What a Cliché!
The small girl straggles from the museum to the
school bus. Everyone else has already boarded
and is waiting impatiently. Well, claims the little
girl proudly, last but not lost. At least that's what
my mother always says. Fifty other schoolchildren
hear and nod.
That is how a clashing cliché gets started, or at
any rate that is the explanatory scenario I dreamed
up. Like someone who hears a pun and then searches
for a story to use it as a punch line, over the years I
have collected mangled metaphors, battered idioms,
and twisted expressions, always looking for explanations
behind the novel usage. Some of this may have
to do with my chosen profession, which involves poring
over student essays. But I also hear full-grown
adults, clearly native speakers, talk that way. At the
risk of opening up a whole can of beans, let me proceed.
The first category of altered expressions resembles
malapropism in all its unintentional oddysey.
Perhaps the simplest explanation for many of these
missed idioms is mis-hearing, as in You can't pull the
wool over my ice. Since people rarely bother to think
about the meaning behind a figurative expression,
anything that sounds right will foot the bill. In this
realm are several undisputed classics: cutting off
your nose despite your face is quite popular, as is the
gloomy reflection It's a doggy-dog world. Other
highly ranked candidates are taken for granite and
empiric victory. It is worth noting that some of these
were first heard from the radio character Falstaff
Openshaw on Fred Allen's imaginary Allen's Alley,
where they were used for all intensive purposes.
Usually these errors sound simple-minded;
many are merely careless. Give him a wide birth, for
instance, may have been just a spelling error on a
student's paper I was reading. But in slovenliness
sleeps the sound of new sayings. He wants to go out
and wipe the world, for instance, has an idiosyncratic
rightness, bespeaking not a powerful conqueror but
a great reformer. These newly created meanings are
what make these expressions more than mere mistakes,
even if at times they bring one upshore. I
treasure the sage advice in Savor the best for last and
The victor is spoiled . And worshipers of satin , even if
it is just a typographical slip, describes a class of
people I know all too well. Occasionally, these eras
occur on a rather high level of sophistication, such as
engaging in self-flatulation .
A more complex category is the conflation of
two expressions. The first time I stumbled across
this phenomenon, I was discussing an agenda with
a middle-aged business executive. We got to item
three. Hmm... he mused. I'll have to touch
bases with you on that one tomorrow. Only after I
replayed his sentence in my mind did I realize that it
was a splice of to touch base and I'll get back to you .
Since then, that hybrid has become so prevalent that
it hardly sounds peculiar at all.
In fact, that kind of error crops up--or creeps
up--frequently, especially with two expressions using
the same locution or image. John Ferguson,
writing some seven years ago in VERBATIM [XI, 4],
termed them Bunnyisms after Bunny, the wife of
film director Norman McLeod and an egregious example
to us all. Telling me a thing one day and out
the other is one of hers. Figures like Gracie Allen on
Burns and Allen , as well as Jane Ace, known as radio's
mistress of misinformation on The Easy Aces ,
simply turned that kind of locution into a routine in
the 1930s.
Unfortunately, that kind of routine has become
unconscious error with many; in other words, routine.
Consequently, a politician will paint a portrait
of an administration both incompetent and corrupt:
The left hand doesn't know how to wash the right .
His opponent, on the third hand, might speak disparagingly
of proposed reforms that he regards as
trite yet dangerous: old worms in new cans . Other
attempts may be simply off-- the bad end of the stick
of life, there's no dog like an old dog --or inspired:
That throws a wrench into your soup, doesn't it? , I
once heard a math professor tell a colleague. There
may even be instances where two clichés trade half
their similes. The trouper's get your ass together . and
the trouper's get your ass in gear are often confused
as get your act in gear and get your ass together . The
other day I heard someone described as deaf as a
bat , and now, like a man waiting for the other shoe
to drop in the room above his, I listen for blind as a
post .
Figurative accuracy seems to have gone to the
hogs; is figurative language itself on the decline? It is
certainly not encouraged in places like The New York
Times , also known as the gray lady of journalism, but
neither does the Times often mix metaphors. Politicians
often do, as they strive for an image the American
public can embrace. In fact, one of these
homemades recently made national headlines, as
Jesse Jackson protested that the candidates on the
Democratic ticket were cut from the same stripes .
That is a clear conflation of cut from the same cloth
and of the same stripe --what one of my students
once called a slip at the wheel .
Here is another attempt at explanation: in a culture
that has deserted basic agriculture for industry,
where professions such as shoemaker and blacksmith
and cooper have all but disappeared, many people
never learn the connections between mankind and
nature, or the crafts of working with basic materials.
Since so many colorful expressions depend on these
vanished relationships, uncertainty rules the roast.
A girl describes her boyfriend as a tough nut to
catch ; a waitress tells me approvingly as she pours
my cup of morning coffee, The busy bee catches the
worm . Yet modern technology also baffles our culture,
which tends to confuse input with feedback as a
metaphor for soliciting opinion. Maybe the problem,
as Anonymous has stated, is people.
Then there are the image-switches and intensifications.
Go ahead, break my arm , says a persuasible
type. She bit off her nose to spite her face adds a
contortionist twist to an already harsh metaphor.
Jane Ace once complained on the air, I've been
working my head to the bone. Getting the inside
skinny , as a reporter in Time recently put it, is
equally grotesque-- a sight for sick eyes , as a neighbor's
child once said. Here the trend seems to be
toward deepening an image already present or shifting
to a more emphatic expression. One time-honored
way of doing this, of course, is to insert sexual
and scatological terms. Don't crap on my parade!
shouts a student activist in my earshot, decrying defecation
instead of precipitation. The reductio ad absurdum
of this move is the common declarative Fuck
that shit! , where an all-purpose verb and an all-inclusive
noun stand in for all manner of once-current
idioms, including the hell with . An early instance of
this change, when the shit hits the fan , is by now so
ingrained in the public lexicon that few recall the
original expression, when the smoke hits the fan . In
an attempt to reverse this trend, a Southern friend of
mine offers the alternate when the grits hit the pan ,
but this usage seems destined to remain a regionalism
at best, the kind of Southernism collected by
John H. Felts in Bumps, Grinds, and Other Lewd
(1389) Gestures [XVI,3].
Sometimes the shift can be quite subtle, as in
Don't throw all your eggs into one basket , even
though the simple verb-substitution renders the advice
devastating to anyone but an omelet-maker.
Sometimes the shift comes about through the omission
of a word: in a recollection entitled Master
Malaprop [VII,2], James Higgins describes a newspaper
editor who made such proclamations as A
hand in the bush is worth two . Along a similar vane,
a hardware clerk once told me that the brackets I
needed were scarce as hens . In truth, cutting or adding
words may occasionally result in an expression
more felicitous than the original. The road to hell is
paved with good intentions , eminently quotable, is
attributed to Samuel Johnson only as Hell is paved
with good intentions. Play it again, Sam sounds better
than the actual line from Casablanca, Play it,
Sam, and Congreve's Music has charms to soothe a
savage breast was long ago altered to soothe the savage
beast .
Euphony beats logic. Or, as one of these idioms
might put it: take care of the sound, and the sense
will take care of itself. At times, the image shifts
entirely through what Freud called klang associations,
or sheer phonic similarity. Yet Don't bite the
man that feeds you makes satisfactory sense; so does
It takes two to tangle . I do not quite agree with the
sense underlying a tough road to hoe and his head
sank to his boots , but I assume they occasion no discomfort
on the part of the speaker. After all, that is
the way many people are taught.
The last group falls into what I call prepositional
trouble, as in That one threw me over the deep end .
Like some of the phrases in other categories, several
have become so common as to have ousted the original
diction. I cannot count how many times I have
heard of someone walking out of the door , the laws
of physics notwithstanding. A close second is the
request not to hold it up against me --does this refer
to a grudge or the fitting of a suit? A similar corruption
is hanging into his every word: rapt attention or
verbal grappling? Admittedly, preposition usage is
not always clearly defined: does one compare apples
to oranges, or apples with oranges, or just stick in an
and ? Also, certain prepositional phrases, such as
waiting on a friend , probably qualify as regional usage.
As a student of mine once remarked, I suppose
it is all part of the wonder about being alive.
Let us open the drawer of conclusions. First of
all, I do not mean to impugn non-native speakers,
valiantly trying to master a language that often is not
even sure of itself. Rather, the so-called unerringness
of native speech is in part hit or myth. As Lysander
Kemp reminded us in Mrs. Malaprop in
Mexico [XV,4], other tongues have their slips, as
well. All languages are composed of dead metaphors
as the soil of corpses, wrote William Empson.
Some metaphors simply suffer a sea change. If language
is a continual exercise in combination and
permutation, it makes sense that such expressions,
or lusus linguae , will always be with us. They may
even infect otherwise straightforward VERBATIM
prose, as alert readers will have spotted. In any
event, I am keeping my ears peeled. It's never too
late to mend , overheard the other day--is that a
combination of It's never too late to learn and First
ended, soonest mended? When will someone within
earshot confuse swear by and swear at ?
Ah, it is a wise fool that knows his own mother
tongue.
It's turned out to be one of those red herrings
around our necks. [Quote from Bob Porter, director of
Maintenance and Engineering Services in Fontana, California,
in the San Bernardino Sun , . Submitted
by ]
Rhyme and Punishment
In 1781, it was claimed in the Gentleman's Magazine
that A man who could make so vile a pun
would not scruple to pick a pocket, so who dares to
deny that puns are so called because they are punishable?
Yet despite the hearer's conventional groan and
the perpetrator's equally conventional apology, everyone
knows that verbal play gives a great deal of
pleasure, justifying the great deal of ingenuity that
goes into producing it. Writers plainly value being
able to use words in ways that not only fail to reflect
their dictionary meaning but seem flatly to reject it.
In an article a couple of years ago, Jan Morris refers
to professional writers as those of us who live by
the sweat of our ink. Quite apart from the fact that
the association of writing with ink has decreasing literal
validity, there is not much metaphorical sense
to be made here either, if we take the remark word
by word. Ink does not sweat, we do not sweat ink,
and even the traditional fingers clutching traditional
ink-filled pens were less likely to be troubled by
sweat than by chilly cramp. In fact, of course, we
understand Jan Morris with no difficulty because she
knew that we would take the whole sequence, live
by the sweat of our ink (new to us), and map it on
to a similar one that was familiar to us. The similarity
(in structure, rhythm, wording, etc.) is doubly
important. It supplies the stimulus to make the comparison,
and it hints that the degree of mismatch will
be the clue to the meaning. In consequence, because
the familiar live by the sweat of our brows
means work hard for a living (no longer entailing
the sort of physical effort that cause sweating), we
are prepared to conclude that the Jan Morris clone
means work hard for a living by authorship .
And maybe that is all it is meant to mean. But
when Thomas Wilson in his Art of Rhetoric (1553)
speaks of travail and toil with the sweat of his
brows, we can be sure that he is referring to
Adam's expulsion from Eden and the beginning of
toil for everyone (though Genesis III.19 in the Authorized
Version follows Coverdale in using the
words sweat of thy face ). So Jan Morris's readers
are free, perhaps encouraged, to think of a writer's
labors in mythic, cosmic terms as part of post-Edenic
compulsion.
Such convolutions of phrasal meaning (an aspect
of what some call intertextuality) is a common rhetorical
device, especially perhaps at the arty end of
journalism. In The Independent of 8 September
1990, the same page contained not only the Jan
Morris article but a review entitled Duty and the
Beast, another in which the author lambastes a historian
who has left unread those things he ought to
have read, so there can be little trust in him, and
yet another in which Anthony Quinn writes about
the gripes of Roth.
The rhyme-triggered evocation of the fairy tale
Beauty and the Beast, even about a book on the
tinsel town of Hollywood, is not very rewarding,
and it seems just about as pointless to be led to the
General Confession in the Anglican prayer book to
evaluate a biography of Himmler. The punning by
Anthony Quinn is a different matter. He is reviewing
Philip Roth's Deception which contrasts London,
and an anti-semitism in which Jews seem to connive,
with New York, characterized by Jews with force
... full of anger. The contrast is strong enough to
sustain the allusion to Julia Ward Howe's Battle
Hymn (bypassing Steinbeck, of course) when Quinn
speaks of the narrative trampling over the now familiar
gripes of Roth. The contrast also justifies
the neat allusion to London whose Cockney vowels
responsibly transmute the grapes of wrath and enrich
our reflections.
Such intertextual references, whether or not
pointed by rhyme, puns, and rhythmic matching,
must indeed provide depth and enrichment if they
are not to become merely a stylistic cliché of the
scribbling classes (as they show every sign of doing
anyway). Two years on and the same daily paper:
The Independent's arts pages in May 1992 yielded
the following (among numerous others) over a period
of three days:
It's in the jeans ... concerning the apparently
genetic consistency of the Levi Strauss product
over 140 years.
Pause and effect ... on the relation between Sinatra's
careful timing and his continuing success
with audiences.
Ceci n'est pas une critique ... a measured assessment
of a Magritte exhibition in London.
Top hat and tales ... about pop-star Slash and
combining his oral memoirs with his penchant
for fancy headwear.
Making tracks for Elgar ... relating a renewed
interest in the composer to an account of how
his early recordings were made.
Hit and myth ... about a successful recording
of Gluck's Orfeo.
Desert island risks ... a sneer at pulpy romance
and record programmes but with some admiration
for last century's explorers in tropical waters.
(The reference is to a long-running BBC
radio interview program, Desert Island Discs.)
There is of course a very long history of such
textual duplication whereby meaning is simultaneously
compressed and extended. Dramatists and
novelists have been especially keen to provide their
works with titles that are Janus-faced. For Whom the
Bell Tolls enabled Hemingway to look forward into
Civil War tragedy as well as back into Donne's Devotions .
In this instance, indeed, the impact of the
novel was so great that any reference to the quotation
for the past half century could not help evoking
both the Hemingway story and the Donne passage--which
was thereby given an entirely fresh
currency.
There were striking instances of such multiple
intertextuality in late 1990. One occasion was the
centenary of Manet's painting Olympia, and The
Independent (where else need I turn for material?)
ran an article on how the picture's critical reception
had changed from rejection by a scandalized France
in 1890 to enthusiastic acclaim by an admiring
world in 1990. The piece bore the title The Lady's
Not for Spurning, with the reasonably obvious
meaning The subject of this painting is not to be
spurned as a disreputable whore (but enjoyed as a
sensitive portrayal). Reasonably obvious, I say,
though we are helped if we recall that among Christopher
Fry's other norm-defying titles ( A Yard of
Sun, Thor with Angels, A Sleep of Prisoners ) there
was The Lady's Not for Burning , 1949. This enforces
a passive interpretation of archaic or rustic flavor--
though it appears to be neither a quotation nor a
truly historical echo from the wretched time when
women could suffer death at the stake for witchcraft.
All the more remarkable, then, that the article on
Manet has a title that exactly matches Fry's in
rhythm, rhyme, and grammar, the match extending
to the curious use of lady to denote in the one a
medieval wench thought to be a witch and in the
other a French nude of dubious virtue.
But the title could not be read in 1990 without
evoking another text and another lady. A decade
earlier, the British government led by Margaret
Thatcher was facing severe economic troubles and
insistent calls for a change of policy to deal with
them. There was much talk of whether or not the
Prime Minister would do a U-turn, but at the annual
conference of her party in October 1980 she
stoutly rejected any such suggestion. In a rousing
speech, she delighted her audience with a particularly
rousing sentence: You turn if you want: the
lady's not for turning.
This is textually interesting in a number of ways.
It is calqued upon the title of a play that few of the
audience would have seen or read (significantly no
doubt the drafting of the speech seems to have involved
Ronald Miller, himself a dramatist). The lexical
match requires the speaker to refer to herself in
the third person, while ingeniously seizing the opportunity--a
further intertextuality--to hint at her
Moscow-inspired sobriquet, the Iron Lady. But
although the sequence achieves near perfection in
prosodic matching, the grammar is hardly Fry's:
turning is more plausibly active than passive, with
for in its familiar support-oriented role, in favor of.
There followed numerous recyclings of this sentence
with an intertextual reference that was less
and less to the Fry play and more and more to the
occasion of the conference speech. Ten years later,
when Mrs. Thatcher returned from the Rome meeting
of European Community leaders, opponents accused
her of stubbornly refusing to heed political
trends and a change in British public opinion. The
Independent on 30 October 1990 summed up this
view with the headline, The lady's not for learning.
An even plainer link with the 1980 conference
came in a prominent announcement by Sky News in
June 1991, months after her resignation, that Mrs.
Thatcher was to appear in a major interview with
David Frost, and--proclaimed the TV ad--The
lady's not for turning off.
A final twist. Miles Kington's column on 23 July
1992 poked fun at the former Prime Minister's current
interest in a tobacco firm and suggested possible
slogans for advertising a Thatcher cigarette.
They included Who would want to put a Thatcher
out? and The lady's for burning.
English Loanwords in Chinese
The spread of English words into other languages
is a process that goes on daily. This
report details some older and some more recent
adoptions of English words into Chinese.
The British empire's cannon and opium plus the
United State's open-door policy forced open the
Qing Dynasty's feudal gate. With the arrival of foreigners
and foreign goods, English words began to
spread first in port cities such as Guanzhou (Canton)
and Shanghai. Some English words have entered
these dialects, the phonetic translation sometimes
being very homophonous, sometimes not. The Cantonese
called:
cent xian
check chi
quarter gu
fashion hua chen
stamp shi dan
taxi di shi
In Shanghai, the Chinese called:
stick si di ke
gas ga s i
cement shui men ding
chocolate zhu gu li
telephone de lu feng
When western ideas of democracy and liberty
were imported into Chinese in some literature, relevant
English words were borrowed, for example:
romantic luo man ti ke
inspiration yian shi pi li cun
democracy de me ke xi
humour yu me
international ing te nai xang na er
ultimatum ai di mei deng
bourgeoisie bu er qiao yia
The famous writer Lusun in his prose entitled Fe Er
Pe Lai Ying Gai Huan Xing used the phrase fair play ;
the title translates into No Fair Play Now . Another
writer, Xia Yian, in his novel Baoshen Gong (Contracted
Children Workers ), used Number One, name
wen , for the brutal foreman of the children workers.
Of course, western science and technology exerted
great influence on China, so that some scientific
terms were borrowed into Chinese. Of 104
chemical elements, only about ten are direct meaning
translations, such as:
Fe tie
Cu tong
N dan
Pb qian
Ag yin
Hg gong
H qing
O yang
C tan
The others are all sound translations, such as:
Na na
Ca gai
Ba bei
Mn meng
Most units of physics are sound borrowings:
ampere anpei
watt wa te
Hz hezi
gram ke
volt fute
calorie ka lu li or ka
Some medical terms, especially the names of
medicines, are borrowed directly from English
words:
aspirin a si pi lin
analgesic an nai jin
rutin lu ding
penicillin pan ni xi lin
atropine a tu pin.
cocaine ke ka in
Some scientific terms were first borrowed with
their original sounds; later, these sound-translations
were dropped and new words were invented to
carry the meaning.
ENGLISH PHONETIC REPLACEMENT AND LITERAL
WORD GLOSSES
penicillin pan ni xi qingmei su green fungus
lin element
laser lai sai ji guang exaggerated light
motor ma da dian dong ji electric-powered machine
engine yin qing fa dong ji a machine that
can start another
machine
microphone mai ke feng kuoin qi sound transmitting
device
Readers may be more interested in the common
words popular in standard spoken Chinese language
in which there are some words directly borrowed
from English:
model moter
sofa sha fa
disco di si ke
cocoa keke
Coca Cola kekou kele
pump beng
nylon ni long
cashmere kai si mi
tank tang ke
poker pu ke
tango tan ge
jeep ji pu
chocolate qiao ke li (standard; different from
Shanghai zhu gu li)
pound bang (two written forms in Chinese
standing for British currency unit
and weight respectively, but of the
same sound)
Kentucky Fried Chicken has changed into kente ji:
kente keeps the sound of Kentu, and ji meaning
chicken, imitates the sound of ky. Chinese has
no sound for /ki/; ji is a phonetic adaptation.
MacDonald mai ke tang na
hamburger hanbao bao
hot dog regou
These terms are very popular in Beijing for the two
restaurants were opened there. Even the modern
American slang cool , excellent has become Chinese: ku .
The interjection word wau (Wow!) can be
heard on radio or television. Chinese children, even
in the countryside, say bai bai to their parents instead
of zai jian .
It is interesting to note that a Chinese writer
called on the Chinese to invite Mr. De and Mr.
Sai to China, de standing for democracy and sai for
science .
Some translations are most fortuitous both in
sound and meaning: for Coca-Cola, kekou means
tasty and kele satisfied. Baishi kele is Pepsi Cola ;
this translates into satisfied with everything. There
are occasional anecdotes created around the inevitable
ambiguities that arise: one day an old country
man heard one young fellow mention disco ; the old
man thought that the young man was to kick his dog
to death, since disco sounds like di si kou , which
sounds like ti si gou; ti kick + si death + gou dog.
Some of the borrowed words are formed with
combinations of sounds and meaning:
car ka che: ka repeats the sound of car,
and che means carriage
card ka pian: ka imitates the sound; pian
means piece, or page, or card
carbine kabin qiang: kabin imitates the sound
of combine; qiang means gun
rifle laifu qiang; laifu imitates the sound of
rifle
butter baituo you: baituo imitates the sound;
you means oil or grease
beer pi jiu; pi imitates the sound; jiu means
wine
Chaplin's film Modern Times was translated into
Medeng Shidai , a typical example of combination
translation: medeng is a phonetic rendition of modern;
shidai means times. The Chinese word for
times is very old; medeng is a new word.
In semi-colonial China, because of the underdevelopment
of science and technology, even some
simple products such as nails, matches, colorful
clothes, and soaps had to be imported from abroad.
So even though the Chinese language was used, the
modifier yang foreign or imported had to be added:
nails yang ding
matches yang huo
oil yang yiou
soap yang yizi
cement yang hui; (literally, foreign ash)
With the development of industry, yang was deleted.
Now the young generation of Chinese do not
understand yang yizi; they know fei zao for soap , or
xiang zao for toilet soap . The age when foreign oils,
Mobil and Shell, were dominant in the Chinese market
has gone. Nevertheless, in some Chinese novels
and films and in some spoken Chinese, we can hear
yang guizi , foreign devil, a derogatory term referring
to a foreigner, especially from western countries,
like Professor Charlie Blinderman, who was
kind enough to type this article.
In the mainland of China, in Taiwan, and in
Hong Kong there may be different translations of
the same English word. The English word computer
was translated into ji suan ji calculating machine, in
the mainland of China, but into dian nao , electronic
brain in Taiwan and Hong Kong. In spite of political
barriers, the academic circle in the mainland of
China prefer dian nao to their original translation of
calculating machine: calculating being just one of
the several functions of computers, Taiwan's translation
is felt to be more exact. There have been a lot
of different translations of computer terms which are
waiting for unification by the Chinese scholars on
both sides of the Taiwan channel.
Kennedy on the mainland is ken ni di; but in Taiwan
it is gan nai di. Bush on the mainland is bu shi;
but in Taiwan it is bu xi . New Zealand is niu xi lan in
Taiwan; but it is xin xi lan on the mainland.
It is certain there will be more and more English
words coming into the Chinese vocabulary, and
vice-versa. Chinese has made many contributions to
English, among them typhoon, sampan, taipan, tea,
silk, tong, Shanghai as a verb, and tofu . The Chinese
words kung fu and wok are currently in vogue in
the US, whence they are likely to spread to other
English-speaking countries.
The Life & Times of the English Language,
This is a new edition (1990) of the popular book
first published in 1983. The differences are hard
to discern, but no matter, for the book is a user-friendly
excursion through the history of the language,
with many good examples of loanwords, derivations,
and other linguistic incunabula, curiosa, and
paraphernalia interestingly presented in a lively
fashion by a good writer. Not written for academics,
the book makes a fine introduction to the subject
and has a useful Index.
Laurence Urdang
Bloomsbury Dictionary of Word Origins,
This is a paperback reprint of the 1990 book
reviewed in these pages in the Winter 1990 issue
[XVII,3]. We still like it.
Laurence Urdang
Dr. Robert Stein testified that he put the eight separate
pieces of Bridges' body together in the alley and then
pronounced Bridges dead. [From the Chicago Tribune , :2,3.
