VOL19_4.txt

   
      
         
            Dickey Ticker



            Despite their reputation for distrusting polyglots,
it is by no means unusual for Englishmen
to be bilingual.  Schoolchildren all over the British
Isles speak the local dialect at home and in the
playground but switch to Received English--the
language of BBC announcers, Whitehall, the great
universities and the public school--once the school
bell has sounded.

            Some time ago, Peter Trudgill, a lecturer in linguistics
at Reading University, deplored the fact that
many kids get the idea that their own language is
incorrect and even inferior, and as a result become
alienated from at least two of the Three Rs.  Though
snobs and the stuffier sorts of pedagogues are toffee-nosed
about regional dialects, poets such as Ted
Hughes have acclaimed the organic way they have of
fitting the syllables/To the long swell of the land.

            The critics of dialect often single it out as lazy
speech, citing for example the Lancashire 'em for
them .  Yet 'em is a far older English word--derived
from old English--them them , which is a Scandinavian
import.  In Northamptonshire, Jeremy Seabrook
reported in The Unprivileged that his mother would
use terms that appear in Chaucer but have long vanished
from Received English. Deploring his lack of
appetite, she would tell him, It's no wonder, with all
them mullocks you've been eating, unselfconciously
employing a word you can find in A Canon Yeoman's
Talé.  Americans will appreciate the irony of
the scornful British rejection of I guess, a term that
was good enough for the author of The Canterbury
Tales .

            The difficulty of communicating across these regional
and class barriers is considerable.  Received
English is an essential part of the cultural baggage of
the Cornishman or the Highlander who refuses to be
confined to some sort of parochialism for life.  Oddly
enough, the more unworldly sorts of academics run
the risk of this self-imposed isolation because their
particular dialect renders them incapable of being
understood outside a very restricted circle.  Professor
Edgworth of All Souls, according to Robert Graves,
tended towards this kind of sesquipedalian speech.
Loitering by the college gates, he once greeted T.E.
Lawrence, who had just returned to Oxford after a
visit to London.

            Was it very caliginous in the Metropolis?  he
asked.

            Somewhat caliginous, Lawerence replied gravely,
but not altogether inspissated.

            Toward the end of the Seventies, it gradually
became apparent that Britian's National Health Service
was suffering from a breakdown in communications.
More than half the hospitals' staffs were immigrants,
mainly from India, Pakistan, and the West
Indies, who were experiencing difficulties in understanding
the natives.  The problem, however, was
not what one might have expected: the misunderstandings
did not occur because the immigrant's
English was poor.  On the contrary.  They were quite
capable of telling a British colleagues, We've carried
out a bronchoscopy, inserted an endotrachial
tube, provided assisted ventilation, and positioned a
catheter in his bladder to monitor his urinary output.
What they could not fathom was the British
version of the same procedures: We've bronched
him, tubed him, bagged him, and cathed him.  The
confusion was even greater when immigrant physicians
failed to understand the patients who attended
their surgeries.  Eventually, the situation was recognized
by the Ministry of Health and passing an examination
in English--of a sort--became a condition
of employment.

            Most of the candidates boned up on the subject
with the aid of Joy E. Parkinson's Manual of English
for the Overseas Doctor , a book that enjoyed a brisk
sale at the beginning of the 1980s.  The manual explained
that to understand your patients you must
be able to understand the colloquial and idiomatic
expressions they use and you must be able to speak
to them in a simple way so that they'll understand
you.  The almost universal ignorance of medical nomenclature
among English laymen and their dependence
on euphemism is even the basis of corny old
jokes, like the one about the two old biddies who
spotted a haulage contractor's truck bearing the slogan
We Guarantee To Move You, Anytime, Anywhere.

            I'll give it a try, Gertie, one told her friend.
That Ex-Lax doesn't do me any good at all.

            A few common examples of the sort of misunderstandings
that cropped up repeatedly in the examination
room show how wide the gulf could be
between the patient and the general practitioner:

            It's me waterworks, doctor, a patient suffering
from some disorder of the urinary tract would
complain to an uncomprehending physician who
thought he had been mistaken for a plumber.

            I've always had trouble with me tubes could
be especially misleading in the case of a female patient,
for she would almost certainly be referring to
a history of chronic lung disease and not tubes of the
Fallopian variety.

            One would also have to forgive the Indian subcontinent's
most highly trained cardiologist for failing
to recognize that It's me dickey ticker, doctor--which
sounds as if the patient requires the
services of a watch-repairer--is an allusion to longstanding
heart disease.

            One begins to get some idea of the extent of the
problem reading Parkinson's list of just a few of the
colloquial expressions for pregnancy: Away the trip
(Scottish working class), to be caught, to be expecting,
to be having a baby, to be in a delicate condition,
to be in an interesting condition, to be in pig, to be in
pod, to be in the family way, to be in the pudding
club, to be preggers, to be so, to be up the pole, to be
up the stick, to catch on, to catch the virus, to fall for
a baby, to have a bun in the oven, to have a touch of
the sun.
            

            Medical practitioners born and bred in the
United Kingdom are just as guilty as their patients of
spreading these opaque synonyms, abetted in their
case by a fondness for a special kind of baby-talk that
is supposed to reassure the patient: We're just going
to pop you into the operating theatre and have a
little peep in your tummy.  One particularly outrageous
example of a coy euphemism crops up in Diane
Johnson's The State of the Language.  A London
gynecologist was explaining her impending hysterectomy
to an understandably concerned patient.
We're taking out the cradle, he told her, but
we're leaving in the playpen.
         
         
            Sussex Speak



            Old Sussex dialect is sadly dying out, save in the
remoter villages, where the oldest inhabitants
still speak it naturally.  That is a great pity, as Sussex
rustice were once famous for their amusing knack of
adapting words to suit their own requirements.  For
example, a touch of the old brown crisis would mean
an attack of bronchitis and I mises would be Sussex
shorthand for I surmise or guess.  Typical of the
county is still the arbitrary pronounciation of the letters
ee: sheep is often pronounced as ship and
week as wick.
            

