VOL18_4.txt

   
      
         
            Politically Correct Nomenclature
or, How to Win at Trivial Pursuit and Lose Friends




            As a child of the 60s, I remember starting a
school year learning the names of countries a
certain way in geography class, only to end the year
with the old names scratched out, replaced by new
ones as scores of former colonies became independent,
with (usually) new names.  Bechuanaland
became Botwana, the Gold Coast became Ghana,
British Guiana became Guyana, and so on.  Now, a
generation later, we seem to be going through another
period when names are changing.  As frustrating
as this might be, it does have one advantage of
providing plenty of ammunition for games of oneupmanship
!  Personally, I like to keep my friends and
associates properly informed and up to date and do
not hesitate to correct them when they refer to, for
instance, “Ivory Coast” (it is now PC to say Côte
d'Ivoire, even in English), or “Burma” (which is, of
course, Myanmar, capital city Yangon, not “Rangoon”).
My friends--those who remain--rarely fail
to thank me for this service.

            Why do names change, and why do different
people refer to the same place by different names?
In spite of this neo-Puritan trends towards PC `politically
correct' nomenclature, with all the presure to
conform that it brings, there are still sometimes perfectly
good reasons for changing the name of a place.
It is when the trend is carried to sanctimonious extremes
that it becomes irritating.

            The most widely-known example of PC name-changing
in the U.S. is not that of a place-name but
of an ethnic or racial group: Black Americans.  In
my youth the acceptable term for Blacks was Negroes
or Coloureds .  Coloured seems to have come to
North America from South Africa, where it actually
refers to mulattoes, or descendants of mixed race.
Negro, from the Spanish/Portuguese word for `black'
seems to have been a euphemism, a softer term, and
replaced the earlier term, Black .  With the rise of
Black consciousness and Black pride, Blacks challenged
the need for a euphemism (the very use of
which implies, of course, something bad or negative,
which has to be rendered pleasant or acceptable).  I
can sympathize, therefore, with their rejection of
the term Negro as a racist term.  Lately the terms
African-American and Afro-American seem to be
gaining wider acceptance, although according to a
recent poll most U.S. Blacks prefer the term Black;
perhaps African-American is still too avant garde.

            Just to add another wrinkle, the stylebook of the
U.K.-based international news magazine The Economist
makes the eminently sensible observation that
not all Africans are black; “Africans may be black or
white.  If you mean blacks, write blacks.”  Strictly
speaking, then, according to The Economist, would a
white refugee from Ian Smith's Rhodesia now living
in the U.S. be justified in calling himself an “African-American”?
Somehow I do not think that that is
what most Americans have in mind when they hear
or read the term.

            As another example, the indigenous people of
the Arctic are, as far as I know, still commonly referred
to in the United States as Eskimos; but for
some time now the PC term in Canada has been Inuit,
a term which affords great scope for PC snobbery,
as it can be fairly complicated; the people are
Inuit; the language is Inuitituk; and an individual is
an Inuk.  This attention to detail is, however, devotion
to PC-ness above and beyond the call of duty,
and in usual practice most educated or academic
Canadians now use Inuit as a comprehensive adjective
and noun.  The reason Canada has made this
change is fairly complex but has to do with a fine
point of anthropology.  According to The Canadian
Encyclopedia, “Inuit simply means `people.'  Inuit
were earlier known by Europeans as `Eskimos'--a
pejorative, roughly meaning `eaters of raw meat,'
applied to them by INDIAN groups.  The language is
called Inuktitut, or Inttituut, which is divided into
six different dialects.”  I suppose that no one would
want to be known by a term that means `eaters of
raw meat.'  However, that does not explain why the
change seems confined to Canada.  In fact, the term
Eskimo is still popularly used.  Two of Canada's best-known
popular history writers, Peter C. Newman
and Pierre Berton, use the term almost exclusively
in works they have written on Canada's North.  The
publisher of The Canadian Encyclopedia, Mel Hurtig,
is a well-known Canadian nationalist with leftwing
political views and probably intends that his
publication “lead” public opinion.  There is also an
academic distinction between Inuit and Eskimo, as
explained by Alan D. Macmillan, a British Columbia
professor of anthropology:


...inhabitants [of the Arctic] are the Inuit, who
are distinct from all other Canadian native peoples.
They belong to a linguistic stock termed
Eskimo-Aleut (or `Eskaleut'), named for its two
major branches.  The Aleuts, on the Aleutian Islands
of Alaska, are the most divergent.  The
larger branch, Eskimo, has a major division near
Bering Strait.  On one side, the Yupik comprise at
least five separate languages in eastern Siberia
and central and southern Alaska.  On the other,
the Inuit extend from northern Alaska to Greenland,
including all of Arctic Canada.  In Canada,
the word `Inuit' (meaning `people'; the singular is
`Inuk') has now almost totally replaced `Eskimo'
(generally, although perhaps erroneously, believed
to be derived from a derogatory Algonkian
term meaning `eaters of raw meat').  However, it
must be remembered that not all `Eskimos' are
Inuit.  Throughout their vast distribution, the Inuit
speak a single language (Inuktitut), although a
number of dialects are known.

Native Peoples and Cultures of Canada: an
Anthropological Overview, Douglas & McIntyre,
1988, p. 240.

            

            One could, therefore, simplify matters by saying that
Canadian and Greenland--but not Alaskan or Siberian-- Eskimos
are Inuit .  Although, as it so happens,
according to Macmillan, at the first Inuit Circumpolar
Conference, held in Barrow, Alaska, in 1977, Inuit
from Alaska, Canada, and Greenland officially
adopted the term Inuit for all peoples formerly
known as Eskimo, despite linguistic differences.
(Siberians were prevented from attending at that
time for political reasons.)  These two examples of
name changes arose out of demands made by the
ethnic groups themselves, for both Blacks and Inuit
objected to previous terms because they considered
them derogatory.

            Two examples of name changes which I find
harder to accept are the new names for what used to
be called Ivory Coast and Burma .  Côte d'Ivoire, of
course, is the literal French equivalent of Ivory
Coast, and in other European languages that country
has traditionally been called by a name which is the
literal translation of the term (e.g., Elfenbeinküste in
German).  So why insist on using the French term,
when its literal meaning is identical to the traditional
English name?  It seems that the President-for-Life
of Côte d'Ivoire, son Excellence Félix Houphouet-Boigny,
is a confirmed and impassioned francophile,
and seems intent on converting his agricultural nation
into a sort of Paris-on-the-Guinea.  He has
erected, at enormous expense, a European-style
capital city, Yamoussoukro, in the interior of the
country, and furnished it with, among other things,
an embarrassingly gauche, oversized Roman Catholic
basilica rumored to be larger even than St. Peter's
in Vatican City--all this supposedly to serve
the spiritual needs of the country's francisized
Catholics, who constitute no more than 12% of the
country's 11 to 12 million people.  To make a long
story short, I am convinced that the PC-ness of Côte
d'Ivoire arises out of President Houphouet-Boigny's
desire to be seen as the leader of a linguistically and
culturally French nation.  Whether one chooses to
use this term or the traditional term depends, I suppose,
on how sensitive one is to the wishes of people
(or of their leaders) regarding the way they are
named.

            Likewise with Myanmar, the name now used--
at least in the non-U.S.-English-speaking world--for
what used to be called Burma .  The official name of
the country in Burmese has, since independence
from Britain, been Pyidaungsu Socialist Thammada
Myanma Naingngandaw , so Myanmar, it seems, is
simply Burmese for Burma .  This is the same phenomenon
as Côte d'Ivoire .  But the current Myanmarese
(do I venture where angels fear to tread by
coining the adjective?) regime is a repressive one
that liberal Western democrats view with distaste:
one could say that they could give “Paradise” a bad
name had that been the new name chosen for their
sad little country.

            In the case of Côte d'Ivoire and Myanmar, well
read individuals and others who pride themselves on
being up to date and informed (and therefore especially
susceptible to “PC-itis”) will use the new
terms, but with a certain amount of distaste.  The
degree to which they show their ambivalence shows
their ability to walk the trendy pseudo-liberal tightrope
of PC-ness.  “I use this term, but knowingly,
with reluctance” shows a certain intellectual virtuosity
which is an entrance requirement for those
who aspire to beatitude within neo-Puritanism.
         
         
            The Gremlins of E.T.



            No, I am not referring to the Extra-Terrestrial
but to Errors Typographical (also called typos,
for short, or, in Britain, literals).

            During the hearings before the Senate Judiciary
Committee Judge Clarence Thomas read a categorical
statement denying flatly and absolutely the
charges of sexual harassment against him, but he
used the adverbial “uncategorically,” thus negating
the very essence of his statement.  For a man of his
intelligence and lifelong habit of writing, such a slip
of the pen--or tongue--readily suggests to a psychoanalytically
trained eye or ear an ambivalence, if
not a mental conflict, about the denial.

            This episode reminded me of the “Wicked Bible,”
so called because the word not was omitted
from the Seventh Commandment, which read “Thou
shalt commit adultery.”  Would it not be P.C. (no,
not `politically correct' but `psychoanalytically correct')
to assume that the typesetter's unconscious
played a role in such a significant error?  The
“Wicked Bible” was published in 1631 by the official
printer of the King of England, and he--the
printer, not the King--was fined 300 pounds, an exorbitant
amount of money in those days.  The fine
drove him to ruin.  Was the punishment particularly
harsh because the affair reminded everyone, including
the King himself, that his Majesty behaved according
to the “Revised” Commandment?

            Of course, not every typographical error should
be ascribed to a hidden unconscious motive on the
part of the typesetter (or typist).  Sometimes it is
totally innocent and does not interfere, even for a
second, with the flow of reading or comprehension.
A plea on groups of insanity, in a newspaper report
of a criminal trial, is promptly dismissed by the mind
and substituted with “grounds.”  Newspapers, particularly,
are bound to have such innocent typographical
errors because of the constant pressure of
deadlines.

            Sometimes a simple transposition of letters may
make things more complicated.  When a sentence in
a research report read “the results of the experiment
were nuclear,” I stopped to reread it, and
smiled when I quickly discovered that it should have
read “unclear.”  Similarly, “density,” in place of
destiny , is initially confusing until one deciphers,
from the context, the true intent of the sentence.  A
lecture of mine was once described in a newspaper
as “light-headed,” instead of “light-hearted” (unless
the reporter was being mean-spirited...).

            Some typos might be said to be “errors of similarity
or familiarity,” when similar or more familiar
words are substituted for the words in the manuscript.
I should include in this category (the corrected
words are in brackets) graduation recession
[procession], Gamblers Anonymouse [anonymous],
Third Rights [Reich], American Protective Drawing
Institute [Projective], Postal Doctoral Institute
[Post-], End Quiry [Inquiry], Clinical and Counter
[Encounter], and similar misprintes.  All these typographical
errors could easily have been avoided by a
careful reading of the galley proofs.

            One group of typographical errors is much
more serious than a single misspelled word.  This occurs
when a line or more from the original text is
unintentionally skipped altogether, resulting in an
incomprehensible, mangled style.  I call it the propinquity
error because if often happens when the
typesetter's eyes make an inadvertent visual jump
from one line to a line or two below in the manuscript
because the same word appears in both
places.

            On rare occasions a typographical error is uncanny.
The obituary in The New York Times of the
famous psychoanalyst Theodor Reik ended with the
sentence: “His body was created.”  Reik, who loved
language, would have greatly enjoyed such a parapraxis.

            At times a typographical error is made on purpose,
as in advertisements or signs, to catch the eye
of the reader or passerby.  If it is a “good” one it
may even become a conversation topic, the very
hope of the intentional misspeller.