Submitted by ]
2: The new British Library--sitting comfortably on
enlarged piles. [Sidebar headline in the New Scientist , :28.
Submitted by ]
Moped injuries are clearly one of the top causes of
major head injuries in this area...some major fractures
require amputation. The injuries sustained in the accidents
may not permit the person to do athletics forever.
[From the UCLA Bruin , . Submitted
by ]
Reaching for the Ready-Made
As every good copywriter knows, one of the
most effective ways of drawing the attention
of newspaper readers to a consumer advertisement
is to juggle cleverly with the shape and meaning of a
familiar idiom or set phrase. One famous British advertisement
for eggs urged readers to Go to work
on an egg! Go to work on can of course be interpreted
idiomatically as attack, but the presentation
also hinted wittily at the literal sense of the phrase
by portraying a man pedaling to work on a cycle
with a single egg-shaped wheel. More recently, a
quality Sunday newspaper has run an advertisement
for a nippy hatchback car under the caption A
hardy performer wins its laurels. This heading has
layers of meaning that can be peeled off like the
skins of an onion. The tough little runabout has certainly
won an accolade from the motoring press. But
hardy performer also suggests hardy annual and, as
any gardener knows, the laurel is a shrub that survives
out of doors throughout the winter, just as a
maid-of-all-work minicar has to fetch and carry in all
weathers. On another level again, we recognize the
vintage comedy performers Laurel and Hardy--one
pretty light on his feet, the other with solider qualities.
In advertising, almost any type of fixed expression
can be pressed into service. Some familiar
phrases--such as go to work on --are plain idioms
with no cultural overtones. But Laurel and Hardy,
like Astaire and Rogers (or Rodgers and Hart) are
part of the history of popular entertainment in this
century. In those examples, the popular culture is
shared: the references are understood by moviegoers
and radio listeners on both sides of the Atlantic.
In other cases, the appeal is to something specifically
American or peculiarly British, as in the ad
that referred to a popular brand of matches as The
Light Brigade and to its price as The Charge.
Set phrases not only serve as arresting openings
and closings in advertising; they also function as
headlines in newspaper articles, quotable climaxes
in political speeches, and punch-lines in jokes, as
when a Times journalist attending a demonstration
of teachers outside Parliament wrote:
It grew minute by minute windier and colder.
To one of the press cameramen it was a good
joke: You've got the thin blue line here all
right.
Idioms are frequently fossilized metaphors: the thin
red line , which lies at the back of this piece of wordplay,
means the heroic resistance of the few against
many, and originally described a regiment of
redcoated highlanders at the battle of Balaclava. In
the puns we have been looking at, the writer may
revive and extend a metaphor (portraying the teachers
as a small embattled force, but making them blue
with cold, as well) while at the same time changing
the form of the expression. And as we saw with Laurel
and Hardy , such phrases are not only thought of
as normally fixed but are also deeply embedded in a
culture. For this reason, writers produce a mild
shock-effect by distorting their forms or making over
their meanings.
Fixed expressions that are open to humorous reshaping
are, of course, not always reshaped. And
there are important types in English that are hardly
ever adapted at all. Consider the formulae we
regularly use to direct or punctuate the flow of conversation
and often, too, to indicate the speaker's
attitude to the person addressed. Among such formulae,
You have to be kidding! or You must be
joking! (the first mainly American, the second
largely British) are used to express skeptical dismissal
of a claim or suggestion:
Fred buy a round of drinks! You must be
joking!
In contrast, wholehearted agreement with an earlier
claim can be signaled by You can say that again!--
though as with You must be joking, this gambit
would only be used among people of roughly the
same age or status. Consider this exchange:
A: I wish they'd get round a table and sort the
whole thing out.
B: You can say that again!
Now if A were a professor--or an older person of
any standing--and B a student, then B's gambit
might well seem impertinent. I mention this detail--which
by the way is seldom treated in dictionaries--because
as speakers of English we usually
have little freedom to decide how formulae are
used. (Note, too, how in You can say that again,
the stress is always on that .)
When writers wish to convey the opposite of
what they seem to be saying on the surface, they can
do so by engineering a change of style or tone.
When Cole Porter in the song Just One of those
Things wants to suggest the painful directness with
which Dorothy Parker might have sent a discarded
lover on his way, he switches incongruously from
plain language to an Elizabethan flourish:
As Dorothy Parker once said
To her boyfriend Fare thee well.
Later on, he changes the direction of the stylistic
switch, and the move along the time scale, by ending
with a piece of up-to-date slang:
As Columbus announced
When he knew he was bounced,
“It was swell, Isabel, swell.”
But Porter is not content simply to shift to a
style that is out of keeping with the speaker or period.
He gives extra humor and zest to the erstwhile
lover's goodbye by wrapping it in a familiar set
phrase. This is a favorite Porter device, used as here
in the verse but also in the title and refrain-- It was
just one of those things . The trick is not confined
to Porter. One of the best-known numbers in the
Gershwin score for the movie musical Shall We
Dance? originates in a well-known formula, They
can't take that away from me, which duly appears as
the climax of the chorus. But the last word in more
senses than one goes to Irving Berlin. In a perfectly
constructed ballad of the depressed mid-thirties he
captures the mood of our own impoverished times
and offers his punning remedy to gloom:
Before the fiddlers have fled,
Before they ask us to pay the bill,
And while we still have a chance,
Let's face the music and dance.
We're going to pay now, or pay later. Now, we're
paying later. [Sen. Lawton Chiles (D-Fla.), commenting
on the need for prenatal care for poor women, NBC Today,
. Submitted by ]
New Faces to Fill Pleasants Seats. [Headline in the
Parkersburg (West Virginia) News, . Submitted
by ]
Eyebrows and Lowbrows
I once thought that most languages would have separate
words to identify and denote eyebrows, eyelids,
and eyelashes, features about as easily and objectively
observed as ears or lips. French seemed to
bear this out with sourcil eyebrow, paupière eyelid,
and cil eyelash, although the literal sense of
sourcil (upper lash) seemed not too appropriate.
(Note also the obvious double duty of cil .) But such
trouble as there was stemmed largely from goings-on
in Latin.
Latin had terms for eyebrow and eyelid that
were the sources of the French ones (Lat supercilium
and palebra ), but eyelash evidently caused trouble.
Some Roman authors resorted to palpebrārum pilus
lit. eyelids' hair for eyelashes. To complicate matters,
they also used the plural of eyebrow
( supercilia ) to mean eyelashes. And cilium , which
meant upper eyelid to Pliny the Elder, acquired in
later centuries the senses of eyebrow, eyelid, and
eyelash. Körting's Lateinisch-Romanisches
Wörterbuch (Stechert's 1923 repr.) glossed cilium as
eyebrow, as the only meaning (Col. 271, No. 2176).
Pokorny, echoing predecessors, suggested that cilium
meant the lower lid and supercilium the upper (553).
But supercilium meant eyebrow!
Italian has inherited some of the confusion of
Latin. It agrees with the ancestral tongue in sopracciglio
for eyebrow (compare Fr sourcil ) and in
palebra for eyelid (Fr paupière ). But Ital ciglio can
mean either eyebrow or eyelash, and regional variants
complicate the picture.
Portuguese has sobrancelha and palebra , in
agreement with Latin, French, and Italian. But for
eyelash it has pestana , matching Spanish pestaña
(compare Sp pestañear blink). Spanish has ceja for
`eyebrow,' however, probably from the Lat plural
cilia .
The purpose of this article is not primarily to establish
etymologies--although that is partly involved--but
to note the extent to which the three
elements discussed are kept distinct (or the opposite)
in certain languages. Welsh has a word for brow
( ael ) and a word for lid ( amrant ), but, although there
is an expression meaning eyelash, it is a phrase: blew
yr amrant (hair of the eyelid, reminiscent of Lat
palpebrārum pilus ). The Breton for eyebrow,
abrant , seems akin to Welsh amrant eyelid, while
Cornish abrans eyebrow is patently closer to Breton
(as is often the case). Bret malvenn can mean eyelid
or eyelash and is probably a compound (browhair).
(Compare Middle Irish finda malach with the
same sense.) A separate term in Breton for eyelash
is kroc'han lagad skin of the eye. It is easier for me
to conceive of eyelashes as hair than as skin.
Goidelic Celtic does not have clearcut terms for
brow, lid, and lash either. There is an Irish mala
eyebrow (Gaelic mala also; compare Bret malvenn ,
above) side by side with the synonymous braoi , which
may be related to or borrowed from English brow .
Irish fabhra means eyelid and eyelash (and, at
times, eye). Gaelic fabhradh appears to mean eyelash
and may share the other senses of Irish fabhra .
Gaelic rosc (alternating with rasg ) means eyelid and
eyelash, as well as eye. (Old Irish rosc meant
eye.)
German clearly distinguishes Augenbraue eyebrow,
Augenlid eyelid, and Augenwimper eyelash.
Scandinavian languages also show separate
terms for the three. English eyebrow and German
Augenbraue are matched by Swedish ögenbryn , Norwegian
øyebryn , Danish øjenbryn , Icelandic (Old
and Mod.) augabrún , Faroese eygnabro . In Swedish,
Danish, and Norwegian eye-hair is used for eyelashes:
Swed. ögonhår , Dan. øjenhår , Icel. augnahár .
But Norwegian has øyevipper for eyelash (compare
Ger Augenwimper ), and Danish has, in addition to
øjenhår , a secondary word for eyelash, øjenvipper .
For eyelid, several Scandinavian languages have
words ending with the element lok , etc. (lock,
cover, lid), for example, Swedish ögonlock , Danish
øjenlåg , Norwegian øyelokk , Faroese eygnalok . An
old Icelandic word hvarma eyelid persists in archaic
style in Modern Icelandic as well as in Faroese,
where it is in competition with eygnalok . An Old
Icelandic kenning, hvarm-skógr , literally, eye-woods,
means eyelashes, as if implying that the
lashes resemble trees lined up along the eyelid. And
geisli hvarma, literally beam of the lids, means
eye. Yet, apart from such figurative and poetic language,
Icelandic seems not to confuse lids and
lashes.
In Welsh, there is, in addition to the primary
word for eyelid ( amrant ), a secondary expression
clawr llygad , literally, eye cover, = eyelid. In
Middle Welsh, the word for brow can also mean
lid.
There are, in various parts of the world, languages
with unambiguous designations of the three
periophthalmic structures discussed. A sampling of
those languages follows. The words mean, of course,
eyebrow, eyelid, and eyelash, as indicated.
eyebrow eyelid eyelash
Russian brov' v'eko recnítsa
Polish brew powieka rzesa
E. Armenian honk h kop arteanunk h
Mod. Greek phúdia matotsúnoura vlépharo
Yiddish brem oygnledl vi-\?\
Lithuanian añtakis vókas blakstíena
Farsi âbru pelk moǽé
Ossetic has specific designations for eyebrows
and eyelashes ( ærphÿg and tsæstÿxau , respectively,
as transcribed from Cyrillic). It also distinguishes
upper eyelids ( \?\ æltŭÿphal ) and lower eyelids
( dæltiŭÿphal ). I am not usually aware that I have
lower lids, except when something ails them, but the
Ossetes specify upper or lower lid without batting
an eyelash. I am trying to find out whether they can
say eyelid itself, sans upper or lower. Dictionaries
seem to offer scant help. The Digor dialect (in
the west and north of the Ossete region) seems to
have such a separate word resembling the second
part of the Ossetic ones given above. Since Ossetic
is an Indo-European language (specifically Iranic;
one of its chief varieties is called Iron--and in
Germ. Ironisch! ), we might expect to find some
meaning in the words or their parts. Waldteufel will
hardly do as a cognate of the upper word, nor
Daredevil of the lower. It seems that dæl - lower is
from the Indo-European source of words like East
Frisian del down, English dale , Old Church Slavic
dolŭ down, dolinŭ lower.
This consideration of the varying ways in which
the physiological features of brows, lids, and lashes
are perceived in some languages, despite their possibility
of being objectively observed, is part of the
larger question of how the parts of the body are
named. The often important factor of taboo seems
not to operate here too conspicuously, although the
superstition of the evil eye is often a potent consideration.
It may, in fact, be reflected in Irish mac
imreasan pupil of the eye (probably literally son of
contention or the like).
English regards lungs as a plural (at least its
speakers do), but German die Lunge is singular. In
some languages foot and leg are not differentiated,
note Russian nogá foot, leg. Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese,
and Khalkha Mongolian share that characteristic.
But, while Russian can denote arm and hand
by one word ( ruká ), Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, and
Khalkha Mongolian have separate words for arm
and hand.
In English, as in German, Dutch, the Scandinavian
languages, etc., we distinguish between fingers
and toes, physiologically and lexically. In some languages
(Spanish, Romanian, Russian, Czech, Greek,
Arabic, Hebrew, Welsh, Irish, and others) the same
word denotes both finger and toe (although it must
be remembered that when there is need to specify
that toes and not fingers are meant, or vice versa,
there are ways to do so in those languages).
In some languages a distinction is made between
chin and jaw, in others not. Hair of the head
is at times called by a different word from that for
hair elsewhere on the body (Welsh gwallt vs. blew ,
for example). In English this difference is not found,
except possibly in medical contexts.
We might well inquire whether a language lacking
a certain distinction (like that between eyelids
and eyelashes) also lacks other distinctions (and
shares the lacks with other languages). Parallels are
difficult to discover, except fragmentarily. Those
languages which show no difference in words for finger
and toe do not necessarily suffer (if that is the
right word) the lack of distinction between lid and
lash, etc.
A high-school Latin teacher used to give us
what he called language correlations, writing one
or two of them on the blackboard each day. He
aimed at general (maybe universal) claims and
mentioned no languages by name. Some of his correlations
that I still recall were: Languages with an
ablative case will have no word for have . Languages
with the same word for green and blue have
no plural nouns or adjectives. Languages with
more than three degrees of comparison of adjectives
lack words for yes and no . Languages which do
not distinguish thumb and finger have no word for
hedgehog . Here he was no doubt pulling our legs
(or feet?).
It is possible to think of languages in which his
strangely selected correlations apply. The first
could be Latin, the second Japanese (a language he
had studied), the third might be true of a Celtic language,
etc. At any rate, he never seemed to bother
about brows, lids, and lashes, although his attitude
was sometimes supercilious.
Dictionaries for Advanced Learners and Users of Foreign Languages
It is widely acknowledged that complaints about
missing items in the range of dictionaries required
by advanced learners and users of foreign
languages are justified to a very considerable extent.
Clearly, distinctions need to be made about the particular
first, or native language (L1) and the second
language (L2) of such learners if the above common
perception is to be substantiated. If we are talking
about Finns attempting to learn Turkish or Korean
then no one, surely, is going to argue that point,
except to make the observation, perhaps, that such
hapless Finns are going to have to operate via an
interlingua (and its dictionaries), such as English,
German, or Russian. If, on the other hand, it is a
matter of native speakers of English grappling with
the task of acquiring a sophisticated knowledge of
German or Russian, then difficulties associated with
dictionaries will be of a lesser order, but there will
still be many occasions on which such learners will,
by reflex action, stretch out a hand to grab hold of a
dictionary that simply does not exist!
A root cause of this problem is the logically reasonable
but in reality fallacious contention that what
you cannot find in a dictionary you are entitled to
find in a grammar and-- nota bene! --vice versa. Of
course, we all know that there is a tangible overlap
between dictionaries and grammars rather than a no-man's
land between them, and this in spite of their
different purposes. Given that grammars are often
used on a systematic basis--the regularities dominate
the idiosyncrasies--grammarians write and format
them on that basis; yet grammars are also used,
exceedingly often, on a single-shot basis, a quick in
and out, just like a normal dictionary consultation.
If learners want more than a valency pattern for a
particular verb or group of verbs or more than the
translation equivalent(s) of a single source-language
word, where do they turn? The traditional and often
cynical-sounding counsel given to students complaining
about this dilemma is: Go away and read
and/or listen to twenty million words in your L2 and
you will find that the problem is diminished. The
counselor's hope is that the student will hone to
quasi-perfection a fine ability to detect, capture, and
internalize information about the occurrence, co-occurrence
and patterning of lexis in context, plus a
lot else besides. Maybe there was or is a subconscious
view that the path to L2 proficiency and success
is open only to those who can summon up the
intellectual energy and also physical, dictionary-(man)handling
stamina for the task. It is a moot
point whether it is better for the student to read--
let us say--the twenty million running words of
text, or read the same ten million words twice or
even read the same five million words four times
over! Similar questions can reasonably be asked
about the homogeneity versus heterogeneity of subject
matter and stylistic mode of this reasonably extensive
material amounting to about one hundred to
one hundred and fifty average-sized books.
Let us assume that advanced students of a particular
L2 have equipped themselves with the following
reference word books: a top of the range L1→L2
and L2→L1 dictionary; a college -sized defining
dictionary produced for and within their target L2
discourse community; the best available L2 synonym
dictionary and thesaurus; and a dictionary of proverbs
and idioms. Ideally, they should also own their
FL equivalent of Adrian Room's Dictionary of Great
Britain. If this is not available, they should start compiling
their own, on cards if necessary but ideally as a
computerized database. They should also have access
to a large encyclopedia written in the L2. With this
back-up are they well prepared for the intricate task
of composing documents in their L2 on various topics?
They are probably reasonably well prepared in
general terms but not so in particular terms. What
they lack in terms of general lexical resources is a
collocations dictionary and a synonym differentiator,
such as --in the case of a German--Duden's
Die richtige Wortwahl , which subtitles itself as a
comparative dictionary of sense-related expression.
For this aspect of L2 writing, incidentally, advanced
Russian-speaking students of English may
have recourse to the excellent English-Russian Synonym
Dictionary , by A.A. Rozenman and Y.D.
Apresyan (Russki Yazyk Publishing House, 1980);
this compendium contains 350 synonymic series, and
each article in the dictionary explains the meaning of
the lexemes comprising the synonymic series, provides
a best approximation translation, and--crucially--supplies
a detailed characterization of the
similarities and differences between the synonyms,
offering at the same time an analysis of the conditions
in which each synonym is appropriate and where
they may substitute for each other. All of this is exemplified
by belletristic citations. Advanced Russian-speaking
students and users of German have available
the major Deutsch-russisches Synonymwörterbuch , by
I.V. Rakhmanov et alii (Russki Yazyk, in 1983). This
thoroughly researched and crafted reference book
contains approximately 2,500 entries, each representing
a synonymic series. All items are quasialigned
with translation equivalents and are illustrated
by example sentences--not citations--in
German, which are also given in Russian translation.
The front matter of both of these dictionaries from
Russia includes substantial theoretical essays on the
theory of synonymy and on the lexicographic practicalities
of arraying and presenting synonyms in dictionary
format.
It is clear that collocations dictionaries and
synonym differentiators may not exist at all in a
particular language community: in fact, very few
language communities can boast of such resources.
That is a great pity because that is exactly what advanced
learners need. In fact, it is not stretching
things too much to say that first-class collocational
control is the hallmark of the true L2 expert; collocational
control is normally the last linguistic subsystem
to be mastered by learners who proceed to
an advanced level. Correct deployment of collocations
is particularly important for anyone striving for
authenticity of performance within a particular professional
sociolect, such as the language of medicine
or economics.
No one could claim that it is an easy task to create
collocations dictionaries: the chief problem is
where to draw the proverbial line on a spectrum
ranging from complete predictability, usually on a
left-to-right basis, to total volatility of association by
mere juxtaposition, for example, corned beef v.
cheap beef . The dictionary maker's job is to capture
the habitualisms without overloading the dictionary
with items which are putatively valid enough in
absolute terms by not in the statistical sense of significance
derived via measurable co-occurrence.
It has to be admitted that there are far too few
collocations dictionaries around. In the English-speaking
dictionary microcosm The Oxford Thesaurus
(1991), has clearly stolen a march over all its
rivals in terms of size, structure, and depth of treatment.
Synonym differentiation was evidently--and
rightly--seen as a crucial task and the thoroughness
with which this task was carried out is one the dictionary's
most important assets. In fact, the provision
of one example for each sense group within an
entry is an innovative and pragmatically satisfactory
way of hinting at the possibility and permissibility of
collocation with other words a writer, whose native
language is not English, may have in mind at the
moment of consultation. Useful though that is, the
best-known genuine collocations dictionary for English--probably,
however, only until the publication
of the seriously delayed Words in Use compilation
from the Cobuild stable--is undoubtedly the BBI
Combinatory Dictionary , by M. Benson, E. Benson,
and R. Ilson (Benjamin, 1986). Two other notable
dictionaries come from Poland: Selected English Collocations ,
by H. Dzierżanowska and C. Kozlowska
(PWN Warsaw, 2nd ed., 1988) and English Adverbial
Collocations , by C. Kozlowska (PWN Warsaw,
1991). [See p. 35.] In Great Britain the Cobuild Collocations
Dictionary is eagerly awaited.
A quite remarkable and innovative dictionary is
now about to appear in revised, updated, and enlarged
re-edition: this is I.I. Ubin's Dictionary of
Russian and English lexical intensifiers (Russki
Yazyk, orig. pub. 1987). In essence, this is a versatile
two-way bilingual (Russian English) collocation
dictionary providing information about how to intensify,
heighten, or escalate the basic meanings
of nouns on the one hand, and verbs and adjectives
on the other, by qualifying them with
adjectives and adverbs, respectively. The dictionary's
structure is quadripartite with appropriate
cross-referencing, linkage, and metalinguistic information.
Each of the Russian and English halves
has two sections: the first comprises the alphabetically
ordered listing of the intensificands, each of
which constitutes a dictionary entry. To each intensificand
is appended a translation equivalence
and an alphabetic list of permissible intensifiers.
The second section consists of an alphabetically ordered
inverted list of intensifiers, alongside each of
which is a list of those intensificands which it can
modify. Altogether, the dictionary yields some
10,400 Russian collocations and about 12,500 English
collocations.
A. Reum's A Dictionary of English Style , republished
by Hueber in 1961 but dating back six decades,
was intended by its author as a reference work
which would allow writers to formulate their ideas in
German yet express them in English, using typically
English modes of thought and linguistic templates.
The same author is noteworthy for his Petit Dictionnaire
de Style (1911) which offers German speakers
an open sesame to authentic French. This handbook
was conceived as a linguistic guide which would
somehow prevent its users from grabbing hold of a
German→French dictionary the moment their personal
vocabulary ran out.
Collocations dictionaries published in Russia for
advanced L2 learners of Russian date back a quarter
of a century or so and have developed a very high
degree of variety and sophistication over the intervening
years. The afore-mentioned variety extends,
for instance, from learner's dictionaries of collocations
for RSP (Russian for specific purposes) areas
as disparate as agriculture, materials science, and sociopolitical
discourse. The main general collocations
dictionary is Slovar' sochetaemosti slov russkogo
yazyka Russian Word-combinatory Dictionary), by
P.N. Denisov and V.V. Markovkin (Russki Yazyk,
1983). Such is the depth of the lexicographical
treatment that the dictionary, whilst containing only
2,500 articles, occupies 685 pages!
In Germany the nearest thing to a straight collocations
dictionary is E. Agricola's regularly republished
Wörter und Wendungen , written for Germans
but highly valuable for foreigners using German at an
advanced level. It is, however, worth examining H.
Becker's Stilwörterbuch (Leipzig, 1964-66). Although
containing a mere couple of hundred entries
or so, the dictionary is valuable by virtue of the depth
of treatment and the ramifications of the information
supplied.
Mention needs to be made, finally, of one other
publication from Germany: H. Erk's Zur Lexik wissenschaftlicher
Fachtexte, Vols. 4, 5, & 6 (Hueber,
1972-82). Its aim is to provide frequency data and
modes of use of the basic vocabulary of German academic
discourse. The value of this work is diminished
by the fact that the citations given are merely
sub-sentence fragments from the corpus, which was
assembled for the frequency study itself, thus denying
users the opportunity to make full use of this
important data.
This last point opens the door for a plea, or at
least a statement of a desideratum perceived by advanced
users of various L2s and by their teachers.