            The use of the double plural is another old Sussex
feature, as in the verse,

I saw two ghostesses
Sitting on postesses
Eating their toastesses
And greasing their fistesses
Weren't they beastesses?
            

            Back in 1904, E.V. Lucas in his Highways and
Byeways in Sussex, noted that the Sussex dialect
changed markedly from east to west and that the
demarcation line between the two was the lovely
Adur Valley--where even the breeds of sheep
changed!  If one hears the old Sussex dialect at all
now it is usually found in the rural hinterland of the
county between Battle (of 1066 fame) and Health-field,
or that fine open stretch of country twixt
Chichester and Midhurst.

            The old West Sussex tendency is to add an extra
syllable to monosyllabic words, so cow becomes
cayoo, or fowl is pronounced fewoll.  In East
Sussex respectively these would be kew and
fewl.  The true Sussexer has problems with the
letter h , so one old traditional dish is the Plum
'eavy, the highway is naturally the ighway, etc.
In East Sussex th is often pronounced as d, so that
the, them , and that become de, dem, and dat.  Due
to the old Sussex dialect the village folk could
quickly divide all those they met into the sheep and
goats: the homelings were the natives and the comelings
those who had come into Sussex from another
county.

            Frequently heard old expressions include Shennagoo
for shall not go, and Drackly for straight
away, directly.  High praise is tidy middling and middling
is very fair!  Purdnye means almost.  Darngurt
is Sussex speak for anything very large, as this
county is naturally given to emphatic statements.  An
overdressed woman may be summed up as looks like
a sow saddled and any impossible task calls forth the
comment I can't suck flour and whistle!  Leaves
back'ards up'ards, it's going to rain was a favorite
saying of the ancient Sussex shepherds.  The cowman
driving his cows up Steyning High Street would call
Coup, Coup, Coup, coom along, as did generations
before him.

            A scolding woman was said to give her husband
a dish of tongues, and the old Sussex bachelor often
gave crisp reasons for staying single: one went
on record as saying Mesel, I ain't no marryin' man,
fer I can't see naun in givin' 'arf yer grub away ter
get t' other 'arf cooked.  I does me own.

            Counting words in Sussex were often used by
agricultural workers.  The sheep were counted in
pairs, thus, One-erum, two-erum, cockerum, shuerum,
shitherum, shatherum, Wineberry, Wagtail,
Tarydiddle, Den = 20.

            Many writers have collected gems of Sussex dialect
down the years, like Rev.  William Parish and
another cleric, Rev. Edward Boys Ellman, both before
World War I. Parish discovered some amusing
differences, as when a Sussex girl cries, Oh!  do
adone she means Go on but if she says, Adone
do, she means Stop at once!

            The ladybird was called Bishop Barnaby by Sussex
children, as in the old rhyme

Bishop, Bishop Barnaby
Tell me when my wedding will be,
If it be tomorrow day,
Open your wings and fly away.
            

            
               Broom dasher was the traditional Sussex description
of a roughly dressed or roughly behaved
person, and someone of low intelligence was described
as chuckle-headed, a term not unfamiliar to
Americans.  To be fair clemmed  meant to be very
hungry, cold, or miserable.  A typical county boast
still often expressed is Sussex won't be druv and
anyone contrairy is reckoned to be obstinate. Darn
ma wig is a humorous expression of surprise.
Frouden means to be afraid or to be frit, whilst
feeling ill was once expressed as I be gellish
ornary today.  Goistering was a curious term for
loud feminine laughter; a bad worker was called
latchety: his excuse might well be, Old Laurence
has got hold of me today!

            Time and time again the dry Sussex sense of humor
breaks through.  The sadly defunct Horsham to
Steyning railway line was called the linger and
die.  My obedience was a mother's reference to her
first-born child, and a ditherer was called a mess-pot .
Nineways for Sunday meant a bewildered expression
and is a good example of the originality of
thought behind many of the county sayings.

            The folklore of the county is particularly rich
and this too gives colorful phrases.  The Miller's
glory refers to the sweeps of the windmill set in the
sign of a cross, said to bring luck to anyone in the
village getting married.  A shim means a ghost or
just a glimpse of someone.  Pharisees fairies are
also deep in Sussex folklore, while something too
complex to understand is called wigwams for
goose's bridles.  Long Rope Day refers to the old
Brighton or Hastings custom of skipping for luck on
Good Friday.  January butter is the name for the mud
it was thought lucky to bring into the house on one's
feet on January 1st.

            Of all the English county dialects I suspect that
Sussex is the richest in its allusions, but I may well
be prejudiced in favor of my beloved South Downs.
To conclude, here is a snippet of the conversation of
an old West Wittering woman, who lived near a scientist:


such a nice, still man, only he's always losing
his recollects....  He disremembers everything.
Why the other day he was in a tarrible stodge
cause he mus catch the London train, an'
prensly there he was back again.  He most-in-ginral
goos along reading an' a whiffle of wind
blew his book an he disremembered what he'd
gone for!
            
         
         
            The Language of Past Money



            On February 15th, 1971, Britain introduced
decimal currency.  The familiar pennies, halfpennies,
sixpences, half-crowns, florins, etc., in circulation
were replaced by New Pence.  Into our language
came a new description, a pee two pees,
and so on, according to the price charged, for decimal
currency, but out of use went the nicknames and
slang terms used in Britain for the previous currency.
This had previously happened in Australia,
which went over to decimal currency in 1966.  The
Australian Jockey Club even advised bookmakers
and gamblers to avoid using money slang: quid, spin,
brick, and pony for ¥1, ¥5, ¥10, and ¥25, on Australian
racecourses.