            The nationally famous stores “Toys `\?\' Us” use
a child's reversal of the letter R. Similarly, the title
of the movie The \?\ussians Are Coming, The \?\ussians
Are Coming , which plays games with a letter in the
Cyrillic alphabet (which is not an r).

            During the 1956 presidential elections the
Hudson County Democratic Committee in New
York erected a huge billboard sign high atop a gasoline
station near the Holland Tunnel, which people
driving into and out of Manhattan could not help
seeing.  The sign intentionally misspelled the name
of the Democratic candidate and read: “On November
6 vote for Adlai E. Steviesion.”  The caption under
the picture of the billboard in The New York
Times read: “Think!  Sign atop a gas station near
entrance to Holland Tunnel in Jersey City bears an
intentional misspelling.”  A Committee member
stated, “the planned mistake paid off wonderfully
and got more attention than if the name were
spelled correctly.”  Stevenson's reaction is not
known.  Being a master of the English language and
certainly a careful speller, he most likely would have
shaken his head at this kind of childish electioneering.

            During the 1988 presidential campaign both
candidates, reading from prepared notes, made interesting
slips of the eye: Governor Dukakis spoke
of equipping aircraft carriers with modern “musicians”
[munitions], and Vice President Bush said: “I
hope I stand for anti-bigotry, anti-Semitism, antiracism.”
These slips were essentially due to the similarity
of the initial letters or part of the word, like
the typographical errors of similarity or familiarity
cited above, but probably also due to the immense
fatigue and exhaustion brought on by a presidential
campaign.

            When one's name is deliberately or even unconsciously
misspelled, or when it is knowingly mispronounced,
a person perceives it as a slap at his pride.
One does not have to be psychologically sophisticated
to see in it a deliberate discourtesy, an intended
injury to his dignity.

            Missing or misplaced punctuation marks naturally
fall within the net of the E.T. gremlins.  Read
the sentence “Let's eat, children” without the
comma and see the difference it makes.  There are
many examples of how sentences with improper
punctuation marks sound ludicrous.  For example, a
program chairman prepared in longhand a few laudatory
introductory remarks about a lecturer: “...
I bring you a man among men.  He is out of place
when among cheaters and scoundrels.  He feels
quite at home when surrounded by persons of integrity...”
As if by a devilish design a number of errors
in punctuation were made in the process of
transcribing the prepared introductory notes, resulting
in “Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you a man.
Among men, he is out of place.  When among cheaters
and scoundrels, he feels quite at home, ...” and
so on [(“A Punctuation Parable,” VIII, 4, 16)].

            Computer errors may not technically fall within
the category of typographical print errors, but they
are nonetheless mistakes, and can be quite costly.  In
July of 1962 the spacecraft Mariner I veered off
course about four minutes after its launch from Cape
Canaveral, Florida, and had to be blown up in the
air.  The reason: an inadvertent omission of a hyphen
from the computer's mass of coded mathematical ascent
guidance instructions.  The spacecraft was to
transmit scientific observations about Venus from a
distance of 36,000,000 miles.  Its cost: ten million
dollars.

            Every word or combination of words carries
within itself a potential E.T. bug.  Even monosyllabic
words are not immune, as when a doctor's familiar
words “say Aah,” while examining a patient's throat,
came out in print as “say Haa.”

            On guard against such a potential E.T. viruses is
an army of professional proofreaders who, like electronic
inspectors at airports searching for concealed
weapons, are supposed to weed out errors before
the final printing.  Proofreaders use a special set of
marks, signs and symbols to indicate on the gallery
proofs the required corrections--deletions, insertions,
size or type of fonts (lower case letters,
capitals, bold face), space notations (size of paragraph
indents, missing spaces between words or extra
spaces within words, type and length of dash),
etc.  To the uninitiated these marks to look like hieroglyphics
of an ancient people.  (See the entire p.
1081, Proofreaders' Marks, in the Random House
Webster's College Dictionary, 1991.)

            I had better stop here.  While I am pointing out
and correcting various typographical errors, the
gremlins of E.T. may play a trick on me, mischievously
introduce new errors, and attribute them to
moe....
         
         
            
               ETYMOLOGICA OBSCURA
            
         
         
            Jeux d'Esprit



            If the European Community has achieved nothing
else it has produced one magnificent acronym:
ESPRIT, the European Strategic Programme of Research
in Information Technology.  Indeed, there
might well have been equal willingness in Brussels
to launch a program in, say, Ichthyological Taxonomy
for the sake of such a satisfying acronym.

            Information technology was, however, the favored
field, and the ESPRIT program was launched a
few years back to promote European research of this
type.  Information technology, or IT, covers areas as
diverse as automatic speech recognition and synthesis,
telephone and other communications engineering,
database management, human-computer
interaction, and indeed computer science itself.
Communication via computer is at the heart of IT.
For instance, a much-used catchword of IT is “the
paperless office”;  It is supposed to replace all those
filing cabinets and folders with a chip or two here
and a CD-ROM there.

            It is not much in evidence, however, in the actions
of ESPRIT itself.  For instance, paperless is emphatically
not the first adjective that springs to mind
to describe the office of an ESPRIT participant.  The
more typical ESPRIT decor is, in fact, wall-to-wall paper--much
of it in curious Euro-colours like mauve
and puce.  The European Community has, in the few
decades of its existence, established quite a reputation
for generating paper output on a scale that no
mere national government has ever aspired to: like
every other Euro-initiative ever launched, ESPRIT
generates Euro-text by the ream.  This is rather depressing,
because it suggests that there is no escaping
the remorseless Euro-bumf generator even for a
program with an avowed aim of paper reduction.
However, in its own way ESPRIT had indeed made a
small step towards reduction of the European paper
mountain.  Perhaps inspired by its own acronym, ESPRIT
insists that each ESPRIT project, however complex
its title, choose a single-word acronym by
which it may be identified; and ESPRIT itself never
refers to projects by their full names, but only by the
acronyms.

            Whole forests may be saved by this, as “Speech
Processing and Recognition using Integrated
Neurocomputing Techniques” turns to SPRINT, and
“Correct Hardware Design Methodology: Towards
Formal Design and Verification for Provably Correct
VLSI Hardware” becomes CHARME.  (These are real
ESPRIT projects, by the way.  They are participants in
ESPRIT's Basic Reasearch Actions, or BRA--a less conspicuous
support system.)

            A study of successful ESPRIT acronyms (i.e., the
acronyms of grant applications which proved successful)
suggests certain guidelines.  The ideal acronym
should resemble ESPRIT itself by expressing a
concept with international acceptance.  It should
preferably be French in origin, since that may lessen
potential irritation in Brussels at the fact that the
acronym invariably represents an English word sequence.
So a group which plans to build a Partially
Automated Restricted-Access Voice Input/Output
Network would do well to call it PAR-AVION.  Likewise,
a consortium studying Algebraic Methods In
Expert Neural Systems might call their projects AMIPENS
(though AMEX would also do quite nicely).

            Just as the right acronym can be the key to a
project's success, so can an ill-chosen acronym lead
to disaster.  Perhaps that is what happened with my
unsuccessful proposal for a Multiple Entry Reconfigurable
Dialogue Editor (“This project stinks”--
Referee A), or my Comprehensive Universal Labelled
Database Enumerating System Architecture
Concepts (“Will this work lead anywhere?”).

            In fact the area of acronym selection is so important
that it seems to me there is a technology gap
here.  Moreover, a project to fill it is just what ESPRIT
ought to support.  So I plan to call on colleagues
throughout Europe to join a consortium which will
design and build a Computational Human-Assisted
Multi-Purpose Acronym Generator/Neologism Evaluator.
All we have to do is think up an acronym
for it.

         
         

            The article on Hindi words [XVIII,1] prompts
me to ask if anyone knows the etymology of bungee
`springy cord.'  I have always assumed that it must
be Hindi because of its look, but I have no evidence
of that.  At this moment, the word is most commonly
used for the elastic tether by which daredevils attach
themselves to a bridge or building before leaping
off into space, a sport that was graphically depicted
in the opening scene of the movie, To Live
and Die in L.A.  My daughter tells me, however, that
the terms was used at least ten years ago for the elastic
cords used for tying schoolbooks to the luggage
rack at the back of a bicycle.




         
         
            [ The dozen or so American and British dictionaries
I checked are silent on the origin of bungee;
though The Australian National Dictionary suggests
that it is related to bungle `India rubber; an eraser,'
neither is given an etymology.  A bungee consists of a
number of strands of rubber bound together in a
tough woven cloth covering.  The term familiar to me
from my sailing days is Shock Cord, for it is often used
to relieve the strain on a mooring or anchor line.
However, as Mr. Levitt's daughter pointed out, it is
usually found as a stretchy tie used to bind things up,
as a reefed mainsail on its boom, light articles to a
luggage rack, etc.--Editor.]
            
         
         
            Learn to Spike Lunars



            Each time I visit Oxford, I walk past the Bodleian
Library, pass under the Bridge of Sighs, and
turn down the narrow lane that leads to Oxford University's
New College, treading the same path as the
late venerable Reverend Doctor William Archibald
Spooner.  In my head and on my tongue, spoonerisms
spring forth.  I recall a childhood favourite from
my father's sparse joke repertoire: “Church usher to
errant worshiper, `Mardon me padam, but you are
occupewing the wrong pie.  May I sew you to another
sheet?' ”  Slips allegedly uttered by Spooner
himself bring a smile: “Who has not felt in his heart
a half-warmed fish to live a nobler life?”  Transpositions
come to mind that appear daily in the thoughts
of every dedicated spoonerist: darking bogs, a lanely
lone, the lissing mink.  Each of these metatheses
evokes a chuckle of delight.

            The good Dr. Spooner, a kind man with white
hair and cherubic face, served New College for a
half century as distinguished scholar and able administrator.
He denied having made the slips of the
tongue that made him famous, and his contemporaries
agreed that most legendary spoonerisms were invented
by imaginative New College undergraduates.
Eyewitnesses claim, however, that the concept began
with Spooner's twice-spoken chapel announcement:
“The next hymn will be `Kinkering Kongs
Their Titles Take.' ”  Others claim he once actually
said: “...in a dark glassly.”  A colleague recalled a
discussion in which Dr. Spooner referred several
times to “Dr. Friend's child” when he meant Dr.
Childe's friend.  Equally famous (though as an Irish
bull) is his question of a former student shortly after
World War I: “Was it you or your brother who was
killed in the war?”

            Spooner admitted “occasional infelicities in verbal
diction” but became openly irritated when his
name was associated with oral transpositions.  When
introduced as the “Dean of Kew Knowledge” at a
college social function, he responded with outspoken
displeasure.

            In the six decades since Dr. Spooner's death,
the phenomenon of transposed sounds has found a
firm place both in spoken and written language.  A
spoonerism, or more technically, a methathesis, is the
transposition of letters, syllables, or sounds in a
word or phrase.  More often, they take an oral rather
than a written form.  Writers employ them, however,
as a useful comedic device, and accidental faux
pas occasionally appear in printed material.

            Following exhaustive research and practice, I
divide spoonerisms into two general categories
based upon their structure and their function.
Structural categories depend upon changes in the
sound of words or upon their appearance in written
form, particularly the effect upon spelling.  Functional
groupings deal with meaning, either overt or
implied, both before and after transposition.  Analysis
of these groups enables one to determine what
might be called “good” as opposed to “bad” spoonerisms.
(Many critics maintain all are “bad”.)