Notwithstanding the logistic difficulties of constructing
synonym differentiators and collocations dictionaries,
particularly the latter, it is now possible
for information technology to deliver direct to socalled
end-users lexical data retrieval systems of
great size, power, and usefulness. Any doubting
Thomases should make arrangements to view and
use the CD-ROM implementations of dictionaries
from such famous publishers as Oxford University
Press, Langenscheidt, and Robert. The writer of
these lines believes that the CD-ROM implementation
of Le Grand Robert , for instance, is not only a paragon
of dictionary content but of navigation software
and of the retrieval tools provided. What advanced
users of various L2s need, by comparison, is ridiculously
simple: they need a lexical data retrieval system--is
this sophisticated enough to deserve the
term lexical database? --which will allow them to
enter a search word of interest, either from L1 or
L2, and view nothing more than an arbitrarily chosen
number of underlying corpus citations relating
to one target-language lexeme, so that they can
get a feel for its semantic range and combinatory-collocatory
possibilities. Of course, they should be
able to choose how many citations, what language
level they come from etc. They should also be able
to operate various controls to refine search strategies;
still, when all is said and done, all they want is
authentic citations and authentic collocations.
The main benefit of having such a facility is to
accelerate learning and growth of confidence by dint
of exposure to much more and much better focused
linguistic material. All of this is so easy from the technological
point of view--how does it look from the
commercial angle? Responses or ripostes awaited!
The Coming Hybrids
In the Philippines, someone asked not long ago, Sainyong
palagay, what will be the long-term economic
effects sa ating bansa ng Middle East War?
This question blends Tagalog and English, in a widespread
medium that Filipinos call Taglish or Mix-Mix.
The Tagalog elements mean in your opionion
and on our country of the. In northern India,
someone might say, Mai ap ko batati hum, he is a
very reliable fellow , where the opening words are
Hindi for I tell you. This time, the mélange is
called Hindlish. A similar statement in Malaysia
could be This morning I hantar my baby tu dekat
babysitter tu lah , in which the first and second Malay
elements mean took and to the, and the particle
lah shows that speaker and hearer are socially close.
Finally, on the other side of the world, a Latino on
the US-Mexican border might observe, with a shrug,
Sometimes I'll start a sentence in English y terminó en
español . And this time the mix is known as Spanglish
or Tex-Mex.
Such hybridization is all the rage on every continent
in the world and shows no sign of letting up.
It is so common that many jokey and dismissive
blends formed on - lish have almost become technical
terms. Among them are Arablish, Chinglish,
Frenglish, Gerlish and Deutschlish, Italglish, Janglish
and Japlish, Russlish , and Yinglish . The complex and
fluid developments in the European Community, between
English and eight other languages, have been
labeled in at least four ingeniously pejorative ways,
as Eurolish, Eurospeak, Desperanto, and Minglish
(the first two also used to denote and deride Common
Market bureaucratese, the third to catch the
confusion that can arise among simultaneous translators).
Although picturesque labels like these indicate
both amusement and anger among those who use
them, they do not match the scale of what is happening.
The hybrids they denote may be mocked, denounced,
enjoyed, or ignored by teachers, linguists,
and the media, but regardless of censure or praise
they just steamroller on. Vast and utterly pragmatic,
they are used as freely by the purists who condemn
them (when they relax) as by those who simply go
with the flow. The hybridization of English with innumerable
other languages on a one-to-one basis is a
product of necessity and one of the most remarkable
developments in communication that has ever taken
place. Many have written on whether English will
supplant other languages, but few have considered
whether English (among other things) is simply going
to merge with many of them, for certain purposes
at least.
This miscegenation is of course what has always
happened when people comfortable in two languages
use them freely in their daily affairs. In the
heat of the moment, expressions in one language
come more quickly to the tongue than expressions in
the other--and speakers may never be sure at any
time which will provide the next word, phrase,
clause, or sentence. In an important sense, such
mixers do not have just two systems, A and B, to
work with, but four: a spectrum of A, AB, BA and B.
This universal quartet of possibilities is nicely reflected
in such current sets of labels as English--
Frenglish--franglais--français in Quebec, English--
Taglish--Engalog--Tagalog in the Philippines, and
English--Spanglish--englañol--espanol in Puerto
Rico.
In general terms, when bilinguals are talking
with speakers of Language A alone, they stay pretty
well inside A, and the same with B. But when they
are together, and especially if they constitute a large
community, they splice the contents of their languages
into new and often unpredictable patterns;
this happened in England when Old English and
Norman French came together after 1066, giving
rise to the Middle English hybrid that was in due
course used to such effect by Chaucer and Malory.
English is now Language A or B in the repertoire
of millions throughout the world. These versatile
bilinguals are at least as significant for the future
of the language as the more or less unilingual communities
of the UK, and US, and Australia; indeed,
they may be more significant because they outnumber
the unilinguals. In such states as Canada, India,
Kenya, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Singapore,
the mixers are already key figures in the shaping
of national usage. Bilingual and multilingual
communities are often the product (in part at least)
of colonial pasts, as in the Philippines, Malaysia, and
India, but not always: they can also be the outcome
of simple proximity, as when Mexican Spanish and
American English come intimately together in a
Texas supermarket:
HUSBAND: ¿Que necessitamos?
WIFE: Hay que comprar pan, con thin slices. [to sales clerk] ¿Donde está el thin-slice bread?
CLERK: Está an aisle three, sobre el second shelf, en el wrapper rojo.
WIFE: No lo encuentro.
CLERK: Tal vez out of it.
From Tex-Mex, Lorraine Goldman,
English Today, January 1986.
Translation: H: What do we need? W: We have to
buy bread, with thin slices. Where's the thin-slice
bread? C: It's in aisle three on the second shelf, in
the red wrapper. W: I can't find it. C: Maybe we're
out of it.
It is a venerable truism that English has long
been a mongrel tongue with a hybrid heritage.
Writers about the language routinely describe and
illustrate its ancient talent for picking up bits and
bobs from all kinds of sources, from Arabic to Zulu.
From time to time scholars have debated whether
Modern English should be listed not just as a Germanic
language, but in lexical terms as a Romance
language--in effect as a hybrid that is now spinning
off further hybrids, such as Anglo-Malay and
Anglo-Hindi.
Anglo-Japanese (or, informally, Japlish) is
an intriguing case because of the economic prominence
of Japan, the relative one-sidedness at present
of the flow of words, and the restrictedness of Japanese,
a language little used outside the home islands.
Since immediately after World War II, the massive
inflow of English words has represented modernity
and internationalization. Many thousands of items
in contemporary urban Japanese usage are adapted
English words, nativized by reshaping their syllabic
patterns into forms that can be written in katakana
symbols and pronounced without difficulty.
Specimens of this virtually machinelike process
include erekutoronikkusu electronics, kurisumasu
Christmas, and purutoniumu plutonium. Words
with sounds that are not present in Japanese are
given the best local fit, as in takushi taxi, rabu
love, and basu both bus and bath. Some loanwords
undergo a semantic shift, as with manshon
high-class apartment block (from mansion ), konpanion
female guide or hostess (from companion ),
and baikingu buffet meal, smorgasbord (from Vi-king ).
Clippings and blends are common, such as
terebi television, masukomi mass communication,
and wapuro word processor. English words also
sometimes combine with Japanese words, as for example
haburashi toothbrush, from Japanese ha
tooth and English brush . Two or more words from
English also sometimes come together in new ways,
as with pureigaido (play guide) a ticket agency, and
bakkumira (back mirror) a rear-view mirror. In
Japanese such indigenous coinages are wryly referred
to as wasei eigo Made-in-Japan English.
The Japanese have for some time been quietly
returning the compliment. The number of loans is
low and almost entirely in the field of commercial
names, but their impact has been out of all proportion
to those numbers. A common formula is a two-word
phrase that opens with a Japanese company
name and closes with a product name that is genuinely
Western, as with Honda Ballade, Mitsubishi
Colt , and Toyota Corolla , or that echoes such a word,
as with Honda Acura (accurate?), Nissan Sentra
(central, sentry?), and Nissan Micra (a feminization
of micro ). The Japanese capacity to produce
decorative off-beat English has been widely noted
for some time, as in this comment from Time in
1986:
The Japanese long ago mastered the process of
labeling their consumer goods to appeal to a
global market. Walkman may be a piece of fractured
English, but the term has become as generic
and widely recognized as Xerox or Coke.
--The Japanese Naming Game, January 13
The term Walkman is on a par with the atmosphere
English found on Japanese T-Shirts, bags,
and pencil boxes, such as Tenderness was completed
a pastel and The New York City Theatre District is
where you can and us, anyone . Such novel (mis)uses
of English, as tokens of modernity rather than as
normal messages, are now widespread in East Asia
and elsewhere. How long it will remain a standard
Japanese practice and an international fad is anybody's
guess. But regardless of how decorative English
develops, it seems likely that a Japanese input
into English--whatever forms it takes--will steadily
increase in the twenty-first century, not stay the
same or diminish.
Although the various Anglo-hybrids are currently
unstable, the hybridity itself is stable enough.
It has been running for decades in Asia and Africa
and appears to have many more decades to run. If
past situations are anything to go by, those languages
affected today will undergo irreversible
change, as English did after the Danish invasions and
the Norman Conquest. Malay by government design
and Japanese by casual osmosis are already indelibly
marked by borrowings (including what English took
in earlier times from French, Latin, and Greek). The
outcome is far from clear, but it can hardly be minor,
and English will be affected in ways that we can
hardly imagine.
Osborne chased it around the back of the net, dug
the puck off the sideboards and fired a pass to Poddubny,
who beat Buffalo goaltender Tom Barrasso between the
legs. [From an AP story in the Danbury News-Times, . Submitted by
Anyone would be a tender goalie in the circumstances.
And was Barrasso so named for playing bottomless?]
Humor Caribbean Style
There is no nation or country on earth that does
not have its own style of humor, hence the
proliferation of Irish jokes, Jewish jokes, Russian
jokes, Polish jokes, etc. Humor is defined in the
OED as that quality of action, speech, or writing
which excites amusement and in MWIII as that
expression of ideas in a happening, an action, a situation,
or an expression of ideas which appeals to a
sense of the ludicrous or absurdly incongruous. We
all know the highly beneficial effects of laughter on
our physical, mental, and emotional well-being.
Luckily for us Caribbeans, humor plays a great part
in our daily lives and laughter is generally much
more common than a gloomy face. Perhaps this is
related to our down-to-earth, often rather unsophisticated
use of language, especially at the folk level.
A few examples (from the Archives of the Caribbean
Lexicography Project) illustrate how our use of
language translates into laughter.
In the 1940s a certain man-of-the-people councillor
in an Eastern Caribbean island (now independent;
it shall remain nameless) could not bear the
thought of any kind of expenditure by the local council,
apart from that on roads and water-supply, the
two services that he had faithfully promised his constituents.
When the question of money for urinals
came up, our redoubtable councillor, in typical fashion,
loudly and vehemently abjected to spendin' the
poor people money on dese urinals! So persistent
and determined was his blocking of the vote that it
spurred another councillor to take him aside and explain
what a urinal was. In he came again, gesticulating
vigorously, to deliver this piece in support of a
change of vote:
Why y'all didn't put de thing in praper terms?
Yes! Yes! I vote for them. And while you buildin'
you must put in some arsenals too!
The concept of a plain-clothes policeman is familiar
to most, but don't be so sure in the Caribbean:
a policeman who is not in proper unformed dress is
simply not dressed, as one witness saw it in this
newspaper report of her testimony in court:
Cheryl also claimed that among the men were a
St Michael landlord, a uniformed policeman and
others who she believed were undressed police
officers carrying guns.
But if such superficial use of words suggests that
their humor is hidden from the speakers concerned,
it would be a mistake to take that as normal. More
often, there is a deliberateness in the Caribbean
speaker's purpose to ridicule: A well-dressed girl is
strutting along on the sidewalk one Sunday afternoon.
A boy in rags notices her rather bony legs, so
he levels her with Hi girl, you ain' 'fraid hungry
dog see you? A woman with noticeable steatopygia
may be specially greeted in the middle of the morning
or in the night with Oh good AFTERnoon! A
teenager wearing a neat pair of trousers, probably
hand-me-downs since they are much too short--so
short that he would not need to pull them up to walk
through water--evokes the arch query from his
peers, You expecting flood?
The Caribbean experience often thrusts itself
on the Eurocentric world view that has been superimposed
by schooling or by everyday circumstances.
For example, a common language exercise
in schools is to ask students to complete well-known
proverbial sayings like those below: each is followed
by the completions given in one Caribbean school
(as collected over a period of time by a teacher).
A bird in the hand will mess on your clothes.
One swallow does not make a meal.
You can't teach an old dog so don't waste your food.
Penny wise is too far from dollar wise.
In similar vein, there is a profusion of picturesque
metaphors and similes framed in local experience
as is illustrated in the following examples:
rice dog or Heinz 57 a mongrel.
pond-fly of a woman a promiscuous woman who
flits around distributing her favors with premeditated
and predatory intent.
yard-fowl a political sycophant or one who
gives allegiance to the political party in power
with a view to any pickings that he or she might
receive.
banana-jockey a poor person who would cadge
a ride on a truck carrying bananas to the port in
the banana-producing islands of the Caribbean.
bag-blind bastard (derogatory and offensive) a
person so poor that he or she lives in the meanest
of dwellings with only empty sugar-bags for curtains
(blinds as they are also known in the
Caribbean).
breadfruit-swopper (derogatory and offensive) a
person so poor that he or she has nothing to offer
in exchange for any item but a home-grown
breadfruit (which nearly everybody already has).
be as close as batty and po (or batty and bench)
be bosom companions (batty being the Caribbean
English folk term for buttocks).
give a man a jacket to present him with a child
that is not his (jacket referring to an article of
clothing that is not normally worn by a laborer in
the Caribbean).
And what about the prominence of the word
bless which carries the meaning of exorcism, healing,
remedy in Caribbean folk consciousness? So,
runs one folk aphorism, Something mus' [be] wrong
with marriage if [a] priest ha[ve] to bless it!
In a slightly different category is a Afro-Caribbean
user of words who flourishes, particularly at
the folk level, immensely enjoying word-use as an
exercise--even a challenge. He uses standard English
word-formation devices in order to create new
words with broad sensory connotations, such as
foodist, bellyologist , and groggist to refer to people
with uncontrolled appetites, dedicated drinkers of
alcohol, and eaters.
The inventiveness of such word-users may also
be uncontrolled, a feature of which little account has
been taken in analyzing Caribbean language use, the
display of diction practised by elderly men on
such festive occasions as christenings and weddings,
especially the latter. In most Caribbean colonies in
former times, but today in a few rural communities,
practitioners of the art of such diction were
sought out and specially invited so as to give status
to the ceremony at the wedding house. The following
is a sample of one such speech:
Lordly ladies and magnificent gentlemen, I
come on the gijantic wings of the Archangel Gabriel
to expaterate the absolutely right-minded
eucharistic blessings upon you-all proceedings
this evening. Primarily I was entranced at the entrance
by the Royal Magna Carta appearance of
Mr Bridegroom and the celestial and capital incorporated
specifications of Mrs Bride. A man's a
man for all that and what a piece of work is man
and God saw fit that man should not be without
his keepmate and took out his ribs to make his
woman. Do not let any bumptious, presumptious,
officious, malicious or contentious reactionary socialist
come between you and interfere to counteract
the felicitary interprications of your marriage
bed. Distolerate him! Ostracize, cauterize
and excise him! What a piece of work is man! Do
not hesitate to generate and add exhilaration to
our population.
...
And now to Him that giveth and taketh away
and doeth exceeding great good to all that loveth
Him and doeth his will willy-nilly, may the words
of my mouth and the meditations of mine heart
be acceptable to all of you and to both of you this
day and henceforth forever, Amen.
Malcolm
My friend Malcolm is a born disciplinarian, and
language annoys him no end. He feels that,
as a type of mechanism, any language ought to have
a predictable regularity. A lot of built-in irregularities
are merely inefficient. A proper language
should click along like a Swiss watch, doing its job in
a no-nonsense way. As a native speaker of English,
Malcolm has a difficult time. English has rules--
some fairly regular rules--but too many exceptions.
Those aren't exceptions I tell him, there are subrules.
He glares at me, sneaky deceiver. I am not
getting away with that one.
Recently Malcolm got hold of a book on Sanskrit
and has been chewing away firmly at it. That is the
way a language ought to be! I remind him that there
is only one Taj Mahal--and that is a tomb. The mass
of humanity have to live in houses. Some hovels too,
and caves and tents: palaces are relatively few. Languages
built to architects' specifications are artificial
and largely remain unspoken. Some are even unspeakable.
If a language is to reflect what goes on in
the mind, it must have a lot of flexibility, tolerance,
fluency. The language genius exploits this flexibility
and fluency--and makes the best of it. The language
first learned fixes itself deeply in memory in
the fabric of the mind. It becomes normal: it is the
idiolect--the vehicle of thought unique to each
person, the basic layer. One is seldom aware of it,
but it is still there underneath. Malcolm's language
as he learned it in infancy is fixed. He does not see it
as a set of rules; it is simply there and he resents
tampering with it. Then he has another set of rules
derived from his high-school English teacher, Miss
Martinet, about double negatives, final prepositions,
and other unquestionables that have an aura of
Mount Sinai. Sometimes he sees me as a golden calf.
Malcolm feels that language should be strictly
logical. He carries around Occam's razor--it is his
Swiss army knife. He has a sharp eye for any kind of
redundancy, even when used deliberately for emphasis
or to make a distinction or sense division. A
rose is a rose is a rose --so why say it three times?
There is no need for widow-woman as long as we
have the word widower . The country man who
speaks of a viper snake ought to know that vipers are
snakes and we do not need to be told so. And when
kids go swimming in the raw, of course they are bare
and they are naked, so why bare-naked? They are
not naked unless they are totally bare. Bare should
mean totally too. Why insist? Excitement, enthusiasm,
are always messing up logic. Also messing up
the language.
Malcolm has working in his office an Englishwoman
who he thinks, having been born English,
should have more respect for the language. She is
an exuberant person, and it shows. I rather like her
spontaneity, but Malcolm finds it hard to take. At
office parties she finds the foods frightfully tasty or
dreadfully nice, and when they are covered with
sugar or whipped cream, they can be sinfully delicious.
Malcolm cannot resist her--he has a sweet
tooth that forever betrays him--but he finds her
oxymoronic style hard to bear. Oxymorons in general,
he says, are well named, and he is against them.
But he is not beyond a grumbling pun on oxen and
morons , while looking hard at me. I have challenged
him with Pope's line of the pun as the lowest form
of wit, but he says not if they are appropriate.
Malcolm suspects great and dangerous social
forces underlying changes in the use of words. Not
long ago he had a running horror at what had happened
to the word awful . Milton, he says, had it
right, the way it should properly be: full of awe,
awe-inspiring, an awful God . But in our populist
time with too many half-educated people at large,
awful has become etiolated. (Nice word--one of
Malcolm's favorites.) And awesome seems now to
have gone the same way--among teenagers, at least,
a raw, brainless lot. I grant teenagers their last
fling of childish freedom before adulthood begins to
descend. Malcolm matured earlier than I; my occasional
lapses into juvenility pain him. He is generally
forgiving: he still has hopes for me.
Malcolm's objections come not only in matters
of logic--there is a moral tinge to them sometimes.
He is against what seems deception, self-contradiction
in public speech-making. He finds it insidious.
In its linguistic form, a speaker introduces his
subject by saying, To this audience I need not
explain..., then goes on and explains it. To Malcolm
this is a kind of hypocrisy: flattering the audience
by pretending they know something already
when he feels pretty sure they do not. To tease him
I recently made a list of such phrases: It goes without
saying..., I hardly need to point out..., It
should be unnecessary to note that..., I will not insist
on the point, but if I did... And there are others,
old-timers such as Far be it from me to claim... .
My list only put Malcolm into a dismal mood.
I chatter about the psychology of speech-making,
catching and keeping an audience's attention,
but it does not impress him. Audiences should
need no flattery. Give them the facts, the truth, no
soft soap, and that should be enough. I insist on the
need to repeat, to emphasize, even to exhort. Audiences
appreciate a bit of verbal legerdemain. Will
Rogers knew it, and Barnum before him, and Shakespeare's
Antony before them. To Malcolm it all reflects
on the shameful gullibility of mankind and the
amorality of language, which should be at least logically
pure, if also, unfortunately, anybody's strumpet
otherwise.
I have pleaded with Malcolm about the right of
language to an occasional holiday--to have a bit of
fun. He admits the pleasure of a good pun--not a
false or missed pun, or a too obvious, witless pun,
but one that activates a mental Leyden jar. But he
feels uncomfortable with the imitative uses of language,
which often seem primitive and trivial. Ono-matopeias,
especially--the old bow-wow theory
of language origin--it is too obvious and too limited:
oral noises, not language. Even when they become
conventionalized, echoic words are suspect. They
are baby talk, purely animal. They are not language
until they are elaborated, until they develop rules,
system. I do not think Malcolm has ever seen a small
child break the single-word language barrier and get
hold of syntax, a fundamental breakthrough in language
learning. He favors a sort of Athenian approach:
language bursts full-armored from the brow
of Jove.
He should follow a child's language learning,
not sternly but curiously. It might impress him to
hear the child regularize our odd plurals, with mans
and gooses and lifes , a sub-rule which he has to swallow
willy-nilly. And children's imitative words and
the noises they make, the words they invent as they
play with their vocal apparatus and explore the possibilities
of the language. Not children alone, but
adults rolling on their tongues such wondrous inventions
as discombobulate and goloptious and humongous --fun-words
for special occasions, word play.
If all the world were playing holidays, Malcolm
quotes, and blows the umpire's whistle. He enjoys
enforcing rules: you do not have a game without
rules. I agree, and add that rules have to be revised
from time to time, not always on grounds of theory,
but of experience learned in play. The thing to
avoid is rigidity. Malcolm sniffs and tilts his chin.
Malcolm bears with my frivolous ways, for we
have been friends for many years. I find myself inventing
words from time to time and even getting
them into print when they slip past weary or tolerant
copy-editors, perhaps even on their merits.
Obviable is one of these beauties, and brainworm is
another. I know I made them up all new, though
lexicographers might already have registered them.
They just seem to come out naturally to fill a place
where nothing else would quite do. I have not
boasted of them to Malcolm but perhaps I should set
up a subtle test--slip them over on him, not as mine,
and see the effect. One might pass on the flavor of
Latinism. But I shall never risk any syntactic experiments
on him. Not even Shakespeare's renown and
grace is dead or that cannot be so neither would
get by. Nor Milton's airy tongues that syllable
men's names. I can hear him declaring firmly,
Nouns are nouns and should not be wrenched into
verbs. Southey's now no respite, neither by day
nor night, Johnson's neither search nor labour are
necessary, Chesterfield's others speak so fast and
sputter that they are not to be fully understood neither--are
all blunders. They flout logic. Jefferson's
claim of unalienable rights in the Declaration
of Independence is, to Malcolm, an egregious example
of miscegenation, where a Latin word is joined
to an Anglo-Saxon prefix. The fact that unalienable
had existed alongside inalienable for over a century
is no excuse. I quote Milton's Alas, what boots it
with uncessant care.... Alas, indeed, says
Malcolm.
Some time when Malcolm is in a lugubrious
mood and we are telling sad stories of the death of
kings, I am going to propose, for his tombstone,
English, with all thy faults, I loved thee still. For
mine I can imagine him coming up with something
like, A good man, apart from his too easy tolerance.
Word Watchers: Fitzedward Hall
Fitzedward Hall (1825-1901) traced his career
as an etymologist to a shipwreck. Son of a prosperous
lawyer in Troy, New York, Hall completed his
studies in engineering at Rensselaer in 1842 and was
about to graduate a second time--from Harvard College
in 1846--when his father sent him on an errand.
A younger brother, inexplicably drawn by Dana's
grim novel Two Years before the Mast (1840), had run
away to a life of adventure at sea, and their father
ordered Fitzedward to bring him home.
Soon thereafter, Hall found himself a castaway
at the mouth of the Ganges, and he chose to remain,
first in Calcutta, where he became a journalist and
teacher. Drawn to the study of Indian languages, he
rose to professor of Sanskrit at Government College,
Benares, in 1850, and commenced a career as editor
and publisher of Sanskrit texts, the first American to
do so. In 1857, he took an armed part in the suppression
of the Sepoy uprising and then rewarded
himself with a vacation in America and Europe.