            In Britain tenner, tanner, bob, oncer, guinea,
quid, and other terms were in common use in conversation
when purchasing an item.  It is interesting
how some of these names and slang money names
arose.

            The name tanner for a sixpence coin was first
used at the beginning of the 19th century.  The reason
is obscure but may come from the gypsy word
tano or tawno meaning little, as it was a small coin
compared with others then in circulation.  It may
also be so called for the same reason it was called a
Simon.  A legandary joke concerns St. Peter's banking
transaction when he lodged with one Simon, a
tanner.  Another name for the sixpence was sprat,
which probably came from a cross between this
word and sprazianna, the Cockney rhyming slang for
a sixpence ( tanner ).

            A shilling coin was called a bob .  Again no certain
meaning is recorded though it is believed to
have been first used when Sir Robert Walpole was
Prime Minister of England in the 18th century.

            The name of the small silver threepenny coin,
known as the threepenny joey or just joey, had the
origin in another small coin, a fourpenny piece or
groat.  The latter was issued in 1836 on the advice of
Joseph Hume, a Member of Parliament.  Hume's
idea was for a convenient coin to pay for short cab
journeys.  The dissatisfied London cabmen did not
like it.  Until then they were usually given a sixpence,
the nearest single coin to the amount of the
fare and few people hiring the cab bothered to ask
for the change.  When the fourpenny groat was introduced
passengers handed that over and the cabbies
were down twopence on each journey, so they
nicknamed it Joey and frequently spat on it in disgust
before pocketing it whenever one was given to them
in payment.  It was last struck for currency use in
1855.  But in 1845 a silver threepence had been reintroduced
and after the disappearance of the fourpenny
joey , the nickname was transferred to the
threepenny joey .

            The two-shilling coin was known as a florin,
named after a medieval gold coin from Florence, Italy.
This was called a florin (from the Italian fiorino
little flower) because it bore a flower, a lily, the
badge of the city.

            Cockney slang for a half-crown coin was tusheroon,
tossaroon, or tosheroon , a corruption of another
slang term for this coin, madza caroon, a corruption
of the Italian mezzo half corona crown.

            The term guinea , which had a value of twenty-one
shillings, arose because the first guinea coins
were minted in 1663 from gold brought from the
Guinea region of West Africa.  But the guinea was
not always valued at twenty-one shillings: from 1663
it varied from twenty shillings to thirty shillings; its
value was not fixed at 21 shillings till 1717.  Guineas
ceased to be minted in Britain in 1813, but continued
until decimal introduction, as a term used in
pricing goods and services.

            
               Quid, dating from the 17th century and shown
as of obsure origin in the Oxford English Dictionary ,
means a pound, originally a note, now a coin.
However, it was first used by criminals as a slang
term for a guinea as long ago as 1688.  The terms
nicker for a one-pound note and half a nicker for a
ten-shilling note are New Zealand expressions that
arrived in Britain, and they were also widely used by
counterfeiters in the underworld.  They also called
their forged half-crowns large whites and forged
shillings small whites.  Half a bar for ten shillings
was first used by gypsies in the 19th century.  The
word bar for pound might have originated from the
Romany word bauro big and heavy.  Cockneys also
used to call ten-shilling notes gennets , the origin of
which I have been unable to trace.

            Sovereign and guinea coins have been called
bleeders, Jemmy O'Goblins, glisteners, Janes, harlequins,
jingleboys, yellow boys, red rogues, megs, shiners,
rainbows , and thick 'uns.
            

            In racing slang a pony is ¥25, a monkey ¥500, a
cow ¥1000, plum ¥100,000, and a marigold ¥1 million.
It is probable that pony was used because it is a
small horse, and racing gamblers thought ¥25 was a
small sum with which to bet.

            It should also not be forgotten that in the rural
languages there are also words referring to coins,
money, etc.  In my own county, Kent, Borrow Pence
is an old word for ancient coins, probably those
found in barrows or tumuli, another being Hegs
Pence, a third being Dwarf's Money , though the last
was more frequently used in the coastal ares.  Scimminger
was the name for a counterfeit coin, while
Bargain Pence was earnest money, a low-value coin
given on striking a bargain, making a deal at a market,
or in similar circumstances.  Bald Pates is almost
self-explanatory, being a name used in Kent rural
areas for silver Roman coinage ploughed up, found
in barrows, etc., and possibly referring to the poor
design or baldness of the effigy on some of the coins.
         
         
            How to Gain Proverbial Wisdom, or It Takes One to Know One



            Proverbs, those self-contained nuggets of folk
wisdom, can be addictive.  I know: I once had
an aunt who had a saying for every occasion.  She
was a short, plump woman with iron-gray hair in a
bun, and she liked nothing better than putting in her
two cents' worth.  She was a dilatory walker, with
always the same quip: Slow and steady wins the
race.  Reading that the government was going to
raise taxes, she thumped the newspaper and intoned,
You can't squeeze blood from a turnip.  If
ever asked to explain one of her rare periods of
quiet, she would reply, Still waters run deep.

            My aunt's visits were infrequent during my
childhood, and it was only after her husband died
and I was in high school that she began seeing my
parents on a regular basis.  I tolerated my aunt and
her proverbial wisdom until she began applying it to
her nephew.  Hearing that I regularly went to sleep
after midnight, she lectured me: Early to bed and
early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and
wise.  When I took a trip to Atlantic City and gambled
away the amount I had intended, she warned,
A fool and his money are soon parted.  She even
found fault with my studious habits: All work and
no play makes Jack a dull boy.

            It is hard to counter a proverb: they have all the
plodding force of a mule-driving peasant, earthy and
inevitable.  So when my aunt related gospel like
Blood is thicker than water, I could think of no
answer but a sullen nod.  That is, until one day when
I was helping my mother fix dinner for a family occasion
and my aunt came into the kitchen.  She asked
how she could help, and when I protested that we
had everything under control, she placed her hands
on her hips and told me, Many hands make light
work.

