Speaking of the Unmentionables
In the nineteenth century, the Age of Euphemism, the word unmentionables designated only one
specific referent--men's trousers. Not only was the
mentioning of a man's (or woman's) leg taboo, but
the garment covering it was also forbidden to be
spoken of in polite conversation. In modern dialogue,
which in no sense approaches the gentility of
the perfumed puritanicals, the denotation of unmentionables
has broadened to include body organs,
curses, and biological functions. How clever it is,
though, that metaphor, the great facilitating factor in
the changing of word meanings, has carefully camouflaged
the unmentionables of the current day.
Consider the following vignette, apparently
void of any hint of an unmentionable:
Mrs. Eleanor Sutherland, the vivacious wife of
the petroleum magnate, H. R. Sutherland, is hosting
a midsummer patio brunch with her friend of many a
social season, Grace Walthum, wife of Sam Walthum,
considered by many to be the richest man in the
state, in honor of Sandra Chapman, the young Illinois
debutante and intended wife of Tom Weed, Republican
candidate for governor.
“Girls, the treat for this morning is avocado finger
sandwiches. Fanny made them for the first time
last week, and H. R. thought they were simply
sumptuous. Only today, she made them with German
pumpernickel. I do hope you like them.”
“Oh, Eleanor, you must pencil this off for me on
one of your personalized recipe cards. These are
purely delicious. Don't you agree, Sandra?”
“Indeed, I do. I might serve them as hors
d'oeuvres for Tom's political science seminar at the
university next week.”
“You two are testimony enough for Fanny's culinary
powers, although I do detest her slicing the
bread so thick. After finishing off the sandwiches,
we'll savor some vanilla mousse.”
“That's a lovely centerpiece of bachelor's buttons
and cowslips, Eleanor. Wherever did you find
such exquisite flowers?”
“Yes, and the cubicle you have them arranged
in is just gorgeous.”
“Oh, Frank, the gardener, grew them on the
front lawn. He's hoping to have mistletoe by Christmas,
and if the spring orchids don't fizzle, Sandra
can use them in her nuptial ceremony. By the way,
Sandra, where will you and Tom honeymoon?”
“We're going to spend two weeks in the Grand
Tetons. Then we're off to the ocean where Tom says
he's going to swim stark nude. Would you believe
it?”
At this moment, there is a disturbing noise
nearby.
“Jeepers creepers, Eleanor, what is that whirring
commotion?”
“Why, Grace, look across the lawn to the orchard.
It's a feisty covey of flatulent partridges taking
flight. Aren't they beautiful, girls?”
“Tom's greyhound would certainly think they
were a beautiful sight.”
“My, how the time has slipped away. We must
be going, Sandra.”
“Of course, we must, and Mrs. Sutherland, I
have so enjoyed being a part of such a stimulating
conversation.”
“Girls, it was my deepest pleasure. Please do
come again.”
Actually, in the preceding dialogue, three ladies
from the highest level of society can be cited for
innocently mentioning the unmentionables in no less
than twenty-plus instances, to wit:
Avocado was borrowed from Spanish and was
originally spelled aguacate . The word's origin is Nahuatl
ahuacatl , a word meaning `testicle,' because of
the similarity of the shape of the fruit.
Pumpernickel was borrowed directly from German,
a compound of pumpern `to fart' and Nickel the
`devil.' The allusion could be to a hand slapping the
loaf, thereby producing a deep, hollow, fartlike
sound. On the other hand (pun intended), the root
sense might be implying the bread is so hard to digest
it would make the devil fart.
Pencil (as well as penicillin ) was borrowed from
Latin pēnicillus `paintbrush,' a diminutive of peniculus
`brush,' which is also a diminutive of penis , which
in Latin (also) meant `tail.' Figuratively, a brush is a
penis is a tail.
Seminar came through German from Latin
sēminārium `plant nursery.' The word's ultimate origin
is Latin semen `seed.' Since the testicles are producers
of semen, they are often referred to in slang
as seed .
Testimony and detest are both based on Latin
testis `witness, testicle.' In the final analysis, a man
can only witness to his virility by his testicles. The
root sense of testimony , then, is `a laying of the testes
on the evidence table' and of detest is to `hate to the
extent of losing one's testicles.'
Vanilla , extracted from the seedpods of a tropical
plant, was borrowed from Spanish vainilla , which
denoted the flower, the pod, or the flavoring. Spanish
had formed vainilla from vaina `sheath,' a word it
had borrowed from Latin vāgina `sheath for a
sword.' Later, vagina was borrowed into English
and assigned its present meaning from the similarity
of the functions.
Bachelor's buttons, a term that denotes a plant
with spherical-shaped flowers, was created as a metaphor
of the male testes.
Cowslip is not “cow's lip.” It is from Old English
cūslyppe `cow manure,' literally, `cow slip.' The
flower is aptly named, since it grows well in profusely
manured pastures.
Cubicle is from Latin cubāre `to bend over in
preparation for sexual activity.' The word now
designates a space so small a person might be required
to bend over to enter it.
In its root sense, mistletoe is the `bird-shit
plant.' The word is cognate with Old High German
mist `manure, shit, dung.' The seed of the plant was
dispensed in the dung of birds.
Orchid is from the Greek orchis `testicle.' The
flower was so called by Pliny the Elder because the
double root resembled two hairy testicles.
Fizzle is probably from Middle English fisten `to
fart.' In 1532 the word is recorded with the meaning
to `fart noiselessly.'
The Grand Tetons is a mountain range in Wyoming.
They were coarsely named from their root
sense, `big tits,' from French teton `tit,' because of
their shape.
Stark nude is euphemistic for stark naked. The
term was originally start naked (Middle English stert,
from Old English steart `tail, ass') and is preserved in
redstart `bird with red tail feathers.'
Jeepers creepers is nothing other than a euphemistic
cover-up for the curse Jesus Christ. The term
was actually used as early as 1937.
Feisty, like fizzle, began as Middle English fysten,
fisten `to fart.' At one time, fysting curre referred
to a stinking dog, and feist named a small dog
of mixed breed.
Covey, like cubicle, is from Latin cubāre `to bend
over for sexual purposes.' The word came through
Middle French cover `to incubate.'
Flatulent “having stomach gas” came through
French from Latin flatus `a farting.'
Partridge came through Old French and Latin
perdīcem, from Greek pérdīx `partridge,' which is
related to pérdesthai `to fart.' The partridge is a
“farting bird” because of the noise made by its being
flushed.
Finally, the first element of greyhound probably
means `bitch.' Old Icelandic greyhundr is `bitch
hound.'
Most will agree that euphemism is an acceptable
means of avoiding the unmentionables, unutterables,
inexplicables, ineffables, inexpressibles, and
whatever else they have been called. While it is the
function of metaphor to conceal the unmentionables,
it is likewise the pleasurable business of etymology
to expose them.
“Every minute was more exciting than the next.”
[From an on-camera interview with Linda Evans, commenting
on “Night of 100 Stars” party in New York to
promote “Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous.”]
“Best Place In Town To Take A Leak.” [From an advertisement
of Conn. Auto Radiator, Inc. in a local television
program guide, ]
Wrenches in the Gorse and Bracken
It began innocently enough, without guile on my part. We were traveling on an interstate through
flat, scraggly country. Nothing seemed to grow at
the roadside except dry, brownish, stalky, weedy
brush.
“What're those bushes, daddy?” a child
whined.
“Gorse,” I said absently.
“Gorse?” said my wife, raising an eyebrow.
“Well, then, what's that?” She pointed to a patch of
equally depressing but bushier shrubbery.
“Bracken,” I said serenely.
I had, I now believe, been reading an English
novel, or perhaps a Sherlock Holmes adventure, and
so the words just popped out of my subconscious.
You know, in English novels people and large
hounds are always chasing about on desolate moors,
amid gorse and bracken. I hadn't the foggiest
idea--and haven't to this day--what gorse and
bracken look like.
“Gorse and bracken,” my wife mused. “Ah yes,
one of the great teams of the Golden Age of comedy.
Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, Gorse and
Bracken.”
“Gorse and bracken, gorse and bracken,”
chanted the children gleefully.
A bit farther down the road we halted for lunch
at a roadside rest stop. My youngest pointed to a
bird and said: “What's that, daddy?”
Perhaps I was thinking of car repairs, for the
engine had been making odd noises. Whatever the
reason, without a blink I replied: “It's a Wrench.”
The lie came to my lips just as easily as to the lips of
Joseph Goebbels. Then, to my horror, without waiting
for another childish question, I pointed to a
crawling caterpillar and said glibly, “Look. There's
a Squirm.”
I had embarked on a life of deceit involving the
names of nature's own flora and fauna. Perhaps I
had an unconscious recollection of seeing, long ago,
James Thurber's delightful drawings of such creatures
as The Dudgeon and The Barefaced Lie in his
“A New Natural History.” If so, I didn't make the
connection for years, and prefer to believe that great
minds,... et cetera.
Anyway, to my kids, all bushes became Gorse
and Bracken. All birds were Wrenches. Worms,
snakes, and such were Squirms. I didn't disillusion
them. Instead, I confess with shame, I found that
merely misleading my children was not enough.
Since I lived in South Florida, where real tropical
exotica abound (poisonous toads, walking catfish,
two-foot-long green lizards from Cuba, etc.) it was
easy to flummox visitors.
“Gosh,” my brother-in-law said, peering apprehensively
into the dark of my back yard, a subtropical
jungle, “it sounds like we're in Africa. What's
that ... growly sort of chirping sound?”
“I believe that's a Strike,” I said. “A bird related
to the macaw.” Cupping a hand to my good
ear, I added, “Yes, I'm sure of it. A common Strike.
It has a predatory cousin, the Preemptive Strike.”
“Is that so?” my brother-in-law muttered, with
some awe in his voice.
Visitors from the North always demanded a visit
to the nearby tourist attraction, a lush, tropical paradise
populated by trained parrots and alligators and
colorful insects and such. So I took them.
“See that curious little beast over there?” I said,
pointing. “That's a Peccadillo. His armor, like a
shell, over most of its body, and great long claws to
dig in the ground. And there, climbing that tree--
the big blue lizard, see it?--that's an Orthodontia.
The striped one--see it?--is a Pharisee. Or, wait,
maybe that's a Paraphrase. Whatever. It's larger
than the Stentorian at any rate.”
With practice, I became bolder, mixing in the
names of real flora and fauna.
“A neighbor of ours used to own a ring-tailed
coatimundi,” I said. “It would escape and climb our
Ficus Benjamina. Look out, don't step on the Bufo
Marinus.” Then, without missing a beat, I continued:
“See those leafy things there? That's Impetigo.
The feathery thing is Implicit. And the vine growing
beside it is Thorax. It's sort of like poison ivy so
don't touch. You'll break out in a rash. The flowering
bush is Divertissement. And that bristly thing is
a Septum. One variety of Septum has been genetically
mutated by exposure to radon in the soil; it's
called the Deviated Septum.” Without a blush I
eyed ground-hugging plants and reeled off their
names: Hex, Ponder, Explicit, and Envy.
“See the ground cover with the yellow blossoms?”
I said. “It's Regalia.”
I was delighted to answer questions about butterflies,
birds, and creepy crawly things:
“Yes, that's an Utter Gall. And there in a row
are a Sheer Audacity, a Wretched Excess, and a Cistern.
I had hoped we'd see a Damnable Outrage but
they usually hole up in the daytime; there might be
one hiding there in that patch of Philanthropy. The
orange one is a Flirtatious Glance and, look, the little
one hiding behind that bed of Logic is the Furtive
Glance. That one in the ferns is a Connubial
Bliss. The fern itself is Lurch.”
Touring the tourist attraction's aviary--in
which the birds flew free while visitors strolled in a
glass tunnel--I hit my stride.
“The big blue wading bird is a Shrift. The
smaller one there is the Short Shrift. There's a flock
of Cognitive Verbs and a pair of Light-Hearted Banters.
The one zipping around in circles is an Orbital
Sander, and the drab little creature making those sad
chirps is a Plain Brown Wrapper.”
At the nearby zoo, I was quick to point out the
Utter Gall, a burrowing marsupial similar to the Unmitigated
Gall, and the horned mountain dwellers,
the Apex and the Pharynx. Back at home, sitting on
the terrace listening to the evening sounds, I would
invariably inform our visitors that many of South
Florida's indigenous species are scarce now.