            Perfect or true spoonerisms are correct in both
sound and spelling when transposed.  Laborers are
tons of soil, in place of sons of toil, not only sounds
right and spells right, but has meaning in its revised
form.  The best spoonerisms produce an element of
humor or irony, as this one does.  Sound, spelling,
meaning, and humor all combine to make great
spoonerisms.

            Partial spoonerisms occur when transposition
produces only one meaningful word.  A treckled
spout in the lake for speckled trout is interesting,
perhaps even amusing, but it lacks the satisfaction
and punch of a true spoonerism.  As one plays the
transposition game, many partial spoonerisms come
to mind, but they must be discarded quickly, if you
me what I seen.

            Auditory spoonerisms preserve the right sound
when transposed, but require varied spelling when
written.  Thus, a spoonerized loose-leaf note book
becomes boat nook, not “bote nook,” when written.
Dr. Spooner's proverbial half-warmed fish for half-formed
wish has a totally different sound and meaning
if written as “half-wormed fish,” requiring the
spelling to be changed.  Since sound and mental image
are the keys to good spoonerisms, auditory types
are most acceptable.

            Visual spoonerisms appear to be correct in written
form, but transposition produces the wrong
sound.  For example, when warm food becomes farm
wood, the result is neither meaningful nor pleasing
to the ear.  Farm does not rhyme with warm, and the
sound of wood differs greatly from food.  While the
term form wooed has good sound, it loses its effectiveness
because there is no real meaning in the
phrase.  Strictly visual spoonerisms must be rejected.

            Meaningless spoonerisms may be amusing in
sound, but do not create real words.  Spooner's original
Kinkering Kongs for Conquering Kings falls into
this category along with the comment attributed to
him that the story of the flood was “barrowed from
Bobylon.”  His apochryphal statement of compassion
for the duff and demb brings a smile but creates
no new meaning in the transposed words.  Because
they give great pleasure both to ear and mind, however,
meaningless transpositions are acceptable,
even relished, by all spoonerists.

            Mirror spoonerisms occur when transposition
simply reverses word order, usually with little
change in meaning.  In this phenomenon, the words
rhyme.  Thus, a great date becomes a date great .
Mirror types are somewhat rare, seldom have new
meaning, and usually are uninteresting.  I recall a
college dean who was addressed as Dean Greene to
his face.  Behind his back, however, irreverent junior
faculty referred to him as the Green Dean .

            Spoonerisms can be classified on a functional basis
as either useless or useful.  Useless spoonerisms
produce correct words which, unfortunately, neither
amuse not have current meaning.  If a stack of
plates is changed to a plaque of states , the result is, to
say the least, puzzling.  Plaque is a word, and states is
a word, but no meaning attaches to the term since
there is no mental connection.  Useless spoonerisms
must be avoided and characterize their creators as
rank novices or amateurs.

            Useful spoonerisms substitute a common or
meaningful phrase for another when transposition
occurs, as when “the movement was dealt a crushing
blow” becomes “the movement was dealt a blushing
crow .”  Changing “there's a cozy nook in my
kitchen” to “there's a nosey cook in my kitchen” not
only introduces a totally new meaning, but also injects
humor.  Having achieved these desired results,
a sense of satisfaction and well-being settles upon
both speaker and listener.

            A gratifying subset of the useful category includes
the obscene spoonerism, either intentional or
accidental.  Transposition produces a vulgar term or
phrase.  Think what the clever spoonerist can do
with “the painting is foul art, ” or perhaps even better,
fowl art .  Could one resist tampering if Joyce
had written “She was a bit of awful lass, ” or if
Shakespeare had penned “Thy chatter is but
showful wit! ”  Obscene spoonerisms represent the
pinnacle of spooner-type wit (or is that wooner-type
spit? ).

            Making up spoonerisms is a pleasant form of addiction.
The malady is similar to that of the clever
little tune that becomes imbedded in the mind and
demands to be hummed: the more one tries to forget,
the stronger is the sense of impulsive and involuntary
recall.  Unlike other life-long addictions,
however, the spoonerist incurs no cost, inflicts little
pain upon others, and can engage in his or her passion
anywhere at any time, greatly enriching the
quality of life.  No one ever recovers, but under the
circumstances, who wants to?  As I often say: “To
spooner not to spoon?”

            I'll probably try dying!
         
         
            Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch ...



            After bragging about his three granddaughters, a
rancher friend of mine said of his prolific son,
“And of course he's got that little ketch-colt in
town.”  A bit later at the same picnic when the same
son's pretty Hispanic wife joined us with a mess of
beans she had cooked, she too talked about family,
including the blond baby daughter she carried on
her hip.  “People ask me how come she's so blond
when the other two are so dark,” the young mother
said, laughing, “but that's just the way it turned out.
I told Joe, I said, `Honey, honest, I didn't jump the
fence.' ”  Most of us with our British visitors had just
come down off the mesa where Joe had been branding
calves.  In ranch lingo branding often implies
vaccination, castration, and ear-marking as well.  So
the rancher's sister yelled, “What did y'all do with
those mountain oysters I fried up?”

            “The what?” the lady visitor from Sheffield inquired.

            “The huevos... You know, the balls,” the hungry
American lady interpreted, giving up her attempt
at delicacy.

            I lived on a ranch in my formative years, and the
terms, the jargon, at least in the Southwest of the
United States, is not unfamiliar to me.  But I am
aware that stockmen's vocabulary varies considerably
around the English-speaking world, much more I
imagine than, say, nautical, or culinary, or musical
terms do.  Once while my wife and I were spending
a few weeks on my father's ranch in Oklahoma, we
left our Virginia house in the care of a former Foreign
Service colleague who had just been fired for
marrying an Australian woman without Departmental
permission.  Another friend, an American,
phoned me at home then and was answered by the
Australian bride.  “Bill isn't here,” she said; “he's on
a station in the bush.”  Now, the Australian was
quite angry over the firing of her husband, and probably
she was being deliberately un-American on the
phone to confound yet another stupid Yank.  If so,
she succeeded, as my American friend later told me,
and, more interestingly to me, revealed by example
how much terms in the same language for the same
things ( station = ranch; bush = country, sticks ) in the
same occupation can vary from place to place, at
least when it comes to stock raising.

            “Most of what you've just seen goes on in the
UK too,” I remarked to our British visitors as we
drove down off the mesa, to which the lady from
Sheffield rejoined, “Oh, no, I don't think so.  I think
we mark cattle with little tags in their ears.  We
don't rope the calves either and throw them down.”
On second thought, I had to agree that she was
probably right.  But the most repugnant part of the
multiple operation we had just witnessed was the
castration, and I remained sure that bull calves are
made steer calves in Britain and are vaccinated.  I
wondered whether on British farms the common
word for castrate was the same as here: cut .  Presumably
the other terms we had heard in use on the
mesa, flank for `heave the roped calf onto the
ground' and hogtie for `truss it up with a pickin'
string ' while the well-trained roping horse keeps the
ketch rope taut, are not used, as the practices are
not, in Britain.  In fact, on many, if not most, American
ranches nowadays all of these operations are
performed in chutes rather than by roping calves
from horseback and flanking and hogtying them.
Also, increasingly brands are painlessly frozen, not
burned, into the calves' hide.  Even in the relatively
primitive procedure we had witnessed, though, Joe
had been so brisk and deft and the calves so nonchalant
as soon as they got back on their feet that the
business had not seemed so atrocious as one might
think.

            Here in the Western States, just as worldwide,
ranch terminology varies from area to area.  Everywhere
in North America ranch vocabulary has
drawn heavily from Mexican Spanish, since the industry
largely evolved in Mexico and the border
states, especially Texas.  But even though as a boy I
lived on a ranch right on the Mexican border, I remember
being mystified by ranching terms that
crept into Western songs from north of us, cayuse,
for example.  I wondered about the word coulee in
the old song: “...they feed in the coulees and water
in the draws...”

            Ranch words of Mexican origin, besides ranch
itself, are: rodeo, latigo `a long strap to fasten the
cinch to a Western saddle,' corral (a word I could
not find in an English dictionary, except in its Afrikaans
form kraal, when I needed to know how to
spell it some sixty years ago), bronc(o), palomino,
buckeroo (which I have heard used only in fun), and
chaps, to list a few that come to mind.  But most
ranching terms, including such essential ones as
cowboy, grass, pasture, fence, heifer, beef, boots, saddle,
and so on, are obviously common English words
of long standing.  Some of the English words have
taken on a special application in ranching usage.
Take the verb cut, which in common ranch parlance
has two meanings, the first as stated above being
`castrate.'  The second meaning, not exclusive to
ranch talk, is `separate,' as in “Cut the deck (of
cards).”  On a ranch you might hear someone say,
“Today we've got to cut those penned steers,”
meaning perhaps `separate out the ones to be
shipped.'  A cutting horse is a mount trained to separate
certain cattle out from the herd or bunch.

            What on most ranches in the Southwest is called
a ketch (catch) rope is a reata in Mexican Spanish.
Our word lariat comes from this Mexican word with
the definite article prefixed and the final vowel
dropped.  In the northern Mexican states, especially
Sonora, these ropes used to lasso animals from on
horseback sometimes are--or anyway were--
woven of strands of rawhide, which is elastic.  If a
big calf or steer was roped with one of these rawhide
lariats attached solidly to the saddle horn, American
style, and the roping horse came to an abrupt halt or
sat back so that the roped animal hit the rope at a
run, the lasso tended to stretch like a rubber band
and then snap, possibly springing back to knock an
eye out of the cowboy.  Monolongual Mexican vaqueros
witnessing the folly of such misuse of their implement
would shout at the Gringos in excellent
Desert Latin (as Spanish has been called): “Dale,
dale!”  Literally this means simply `Give to him' but
actually the advice offered was more like “Play him
(like a fish).”  The idea was that you had to hold the
rope in your hand and reduce the tension to what
the elasticity would tolerate.  American cowboys,
perhaps confusing the Spanish dale with English
dally, began to understand, maybe at the cost of an
eye or two, and in their own lingo called the rawhide
lariats dally ropes .  That, at least, was the etymology
current in Southern Arizona, which was
plausible enough to convince me.  I have heard
other explanations of dally rope in New Mexico that
were too implausible to remember.

            Another interesting word that American cowhands
have taken from their Mexican predecessors,
along with the thing itself, is chaps, typically truncated
from the Mexican chaparreras, the word for
protective leather leggings worn mainly by cowboys
on horseback in thorny brush.  The only time I have
heard the American word pronounced with the
usual English, or for that matter Spanish, ch sound
was in a perfume ad on TV.  By the people who wear
chaps the article is invariably called as if spelled
shaps .  Two linguistic forces have shaped this word:
the English-language tendency to reduce words to a
single syllable (e.g., pram, sync, perk, Miss/Ms., etc.)
and the law of open syllables that causes the first of
two consonants that come together in a Spanish
word to be dropped, most commonly in the case of
ll, which prescriptively should be pronounced as ly
but is much more often pronounced as y alone.  The
t element of the tsh combination represented by ch
in Spanish, as in English, is not so commonly skipped
as the first l of the double l combination, but it is
often dropped, at least in northern Mexico; so what
the Gringo cowboys heard was shaparreras, which
they trimmed down to what was spelled chaps but
pronounced shaps .

            Drawing on occupational jargon for metaphors
to enliven communication is a common way to color
and illustrate language.  And where a basic occupation
centers on livestock, as in Biblical Judea or parts
of the American West or the Australian bush, the
stockman's jargon is bound to be a main source of
metaphors, whether the subject be marital transgression
as in the banter at our picnic, or the Lord's
providing for His flock as in the Twenty-third Psalm,
or national character as in “Waltzing Matilda.”
         