            Too many cooks spoil the broth, I murmured.
My aunt opened her mouth to reply, but nothing
came out.  It was a momentous occasion.  Several
weeks later, I was complaining about having to buy a
new suit, and my aunt happened to be within earshot.

            Clothes make the man, she informed me.  I
considered her point.

            You can't judge a book by its cover, I replied.
So much for the wisdom of the ages.  After that,
my aunt was a lot more careful what she said around
me, like a burnt child that shuns the fire.  But eventually
she reverted to her old proverbial ways.  On
one occasion, I had spent half my allowance on an
expensive pair of sneakers, and when she told me I
should have bought a cheaper brand, I simply betmoaned
my small stipend and wondered if I would
ever amass any significant sum of money.

            That was her cue.  She wagged her finger at me.

            Let me tell you something, young man.  Take
care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of
themselves.

            Oh?  I admit I was semi-prepared for this.  I
had checked out a collection of proverbs from the
library and was becoming rather well-versed in
them.

            What about Penny-wise, pound-foolish?

            My aunt thought about this for a moment.

            I think, she said finally, you are being deliberately
provoking.

            I weighed the justice of this remark, but could
not be bothered to adjust the scales.  If my proverbial
aunt was going to advise me, I was bound to
devise some counter-stratagem.  Luckily, the world
of proverbs, sayings, adages, maxims, and plain old
saws is various enough to say anything you want.
Since they are meant to cover all of life's vicissitudes
from cradle to grave, they are bound to collide at
times, sometimes obliquely, sometimes head-on.  I
pressed this knowledge to my advantage.  My next
opportunity came soon enough.  I was complaining
that I could not find a girlfriend.  (I complained a lot
in those days, a habit many proverbs warn against.)
Apparently, I protested loudly enough for my aunt
to take note because she tried to console and scold
me in that double tone that proverbs have.  She put
her hand on my shoulder.

            Don't fret so much, she said.  A boy's best
friend is his mother.

            A boy's best friend is his dog, I retorted, but
I can't see myself asking Jessie out on a date, can
you?

            My aunt just shook her head and sighed.  A year
later, after I actually had a girlfriend and was worried
about summer vacation when she would be
away, my aunt passed on this pearl of wisdom: Absence
makes the heart grow fonder.

            I was growing more educated and this time
quoted Shakespeare back.  Out of sight, out of
mind.  (Unfortunately for my love-life, my proverb
turned out to be the right one.)

            My aunt gave an annoyed tsk.  I give up on
you, she said, and left the room.

            Of course, she never quite conceded defeat:
hope springs eternal in the human breast.  She continued
to quote at me, and I requoted back.  But as
she got older, her steel-trap memory turned into a
steel sieve, and she became almost touchingly uncertain
of her words.  I recall to my credit that, when
she was despairing of ever doing anything more with
her life and muttered, You can't teach an old dog
new tricks, I cheered her up by flatly opposing her:
It's never too late to learn.  She died in her eighty-third
year, and though only her name and dates
adorn her headstone, I often think of inscribing an
addendum: A little advice goes a long way.

            My aunt did not leave behind much in the way
of possessions.  What I am left with is a list of proverbs
for all occasions, which I hereby bequeath to
the reader along with my own contradictions:


Strike while the iron is     The more haste, the less
hot.                            speed.

The best things in life      There's no such thing as a
are free.                    free lunch.

Repent before it's too       It's never too late to mend.
late.

Look before you leap.        He who hesitates is lost.

Never back down on           Cut your coat according to
what you believe in.         your cloth.

Don't rock the boat.         The squeaky wheel gets all
                             the grease.

Seek and ye shall find.      Don't go looking for
                             trouble

The more haste, the          Strike while the iron is hot.
less speed.

Every cloud has a silver     It never rains but it pours.
lining.

The first shall be last.     To the victor belong the
                             spoils.

Two heads are better         If you want something done
than one.                    right, do it yourself.

Always plan ahead.           Don't count your chickens
                             before they're hatched.

Money is the root of all     Money makes the world go
evil.                        round.

Opposites attract.           Like breeds like.

Never bet on a sure          A bird in the hand is worth
thing.                       two in the bush.

Actions speak louder         It's the thought that counts.
than words.

Use a carrot instead of      Spare the rod and spoil the
a stick.                     child.

The meek shall inherit       Where there's a will, there's
the earth.                   a way.

Do unto others as they       Do unto others as you would
do unto you.                 have them do unto you.

Monkey see, monkey           Imitation is the sincerest
do.                          form of flattery.

One cannot step into         Those who cannot
the same river twice.        remember the past are
                             condemned to repeat it.

Beauty is only skin-deep     A thing of beauty is a joy
                             forever.

Wisdom comes with            There's no fool like an old
age.                         fool.

Make hay while the sun       Take time to smell the roses.
shines.

Honesty is the best          Don't wash dirty linen in
policy.                      public.

Uneasy lies the head         Absolute power corrupts
that wears the crown.        absolutely.

Seeing is believing.         All that glitters is not gold.

As you sow, so shall         Virtue often goes
you reap.                    unrewarded.

People are the same          To each his own.
the world over.

            

            Of course, just because these sayings cross each
other up does not mean they are incorrect; they simply
suit different occasions.  Literature, which is now
my profession, teacher the importance of context.
For instance, Polonius' spate of proverbial advice
that ends To thine own self be true is not all bad.
It is just that, to employ a proverbial expression, he
does not practise what he preaches.  And Hamlet's
turns of phrase are more intriguing.  Or at least I
thought so years ago when I identified with youth.
Nowadays, I feel an odd kinship with Polonius.  In
fact, I have felt lately as if I were employing more
proverbs in my own speech, maybe turning into my
aunt--like aunt, like nephew.  This would be a fine
turnaround for someone whose first interest in language
was as a proverb-basher.  Somewhere in the
background I can hear my aunt's reaction to this
confession.  Or as she might put it: She who laughs
last laughs best.
         