“When we first moved here, a covey of Ruffled
Grouch lived right over there in that hedge of Presumption,
but no more. And Visage, Expletive, and
Articulate used to grow wild. Now...” and I
laughed harshly, “now only the garden catalogues
have them. And Expletive has even been deleted
from those.”
I suspect that many visitors were so overwhelmed
with the tropical heat that they didn't pay
close enough attention. Or perhaps it was my habit
of feeding them industrial strength Martinis before I
began my nature lessons.
One of my visitors, however, listened solemnly
to my spiel, then presented me with a card. It said:
Membership in the Indoor Bird Watchers is
granted to those who have identified the following
birds through the bottom of a Martini glass,
while seated--The Extra-Marital Lark, the Great
American Regret, the Morning Grouse, the After-Dinner
Pee Wee, the Double-Breasted Seersucker,
and the Rosy-Breasted Pushover.
I had been checked and mated at my own game.
But that didn't stop me. I remain addicted to my
Miami vice, although torn by the knowledge that all
over the country are innocent children, naive relatives,
and perplexed winter visitors, all telling their
friends and families about the wildlife I showed them
in Florida.
Guilt can't stop me, of course. Like any other
addict, I can't wait for my next fix. Come on down,
y'all, I want to take you out in the yard and point out
the Wretched Excess, the Ingratiating Manner, the
Hesitant Smile, and the Sheer Audacity. There's a
Veritable Shambles right beside the front steps, and
by the fish pond you can spot a Receptacle, an Incipient
Quarrel, and a Fidget. And look up; there goes
a Smote, circling in the air. I think it's hunting an
Apparent Hoax. See, there's one now, crawling under
that bed of Xerox.
Laurence Urdang's comments on “politically
correct” language reminded me of a television interview
on a network morning program the day after
“Dances With Wolves” won several Academy
awards. Live from the Pine Ridge reservation in
South Dakota, the (Anglo) interviewer was very
careful to refer to “Native Americans.” The interviewees
consistently referred to themselves as “Indians.”
Cross-talk
Searching for some refreshment in an unfamiliar
town, I came across a luncheonette with this
sign in the window: “HOT” COFFEE. I stared at the
sign for a moment. Something about the quotation
marks made the coffee suspect, the way a real estate
agent will call a closet a “room.” Since I didn't feel
like drinking a tepid beverage, I walked until I got to
a diner that served me an acceptable cup of java.
There on the menu was listed “FRESH” EGGS. The
purpose was obviously to highlight, to emphasize,
but I would argue that these places are only hurting
their business. Scare-quotes, as they are sometimes
called, call into question the very words they assert.
These are examples in which the wording undercuts
itself, yet without any apparent sarcasm.
There are those who argue that it is simply a case of
language calling attention to itself, as Steven Short
noted in a letter to VERBATIM fifteen years ago.
Other readers, such as Jon Mills and Pat Solotaire,
showed outright suspicion of entrees like “Roast
beef with `gravy' ” and a liquid soap boasting
“ `Contains No Phosphates!' ” The basic meaning
does not shift, but somehow its implications turn
against it. The effect is generally unintentional, like
two people talking at cross-purposes--so I decided
to call this phenomenon “cross-talk.”
Soon after that, I discovered another kind of
cross-talk, which has the insidious effect of undercutting
not itself but all related instances. I was in
the supermarket, buying dessert. “We use only the
finest ingredients,” read the label on one ice cream
brand. This seems like a simple statement, what the
linguistic philosopher J. L. Austin termed a constative
utterance: a base level of communication, with
no metaphor or secondary meanings attached. But
consider the implications of the label: most other ice
cream makers cut costs by using mediocre contents.
The wording thus has an extended or connotative
aspect to it, becoming what Austin called a performative
utterance. In fact, many manufacturers use this
kind of wording as a polite way of discrediting their
rivals. The impact of this seemingly nonassertive
language is such that the Federal Drug Administration
has recently banned the “No Cholesterol” label
on foods that never had cholesterol anyway. The
unfair inference is that somehow the manufacturer
has reduced the cholesterol, or that other brands
still contain a lot of it. The increasingly common
claims “All Natural” and “Fresh” have a similar effect
and are also coming under federal scrutiny. But
the investigation should really go beyond the supermarket:
when a jewelry store that does ear-piercing
advertises, “We sterilize all our instruments,” is it
not hinting something unsavory about other establishments?
What accounts for the pernicious effects of
cross-talk? Cross-talk seems to be a cousin of irony,
giving a result opposite to what is seemingly intended.
The difficulty arises in trying to say what
kind of irony cross-talk resembles. Irony of statement,
or sarcasm, seems close: exclaiming, “What a
surprise!” over a drearily foregone conclusion, for
example. But consider when a little child tells his
father, “We're going to surprise you with a birthday
party tomorrow afternoon!” There is no irony of
statement intended here, yet the sentence neatly
defeats its purpose. A clue may be offered by dramatic
irony, in which the audience knows what the
speaker is unaware of. Does the cross-talk in the
birthday-surprise announcement derive from the select
audience, who knows that the speaker is sabotaging
his meaning? Situational irony need not involve
language at all, just an action that achieves the
opposite effect of the intention. Maybe this is where
the bulk of cross-talk belongs, though it needs an
audience to apprehend it correctly, which makes it
also linked to dramatic irony.
The truth is that cross-talk may at times resemble
all three ironies, depending on the intent, audience,
and effect. And since only irony of statement
is deliberate, the effects of cross-talk range from accidental
to purposeful. Praeteritio , that sly rhetorical
device of mentioning what one is passing over,
belongs to this category of cross-talk: “That goes
without saying” covers up the obvious need to say it,
and “I will pass over the topic of my opponent's
adultery” should be recognizable as the ploy it is.
But then there are instances where the degree of
dislocation is unclear. Does the common capper to a
brief business conversation, “Let's do lunch sometime,”
signify an upcoming meal or a polite brushoff?
Let me illustrate the intricacies involved: I recently
received a card from an academic journal acknowledging
an essay I had submitted. They were
holding it for further consideration. The last sentence
read: “We assume, of course, that you have
not submitted this essay elsewhere.” Is this sarcasm?
Almost certainly not. Yet once again the implications
run counter to the wording and tone. The
urbane assume and of course finesse the real meaning
of the sentence, i.e., “We are worried that you
may have indeed submitted this essay elsewhere.”
The message is all the more urgent because its mere
presence hints that would-be contributors often do
submit the same essay to more than one journal simultaneously.
The most perplexing species of cross-talk remains
the unintentional reversal. In a recent advertisement
for the luxuriously quiet Lincoln Town Car,
Jack Nicklaus is trying to make a putt, but cannot
because of the noise of the spectators. Through the
miracle of television, all of them are crowded inside
the car with the windows shut, resulting in utter silence.
Nicklaus takes a swing: the ball rolls to the lip
of the cup, where it stops. Suddenly someone inside
the car sneezes, and the ball slips into the hole. It is
a funny moment, but what does it imply? That the
new car is not really quiet? That quiet is not always
such a good idea, anyway? And do not both ideas
run counter to the advertising pitch?
We may mean what we say, but do we always say
what we mean? A friend of mine once tried to sell his
old car by parking it in his yard with a sticker that
read “FOR SALE: $300.” He couldn't understand why
no one showed any interest, until a passerby told him
any car that cheap had to be a lemon. He promptly
changed the price to $700 and sold it the next day.
This story shows that interpretation is all important,
as in cheap meaning `inexpensive' to some people and
`shoddy' to others. To return to Austin's distinction
between constative and performative utterances:
Austin eventually concluded correctly that there are
no purely constative utterances. The simplest sentence,
such as “I am a woman,” can have secondary
meanings in certain contexts: for example, “I wish I
were a man” or “Thank God I'm not a man.” In the
broadest sense, then, any language is potentially
cross-talk, given a suitable situation, just as any utterance
may become ironic. Meaning is not as stable as
we might like it to be.
At times, the simplest wording can cross up the
reader. Last week, I was stopped at a traffic light
with a sign underneath that read, “RIGHT ON RED
AFTER STOP.” Since I live where right turns at a red
light are permitted, first I did not think much about
it. The sign just seemed superfluous. But then it
occurred to me: why was the notice there at all? I
stared at the sign for a moment, and I realized that
the words in a way implied their opposite; that is, a
right turn at a red light is not allowed in this district--except
here. In the end, I spent so much time
pondering the implications of the wording that I
missed two traffic light changes, and cars started to
honk behind me.
Here is a real cautionary tale. For years, a sign
along Route 80 in New Jersey near the George
Washington Bridge flashed a “BEST ROUTE” arrow to
indicate the road with the least traffic. Savvy motorists
soon realized that everyone took the route indicated
and clogged the roadway--so the “best
route” was probably the worst one. This raised a
troubling question: if enough people were alive to
the real significance of the sign, and so left the “best
route” alone, would not the sign become trustworthy
again? In that case, people would once again
take the “best route,” which would once again call
the sign into question ... and the situation would
rapidly escalate into a paradox.
Where does this leave us? To postulate that all
language is two-faced runs counter to everyday reality,
where people seem perfectly capable of talking
to others without any slippage in meaning. Yet to
examine even the simplest utterance is to enter a
labyrinth of possibility. In literary criticism, deconstruction
and reader-response models try to deal
with this problem, deconstructionists pointing out
the inherent instability of all language, reader-response
critics insisting that all meaning resides in the
audience's interpretation. There are also moderates
who believe, with some common sense, that these
ideas are true up to a point. Perhaps a better way to
put the situation is that language is potentially unstable,
and that the audience is responsible for a large
part of the determinable meaning.
Or maybe not. Cross-talk, after all, depends on
some idea of “the real meaning” to achieve its contradictory
effect: it is just that sometimes the meaning
gets lost or misconstrued. Some years ago in our
faculty lounge, one of my hazier colleagues got up to
get another cup of coffee. “Would you like some?”
he asked the woman sitting next to us.
“No, thanks,” the woman waved aside his offer.
“I don't drink coffee.”
“Really?” he said. “What do you do with it?”
At the time, everyone thought he was kidding.
Looking back on it, I am not so sure.
Notice
We received a manuscript recently from Europe. It was
inadvertently separated from any covering letter that
might have accompanied it, and--a lesson to all writers--
it has no name on any of its pages. Would the author of
“Easy Does It” (about translating proverbs) please stand
up?
--Editor
I know I'm not among the first to call attention
to Dr. Dal Yoo's error published in your Summer
issue--the one which attributes the “WIN” slogan
to President Carter and the Democrats. The slogan
was, of course, President Ford's and the Republicans.
Donald McKay's article “The Gaelic View of
Heather” reminds me of Arden Carl Mathew's short
but pointed poem “The Death of Irish,” which I reproduce
in full below:
The tide gone out for good
Thirty one words for seaweed
Whiten on the foreshore.
Bill Bryson's enjoyable “English Know-how, No
Problem” (Spring 1991) states that the Russian word
for railroad station vagzal comes from Vauxhall in
London. (Since the revolution, `Victoria' would certainly
be a no-no.) I always thought the term comes
from the German Volksaal `people's waiting room.'
Texas Prison Slang
Some prison slang collected here at Huntsville, Texas, originated in riots or more limited forms
of violence. Other prison slang words and phrases
were possibly invented merely to confound eavesdroppers.
A number of them might have been created
by prisoners whose vocabularies were too small
to accommodate the concepts, events, or situations
named.
announcer,
n . a rapist who caused a conception. See also
disannouncer, disannouncement.
Army,
n . a term for the Arian Brotherhood (neo-Nazis),
sometimes used by its members.
click
v . to fight with another prisoner or other prisoners:
Those guys were really clicking .
commercials,
n.pl . prescription medicine in the illegal
drug trade.
disannouncement,
n . an obituary. (The etiology of this
and the following term is among Latin American
prisoners, one of whom was still learning English.
Seeing the “Announcements of Births” in a newspaper,
he concluded that, by analogy, the “Announcements
of Deaths” must be disannouncements .)
disannouncer,
n . a murderer.
doughby,
n., pl . doughbies. a roll or biscuit.
drive up,
v . to arrive at prison: He just drove up today .
drive-up,
n . a new arrival at prison: He's a drive-up .
going off,
n . losing one's temper.
gringa,
n . (1) the female equivalent of gringo , a term
used by some of Latin American extraction to derogate
North Americans. (2) an “Anglo” woman kept
captive in the U.S. by one or more persons of Latin-American
origin. The gringa is expected to perform
menial labor so her captor (s) can make car and rent
payments. The gringa does not herself get paid.
gyne,
v . (pron. jīne) From gynecology . to have sex with a
female. Context determines whether the event occurred
between mutually consenting adults.
hallucinary,
n . a prisoner who hallucinates.
hogging,
n . (1) the begging by one prisoner for another
prisoner's property. (2) the theft by one prisoner of
another prisoner's property.
house,
n . a cell.
jayroes,
n. pl . a pair of old shoes with their backs mashed
flat to turn them into slippers.