While he was in the United States, William Dwight
Whitney, America's preeminent orientalist, did all
that he could to persuade Hall to remain at home,
but he could not prevail. On his way back to India,
Oxford awarded Hall an honorary doctorate in recognition
of his contribution to oriental learning.
In 1862, Hall left India to spend the rest of his
life in England. Whitney's campaign to find him an
appointment at Harvard continued but with diminished
chances of success. In a letter to Charles Eliot
Norton--like Hall and Francis James Child, a member
of the class of '46--Whitney wrote resignedly,
Anyhow, one takes a kind of wicked satisfaction in
seeing that England has to come even to America for
her scholars in that department of Oriental study
which it is most her duty and interest to cultivate.
On settling at last in London, Hall was appointed
professor of Sanskrit, Hindi, and Indian jurisprudence
at King's College, London. In short order, he
was made librarian of the Indian office and examiner
in Indian languages for the Civil Service Commissioners.
He continued the duties of examiner even
after his retirement in 1869 to Marlesford, Suffolk,
when he completed his Sanskrit editing. (Belatedly,
in 1895, Harvard awarded him an honorary doctorate
and was rewarded by the bequest of his Indian
manuscripts and editions.)
Hall's philological career had another side, one
of special interest to readers of VERBATIM. As far
back as 1838, he wrote, I began the practice,
which I have kept up ever since, of desultorily jotting
down notes on points of English. (He was then a
mere philological stripling of thirteen.) Not until
1872, however, did he compile these notes into book
form, a volume with the splendid title, Recent Exemplifications
of False Philology . In it, he attacked vigorously
three worthies well-known for their opinions
about English--William Savage Landor, Thomas De
Quincey, and (lengthily) Richard Grant White. All
three were inclined to uninformed etymology or ignorant
censure, he alleged. In Modern English
(1873), he harassed other self-proclaimed authorities,
and, in both books, three or four lines of text
float above a dense mass of footnotes in tightly set six-point
type. By this method, he ensured that no claim
would stand without supporting evidence.
Hall's authority came from his citations, a mass
so large that desultorily can hardly describe the
intensity of his collecting. Before the OED , no one
could have easily located examples to dispute him,
though Richardson, Johnson (as revised by Todd and
Latham), and Webster (as revised by Goodrich) all
gave historical usages. Hall was immeasurably better
informed than those he criticized, and he recognized
that a trustworthy dictionary must be founded on
examples--a thing never to be expected, save as the
result of extensive cooperation, and judicious subdivision
of labour. Naturally enough, he was soon
recruited by James Murray as a collaborator in the
preparation of the OED . In the preface to the first
volume of that great dictionary, Murray thanked Hall
expansively for his voluntary and gratuitous service:
Those who are familiar with the pages of his
Modern English , his English Adjectives in -able
[1877], and his numerous articles and papers on special
points of English, know with what an amazing
wealth of evidence the author illustrates the history
of every word, idiom, or grammatical usage, upon
which he touches. In the preface to volume 5, Murray
declared to the Dictionary his death is an incalculable
loss, a loss that would indeed have been irreparable
but for the fact that he left directions that
all his ms. quotations, references, notes, and memoranda,
should be handed over to the Editor, and that
we should have the free use of the books in his own
extensive library to which these referred. Hall was
similarly generous in opening his collections to Joseph
Wright (for the English Dialect Dictionary ) and
to the workers engaged in the preparation of Whitney's
Century Dictionary .
Like many people, Hall grew increasingly conservative
as he aged, but his allegiance to usage as
the foundation of judgments about English remained
firm. In particular, he was suspicious of language
reformers who wished to revive or fabricate Anglo-Saxon
synonyms for Latinate words. Masses of
older English, he thought, had no more chance of
revival than water-clocks and tinderboxes. In a
sentence intended to poke fun at the Saxonists, Hall
declared: Our lingual hybridism is ineradicable.
Romantic yearnings for an imaginary past were, to
him, anathema, and conservatives of many kinds
were early subject to his critical strictures: The
rights of man [the conservative] has gradually grown
used, after long years of disquietude, to hear talked
of, without apprehension of catalepsy; but you must
wait for his son, or for his son's son, if you would get
a candid hearing for the rights of woman.
Despite his long residence abroad, Hall was self-consciously
American and, latterly, all too ready to
cede authority to the British in matters of English.
Toward the end of his life, he wrote: If egotism for
a moment is pardonable, no false shame deters me
from avowing that, though I have lived away from
America upwards of forty-six years, I feel, to this
hour, in writing English, that I am writing a foreign
language, and that, if not incessantly on my guard, I
am in peril of stumbling. What a pained admission
from an acknowledge authority on the language--
particularly one who had earlier celebrated the revolutionary
fervor in the United States that had led,
at the end of the 18th century, to forswearing...
supine parrotry. How different from his declaration
at the outset of his career as a philologist: As
regards everything else, so as regards language, the
spirit of rigid conservatism operates as a principle of
unalloyed evil and mischief.
Hall's disputatious style in his many contributions
to magazines led him into controversy, and the
memorial notices published after his death were often
circumspect. In one, a life-long friend declared:
Dr. Hall had all the aggressive confidence of modesty
adequately equipped, a judgment that conceals
criticism in praise. Another opined that his
prose was apt to be difficult reading. Had he combined
with his vast learning a light and playful style,
he would not more effectually have strewn the field
with the slain, but he would have made the process
as delightful as it was edifying. As it is, his works are
a permanent resource against the ignoramus and the
charlatan who seek to make the English language
into their own likeness. The Dictionary of American
Biography is rather more blunt: His style was
too subject to his own criticism to be natural; it was
selfconscious and pedantic.
Despite their often dry character, Hall's works
bear re-reading, not least because of his refusal to
bewail the state of the language: No unprejudiced
person, if he takes the trouble to observe and consider,
can soberly maintain, that English is deteriorating.
Yet, above all, Hall raised the standard of
discussion on the bulwarks of evidence, and, even
when he was captious or carping, he compelled respect.
Thus, Ralph Olmsted Williams often engaged
Hall in the pages of the Dial and of Modern Language
Notes; these exchanges Williams published in
Some Questions of Good English (1897), recognizing
that with such an adversary as Dr. Hall it was difficult
to claim victory even when claiming the benefit
of the last word. Of course Hall was often dismissed--by
the British as a foreigner unworthy to
judge English usage and by the Americans as an anglophile
and expatriate. But the most serious scholars
of the day took him seriously, and, if he did not
make uninformed allegations about English impossible,
he at least made them subject to the trial of
evidence from usage.
Australia and the Environment: the First Fifty Years
Australia has recently (in 1988) celebrated its
bicentenary. The Australian National Dictionary
was published in that year and, for the first
time, it has been possible to assemble and describe
the set of lexical innovations used in one particular
semantic field, that is, the words and meanings of
words that register perceptions and utilizations of
the Australian environment. I have tried to build my
argument not on the over-interpretation of single,
apparently key words but on the evidence of the use
of those words within a set, within a context of
groupings of semantically related words that gain
weight and suggest directions of enquiry from their
mass. But the problem of over-interpretation remains.
This article is concerned with the first fifty years
of settlement, 1788-1838 and begins with the two
collocations Crown land and waste land , which
sometimes coalesce in the uniquely Australian waste
lands of the Crown. Crown land is used (as it has
been in Canadian English) of land that is either inalienable
or unalienated, of land that is either reserved
for the purposes of the Crown or the Crown's
agents or held in the name of the Crown. In the
former sense it gives way to government land or to
more specific terms for parcels of land like government
domain, government farm, government garden,
government ground, government paddock, government
reserve and government run ; in the latter it
comes increasingly to refer to land that is available
for grant, lease, or purchase, to distinguish land
which is variously described as unlocated, unoccupied
or (from slightly later, in the 1840s) unsettled
from land which is located or settled. Waste land is
used (as it had been in American English and, later,
in New Zealand English) to distinguish unused
land--uncultivated because unoccupied land--from
land under cultivation or in some way improved as
pasture. It is thus synonymous with wild land (also
so used in American English) or with the apparently
contradictory wild government ground described in
1849 as covered with trees and grass never used
before, except for feeding blackfellows, kangaroos,
cattle, horses and sheep. This description recognizes
that as yet unalienated land might have been
used as wild pasture, just as an 1867 critic of bureaucratese
can complain that the Crown lands
are very frequently, in Government phrase, styled
the waste lands of the Crown... [though] they
cannot... with propriety be called waste lands, for
they are applied to the only purpose, speaking of
them in general, to which they can ever be applied--grazing.
European arrival in these waste lands was described
in terms of settlement and location . Both are
very much terms of occupation. Settlement is used in
1788 of the British community as established or
founded in the colony, in 1792 of a small town, or
place where people have settled or established
themselves. The verb settle is used transitively of the
action of peopling a place, as in to settle a district,
intransitively of the action of settling oneself, as in
to settle in the colony. By 1803 the unoccupied
land is so designated and before 1820 the settled districts
or settled lands are so identified. Settler , from
1788, was roughly synonymous with colonist: I say
roughly because W.H. Breton, in 1833, distinguishes
between settlers the farmers only and colonists
the whole of the free inhabitants, though this
may be an academic distinction as John Dunmore
Lang in the next year remarks that spirit of irreconcilable
enmity to standing timber... almost uniformly
evinced by all Australian colonists. The
point is that, settlers or colonists , they had come to
occupy land and through occupation to utilize it. Location
is more difficult, because its sense history in
American English is complex; but in the Australian
usage of the 1788-1838 period it meant either an
allocation or grant of land or the act of establishing a
settler in a place, in which case it was synonymous
with settlement, as in the country will shortly be
thrown open to general location. To locate meant, similarly,
to allocate (a parcel of land), to settle (oneself)
on a piece of land, or to select (a piece of land).
Located districts was synonymous with settled districts,
the limits of location (or boundaries or bounds)
the further extent of settlement, the boundary within
which land was surveyed and available for legal tenure,
the border , as it was also known. The business of
allocating land within the limits of location required
land agents , a Land Board, Land Commissioner, land
fund, land orders, and led (as early as 1809) to
land-jobbing and speculation by land-jobbers and
land-sharks.
There was a continuing expansion into new
country, new districts, new settlements as land was
taken up, opened up or, as the pace grew, thrown
open (1830). Movement towards the interior was
movement up the country (from as early as 1805) or
into the back country; movement towards the settled
districts was movement down the country or in: travelers
came in from the bush as they can now come in
to a station, though out, except in collocations like
outdistrict, outfarm, outsettler, outsettlement, belongs
to a later period. Squatter, not in the American
and earliest Australian sense of one who illegally
occupies land but in the main Australian sense of
one who has title to a tract of grazing land, is recorded
in 1837 and is essentially a word of the
1840s; but in the earlier period both runs and stations
were being established for the grazing of sheep
and cattle. From 1804 a person so engaged, as distinct
from one who farmed crops--who engaged in
agricultural pursuits--was known as a grazier, and
from the 1820s such a person occupied a property
(with the clear connotation of ownership).
Words which through their coinage reflect the
utilization of the land give some measure of the environmental
impact --if I may use an anachronism.
A group of words reflects the immediate needs of an
isolated settlement seeking self-sufficiency: dairy
station, farm, farming (restricted to crop-raising)
farm-station, stockholder, stock-keeper, stockman,
stock owner, stock pen , and stock yard . A group reflects
the use made of local resources. Two examples
are Mount Pitt bird and mutton bird. Of the first
Philip Gidley King wrote in 1794: The Mount Pit
Birds are as Numerous as ever, Notwithstanding
upwards of Two Hundred thousand have been killed
Yearly. (The name is now obsolete and the bird
breeds only on Lord Howe Island.) As to mutton
bird, tastes vary: it may have required as W.H.
Leigh wrote in 1839 a desperate stomach to attack
such an oily mass, but Ralph Clarke in 1790 lovingly
packed a box for his beloved woman, Containing
a Mount Pit Bird, A Mutton Bird. More
demonstrative are the uses of the kangaroo, as evidenced
by kangaroo dog, kangaroo flesh, kangaroo
hide, kangaroo hunt, kangaroo leather, kangaroo rug,
kangaroo skin, kangaroo soup, kangaroo steak, kangaroo
steamer, kangaroo stew, kangaroo tail, kangaroo
tail soup ; of bark, as in bark chopper, bark mill, bark
stripper; of cedar, as in cedar brush, cedar cutter,
cedar grounds, cedar party. But a much larger
grouping of coinages bears witnesses to the embryonic
pastoral industry: cattle walk, cattle hunting,
cattle run, cattle station; stock agent, stock driver,
stock establishment, stock horse, stock house, stock
hut, stock proprietor, stock property, stock run, stock
station; sheep country, sheep downs, sheep establishment,
sheep hills, sheep holder, sheep land, sheep
master, sheep overseer, sheep owner, sheep proprietor,
sheep watchman, sheep yard.
The words listed so far are those of occupation
and use: what remains to identify in the early period
is an indication of the perception of the landscape on
which the settlers were imposing themselves and
their industry. From the start there was a tension
between resemblance and difference, between recollection
of the old world and recognition of the
new. On the one hand there were names which
were qualified before being applied, like wild currant,
wild fig, wild geranium, wild indigo, wild parsnip,
wild spinach, wild yam; or native flax, nabox,
native cherry, native cranberry, native flax, native
grass, native myrtle, native parsley, native plum;
or names in which the qualifier is a color, as in blue
gum, green wattle, white honeysuckle. On the other
there were new names, borrowings from Aboriginal
languages, like boobook, dingo, koala, kurrajong,
wallaby, wallaroo, waratah, and wombat, all from
Dharuk (the Sydney language); descriptive names
like blackbutt, bottlebrush, duckbill, flooded gum,
and gumtree; or popular adoptions of scientific
names like banksia, callistemon, casuarina, boronia,
eucalyptus, and platypus. In generic terms this is
manifested in the replacement of woods by bush,
once the inadequacy of woods is recognized, and by
the redefinition of words like forest and plain. The
important contrast is between the bush vegetation
in its natural state, country covered in such vegetation,
and brush and scrub as subsets of bush on the
one hand, and, on the other, country that is naturally
open or that has been cleared, an activity which gave
the language to burn off as well as short-lived collocations
like clearing gang, clearing lease, and clearing
party. Forest is redefined, as in an 1805 description
of forest land as such as abounds with Grass
and is the only Ground which is fit to Graze; according
to the local distinction, the Grass is the discriminating
Character and not the Trees, for by making
use of the Former, it is clearly understood as different
from a Brush or Scrub. Plain is also redefined,
being applied to undulating as well as flat country
and admitting the presence of trees or stands of
trees. The important feature is openness, as in collocations
like open forest, open forest country, and open
forest land.
Availability of water is obviously important: the
Anglo-Indian tank (as in the name of the Tank
Stream) is there from 1791; lagoon used, as in American
English, of fresh water as well as salt from 1797;
pond as in chain of ponds from 1799; waterhole from
1817. The value of a river frontage was recognized,
land distant from water being known as back country.
In from the coast ranges of mountains, tiers as
they were known in Tasmania and later South Australia--in
both cases a specific use of a word meaning
line or series--supplied an impediment just as,
on a more local scale, flat implied a usable river
plain, gully or razorback an obstruction to land
use or to movement. The hot wind that blew from
the interior, later to be named the sirocco, was
known with vivid simplicity as the hot wind.
The point is that in the first fifty-year segment,
the lexical landscape is one of occupation and subsistence
rather than exploration: it is utilitarian rather
than interpretive. It registers a process of improvement,
improve being an originally American usage,
Australian from the 1830s, referring to the bringing
of land into agricultural or pastoral use, and including
clearing, the provision of fences, buildings, etc.,
with the intention of increasing the land's productivity.
Despite that--or because of it--another Americanism
which came into Australian use in the 1830s
was overstock. One will have noticed that there has
been no reference to the indigenous inhabitants--
the Indians, natives, Papuans, Blacks, or Aborigines,
as they were variously named. That is not because
their presence had made no impact on English, for
more than fifty words were borrowed from Dharuk,
most of them in the early period. These did include
gunyah and gibber-gunyah , which recognized that
they had places of habitation, also given the English
names of breakweathers, or breakwinds, or known as
huts. But the only words which imply some sort of
relationship, either of location or utilization, between
the Aborigines and the land are hunting
ground (it being observed in 1830 that the Natives
are as tenacious of their hunting grounds as settlers
are of their farms), the verb to fire , used with reference
to the Aboriginal practice of setting fire to a
tract of vegetation either to trap animals or to maintain
grassland, and run and station. Both of the last
were used in the 1820s of land recognized as being
occupied by an Aboriginal community, in contexts
that acknowledge the existence of tribal boundaries.
Run continued to be used in this sense (as late as
1909), but station came increasingly to mean an establishment
rather than an area and, in this application,
to equate with mission station or a reserve set
aside by a government agency (later native reserve,
and later still Aboriginal reserve ).
Quotations in the text will be found in The Australian National
Dictionary, a dictionary of Australianisms on historical principles ,
ed. W.S. Ramson, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1988.
Sheep Dip, An 8 year old pure Malt Scotch Whisky
much enjoyed by the villagers of Oldbury-on-Severn.
[From an advertisement in The Sunday Times , :1:2]
Other cities around the nation will sponsor crime
prevention awareness activities tonight, but not Olean.
Candlelight marches, children's activities and block parties
will take place as neighbors unite to speak out against
crime prevention across the country. [From the Olean
Times Herald , . Submitted by
].
People of the Books: Biographical Entries in Dictionaries
Not all dictionaries enter the names of real people,
but many do. Among English-language
monolingual dictionaries, the practice is widespread
in America and reviving in Britain. A very recent
development, of British origin, is the addition of
names to monolingual dictionaries of English as a
Second Language [ESL], such as the new encyclopedic
edition of the Oxford Advanced Learner's
Dictionary (1992).
Pronunciation dictionaries and bilingual dictionaries
typically enter names, too. But the purpose of
such entries is linguistic rather than encyclopedic:
they are there to show how they are pronounced or
how their form differs in different languages:
Cicero... Cicerón.
Mary... Queen of Scots, Stuart María Estuardo.
--Collins Spanish Dictionary (1988)
Now and then, however, even bilingual dictionaries
enter names for their content rather than for
their form. Mondadori's Pocket Italian-English English-Italian
Dictionary (1959) attempts to introduce
its Anglophone users to the glories of Italian civilization
by entering the names of some of its avatars and
describing their achievements in English:
Cimabue, Giovanni, early Florentine painter
(1240?-1302?).
Goldoni, Carlo, the greatest Italian dramatist and
writer of comedies (in Venetian dialect) (1707-1793).
Mondadori, Arnoldo, leading Italian publisher
(1889- ).
This last array prompts the question: how are names
chosen for inclusion?
Other items ( cat, the, kick the bucket ) are sometimes
selected from a corpus of language in use.
Items that appear frequently in sources of different
types are included; items less frequent or more restricted
in their distribution are kept out. Not all
dictionaries use such objective evidence. Many--
perhaps most--still rely on the subjective judgment
of the lexicographers who compile them, aided often
by a judicious perusal of what other dictionaries
include. Where names are concerned, I know of
no dictionary in any language whose selection was
made from a corpus: all rely on the assessment of
lexicographers.
Which names are deemed worthy of inclusion?
Let me examine five dictionaries with names in
them: Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary
(1983) [W9] 1983; Random House Webster's College
Dictionary (1991) [ RHWCD ]; The American Heritage
Dictionary, 3rd edition (1992) [ AHD 3]; Collins
English Dictionary, 3rd edition (1991) [ CED 3]; and,
for good measure, an ancient Nouveau Petit Larousse
Illustré (1958) [ PL ]. The first three are American;
the fourth, British; the fifth, French. All five enter
Cicero/Cicéron, Cimabue, Goldoni, and Mary/Marie
Stuart (Mary Queen of Scots) , but not Mondadori .
For a finer-grained investigation my starting-point
will be the surname Robinson, where I find the following
names:
Robinson
Name W9 RHWCD AHD3 CED3 PL
Edward G. (US actor) No Yes Yes Yes No
Edward Arlington (US poet) Yes No Yes Yes No
Esmé Stuart Lennox (Fr Playwright) No No Yes No No
George Frederick Samuel (UK Yes No No No No
statesman)
William Heath (UK cartoonist) No No No Yes No
Jack Roosevelt (US baseball No Yes Yes No No
player)
James Harvey (US historian) Yes No Yes No No
John Arthur Thomas (UK theologian) No No No Yes No
Mary (Fr President) No No No Yes No
Robert (UK chemist) Yes No Yes No Yes
Smokey (US singer-songwriter) No No No Yes No
Sugar Ray (US Boxer) No Yes Yes Yes No
12 4 3 7 7 1
Startlingly, of these 12 Robinsons no single one is
enshrined in all five dictionaries! Of the 12, six are
American; four, English; two, Irish. But as can be
seen from the table above, only W9 has, and only
CED3 approaches, parity between American and
non-American Robinsons.
So to check these dictionaries for national bias, I
looked at a few minimal pairs: pairs of people who
seemed to play similar roles on their respective sides
of the Atlantic: suffragettes, birth-controllers, popular
advocates of self-reliance, and engineers:
Minimal Pairs
Name W9 RHWCD AHD3 CED3 PL
Anthony, Susan B. Yes Yes Yes No No
Pankhurst, Emmiline (or Yes (E) Yes (E) Yes (E) Yes No
Christabel or Sylvia) (E,C,S)
Sanger, Margaret Yes Yes Yes Yes No
Stopes, Marie No No Yes Yes No
Alger, Horatio Yes Yes Yes Yes No
Smiles, Samuel No No No Yes No
Fulton, Robert Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Brunel, Mare Isambard (or No No No Yes Yes
Isambard Kingdom) (both) (both)
8 5 5 6 7 2
It is pretty clear that the British CED3 takes more
account of American names than do the American
dictionaries of British ones. This is hardly surprising,
as British dictionaries do a better job with
American English generally than American dictionaries
do with British English.
But encyclopedic dictionaries (though not, perhaps,
ESL ones) are supposed to include important
names from all over the world. So to examine cultural
bias in a wider sense, I checked the surname
Lambert, happily borne by Anglophones as well as
Francophones. Here is what I found:
Lambert
Name W9 RHWCD AHD3 CED3 PL
Michel (ca. 1610-1696: No No No No Yes
French composer)
John (1619-1683: English Yes No No No Yes
general)
Anne-Thérèse (1647-1733: No No No No Yes
French writer)
Johann Heinrich (1728-1777: No No No No Yes
German scientist)
Constant (1905-1951: English No No No Yes No
composer)
5 1 0 0 1 4
If the French dictionary was weak on Robinsons, the
British and American dictionaries are at least as
weak on Lamberts. The pedagogical pretensions of
encyclopedic dictionaries must be taken with a grain
of salt, though their skewing may be a fair reflection
of the limited knowledge that speech communities
have of the worthies of whom other speech communities
boast. And the German Lambert, though unworthy
of a biographical entry of his own in the four
Anglophone dictionaries, is remembered nevertheless
in their etymologies of the scientific unit, the
lambert, that bears his name.
Having somehow selected the names to be included,
lexicographers must set about explaining
them. But how? The mere indication of the dates
and places of birth and death will usually suffice to
identify the bearer of a name uniquely; if one goes
further, where does one stop? Dictionaries seem to
divide into two camps. Some say the minimum, limiting
themselves typically to birth and death dates,
nationality, and occupation or status [ W9 ]. Others
attempt more, need more space, and run risks. Two
examples will show the problems:
Cornwallis, Charles
...1738-1805... Brit. general and statesman.
[W9]
...1738-1805. British general and statesman.
[RHWCD]
...1738-1805. British military and political
leader who commanded forces in North Carolina
during the American Revolution. His surrender
at Yorktown in 1781 marked the final
British defeat. [AHD3]
...1738-1805, British general in the War of
American Independence: commanded forces
defeated at Yorktown (1781): defeated Tipu
Sahib (1791): governor general of India (1786-93,
1805): negotiated the Treaty of Amiens
(1801). [CED3]
..., général anglais, né à Londres (1738-1805).
Il capitula à Yorktown pendant la
guerre d'Amérique (1781), soumit Tippo-Sahib
(1792); vice-roi d'Irlande, il réprima la
rébellion de 1798. [PL]
..., English general, born London
(1738-1805). He surrendered at Yorktown
during the American War of Independence
(1781), subdued Tipu Sultan (1792); as viceroy
of Ireland, he suppressed the rebellion of 1798.