         
            
We can't make good grammar great.  But we want to
make flawed writing acceptable.  [Lance A. Miller, in the
Wall Street Journal , .  Submitted by
]
         
         
            Thunderboxes and Chuggies



            In semantic terms, the words in the above title
belong to a specific domain in the English vocabulary
with which every member of the human race
achieves intimate familiarity.  The naked terms for
such a traditionally taboo subject as the toilet
have always proved too much to bear for polite society,
which hastily covered the bare-cheeked shame
of them with a blanket of euphemism.  The domain is
a prolific nursery of such linguistic fig-leaves, and as
a result (contrary thing that human nature is) has
also fostered many ribald versions.  It is not surprising,
therefore, that there is an almost inexhaustible
supply of paraphrases and synonymous terms in this
field, ranging from the most tasteful euphemism to
the most flagrant vulgarity.  While most of these
bear testament to the wonderful versatility of the
English language and the rich vein of humor that
runs through our culture, some necessitate etymological
investigation in order to uncover their roots
and, in some cases, to explore changes in meaning.
Most, indeed, defy precision in the attempt altogether.

            Six hundred years ago, toilet designs, though
crude, were what we might term today latrines (the
Middle English word was laterin from Latin latrina):
planks of wood with circles cut into them, placed
over a ditch.  Conveniences for the wealthier sections
of the community (i.e., those who could afford
high-rise property) consisted of straight-drop or
long-drop privies.  The word privy is one of the earliest
euphemisms used in England; an anonymous
writer at the turn of the fifteenth century advised
whanne he sitteth at privy he schal not streyne
him-silf to harde.  It is derived from the French
word privé and the Latin privatus , both meaning
private, and this is the specific sense in which the
word entered the English language.  The earliest euphemisms
documented use of the word in this original
sense of intimacy or familiarity between people
dates from 1225, and privy council (a small group of
advisers to the monarch) from 1300, when Edward I
established it.  It is not surprising, semantically
speaking, that the word widened its meaning so
quickly since it naturally lent itself (as did closet ) to
the description of a solitary place, one where people
performed lavatorial functions.

            
               Privy and closet are examples of euphemism by
metonymy, which is the substitution of the name of
an attribute of a thing for the thing itself: a toilet is a
private place, therefore a privy.  Similarly, Bombay
furniture (a style combining European forms with Indian
ornamentation) provided the metonymic euphemism
The Bombay; the Oxford English Dictionary
tells us that the name is possibly attributable to the
Bombay chair , wherein chamberpots were placed, as
it was common in the past to have one's chamberpot
concealed in a piece of furniture, which could then
be proudly displayed.  The name close-stool , which
makes an appearance in Shakespeare's All's Well That
Ends Well of 1606 and John Florio's Montaigne of
1603, was also inspired by the furniture in which it
was cased, as was commode .

            If one is to go by Florio's use of close-stool, it
seems interchangeable with another, less notorious,
term for a privy, the ajax.  In the sixteenth century,
an Elizabethan courtier, Sir John Harrington, invented
a water-closet with a flushing system and
wrote a book on the subject entitled A Metamorphosis
of Ajax, published in 1596.  The word, however,
seems to have existed before that, as Shakespeare
uses it, also in close conjunction with close-stool, in
Love's Labour's Lost , c. 1593, and it achieved an entry
in Cotgrave's Dictionarie of the French and English
Tongues of 1611.  Its exact origin is unascertained,
but it is likely to have been a variant of jakes
(with the indefinite article preceding it).  Jakes is
also of unknown origin; the most common suggestion
for its roots is in the proper name Jacques or
Jack , which is not unbelievable when we consider
other examples such as jerry and john .  Shakespeare
uses jakes confidently in King Lear (c. 1605):

My lord, if you will give me leave, I will tread
this unbolted villain into mortar, and daub the
wall of a jakes with him.

            

            Eric Partridge, in A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional
English, suggested that the word dates
from 1530 and was standard English until about
1750, when it became a colloquial term.  The word
was also very much alive in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries in the dialect of southwestern
England, where it had come to mean any type of
filth or litter, according to Elworthy's A West Somerset
Word-Book.  Patridge also says that the term is
now obsolete, but to this day the blocks of toilets at
my old school, St. Edmund's College in Hertfordshire,
are affectionately known as Jakes Tower.

            The origin of jerry , like so many of these terms,
can only be guessed at.  It is slang for chamberpot
and, like jakes , could be the familiar variant of a
proper name ( Jeremiah or Jeremy ).  It is supposed,
however, that it is an abbreviation for jeroboam,
which started off life as a large bowl for holding
wine [I Kings xi. 28/xiv. 16]; the addition of the suffixes
-y, -ie, and -ey to the main stem of a word have
always been popular ways of forming diminutives.
Jerry first appeared in Hotten's Dictionary of Slang
in 1859, defined as a chamber utensil.  In An Etymological
Dictionary of Modern English, Ernest
Weekly suggested an even earlier association with
the word jordan, a medieval alchemist's vessel and,
later, a chamberpot.  All these are feasible surmises
by the process of metonymy.  Perhaps it hails from a
shortening of jerry-shop (c. 1851), a term used to
describe a low beer-house.  As the chamberpot is a
great friend to those with bibulous tendencies, jerry
might have become a pet-name for it.

            The etymology of the word loo is perhaps the
greatest mystery of all in this field of vocabulary.
The word first gained general usage in Britain during
World War II, and possibly came about as a result
of fraternizing with French troops, perhaps as a
corruption of l'eau (water) or lieux d'aisance (Water-closet),
or even as a derivation of the cry ( Garde á
l'eau! , given to warn passerby that someone above
was about to slop out (the anglicised form, gardyloo
! , occurs in this context in a novel by Tobias Smollett
as early as 1771).  Also at that time, rustic laborers
in Italy used to have the number 100 painted on
their privy-doors; to go al numero cento was an accepted
idiom of the day: indeed, children used to
have fun replacing the last zero with a one after the
privy had been used.  The number 100 is not dissimilar
in appearance to the word loo , and there were
plenty of servicemen from the U.S.A. and England in
Italy from 1943 onwards.