Look out!,
interj . “Stop! Listen to me!”
ride,
v . to use, without compensation, another prisoner's
property: I'm riding with you .
roach,
n . cigarette butt.
road dog, best friend.
shank,
n.phr . a crude, homemade knife.
short,
n . a cigarette butt.
smork,
n . the nickname given to one or more Caucasian
prisoners who were slowly burned to death--and
possibly eaten--by Negro prisoners during a riot.
spread,
n . the pooled food of a group of prisoners who
contribute food bought in the prison store for group
feeding.
tithe,
v . (rhymes with Smith ) to pay off another prisoner
or a phony religion or shaman under coercion or
threat of coercion.
United Stakes of America,
n. phr . a suggested agreement
among prison gang leaders to redistribute the property
of prisoners who are not gang members.
use,
v . (1) to torture (someone). (2) to submit to torture
by (someone). (To confuse eavesdroppers the active
and passive senses are often interchanged; thus,
“Who are you using?” might mean “Who are you
torturing?”)
White House,
n. phr . usually in the phrase in the White
House , said of female visitors who were taken captive
by the prison staff and detained to perform menial
labor and to work as domestics in the Huntsville
area, without wages or salary.
All the slang words collected here reveal aspects of
prison life, which is never pleasant. Being behind
bars is sometimes very dangerous, as evidenced by
terms like shank, smork, gringa , and White House .
Becoming and being a prisoner is very expensive
and requires a mandatory lifestyle that no one
would want to experience. To avoid the opportunity
to collect your own list of prison slang words, obey
the laws of the land.
The Penguin Dictionary of Abbreviations
This well-established work by a doyen of reference-book
compilation--Paxton was the editor of
The Statesman's Year-Book from 1969 to 1990 and
author of several other highly regarded works--is a
vademecum mainly for British and, perhaps, European
users. Although the book offers a good coverage
of universal abbreviations, acronyms, and what
are these days called “initialisms” in its 27,000 entries
and “over” 37,000 definitions and goes into
British material quite thoroughly, it is too sparse in
its inclusion of American matter to make it of significant
usefulness to American users, who should
cleave to the De Sola dictionaries of abbreviations.
Moreover, there are omissions that are criticizable
even from the British user's point of view; for instance,
abbreviations of some important American
scholarly societies and periodicals, likely to be
needed by scholars in the UK, are missing: MLA is in
for `Modern Language Association,' but not LSA for
`Linguistic Society of America'; PMLA , for `Publication(s)
of the Modern Language Association,' known
throughout the world, is missing as is AS for `American
Speech.'
ACLU `American Civil Liberties Union'
is not in, nor is ACL `Association for Computational
Linguistics.' Space was found, however, for
U.N.C.L.E . `United Network Command for Law Enforcement'
(followed by “(television),” as if that explained
this--what shall I call it?--obsoletism.
MADD `Mothers Against Drunk Driving' is in
(labeled “U.S.A.”), but D.W.I . `Driving While Intoxicated'
is not, nor is D.A.M . `Mothers Against Dyslexia.'
While the expanded forms are given, generally,
with no comment beyond a useful contextual
label (like “U.S.A.,” “television”), some have been
given explanatory treatment: P.C . `... Plaid
Cymru , Party of Wales, founded 1925 with the aim
of obtaining dominion status for Wales'; P.B . `...
Plymouth Brethren, Christian sect founded in 19th
cent., fundamentalist in doctrine'; T.I.R . (seen everywhere
in Europe on “juggernauts”) `Fr. Transport
international des marchandises par la route , Intern.
transport of goods by road. Customs agreement covering
26 countries allowing T.I.R . lorries to avoid
customs until reaching final destinations.' ( `Intern .,'
by the way, is not listed in the book as an abbreviation
for `International,' only int . and intl .) On the
other hand, some entries that have historical value
are in (like N.R.A., B.O.A.C .) but no indication that
they are obsolete; W.P.A . has this listing: `Works
Progress/Projects Administration (U.S.A.), begun in
1935 to provide work for needy unemployed': one
might assume that it is still functioning; at P.W.A .,
however, we learn that the `Public Works Administration
(U.S.A.), New Deal Agency [sic], [was] estab.
1933 to create work and promote economic recovery,
abol. 1943. A `U.S.A.' label was evidently
deemed unnecessary for D.A.R . `Daughters of the
American Revolution, society of women formed in
1890 for patriotic and charitable purposes.' Although
the editor mentions pronounceable acronyms
in his Preface, users would be at a loss to determine
that UN and R.A.F . are not pronounced but
that R.A.D.A . (Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts
“RAHdah”), UNICEF, U.N.C.L.E ., and Pan-Am are;
worse, the showing of radar as RADAR (for `radio
detecting and ranging') and sonar as SONAR (`sound
navigation and ranging') is in outright error. The entry
for S. & M . lists only `Bp. of Sodor and Man.'
In short (excuse the pun), for one reason or another
users in the UK would be better served by a
better dictionary of abbreviations than this; US users
should be alerted to the fact that the text is British,
unedited for American spelling: for `decagramme,
decalitre, decametre' read `decagram, decaliter, decameter.'
This is a shame, for publishers in Britain
are frequently heard to comment on the hugeness of
the US market: in the circumstances, one might expect
a publisher as knowledgeable as Penguin to
make some effort to cater to such a promisingly lucrative
source of revenue.
Laurence Urdang
Andrew Gray's remarks on “nonsense about the
German language” [XVIII, 1] reminded me of another
myth widely held in the English-speaking
world about German: it tends to have longer words
than English does.
That impression, however, is correct only with
respect to orthographic words. Thus, German Impulsquantumzahl
may seem long to the English-speaker,
but that is only because German uses
closed compounds much more than English does.
The English equivalent of this German word is spin
quantum number . Were it to be spelled *spinquantumnumber
or were the German word to be spelled
*impuls quantum zahl , people would have other impressions,
yet both words have exactly the same
number of syllables (five) and letters (seventeen).
Today's Quote: “The judgment that we can make
given our information is that it's not probable that there
will be an impact on decision-making in Iraq over the
course of the next months.--External Affairs Minister Joe
Clark.” [From The Province , Vancouver, BC, . Submitted by ]
Samuel Johnson in the Medical World
A frequent ploy in reviewing scholarly books is
for the reviewer to chide the writer for not having
written the book he would like to have read. What a
pleasure it is to report that John Wiltshire of Melbourne's
account of Samuel Johnson and the medical
aspects of his life is just the sort of exposition and
analysis that this reviewer once considered writing
and that Wiltshire has done it better and on a
broader canvas.
Wiltshire starts with a review of Johnson's own
medical history: juvenile scrofula, poor vision in one
eye, the famous “tics and gesticulations,” gout,
asthma, a stroke with transient aphasia, and finally
“dropsy” with death due to arteriosclerotic heart
disease with congestive failure. Add to this an account
of his recurrent attacks of melancholia, and
the patient is clearly revealed. By his own statement
Johnson was “a dabbler in physick,” and the reader
is given a full account of Johnson's medical readings
and how he assimilated his knowledge for purposes
of self-medication. Johnson's doctors--Bathurst,
Lawrence, Brocklesby, Heberden, and others--are
not neglected.
In further chapters Wiltshire sets forth considerable
useful information about medicine in 18th
century England, its theories, its mode of practice.
Judicious use of primary sources and an aptitude for
a telling vignette combine to make these chapters
useful and intelligible to a reader unfamiliar with the
period. Wiltshire makes full use of Johnson's own
writing, especially the essays in The Rambler and
The Idler , to analyze Johnson's frequent, almost habitual
use of medical ideas as metaphors.
A well-shaped chapter deals with the astronomer
in Rasselas as an example of the man of learning
whose actions are severely limited by a psychiatric
problem. Unique in the annals of Johnsoniana is a
full treatment of Dr. Robert Levet, an unlicensed
practitioner who was a valued member of Johnson's
peculiar household, and Wiltshire's close reading of
Johnson's elegy on Levet is welcome and commendable.
The monograph concludes with a chapter on
therapeutic friendship, dealing chiefly with Johnson's
attempts to steer Boswell into a more sensible
way of life and behavior. These were only transiently
effective because Boswell was less than candid
to his mentor about his compulsive drinking and
whoring.
Some minor cavils: Occasional paragraphs are
devoted to the exposition and dismissal of various
pseudo-psychoanalytic theories about Johnson's personality,
a waste of time and space because no Johnson
scholar relies upon them. Also, the exposition of
medical ideas about melancholia relies chiefly on the
contribution of William Battie; the two Scotsmen,
William Cullen and Robert Whytt, deserve equal
billing for their contributions toward mid-18th century
ideas on melancholia. But on balance Wiltshire's
book is sound and sensible, a distinguished
contribution not only to Johnsonia but to the wider
field of eighteenth-century studies.
William B. Ober
Tenafly, New Jersey
Have a Nice Day--No Problem!
From the standpoint of style, clichés are anathema:
they are boring, repetitious, and reflective of
poor writing. From the standpoint of communication,
however, they are extremely important: for
one thing, they provide relief from what could otherwise
be a terrifyingly condensed onslaught of information.
Study a well-written scholarly article;
notice how compact it is. Succinct style presents no
problem to readers, for they can reread a passage as
often as necessary to assimilate it. Those who attend
academic conferences soon come to dread the
speaker who reads aloud a paper meant to be read in
a journal: it is almost impossible to assimilate its information
because none of the normal communicative
devices used in viva voce communication are
present--repetition being among them. Then, too,
the speaker who maintains eye contact with members
of his audience can readily detect lack of understanding
or confusion (the “knitted-brow signal”)
and, if a good speaker, can take an idea and phrase it
in another way to make it more readily understandable.
Clichés are the background noise of speech; attention
spans being as brief as they are and the ability
to sustain a prolonged period of concentration
differing considerably among individuals (even if
one assumes that the subject under discussion is of
some interest to the listener), the insertion in speech
of clichés acts to give the overworked cells a rest,
however momentary, from overdosing on information.
Clichés in writing are another matter; depending
on the style striven for, they might conceivably
serve a function; as with everything else, overdoing
them can create a long-winded, boring experience.
It is not easy to distinguish between clichés and
what linguists call collocations--that is, collections
of words that, while not unanalyzable idioms per se
(like red herring, tall order , or take off in the sense of
`satirize'), nonetheless seem to fall together with
great frequency. Serve a function is such a collocation
as are (from the preceding paragraph) from the
standpoint of, provide relief, present a [or no ] problem,
as often [or any adjective/adverb] as , noun
phrases like eye contact, lack of understanding, member
of his [or any pronoun, name, or article] audience,
background noise , and attention span . Those
who have had experience with a person learning
English as a foreign language are aware that a breakthrough
seems to come as soon as the person starts
using clichés and colloquial or slang expressions appropriately,
even though the speaker's pronunciation
may still be far from a native speaker's. It would
seem that good control over clichés, especially, is
coordinate with a speaker's grasp of the idiom (in
the sense of `spirit') of the language.
A dictionary of clichés is an entirely different
matter. I venture to say that there is hardly anything
more soporific than being given the meanings of expressions
that every native speaker knows quite intimately,
from do an about face to yours truly (in this
book). One could not compile such a book without
giving the meanings, but the interesting and useful
material here for the native speaker is what Christine
Ammer has to say about their past and provenance.
Thus, we learn that on the razor's edge occurs
in Homer and that mad as a hatter , which
antedates Alice's teaparty, “is thought to come from
the fact that the chemicals used in making felt hats
could produce the symptoms of St. Vitus' dance or
other nervous tremors.” As one might expect, many
clichés are simply metaphors, some of which are
transparent to us, others needing explanation. Thus,
play ball with seems obvious; but mad as a hatter ,
though properly a simile, needs an explanation; play
possum is meaningful only to those who have been
told what it means or have had direct experience
with the behavior of opossums. There are quite a lot
of opossums where I live (not, I hasten to say, of the
possum type meriting the affectionate attention of
Dame Edna Everage), and one sees them most often
after they have been killed on the road by a car. A
contemporary might thus be inclined to imbue them
with attributes that would give play possum a mysterious
import. One might well wonder why some
clichés have survived at all, considering their meaninglessness.