         
            A Dictionary of English Place-Names
            Place-names have many different “meanings.”
We could all write down a list of names which are
personally meaningful, recalling places where we
have lived and loved.  If ever I write an autobiography
it will be in dictionary form: names of places and
people defined in terms of private significance.  For
poets, humorists, and those blessed with fertile
imagination, place-names can have other meanings:


Yes, I remember Adlestrop
--The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly.  It was late June.

            

            Thus Edward Thomas begins the poem which enables
us to join him in his railway compartment at
the turn of the century.  He goes on to fix that summer
afternoon and the name Adlestrop forever in
our consciousness.  Poets, as Stephen Vincent Benét
reminded us, can fall in love with place-names.

            Humorists respond to them differently.  I hope
everyone is familiar with The Meaning of Liff, by
Douglas Adams and John Lloyd (1983).  The authors
decided that place-names spent too much time
“loafing about on signposts.”  They assigned definitions
to the names which allowed them to “start
earning their keep in everyday conversation.”  Adlestrop,
to them, was “that part of a suitcase which is
designed to get snarled up on conveyor belts at airports.
Some of the more modern Adlestrop designs
have a special `quick release' feature which enables
the case to fly open at this point and fling your underclothes
into the conveyor belt's gearing mechanism.”

            Reluctantly I have to admit that the reader has
no right to expect poetry or wit in this latest Oxford
place-name dictionary.  The author is a highly reputable
academic toponymist, and he is dealing with
English, not American, place-names.  Those who
study New World place-naming are at a distinct advantage.
They are mainly social historians, with
many an anecdote to relate about why settlers from
Europe transferred existing names.  Scholars like
A.D. Mills have to shift back several centuries and
be linguistic archaeologists.  They then have the difficult
job of explaining the results of their researches
to laymen.

            What, then, has Mills made of Adlestrop?  For
him it is a place in Gloucestershire which had its
name recorded in 714 as Titlestrop .  By Domesday,
in 1086, it had become Tedestrop .  He therefore explains
the name as “outlying farmstead or hamlet of
a man called *Tætel.”  In other words, as he says, it
is an OE personal name plus the element throp .  He
adds: “The initial T- disappeared from the 14th century
due to confusion with the preposition at .”

            I think we should consider for a moment to
whom Mills is explaining all this.  I imagine that it is
likely to be someone who happens to live in Adlestrop,
a chap who has woken up one day and said to
himself: “Adlestrop--that's a queer sort of name.
Why Adlestrop?”  Having popped into his local reference
library and taken this dictionary from the
shelf, has all become clear to him?  Is this entry as
“clear and concise” as the blurb claims?

            If our enquirer had at least some formal training
in philology, it will have been crystal clear.  He will
have had no need to consult the Introduction to discover
that Tætel's name is preceded by *because it
is “inferred from comparative [place-name] evidence
and postulated to occur.”  He will not have needed
to consult the list of abbreviations to learn that OE
stands for Old English, and that “old” in that context
has a fairly specific meaning.  He will have understood
why the at confusion occurred.  Though he
would probably talk of living in Adlestrop he knows
that that he gets off the train at Adlestrop.  Not that
he would think in such simplistic terms: his historical
knowledge of prepositional usage would have
made such reasoning unnecessary.

            My point is that a more normal reader will have
extracted far less from the entry--probably no more
than that Adlestrop originally meant `someone's
farm.'  My further point is that to be totally successful,
a dictionary of this kind requires far more than
the academic skills of a place-name specialist.  If
such a work is really to do its job--tell the story of a
place-name in simple terms to an average reader--a
great deal of further thinking needs to be done by
the editorial team about how the information is presented
and for whom.  Imagination on their part is
required, even if it is not the imagination of the poet
or humorist.

            The information in this book would have been
better presented in an entirely different form.  Had
it remained a traditional book, there would have
been a strong case for listing separately the hundreds
of names that consist of a personal name and
common place-name element.  Various other lists
could have given the essential information about
names based on words with meanings such as ford
and wood .  An index would have allowed names to
be traced in alphabetical order.  Separate articles
could have dealt with the meaning of elements like
throp and such matters as the loss of initial letters,
owing to confusion of preposition and name.

            A much better solution, however, would have
been to publish this material as computer software.
Surely the reference libraries to which people turn
for such specialized information as the origin of
place-names, as well as the individuals who are interested
enough in such subjects to buy dictionaries,
have access by now to personal computers?  I should
have been able to refer to the fruits of Mills's labors
by inserting a floppy disk into my machine.  On typing
Adlestrop I should have been presented with the
early spellings and Mills's interpretation.  Had I
needed it, a Help key should have brought an instant
explanation of the symbol * and the abbreviation
OE.  There would have been a far fuller discussion of
the preposition question in a separate paragraph,
one that would have appeared on screen had I typed
in a name, such as Elstree , where it was also relevant.

            Academic reviewers of this dictionary will, as
usual, write a great deal about whether the author
was right to choose one postulated form of an Old
English name rather than a slightly different one.  I
believe it would be wrong to confine the discussion
to such matters.  I am prepared to trust Mills's scholarship
and accept that he has explained to the best of
his ability some 12,000 names.  He has conscientiously
done his job.  His editors, in my view, have
not.  They have complacently chosen to update and
marginally simplify Eilert Ekwall's previous Oxford
Dictionary of English Place-Names .  I see very little
evidence that they stopped to think who would be
interested in this specialized information, and how it
could best be presented.

            This is all the more disappointing since other
sections of OUP, along with other publishers of reference
works, have made great strides forward in
recent years.  Academic excellence has been maintained,
but combined with good design, editorial
flair, and original thinking.  The editors of this book
had an important part to play.  Unfortunately, both
for Mr. Mills and his average reader, they appear to
have completely missed their opportunity.

            Leslie Dunkling

            
               Thames Ditton, Surrey
            
         
         
            Reception and Response, Hearer Creativity and the
Analysis of Spoken and Written Texts
            In the early 1960s I wrote an article [WORD,
XXVI (1966), Nos. 1-3, an offprint of which I shall
be happy to send to those requesting it] in which I
suggested that relatively accurate statistics on word
frequencies could best be attained by factoring in
the circulation and listenership figures of periodicals
and radio/TV media used as sources of data about
the words and phrases under investigation.  While it
is acknowledged that such a method would not work
well for books, the idea was that the number of occurrencies
of a lemma (a technical though convenient
term for the `thing--word or phrase--under
study'), multiplied by, say the Audit Bureau of Circulation
sworn circulation of a periodical would
yield a figure that could legitimately be called its
Exposure .  Obviously, such a number would be far
too large to manipulate readily, so, using a formula
familiar to statisticians, it was normalized to produce
a simple decimal number of only a few digits which I
called the lemma's Exposure Index .  The purpose of
the exercise was to connect the frequency information
with the language as it is used and perceived; in
addition, the approach would serve to eliminate
from consideration those materials which, though
published, were little read, with a consequent low
influence on the lexicon.

            Frequency information on the language, of
great usefulness to lexicographers and other linguists
is sorely lacking: a study by Thorndike and
Lorge in the 1930s yielded the Teacher's Wordbook
of 30,000 Words , but that had outlived its accuracy
and usefulness by the mid 1940s.  With the emergence
of computer typesetting in the 1960s, it
seemed likely that the analysis of large bodies of text
from newspapers and periodicals (in particular)
would be facilitated, for one of the greatest expenses
was the cost of keyboarding the texts into machine-readable
form so that they could be processed
speedily and economically by computer.

            Those who question why a large corpus of material
should be needed for study ought to realize that
the amount of language written and read, uttered
and heard in a single day is unbelievably huge.  In a
given hour, the numbers of words spewed forth by
the dozens of TV channels and AM and FM radio
stations alone is unimaginable.  While it is acknowledged
that statistics can make allowance for using
samples instead of an entire corpus for analysis, the
prodigious quantity of lemmata (that's the plural of
lemma ) requires an incredibly large sample.  Then
again, the statistics for a few thousand of the most
frequent words-- the, a, an, but, for, of, etc.--need
not be derived again and again, and a few thousand
such lemmata are usually eliminated at the outset.
Still, that means that a reasonably accurate sample,
as I suggested in 1961, would have to contain a billion--preferably,
a billion billion--lemmata.  In
those days, computer storage and processing equipment
were too primitive to accommodate such quantities.
But today, the situation is quite different.
Moreover, publishers are today generally less reluctant
than before to make available to researchers the
disks and tapes containing text.

            As we all know, there is an enormous number of
publications dealing with highly specialized areas.  If
a truly “unabridged” word study of the language
were ever to be undertaken, such materials would
have to be included.  But for practical purposes,
there is little point in including a lemma like hwālrād
(a kenning, `whale-road,' for sea ) if only an infinitesimal
portion of the population reads Beowulf or
an article about it in a recondite learned journal.

            Early in this century Funk & Wagnalls published
dictionaries that contained a large number of
Scotticisms, either out of habit or affection for the
genre or because their lexicographers felt that every
student who read Burns had to be able to find in the
dictionary every word he used.  These days, when all
editions of Burns's poems are annotated, with
glosses for any “foreign” words, allowing such Scotticisms
to occupy valuable space in general dictionaries
is not considered economical, and only those
likely to appear in crossword puzzles are included.
Similarly, historical lexicography--the vocabulary
of Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Richard Rolle of
Hampole, the Holinshed Chronicle, etc.--has been
relegated to footnotes in student editions or to specialized
dictionaries.  Of course, not all Scotticisms
have been excised, and words like auld, land , and
syne are probably still to be found in many dictionaries,
but only because they are frequent.  But these
words are archaisms, obsolete words that are used
for special effect or other reasons, as in popular quotations,
like wherefore in “Wherefore art thou,
Romeo?,” known to every schoolchild (and misunderstood
by many, who think it means `where,'
while it really means `why': it is retained in what for ,
dialectal whuffo ').  The King James Bible, which contains
many such archaisms, has preserved them for
modern English; wherefore more commonly appears
in the tautology whys and wherefores .

            The book under review might well have included
something on the subject of exposure in one
of the essays collected within its pages, for much of
the material selected by lexicographers as source
corpora for citations is arrived at subjectively and
impressionistically--though I hasten to allow that
the subjective and impressionistic maunderings of a
good, experienced linguist might well be worth a
motherlode of statistics.  The point is that Reception
and Response is one of the few works that I have
seen that tries to present a point of view from the
perspective of the receiver of information, while
paying attention to the semiotic aspects of language
(that is, the elements embedded in communication
that are not strictly concerned with language,
per se).

            The twelve articles collected under the general
rubrics of Contexts of responsiveness, Listener response
and communication, and Responsive readers
have mixed success in dealing with the subject.  The
first, “Attending the hearing: listening in legal settings,”
by Peter Goodrich, a lecturer in law, does
not seem to come to grips with its subject--at least
in an understandable way--till more than halfway
through, notwithstanding its inclusion of much matter
that makes good and interesting reading.  Richard
G. Tedeschi's “Therapeutic listening” is a broad,
though concise treatment of psychotherapists' reaction
and receptivity to their patients.  It is more an
article on the behaviour of therapists than on language,
so we can leave it.  Deborah Cameron and
Deborah Hills (“ `Listening in': negotiating relationships
between listeners and presenters on radio
phone-in programmes”) have studied the output of
LBC Radio, London's “all-talk” station, which I
have listened to with interest.  After devoting (wasting?)
about half their space on a penetrating analysis
of how callers and presenters say hello and goodbye
(or not, as is often the case with goodbyes), they
finally get down to the substance of the calls.  In a
subcategory called “Extreme, outrageous and offensive
calls,” the authors refer to “a new genre of
phone-ins [in the US] whose whole raison d'être is
for the presenter to pour abuse on those who call.”
Those who have heard Bob Grant and others in the
US are familiar with the pattern.  What the authors
fail to mention is that the treatment the caller receives
sometimes depends on who the presenter is.