            Among the more incredible explanations (as recorded
by Adrian Room, A Dictionary of True Etymologies)
are a derivation from ablution or luliana
[ Daily Telegraph , 13 September 1968] and even from
hallelujah, as prompted by a caption to a cartoon by
Du Maurier in Punch [22 June 1895], which read
Now we'll begin again at the Hallelujah, and please
linger longer on the lu!  A more promising story to
note is that of a corruption of the word lee: for those
working in the country, a place for relieving oneself
was always chosen out of the bite of the wind, that
is, in the lee.

            Terms such as toilet and lavatory have, like
privy , undergone pejoration over the years (that is,
their meanings have acquired depreciatory connotations).
The original meaning of lavatory was simply
a vessel for washing: in his 1382 translation of the
Bible, John Wycliffe talks of washing feet in a
brasun lavatorie [Exodus xxx.18].  Similarly, to perform
one's toilet in 1681 was the action or process
of dressing or of washing and grooming [OED] .
An unclear sense-development of this word is
mapped out in the OED , but it seems to concede
that the modern sense of lavatory originated at the
start of this century: the (British) Army and Navy
Stores catalogue of 1926 lists a lavatory paper-holder
as one of its items, but it was probably earlier: The
Illustrated London News reported in 1860 that each
ward of the new Florence Nightingale School of
Nursing had its own bathroom, lavatories and
closet.  While toilet and lavatory have discarded
their original meanings, terms such as bog retained
their original meanings (a marshy place) as well as
being understood in Britain as a slang synonym for
a toilet; it achieved an entry in Hotten's dictionary
as early as 1864 as a privy as distinguished from a
water-closet.

            Terms which border on the vulgar tend to be onomatopoeic:
examples include chuggie, duffs, dubs,
biffy, honk , and thunderbox .  The last example (Eric
Partridge tells us) is a nickname for a chamberpot
originating in India c. 1870, and is derived from the
noise therein caused].  By far the most numerous
group of terms is that which contains words only with
a localized meaning.  It would be impossible to compile
a definitive glossary for this group, but a few
examples follow: the heads (naval colloquialism, dating
from the late nineteenth century, said to be from
the location of the latrines on a ship); the longs (pet-name
for latrines at Brasenose College, Oxford, from
c. 1870, so-called because they were built from funds
donated by a certain Lady Long); and greenhouses
(Ulysses , Book VIII), James Joyce's personal slang for
the public toilets after the color of their paint.  It is
this group that ensures steady growth in this most
malleable domain of the English vocabulary, for the
resources of the human imagination are limitless.
         
         
            Windy English



            For the best part of half a century I have lived on
and off in a Windward Island of the now
largely ex-British Caribbean.  The semantic of these
former Crown Colonies is individual and anarchic,
bearing in mind that academically, if no longer psychologically,
they remain anglophone.  Schoolchildren
are guided into, first, O and, then, A
Levels, corresponding to the School and Higher
Certificates of my own English youth; these are set
from Cambridge and incline, to my mind, to an all
too often condescending leaning to local idiom-worship,
from which most BeeWees want to free
themselves.  Northwards, the Leeward Island moving
up through Antigua to Jamaica are today locked
into American television, while southwards the
Mona, Trinidad, campus of the University of the
West Indies duplicates any run-of-the-mill American
municipal college, at least in its language aspects,
being blessedly innocent of any courses in Anglo-Saxon
or Middle English.

            The small pocket of Windward Island semantic,
if such it can be called, has nothing to do with the
patois of adjacent French islands.  Obviously the
short-lived French conquests in the region left behind
words and names; here a crazy man is foo [for
Fr fou ] or, if you want to insult him, a crapaud toad,
while on our little island resolutely British placenames
(Grenville, Victoria) nestle beside villages like
Perd-mon-Temps, La Tante, Crochu.  The fact remains
that no bush local understands French or
wants to.  I am roughly familiar with researches into
this semantic by old friends, like John Groome of
Grenada or Frank Collymore of Barbados, but find
use of the living language hereabouts best shown in
the work of the late and much lamented Shiva
Naipaul, younger brother of V.S. (who declines to
use his knighthood).  Set in the fictional Cuyama
(clearly Guyana), Shiva's A Hot Country is a West
Indian masterpiece, even though islands characterize
the community and Guyana (formerly BG, or
British Guyana) is mainland.  Far from inclining to
French, these natives cleave to British schoolboy
slang, a hard-dying lingo.

            Take nicknames.  Nearly everyone I know has
(=does have) a nickname in the Windwards, where
the Prime Minister of St. Vincent is Son Mitchell
(evidently the first-born of an inside marriage),
while my builder is Sonny, not an easy name for a
New York liberal to summon him by.  Still more difficult
to use with the confidence of a local is my gardener's
sobriquet--Black Man. A career in an
ultra-liberal New York city college inhibits my calling
out, even in the friendliest manner, Come,
Black Man.  (Too, our locals refer unashamedly to
nigger hair which, to date, I cannot.)  So most nicknames
are the inheritance of boyhood features or
facial characteristics, e.g., Chubby, Porgie, Moon,
Snail, Speedy (apparently his opposite), Peg-Leg, and
the like, all delineating good friends of mine.  Rastas
have their own system.