The etymological game being what it
is--( requiescat in ) pace John Ciardi--I fully expect
someone to come up with an origin for cute as a
button that identifies it with the six adorable daughters
of some 17th-century Londoner named Button
or, just to make it more complicated, a corruption of
the expression *acute as a bouton in which bouton
means `stud with a sharp point'--in other words,
originally equivalent to sharp as a tack .
Have a Nice Day contains useful information
about some 3000 such expressions, and we must be
grateful to Ms. Ammer for having come to grips
with a very difficult area of language. My only criticism
is that she often states that a given expression
“first appeared” in a certain work, giving the citation.
I cannot see how she can know that the expression
was not already a cliché at the time of its appearance
in print. In the case of have a good day ,
which riles many people, I submit that it is a revival,
for its equivalent must have been in the language
many years ago in order to have given rise to the
shortened form (about which no one seems to get
upset), Good day . On which note I bid you all a good
day.
Laurence Urdang
Wordspinner
Sterling Eisiminger, whose name may be familiar
to VERBATIM readers as a contributor, has compiled
several hundred quizzes that will undoubtedly
boggle the minds of some. It has always seemed to
me that we view the answering of questions of fact
(like what a word means or what is its etymology) as
either “easy” or “difficult” depending on whether
we know the answer or not. In other words, if one
does not know the date of the Flushing Remonstrance
no amount of thinking, soul-searching, calculation,
or any other mental activity is going to yield
the correct response to the question, “What was the
date of the Flushing Remonstrance?”; on the other
hand, if you know that the date was 1657, one cannot
say that the answer was “easy” or “difficult”: it
is like asking a person his name. Some people have
better memories than others, and we can admire
those who, despite the extraordinary pressure of being
under the klieg lights in a TV studio before an
audience, are able to dredge up obscure information
in response to quizmasters' questions. But the accession
of factual information from the recesses of
the memory is not the same as answering questions
that require rapid mental calculation or analysis. A
very large percentage of quiz shows consist of testing
the participants' abilities to recognize familiar
things, like identifying the pattern K--K --- ---K-- as
kick the bucket before too many letters have been
exposed. There are several TV quiz programs in the
UK and in the US in which the winners are those
who are quickest at recognizing clichés, like come
hell or high water , something that the rest of us
spend a lot of time avoiding (though we can scarcely
help knowing them). Yet, there are some who, believe
it or not, do not possess even minimal control
over this linguistic dross: within the past few weeks I
heard one TV newscaster say “wheres and whyfors”
and another refer to “a Herculanean task” (presumably
the labor involved in giving birth to a volcano).
[See, elsewhere in this issue, the review of Have a
Nice Day--No Problem! ]
That having been said (to coin a cliché), quizzes
are for some people an attractive way to learn things
while playing a sort of game, testing either themselves
or others. In Wordspinner , some of the quizzes
are mere vocabulary tests, though couched in
light-hearted utterances; for example, at Graffiti II
the reader is asked to define the underscored words
in sentences like “Clark Kent was a transvestite”
and “Vasectomy means never having to say you're
sorry,” though one could think of a lot of regrettable
actions for which vasectomy would be a feeble excuse.
Other quizzes “test” the knowledge of the
reader's knowledge of gay, black, or carnival slang,
of the origins of certain words ( topaz matches up
with “Greek for `conjecture' because they could
only guess where it came from”), some of tautological
clichés (like beck and --), others of nautical jargon,
euphemisms, numerical allusions, Yankee dialect,
and so forth.
The range of language is, of course, vast, and
one should not treat with contempt those parts of
the book that deal with matters considered “common
knowledge”: those parts that seem recondite to
one are common knowledge to another. The challenge
is slightly mitigated in many instances by offering
a listing of multiple choices from among
which one selects the answer. If one needs a more
difficult challenge, the choices can be covered by
the hand.
There is no index, hence no way of retrieving
information once encountered (except by trying to
recall the “name of the game”). But that is not critical,
for this is not a reference book. The 400-odd
quizzes could serve well as a source for teachers
who want to test their students' knowledge of different
aspects of language. And while much of the material
might seem simple to sophisticated readers of
VERBATIM, its editor learned from Wordspinner that
a marriage between a brother and the childless
widow of the groom's brother is called a leviratic
marriage and that cut the green calabash is Gullah
for `exaggerate.' I am devising ways of working
those into the conversation at the next cocktail party
I am invited to, though that might be my last.
Laurence Urdang
“Because the statue has 42 arms, it is often called the
Guanyin of the Thousand Arms.” [From China Today , , p. 15. Submitted by
]
Lost Charisma
What ideas would you expect to find expressed
in a book by a liberal economist? Can a holistic
approach to arthritis ignore important aspects
of the disease? Should your teenager's interest in a
movement with a charismatic leader alarm you?
In everyday speech, the vocabulary of social science
and philosophy can be misleading. Just as
badly worn coins convey little information to the numismatist,
their once-clear markings having faded
with countless transactions, so some words convey
little information because their meanings have been
obscured by repeated and varied usage. Charisma is
a good example. Writers use the word when it does
not apply and do not use it in those rare instances
when it does. Charisma's unfortunate fate is the subject
of this essay.
Today, it seems that charismatic figures are everywhere.
Movie stars, athletes, politicians--any-one
who catches the public eye--may enjoy the designer
label. It is applied not only to individuals, but
also, for example, to Richard Pryor's humor, Gershwin's
music, and Lassie. Are the Ninja Turtles next?
Charisma now means little more than dazzle , says
Allan Bloom, and he is correct. But, what did the
word once mean? And what difficulties do its current
usage pose?
Two tributaries brought charisma into the English
language, one theological, one sociological. The
word comes from the Greek, more precisely, the
Greek of the New Testament. Theologically, the Oxford
English Dictionary tells us, it is a “free gift or
favor specifically vouchsafed by God, a grace, a talent.”
In the Bible, it appears only in the Letters of
Paul and occupies a particularly important place in
I Corinthians. There, Paul discusses a number of
spiritual gifts or charismata , including the gifts of
miracles, healing, and speaking in tongues (divinely
inspired but unintelligible speech). During the
Church's early years, these gifts must have captured
the attention and imagination of many, for Paul
writes to remind Christians that all charismata have
a common divine source and that none is as important
as love.
Writers using charisma or charismatic in this or
related theological senses are not likely to err.
Those using the term in its sociological sense, however,
often go astray. This second meaning of the
term entered English through, translations of the
works of the eminent German sociologist, Max Weber.
Writing in the early twentieth century, Weber
used the term in his sociology of religion and sociology
of authority:
The term “charisma” will be applied to a certain
quality of an individual personality by virtue of
which he is considered extraordinary and treated
as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at
least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.
These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary
person, but are regarded as of divine origin
or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual
concerned is treated as a “leader.”
Charisma, Weber argued, provided the basis for an
intensely personal form of authority, dramatically
different from authority based both on the impersonal
rule of law (the modern type) and on the sanctity
of tradition (the oldest type). Historically rare,
charismatic figures, like Jesus or Mohammed,
founded new faiths or, like Napoleon, won the unswerving
allegiance of soldiers and citizens through
military victory.
Today's commentators make two errors when
they use charismatic . First, they apply the term to
inappropriate figures. Even though the word's sociological
meaning has changed ( charisma is “the
capacity to inspire devotion and enthusiasm,” according
to the latest OED ), someone like Henry Kissinger
cannot merit the label. Calling such public
figures charismatic devalues the word and strips it of
meaning (meaninglessness certainly triumphs when
writers see charisma in humor or music).
But users of the word make a second, more serious,
error when they apply the term to virtuous figures
only, as occurs often. An article in the February
1982 Good Housekeeping (“Charisma: Who Has It!
How They Got It! How You Can Get It Too!”) mentions
more than fifteen charismatic figures, from Eleanor
Roosevelt to Lena Horne, all admirable individuals.
Similarly, Ronald Riggio begins a recent
book on charisma by enumerating eleven charismatic
persons, all praiseworthy. After one hundred
and twenty-five pages, we finally discover some demons.
As a corrective, I suggest that someone begin
a discussion of charisma like this:
Would you like to develop your charisma? Would
you like to sway others? Would you like the
power to drive nine hundred people to collective
suicide like Jim Jones? Inspire others to murder
like Charles Manson? Or, why not really go for
it, and annihilate millions of innocents? Hitler
did it; you can too.
Hitler, Charles Manson, Jim Jones--they represent
charisma's other side, one our commentators invariably
ignore. When was the last time you heard a
repulsive figure described as charismatic? In rare
instances, an individual not universally admired, like
Jesse Jackson, earns the label, but heinous figures
are never “charismatic.” Weber, it is worth noting,
had stressed the neutrality of the term:
[Our] sociological analysis will treat [demagogues
and madmen] on the same level as it does the
charisma of men who are the “greatest” heroes,
prophets, and saviors according to conventional
judgments.
Weber wanted to compare aspects of charismatic authority
with aspects of his other two types of authority.
He did not distinguish between villainous charismatic
figures and virtuous ones because such
distinctions, he felt, would muddy sociological comparisons.
Weber obviously knew the term could apply
to both. Modern commentators, however, will
not attribute charisma to those they do not like.
Consider the Ayatollah Khomeini. No political figure
in the last two decades was more charismatic
than he. His authority derived from intensely personal
qualities; he ruled without the institutional
supports we associate with national leadership; he
inspired his followers and revolutionized his country.
But to many commentators, Khomeini was a fanatic .
Charismatic is thus used as selectively as neurotic .
Neurotics are those whose behavior we find
odd. If we like them, however, we speak of their
idiosyncracies .
When we do not apply the term charismatic to
figures like Khomeini, we trivialize them and we
trivialize their followers. We label Iranian fundamentalists
irrational or unstable because they are inspired
by someone we do not like. But charisma is
all about irrationality, and we have little reason to
believe that the followers of Khomeini were less rational
than the followers of, say, Jesus. In fact, as
indicated above, the irrationality of the more spectacular
charismata drew concerned comment from
Saint Paul in I Corinthians. The rich etymology of
charisma teaches us that great villains and great heroes
can have strangely similar effects on their followers.
Charisma should thus be used evenhandedly
as well as selectively. Like other words from the lexicon
of social science and philosophy ( holistic, elitist,
liberal, dialectic ), it confuses rather than illuminates
if used indiscriminately. The season's hottest passwords
must not triumph over clear communication.
Unraveling the American Place-Name Cover
There is no part of the world where nomenclature
is so rich, poetical, humorous and picturesque
as the United States of America.
Robert Louis Stevenson, Across the Plains (1892)
The fascination of American place names--their
style and flair and what they reveal about the
land and its inhabitants--has captivated writers,
scholars, and other observers for more than 150
years. The evaluation of Stevenson, from a collection
of essays on his travels across America, is not
unusual. Stevenson, a native Scot, had traveled
widely through Europe, the U.S., and the South
Seas, so he speaks with some experience and perspective.
Other notables who have praised American
place names include Washington Irving (in an
essay written in 1839), Walt Whitman, and Stephen
Vincent Benét. The qualities most frequently commented
on, perhaps, are originality, uniqueness, and
sound. Consider the following categories of American
place names, selected from the Omni Gazetteer
of the United States of America:
Bizarre
Cheesequake, New Jersey
Jot 'Em Down, Texas
Knockemstiff, Ohio
Attaway, South Carolina
Uneedus, Louisiana
Unthanks, Virginia
Toad Suck, Arkansas
Hump Tulips, Washington
Eek, Alaska
Idiotville, Oregon
Who'd A Thought It, Alabama
Zzyzx, California
Indecorous
Sugartit and Beaverlick, Kentucky
Crapo, Maryland
Superior Bottom, West Virginia
Suck Lick Run (stream in West Virginia)
Blue Ball (Arkansas and Ohio)
Pee Pee, Ohio
Shittim Gulch, Washington
Unimaginative
141 U.S. municipalities are named Fairview
(43 different states); there are 47 Jackson Townships
in Indiana alone; 1,365 streams are named
Mill Creek.
Fanciful
Zook Spur, Iowa
Tyewhoppety, Oklahoma
Zu Zu, Tennessee
Tizzle Flats, Virginia
Utsaladdy, Washington
Sic! Sic! Sic!