            For example, Mike Allen (on LBC) is low-key,
calm, and always gracious and polite, seeming to
evoke no outrageous calls.  Robbie Vinson [sp?], who
runs Robbie Vinson's Night Line and refers to himself
in the third person, is often very unpleasant indeed,
and some of the conversations cited in the article
(especially one in which a caller was told that if he
didn't like Britain he should get out) smack strongly
of his acerbic, dyspeptic, often rude manner.  What
presenters are missing is that listeners often tune in
to hear all sorts of the things that other listeners
have to say, whether they agree with them or think
them mad, and it makes the presenter appear intolerantly
bigoted to cut off a caller whose opinions are
at variance with those the presenter might perceive
to be held by the man on the Clapham omnibus.  On
the whole, despite the preliminary screening that
callers are subjected to, mainly in order to eliminate
cranks, drunks, and undesirables, those who do get
through rarely have anything of moment to contribute,
the presenters are notably unsympathetic in
eliciting a fair exposure of their comments, and the
listener is (too) often left with the feeling that the
presenter has been too dismissive.  The analysis in
this article is interesting and well done, but I question
whether it is an analysis of the listener, as only
the caller and the presenter are discussed.  To consider
the caller a listener in this structure would be a
mistake; as far as I can see, the comment on listeners
is confined to the authors' “Conclusion”:


Radio phone-ins are speech events in which relationships
between individual listeners, a notion
of the “listening public” and the station as personified
in the professional presenter are carefully
negotiated.

            

            I do not accept that, for once the listener has
become a caller he is as much a part of the script,
entertainment--whatever one might call it--as the
presenter and is, in effect, no longer a mere listener.
That is confirmed in the following:


Although it is the presenter who has ultimate
control in the encounter--a control he may legitimate
in terms of the interests of the “listeners
out there,” their right to be entertained and to
be protected from offensive views--the listeners
who call in may challenge the norms he lays
down in various ways, from dogged pursuit of a
“personal relationship” with the presenter to
equally dogged resistance to the “containment
strategies” presenters employ.  Listeners, like
presenters, are aware of the linguistic and social
norms which structure acceptable phone-in talk;
yet they are capable of ignoring or subverting
these and of attempting to renegotiate the rules
of the game.

            

            Lack of space precludes further comment on
this interesting collection of papers, but I should like
to add one observations.  The phone-in programs
have created a culture language of their own, one
that is, curiously, common to both the US and the
UK.  It includes comments like I'm a first-time (or
virgin) caller, I really enjoy your program (which alternates
with You really have a great program tonight) ,
and Thank you for taking my call .  I have
never fathomed the purpose of the first; the second
is pure sycophancy; and the third is patently ludicrous,
for if a presenter of a phone-in program refused
calls it would not be a phone-in program.

            Laurence Urdang
         
         
            New Light on Boswell
            The Cambridge University Press has seen fit to
honor the 200th anniversary of Boswell's Life of
Johnson with a collection of fourteen essays on the
biographer and his subject.  Only one of the contributors
is at Yale, and the ghost of Frederick Pottle
and his colleagues in the “Boswell Factory” should
be delighted that there has been such widespread
enthusiasm for the field they have ploughed for the
past six decades.  Professor David Daiches of Edinburgh
leads off with a splendid introduction on Boswell's
ambiguities, writing about the biography that
“the subject understood the biographer more profoundly
than the biographer understood the subject.”
True enough, but Johnson's intellectual capacity
was greater than Boswell's ab initio .  The
remaining essays are organized into groups, four
general essays on Boswell and eighteenth-century
Scottish culture, four essays on contexts for the Life
of Johnson, and five essays on features of the biography
itself.

            Thomas Crawford (Aberdeen) analyzes the
rhetoric of Boswell's letters to such friends as Andrew
Erskine, John Johnston, and William Temple, a
useful way to demonstrate how Boswell developed
his literary skills.  Richard Sher (New Jersey Institute
of Technology) probes Boswell's relations with
both the Moderate and Popular wings of the Church
of Scotland.  Boswell's ambiguities and internal contrarieties
are neatly shown in his treatment of William
Robertson, Principal of Edinburgh University,
praising his literary skills but inveighing against his
theology.  Pat Rogers (University of South Florida)
provides Boswell's attitude to and use of Scotticisms
both in writing and in speech; at one time, we are
told, Boswell considered compiling a dictionary of
words peculiar to the Scottish tongue.  Joan Pittock
(Aberdeen) undertakes the important task of evaluating
Boswell as a critic.  She points out that had he
lived in this century he would have excelled as an
interviewer, much like David Frost.

            Boswell wrote a considerable volume of published
work before he began the Life of Johnson , preliminary
trials of strength.  Thomas Curley (Bridgewater
State College) uses his Account of Corsica as
an example of a travel book in the same genre as
Sterne's A Sentimental Journey and Smollett's Travels
through France and Italy .  It is also a tract on political
liberty, and Curley quotes the epigraph from the
Corsican rejoinder to a Pope in 1320: “Non enim
propter gloriam, divitias aut honores pugnamus, sed
propter libertatem solummodo quam nemo bonus
nisi simul vita amittit.”  [For we fight not for glory,
riches, or honors, but solely for liberty, which no
good man loses except with his life.]  Gordon Turnbull
(Yale) focuses on Boswell's account of his defense
of the sheep-stealer John Reid to illuminate
Boswell's sense of sympathy, one of a biographer's
necessary skills.  Richard Schwartz (Geogetown)
uses Boswell's interview with Hume on his deathbed
to explore Boswell's own philosophy as well as his
attitude toward death and the life hereafter.  Susan
Manning (Newnham, Cantab.) deals with Boswell's
episodes of melancholia, a trait he shared with Johnson,
and his essays on it in The Hypochondriack .

            The above essays set the stage for essays dealing
directly with the Life .  The first of these is an outstanding
account of Boswell's treatment of the famous
quarrel between Johnson and Lord Chesterfield.
John Burke (Alabama) reviews and analyzes
other contemporary accounts and finds that Boswell's
is not only the most accurate but that he uses
it to demonstrate Johnson's character, whereas others
were merely retailing literary gossip.  Marlies
Danziger (Hunter) takes up the question of Boswell's
authorial comments that are interspersed
throughout the Life .  Certainly he intrudes himself
into the scenes, sometimes for sheer self-display, but
also for a variety of other purposes, all of which are
carefully examined.  Paul Korshin (Pennsylvania)
supplies a masterly analysis of Johnson's conversation
as recorded by Boswell, sometimes a bit long
after the fact.  It may be true that Boswell's formal,
highly generalized diction, quite possibly encouraged
by Malone, is no longer to our taste, that is, not
the diction of twentieth-century biographers; but if
so, so much the worse for 20th-century readers of
biography.  Donna Heiland (Vassar) comments on
other contemporary biographies of Johnson.  She
comments that Boswell presents Johnson as a divine
figure with Boswell as his priest.  “The paradox inherent
in the concept of divinity incarnate is the
epitome... of the dichotomy in Boswell's portrayal
of his subject.  Boswell reveres Johnson, and at the
same time manipulates him continually.”  Greg
Clingham (Fordham), the editor, modestly places his
essay last.  He attacks the complex question of
“truth” vs.  “authenticity” in Boswell's portrait of
Johnson, and therein lies the art of biography.

            This is an exceptionally fine collection of scholarly
essays, greatly to be valued by readers interested
in Boswell and Johnson.  Though some of the
most opaque prose written today is by Ph.D.s in
English Lit., these essays are largely free of that
fault.  Perhaps their clarity owes something to their
subject.  Both Boswell and Johnson wrote readable
and lucid prose, and scholars who gloss their texts
cannot resist their influence, which is all for the
good.  The contributors have, as Johnson advised
Boswell, rid their minds of cant.

            William B. Ober, M.D.

            
               Tenafly, New Jersey
            
         
         
            Of that ilk, or kidney



            In recent decades an ilk epidemic has afflicted
journalists and broadcasters and ordinary people
who like to fancy-up their language a bit.  For instance,
this from a newspaper:


Landers and her sister, Dear Abbey, and several
others of their ilk...

            

            Here is Sir Bruce Fraser in his revision of Sir Ernest
Gowers's The Complete Plain Words:

               
Ilk is a Scots word meaning `same.'  It is not a
noun meaning `kind, sort, kidney.'  “James Sporran
of that ilk” means `James Sporran of Sporran';
it shows that he lives on the estate that bears the
family name and distinguishes him from his cousins,
the Sporrans of Glenhaggis, and his distant
kinsmen, the Sporrans of Upper Tooting.  The
schoolmaster who wrote to The Times about the
damage done by the BBC by “Mrs. Whitehouse
and her ilk” should write out fifty times, “I must
not use words I do not understand.”

            

            In 1934, the Third Edition of the Concise Oxford
Dictionary endorsed the Scots usage but reported
that ilk is used vulgarly for “that family,
class, or set.”  The Eighth Edition (1990) gives this
as the first definition for ilk:

               
colloquial, disputed use a family, class, or set
(not of the same ilk as you).  Usually derogatory,
and therefore best avoided.

            

            The second definition, which I need not quote here,
is a quite inadequate one for the Scottish use of the
word.  Surprisingly, Chambers 20th Century Dictionary,
edited and published in Edinburg, displays the
same insensitivity, as does the Gage Canadian.
However, Webster's New World is quite responsive
to Scottish sensitivity.

            Having had this say on ilk , I am giving up the
fight.  I will not use the word in the now popular
sense, but I will refrain from snarling at people who
do.  I remember, though, that many years ago the
great Fowler declared that the non-Scots use of ilk is
merely an example of Worn-out Humour.

            However, when the noun is used adjectivally it
can mean `each' or `every': Ilka lassie ha' here laddi.
But if you were not born and raised in Scotland you
should not fool with that one: I was not and I do not.

            Perhaps it would be better, as Fraser seems to
suggest, to use the phrase of that kidney.  Apparently,
this use of kidney came from the belief that
the kidneys were a factor in determining a person's
temperament.  Shakespeare had that in mind in The
Merry Wives of Windsor: “A man of my kidney.”
And both Fielding and Disraeli used the word that
way in their novels.  Both the Concise Oxford and
Webster's New World give as one of the meanings of
kidney “temperament” and “kind, sort.”  There
seems a touch of worn-out humor in that--or perhaps
merely of verbal cuteness.

         
         
            Beyond Compare



            In the usual meanings of positives, comparatives,
and superlatives of English adjectives the gradations
are taken to mean “--,” “-er/more --,” and
“-est/most --,” the latter being the adverbs normally
used to distinguish the comparatives and
superlatives of polysyllabic words.  Despite the fact
that it is awkward to describe, there is nothing terrifyingly
profound about this observation: all it means
is that hot means `hot,' hotter means `more hot, of a
higher temperature than that designated by hot ,'
and hottest means `most hot, of a temperature that is
greater than that of anything else being considered.'
For polysyllables, like ignorant, we use more ignorant
and most ignorant .

            
               What is interesting is that the semantic pattern
does not hold for old and older when applied to people:
it seems that an old person is older than an older
person, or, to put it the other way round, an older
person is younger than an old person.  Old in this
context is more or less synonymous with elderly,
which means `quite advanced in age,' while older
means `advanced in age (but not yet so advanced as
to be called “old”).'  ( Oldest does not enter this discussion.)
I venture to suggest that the reason is that
while an old person is merely `old,' an older person is
perceived as being older than a younger person (often
the one who is talking) rather than being older
than an old person.  Clear?  I thought not.