            There is little linguistic ruling available here,
however attractive BeeWee speech rhythms may
sound to the casual tourist.  There is no authentic
dialect in the ex-British Caribbean, not even in the
sense of a pejorative corruption of a parent tongue
(as in Pennsylvania Dutch, for instance).  It is simply
sentimental to propose the contrary, as do the sophisticated
proponents of multiculturalism, like
George Lamming in Barbados.  What mostly characterizes
Windward Island speech could be called a
kind of linguistic laziness, and this has considerable
charm, as a lot of laziness can.  A typical morsel of
such speech plucked from Shiva Naipaul's The Chip-Chip
Gatherers: I tired hear you say that.  The
meaning is perfectly clear.  The speaker is simply
abbreviating from I am tired of hearing you say
that, and expressing character (and class) by doing
so.  This is not to deny that there is an ingrained
poetic in BeeWee--I have been offered  a smile of
whiskey (who could refuse?), directed to a beach
where the water he weep over the rock , and told I
feels a little bit much more better, thanks.  The last is
the typical local double (or triple) comparative, but
it does not establish a linguistic.

            Take the idiosyncrasy in the use of personal pronouns,
that of the lack of, or reluctance to use, accusative
and dative cases or even the possessive.  Why
bother?  One form can do the job.  We will do just as
well for us or ours .  Thus a Windward Island might
say, They take we jobs from we. In Grenada of the
revolutionary 1979-83 interregnum, Prime Minister
Maurice Bishop was We Leader. Or, from Shiva
again: The moment we get we children off we hands
we leavin' here.  They does bramble we.

            None of these rather charming locutions is represented
orthographically (in government documents
and the like), yet one prevalent curiosity has
always struck me, namely the dropping of the final g
from participles.  Sitting brimmin' up a smile of
white (perhaps even a grin of such rum) over a seascape
of beauty, a Windward Islander told me, “I
viewin'.”  This duplicates precisely the U huntin'-shootin'
-fishin' locution of my British youth, and
could be another reason for calling West Indians the
last Englishmen left around.

            Nevertheless, some elements of Windward
speech can be regularized into a sort of grammar,
particularly in verb tenses. The constantly surprising
ubiquity, in stores, dockyards, garages, banks, of
the King James version of the Bible may account for
what seem to visitors to be odd usages, variations
often coming over at first as error; the universal use
of the conditional would for the future will can lead
to serious confusion, e.g., in legal documents.  A
comparison of the present tenses of the verb to have
and to be yields the following reversals:


STANDARD     BEEWEE
I have       I has
he/she has   he/she have
we have      we has
you have     you has
they have    they has

STANDARD    BEEWEE
I am        I is
he/she is   he/she are/am
we are      we is
you are     you is
they are    they is

            

            Of course, these variants are regarded as errors
by the Cambridge examiners, but it will be a sad day
when they are expunged from the West Indian
scene, since they make a response to shades of reality
unavailable in middle-Atlantic BBC.  So do,
surely, BeeWee intensifications, doubling the epithet;
a Windward Islander may call a fruit sweet-sweet ,
one adjective not sufficing to express feelings
about it enough. Sweet-sweet is much more sweeter
than very sweet, is it not?

            Television has recently begun to inundate these
incompetent but lovable little islands, embarrassing
colonial deposits now handed over to sink or swim in
independence.  CNN and the BBC are already busy
ironing out indigenous language rhythms in the
interests of the global village.  In an article (The
Use of Lallans for Prose, The Journal of English
and Germanic Philology, LI, No. 2, April, 1952,
pp. 212-225), I tried to show, elsewhere, this happening
to Braid Scots, the Doric, or Lallans in
Scotland.  But in that case a linguistic amalgam cohered
early and was only pushed back northwards
after having established a local literature (Dunbar,
Henryson).  Nor did it have to fight television.  Alas,
Windward Island English is far more vulnerable to
standardization.
         
         
            VERBUM SAP
         
         
            'Ard Lines



            Maybe I'm a dullard, but... the letter-to-the-editor
writer began, then with nimble argument
demonstrated that he was anything but.  I was induced
to read his piece, however, not so much by
the trusty rhetorical device of self-deprecation as by
that fusty word dullard .  It seemed to wear a thin,
fuzzy coat of mildew, as if summoned for this rare
duty from a cobwebbed trunk in the attic of obsolescence.

            It got me thinking about other words that end in
-ard , a process that inevitably involved hours of dictionary
delving.  Unaided, I could conjure up only
ten, not counting backguard and blow-hard which,
while conforming to the pejorative pattern of the
-ard words, were not formed as the others by the
simple suffix addition.  My list, after dullard ,
counted dotard, bastard, buzzard, coward, dastard,
drunkard, laggard, lollard, niggard and wizard .  Of
those, only the last would be taken today with equanimity,
although wizard was not always complimentary.
The delightful and certainly disparaging canard
also occurred to me, but I had already decided
to limit my quest to personal epithets.

            And what a rich lode of dormant invective I
tapped!  The OED2e lists about five dozen -ard
words to describe people of unsavory character or
underdeveloped intellect, and all but the handful
above now languish in dusty disuse.  Virtually all of
them are derogatory, and some of them are so mordantly
mean that I can only lament their loss--perhaps
to a precursor wave of today's political correctitude?
The next question was this: What was it
about the -ard ending that appealed to our badmouthing
forebears?

            Some time between the 8th and 12th centuries,
German-speakers began honoring heroes and other
eminences by adding -hard to their names,
to denote hardy.  The practice carried over into
Middle High German and Dutch, where it developed
a sarcastic edge and became generally derisive.
The French adopted the habit as an intensifier of
musculine nouns, proper and improper, and this too
became mostly pejorative, as in mouchard sneak or
informer (from mouche fly), and froussard coward
(from frousse fright), and bastard , a trenchant
abbreviation of fils de bast pack-saddle child.  The
practice jumped the Channel, as did many things
French, after the Norman Conquest.  At first the
English were content with unalloyed borrowings,
but then began tacking the invidious -ard onto
purely English words, producing the likes of drunkard,
laggard , and sluggard .