Smartt, Tennessee
Erratta, Alabama
Embarras River, Illinois
Frontier Americana
Lickskillet, Ohio and Tennessee
Gnaw Bone, Indiana
Turkey Scratch, Arkansas
Dunmovin, California
Rawhide, Mississippi
Cut and Shoot, Texas
Hoot and Holler Crossing, Texas
Horse Thief, Arizona
Jackass Flats, Nevada
Hell and Gone Creek, Oklahoma
American place names reveal the national character,
as well as history and heritage. In addition, significant
contributions have come from many Indian languages
and dialects, as well as Spanish, French, and
British sources.
It was in the 1920s that serious scholarship on
American place names, characterized (unlike most
earlier work) by thoroughness, objectivity, and linguistic
training, began to be published on a regular
basis. Among the scholarly pioneers was George R.
Stewart, whose considered reflections are collected
in standard works entitled Names on the Land (1945,
revised 1958 and 1967) and American Place-Names
(1970). Prof. Allen Walker Read, whose distinguished
career now spans seven decades, contributed
solid yet always thoroughly enjoyable papers,
and in addition has given us the handy phrase
“place-name cover” to describe how place names
indeed blanket the country with richness, color, and
texture. Other notables in this necessarily brief catalogue
of American toponymists include Henry Gannett,
working around the turn of the century, who
compiled several state gazetteers and a still influential
study on the origin of U.S. place names; H. L.
Mencken, with several seminal chapters in his American
Language (1936); and Kelsie Harder, whose Illustrated
Dictionary of Place Names: United States
and Canada (1976) remains the most reliable resource
for place-name origins. A full record of work
in this field can be found in bibliographies compiled
since 1948 under the names Sealock, Seely, and
Powell (the latest edition being Bibliography of
Place-Name Literature: United States and Canada,
Third Edition , 1982), supplemented periodically in
the pages of Names , the quarterly journal of the
American Name Society.
Toponymy is remarkable not only for the hundreds
of talented contributors who have expanded
the scholarship in recent decades, but also because
it is not a formal academic discipline, at least not in
the United States. There are no departments of toponymy,
or even of onomastics that I know of, and no
degrees are awarded in these fields. (Whether this is
also true of other countries I cannot say. I have read
that toponymy, gazetteers, and place-name surveys
receive more formal attention in the U.K. and Europe.)
American toponymy is carried on by people
of all academic disciplines, and from many walks of
life. With academia's standard rewards of promotion
and tenure not as readily accruing in this work, the
study of American place names is by and large in
the hands of true lovers of the subject (amateurs in
the etymological sense, and dilettantes). What they
say and write I have found to be characteristically
stimulating and rewarding, not plagued by the turgidity
that so often seems to be the norm in scholarly
papers.
Place names became an official concern of the
U.S. government in 1890. Confusion had reigned
over mining claims, land surveys, assignment of
post-office names, and exploration reports, and this
created havoc and needless expense in bureaucracy,
particularly in the government mapping agencies
such as the U.S. Geological Survey [USGS], the
Army Corps of Engineers, and various other
branches of the departments of Agriculture, Commerce,
and Interior. In a move that, from a lexicographic
standpoint, is decidedly un-American, the
government set up an official board to rule on and
standardize the use of place names, both domestic
and foreign. The United States Board on Geographic
Names was established by an executive order
of President Benjamin Harrison in September
1890, and has been active ever since, publishing its
decisions and issuing official gazetteers. This may be
the only example in which an aspect of the linguistic
practice of Americans has been regulated by government
fiat.
On the other hand, it is largely because of this
unusual intrusion of government that American toponymy
has flourished as a field of study. The U.S.
Board on Geographic Names has compiled and
maintains a massive national database, the Geographic
Names Information System [GNIS]. This
computer file lists more than one million place
names of all kinds (plus hundreds of thousands of
variant forms): cities and towns, lakes and rivers,
mountains and valleys, even facilities such as
schools, parks, and cemeteries. The names themselves,
along with precise locational data and identification
by type, have been painstakingly keyboarded
into machine-readable form from the most
detailed USGS topographic maps, the so-called 7.5-minute
series. Drawn to a scale of 1:24,000, each
7.5-minute map sheet or quadrangle covers an area
of 8.6 miles north-to-south by about 7 miles east-to-west
(the east-to-west distance varies depending on
location, since meridians of longitude radiate out
from the poles and are farther apart nearer the equator).
At this scale more than 50,000 map sheets are
required to completely cover the 48 contiguous
states. Since it was intended to establish a standard,
the GNIS is very regular in format and is compiled
and maintained according to carefully prepared procedures.
This daunting task is overseen by the
USGS, specifically the Branch of Domestic Names,
now under the direction of Roger Payne. Less comprehensive
government files are also maintained by
the Bureau of the Census (listing about 60,000 populated
places), and by the National Institute of Standards
and Technology, formerly the Bureau of Standards
(a compilation, complete with numerical
coding, of some 190,000 populated places, locales,
and neighborhoods of all sizes).
The work is by no means at an end. Experts,
including Mr. Payne, have estimated that there are
more than 3,500,000 current place names in the
U.S. Consider this figure in light of the fact that the
largest English dictionary--now out of print--had
600,000 or so entries, including many obsolete
forms. The highest estimates of the size of the English
lexicon number far less than the number of place
names in the U.S. alone. Were it possible to record
and identify all of the current place names (the Place
Name Survey of the United States, under the direction
of the American Name Society, is attempting
just this), still remaining would be hundreds of thousands
of now inactive names, which are of no less
importance to historians, genealogists, and the like.
Full coverage would also require accurate
pronunciations for each name, with sensitivity to local
preferences (e.g., MAD-rid, New York, for Madrid ,
BER-lin, Connecticut, for Berlin , and PEER,
South Dakota, for Pierre ). It is perhaps understandable
that those who undertake the creation of a complete
record of American toponymy have chosen to
deal with the estimated 3,000,000 named streets
and highways across the land as a separate project.
Taken in this context, the recent publication of
the Omni Gazetteer of the United States of America ,
despite its 1,500,000 entries, may properly be seen
as only a first step, albeit an ambitious one. The editors
of the book identified and acquired several government
databases of place names, including, of
course, the GNIS mentioned above. Owing to the
marvels of computer technology, coupled with the
foresight of the government programmers who set
up the source databases and the expertise of present-day
programmers who devised means of accurately
consolidating several different sources, an
enormous amount of data (140,520,000 characters
of text) was integrated, sorted, and typeset in about
six months. Automated as well as traditional checking
and proofreading occupied the staff for the better
part of a year. The final product is contained in
11 volumes, on more than 9,000 9-by-12-inch, 2-column
pages. The set includes nine regional
volumes, each listing the place names of the states or
territories in a region individually. A one-volume
National Index lists all 1,500,000 entries in a single
A-to-Z sequence. The Appendices volume contains
seven national lists of places such as airports, Indian
reservations, and historic places. The Omni Gazetteer
is a national gazetteer of the United States that
is as comprehensive as possible. It is published both
as bound books and on CD-ROM. Prior to its publication,
such place-name information was only available
in disparate sources, and often only on magnetic
tape or in the form of computer printouts.
Having had the opportunity to sift through so
many American place names in a relatively short
span, those of us who edited the Omni Gazetteer
were particularly struck by the great diversity in
American naming practices, and what it suggests
about the various eras and cultures that were a part
of the settlement of the country. In New England,
for example, towns are the primary division of government
below the state level. Most of the land area
in the six New England states is within town boundaries,
and is primarily administered by the town governments.
New Englanders, even if they do not live
in an urban area, can almost always tell you the
name of the town that they live in. As the name New
England might suggest, many of these town names
were transplanted from the British Isles. Bristol,
Cambridge, Chester, Durham, Essex, Hartford, Lincoln,
Litchfield, Manchester, Marlboro(ugh), Milford,
Oxford, Salisbury, Winchester, Windsor, and
Woodstock are town names that occur in three or
more New England states. Apart from these, names
of Indian origin (Kennebunkport, Naugatuck, Scituate),
honorifics (Amherst, Franklin), and biblical
names (Canaan, Rehoboth, Hebron) account for
much of the rest. As one looks elsewhere in the
U.S., the preponderance of British borrowings diminishes,
and the purely American inventions increase
in proportion, as do Indian, Spanish, and
French-based names. The well-documented Indian
influence is widespread. Spanish names are particularly
common in the areas of long-lasting Spanish colonial
influence, especially California and the Southwest.
French names, of course, are common in the
Upper Midwest (where French explorers and missionaries,
and French-speaking trappers, left their
mark), in states bordering Quebec, and in Louisiana.
The differing forms of administrative divisions
in the states is also revealed in naming practices. For
example, county government, significant in most of
the U.S., is relatively unimportant in New England.
In fact, Connecticut and Rhode Island have abolished
county government altogether, and in those
states the former county boundaries merely furnish
a convenient way in which people can refer to a regional
group of towns. But as one travels west and
south in the U.S., counties are politically vital, and
towns, in the New England sense, at least, almost
nonexistent. (New England-style “towns” are found
to some extent in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania,
and Wisconsin.) In many rural areas west of the
Mississippi, where counties can be as big as New
England states and cities are few and far between,
people do not associate closely with a city, town,
village, or any other such entity below the county
level. Mail, of course, comes to a post office that
handles rural route delivery, but those who receive
such mail may not live in the place with the post
office, and hence do not immediately associate with
it. When asked where they live, such folks are more
likely to say their county, then give a reference
point and directions: “Our place is ten miles north
of Baxter, off Highway 102, then left two miles on
Route 47.” So despite more than 200,000 populated
place names recorded in the Omni Gazetteer , there
are still many areas of the country where the place-name
cover is thin. Local informants, we hope, will
allow us to correct and expand on the entries compiled
so far.
Most of the examples above have been populated
places, as these names tend to be more familiar
to a broader audience. So we have not examined the
bulk of the place-name cover, which is in the form of
names for natural features. But perhaps VERBATIM
readers can more readily allow the author the convenience
of such specialization when they consider
the issue from the viewpoint of a toponymist. As
those who work in the field all too soon come to
realize, most of the names have yet to be recorded,
much less described; the greater burden lies ahead.
With time and additional resources we might begin
to see the fight at the end of the tunnel, perhaps in
ten to fifteen years. All the while, of course, just as
with all aspects of language, new names are coming
into being, others passing out of use, each reflecting
a bit of history or culture. Taken together, American
place names are a unique primary source, a record
of our cultural memory. The publication of that part
of the record we do have, however imperfect, will
still, we hope, give new impetus to this enlightening,
often fascinating study by providing a foundation on
which to build.
The Omni Gazetteer is available in two editions, as
eleven bound volumes and on CD-ROM. The first nine
volumes cover New England, Northeastern States, Southeast,
South Central States, Southwestern States, Great Lakes
States, Plains States, Mountain States , and Pacific ; the additional
two volumes index all 1.5 million entries alphabetically
and offer appendices with additional indexes. The
price of each volume is $ 250; the complete (11-volume)
set costs $ 2000. Floppy disks for each state are available
for $ 125. For full details and a descriptive brochure,
write to Omnigraphics, Inc., Penobscot Building, Detroit,
MI 48226, or phone the toll-free number (800) 234-1340;
the FAX number is (313) 961-1383.
--Editor
Having heard the term gedunk for the first time
and queried its meaning and derivation in a recent
conversation with Midwesterners, I decided to track
it myself. Those who used the term mentioned it so
cavalierly--to mean a `sweet or dessert,' even the
shop that sold it--that I supposed I'd have no difficulty
looking it up.
Referring to dictionaries old and new, I found
gedunk listed only in Webster 3 , with that frustrating
label “origin unknown.” I examined the Oxford
English Dictionary (1977) and the Oxford Universal
Dictionary (1955) and found no listing in either.
Neither was the term cited in any of the many references
I examined, until I saw Dennis Anderson's
“The Book of Slang,” Jonathan David Publishers,
Inc., Middle Village, NY, 1975. There the definition
was a “sweet treat or dessert,” no derivation. Webster
gives “something sold at a soda fountain or
snack bar.” After querying others, I learned only
that the word was used in the U. S. Navy during the
1950s.
I'm stuck on the derivation, finding no hints at
all. Because the word sounds to me German or Yiddish
or Dutch, I tried dank `thanks' or gedank
`thought, idea' but could not bridge the gulf between
definitions.