            Which is younger, a young person or a younger
person?  Perhaps young/younger are not used in the
same way.  How old are “young people”?

            The same sort of thing seems to be going on
with low-class, which is `lower' than lower-class, and
with high-class, which is `higher' than higher-class.
The dictionaries I have checked are silent--improperly
so, I think--on these senses.

            Are there other similar anomalies in the language?

         
         
            Everything I Know



            Occasionally, one hears, She taught him everything
he knows or He taught her everything she
knows, curious expressions when you come to think
about them; indeed, they state an impossible condition.
On the other hand, She taught him everything
she knows and He taught her everything he knows,
though improbable, could make sense.  The ambiguity
probably arose from She/He taught her/him everything
she/he knows (about something specified),
in which the referent of the second She/he is ambiguous:
common sense dictates that it refer to the subject
of the sentence, not to the her or him, thus
yielding the more reasonable She taught him everything
she knows or He taught her everything she
knows .

         
         


            When error or conjecture is uncritically copied
from one publication to another, it is often legislated
into “fact” merely by virtue of having been repeated
so often.  The French word bistro/bistrot, for
example, has countless times been attributed to Russian,
although that is mere fantasy.

            Creating “fact” merely by repeating error is
particularly frequent when it comes to Yiddish and
English: numerous times we read, without supporting
proof, that English words like copacetic, derma
(the food), kibosh (as in put the kibosh on ), Cockamamie,
gazump, gnof or (older English) gnoffe, guy (the
person, not the rope), and shyster are from Yiddish.
Indeed, proof is impossible in such cases, for the
words were not derived from Yiddish.

            Having recently exploded the myth about the
supposed Yiddish origin of several of these words in
articles in Jewish Linguistic Studies, I turned my attention
to gunsel, in its various spellings.  After five
weeks of working on nothing but this word and
thinking that every treatment of it in dictionaries
and elsewhere had been located and evaluated, I
sent the article to press.  Now, to my dismay, Muriel
Smith writes in VERBATIM [XVIII,2,23] that “the suggested
definition [ sic ] is from Yiddish genzel, gantzel
and/or German Gänslein, Gänzel `gosling, young
goose.' ”

            Let the record be set straight: Yiddish has only
gendzl `gosling.'  The e stands for the phoneme /e/,
which in this word is pronounced like the e in ebb in
all varieties of Yiddish.  That vowel would not yield
the first vowel of gunsel, hence a Yiddish origin for it
is doubtful.  Since this English word has no association
with guns, it is not possible that English gun
triggered (as some have suggested) an irregular
sound change, resulting in an English vowel which
the Yiddish one would not otherwise have yielded.

            There is no Yiddish word “genzel” or
“gantzel,” which Smith has copied, uncritically,
from others.  If Yiddish is the source of gunsel, someone
will have to produce an etymon that is phonologically
more likely than gendzl or, if that is indeed
its etymon, explain the irregular sound change.  A
thread running through all these mistaken etymologies
is that their supporters think that the only criterion
in etymology is “if it sounds like x , then it must
be derived from x .”  That misconception can be seen
on a grand scale in Isaac Mozeson's The Word: The
Dictionary That Reveals the Hebrew Source of English,
which purports to show that about 22,000 (!)
English words are of Hebrew origin.  That book is so
brimming with error that the title of the review of it
in Jewish Language Studies [Vol. 2, 1990, pp. 105-83]
sums it up neatly: “Fiction or Medieval Philology.”

            “Truth's a dog must to kennel; he must be
whipped out, when Lady the brach may stand by the
fire and stink.”  [ King Lear , I, iv, 110-12].





         
         


            You mention [XVII,3] the word gunsel as being a
less common, old-fashioned term for `gunman,' etc.
Dashiell Hammett managed to slip the word into The
Maltese Falcon [Alfred A. Knopf, 1965, p. 367], without
explaining that it meant `homosexual'; he was,
not unnaturally, very pleased when readers and critics
assumed that it was actually a gunman or
what-have-you.  His original intention was merely to
slip it past the censor, but the word took off.





         
         


            In reply to Milton Horowitz [XVIII, 2], gedunk
originated in Harold Teen, a comic strip of the twenties,
by Carl Ed, replete with cutie-pie flappers,
porkpie hats, bellbottom slacks, and epigraphic yellow
slickers and jalopies.  It was indeed “something
sold at a soda fountain or snack bar.”  The place was
The Sugar Bowl, owned and operated by Pop Jenks,
if memory serves.  The only reference I have that
mentions the strip at all ( The Penguin Book of
Comics) is rather sketchy on detail.  As I recall, the
gedunk was a confection devised either by Harold
Teen or his diminutive sidekick, Shadow Smart.  It
consisted of a ladyfinger dipped between bites in a
mug of hot chocolate, hence gedunk .





         
         


            On my entry into the Navy in 1942, gedunk was
already well established to refer to any ice-cream
dish with toppings or additions.  On entering the Naval
Academy in 1944, I found that a small ice-cream
bar in the basement of Bancroft Hall (immidiately
under the main entrance and limited to upperclass
midshipmen) was semi-officially known as “The
Gedunk” (pronounced “gee-dunk,” with a hard
g )--although the wares themselves were never
called gedunks, but “chocolate sodas,” “sundaes.”

            For origins, try Pennsylvania Dutch dunk for
`dip,' leading to such usages as dunders and dunkshot --which
Chapman [ American Slang ] traces back
to the 1920s.  Gedunk is obviously a humorous application
of the past participle of dunk --Crullers
“gedunked” in coffee--and by the 1930s it was obviously
well established in the Navy to refer to any
concoction involving ice cream, and especially to establishments
dispensing it.

            Incidentally, dunk is not proper German,
Dutch, or even Afrikaans for `dip,' and to the best
of my knowledge would not even be understood as
slang in German or Afrikaans.




         
         
            [The Random House Dictionary, 2nd Unabridged,
gives, for dunk: “1865-70, Amer .; < PaG dunke to
dip, immerse; cf. G tunken, 
               MHG 
               dunken, tunken,
               OHG 
               thunkōn, dunkōn .  -- Editor .]
         
         


            The following entry in Harold Wentworth and
Stuart Berg Flexner's Dictionary of American Slang
(1960) attests to the currency of gedunk prior to the
1950s:


gedunk g'dong...n. Sweets, dessert; esp. ice
cream or pudding.  1946: “in addition to being
shown the 16-inch turrets...the cadets were
`shown' chocolate sundaes from the `gedunk'
stand back aft.”  N.Y. Times, Aug. 11 3/3.
W.W.II USN use.

            

            As a member of the crew of the U.S.S. Dixie in
1945, I can attest to the common usage of that word
in the US Navy in the Pacific during WWII.  The
Dixie was a large tender that repaired and serviced
combat vessels, mainly destroyers and destroyer escorts,
at fleet anchorages, first at Ulithi and later off
Leyte in the Philippines.  Crews of those smaller
vessels referred to the Dixie as a gedunk ship, because
she had a refreshment stand where they might
obtain delicacies like chocolate sundaes or gedunks .
I never heard of pudding as a gedunk .  And the
gedunk stand on the Dixie was forward, not aft.

            
               The American Thesaurus of Slang, by Lester V.
Berrey and Melvin Van Den Bark (1943) defines
gedunk as `to eat a sundae' [p. 111 (94.11);p. 768
(824.3)].  Gedunk appears as a noun in the second
edition of the Thesaurus (1953) as a synonym for `ice
cream,' suggesting it was derived from the earlier
verb [p. 93 (91.23)].

            ...
In spite of the alternate g'dong cited by Wentworth
and Flexner, the noun gedunk --as spoken on
the U.S.S. Dixie --was accented on the first syllable
(as indicated in Webster III ); how the verb was or is
pronounced I do not know.





         
         


            The elderly proprietor (or overage soda jerk?)
would often accompany his delivery of treats to the
kids at the counter with the hortatory “Gedunk, my
children, gedunk!”  I never knew what he meant by
that, but it seemed to me, a boy of about ten at the
time, that gedunk was clearly a verb and in the imperative
mood.  I somehow imagined that it was a
blend of dunk (a popular debate at the time concerned
the propriety of dunking donuts in public)
and Yiddish gedenk, the intimate singular imperative
of gedenkn `to remember.'





         
         


            Confusion worse confounded, I fear, over the
origin of the Russian word for `railway station'
[“English Know-how, No Problem,” by Bill Bryson,
XVII,4; EPISTOLA from Philip Weinberg, XVIII, 2].
First, the word is not vagzal but vokzal .  Second, it
was not adopted from the name of Vauxhall railway
station, London.  Third, it was not adopted from
German Volksaal `people's waiting room'!

            What happened was this: Vauxhall Gardens
were a famous London pleasure ground and “place
of dalliance,” opened in 1660 (and known until
1785 as New Spring Gardens).  They were named
for their location in Vauxhall, south of the Thames.
The gardens gained international fame, and when
similar parks were laid out in continental Europe
they were known generically as vaxuhall .  In Russia,
the word become associated with the existing zal
`hall,' so that vokzal meant 'concert hall.'  One such
hall was built at the railway station at Pavlovsk after
that town was linked by rail with St. Petersburg in
1837.  As a result, vokzal gained the much wider
sense `railway station.'

            The London Vauxhall Gardens closed in 1859,
but the Russian word for `railway station' has preserved
their name.





         
         


            Mr. Bryson was over-hasty to condemn that
bomber jacket in Hamburg as “gloriously meaningless”
[XVIII, 2], for anyone who has spent time on a
farm would recognize it as intended for people supplying
chickenfeed to egg producers: what it bears is
a good plain advertisement for the product.  However,
some of his examples come close to matching
my own favorite from Japan: “Ivy League Spirit For
Ever This Is My Personal Yokohama.”

            In the same issue, Mr. McIntosh refers to a
“ route mauvais as the French have it.”  If the French
have it, it must read mauvaise; but if what he means
is a road with a bad surface the term used is chaussée
déformée .  And has he not noticed that, e.g., “one in
seven” is now a percentage?

            OBITER DICTA [ibid.] “Stepped-up shoes” is not a
Briticism, nor anything else as far as I am aware.  We
say “built-up” (as given--applied to heels--in the
Collins Dictionary! ).

            And I sympathize with your remark on page 19:
Brunner's First Law of Authorship states: “In any
given body of text there is at least one error that its
writer has read straight past three times.”





         
         

            Upon reading Don Sharp's otherwise well-researched
article on unmentionables [XVIII,2], I
had the distinct impression that he had gone too far
in defining that crucial word.  I knew unmentionables
simply as a euphemism for `underwear'; two
dictionaries of American usage, one thesaurus, and
one husband (from Mr. Sharp's own state of Missouri)
bear out that impression.  Unmentionables
thus underwent the perfectly logical semantic shift
from `trousers' to `undergarments.'  For most Americans,
unmentionables probably does not cover (pun
intended) the body parts beneath those undergarments
and certainly does not include “curses and
biological functions.”





         
         
            [...Literally, a semantic shift?  --Editor.]
         
         

            Don Sharp's essay [XVIII ,2] on the unmentionability
of men's trousers in the 19th century brought
to my mind an advertising poem which my grandfather
saw on the El in Chicago early in this century.
For a long-forgotten brand of trousers, it went like
this:


The pant hunter pantless is panting for pants.
He pants for the best pants the pant market
grants.
But he panteth unpanted until he implants
Himself in a pair of our Plymouth Rock pants.