To Americans, Cornwallis was History (i.e., irrelevant)
after Yorktown. Not so to the British, Indians,
Irish, and French; though it is no less interesting to
not the different emphases of the British CED
(Treaty of Amiens--a truce in the Napoleonic
wars--but no Ireland) and the French PL (Ireland
and the bloodily suppressed rébellion de 1798 but
no Amiens).
Britten, Benjamin
...1913-1976... Eng. composer. [W9]
...1913-76, English composer and pianist. [RHWCD]
... 1913-1976. British composer known for his
song cycles, such as Les Illuminations (1939),
and operas, including Peter Grimes (1945) and
Death in Venice (1973). [AHD3]
...1913-76, English composer, pianist, and
conductor. His works include the operas Peter
Grimes (1945) and Billy Budd (1951), the choral
works Hymn to St Cecilia (1942) and A War
Requiem (1962), and numerous orchestral
pieces. [CED3]
[no entry in PL]
What was Britten's occupation or status? Composer
only? Composer and pianist? Composer,
pianist, and conductor? What, indeed, was his nationality:
English or British? (Cornwallis is unequivocally
British to everyone but the French.)
And which of Britten's many works deserve mention--besides
Peter Grimes ? I suspect that what Britten
is known for most of all is A Young Person's
Guide to the Orchestra; but perhaps music for children
does not count for much in dictionaries for
grown-ups.
With ordinary words and phrases in dictionaries,
the criteria for including them and the criteria
for explaining them are independent in principle.
Cat gets in because of the frequency and range of its
occurrences (determined objectively or subjectively).
What the dictionary says about cat has then
to be decided.
With names in dictionaries, the criteria for inclusion
and the criteria for explanation are inextricably
interdependent. Britten, Cornwallis, and all the
rest get in not because of their abundant presence in
texts, but because lexicographers feel that the bearers
of these names are important folk. And the explanations
the lexicographers proceed to provide for
the names are explicit attempts to justify their inclusion.
What is thus characteristic of such encyclopedic
entries is true of all the entries in encyclopedias.
In other words, an encyclopedia is an enormous exercise
in self-justification.
Verbal Aggression in The Wizard of Oz
Most North Americans and many others worldwide
have watched the movie classic The
Wizard of Oz many times, either as children or later
with their children. Yet few viewers are aware of
the considerable amount of negative language in
that children's movie. There are some ninety occurrences
of name-calling, insults, taunts, threats, self-deprecation,
harsh commands, scolding, sarcastic
remarks, and other verbal aggression in that film.
Unless one's ears are tuned to listen for verbal aggression,
one simply does not notice most negative
language. This holds true for The Wizard of Oz , too;
certainly most of it has escaped the attention of most
people, even though they might have watched the
annual television showing for decades.
L[yman] Frank Baum's book, The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz (1900), is quite different from the film
version, not only in content but also in language.
For the book's text, I consulted The Wizard of Oz ,
edited by Michael Hearn (1983); for the movie, The
Wizard of Oz: The Screenplay , edited by Noel Langley,
Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf
(1989).
Most of the aggression and verbal abuse appear
only in the movie but not in the book. Among the
book's few maledicta --mild and colorless ones at
that--are: You are nothing but a big coward! (Dorothey
to the Lion, 36), This Lion is a coward . (Scarecrow
to the Queen of the Field Mice, 53), You are a
wicked creature! (Dorothy to the Wicked Witch,
83), You are a humbug! (Scarecrow to the Wizard,
97), and I think you are a very bad man! (Dorothy to
the Wizard, 100). The movie, with its alliterative
abuse, name-calling, taunts, shouting and yelling,
threats, scolding, and nasty sarcasm is much livelier
and much scarier for children than the book. To be
sure, by today's standards, the film's most often used
epithet, fool is quite harmless; but such timeless
pearls as You clinking, clanking, clattering collection
of caliginous junk! are as effective and amusing today
as they were fifty years ago.
Actually, much of the verbal nastiness in the
film is not expressed by nasty terms but by the tone
of voice, facial expressions, body language, and
other paralingual means. The Wicked Witch, especially,
uses terms of endearment ( my little pretty, my
fine gentlemen ) when addressing others; but her
menacing face and gestures, her vicious sarcasm, her
screaming laughter, and her saccharine voice while
uttering those polite-sounding addresses and scary
death-threats are much more effective and nasty
than simple name-calling would be.
Space limitations preclude more than a sampling
of the citations. The following are arranged
chronologically:
... and chases her nasty old cat every day.
(Dorothy in the barnyard of the Gale farm, to
Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, about her dog
Toto and Miss Gulch, who hates the dog.)
You ain't using your head.... Think you didn't
have any brains at all! (Farmhand Hunk to
Dorothy in the barnyard, advising her not to
walk past Miss Gulch's place with Toto.)
Are you going to let that old Gulch heifer try
and buffalo you? (Zeke to Dorothy.)
Then the next time she squawks, walk right up to
her and spit in her eye! (Zeke to Dorothy
about Miss Gulch.)
What's all this jabber-wapping when there's work
to be done? I know three shiftless farmhands
that'll be out of a job before they know it.
(Auntie Em to her three farmhands, Hickory,
Hunk, and Zeke, who are idly standing
around.)
You wicked old witch! (Dorothy wildly to Miss
Gulch who wants her to put Toto into the
Basket.)
For twenty-three years I've been dying to tell
you what I thought of you... and now ...
well--being a Christian woman--I can't say it!
(Auntie Em to Miss Gulch who is taking Toto to
the sheriff.)
Doggone it! Hick! (Uncle Henry at his farm to
Hickory, who is working on his wind machine.
Henry uses a euphemism for Goddamn it!).
Only bad witches are ugly. (Glinda correcting
Dorothy.)
The wicked old witch at last is dead! (Glinda,
Dorothy, and the Munchkins about the Wicked
Witch of the East killed by Dorothy's house
that fell on her.)
Ding Dong! The wicked witch is dead! (The
Munchkins singing.)
She is worse than the other one was. (Glinda to
Dorothy, about the Wicked Witch of the West
and her dead sister, the Wicked Witch of the
East.)
Oh, ho-ho, rubbish!... Be gone before somebody
drops a house on you, too! (Glinda threatening
the Wicked Witch.)
I'll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!
(The Witch threatening Dorothy and Toto, before
departing from Munchkinland.)
I haven't got a brain--only straw. (The Scarecrow
self-deprecatingly to Dorothy.)
But some people without brains do an awful lot
of talking, don't they? (The Scarecrow to Dorothy.)
What do you think you're doing? (The Apple
Tree barking at Dorothy who wants to pick an
apple off him, in the forest.)
... you don't want any of those apples! (The
Scarecrow taunting the Apple Tree, so that he
will pelt them with his apples.)
Well, stay away from her! Or I'll stuff a mattress
with you! (The Witch threatening the Scarecrow.)
And you! I'll use you for a beehive! (The Witch
threatening the Tin Man.)
How long can ya stay fresh in that can? (The
Cowardly Lion taunting the Tin Man, upon
meeting him, Dorothy, and the Scarecrow in
the forest.)
Get up and fight, ya shiverin' junkyard! (The
Lion taunting the Tin Man.)
Put ya hands up, ya lopsided bag of hay! (The
Lion taunting the Scarecrow.)
...why, you're nothing but a great big coward!
(Dorothy to the sobbing Lion.)
You're right, I am a coward! (The Lion self-deprecatingly
to Dorothy.)
Curse it! Curse it! Somebody always helps that
girl! (The Witch to herself and Nikko, the
Winged Chimpanzee, seeing Dorothy in the
crystal ball waking up in the poppy field, after
Glinda let it snow.)
Who rang that bell? Can't you read? (The irate
Emerald City doorman--referring to the sign
BELL OUT OF ORDER. PLEASE KNOCK--fiercely
yelling at Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin
Man, and the Lion after they rang the bell.)
Jiminy Crickets! (Dorothy responding to the
Wizard's booming Silence! She utters a euphemism
for Jesus Christ!)
You dare to come to me for a heart--do you?
You clinking, clanking, clattering collection of
caliginous junk! (The angry Wizard yelling at
the Tin Man, who wanted a heart.)
And you, Scarecrow, have the effrontery to ask
for a brain? You billowing bale of bovine fodder
! (The irate Wizard yelling at the Scarecrow,
who wanted a brain.)
Silence, whippersnapper! (The Wizard angrily
responding to Dorothy.)
Throw that basket in the river and drown him!
(The Witch savagely to Nikko, referring to Toto
in the basket, after Dorothy refused to give her
the ruby slippers.)
Fool that I am! I should have remembered! (The
Witch self-deprecatingly, after she touched the
ruby slippers and burned herself.)
Catch him, you fool! (The Witch to Nikko, after
Toto escaped from the Witch's basket.)
Drat you and your dog! (The Witch cursing Dorothy
after Toto got away. She uses a euphemism
for damn!)
I'll tear' em apart! (The Lion to the Scarecrow
and the Tin Man on the rocky hillside, referring
to the Winkies who are marching on the
Witch's castle.)
Seize them! Stop them, you fools! (The Witch
shrieking at her Guards after the Scarecrow
and the Tin Man dropped a huge chandelier on
many of them, and the four are running away.)
Well, the last to go will see the first three go before
her... and her mangy little dog, too!
(The Witch threatening the five with death.)
You cursed brat! Look what you've done! (The
Witch shouting at Dorothy, who has just
thrown water on the burning Scarecrow and accidentally
splashed the Witch, who is now
melting and dying.)
Do you presume to criticize the Great Oz? You
ungrateful creatures! (The Wizard angrily to
the four, after they returned to him with the
Witch's broom and taunted him to keep his
promise, if he were indeed really great and
powerful.)
You humbug! (The Scarecrow indignantly to the
Wizard after they discovered that he was just a
man behind a curtain.)
Yes, yes, yes, exactly so. I'm a humbug. (The
Wizard self-deprecatingly to the three, admitting
his fraud.)
Oh, you're a very bad man! (Dorothy scolding
the Wizard, after he admitted he was a fraud.)
Oh, no, my dear. I'm a very good man--I'm just
a very bad Wizard. (Self-deprecatory admission
and defense by the Wizard to the three
and Toto.)
Mottoes from Zetland
Until 1974, Shetland was officially known as
Zetland, a name more suggestive of its fascinating
and ancient history. The Viking invasion of
the eighth and ninth centuries gave a strong practical
bias to the earlier existing Celtic culture, and
many Norse words remain in the dialect. These give
an arresting piquancy to the many proverbs still surviving
in Shetland.
Most of these are crisp and pithy in the extreme,
with an admirable precision of thought. A native
caution is typical of many, like Better da ill kent
[known] as da guid untried , which roughly parallels
the old saying Better the devil you know... but
expressed rather more forcefully.
Dere few rodds at doesna hae a mirae at da end o
him sums up the realism (even cynicism) of the
Shetlander and more wariness still in Never hüve oot
[throw out] dirty water till da clean be in! Amusingly
this represents a caution against burning one's
boats unless one is sure of a safe exit.
Exasperation with the young is a topic in many
of these proverbs. The sore feelings of a harassed
parent bringing up mischievous boys might be
soothed by the Shetland motto Mony a pellit [troublesome]
foal haes made a good horse or Dere broken
pots in aa lands , as a reminder that the problem
is universal.
Yet overindulgence of the young was firmly
checked by the reminder that It's late time to sift
when da sids [chaff] is ida bread ,' meaning discipline
is only effective when started at an early age.
Love, courtship, and marriage, as might be expected,
called forth more gems of wisdom. Too sudden
and ardent a romance was typically greeted by
head shaking among the elders who had seen it all
before. Cald is da kale at cøls ida plate, an cald is da
love at starts ower haet Cold is the kale that cools on
the plate and cold is the love that starts over hot.
Spinsters were consoled by the proverb Better
lang lowse daa ill teddered , and a grieving jilted girl
was advised by the motto, Better ee hert braks dan aa
da wirld winders , warning her not to show her feelings
too strongly.
More cheerful was the proverb A bonny bride is
shŭn buskit [well dressed]; but the wedding of two
very unattractive people was rather unkindly
summed up as Hairy butter is good enyoch for siddy
[coarse] bread!
Such native shrewdness means excellent judgment
of character and more Shetland proverbs echo
this. The hypocrite was neatly described as Hit's ill
for da kettle crook tae ca da kettle black , while ` Caff
[chaff] aye flees heicher [flies higher] dan guid
coarn summed up a false friend who deserts one in trouble.
trouble.
True comradeship, however, is not forgotten. A
friend ida wye is better dan a penny ida pocket , but
neighbor problems call forth, Yer can win by aa yer
kin, bit by yer neebir ye canna win . As for the damage
caused by gossip, Ill news is lack a fitless heddercowe ,
a witty warning that tittle tattle can travel
like a rootless clump of heather!
The sheer toil experienced by most Shetlanders
is another source of proverbs: Every man's back is
shapit for his ain burden ; and A moothful is as guid as
a belly fu firmly reminds of the days of real want.
Grit is advised rather than brooding in hard
times. Glowerin ida lum [by the chimney] never
filled da pot . As for time of plenty coming rapidly
after scarcity, watch out for Lang want is nae maet
hainin .
Sadly the special motto of the crofter-fisherman
concerns the hardship caused by lack of funds for
investment. Da riven [torn] sleeve hauds de haund
back . Naturally, the lack of ready funds holds one
back from vital purchase of an improved farm implement
or even a fishing vessel.
Many of these ancient proverbs would provide
excellent New Year's resolutions, but perhaps the
best of them advises us to live one day at a time
without so much worrying: It's a guid day at pitts aff
da nicht! It will be interesting to see if any new
proverbs will be invented in Shetland concerning
North Sea oil and the welcome novelty of its young
people now able to make a living at home. A new
awareness of rich history and tradition of belonging
to The Old Rock plus caution concerning
any threat to the native environment now provide
much food for thought and material for pungent new
Shetland proverbs.
Front Back-axle
Playing the dying King David in an otherwise
forgettable 1985 movie, Richard Gere was
short of both breath and temper.
Must you record my every word? he gasped
when he spotted a courtier making notes.
It's for the Book of Samuel, Lord.
Even without the dubious contributions of Cecil
B.De Mille or, in this case, Richard Beresford, there
are enough ludicrous misconceptions about the Bible
in circulation. One of them, based on vague
memories of the Elizabethan English of the Authorized
Version (albeit much of its language was borrowed
from Tyndale's 16th-century translation), is
that Classical Hebrew tends to be long-winded and
is overloaded with the equivalents of peradventure,
verily, and Does it find favor in my Lord's
sight?
The considerable number of italicized words
sprinkled throughout every page of the Bible provides
a clue, usually overlooked, that the original is
not to blame. Classical Hebrew dispenses with some
parts of speech that are necessary in English, so, in
the 17th century, King James's learned men to the
number of four and fifty simply added those that
were required to make sense of the translation,
printing them in italics.
Unfortunately, typographical convention employs
italics for emphasis. I recall my old headmaster
was -ing and is -ing at the top of his lungs as he
read the Lesson every morning to 1,200 uncomprehending
Manchester schoolboys. Behold his
bedstead was a bedstead of iron, Dr. Cheney
would thunder, Is it not in Rabbath of the children
of Ammon. He would then add insult to injury by
frequently reminding us that English is the language
of Milton, Shakespeare, and the Bible. I had
had enough of the original Bible literally knocked
into me by a rebbe , an old-fashioned Hebrew-teacher,
to know that the voice that breath'd over
Eden was not the one that read the news on the
BBC.
The Word according to Cheney was as eccentric
as Charles Laughton's version of Lear . The actor
believed that a capital letter in Shakespeare's Folio
and Quarto texts indicates emphasis, Sir Peter Hall
wrote. No amount of pointing out the vagaries of
Elizabethan typesetting could shift his conviction.
So as King Lear he was left accenting in all the
wrong places and fighting for breath.
Hebrew, I am happy to report, has always
tended to an admirable brevity. By 1708, Iohann
Buxtors had already published his Abbreviaturis
Hebraicis , and the colloquial Hebrew of the sabra ,
the native-born Israeli, carries on the grand tradition.
The result is that everyday speech now resembles
Ira Gershwin's witty lyrics for 'S 'Wonderful:
Don't mind telling you,
In my humble fash,
That you thrill me through
With a tender pash.
This is just the opposite of the current trend in
English. Media people, politicians and academics, to
paraphrase Gavin Ewart, inflate the language in a
way they shouldn't oughtn't just to make their pronouncements
sound more important. Even the BBC
no longer employs two words to describe an institution
founded in 1785 but now describes The Times
as The Times newspaper, as if listeners might otherwise
believe that the Times Furnishing Company
has taken to analyzing Mr. Major's foreign policy.
An old friend of mine who worked on the Guardian
maintains that we ought to be thankful that Arthur
Mee's Children's Newspaper is no longer with us.
Otherwise the BBC would undoubtedly refer to it as
the Children's Newspaper children's newspaper.
Colloquial Hebrew is excessively economical,
and its shortcuts have been further abbreviated by
the numerous acronyms used throughout the armed
forces. If it were not for the fact that military service
is compulsory and most males, at least, do reserve
duty until late middle age, civilians and
soldiers would be quite unable to understand each
other. I once pointed this out to the editors of The
Jerusalem Post, Israel's English-language daily. To
reflect Israeli life more accurately, I suggested, they
would have to print the news in the same sort of
English favored by real-estate agents:
The Is'l govt's refusl 2 agree 2 PLO attndce
be4 renewg the Gen Conf is the most impt elemt
stading in te way of a jst & lsting M.E. peace.
Compressed speech is the norm, particularly among sabras.
Dash, they cry, telescoping ( Drishat ) Sh(alom) ,
when they wish you to give someone their regards, followed
by Lehit(raot) ' literally au revoir, as they bid
you farewell. To be fair, Lehit is gradually being
pushed out by a foreign importation, 'Bye .
Even the notorious sabra impudence is frequently
expressed in a truncated form. Zabash, they
say as they dismiss a subject, Z( u ) ba ('aya) sh(elekha),
That's your problem. Little wonder that foreign-born
Israelis, especially those who were taught old-world
manners, soon learn to parrot another abbreviated
sabra expression: they describe the offender
as having a Padas Pa(rtsuf) d(oresh) s(tira) a face
that invites a slap.
Rehov Dizengoff, one of Tel Aviv's main streets,
is usually shortened to Dizengoff or even Dizi , which
might mislead a tourist into believing it was named
after Benjamin Disraeli instead of Meir Dizengoff,
the city's first mayor. This thrift of tongues sometimes
gets sabras into trouble when they venture
abroad. They confuse their hosts in London, for example,
by asking how to get to Oxford when they
mean Oxford Street and not the city of dreaming
spires. The shopping street, with its branch of Marks
and Spencer's, is more of a magnet for visiting Israelis
than Buckingham Palace and Madame Tussaud's combined.
This sort of mishap is only one of the problems
they encounter. Other misunderstandings frequently
occur because of an inability to distinguish between
the vowels of bit and beet. An Israeli girl who found
lodgings in Weech Road, Hampstead, found herself
involved in an Abbott and Costello routine every
time she went to register as an alien at the local police
station. When she was asked for her address, she
would answer, Wich Road.
Yes, which road? the desk sergeant would repeat
patiently.
I can't imagine what the poor copper would
have had to say if Hebrew pronouns had cropped up
in this comedy routine. The possibilities are endless
for who means he while, contrariwise, he means
she, and me signifies who.
Borrowings from other languages frequently undergo
sea changes, but when they are complicated by
the tendency of colloquial Hebrew to abbreviate, the
results are frequently weird and wonderful. Sealed-beam
headlights , for example, were corrupted into
Silbim in Hebrew; but - im is the masculine plural suffix
for nouns-- kibbutz, kibbutzim, for example. The
result, not entirely unexpectedly, is that a single
headlight is now referred to as a silb. Some borrowings
completely mystify the non-Hebrew speaker. It
does not take much ingenuity to translate ambrex as
handbrakes, but the real difficulty arises when a
two-part noun is abbreviated and the wrong half, so
to speak, is discarded. Kvacker, for example, referring
to any kind of porridge, is a truncated form of
Quaker Oats, while kottej is cottage cheese and not a
quaint little thatched dwelling with roses entwined
round the door. The same anarchy reigns in electronics,
where tep means tape-recorder and not the tape
itself. The leisure industry is similarly afflicted: a
Kountri is not a state, territory, or nation but a country
club.
There are four things according to the Book of
Proverbs that are beyond understanding: the way
of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a
rock; the way of a ship in the sea; and the way of a
man with a maid. A fifth that defies comprehension
is now the herbrew pony, borrowed from ponytail
migrated from the back of the head to the forehead
and came to mean bangs or fringe.
Readers who have got this far, may be able to
tackle another development without the aid of a diagram:
bekex, a simple corruption of back-axle, has
been in common usage since the days of the British
mandate, for the mechanical expertise of soldiers of
the Jewish Brigade, manhandling 30 cwt. trucks over
frozen Italian mountain passes in the winter of 1944,
soon outstripped their grasp of English. Bekex, as far
as they were concerned, meant any azle. As a result,
it is now necessary to qualify the noun in order
to specify which axle is being referred to, so that
bekex kidmi means, tout court, front back-axle.
Tide-end town, which is Teddington (or is it?)
Leslie Dunkling [XVIII, 4] has his reservations
(unfairly, it seems to me) about A.D. Mills, A
Dictionary of English Place-Names. But he could
have mentioned a most important function that the
book fulfills: that of setting straight the many misapprehensions
regarding the origins of English place-names.
It is not just that people like a colorful or
romantic origin for a name and one that they can
readily understand, but that folk etymologies themselves
are perpetuated by reference works and
guide books normally well regarded for their trustworthiness
and authority.
It is they, therefore, as much as anybody, who
are to blame for the continuing fiction that Abingdon
means town of the abbey, that Boston is named for
St. Botolph, that Coventry means place of the abbey,
that the second word of Leighton Buzzard represents
French beau désert, that Lichfield means
field of the corpses, that Maidstone means Medway
town, that Morpeth means moor path, that Redruth
means town of the Druids, that Southend is so
called because it is at the southern end of Essex, that
Westminster is a minster west of St. Paul's Cathedral,
and so on. At least Mr. Mills lays all these revenants
to rest.
Take Coventry, for example, and turn to the general
reference books and guides. Coventre, the
Couentrev of Domesday Book, may derive from a
convent of the Saxon period [ Blue Guide to England,
1980]; It probably owes its origin to the erection
in the 7th c of an Anglo-Sexon convent [ The
New Shell Guide to England, 1981]; Established under
the protection of a Saxon convent in the 7th century
[ The New Shell Guide to Britain , 1985]. Yes,
they are cautious, and do not explicity derive Coventry
from convent, but they do imply that the word
is the source of the name.
Boston has long had its name linked with St.
Botolph and is explicitly interpreted by the Blue
Guide as St. Botolph's Town. The connection is
also mentioned in other works, such as Everyman's
Encyclopaedia (1978): Its name is said to be detived
from Botolph's Town, St. Botolph having
founded a monastery here in 654.
But all these origins are either just plain wrong
or at any rate highly suspect.
So what do the names mean? Abingdon means
Æbba's hill; Boston means Bōtwulf's stone; Conventry
means Cofa's tree; Leighton Buzzard is named
for the Busard family, who owned land here in the
13th century; Lichfield means open land near
Letocetum, the latter name itself meaning gray
wood; Maidstone probably means stone of the
maidens (i.e., where the girls gathered); Morpeth,
like it or not, means murder path; Redruth, a Cornish
name, means red ford; Southend arose at the
southern end of Prittlewell parish; Westminster is
west of the City of London.
How can one be so sure? Because the forms of
the names, as they are recorded over the years, tell
use so. To put it broadly, we must be guided by language
as well as by history or geography. Historic
events and geographical attributes themselves frequently
serve to promote many of these false etymologies.
It cannot be denied that Abingdon arose
by an abbey, for example, or that Maidstone is on
the Medway. St. Botolph's church, Boston, is moreover
a noted landmark (the Boston Stump) is more-can
also readily envisage the Bedfordshire countryside
around Leighton Buzzard as at one time being a
beautiful wild place. (The village of Beaudesert
Henley-in-Arden, Warwickshire, has a name that
really does mean this.)
