policeman while driving on
just three fingers of my left hand.”  [From Lil Phillips's
column in the Cape Cod Times , :11.
Submitted by ]

         
         
            
“I'm sorry I never got to meet him while he was
alive.”  [Leonard Maltin on Andy Devine, from Entertainment
Tonight , TV program, .  Submitted
by ]

         
         
            
“ `It's hard to get medical aid if you're HIV-infected
in many areas.' ” [A quotation from Dr. Richard J. Howard
from The New York Times , .  Submitted
by ]
         
         
            
“The main auditorium of the Midland Center for the
Arts proved the effectiveness of its acoustical design as the
phrases of Feltsman traveled to the back rows where your
reviewer sat, totally intact.”  [From the Midland Daily
News , .  Submitted by ]