            





         
         

            In “The Past As Prologue,” by William H.
Dougherty [XVI,3], the solecism like to of, as in The
boy like to of killed hisself, is labeled as being limited
to a region of Texas.  I have encountered it in South
Carolina and Georgia, and Thomas Wolfe puts it into
the mouth of one of his characters in (I think) Look
Homeward, Angel .  I have assumed that it derivers
from the French expression manquer faire `just miss
doing, almost do,' the primary meaning of manquer
being `to lack,' which could have shifted into colloquial
usage as like .  I cite this merely as a possibility,
definitive proof being pretty hard to dig up.





         
         


            David Galef's “The Niceness Principle”
[XVII,4] makes a persuasive case for the phenomenon
it describes.  At least one example of movement
in the opposite direction comes readily to mind,
however.  One often hears the term splitting the
baby used to describe the actions of a judge or arbitrator
who has reconciled opposing positions by
what is better described as splitting the difference .
The reference, of course, is to King Soloman's decision
when faced by two women claiming to the
mother of the same child.  The Solomonic decision,
to award custody to the woman who was willing to
give the child to her rival rather than see it killed by
being split between them was just the opposite of
splitting the baby .  Nevertheless, by some apparent
converse of the Niceness Principle, the language
perpetuates the notion that the baby was split and
that a judge acts wisely in following that example.

            Here is an instance of what Mr. Galef calls “false
recall” acting not to smooth something out but to
make it rougher than it ever was!





         
         


            Until I read Pagel's The Gnostic Gospels I recalled
the expression the naked truth as having derived
from an old Roman fable (perhaps from Horace,
around 50 B.C.) about Truth and Falsehood
emerging from a swim together, Falsehood stealing
Truth's clothers.  Truth, in the fable, would rather be
naked than don the clothes of Falsehood, thus the
naked Truth .  I don't find the story appealing, but it
appears in all references on the derivation of the expression.

            Compare that pale fable with the force of the
words of Marcus, a student of the gnostic teacher
Valentinus (c. 140 A.D.) who, Pagel writes, describes
the vision that “descended upon him ...in the
form of a woman” who says to him, “I wish to show
you Truth herself; for I have brought her down from
above, so that you may see her without a veil, and
understand her beauty.”  Pagel then quotes Marcus
on how “the naked Truth” came to him in a woman's
form.

            I suppose it is possible that Valentinus repeated
Horace's metaphor in different, more dramatic
terms a hundred years later.  Or each was independently
inspired to imagine Truth as an unclothed
woman.  From now on, I go with the derivation from
Marcus, student of Valentinus the Gnostic.  Has a
VERBATIM reader any thoughts on the subject?





         
         


            May I add a gracenote to the exchange concerning
word processing spelling checkers [XVII,3]?

            I make part of my living as a freelance in word
processing and other computer applications.  Some
time ago I was creating a document for a client, using
a program which I will not name to protect the
guilty, although it was--and still is, by general consent
(my own included)--the best of the pack.  My
client asked me to run “SpellCheck,” and I complied.

            The program rejected the word practicalities
and suggested “proctolitis” in its place, thereby
neatly illustrating my contention that spelling checkers,
as reliable aids to cleaning up one's copy, are a
pain in the ass.





         
         
            [ My program, which also stops at practicalities, suggested
“practicality, practicability, particulates, predictability”
as alternatives.--Editor .]
         
         


            Your article on the Reverend Walter W. Skeat
[XVIII,1] was interesting midway through the first
column on page 18; in the fourth paragraph of
Skeat's reply, the article becomes positively fascinating:


I certainly wrote one [an article] on wayzgoose
...it appeared in the Phil. Soc. Trans. of 1890.
...I wrote about the word to N & Q.

            

            A little over a year ago I was on the verge of
buying a C & P 12 x 15 press with power and joining
the Amalgamated Printers Association.  Everything
related to the old-fashioned letter press seemed on
the up-and-up except that no one knew the origins
of wayzgoose , neither members of the APA nor the
dictionaries available to me.

            With your contacts in England you should have
to access to relevant issues of the journals cited.  Or,
even better, perhaps you already know the etymology
of wayzgoose .





         
         
            [ We have sent Mr. Griffin a copy of the entry for
wayzgoose from the OED.-- Editor .]
         
         


            I take exception to Frank Abate's use of the
term bizarre in conjunction with the place name
HumpTulips , Washington [XVIII,2].  Perhaps if he
spelled it properly as one word--not two--he
would see it as we do: a logical name of a river (and
town) derived from the local native Americans.





         
         
            Brewer's Twentieth Century Phrase & Fable
         
         
            Bloomsbury Dictionary of Phrase & Allusion
            One of the most popular books of the 19th century,
(Ebenezer Cobham) Brewer's Dictionary of
Phrase & Fable was widely accepted by the literati of
the day.  A monumental work first published in
1879, by the end of the century it had sold an astonishing
100,000 copies, an outstanding bestseller for
those days.  Attempts at updating it have been
largely unsatisfactory, for they are marred not only
by poor choices for addenda but mainly by the deletion
of colorful, interesting, quaint, and charming
older entries to make room for the new.  Fortunately,
facsimile editions of the original have been
published, and copies of early printing crop up now
and then at reasonable prices in the antiquarian
book trade.

            It is no small wonder that Cassell commissioned
a new edition, one that would, presumably, do for
the 20th century what the original had done (in
part) for the 19th.  I say “in part” because the original
covered the literature, folklore, and culture of
Britain from antiquity.  Thus the present work, restricted
to the 20th century, has a limited skein to
unwind.  Aside from that, the main attractions of the
earlier Brewer were its eminent readability, its obscure
references, its curiosities, and its browsability.

            It is no fault of the editors that familiarity breeds
contempt: most of the references in this edition occurred
within the living memory of many of its contemporaries,
which leads one to argue with some of
the material.  Also, there is something about the
book that does not encourage the sort of browsing
one associates with the original.  It is the errors of
fact that occasion the greatest irritation, however:
many of them could have been caught had the book
been subjected to a careful reading by a knowledgeable
American editor, for, as will be seen, the preponderance
of them occurs when the editors try to
describe things American:


happening (1) US teenage slang...

I would argue that the term is not slang (slang
words and expressions usually have a
counterpart in the standard language) and it is
most certainly not “teenage,” its origin having
been in the theater.

Happiness is...Charles M. Schultz [twice...]

The name is Schulz.
...illusive nature of happiness...
The word is elusive.

Happy...widow of Nelson Rockefeller...

What a curious way of identifying a person.
Why is she in, anyway?

happy clappies

Should be labeled as a Briticism.

happy hour

Not only not limited to British pubs but it is
very doubtful that the practice originated there,
as the entry specifies.
.bqe

trigger happy Over ready to shoot...World WarII...

Is “over ready” English?  More probably from
westerns or gangster movies of the 1930s.


hardball...some amateurs and children use a soft
ball...

Professional women's teams do, too.  And the
word is softball: it is not a “soft ball.”


hard dog US police slang of the 1980s for a dog
owned by a criminal and trained to attack.
Who makes up these entries?


hard sell...Salespersons using the technique...
make dishonest or exaggerated claims for the
product.  ...The practice is widely used by
holiday timeshare companies who...lure
people...to buy a share in a property, which
most can ill afford.

Although the basic definition (`aggressive
marketing') is essentially correct, the term
refers to salesmanship, not the (broader)
concept of “marketing.”  There is nothing
inherent in hard sell to imply dishonest
procedures, and whether a customer can afford
something he buys is totally irrelevant.


hard shoulder The raised roughly surfaced strip
running along the edge of a motorway, which
is used for emergency stops.  It is illegal to
use--or stop on--the hard shoulder for any
reason that is not an emergency.

Ignoring the bad writing, it is wrong to say that
the hard shoulder is raised: in fact, it is often
the roadway that is raised above the hard
shoulder, which, besides, is not necessarily
roughly surfaced (though it might be paved in
asphalt alongside a macadam roadway).  And
what relevance has a law in such a definition?


Hardy family An insufferable fictional family...
In retrospect, perhaps, but when I was a lad, we
never missed one of the films, and they were
enormously popular.


Harlem toothpick... As a switch-blade knife it
features in `Mac the knife,' a well-known song
by Kurt Weill...(1928).

Neither Harlem toothpick nor switchblade
knife is mentioned in The Threepanny Opera.
As it is the lyrics that are relevant, they were
translated by Marc Blitzstein from Bertold
Brecht's original.  The name is spelled Marc the
Knife, who is a character in the Opera, not
merely a song.


Hashbury...It involves a play on the word
HASH, the smoking of which was central to the
hippie lifestyle.

Most hippies smoked grass (marijuana), not
hash (hashish), which was harder to come by
and too expensive.


keep it under your hat...The US version was
`Keep it under your stetson'.

Balderdash!  The “stetson” version was a joking
paraphrase.


hatikvah

Why not capitalized?


and that ain't hay...it means: `don't turn your
nose up at that, it's not to be ignored'.  It was
used as the title of an Abbott and Costello film
in 1943.

It means `and that's not insignificant.'  The
correct title of the film was That Ain't Hay.

Hays office...formed in response to growing
public indignation at sexual boldness on the
screen and the unsuitable behaviour off screen
of some film stars, notably FATTY Arbuckle.

It is worth mentioning that the main
characteristic of the Hays office censorship
standards included forbidding the showing of a
married couple in the same bed (fully clothed).
Only certain (puritanical) segments of the public
were indignant at the stars' behaviour off screen:
most drank it up.  In view of the fact that the
entry for Fatty Arbuckle mentions that he was
exonerated, the comment here is at worst
libelous and at best unfair.

headhunt To seek out a person already in
employment and offer him or her a post,
usually at a higher level, in a company
involved in the same kind of business.

Almost completely wrong (for the US): the
person need not be employed; and neither the
level nor the kind of business has anything to do
with it.  An executive of a steel plant might be
headhunted to direct a company making
airplane parts or computers.  The emphasis is
usually on recruiting executive talent.


A heartbeat away from the presidency...it is
probably meant to focus the voters' attention
on the [vice-presidential] candidate's potential.
Nothing of the kind.  It is used to play on the
fear of the people lest they elect a vice president
unsuitable to become president, a position he
might have to fill at a moment's notice.  The
expression arose during Eisenhower's
administration.

Eat your heart out!...`I can do as well as you
can, mate', or `It's time to watch out, you have
a rival.'

The phrase means `to be consumed by one's own
feelings of envy.'


the heat (1) Slang for the police.  The term
originated in US Black street jargon...

Not “jargon”--slang.


heavy (1) Slang from the HIPPIE and youth culture
of the late 1960s and early 1970s for serious,
important, or meaningful, e.g. a heavy date.

The term was in use long before hippies were a
gleam in anyone's eye; it is probably an
extension from the theatrical term for the villain
of the piece, later transferred to mean `serious,
important.'


heavy hitter...

How can one have this entry without mentioning
its metaphoric origins in baseballs?

heebie-jeebies (1) Slang for a state of apprehension
and fearfulness.

Insert “nervous” before apprehension.  In (2),
for that read than.


here we go, here we go, here we go...to the tune
of `Stars and Stripes for Ever'...

The title of the John Philip Sousa march is The
Stars and Stripes Forever.


High ho, Silver...spurring on his grey steed,
Silver.

In the first place, it is “Hi-oh, Silver.”  In the
second, the horse is white, not “grey.”