Of course, one cannot be one hundred per cent
certain about the exact meaning of every name.
That is way it is necessary to say probably about
the meaning of Maidston. But this origin is much
more likely than the one first quoted.
Maybe this is the place to shatter a few more
illusions, not restricting the names to England, as
Mills does, but extending them to include other
well-known places in Britain. The pseudo-origins
have all been recorded in print, even though some
derive from 19th-century gazetteers.
Arundel (West Sussex) does not mean swallow,
from Old French, but is Old English meaning
hoarhound valley, from the plant of the nettle
family.
Baltimore (Co. Cork, Ireland) does not mean
Great house of Baal but townland of the big
house.
Bideford (Devon) does not mean by the ford but
probably ford at the stream called Byd.
Birmingham (West Midlands), despite the proximity
of Castle Bromwich and West Bromwich, and
the colloquial form of its name as Brummagem, is
not related to those places (meaning farm where
broom grows) but means village of Beorma's
people (i.e., his family or followers).
Cambridge (Cambridgeshire) is not named for the
Cam. The river is named for the town, and the
town's original name (in modern terms) was
Grantabridge. Granta is still an alternative name
for the Cam today, especially in academic circles,
e.g., for the title for the literary magazine
Granta. Cambridge is named in some Old English
records as Grantcheste, `Roman camp on
the Granta.
Chelmsford (Essex), although on the Chelmer,
does not take its name from the River but the
other way around. Its name means Cēolmæbreve;r's
ford, from a personal name.
Daventry (Northamptonshire) does not mean
town of two rivers or town of the Danes but
Dafa's tree. It is thus a name along the lines of
Coventry.
Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, is not so named
because it was founded by King Edwin of North-umberland
(reigned 617-33). The name is found
before his reign and perhaps means fort on a
slope.
Flamborough Head (Humberside) is not so named
from the flames of a beacon here. Its name
means Fleinn's stronghold, from a personal
name.
Gosport (Hampshire) does not have a name meaning
God's port, referring to a 12th-century
French bishop who took refuge from a storm
here. Its name means market town where geese
are sold.
Guildford (Surrey) does not mean ford where
golden flowers grow, and still less ford of the
guild, but ford by the hill with golden sands.
Halifax (West Yorkshire) does not mean holy hair,
traditionally referring to some martyred maiden,
but probably nook of land with coarse grass,
the first part of the name representing Old English
halh (related to modern hole and hollow ),
and the hair in this case being long, straggly
grass.
Hythe (Kent) does not have a name related to haven
but derives from Old English hyth landing
place. This despite the similarity of meaning.
Lewes (East Sussex), on the Ouse, does not derive
from this river, as if French L'Ouse. It may
not even represent the plural of Old English
hlyw burial mound as usually explained. Current
thinking is that the name is related to Welsh
llechwedd slope, hillside.
Liverpool (Merseyside) is not named for its fabled
liver bird, despite the latter's representation in
the city's coat of arms. Its name means what it
says, livered pool, i.e., one with muddy or
weedy water. (The Red Sea had the former literary
name of Livered Sea similarly.)
Oakham (Leicestershire) is not named for its oaks
but means Occa's homestead or Occa's riverside
land, depending whether the second half of
the name represents Old English hām or hamm .
Oxford does not derive its name from nearby Osney
despite ecclesiastical links with this place. It
means what it says: ford where oxen cross.
(The alternative origin here was doubtless proposed
from the outrageous idea that a venerable
university city should have such a rustic name.)
Rutland, the historic county (of which Oakham,
above, was the county town), does not mean
root land or red land or even rutted land but
Rōta's land, from a personal name.
Wallingford (Oxfordshire) does not refer to a ford
by an old fortification (Latin vallum ) but means
ford of Wealth's people, again from a personal
name.
Wellington (Shropshire) is not so called from its
location on Watling Street. Its name probably
means Wēala's farm (i.e., one associated with
him in some way).
Westmoreland, the historic county now subsumed
into Cumbria, does not have a name meaning
west mere land, despite its proximity to the
Lake District, but west moor land, i.e., land
of the people living to the west of the moors.
And while we are about it, London remains an
obscure name, despite attempts to interpret it as
Londinos' place, from a Celtic personal name said
to mean wild one. The - don is almost certainly not
Old English denu valley (as it is in Croydon , wild
saffron valley) or dūn hill (as it is in Huntingdon
huntsman's hill), but probably represents an integral
part of some pre-Celtic name. This means that
the first part of the name does not mean, as has been
variously proposed, from a plethora of languages,
lake, wood, populous, plain, ship, moon,
among others.
It was Rudyard Kipling, incidentally, who in his
poem The River's Tale, promulgated the origin of
Teddington in the quotation in the title of this article.
True, Teddington is on the Thames, and moreover
it is at the upper tidal limit of the river. But the
name actually means Tuda's farm, from a personal
name. Sorry, folks, but there it is.
In the Name of Revolution
Revolution does not invariably or even usually
have much effect on language. The English
Puritan Revolution, or Civil War, in some ways culturally
the most radical of social upheavals, so annihilated
religious artifacts created in England before
it that they are preciously rare today; yet it affected
the English language hardly at all, even temporarily.
The survival after the American Revolution of such
names in the former British colonies in North America
as Georgetown, Georgia, and New England evidence
that the revolutionary spirit in the future USA
had little effect on nomenclature. The same can be
said of Mexico, where a few words like Reforma and
ejido took on new meanings during and after the
Revolution but where, with the exception of some
street names, toponyms remained largely unaffected:
Guadalupe remained Guadalupe , and Monterrey
remained Monterrey .
With the possible exception of the French, who
tried changing even the names of the months to memorialize
their revolution, the Russians make more
of their language than any other people about whose
language I know anything. But whereas the changes
wrought in French by the French Revolution were
canceled by the Thermidorean reaction, in the
newly formed and freshly named Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics (more commonly called the USSR
or, in Cyrillic, CCCP ) wholesale changes of toponyms,
following changes of personal names, did not
really set in till the Soviet Thermidor brought Stalin
to dictatorial power.
In Russia it was not names alone that were
changed in the language of the revolutionary country.
The alphabet was trimmed of a letter that had
become phonetically superfluous, as c has become in
English, and the orthography was simplified by the
omission of the hard sign after final hard consonants.
More subtle effects were introduced through Communist
diction. For example, Lenin's famous definition
of Communism, Communism--that is Soviet
rule plus the electrification of the whole country,
with its est' and plyus strikes me as rather un-Russian,
as Communist jargon. And the profusion of
acronyms that inundated the Russian language owed
much to revolutionary brusqueness. In Solzhenitsyn's
brilliant title for his exposé of Soviet forced-labor
camps, Arkhipelag GULag , he exploits the ugliness
inherent in one of these acronyms. New terms
like apparatchik, kolkhoz, and khozraschet were invented,
old words like komissar, soviet , and tovarishch
were given new meanings, and some Russian
words of both kinds were borrowed into other languages,
including English.
Until fairly recently the Latinate Russian term
nomenclatura meant about the same thing as in English
and other languages. The 1938 edition of the
Soviet Tolkovyi Slovar' Russkogo Yazyka defines
nomenclatura as The totality of appellations employed
in any specialization. No other definition is
given. But the noun has acquired a secondary meaning
in Russian: the privileged and operative personnel
of a Communist party. It is with this secondary
meaning that the word has been borrowed from Russian
into English, as well as into French and other
languages.
There is logic in the semantic drift of a derivative
of the Latin word for name to mean the top
personnel in a Communist state. Like Christians
joining a religious order, some old Bolsheviks
changed their names. The ostensible reason for such
name changes was to confuse the tsarist police, but
consideration of the root meanings of the names
chosen by the revolutionaries reveals that the sobriquets
were at least as much noms de guerre as noms
de plume or cover names. Ulyanov became Lenin, a
name probably suggested by a strike of gold miners
on the Lena River. But Ilyich, as Lenin liked to be
called, was a relatively modest man--as long as he
got his way. Dzhugashvili selected the Russian word
for steel, stal', as the root of his revolutionary
name, the - in and -ov (-off, -ev) suffixes of Russian
surnames being only surname indicators. Rosenfeld
turned to Stone (Kamenev) , Scriabin to Hammer (Molotov),
and Peshkov became Bitter (Gorky). Bronstein,
perhaps out of a Jewish sense of irony, provided
the exception to prove the rule by borrowing
the surname of an Odessa jailer, Trotsky.
Despite all that embalmers and mausoleums can
do, people are highly perishable, soon gone from
this earth, while cities and geographic sites last
longer. So as Ilyich's body was eternalized in embalming
fluids (or duplicated in wax, as some skeptics
believe) and displayed much like the relics of
saints under an impressive mausoleum in Red
Square against the Kremlin wall, the city created by
the westernizing tsar and named for himself with a
western, German name, Sankt-Peterburg , was renamed
Leningrad. Tsaritsyn was renamed for Stalin,
-grad being the Russian equivalent of -ton or - burg
in English. And other figures in the Soviet pantheon
or nomenclatura were likewise immortalized: Samara
became Kuibyshev; Ekaterinburg was renamed
Sverdlov; Simbirsk was renamed Ulyanovsk , a derivative
of Lenin's original surname; Nizhnii Novgorod
was renamed Gorky; and so on across the map of
Russia and to a lesser extent of the USSR.
As far as language, particularly toponymy, is
concerned, what has been called the Second Russian
Revolution was adumbrated by the recoiling in
horror from Stalin and his works that followed
Khrushchev's address to the Twentieth Party Congress
in 1956. Stalingrad was renamed Volgograd.
Of nine toponyms created to honor Stalin that are
listed in the index of a 1954 Soviet atlas not one is
included in a 1968 Soviet dictionary of geographic
names. But the way in which names were changed
in the period of destalinization differed significantly
from the reversion to tsarist names in the
period of glasnost and perestroika. Stalingrad did
not become again Tsaritsyn, nor did Stalin Peak revert
to an earlier name but rather was renamed
Communism Peak. Stalinabad, the capital of Tadzhik
Republic, did regain its original Tadzhik
name of Dushanbe , but here the change was back
to the old name of a caravan stop and had nothing
to do with tsarist Russia.
Going back to Sankt-Peterburg from Leningrad
was reversion with a vengeance, literally. It has
been said that some people born in Petrograd (as St.
Petersburg was renamed with a Slavic calque in
World War I) have lived out their lives in Leningrad
and will die in Sankt-Peterburg. Sankt-Peterburg is
awkward, is un-Slavic, un-Russian, grating. Peter's
city has hardly ever been called that in conversational
Russian. Peterburg is the name in common use
and is the title of Belyi's novel about the city. An
informal, slightly irreverent name, corresponding to
such slangy American contractions as Chi, Philly,
and Frisco, that spans the official mutations is Piter
(pronounced roughly like English Peter ).
In November, 1991, when I mentioned to a resident
of Sankt-Peterburg my distaste for the restored
official name, she shrugged and remarked,
Well, the thing was to get rid of the Lenin . Nothing
laid bare the latent loathing of Communism,
even at its best, in Russia so strikingly as the change
by referendum from Leningrad to Sankt-Peterburg .
The change was made by popular demand despite
the plea of older residents that it not be made till
they, who had heroically withstood the German
siege of Leningrad, were dead and gone. The renaming
of both Leningrad and Stalingrad was historically
and psychologically costly because nothing that has
happened in either city amounts to nearly so much
as their roles in World War II. One can hardly say,
“The defeat of von Paulus' army at Volgograd was
the turning point of the war.” Conversely when cities
like Kuibyshev and Sverdlovsk or institutions like
the Kirov Theater or streets like Gorky Street regained
their original names, it was rather as if they
had got back on track, as if they had been on a siding
since, say, the tsar and his family were murdered at
Ekaterinburg.
Like the October Revolution, the so-called Second
Russian Revolution has brought changes to the
Russian language that in some cases have spilled
over into English and other languages. Glasnost and
perestroika are obvious examples of old Russian
words that have acquired new, revolutionary significance
and been borrowed with their new meanings.
Examples of words drawn into the Russian vocabulary
by recent revolutionary developments are:
mafia, miting mass meeting and its verb form mitingovat',
and biznes and biznesmen in a non-pejorative
sense. There is also a tendency to resurrect
words current in tsarist times and play around with
them. For example, the Sunday supplement of Izvestia
for November 11-17, 1991, has an article on divorce
in Russia that is titled: Your Ladyship, Dame
Separation...
During the period of destalinization Stalin Peak
in the Pamirs, the highest point in the USSR , was
renamed Communism Peak. One wonders whether
the mountain has been re-renamed or soon will be.
Capitalism Peak? Free Market Mountain? Well no,
the peak's next appellation will probably be a Tadzhik
name since the mountain is in Tadzhikistan.
Examples of this kind of national restoration of local
names are the renaming of Stalinabad already mentioned
and the renaming of the capital of Kyrgyzstan.
Formerly renamed for the Soviet military hero
Frunze, it is now again called Bishkek , which I take
to be Kyrgyz for something.
What is to be the fate of the Russian language in
the fragmented, formerly brotherly republics? I
have noticed that on televised newscasts Lithuanians,
Georgians, and Armenians almost always speak
to reporters or their interpreters in fluent Russian.
A Vienna-based cotton broker whom I met in Sankt-Peterburg
in November, 1991, was negotiating with
Uzbeks in Russian. At about the same time a young
Uzbek on the train between Moscow and Petersburg
seemed perfectly at home in Russian, I suspect more
so than he would have been in Uzbek. On the other
hand, a few years ago I met a Lithuanian film maker
in Tashkent who spoke or would speak no Russian at
all. Perhaps Russian in most of the former Soviet empire
will be grudgingly retained as an economic and
maybe even political lingua franca, somewhat like
English in India. Conceivably, especially in the Baltic
states, English could become the working language
for trade and technology and even have a
cultural impact like Demotic Greek in the Mediterranean
basin in classic times. But one can hardly
imagine that Sankt-Peterburg/Petrograd/Leningrad/
Sankt-Peterburg will ever be called Peterston .
Meditation on media
Graham Green, in the second of his autobiographical
books, Ways of Escape , told this about his
friend, Evelyn Waugh: Evelyn's diaries have been
joyfully exploited by the media, a word that has
come to mean bad journalism. Yes, of course. But I
have noticed that is is principally the windier electronic
journalists, and advertising and PR gentry,
who like to use the word media (often pronounced
[MEEja]), whereas those print journalists who have
sensitivity in English usage rarely use it.
Webster's New World Dictionary gives this as
one of several definitions for medium: a means of
communication that reaches the general public and
carries advertising. Then it points out that in this
sense, a singular form media (plural medias ) is now
sometimes heard. I was afraid that something like
that would happen. Perhaps before long the fancier
speakers and writers will begin to use mediae as the
plural. (Actually, that is the accepted plural for the
media that is the middle coat of the wall of a blood
or lymph vessel.)
Medium was used in England in the late 18th
century with respect to newspapers, and media may
have had some use in that sense during the 19th century.
But the plural has come into full flower only
during the middle years of this century. It was not
given in the 1944 edition of The Concise Oxford Dictionary ,
but is in the two most recent editions.
Now we have an unseemly horde of derivatives.
A few times I have been called a mediaperson because
for many years I have done a little freelancing
for newspapers and magazines. (I have also been
called a POB print-oriented bastard because I have
only flimsy interest in radio and television, except as
a consumer of some of what they have to offer.)
A word that could be useful if it were not so
abominable is mediamorphosis which someone in academia
coined to designate the distortion or transformation
of facts in some of the media. Then there
is the media event , an event staged deliberately and
cunningly, even manipulatively, for extensive coverage
by the media: it has also been called a pseudoevent .
A person who has qualities that make him attractive
to the media, especially television, is now
said to be mediagenic . I once met at a conference a
man who gloried in the title media coordinator: I
learned that his principle duties were taperecording
and film-projecting. If you are media-shy you do not
like being interviewed or reported on by mediapersons.
Media fragmentation is the marketing concept
that there can be too many outlets for a successful
sales campaign: customers are assailed by so many
appeals for their business that the campaign backfires.
This results when the experts have not accurately
measured media weight , whatever that may be.
But there is a word for it! As a professional
translator who has devoted more than 40 years to
the translation of English into Spanish, I beg to differ
with John R. Cassidy in There Just Isn't a Word for
It [ XVIII ,2].
Schedule . In addition to horario, proyecto , and
programa , mentioned by Mr. Cassidy (and the
corresponding verbs, proyectar, programar ),
Spanish has the very useful one-word equivalents
calendario, agenda, and diario (for daily
schedule, of course). And we should not forget
the always handy plan and planear .
Argument. The Spanish dictionary reveals argumento
and argumentación as perfectly good Spanish
words with meanings equivalent to argument (in
the sense of reasoning, if not in that of dispute).
The verb argumantar to argue is in common use.
Esperar can mean to wait or to hope, but to
clarify the latter meaning one can say abrigo la
esperanza , literally, I have the hope. As for the
meaning to expect, literate Spanish speakers
know that--aside from using the noun
expectativa --the precise meaning is conveyed by
employing the reflexive no me esperaba, no se
esperaba , etc. For example, I was waiting for the
bus and hoping it would come; but when it did, I
no longer expected it would be rendered as
Estaba esperando (or aguardando) el autobús con
la esperanza de que llegara; pero cuando vino ya
no me lo esperaba.
Drop . There is a very simple way to say it dropped
without using the self-accusatory I dropped it lo
dejé caer or the reflexive se me cayó: one can just
say se cayó. Lo dejé caer does not necessarily
imply on purpose; it can also mean accidentally.
And se me cayó cannot be rendered, even literally,
as it fell itself to me: its meaning is something
more akin to it slipped away (or out of my hands)
and fell. This type of construction is best handled
be se me fue , which may be translated as it got
away from me.
Chairman . There is another word besides presidente:
it is director . Or one can use jefe or regente .
Ganar . In addition to ganar , to earn can be
rendered as cobrar, lucrar, or percibir.
Kill the Christian Democrats Kill is not an
appropriate equivalent of mueran , which is better
translated as `death to': it is not an exhortation `to
wipe out,' merely an expectation or hope that the
object of execration go to an early grave.
Your correspondent, Raymond Harris [ XIX , 1],
is quite wrong in thinking that Chevalier N. Kenne
Grant was using a bogus word.
The expression Beau-Tick (beautiful mark) is
commonly used in Bordeaux with its many associations
with Anglo-French Negociants.
Clearly, David Galef's classics course was done
in translation, for had he read in Greek, he would
never have written Pandora's Box but Pandora's
Wine Jar [The Niceness Principle, XVII , 2]. The
Greek word was (and is) πíθoς ( pithos ) a six-footish
wine jar. This error is a perpetuation of Erasmus,
who published his Adagia (1500) in which, inter
alia, appears the Pandora story in which he mistakes
πυξις ( pyxis ) a smallish boxwood box for πιθος, the
largest wine storage container.
English Adverbial Collocations,
Most of those who learned English as a native
language have not even the slightest idea of the
problems facing people who learn it as a foreign language.
Those who do not have to give a second
thought to the idiomaticity of English word order
can count themselves doubly blessed: the system
does not yield readily to rules, as native speakers
know from listening to the speech of foreigners who
have not quite mastered it, regardless of how long
they have been using the language. Thus, it is with
the greatest tolerance and sympathy that one approaches
the review of a book that, in its first fifty
pages, attempts to provide users with some inkling
as to what is going on in English word order,
whether the book was written by a native speaker or
a foreigner.
From a hint given on page 51, one gathers that
Kozlowska studied at Edinburgh University; from
her facility with the English used in her discussion of
collocations, one gains the impression that she has
excellent control of the language. But difficulties
begin to become apparent when one investigates her
analysis of English collocations.
(For those unfamiliar with the term collocation ,
a quotation from the opening words of the book is
useful:
What is a collocation? It can be said to be a set
of two or more words that frequently occur in
juxtaposition and that seem to fit together. We
say: a pretty girl, and a beautiful woman, but a
handsome man. We say drive fast and expand
rapidly,' but get tired quickly. It will be noticed
that in each of these examples the meaning of the
various modifiers is basically the same, but different
words are used to express it, depending on
the word that is modified. [p. 9]
If we call the way the speakers of a given language
puts its words together idiom , then the process of
separating out the resulting phrases produces collocations .
An idiom , a combination of two or more
words the meaning of which is different from the
literal meaning of the sum of its components (like
kick the bucket, red herring ), is distinguished from
the concept of idiom , which refers to the natural order
and combination of words by a native speaker.
Unfortunately, we do not have separate words for
the two in English; in French, the red herring type is
conveniently called idiotisme and the conceptual
one is called idiome . So far, English speakers have
shunned calling anything they say an idiotism, so
the ambiguity remains.)
It scarcely needs me to point out that English
word order is indescribably complex, so it is no small
wonder that in a brief work like this, while the author
has labored mightily (and successfully) to identify
many of its features, she has inevitably failed to
cover all contingencies.
The first disagreement I have with her is in her
use of the term homonym , which she defines as [a
word] looking the same, but differing in meaning
[from another word] [p. 11]. She then proceeds to
call see physically and see comprehend
homonyms, as well as provoke anger and provoke
cause, run physical sense and run work, function,
and attack physically and attack verbally. I
eschew the term homonym because it suffers from an
inherent ambiguity: a homograph is, to lexicographers,
at least, a word that is spelled the same as
another but has a different etymology ( bear 1 animal/
bear 2 carry; bore 1 carried/
bore 2 drill/ bore 3 tire/
bore 4 tide wave); a homophone is a word that
sounds exactly like another but is spelled differently
( bear/bare; bier/beer; bore/boar ). In this context,
homonym , which is usually defined as a word that is
pronounced or spelled like another but having a different
meaning, is ambiguous, if not inaccurate, for
the implication is that homonyms are different
words.
In her care to be precise, the author errs by
writing, The language is British. No U.S. expressions
are given. As it happens, of course, most of
what is described is American English as well, so the
second part of the statement is incorrect.
As Koslowska correctly points out, the choice of
adverb or adjective depends largely on the verb, adverb,
or substantive being modified. The problem
arises with the enormous flexibility of metaphor accorded
by language: we can use provocative of
words, situations, and even low-cut dresses, depending
on the focus of emphasis of what is being provoked.
I should not like to have to face the task of
listing all the adverbs that might be used with the
verb run , even if it is restricted to cars: smoothly,
quietly, silently, uninterruptedly, fitfully, intermittently,
efficiently, well, faultlessly, beautifully, perfectly,
poorly, badly, sluggishly, economically,
swiftly, rapidly, quickly --and then one must be prepared
to add the multi-word phrasal modifiers, like
without a hitch, as if it would never stop, like a clock,
like clockwork , etc. There is not a finite number, I
am sure, but it must be a large number. The author
is spared an exhaustive listing by the constraints of
her corpus (British newspapers), which provides a
representative listing but barely scratches the surface
of the language.
I would take issue with the analysis of [ACTIVE
ONLY, ACTIVE/PASSIVE,] and [PASSIVE ONLY] constructions,
if only because one of the nastiest areas of
grammatical analysis of English lies in distinguishing
between passives--that is, past participles--and adjectives.
We would say, for example, that gone in He
has gone is a past participle but an adjective in He is
gone (if only because English does not use the verb
to be as an auxiliary, the way French does); alleged
in it was alleged is clearly a past participle, but in the
alleged culprit it is an adjective. It is set forth [p.21]
that contrive something can be modified by brilliantly,
neatly, or skilfully only in the [PASSIVE], with
cleverly, ingeniously restricted to its [ACTIVE/PASSIVE]
reflexes; but that is not so, for we can say, They brilliantly/neatly/skilfully/treacherously/nefariously...
contrived to make the blame fall on the chairman .
The sentence Napoleon badly/ignominiously defeated
the Austrians and Russians is called wrong
on the grounds that badly and ignominiously (like
heavily, thoroughly, utterly) can be used only with a
passive verb; but we can say Napoleon defeated the
Austrians and Russians badly or ignominiously at
Austerlitz without violating natural English idiom.
In a short section in which Postmodifying adverbs
with adjectives are discussed, confusion is
confounded by juxtaposing stiff neck with We were
worried stiff . The latter is not readily analyzable by
normal parsing, for if we are drawn to retain the
adjectival nature of stiff (instead of conceding that it
might be used as an adverb), we are obliged to characterize
worried as having taken on the guise of a
copula.