I guess the use is American, not used perhaps
until the fifties. Do VERBATIM readers know?
As a new subscriber to VERBATIM I was sorry to
miss the learned disquisitions on the grammatical
use of the f -word. The apotheosis was reached,
without doubt, in the western desert when a disconsolate
squaddie who was peering through the mechanical
entrails of his tank was asked by his oppo
what was “up.” “I dunno,” he replied, “I think the
f...g f...r's finally f...gwell f...d.”
In the matter of the adoption of English in preference
to German as the official American language
[XVII,3], according to George Berlitz's book, Native
Tongues (Granada, 1983), Hebrew and French as
well as German were suggested, with German favored
for several reasons:
There were many German-speaking Americans
in Pennsylvania and other states; Dutch settlers in
New York and elsewhere could learn to use German
easily; German would be easy for other colonials to
learn, since it was basically similar to English; the
Hessians, German troop levies “rented” by the British,
were deserting to the Americans and many
wished to remain in America.
There is support, in both the OED 2nd Supplement
and the Dictionary of American Slang , by Wentworth
and Flexner, for Tony Thorne's definition, in
the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Contemporary Slang
[XVII, 3], of `callow youth' for gunsel . That appears
to be the primary meaning of the word, whose suggested
definition is from Yiddish genzel, gantzel and/
or German Gänslein, Gänzel `gosling, young goose.'
In the underworld, apparently, it came to be applied,
contemptuously, to a whole range of people,
mostly young: apprentice hobo, inexpert hoodlum,
punk, nance, sneak, informer, and so on. In The Maltese
Falcon , the Bogart character was probably using
it as a general term of disparagement.
Ellery Queen, in In the Queen's Parlour (1957),
has a note on Dashiell Hammett's use of the word.
Hammett had a taste for trying to slip censorable
words past cautious editors, and he succeeded with
gunsel , which sounds innocent enough to anyone
who never heard it before. When the book was
coming out in Black Mask , in 1929, the editor presumably
took gunsel to be a synonym of gunman , and
in that sense it was very widely adopted by Hammett's
imitators, by the general public, and even, it
seems, by the underworld.
Regarding J. B. Lawrence's comments on my
BIBLIOGRAPHIA [XVII, 4], I am obliged to set the
record straight. I asked one hundred friends, students,
and fellow linguists about the grammaticality
of eclectic bounty . Not one felt that The New York
Times erred in its usage. Mr. Lawrence is a prescriptivist
and we linguists are descriptivist in orientation.
Turning to Mr. Lawrence's remark that featherweight
should precede lightweight , my listing them
in the reverse order was done randomly and in no
way implied how much a boxer or wrestler weighed.
He, unfortunately, jumped to the wrong conclusion.
My list was also merely indicative of the terms currently
employed (five of them), and Bernstein's Reverse
Dictionary mentions the other major divisions
as well. I could have listed the other terms too, but
chose not to do so.
Finally, concerning the etymology of savvy , Mr.
Lawrence should not believe everything he reads in
sources such as Mencken's American Language . In
fact, I checked in another dozen English dictionaries,
and they all state that savvy comes from Spanish
sabe . These dictionaries are simply wrong on this
point (as they are, I might add, on many other etymologies).
No less an authority than Professor Robert
A. Hall, Jr., of Cornell University, one of the
world's leading figures in Romance linguistics and
historical linguistics, the author of dozens of scholarly
books and hundreds of scholarly articles, states
that it derives ultimately from Cantonese Pidgin
Portuguese through Chinese Pidgin English ( Pidgin
and Creole Languages , Cornell University Press,
1966, p. 6).
I want to add my bit to the letters of Zellig Bach
and Sol Steinmetz in respect to the mangled forms in
Yiddish issued by the U.S. Census authorities.
Though I'm not a U.S. citizen I feel personally offended
that they treated the language in such a cavalier
way. The form (which I obtained) was downright
gibberish, corresponding to no idiom on earth.
In spelling, grammar, and plain meaning it made no
sense whatsoever. Surely they could have consulted
with YIVO, whose name must have penetrated even
darkest Washington.
I read Bill Bryson's article “English Know-How,
No Problem” with much interest and amusement.
However, some of the words he indicates as listed by
The Economist in 1986 are not by origin English but
French ( hotel, cigarette ) or international ( telephone ).
True, they may owe their worldwide currency and
ubiquity to the fact that they were part of the body
of English word export, but are they really words
that originated in English or are they loanwords in
English?
In your OBITER DICTA you translate hocking a
tchainik as `gossiping.' Isn't it something stronger:
`senseless chatter, needless noise, committing oral
nuisance'? Uriel Weinreich's dictionary gives “talking
nonsense.”
Misha Allen of this city and I are, respectively,
secretary and president of the AAA, the Anti-Aleichem
Association. It is an organization that
stands on guard against the practice by cataloguers,
librarians, and critics and reviewers of truncating
the name Sholem Aleichem and producing a (Mr.)
“Aleichem.” This nom de plume, as is known,
means `Peace Be Upon You' and it strikes us as absurd
to see him referred to as “Be Upon You” or Mr.
“Upon You.” Even The New York Times is a frequent
offender. I recently read Life After Death by the Canadian
writer Tom Harpur. He makes reference to
the eighteenth-century Jewish mystic Israel Baal
Shem Tov and a paragraph later refers to him as
“Tov”--a similar misunderstanding. Sholem
Aleichem is a single expression and he who bisects it
commits nothing less than literary homicide. I mention
it now as we have just marked the 75th anniversary
of his death and his name has been appearing
here and there.
To David L. Gold's comments [XVIII, 1] on Leslie
Dunkling's review of A Dictionary of Surnames
[XVII, 4, 11] I would like to add one remark: not
only is the list of the author's personal acknowledgments
far longer than their bibliography of printed
sources consulted (as Gold notes), but even if a certain
work appears in the bibliography, that does not
necessarily mean they relied on it.
Here is an example from my own field, Jewish
family names: the bibliography lists Benzion C.
Kaganoff's A Dictionary of Jewish Names and Their
History , but the few times this work is cited in A
Dictionary of Surnames , a disclaimer follows immediately
to the effect that no support could be found for
Kaganoff's explanation (at the name Gordon for instance).
It is not surprising that no credence was attached
to Kaganoff. A review of his book in Onoma
(23, 1, 1979, pp. 96-113) begins: “a disappointment,
[which] can be recommended neither for the
specialist nor for the novice.... The number of
errors in citation and analysis is staggering....
Kaganoff is ignorant of most of the relevant literature.”
(Further severe criticism appeared in Jewish
Language Review 5, 1985, pp. 363-376 and 6,
1986, pp. 416-418).
It is not my normal practice to respond to unfavorable
reviews of my books, since obviously a reviewer
is entitled to his or her own views, attitudes
and prejudices when assessing a work. One takes
the rough with the smooth, like most things in life.
But when a reviewer misrepresents what one has
written, I feel a counter is called for.
The review of my Bloomsbury Dictionary of
Dedications [XVII,4] made no mention of the fact
that the quoted dedications are glossed or explicated.
To ignore this fact is to treat the book as if it
were a dictionary of headwords with no accompanying
definitions or etymologies. The reviewer quotes
five dedications (misquoting one) and merely says
they seem to him “neither funny nor clever.” They
are actually not meant to be either. But the whole
point of the apparently trivial dedication by Mary
Storr [“I dedicate this book to my friends”] is that
the names of 200 individual friends follow, making
the dedication something of a record. And when
Roger McGough dedicates his poems for children
“to those who gaze out of windows when they
should be paying attention” he is punning on the
title of the book, which is In the Glassroom (not
Classroom , as misquoted: ironically, in view of the
reviewer's own article in the same issue on “Accuracy
in Quotations”!).
It also seems odd to me that the reviewer should
not be curious about the meaning of the strange
name in the dedication “To my dear friend, Hommy-Beg.”
It is when one discovers that the dedicatee
was a Manxman, and that the words are Manx for
`Little Tommy' that one feels the nice sense of satisfaction
that a detective must feel when he has at last
unraveled a long baffling clue. But this gloss on the
dedication is omitted in the review, leaving the
reader no wiser than before.
Incidentally, the reviewer of A Dictionary of
First Names , by Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges, is
wrong to state that “they choose to ignore Hugo .”
They don't: it is included as a variant of Hugh .
Permit me a few observations on Don Webb's
addendum [XVII, 2] to Harry Cohen's “Jingo Lingo”
[XVI, 4].
The former's statement that “[t]he French
words for junkie are toxoman and morphinman , neither
of which merits official use” leaves me puzzled.
I've never seen (or even heard) the words toxoman
or morphinman , though I wouldn't swear that no
Frenchman anywhere has ever used them. There
are, indeed, many words invented from pseudo-English
with the suffix - man (e.g., barman `bartender';
recordman `record-holder'; and dozens of others),
but I don't believe that Mr. Webb's two examples
are among them. On the other hand, the common
terms morphinomane and toxicomane (note spellings)
not only “merit official use” but have been in
the language for quite some time (ca 1900 and 1920
respectively), as have numerous other nouns--e.g.
mégalomane, cocaïnomane, héroïnomane, éthéromane,
etc.--ending in the similarly pronounced
but very different Greek-rooted suffix - mane . ( Belle
Epoque specialists will recall the celebrated night-club-performer-cum-anatomical-wonder Le
Pétomane, much admired for his ability-- mirabile
rectu! --to fart [ péter ] in near-perfect tune, unto every
sharp and flat(ulence), and with great brio, and
whose rendition of La Marseillaise is said to have
been particularly memorable.) For that matter, the
word junkie itself was even adopted into the French
“in” slang of the eighties-- le français branché --
along with the less common addict , more often reserved
for figurative use. An addict du foot , for example,
is a soccer junkie.
While on matters Gallic I would point out, in
regard to Don Sharp's article in the same issue
[XVII, 2], that, though not as addicted to the practice
as American English, French is also given to creating
words from letter abbreviations. Note, for example,
such slang forms as bédé (from BD, bande
dessinée `[sophisticated] comic strip'); elpé (from LP ,
i.e., `long-playing record'); and jité (from JT, journal
télévisé `television news broadcast'). Along the same
lines, though somewhat more involved, is the word
pécu `toilet paper' (from PQ , itself a punnish abbreviation
of papier cul ), which has also come to mean a
pompous piece of writing, with the corresponding
verb pécufier .
Jack Orbaum [EPISTOLAE, XVII, 4] wants to
make readers aware of what he calls a “mistranslation”
in the Bible. He directs readers' attention to
the King James version of Isaiah 7:14: “Behold a virgin
shall conceive and bear a son....” He also
cites the New Testament passage in Matthew
1:22-23 which speaks of Jesus as the fulfillment of
this passage from Isaiah: “Behold a virgin shall be
with child....” He then cites modern translations
of Isaiah which read “young woman” instead of
“virgin.” He calls these “corrections of the original
mistranslation.”
Mr. Orbaum is correct regarding the translation
of the Hebrew word in Isaiah 7--the word ` almah
means `young woman,' and also correct that the Hebrew
word betulah means `virgin.' However, in several
respects he has either misinterpreted the data
or has not taken into account the relationship between
Old and New Testaments in regard to ancient
translations.
1. The word ` almah which appears in Isaiah
7:14 can be translated `young woman' or `maiden' or
`woman of marriageable age.' It is a general term
and can refer to any young woman. While it is not a
specific indicator of virginity, it is not used to mean.
that the woman is no longer a virgin. In fact,
Rebekah, the woman sought as a wife for the son of
Abraham, is referred to as ` almah in Genesis 24:43.
Rebekah's virginity was never in question and she
was referred to as ` almah , not betulah . Therefore,
Mr. Orbaum is incorrect when he says that the Hebrew
betulah “would have been used in the original
had the young woman been a virgin.” The word
` almah allows the possibility that the woman was a
virgin.
2. That there is a relationship between Isaiah 7
and Matthew 1 is correct. The gospel cites the passage
from Isaiah “a virgin shall be with child...”
and considers it to be fulfilled in Jesus. But, is the
passage in Matthew a “mistranslation?” Why does
this gospel use the term virgin? Matthew's gospel
was certainly not influenced by an “original mistranslation”
from the King James Bible!
There is more than one question here: Did the
gospel of Matthew misquote the Bible? Which Bible
was this gospel using as a source?
The New Testament community used a Greek
translation of the Bible, not the original Hebrew.