            

            The book is riddled with such errors and misconceptions,
apparently owing to the fact that no knowledgeable
American editor was engaged to review.
the material.  It says, for instance, that The Three
Stooges' films “had a comparatively short life,” obviously
unaware that they are still shown regularly on
American television.  ( WSBK Boston runs them continuously
on New Year's Eve day every year.)  It defines
sting as `a robbery or con trick,' when, in fact,
the term refers to only one of several phases in a
carefully orchestrated confidence game.  The entry
swat team should be shown as SWAT team , and it is
not slang.  And at cry all the way to the bank one
reads “A later sarcastic version is laugh all the way
to the bank .”  The person who wrote that could use a
review course on the meaning of sarcastic .

            I am informed that this book has received uniformly
favorable reviews and that it is selling like
hotcakes.  The reader may draw his own conclusions
about the ignorance of critics and the gullibility of
the public.

            It is perhaps unfair to review the Bloomsbury
Dictionary of Phrase & Allusion alongside the
Brewer's Twentieth Century: despite the similarity of
the titles, the former is a slighter work; also, it consists
largely of quotations and the titles of books,
plays, films, and other written works traceable to
them (and vice versa).  The writting is better, however,
it is generally more accurate (though it, too,
misspells Charles M. Schulz's name), and there is a
little overlap.  For instance, the name of the Abbott
and Costello movie is (correctly given as That Ain't
Hay ,) though it adds the suggestion that the film
probably gave currency to the expression, which is
quite far from the fact.  The orientation of the two
books is different: the interval of fourteen pages covered
in the comments on the new Brewer (which
includes 146 entries) occupies only eight pages in
the Bloomsbury (which has 81 entries, both counts
including cross references); of these, only about a
dozen appear in both books.

            The point of departure of Rees's book is literary
references, while that of the new Brewer is popular
culture as reflected in catch-phrases.  Provided that
the user makes sure to double-check the information
in both books and is not tempted to accept as gospel
everything encountered in either work, both books
should be considered useful additions to a reference
library.

            Laurence Urdang
         
         
            Lunatic Lovers of Language 
            Readers of science fiction have occasionally
been exposed to invented words and languages used
by extraterrestrials.  Some of the words associated
with sci fi were discussed by Dr. Stephen Hirschberg
in “Zap the BEMs!--” [XV,4], but that article
dealt with words and not languages, and, with a few
exceptions, with words used by humans in some future
time, not by extraterrestrials (either now or in
the future).  Some years ago I met a woman who was
writing her master's thesis on languages created by
sci-fi authors, but she never sent me a promised
copy (or, maybe I just dreamt the whole thing.)

            Many writers avoid the language problem by introducing
mental telepathy as the means of communication,
which is just as well: human speech employs
the available organs situated between the
lungs and the face, and there is no reason to assume
that fish-faced or vegetablelike or otherwise constituted
extraterrestrials would be endowed with like
equipment (any more than are many nonhuman
creatures on earth), and they would thus be unlikely
to use languages constructed for humans.  The language
of extraterrestrials merits only passing mention
in Lunatic Lovers of Language, which deals with
the development of artificial languages and with the
search for language universals, characteristics that
many (or all) languages share and that lend credence
to the notion that there was only one original language
from which the present stock has liverged.
(Without going into the matter here, it must be said
that universals concern themselves with underlying
structures of language, not with superficial correspondences
of the type that enable us to identify
language families.)

            The following passage will help to explain the
slightly off-putting title and will impart to the reader
a sample of the author's humor, which I find engaging:


Just take a look at the lunatic in love with language
the logophile, the inventor of languages.
Sitting in his book-lined study, he collects great
piles of information, he collates and classifies it,
he makes lists and fills card indexes.  He is in the
clutches of a denominatory delirium, of a taxonomic
madness.  He has to name everything, but
before being able to name, he has to recognise
and classify concepts, to enclose the whole Universe
in a system of notation: produce enumerations,
hierarchies and paradigms.  A lunatic ambition;
yet there is something grandiose in it which
you can't help admiring.  So much energy spent
for so little result.  I don't believe any other fantasy
has ever been pursued with so much ardour
by the human spirit, apart perhaps from the philosopher's
stone or the proof of the existence of
God; or that any other utopia has caused so much
ink to flow, apart perhaps from socialism.  [p.17]


            

            Try as hard as they might, inventors of artificial
languages have been unable to disbuse themselves
of the ineluctable attraction of their own, native language
or language family.   Thus, for example,
Zamenhof's Esperanto is easy for speakers of Indo-European
languages to learn (especially if they know
some Latin or a Romance language): Zamenhof was a
Pole who knew other European languages.  But Esperanto
is lingua incognita to the native speaker of
Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, or any other non-Indo-European
language, notwithstanding its somewhat
simplified structure, which aids in its rapid assimilation.
Now that certain (very literate) people have
taken hold of Esperanto and published novels and
poetry in it, its chief function as a means of basic
communication has been violated, and with the onset
of its sophistication it has become more complex,
thus defeating its original purpose.  Esperantists are
an eagerly energetic group who believer in Esperanto;
as far as I know, there are no “native” speakers
of Esperanto.  If Esperanto is aspiring to become
a “real” language, then it must begin to behave like
one and, before long, it will begin to suffer the same
“weaknesses” that natural languages suffer--polysemy
and pleurisemy.  Before you know it, you are
saying to yourself, “Why should I bother to learn a
whole new grammer and vocabulary of Esperanto
when I can learn some sort of lingua franca (English
or French, for example) which at least has an extensive
literature to offer?  Today, English, far from an
easy language to master, has probably replaced
French as the most universally used lingua franca.
Yiddish serves as a lingua franca of sorts for Jews--
whatever they may be--but it seems to be diminishing
in that role and is, I understand, frowned upon
by the Israelis (many of whom can now claim Hebrew
as a native tongue).

            This is a curious book.  Those who might be encouraged
by this brief review to read it ought to
know that frequent recourse to Appendix II will
clarify many of the author's references--indeed,
one would do well to read Appendix II after reading
the Introduction.  The author, a linguist, is often obscure,
though it is impossible to know whether that
is her fault or her translator's.  I was unsure, for instance,
exactly how to understand the following sentence,
which opens Chapter I, and which seems curiously
unidiomatic (or, in my ignorance, perhaps it
is poetic):


How it came about the the myth could take the place
of history, and feed both fiction and utopia, that
fiction in the form of dogma of various kinds
could take the place of science, that science
could progressively dominate fiction, that history,
in eliminating myth, could itself become a science,
at the cost of a ruthless battle between the
imaginary and the real--a battle whose outcome,
even today, remains unclear--this story reads
like a novel: and in any case, doesn't the word
history itself, which designates a succession of
facts through time, also encapsulate the word
story: a tale, a fable, an imaginary account? [p.5]

            

            I suppose that is English, but it is certainly anacoluthic,
obscure, and viciously punctuated (after the
British style, which can be destructive to both sense
and grammar).

            The flashes of wisdom should not be overlooked,
however:


The same impoverishment of formal devices is
found in examples of religious glossolalia, with an
exaggerated tendency towards repetition, syllable
reduplication, vocalic parallelism, open syllabification,
excessive symmetry in contrasts, an impoverished
inventory of sounds--whatever the
mother tongue of the glossolalist.  [p.100]

            

            ...and that appears in an analysis of Martian.  Some
of this would be quite funny if it weren't so serious.
The reader is encouraged to find out for himself.
Trekkies please copy.

            Laurence Urdang
         
         
            Definite Articles and Indefinite People



            
               Mr Austin Mitchell (left) with Racheal Garley, the
model, and Mr Frank Field at the Queen Elizabeth
II Conference Center in London, yesterday,
at the start of Challenge, part of a retail industry
drive to buy British-made clothing and shoes.
            

            So goes the caption of a photograph in The
Times [n.d.].  Is this some sort of insider's put-down?
As there was no accompanying article, Messrs.
Mitchell and Field were not further identified, so we
can assume that they are “the” Mr. Austin Mitchell
and “the” Mr. Frank Field, who, of course, are
known to all at the Queen Elizabeth II Conference
Centre as key people involved in Challenge, or as
boulevardiers famous for sporting British-made
clothing and shoes.  But pretty Rachael Garley (not
“Miss,” “Ms.,” or “Mrs.,” mind you), whose name
does not ring the bells in my head that are (w)rung
by names like Marilyn Monroe, Margaret Thatcher,
and Marie, Queen of Rumania, is identified as “the”
model, as if she were being distinguished from the
Rachael Garley who succeeded Sir Randolph Quirk
as president of the British Academy and that other
Rachael Garley whom we all know to be the (not
“a”) power behind Boris Yeltsin or Saddam Husein.
Or perhaps she is identified as “the” model just to
remind us that she is an outstandingly unique and
famous model, to be distinguished from what might
otherwise be characterized as “a” model, which
would make her just another one of the pack.  In
such cases, “the” is followed by a real or implied
“well-known” or some equivalent thereof, to wit,
( internationally) famous, beloved, notorious, undisputed,
disputed, recently released (or Escaped ), prize-winning,
novelist, etc.  Note the difference between
the transposed form,... with the model, Rachael
Garley, and Mr ...., and the form as given:... with
Rachael Garley, the model, and Mr. ... Clearly, the
first seems to call for “a model,” for the name, surrounded
by punctuation becomes less significant;
also, in that sequence the reader is not boxed into
the corner of obligation where he must stand, face to
the wall, if unaware of who this “in” personage
might be.  If a young person today were to encounter
a reference to, say, “the madam, Polly Adler,”
the question might well come up, “Who was or is
Polly Adler?”  in which case the reply would probably
go something like, “She was A well-known
brothel-keeper of the 1920s and '30s in New York.”
That is, the “the” would naturally and abruptly
change to an “a,” (particularly in reference to New
York, where it is acknowledged that brothel-keeping
was endemic and madams' fame universal).  Had the
reply been, “She was THE well-known brothelkeeper...,”
that could have been interpreted as a
put-down of the questioner, as if to say, “You stupid
ignoramus!  Everyone (else) in the world knows that
she was the Brothel-Keeper Extraordinaire of New
York!”

            This approach is often used by “entertainers”
who invoke strange names of strange people to demonstrate
to an audience that they are au fait with the
latest, though I am never quite sure “the latest
what.”  It is also the technique of the “in” joke
shared between such entertainers and their audiences,
though how “in” something can be when
shared with thousands is debatable.  I felt definitely
“out” when I first heard a British audience applaud
with chuckling appreciation at the mention of the
name Val Doonican .  For all I knew, the man who
said it had made up the name and the audience was
laughing because the name was funny, as they might
well do when hearing a name like Kylie Minogue .  It
took me a while to understand that Kylie Minogue is
the name of a real person.  I also discovered that Val
Doonican is the name of a real person.  Though I
have no way of knowing whether either name is genunine
or assumed, it occurs to me that if one wanted
to assume a name, more euphonious choices might
present themselves.  On the other hand, Kylie Minogue
does have a certain je ne sais pas about it (as I
once heard someone say).  Certainly, it seems unlikely
that someone would have to refer to her as
“Kylie Minogue, the singer,” except for the benefit
of the same people who need the reinforcement afforded
by “Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister,”
“George Bush, the president,” or “Elizabeth II, the
queen,” as if to distinguish them from the local
roofer, the itinerant hedge-trimmer, or the ocean
liner.  There are not a lot of prime ministers, presidents,
and queens about--at least, not that we are
exposed to continually in the media--and it would
be a bit ludicrous to read about “Margaret Thatcher,
a prime minister,” etc.  On the other hand, till she
becomes as famous as Thatcher or Elizabeth II, it
seems to me that Rachael Garley ought to be referred
to as “a,” not “the model.”  To be sure, there
are not a lot of Rachael Garleys, Val Doonicans, or
Kylie Minogues about, either, for which we and they
may be equally thankful.