Laurence Urdang
Volunteer Tudors Needed. [From an ad in the Sentinel-Standard
(Ionia, Michigan), . Submitted
by ]
WARNER'S BUY 6, GET 2! [From a Macy's advertisement,
The Philadelphia Inquirer ,
Submitted by ]
The Language of Jokes
That humor is a very serious business is certainly
borne out by the po-faced treatment the subject
receives in this analysis, though the fault cannot
be said to lie with the author. The subject, alas, calls
for jokes to be explained, surely the most painful
experience that could be dreamt up by the mind of
woman (just to give them equal time): Torquemada
do your worst! It is hard to believe that anyone
could survive the mental thumbscrew that explaining
jokes inflicts: even if one has not got a joke and
its explanation is, in a sense, welcome--after all, no
one likes to feel left out--what humor it might once
have possessed is crushed out of it. I have tried to
write about humor and have found it such a humorless
chore that I have given up, usually after one
paragraph. There is a great deal to be said about
jokes and humor in general, and it is hard to understand
why the subject is so exasperatingly boring.
Perhaps it is because there is a huge difference between
something's being funny and the explanation
of why it is funny, often given to someone who does
not think it is.
Those jokes in one's native language that need
explanation are usually those that have references
outside the ken of the listener. Ms. Chiaro treats not
only these but, when she hits full stride, the difficulties
in translating jokes between languages, where
even the explanations are often hard to get across,
because of either sociocultural differences, linguistic
differences, or both. Puns are a common source of
jokes, especially those that have come to be called
one-liners. In a recent letter in Sunday Times
Books [18 October 1992], a West Sussex headmaster
wrote as follows:
For years it has been sub-editing practice to
headline pieces in a punning manner: in the
Books section of October 11, for example, we
have, The art of friction, Tartar source,
Reef encounters, Class menagerie.
My mild amusement at this is, after a couple of
decades, turning to mild irritation: any chance of
a change?
Jokes involve the use of language most of the
time, though the author acknowledges the existence
of visual jokes, too. One of the shortcomings of the
book is the failure to cover, even minimally, the major
types of jokes. For example, the current trend
among stand-up comedians--particularly as reflected
in the persistent American television broadcasts
from various improvs--is simply to retail
common, ordinary, everday events and rely on the
audience to laugh appreciatively at the perception
of the comedian to point out our foibles. I suppose
that can be classified as a reaction of mild
amusement at the cleverness displayed, but it, too,
soon cloys.
The author does not appear to have reached serious
conclusions: at the end of the book, in a short
section titled Conclusion, she offers some useful observations
about expressions of humor and about
the difficulties encountered by a teacher of English
as a foreign language in trying to impart to students
the linguistic skills required to understand English
literature; but these observations can scarcely be
termed conclusions, for no coherent theory has
actually been set forth in the book.
Chiaro, always more that than oscuro in her
presentation, is not only not to be blamed for the
lack of theory but merits praise for having tackled a
subject that most of us dread and that has not been
treated satisfactorily by any of its commentators,
from Plato to Freud to Hockett, et al. In such a brief
treatment, it is not possible to cover every aspect of
a complex, multifaceted, albeit deadly subject.
I found only two small errors, both on page 94:
homphone, and the transcription \?\/tInguetI/
should be \?\/tInguttI/(for Italian cinguetti ).
Laurence Urdang
The Oxford Companion to the English Language
Readers of VERBATIM and all who share their interests
in language should own a copy of this outstanding
work. Although it is not exhaustive in its
coverage, the OCEL offers by far the most comprehensive
picture available of the English language as
the 20th century draws to a close. Still, for historical
reasons one should have liked to see entries for Ido,
Interlingua, and Volapük, which do not merit even
mention under ARTIFICIAL LANGUAGE; Syntactic
Structures , listed under CHOMSKY, ought to have its
own entry, if only for the cross reference (though
TRANSFORMATIONAL-GENERATIVE GRAMMAR is in);
scores of individuals, from contemporaries like Yorick
Wilks to important historical commentators like
Alford, Pegge, and Tooke, would have provided informative,
useful entries. (It hardly behooves me to
complain, as there is an entry not only for VERBATIM
but for URDANG, Laurence; besides, I must accept
responsibility as contributor of a number of the entries,
though, of course, I did not see the complete
work till it was published.)
I see from the foregoing that I have, inevitably,
slipped into the reviewer's trap, so neatly laid by
generations before me, of commenting on what is
not in the book under discussion rather than what is.
If I have not impaled myself on the upthrusting
points of editors' razor-sharp styli, I shall try to recover.
Some of the more interesting kinds of entries
deal with writers. As the OCEL is concerned with
language, per se, one would expect such entries to
treat the writer's style, and, indeed, the entry on
MELVILLE does so; but the treatment is uneven: that
for CONRAD, aside from quoting a passage from Heart
of Darkness , is barren of comment on language, and
that for BURGESS focuses on a quotation of nadtsat'
from A Clockwork Orange , with no mention of the
author's position (at least in the UK ) as a language
guru. Admittedly, such entries are extremely difficult
to compose, but a proper treatment has certainly
been successfully attempted in the entries for
SHAKESPEARE and for ORWELL.
The occasional historical comment involving
history recent enough for me to have been a part of
it is not always exactly right. For example, under
RANDOM HOUSE DICTIONARY is given the information,
Recognizing an opportunity in the national outcry
against Webster's New International Dictionary (Merriam,
1961), Random House commissioned an expansion
of its American College Dictionary (1947)
.... As it happened, the first plans for the expansion
of the ACD were discussed in 1958, when the
people at Random House had no inkling of a forthcoming
new edition from Merriam; as I have described
elsewhere, from its conception, the plans for
the RHD were entirely market-driven. In the entry
for COMPUTER TYPESETTING, the information is given,
Starting in the 1970s, devices with film strips or
film wheels, containing images of characters, were
widely used to produce master copies on photographic
film. More recently, the use of pre-made
film images has given way to cathode-ray tubes
which generate characters as requested. The Photon
machine was in use during the 1950s: I was
used for the composition of the Funk Wagnalls
Dictionary--International Edition in 1956; I was
present at a demonstration of the (Mergenthaler) Linofilm
in the early 1960s; and Dr. Hell's Digisetter,
which generated characters as requested from
what we might today call image bytes (to distinguish
them from pixels) was in use in the latter part of the
1960s: one was certainly in operation in 1969 at the
McCall Corporation's composition plant in Princeton,
New Jersey, driven by an RCA Spectrum computer.
One hopes that such factual slips can be
cleared up in the next edition (or printing).
It would have been useful had the entry FOLK
ETYMOLOGY included a reference to Folk Etymology,
A Dictionary of Verbal Corruption or Words Perverted
in Form and Meaning by False Derivations or
Mistaken Analogy , Rev. A. Palmer Smyth, George
Bell & Sons [London], 1882. On the other hand,
now that I have provided the reference, I suppose
that there is no need to add it to the OCEL .
Turning to subjects about which I know little, I
was delighted by the full and informative article, INDIAN
ENGLISH 1, but even that provokes a criticism
(probably felt by the Editor even more strongly than
by me), namely, where is the Index? There is such a
wealth of material buried in its thousands of articles
that remains inaccessible for lack of an Index that
one despairs of the judgment of the publishers. I
know, I know: there is a thematic guide in the
forematter and the two types of cross references at
the ends of the entries are extremely helpful; also, to
have added an Index would have run up the price of
the book by another 25 per cent (or whatever). But
so what? What boots it to have paid 20 per cent less
(I shall leave it to you to do the arithmetic) for a
book the depths and wisdom of which it is difficult to
plumb without an Index. In the entry PHILOLOGY,
for instance, appears a reference to dead language,
but there is no mention of that entry at DEAD LANGUAGE
(which, in any event, has only cross references,
quite appropriate in view of the fact that the
subject of the book is English). Still, members of
The Society of Indexers will spin in their groove--
and with justification!
The OCEL is, surely, a prodigious undertaking
and Tom McArthur, aided by his wife Feri, deserves
enormous credit for having produced a well-balanced
work. Inevitably, one encounters articles
on relatively abstruse subjects that, owing to concision,
are not easily understood, chiefly because they
assume a level of sophistication not necessarily possessed
by the user. The lengthy article on LITERARY
CRITICISM, though conveniently broken down into
fifteen sections, proved difficult reading for me. In a
review of OCEL in the Times Literary Supplement
[11 December 1992] it was suggested that inserting
asterisks alongside the terms that were treated in
their own entries would have helped; that is certainly
an accepted and often helpful practice in
longer encyclopedic texts, but it tends to interrupt
reading and clutters up shorter entries of the kind
encountered in the OCEL . It was further suggested
that language is not best served by alphabetic organization,
but that is merely a plea for much longer,
more comprehensive articles, which lie outside the
scope of a Companion . Given the restrictions on
space, the editors have done an admirable job.
One must bear in mind, too, that one of the
most difficult of an editor's responsibilities in such a
work is to rewrite articles submitted by contributors,
with widely disparate writing styles, in order to
make them, if not uniform, at least compatible. In
fine, while there is no doubt that the Companion
will--and should--become a standard work on the
language, one must not impute to its function anything
more than its service as a guide: the English
language is unimaginably vast, in its origins and history,
in its literary, philosophical, psychological, social,
and specialized applications, and in the descriptions
of its grammar, usage, dialects, and lexicon,
both historical and contemporary. Consider that the
OED , which makes no pretensions at being exhaustive
or complete, occupies some twenty quarto volumes
in its description of the lexicon alone; consider
that a descriptive bibliography of the huge number
of lexicographical works on the myriad aspects of
English alone would occupy several similar volumes;
consider the multivolume works on English grammar--by
Curme, Poutsma, Jespersen, et al.; consider
the immense corpus of English literature and
of the writings about it; and then consider all the
material ancillary to the foregoing: the teaching of
English not only to foreign learners but to native
speakers as well, the conventions of writing, punctuation,
usage, and pronunciation, the multifarious influences
of English and on English around the world,
the study of style and of literary devices, etymology,
etc. It is difficult enough to assimilate all the categories
associated with language without trying to cope
with their organization and treatment. In such an
attempt, there are bound to be points of disagreement,
arguments that important subjects have
been accorded short shrift, minor inaccuracies that
will submit to later refinement.
It is neither a matter of Don't shoot the piano-player,
he's doing the best he can, nor of If y'
know a better 'ole, go to it: the OCEL stands as a
mighty effort and, in my over-all estimation, a
hugely successful one at bringing together into a coherent,
cohesive work what is--at least--a superb
introduction to what must be acknowledged to be a
subject that is at once the most complex, changeable,
elusive, technical, emotional, political, controversial
subject of all time.
Laurence Urdang
Notes and Queries, 9th S. VI. Aug. 25, 1900.
Those who have met with extracts from Notes
and Queries in earlier issues of VERBATIM have
pressed to see more. As each year of N & Q is contained
in two large octavo volumes of some 500
pages (excluding the Index) set in eight-point type
(with reviews of books and periodicals in six-point),
readers will appreciate that it takes a while to read
through several years' worth of material and will be
patient as the volumes are mined for their gems of
informative, occasionally entertaining matter. On
the grounds that much of what we have to say today
has been said (or written)--often better--before, it
is hoped that the following will prove interesting
and useful to those who do not have ready access to
those early volumes (or the time to read them). If
the punctuation seems a little odd, it is because it
has not been changed from the original to conform
to the modern practice.
As will be seen, not every one of the following
extracts is from N & Q occasionally, another, relatively
rare source (though fortunately accessible in
the VERBATIM library) has yielded an item of interest.
Where Are They Now?
Pray, what did T. Buchanan Read?
And what did E.A. Poe?
What volumes did Elizur Wright?
And where did E.A. Roe?
Is Thomas Hardy nowadays?
Is Rider Haggard pale?
Is Minot Savage? Oscar Wilde?
And Edward Everett Hale?
Was Laurence Sterne? was Hermann Grimm?
Was Edward Young? John Gay?
Jonathan Swift? and old John Bright?
And why was Thomas Gray?
Was John Brown? and is J.R. Green?
Chief Justice Taney quite?
Is William Black? R.D. Blackmore?
Mark Lemon? H.K. White?
Was Francis Bacon lean in streaks?
John Suckly vealy? Pray,
Was Hogg much given to the pen?
Are Lamb's Tales sold today?
Did Mary Mapes Dodge just in time?
Did C.D. Warner? How?
At what did Andrew Marvell so?
Does Edward Whymper now?
What goodies did Rose Terry Cooke?
Or Richard Boyle beside?
What gave the wicked Thomas Paine?
And made Mark Akenside?
Was Thomas Tickell-ish at all?
Did Richard Steele, I ask?
Tell me, has George A. Sala suit?
Did William Ware a mask?
Does Henry Cabot Lodge at home?
John Horne Tooke what and when?
Is Gordon Cumming? Has G. Lo.
Cabled his friends again?
antidisestablishmentarians
Dr. Murray points out in his notes to In-Infer that
those who are interested in the length of words will
observe that incircumscriptibleness has as many letters
as honorificabilitudinity , viz., 22. The authority
quoted for the former is one Byfield, a divine, who
in a treatise on Collossians, published in 1615,
wrote: The immensity of Christ's divine nature hath
...incircumscriptibleness in respect of place. In
the recent biography of Dr. Benson is an entry from
the Archbishop's diary to the effect that `the Free
Kirk of the North of Scotland are strong antidisestablishmentarians,
26 letters.
Ibid .
9th S. VI. Aug. 25, 1900.
disintellectualization
from Jeremy Bentham's Abridged Petition for Justice ,
1829, p.18.
Ibid .
9th S. VI. Sept. 15, 1900, p. 207.
Mispronounced words: schism (as [skizm] rather than [sizm]).
data
...as a singular noun noted in London Stock Market
Report , 11 August 1900, is, according to N & Q editor,
probably due to ignorance.
Old England
First used in 1641, 21 years after the American colony
of New Virginia received the name of New England:
Oh, the roast beef of England,
And old England's roast beef!
Grub Street Opera , III , ii, Henry Fielding.
It is well known that the origins of many words
still elude the most determined researchers in etymology,
but, taken as a whole, I should imagine that
the proportion of idiomatic expressions without confirmed
etymologies may be higher than that of
words whose provenance has not been established.
That is not for the want of speculative comment by
those who offered largely folk etymologies, which
readers of VERBATIM will recall so sorely vexed Walter
W. Skeat. The expression take down a peg is purported
to have originated in a time when peg tankards
were in popular use. The following extract is
of interest:
Peg-Tankards , of which I have seen a few still
remaining in Derbyshire, have in the inside a row
of eight pins one above another, from top to bottom;
the tankards hold two quarts, so that there is
a gill of ale, i.e., half a pint Winchester measure,
between each pin. The first person that drank
was to empty the tankard to the first peg or pin;
the second was to empty to the next pin, &c.; by
which means the pins were so many measures to
the compotators, making them all drink alike, or
the same quantity; and as the distance of the pins
was such as to contain a large draught of liquor,
the company would be very liable by this method
to get drunk, especially when, if they drank short
of the pin, or beyond it, they were obliged to
drink again. For this reason, in Archbishop
Anselm's Canons, made in the Council at London
in 1102, Priests are enjoined not to go to drinking-bouts,
nor to drink to Pegs. The words are:
Ut presbyteri non eant ad potationes , nec ad pinnas
bibant (Wilkins, Vol. I, p. 382). This shews
the antiquity of this invention, which is at least as
old as the Conquest.
Anonymiana; or Ten Centuries of Observations
on Various Authors and Subjects ,
[Samuel Pegge], London, 1809, p. 183.
[Published posthumously; written ca 1766.]
Perhaps I am missing something, but, in the event, it
is difficult to understand how the expression take
(someone) down a peg , which means demean (someone);
reduce (someone) in estimation, esp. his own;
puncture the self-confidence or arrogance of (someone),
unless it has changed somewhat over the
years, could be connected with peg tankards. It
seems unlikely to me that being more precise than
(someone) in a drinking competition could easily
translate into the modern sense of the idiom. What
has happened, evidently, is that peg acquired the
sense of step, measure, degree hence take (someone)
down a peg meant reduce (someone) by a measurable
amount, and this is borne out by the OED at
peg, sb . 1 3, (with variants) which has citations going
back to 1589. (As the quotation above indicates, the
1102 Canons were in Latin, thus not valid citation
fodder for the OED .) Those who would derive the
expression directly from the peg tankard sense are
thus not correct, for, while that attribution might
have been the original source, the expression itself is
traceable only to a metaphor once removed from the
tankard.
EX CATHEDRA
The Diamond Jubilee Issue
As it is unlikely that I shall be around to celebrate
the Diamond Jubilee Year of VERBATIM, it
seemed reasonable to celebrate while I can and to
reminisce, briefly. As we all know, one characteristic
of time is that it stretches out before us in an
apparently interminable manner; yet, when one
looks back, it seems to have fled, disappeared, evaporated--heaven
knows where. When VERBATIM was
first published, though, I cannot recall having
looked forward much beyond the first issue; now,
thinking back, I find it astonishing that seventy-four
numbers have preceded this one. The life of a periodical
is quite unpredictable; periodicals change or
remain the same, but people are more likely to
change than remain the same, with the consequent
disappearance of venerable publications like Punch ,
for example. I do not have figures for the number of
periodicals that have met their end during the past
two decades, but I understand that there have been
many.
VERBATIM, too, has had its ups and downs. The
first issue was mailed to 96 paid subscribers; this issue
will go to more than 7000, including many outside
the United States that are not numbered among
those listed in the audited annual circulation report
required by the Postal Service to maintain a Second
Class mailing privilege. According to a survey we
conducted some years ago, each issue of VERBATIM is
read, on average, by about three people (excluding
those that go to libraries). Thus, The Language
Quarterly has more than 20,000 readers in some 60-odd
countries. Perhaps the most gratifying thing
about publishing it is that an average of more than
75 per cent of subscribers renew; in recent years,
the response has been 100 per cent to the renewal
notices attached to certain issues. I am given to understand
that, aside from journals associated with
membership in some organization, anything beyond
50 per cent is considered phenomenal. Yet, we have
never sent subscribers more than one renewal notice
followed up by a reminder a few weeks later.
On the first page of Volume I, Number 1, I
promised readers (among other things) that their
names and addresses would never be sold to anyone,
on the grounds that everyone receives enough junk
mail as it is. That promise has been kept: companies
seeking our mailing list are told that the only way to
reach our readers is through advertising in the pages
of VERBATIM.
Looking at the price of VERBATIM, it might be
worthwhile noting that the first issue consisted of six
pages; the first volume contained 28 pages (issues
alternating six and eight pages) and a subscription
cost $2.50 (about ¥1.75 in 1974). The price was
increased to $4.00 (¥2.75) a couple of years later.
Today, VERBATIM publishes 104 pages a year for
$16.50 (¥11.50)--not including this double issue.
For those who do not object to (very) rough statistics,
that averages out to an increase of from 8.9¢
(6.25p) per page to 15.9¢ (11.5p) per page. That
might seem like an unconscionable increase, allowing
for normal inflation, but the costs of paper
and postage (especially) have been driven up out of
proportion.
The greatest cost we encounter is that of advertising,
which is not only expensive but yields
meagre results in comparison to the money spent. It
is impossible to find another publication in which to
advertise that is quite like VERBATIM--that is, one
that reaches people who are interested in language--so
we advertise in media whose readers are
likely prospects and hope for the best. Our current
(September 1992 to February 1993) campaign has
cost more than $30,000 (¥20,000), yielding, so far,
fewer than 1000 subscribers. It is not difficult to
calculate that readers so expensively acquired are
not profitable till they have renewed for the third
year. Factor in the 75 per cent renewal rate, and it
can be seen that one must wait till the fourth year's
renewal; although revenues from advertising and
book sales improve that slightly, they are offset by
the fact that we have recently begun paying all contributors
The foregoing are facts, not a plea of any kind
for anything except to urge those who enjoy VERBATIM,
who have made it the highest-circulation popular
language journal in the (English-speaking) world,
to encourage others who share their interest to subscribe
and to send in their renewals quickly. VERBATIM
makes an inexpensive gift for any occasion and is
especially enjoyed by teachers (who plunder it for
ideas) and students.
Readers of long standing are aware that a few
years ago we discontinued both The VERBATIM Book
Club Catalogue (because filling orders became enormously
complicated) and, after five years, The VERBATIM
Annual Essay Competition (because the number
of high-quality submissions was diminishing).
Beginning when the Competition was terminated,
we established the VERBATIM Award, for the Pursuit
of Scholarship in Lexicography. Each January,
a Committee consisting of the three past-presidents
of EURALEX (the European Association for Lexicography)
select one or more successful applicants from
among EURALEX members to receive the award of
¥1500 (between $2500 and $3000). Since it was set
up, the entire award, at the discretion of the Committee,
has been made to one person each year. It
may not be much, but, like VERBATIM, it is, as they
say, the only game in town.
Finally, it might interest readers to learn that
the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition , now
available on CD-ROM, lists 121 citations from VERBATIM
(through Spring 1985 only).
Laurence Urdang
Tomorrow's Business Buzzwords
Change is in the air, and change brings innovation
in language. New terms spring up to reflect
new ideas. I am betting that new business jargon
will flourish in three major categories in the
1990s: human resources, internationalization, and
high technology. The trends are becoming worldwide
among English speakers as free trade and the
lowering of economic borders serve as a catalyst for
all three.
The function of business jargon is threefold: it
describes new phenomena ( PCN, Knowbot ); it can
camouflage unpleasantness ( Decruitment, RIF ); or it
can simply amuse ( Globasm, Glocal ). Some of the
other forces that prompt new words in the English
language include the arrival of the Japanese on the
world business scene and the penetration of computers
into our daily life. Admittedly, some people
use buzzwords as a weapon in the corporate jungle.
They pepper their speech with more and more of
these strange terms and words until their rivals and
colleagues find them difficult to understand. When
an adversary has to ask for clarification, the jargon-wielder
has won a point.
Here is a selection from the future, organized in
the three most fertile categories.
1. OPTIMIZING HUMAN RESOURCES
RIF Reduction in force. This is a euphemism
for sackings or firings. It also works as a verb,
when the chief hatchetman reports, after a busy day:
Great news, boss. We riffed another thousand today.
decruitment Human resources jargon for
eliminating staff; the opposite of recruitment. If
you are decruited , you are out of a job, but your
superiors feel better about not having fired you.
In fact, rule No. 1 for the surviving managers is
never to utter the F-word.
right-sizing Reduction of payroll to conform
to the staffing needs of the moment. This term
is loaded with sanctimony. In effect, it says to the
victim: Don't argue with us; just go away. We
know what size workforce is right.
skill-mix adjustment Reducing the company's
strengths while also trimming away part of
the workforce. This term can dress up even the
most ruthless staff-cutting program. Smart packaging
is half the battle.
2. GOING INTERNATIONAL
globasm Compulsive international expansion
to achieve instant gratification. Companies
that seek recognition as world-class players sometimes
move hastily into international acquisitions
and alliances. The heavy costs to the balance sheet
and the problems of culture clash can lead to a feeling
of depression and disappointment after the initial
euphoria.
PCN Parent-company national: an executive
of the same culture as the headquarters flag. As
managers begin to cross borders to work for companies
outside their native country, they bump into a
barrier they probably never imagined--the wall of
parent-company nationals that stands between them
and advancement. The PCNs have a strong career
advantage: they went to the same schools, they use
the same references, they have the same mother
tongue. In France, for example, you must know
your Victor Hugo, your Napoleonic victories, and
your future conditional. Tricky territory for the ambitious
foreigner.
dochukaku The Japanese term for adapting
corporate ways to local conditions. Originally, this
word was an agricultural term for adapting seed and
fertilizer to local soil conditions.
transnational company A firm that merges
with a foreign partner.
multidomestic An international company
that allows its foreign subsidiaries autonomy and local
identity. Different from multinational , in which
the emphasis is on worldwide homogeneity.
cross-border alliance Links with companies
beyond your home borders. A strong trend in the
early phases of Europe's burgeoning Single Market.
The cross-border alliance in technology, marketing,
manufacturing, even exchange of equity, is a good
way to test a partner before going for an outright
takeover.
glocal The fine balance between an international
company's global imperatives and local requirements.
Done well, it ensures the best of both
worlds. Probable a buzzword with a good future.