When the gospel writers read Isaiah 7:14 in the
Greek, they read parthenos , the Greek translation of
` almah . This term had a narrower range of meaning
than ` almah , and more specifically meant “virgin,”
but it was within the range of equivalence for the
Hebrew term ` almah . The gospel writer did not misquote
the Bible in this matter. The gospel writer
read the Greek translation and related this passage,
as well as many others, to Jesus.
3. The Greek translators of the Hebrew Bible
some 300 years or more before the composition of
the New Testament were not misquoting the Hebrew;
they were doing the difficult work of translation
from one language into another. As all of us
who love words know, translators are not mechanics
who simply replace a word in one language by another
word identical in meaning. Translators are interpreters.
They look for the word or phrase which
will best bring to the audience of their time the text
being translated.
Translators of the King James Bible had the
same task as did the Greek translators centuries before:
to make this ancient text accessible to the readers
of their day. What texts did the King James
translators use? They had Greek and Hebrew texts
of the Bible, and they used these in their work. The
translators of the King James Bible were translating
the Bible for a Christian audience; for them, the Bible
consisted of the Old Testament and the New Testament.
When they read the Hebrew and Greek
texts of Isaiah 7, and the Greek text of Matthew 1,
they had to decide which terms from the common
language would best express what was in the ancient
manuscripts. The adoption of the term virgin was
not a mistranslation: it was a judgment of the translators
based on the texts which they had before them
and the audience for which the translation was intended.
Bible translators today as a general rule prefer
to translate from the original languages--for the Old
Testament (or Hebrew Bible), Hebrew and Aramaic,
for the New Testament, Greek. However, when the
reading is unclear or ambiguous, difficult or corrupt,
the translator will turn to other translations or versions
to see how ancient translators rendered passages
in question. Bible translators today must also
take into account their audience as they translate.
The New English Bible is addressed to an English
audience, the New American Bible an American audience.
The New Revised Standard Version has as
part of its translation agenda the elimination of language
which has been made sexist by the limitations
of English.
We must be cautious in our assessments of translations
to be aware of the subtleties of translation
before we too quickly attach the label “mistranslation.”
That Christians and Jews have different interpretations
of a number of passages in the Bible is
apparent. The availability of many excellent translations
today affords readers a chance to see how a
variety of first-rate translators read and interpret ancient
texts. Different interpretations by excellent
scholars are far different from mistranslations. The
modern translations of Isaiah which are cited above
are legitimate translations; the King James translation
is also a legitimate translation of Isaiah 7, not a
“mistranslation.”
It appears that I am becoming the champion of
“mistranslations.” Some time ago I came to the defense
of St. Jerome and his “mistranslation” which
gave Moses horns. Now I feel compelled to respond
to Jack Orbaum's interesting letter [EPISTOLAE, XVII,
4] about the “mistranslation” of the Hebrew word
` almah in Isaiah 7:14, which Mr. Orbaum says ought
not be translated `virgin' but `young woman.'
As readers of VERBATIM well know, it is simplistic
to assume that there is but one correct translation
of any given word. `Almah is no exception. It almost
surely does mean `young woman,' but it can also
mean a `girl,' `maiden,' `bride,' `youthful spouse,' a
`woman of marriageable age' or `the age of puberty'
(according to Gesenius-Robinson, my trusty 1888
Hebrew and English Lexicon). It is not difficult to
infer virginity from some of these usages (at least in
Biblical times when virginity prior to marriage was
expected of a woman). My old lexicon also points
out, as does Jack Orbaum, that the customary word
for `virgin' is bethulah, not `almah .
That brings us to the Septuagint, the Greek
translation of the Hebrew Old Testament “said to
have been made by 72 Palestinian Jews during the
third century B.C. at the command of Ptolemy Philadelphus...
this version of the Bible was used in
Mediterranean lands during the time of Christ and
the early Church.” (William Rose Benét, The
Reader's Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., 1968) The Septuagint
translates `almah in Isaiah 7:14 as parthenos.
Thayer's Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament
says of parthenos: “a virgin... (fr. Hom. down;
Sept. chiefly for bethulah, several times for na`arah;
twice for `almah ...).” So we see that the Greek
word “chiefly” chosen by the Septuagint scholars to
mean parthenos is the word bethulah , which Mr.
Orbaum stresses is “the Hebrew word for virgin .”
But the Jewish scholars of the Septuagint also chose
the word parthenos to translate `almah in Isaiah
7:14, where one might have expected a less specific
word. It becomes very muddy. Gesenius-Robinson,
by the way, translates bethulah as “a virgin pure and
unspotted,” “a virgin just married,” and “a young
spouse” (see Joel 1:8, where bethulah is translated
by the Septuagint as nymphe, “a betrothed woman, a
bride,” “a recently married woman, young wife”--
Thayer). The Jerusalem Bible, in a footnote to the
word “maiden” (as `almah is translated by them in
Isaiah 7:14) says:
The Greek version reads “the virgin,” being
more explicit than the Hebr. which uses almah,
meaning either a young girl or a young, recently
married woman.
A more recent commentary on Isaiah 7:14 may
be helpful here, or may simply muddy the waters
further. Carl Stuhlmueller, C.P., in “Psalm 46 and
the Prophecy of Isaiah Evolving into a Prophetic,
Messianic Role” in The Psalms and Other Studies on
the Old Testament, 1990, writes:
... we return to Isa 7:14 and especially the Septuagint
rendition of `alma. As is well known, this
Greek text renders the word with the technical
word for virgin, parthenos, not with what one
would expect, neanis--young maid, the Greek
word which is deliberately put in place here in
the ancient Greek versions of Aquila, Symmachus
and Theodotion. We suggest that the Septuagint
sees the maid as Jerusalem, the virgin spouse of
the Lord. The text of Isaiah, therefore, resounds
with extraordinary richness: the mysterious, marvelous,
fertile ways of new life, accomplished
solely by the Lord through Israel's faith.
Innumerable chapters and verses might be cited
without a definitive answer and without convincing
any one side of the debate that `almah unquestionably
means, or does not mean, `virgin' in Isaiah 7:14.
It may be worth noting here that Martin Luther used
the word Jungfrau to translate `almah , bethulah , and
parthenos . Jungfrau , although referring almost exclusively
to `virgin' in present-day German, has the
literal root sense of `young woman,' or `young wife.'
The English word virgin itself comes from the Latin
virgo , which can mean `virgin,' `maiden,' or `young
woman' and which reflects the same ambiguity as
the other languages.
Translation cannot be an exact science, and so
we may never know precisely what the author of
Isaiah 7:14, or the author of Matthew 1:23f, meant.
Isaiah's authors (and there were most likely more
than one) were poets. Matthew's author(s) had an ax
to grind and sought to prove a point by using a
rabbinical-style proof-text argument. In either case,
we must not expect these writers to use words as we
should like them to have done. Some translators are
poets or teachers, too, and we must not expect them
necessarily to respond to words in our fashion, either.
I would make a plea that we all be a bit more
careful in our use of the term “mistranslation.”
It remains unclear to me on whom Mr. Orbaum
would pin the blame for what he calls “the original
mistranslation.” He seems to suggest that somehow
we should fault the group of translators who produced
the King James Version of the Bible, but, as
we have seen, the confusion lies not so much with a
group of sixteenth century English scholars as with
the very nature of the art of translation. The Christian
Church, nevertheless, chose to latch on to the
concept of the Virgin Birth long before the sixteenth
century ( cf . Tertullian, who lived c. 160-240 A.D.) in
any case, and we do not know whether the use of
Isaiah 7:14 was to justify an already extant belief
with a text, or whether it was to take an already
accepted text and graft its meaning, as was then understood,
upon the events of the Annunciation to
Mary.
Ultimately, it seems, one's reading here comes
most likely from religious orientation rather than
from “correctness” of translation. We agree to disagree
and, meanwhile, enjoy the richness of languages
and the art of playing among them.
Writing Maketh an Exact Man
The title is taken from one of Sir Francis Bacon's
sententious essays one read as a schoolboy. As
a writer, I wish it were true. But precision and accuracy
are elusive virtues, and any number of pitfalls
lie in the trail. Herewith is an account and plausible
explanation of a few howlers committed by competent,
experienced writers in books and articles I
have read in recent months.
In her fine biography, Nora: The Real Life of
Mollie Bloom (Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1988),
Brenda Maddox feels impelled to flesh out the account
of Nora's life, which revolved largely around
her husband, by describing the decoration of their
flat in the Square Robiac. The walls were hung with
“family portraits (women in big bonnets and men in
red hunting coats) and his reproduction of a
Vermeer view of Ghent.” Alas, no: it was a street in
Delft. Vermeer was born, lived, painted, and died in
Delft. He never, so far as we know, visited Ghent,
beautiful as it is. How did the geographical mistake
occur? Maddox, far too young to have visited the
Joyces in Paris, was relying on an account by Arthur
Powers in The Joyce We Knew , who had visited the
Joyces in the 1930s and who had mistaken the city.
The point was not checked by the copy editor, probably
an inexperienced B.A. in English Lit., underpaid
by the publishers, and the lapsus appears in the
text.
Faulty geography is the basis for an error in Peter
Winch's review of Hans Blumenburg's Holenausgänge
that appeared in the usually faultless Times
Literary Supplement [October 13-19, 1989]. He
starts with a bit of name-dropping, one of the minor
sins of academic reviewers, to show his familiarity
with the great names of 19th-century German philosophy,
and continues with, “Johann Bachofen, colleague
of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacob Burckhardt
at Zürich University...” Alas, Dr. Winch, who
teaches philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana,
has mistaken Zürich for Basel, where they
were both members of the same faculty, ca . 1870s.
Such inaccuracies in the opening sentence of a book
review fail to inspire confidence.
At a different level of inaccuracy are some
lapses in Robert Craft's new book, Small Craft Advisories ,
a collection of clever essays on musical topics.
Craft set himself up as Stravinsky's amanuensis, and
his apercus are well worth reading; but when he mislabels
the tile of Philip Larkin's Required Writing as
Required Reading , he kills Larkin's playful title. He
also refers to Mozart's first love, Aloyisia Weber,
Constanze's older sister, as Aloysius, creating a sexual
ambiguity that even Peter Sellars did not dare
hint at in Amadeus . Aloysius was the name of Sebastian
Flyte's teddy bear in Brideshead Revisited , but
not the given name of Mozart's first love. The error
suggests sloppy proofreading.
More egregious are errors committed because
the writer or speaker is ignorant of the facts. In a
recent BBC Symposium on the ethics of genetic engineering
[October 22, 1989], George Steiner, the
Oxford pundit and master of the mandarin style,
took the negative view, largely because the margin
for error was too great. In addressing the question
of antenatal treatment of congenital diseases, he
claimed that had we been able to treat congenital
syphilis, we would have lost the genius of Beethoven.
This is simply untrue. Beethoven did not have
congenital syphilis, a disabling disease that usually
produces driveling idiots. Whether he acquired
syphilis as an adult has been suggested and debated,
but the evidence seems to be against it. But Professor
Steiner's rhetoric and video-camera style were
so persuasive that it was easy to overlook the fact
that his argument (or part of it) was based on a complete
misstatement of the facts.
The same charge of ignorance can be leveled at
Frederick R. Karl, whose biography William Faulkner,
American Writer (New York, Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1989) has many fine literary insights. But we
read medical information such as “At 1:30 A.M. on
July 6, just seven-and-one-half hours after admission
to Wright's Sanitarium, William Faulkner died...
The diagnosis was definitely coronary thrombosis, in
which a piece of fat that has formed on the vein wall
breaks away and blocks the passage of blood in the
vein; the result, loss of blood flow, heart stoppage,
almost immediate death.” Karl is a Professor of
American Literature at N.Y.U., but had he checked
with the Pathology Department he would have
learned that coronary thrombosis occurs in arteries,
not veins, a fact that many laymen without medical
education know, and that it is not “fat” that forms on
the wall of coronary arteries but atheromatous
plaque.
Ignorance of anatomy was the cause of a gross
error in an article I read in a travel magazine on a
recent flight to Europe. Writing in Clipper Magazine ,
the Pan-Am house organ, Barbara Gibbons recounts
her experience in drinking slivovitz during a
recent trip to Yugoslavia: “A fiery plum brandy, its
alcohol content ranges from 25 per cent ( mekana,
soft) to 55 per cent ( ljuta , hot). Mine was ljuta , and
it burned a path down my trachea to the pit of my
stomach.” Unless Gibbons has an uncorrected tracheoesophageal
fistula (hardly likely), her trachea is
in continuity with her bronchi and lungs. If she aspirated
slivovitz into her respiratory tract, she would
be coughing from the time she wrote the article until
today. One can drink slivovitz, even ljuta , with
impunity, provided it goes down the esophagus.