3. HIGH TECHNOLOGY
face time Personal, face-to-face meetings
with human beings. The opposite of communication
by electronic mail, voicemail, or straight telephone
talk. A true computer nerd might say: I
talked with him for six months on Compuserve, then
we finally got some good face time at Comdex in
Vegas.
knowbot A smart software package that acts
like a robot. Typically, a data-base searcher that
selects information according to personal interests,
which the computer deduces from every previous
search conducted by the operator. Very Orwellian.
zaitech Financial engineering in Japanese
technology companies applied as a way of bolstering
profits. Zai finance + tech technology.
Big Iron Tough talk among computer salesmen
to designate large computer systems that cost
millions of dollars. Such machines are not exactly a
disappearing breed, but they are increasingly replaced
by workstations that are growing steadily in
power and speed.
Bird Talk
When one enters prison for the first time,
many new things must be learned--and
learned fast. Such things as where to go, what to and
what not to do, how to behave with one's fellow inmates,
and how to communicate with them. Primarily
created as a self-defence measure against eavesdroppers,
prison slang in its own evocative way
describes common and not so common experiences,
emotions, and professions. Inmates are not refused,
they are knockbacked ; they are not told to leave but
to Do one . If one hears of someone having Gone into
one , he has not entered anything other than a state
of extreme annoyance. Also, we do not ignore somebody;
we blank him. It is far better to act in a trustworthy
manner, thus one will be considered sound .
Whilst many of these terms may have entered
the common vernacular, that is not the case with the
majority. For, not only are convicts or screws prison
officers the only people to use them, they are likely
to be the only people to know them.
Each crime has its own particular name, so the
inmate in for screwing burglary and the one in for
hoisting shoplifting, can be distinguished from the
blagger robber. Prison has a fairly fluid social
structure, depending on the crimes committed, for
how long and how much was earned. One thing is
certain though: however much thieves-- kiters bad
check passers, petermen safecrackers, and ringers
car thieves who disguise and resell them--as well
as those already mentioned jockey for position, all
despise the nonce sex offender.
As well as the nonce , the grass informer is also
in danger, such danger being especially acute if the
offender is dragged into a pad (a.k.a. peter cell) out
of sight and hearing of the kangas (short for kangaroo ,
rhyming slang for screw ). Such inmates may
have to be put on 43s (Rule 43 covers those inmates
who are dangerous or in danger). Though the prison
generally decides who is placed on 43s, an inmate
may place himself on 43s, a process referred to as
Going on the numbers . These inmates will be sent
down the block segregation unit and may even be
ghosted moved at short notice to another jail (a.k.a.
shanghaied ).
An inmate awaiting trial and thus on remand,
will be in browns wearing brown denims, while the
convicted inmate will be in blues wearing blue denims.
Regardless of the color of his clothes, an e-man
one regarded as a potential or actual escaper will
be in pathches wearing clothes to which bright yellow
patches have been sewn. Like the e-man someone
who is on cat A in maximum security will find
life very restrictive, with all his movements being
recorded in a little book. A Cat A man is thus also
referred to as being on the book .
The jail one is sent to is of a specific type. One
starts off at a local the jail in one's town or region.
To prevent moral corruption, adults and Y.P.s young
prisoners: those under 21 are placed in different
parts of the jail. After sentencing, a Y.P. will go to a
Y.O.I. Young Offenders Institute, whilst his adult
counterpart may go to a Dispersal , where longtermers
are assessed before being sent to other jails.
If given a relatively light sentence, one could be sent
to an Open minimum security jail.
The boredom of jail is alleviated if one puts
some puff (a.k.a. weed a.k.a. draw ) marijuana in
with some burn (a.k.a. snout ) tobacco to make a
joint marijuana cigarette, which, when washed
down with some hooch illegally brewed alcohol can
make the time pass a little quicker. If such activities
come on Top are discovered or one is caught bang
to right in possession or vicinity, the perpetrator is
placed on Report (a.k.a. nicked ) charged with a
breach of prison rules and put on adjudication sent
before the prison governor for punishment.
After coming in, getting out is the major priority.
One counts the days to one's P.E.D. Parole Earliest
Date: jam roll parole is available after a third
of a sentence has been served. Those serving long
sentences for serious crimes will be more likely to
get out on their E.D.R. Earliest Date of Release,
which is their sentence less a third taken off for good
behavior. If one misbehaves, he will not be released
till his L.D.R. Latest Date of Release, which is the
original sentence with no time off.
Visits, which are obtained by sending a V.O.
Visiting Order, are one of the few things to look
forward to. One must be careful though, for if one is
caught necking swallowing drugs or passing out a
stiff a letter which has not passed through the hands
of the prison censor, future visits may be closed in
which `a screen is put between the prisoner and his
visitor.
These words may be of only academic interest
and of no practical use till one gets some bird (short
for birdlime , rhyming slang for time ), in which case
an interpreter will be unnecessary.
Unsecured creditors get the shaft in mining bankruptcy.
[From The Silverton Standard and the Miner , . Submitted by ]
Tonight's program focuses on stress, exercise, nutrition
and sex with Celtic Scott Wedman, Dr. Ruth Westheimer
and Dick Cavett. [Submitted by
]
“Gook: Derisive slang for Koreans; a corruption of
the Korean han'guk saram, which means Korean. [From
U.S. News & World Report , . Submitted
by ]
Why All Living Things Have Latin Names
One of the most beautiful names in the animal
kingdom is the binomial for the evening grosbeak ,
the bird that was thought to sing only when
night draws nigh. Hesperiphona vespertina might
even be called a double binomial, because it says it
twice--western sound (song)/at eventide. The binomial
not only gives information, it also dispels confusion.
The evening Igrosbeak is also called the western
evening grosbeak , and the American hawfinch . When
it appears in England (and it has been seen in Norway)
the French get to call it the gros-bec errant , but
the name known throughout the world remains Hesperiphona
vespertina .
The other day a young lady brought me a dead
moth. I reached back to my childhood, and remembered.
It's a hawkmoth . But she had already
named it. She called it an army moth, because it
had camouflage-like gray and green markings.
What other kinds of moths are there? I went
home to find the moth book my father and I had
used. Cynthia's specimen was the big poplar sphinx
moth. Hawkmoths are also called sphinx moths . But
big poplar sphinx does not say the same thing to everybody.
There are one thousand different hawkmoths
and sphinx moths in the world, and there are
over a hundred thousand moths in other families of
moths, and among them there are many dozens of
poplar moths, big and little.
The confusion can be avoided by using the
moth's Latin name which was established two hundred
years ago by a natural scientist named Carolus
Linnaeus, and by the two-name namers who followed
after him. Binomial nomenclature uses a generic
and a specific term, used to designate species.
Only the binomial, Pachysphinx modesta , pins down
what Cynthia found. Its first, generic (general)
name is a bonus--giving extra information--because
it incorporates meanings for two of the stages
of this animal-- pachy - thick (it is wide-bodied) for
the adult insect, and the typical sphinxlike raised
head for the caterpillar stage. The second name, the
(special) name, modesta , means modest in the sense
of free from ostentation (Cynthia was struck by the
moth's drab garb). All we need to say is modesta
when we talk about this genus of moth to other people--all
over the world.
Even scientists use different colloquial names
for animals. A brown and yellow butterfly with blue
eyes on its front wings is called the common wood
nymph , or the wood satyr . Other lepidopterists
named the wood satyr the blue-eyed grayling , others,
the goggle eye . Who is right? The correct name, the
binomial, is Cercyonis pegala , and that is the only
name that correctly identifies this butterfly everywhere,
to everyone. Also, anyone discussing the
Satyridae family of butterflies will know that just
plain pegala designates the goggle eye the wood satyr ,
the blue-eyed grayling , the wood nymph .
What happens when the American Museum of
Natural History wants to talk to entomologists in Europe
about a butterfly we call the mourning cloak?
In Germany it is called der Trauermantel; in France
it is le morio (the moor); the English named it the
Camberwell beauty . What butterfly are they talking
about? They are referring to Nymphalis antiopa , and
this binomial jumps all geographical boundaries,
crosses through every language, through all the alphabets,
and determines this animal's true identity.
We may not know how to read or write the letters
and symbols in Japanese, Chinese, Arabian, or
other languages, but we do not have to when we
refer to living things, because the generic name and
specific name, in Latin, are the same all over the
world.
A species of tick, the animal that Pliny the Elder
called one of the foulest and nastiest creatures that
be should be known to most residents of the northeast
coast of the US, because Ixodes dammini , the
deer tick, is the vector for another dreadful animal--the
spirochete Borrelia burgdorferi , which
causes borreliosis Lyme (disease)--the fastest-growing
infectious disease in the US after AIDS.
Perhaps a good start for Cynthia's further exploration
of the animal kingdom would be with dinosaurs,
cats, and dogs. Young people probably know
more than most adults about the huge lizards ( sauri )
that roamed this planet a hundred million years ago.
One of these dinosaurs (frightful lizards), Tyranno-saurus
rex, is the tyrant lizard, king of them all.
And the cats: Felix ( Felis catus ), the tiger ( Felis
tigris ), and Leo the lion ( Felis leo ). Canis lupus is the
wolf. Another dog, domesticated, is bred in many
varieties: Canis familiaris is a family-type canine. In
order to distinguish him from other varieties of Canis
familiaris I gave my dog an extra, varietal name:
Thunder. I also, very unofficially, invented a joke
binomial for him: Fido fidel . He is faithful Fido.
Occasionally, the colloquial name, by itself,
adds to the information given in the binomial: the
platypus (Ornithorhyncus anatinas ) is a (ducklike,
bird-snouted) flatfoot. There is a lot of information
in those three words.
The binomial for Cynthia and me is Homo sapiens .
My varietal name is Douglas . Cynthia's varietal
is Cynthia , and it can be as long as Cynthia Elizabeth
Smith-Jones . But the International Code of Zoological
Nomenclature (for binomials in the animal kingdom)
does not accept Latin varietal names because it
would create too much clutter. Our parents had to
invent our varietal names in order to single us out, to
call out to us. Other animals probably do the same,
for each other and for their children. I feel sure that
Thunder has his own names for his Canis familiaris
friends, and imagined enemies.
Although we can sometimes take the shortcut to
just the specific name, it is better to use both names
at first mention, unless we are sure the people addressed
know what genus we are talking about, because
many of the same specific names are used in
other genera. Also, since most specific names contain
words that are more descriptive than those used
in the names of the various general--like the Latin
words for modest, beautiful, amiable , and magnificent ,
for example--there are not enough to go
around, not just for other genera, but for the millions
of other living things in all the tribes, families,
orders, and classes in the animal and vegetable kingdoms.
Our own, specific, descriptive name, sapiens ,
comes from the Latin word to know. We are supposedly
more knowing and wiser than other (lower?)
animals. About a dozen other animals bear this same
specific name. Our generic name, Homo , is akin to
another Latin name, humanus human and to humus
earth.
All living things includes, of course, the vegetable
kingdom. All plants, from seaweeds to orchids,
follow the rules of binomial nomenclature. Some of
the most interesting names, and flowers, in the
vegetable kingdom are found, fittingly, in the
Orchidaceae family. Phalaenopsis amabilis , the lovable
moth-resembling orchid, or Trichocentrum
orthoplectron , the hairy-spurred cock's spur orchid
(another binomial that tries to say it twice).
Dear Cynthia,
I hope that when you get to high school you will
impress your biology teacher with modesta , and that
your animal friends, for all your life, will be fidel,
domesticus, amabilis, agilis , and magnificens , even
sempervirens , but not too vociferus, tristis , nor
neglecta .
You may never see the beautiful animal that flies
through the night while you dream sweet dreams,
but your namesake, the moth Samia, cynthia surely
hovers out there in the dark watching over you.
Thesaurus of Traditional English Metaphors
Works of this kind are more often the products
of individuals, in the great tradition of Johnson,
Brewer, Skeat, Burger, and other--mostly earlier--
writers, than of teams of researchers and editors.
Wilkinson, identified as having studied Classics, Old
English, and Old Norse at Cambridge, worked as a
Forestry Commission woodman, an occupation that
evidently afforded him the time and solitude required
to concentrate on compiling and writing such
a work, though no indication is given of how long he
took to complete it.
The main part of the book, arranged under
rather odd categories, covers 486 pages; it is followed
by an 11-page Index of Themes (which might
have been made more accessible if placed at the
front); the rest consists of an Index of Keywords,
some 40,000 according to the blurb. Covered in
the text are over 20,000 English sayings.
Although many articles, theoretical essays, and
books have been written about metaphors, little effort
has been made to investigate them systematically:
as all of language is itself a metaphor (unless
one believes in logomancy), one is continually confronted
in the compilation of an ordinary dictionary
with examples of semantic and linguistic changes (as
well as amelioration, pejoration, etc.) that are tantamount
to shifts of meaning that, loosely, could be
said to be metaphoric. So it remains to see just
which 20,000 sayings Wilkinson has chosen to analyze
and record. With few exceptions, they appear
to be phrases ( bridging loan, wide open, Hyde Park
railings ), adages or proverbs ( Don't be after breaking
your shin on a stool that is not in your way, When the
wheat lies long in bed, it rises with a heavy head, The
water that comes from the same spring cannot be both
fresh and salt, Better feed five drones than starve one
bee ), and, occasionally, individual words ( beeswax
business, grape-vine, stagnant ). Many of the last
are likely to be found in dictionaries, but modern
dictionaries do not offer such useful treatment,
which essentially links to a word or phrase the culture
of the people who use it.
It would be grossly unfair to continue without
quoting the author's purpose, set forth in an Introduction,
which is all too brief considering the complexity
of the subject. Here are some relevant extracts:
In everyday life, metaphors take many different
forms, including similes (a nose as red as a cherry),
proverbs (don't count your chickens before they're
hatched), transfer phrases (make heavy weather
of...) [,] wellerisms (everyone to his taste, as they
said when the old woman kissed the cow), metonymy
(the knife for surgery, the crown for royalty),
synecdoches (sixty head of cattle, a cut-throat), and
swearing (bloody bugger!)...
Particularly interesting are the kinds of metaphor
excluded:
As the main purpose of this collection is to
trace the origins of folk metaphor in English,
nearly all examples of metonymy, synecdoche and
swearing have been omitted as being too marginal
or personal...
Metaphor is often used to warn or conceal from
a third party, as in your barn door's open. In this
category are all euphemisms, but they contain the
seeds of their own decay. Many good metaphors
have therefore been excluded because of this inevitable
ephemerality. There are also two large
groups which are not admissible as metaphors
because they derive arbitrarily from sound-similarities
without the necessary sense-relationship.
These are based on puns like camp as a row
of tents, and on rhymes--plates of meat etc. Occasionally,
rhyme and reason happily coincide, as
in skin-and-blister = sister, but for true metaphors
there must be some sense connexion, otherwise
the substitute word or phrase is merely
used randomly, or like a secret code.
Another group of metaphors excluded is the
names of natural species such as footman and emperor
moths, lady's slipper, shepherd's purse, porpoise,
etc.
...
Purely literary metaphors have been excluded,
except for those which have become traditional
by general acceptance, as have many Shakespearean
sayings as well as titles and phrases from
modern authors.
The result is, in large measure, a catalogue of the
treatment once given in those older dictionaries that
might, in an entry for kink , have defined it as a condition
of a piece of wire then continued with,
hence, kinky twisted, abnormal, perverted. Wilkinson's
entry for kink (under theme A3a Metal, different
metals ) is as follows:
Kink Aberration, abnormality (as when straight
wire or metal gets kinked. Hence kinky =
perverted, eccentric to the point of abnormality.
(Two matters of style should be noted here: first, all
entries are capitalized, which I find off-putting; second,
runover lines are indented, necessary in a dictionary
but not in a work consisting of such short
entries, with a resultant waste of space.)
The thematic categories, TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER,
SAILOR, RICHMAN, POORMAN, BEGGARMAN,
THIEF, with AT HOME, AT SCHOOL, and AT PLAY added
to allow for entries not otherwise classifiable, I find a
bit too whimsical, especially when one finds Farmers,
Farm Animals, and associated subcategories
listed under RICHMAN, while those who tend them
appear under POORMAN; the impression is that the
author is subtly trying to pass on some sort of cynical
message. Also, it is important to note that the
categories describe the literal content of the metaphor,
not the metaphoric aspect. Thus, kick the
bucket is listed in the category E29e Pork (because
of its presumed etymology, Slaughtered pigs are
hung by the heels from the bucket or beam)
while go west appears under G12e Sunset,
bite the
dust (questionably defined as brought low) appears
at C10f Winning and losing the battle,
buy the
farm (which I cannot find in the OED ) is listed under
E7a Land (where it is labeled as an Americanism,
confuting my understanding that it originated with
the R.A.F., early in WWII), and cash in your chips/
checks goes under K77c Roulette (which might be all
right for a British English classification, but I think
that Americans would expect to find it at K81
Poker ). Although the Index lists most expressions at
least twice ( kick the bucket is under both kick and
bucket , which is fine), it seems that no expression
appears more than once in the main section notwithstanding
any ambiguity or polysemy that might it
might reflect.
Metaphors are the shibboleths of language and
culture, and proper imaginative, apt control of them
is an indicator of one's knowledge of both. Within
a language, they can be culture-specific or cross-cultural,
dialect-specific or cross-dialectal. kick the
bucket die, for example, is probably known in all
dialects of English; kick into touch curtail or postpone
further treatment is unknown except to those
familiar with British idiom. This seems an appropriate
place to describe a personal experience that took
place in 1970, when I was far less conversant with
British idiom than today (though I hasten to point
out that it is unlikely that one can ever become fully
bi-dialectal any more that one can become perfectly
bilingual).
The setting was a conference room at the offices
of William Collins Sons (since renamed Collins Publishers),
in St James's Place, an engaging set of
creaky buildings situated between the Stafford Hotel,
where we often repaired for dinner after our
lucubrations, and Duke's. Sir William and Lady
Collins lived in a suite at the top. At the corner of St
James's Place and St James's Street was the map
store owned by Sir Francis Chichester, of single-handed
sailing fame; across St Jame's Street was--
still is--Boodle's, a club for the gentry; round the
corner was the famous French restaurant, Prunelle's.
It was a time when those attending the meetings,
chiefly Jan Collins, who was managing director,
the company's attorney, and I were trying to arrive
at a viable budget for the preparation and publication
of what was to become the Collins English Dictionary .
Various other people drifted in and out of
those meetings, which were held sporadically over
the course of several months, but we three were the
chief punters (as they say in Britain). The discussions
often went on for hours, all afternoon and well
on into the evening. Though hardier in those days,
my constitution was somewhat affected by jet lag, as
I had usually arrived only that morning or the day
before from the U.S. On one occasion, as our deliberations
were drawing to a close after many months,
we came to a particularly niggling point of dispute
regarding the cost of some phase of the project--I
have forgotten which--and, in frustration and exasperation,
I burst out with, You must realize that if
you want to earn a penny, you've got to spend a
penny!, whereupon, much to my consternation, all
those present fell about laughing merrily. [Note to
non-British readers: spend a penny is a British idiom
meaning go to the lavatory, obviously a reference
to the ubiquity of pay toilets.]
Despite his protest to the contrary, Wilkinson
has included a number of what can only be termed
literary metaphors in sections under Myth that include
Primeval, Jewish, Greek, Germanic, and
Celtic, but no Roman. The coverage is uneven: sop
to Cerberus is in, but not Pegasus (even though it is
not couched in a metaphoric phrase that I can think
of). In the category of proper names, which are not
specifically excluded in the Introduction, Brillat-Savarin
and Escoffier are missing as metaphors for
great chef as is Einstein for genius. One of my
personal favorites in this category is mithridatism
the gradual immunization of a person against a poison
by administering it over a long period in small,
but increasing dosages; it refers to Mithridates IV
the Great of Pontus (? 133-65 BC), who, according
to Justinian, foiled a conspiracy by just such a
method before dispatching the conspirators one day
at dinner by dosing the food with poison that had no
effect on him. Nouns and verbs are the mainstay of
the metaphors treated, but adjectives are in very
short supply. One could write a longish essay on the
allusions conjured up by the words Dickensian, Kafkaesque ,
and Orwellian , yet none of these (among
thousands of others) are represented.
I see that I have fallen (not inadvertently, I fear)
into the trap that I so often criticize in other reviewers,
namely, scoring a work for what it does not contain
instead of sticking to commenting on what is
there. Despite some disappointments, inevitable in
any book (even those one has written himself) but
especially in one that by its very nature could never
approach completeness, it must be said that what is
included is well and concisely handled, useful, and
interesting. Still, I return to my point regarding certain
omissions, for the purpose of a reference book is
not solely to serve those who wish to look up metaphors
they hear, but ones they read, as well. Focusing
on the living language alone (according to the
blurb) is a bit of a conceit, for what people are
saying in Montgomeryshire, Northumberland, and
Pennsylvania, even if it accurately represented, is
scarcely the living language for most English
speakers. It must be said that the days when every
schoolchild was (at least) exposed to classical mythology
and the Great Books have been superseded
by an obsession with education applicable only to
commercial pursuits, the syndrome reflected in,
Why do I have to study Chaucer and Shakespeare
to become a car mechanic or an astronaut? The
liberal arts need not be regarded as ends in themselves--that
is, to produce artists, writers, and other
practitioners--but to create well-rounded human
beings who are passing familiar, if only subconsciously,
with the underpinnings of their society
based on the bedrock of their culture. Of course, if
by culture we mean today familiarity with the names
of the top ten rock hits and the details of latest episode
of Neighbours, Roseanne , or Coronation Street,
then n one of this is important. At worst, modern
education ignores totally the whole person; at best,
it pays his tutelage mere lip service.
Some readers may know of my involvement
with a related work, Allusions--Cultural, Literary,
Biblical , and Historical : A Thematic Dictionary [with
Frederick G. Ruffner, Gale Research Company,
1982, 1986], an attempt to provide a quick reference
guide to what can be termed metaphors, consedering
the present context. Each entry in that
book was accompanied by a source reference, more
than a thousand of which were listed in the Bibliography
preceding the Index. I miss such documentation
in Wilkinson's book: the only indication we
have, from How to use the book, is in a vague mention
of Heywood, Ray, OED, ODEP , Apperson, and
Skeat's 1895 edition of Chaucer--vague because
the average user of this book may not be familiar
with these cryptic references, and no bibliographic
details are provided. There are no references to
sources in the text at all. For the casual user, they
might not be important, but their absence makes the
book virtually useless for the serious researcher.
Moreover, I, for one, should like to know the source
that pins down to California the expression so low he
could sit on a cigarette paper and hand his feet over
the edge: given no gloss, does this refer to low depressed,
low degraded, or low abject? Who is it
that has attributed to America the Pepysian He cannot
whip a cat but I must beat the tail of it? On what
authority does Wilkinson accept that in Pimlico order
is used in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut?
It is possibly because of my predominantly
urban upbringing in America that I have never
heard that or several other expressions, similarly attributed,
having to do with persimmons (which were
always something of a joke, in any event). Spill the
beans is in wide use in Britain and should not be
labeled American: the OED shows it as orig. U.S.
Lollipop lady/man school crossing guard, on the
other hand, carries no label at all, which one takes to
mean it is universal, but it is virtually unknown in
America. On the other hand, returning to omissions.
I should have expected to find born on the wrong
side of the blanket and fiddler's green , among others.
To the best of my knowledge, the American expression
is come up smelling like a rose survive an ordeal
untainted or even in enhanced condition; Wilkinson
has smell like a rose [Amer] be pure and innocent.
(Why is CB Confined to Barracks listed among the
Abbreviations in the forematter? Surely it cannot
appear as a label, since the phrase, which is literal,
hence not an entry, is a description of a military punishment.
Perhaps the author is testing to see if we
are alert.)
Such are the problems with a new work, and
they might be corrected and improved in later editions,
for which one profoundly hopes there proves
just reason. One is bound to wonder, For whom is
the book intended? At the price, it is clearly not to
be found in the book rack at the airport, and one
must conclude that libraries are the likely target.
These days, some might have the resources to pay
that much for such a book, but I daresay there are
not many, and at that price one would expect a cloth
binding rather than the hard paper binding provided.
Laurence Urdang
For gift delivery anywhere call 800-CHEER-UP (except
where prohibited by law). [From an advertisement
for Grand Marnier, FMR , , back cover.]