Lastly, errors creep in because the writer is
making up local color. This is not unlike reconstructing
a supposed conversation and setting it
down as direct discourse. In The Patriarch: The Rise
and Fall of the Bingham Family , Susan Tifft and Alex
Jones describe the arrival of Mary Caperton, later
the wife of George Barry Bingham, Sr., into Radcliffe:
“In September 1924 Mary climbed aboard a
train with Louise Burleigh and set out for Radcliffe.
Once in Boston, the pair motored along the Charles
River, where the trees were just beginning to take
on their vivid autumn color, and then crossed into
Cambridge.” Not so! They probably piled their
baggage into a taxi either at South Station or Back
Bay Station, drove out Commonwealth Avenue and
Bay State Road, crossing the Charles at any of several
possible bridges. But the trees along both sides
of the Charles do not begin to turn color until mid-October.
Registration at Radcliffe was usually between
September 15th and 20th, but the authors are
New Yorkers, and from some deeply suppressed latent
hostility, New Yorkers usually manage to get it
wrong when they write about Boston or Cambridge.
Perhaps they don't speak the same language.
Verba scripta manent , so goes the Latin tag, and
the printed word carries weight, even when it is inaccurate.
Even the graffiti in Pompeii carry weight
and are subject to scholarly exegesis, though they
were written in haste and there was no leisure to
repent. If there is a moral to these anecdotes, it is
that writers cannot be too careful. One recalls the
advice given by the aged Martin Joseph Routh
(1755-1854), President of Magdalen College, Oxford,
to an undergraduate: “Always verify your references,
sir!” Check and double check. That is why
they put erasers on pencils.
There Just Isn't a Word for It
When the devil gets the upper hand in me,
I like to tease my Spanish and Spanish-American
friends about some of the words their language
lacks. I tell them that when a specific word
for a thing or a function is lacking in a language it
must indicate that the thing or the function itself is a
concept that is either unknown or is considered unimportant.
Schedule , for example. Spanish doesn't have a
word for it. You can say timetable (horario) , and you
can proyectar something, or programar it. But that
is as near as you can come to a one-word translation
of the meaning. And I have noticed that it is no easier
to find one word in Spanish that means schedule
than it is to explain to a Spanish speaker the range of
meaning in schedule in addition to that of timetable .
Speaking of meaning , you can't say “Do you
mean that?” in Spanish. You can say “Are you
speaking seriously?” which isn't quite the same
thing. When you want to ask “What does that word
mean?” you can ask “What does that word signify?”
or “What does that word wish to say? ” and thus take
care of that meaning of meaning adequately. But if
you want to pin a Spanish speaker down with the
equivalent of this useful term in English, you are
going to have to be content to ask him if he is being
serious, even if he happens to be dying with laughter
over what he has said.
Are these things clues to the Hispanic character
and culture? I do not know, but they do provide
material for some glorious arguments. There is no
word for argument in Spanish, either, in that sense of
the word. Argumento is a reasoning, or the plot of a
story or play. If you had to find one word in Spanish
for our special meaning you would have to choose
among the Spanish equivalents of discussion, debate ,
or quarrel , none of which quite hits the mark.
Spanish has only one word for hope (esperar)
but esperar also means ` wait ' and ` expect ,' and if the
context is not clear the Spanish speaker will not
know whether you are waiting for a bus, or expecting
one, or simply hoping that one will come along
eventually.
There is no exact word for drop in Spanish. For
this term you need to use the word for fall , either
with the auxiliary let (lo dejé caer `I let it fall') or in
the reflexive (se me cayó `it fell itself to me) '. Either
way, who can blame you? In one case you did it
purposely, and in the other the object did it to you.
To speak of earning something you must use a
word that also means winning . The only word for
chairman is presidente . Chairmen do preside, of
course, but to the English speaker steeped in a tradition
of civic committees and PTA the functions of a
chairman go beyond simply presiding. To a Spanish
speaker, apparently, the head of a committee presides,
and that is it.
Spanish had no word for leader , and so eventually
they borrowed ours, and can now often be heard
to speak of a líder . On the other hand, we do not
have a word for caudillo . The nearest we can come
is probably boss or strong man , but these words do
not encompass the full Spanish meaning.
Which brings us to the subject of words Spanish
does have that English lacks. Lidiar , for example, is
what a man does with a bull in a bullring, and to him
the process is not in the remotest sense a fight . It is a
lid , and if you do not understand that word you will
not understand him.
It may surprise anyone whose mind's eye sees
the typical Hispanic as a man in a funny hat sleeping
in the shade of a saguaro cactus to learn that Spanish
can express with one word the concept of `getting
up early in the morning.' The verb is madrugar :
madrugo (`I get up early in the morning'); madrugas
(`you get up early in the morning'); madruga (`he
gets up early in the morning').
We have borrowed simpático , but I somehow do
not get the same pleasant glow from the word in an
English context that it arouses in Spanish speech.
Street demonstrations in Latin America resound
with simple cries we simply cannot duplicate in English.!
Viva la patria! (`Hurrah for the fatherland'?)
!Mueran los demócratacristianos! (`Kill the Christian
Democrats'?) !Solidaridad! Poles would understand
that, but not we English speakers.
In contrast to the rather standoffish attitude of
the English language, Spanish is on familiar terms
with the deity and things holy or revered. Why not
name your son Jesus? Or John of God? You can
name him Joseph Mary or Paul Mary , and nobody
will think the less of him. And why not call your
daughter Conception , or Sorrows (Dolores)? Or why
not search the calendar of saints and holy days for
names for the newborn? I have even heard of country
boys named Circuncisión , but I have never met
one.
We are hard put to bring into normal English
the diminutive endings that tend to adorn Spanish
discourse with such interesting furbelows: caballito,
mujercita, amiguito, autito . There is no hesitancy
about using even a double diminutive, as in chiquitito.
Chico would be `little,' chiquito would be `tiny,'
or perhaps `teeny-weeny,' and chiquitito could only
be `teensy-weensy,' I suppose.
In his Growth and Structure of the English Language,
Otto Jespersen noted how few diminutives
English has, and how little it uses them. He thought
that the use of diminutives “produces the impression
that the speakers are innocent, childish, genial
beings, with no great business capacities or seriousness
in life.” Jespersen may have overstated the
case, but there is no doubt that whereas no Hispanic
male would hesitate to call a little pig a chanchito ,
few American men would care to be heard calling
one a piglet .
Nor, at the other end of the scale, can we match
the Spanish superlative suffix - ísimo , e.g., grandísimo,
altísimo, bellísimo (rendered in English as the `biggest,'
the `highest,' the `most beautiful,' although for
an exact equivalency one would use the other superlative
form in Spanish, más grande, más alto, más
bello ). Nothing I have ever heard in English can
match the breadth of lighthearted insult expressed by
a Spanish wit some years ago who used the suffix with
reference to the notoriously pampered, well-connected,
well-heeled, well-placed brother-in-law
( cu
ñado ) of Francisco Franco. He called the generalissimo's
brother-in-law el cuñadísimo .
When your language can do that, who cares
whether it can schedule things or hope for them, or
drop them?
!Viva el español!
If you move, please send change-of-address notice to the
office nearer to you, either in Aylesbury or in Indianapolis.
The Power of Doubled Words
In a recent column on etymologies, Attorney General
Richard Thornburgh and Defense Secretary
Richard Cheney were cited for their use of willynilly
(Atlantic Monthly , March 1990). Thornburgh
stated that “he did not favor a `willy-nilly' U.S. military
commitment” in Latin America and Cheney
“decried ... `willy-nilly' cuts in defense spending
proposed by some lawmakers.”
By using willy-nilly rather than more formal
terms such as “whether desired or not” ( American
Heritage Dictionary ), they were turning to a minor
word pattern in English called `reduplication,' meaning
a partial or complete duplication of a given word.
Many languages use this doubling pattern, some extensively.
Hawaiian, having only fourteen letters in
its alphabet, resorts to doubling frequently. Some examples
are lahi `thin, frail,' lahilahi `weak' (coffee,
etc.) and wiki `hurry,' wikiwiki `hurry up.'
Reduplication uses two devices that help make
language powerful and memorable--rhyme and
rhythm. Also, the usage level of English doubles is
usually informal or colloquial; and when placed in a
context of standard English, a double can make a
sentence sparkle.
Among the several types of doubles in English, a
rather large group ends both parts with the diminutive
suffix - y or - ie . The group seems also to contain
two similar sub-groups that produce opposite effects:
those that diminish size and express endearment
or amusement and those that diminish stature
or worth and express disapproval or contempt.
Among the first group are many children's words--
Georgy-Porgy, Henny-Penny, Turkey-Lurkey, kitchy-kitchy,
lippity-lippity, piggly-wiggly . Among the second
are fuddy-duddy, funny-money, hoity-toity,
hokey-pokey, namby-pamby, shilly-shally, silly-billy,
ticky-tacky, wishy-washy , and the double cited
above, willy-nilly . The power gained through rhyme
and rhythm seems to be directed by the diminutive
suffix toward favorable or unfavorable meanings.
During the Watergate scandal President Nixon
had to face an even more powerful combination, one
that incorporated his own nickname in a double that
ended with the negative diminutive - y . Whoever
coined the term tricky-dicky must have sensed that
the combination would hit hard.
Perhaps the two Bush administration officials, or
their writers, were aware of objections to the positions
attributed to them and decided to take the initiative,
Thornburgh by distancing himself from those
favoring a `willy-nilly' commitment of troops in
Latin America and Cheney by blaming members of
Congress for urging `willy-nilly' proposals to cut the
defense budget.
J—y ... Bang!
Those interested in the magic of onomasiology
might note the following full names with the initial
letter J and the terminal letter y seemed destined for
fame and infamy:
Victims: John F. Kennedy
John B. Connally
James Brady
Gunmen: Jack Ruby
James Earl Ray
John W. Hinckley
Tragedies are not limited to the “J--y” phenomenon,
of course. Consider Lee Harvey Oswald,
whose “L--d” becomes LD , medical jargon for `lethal
dose.'
The article by Bill Bryson [XVII, 4] on the vagaries
of English abroad unfortunately also serves to
illustrate the lack of linguistic understanding which
exists between our two countries.
Specifically, the first illustration given is “Full-O-Pep
Laying Mash,” which is presented as if it were a
nonsense phrase. In fact, of course, “Full-O-Pep”
and many variations thereon were, and perhaps still
are, common trade names of a variety of animal feed
products. And laying mash, as any farmer knows, is a
form of chicken feed so formulated as to enhance egg
production. In the cited example, the feed manufacturer
was even named--which should have been a
clue to the author, although the terminal part of the
phrase (1091 DS) admittedly baffles me.
One wonders whether the author is the Bill Bryson
who wrote The Lost Continent--Travels in Small
Town America . If so, the mistake is doubly surprising,
as that BB was born (?) and raised in Iowa, then
moved to England.
I am addressing this to you since I don't have
the address of the journal of original publication
( The Independent ), and hope that word may eventually
drift back to England.
“Controlling emissions at the source not only protects
freshwater ecosystems, but also allows fairly rapid
recovery of lakes' indigent species...” [From “Science
Watch,” The New York Times , . Submitted by
.]
Medical Emergences
Through the use of ultrasound, University of Washington researcher... studies women who develop high
blood pressure during pregnancy with the assistance of
AHA-WA funds.” [From Heartlines , a Washington affiliate
newsletter of the American Heart Association, Vol. VI, No.
2, ]
“Movie: `Of Human Bandage.' ” [From TV Supplement
to the St. Petersburg Times .]
“Dr. Robert Stein testified that he put the eight separate
pieces of Bridges' body together in the alley and then
pronounced Bridges dead.” [From the Chicago Tribune , : 2,3. Submitted by ]
“Osborne chased it around the back of the net, dug
the puck off the sideboards and fired a pass to Poddubny,
who beat Buffalo goaltender Tom Barrasso between the
legs.” [From an AP story in the Danbury News-Times,
. Submitted by
Anyone would be a tender goalie in the circumstances.
And was Barrasso so named for playing bottomless?]