            Before long, there were many, both imported
and home-grown.  They fell into three main categories:
words for fools, idlers, and wastrels; for people
with other undesirable or downright anti-social attributes;
and for those with some physical disability.

            In the first category were babelard or babillard
for babbler; lubbard for big, stupid lout (from
which came landlubber); caynard lazy dog (ultimately
from the Italian cagna bitch); losard rake
or profligate (from Old English losel one who is
lost to perdition); and the mellifluous but contumelious
musard , whose sin was day-dreaming.

            Even more to be censured were the peevish and
fretful fretchards, the penny-pinching misards and
muglards, the parasitic, hypocritical sycophants
known as papelards (after Italian pappalardo one
who eats bacon fat), the pilfering pillards , the pusillanimous
snivelards , the deceitful trichards , and the
loathsome loners called unkards .

            More persecuted than censured were citizens
who fell short of contemporary standards of physical
perfection.  They included the sparsely coifed ballard ,
the squinting, weak-eyed blincard (who could
also be one who deliberately ignored reality), the
hobbling mendicant limpard or clochard (from
French clocher to limp), the stammering mafflard ,
and the scallards and scabbards who suffered from
some skin disease.

            A sub-species of -ard word, if not of humans,
might be labeled political.  In this charming group
we find Dynamitard, an explosive 19th-century.
French radical leftist; Dreyfusard, erstwhile
bleeding-heart supporter of Capt. Alfred Dreyfus,
wrongly convicted of treason in 1894 and exonerated
in 1906; Cagoulard (from French wearer of a
monk's cowl), a member of a sort of 1930s French
Ku Klux Klan; and Communard, an adherent of the
Commune of Paris, a group that took over the municipal
government of the French capital and played
a leading role in the post-revolutionary Reign of Terror.
Members of a rebellious 16th-century French
faction were called Guisards because of their extravagant
get-ups; the word has become a common, if
rarely used, noun for a masquerader or mummer.

            This by no means exhausts the store of sleeping
slurs that once formed an 'ard core of popular insult.
I could go on, but given the space constrictions, that
would be foolardy.
         
         

            The horse in Brewer's Twentieth Century Phrase
and Fable [XVIII, 4] can only be referred to as
white if it is a Lippizaner.  Otherwise, snowiness
notwithstanding, it is grey.



         
         

            The discussion of Spoonerisms [EPISTOLAE,
XIX, 2, 17] should, I feel, not be closed without mentioning
at least a few more of the classic examples of
the genre.  Thus Spooner himself is supposed to
have referred to Cambridge as a muddy bleak
place.  When the first motorized vehicles appeared
on the roads he opined that Automobiles are all
very well, but for pure pleasure give me a well-boiled
icicle.  In my own family Spoonerisms flourished
luxuriantly for many years, and we hardly
spoke of the weather, for instance, without invoking
their oblique charm: It's rotting with Spain, or
perhaps more frequently (it was in the English Midlands,
which as Hilaire Belloc said are sodden and
unkind): It's roaring with pain.  Some of our visitors
must have been rather put off when my six-year-old
daughter announced to them before dinner:
We're going to have parrots and keys.  But even
further back, in my own schooldays, the Spoonerism
celebrated many triumphs.  We would ask each
other, for instance, what was the difference between
a bon mot and a fart.  The answer was that the bon
mot is a shaft of wit.  While on this subject, I may as
well quote another of these prize questions: What is
the difference between a warhorse and a carthorse?
The answer is, to Spooner's eternal glory, that the
warhorse darts into the fray.



         
         

            I learned in Botswana that plonk means purple
liquid, origin not known. STP is a step lower:
screw-top plonk.  These definitions might have
emerged from extensive trials.



         
         
            A Dictionary of South African English,
            The appearance of a fourth edition of this dictionary
[DOSAE] within thirteen years of the first is
an indication of its popularity as well as of its scholarly
significance.  The current edition was partly
motivated by the recent political changes in South
Africa, which resulted in the unbanning of organizations,
individuals, and books.  For the lexicographer
this opened up the possibility of new words (e.g.,
the last apartheid ruler, P.W. Botha had officially
outlawed the regime and white minority rule) and,
more important, of new citations.

            Of all the countries in which English is a significant
first language, South Africa is perhaps the most
complex socially and linguistically.  While English is
currently the most important language, it is the first
language of only a small proportion of speakers: according
to official estimates for 1989-90, English,
with two million first-language speakers, is well behind
Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Tswana, and North
Sotho.  Furthermore, English is not the only colonial
language of the territory, for since 1948 the
ruling Afrikaner nationalists have promoted Afrikaans
as an essential language for advancement in
the public service.  Finally, segregational laws in the
country have tended to polarize the dialects of English
along partially ethnic lines.  Lexically speaking,
this has tended to produce fragments of South African
English, rather than a general, roughly homogeneous
variety.

            Such a multilingual environment--and the picture
is made still more complex by other immigrant
languages like Malay (no longer spoken), Indian languages
(e.g., Hindi and Tamil), as well as indigenous
languages of the Khoi and San families now extinct
in South Africa--makes the lexicographer's task at
once difficult and stimulating.  The DOSAE is in
some respects a reflection of the contact history of
South Africa, played out in terms of the English lexicon.
In its pages can be found linguistic traces of the
former rivalry between Boer and Briton, the naming
practices of the Khoi and San (Hottentot and Bushman
in former terms), racial conflict (derogatory
terms like Boer, Kaffir, and Hottentot each have
more than a page devoted to them), the political
discourse of the apartheid regime, and the counter-discourse
of the resistance movements.  The more
positive side of language and culture contact does
show up, however, in the numerous terms for food
and drink, entertainment, the landscape, terms of
endearment, forms of address, and words of approval.
It is also through this and earlier editions of
the DOSAE that one learned, to one's surprise, of
the South African provenance of words like off-load
unload, bottle store liquor store, butchery
butcher's shop, and bond mortagage bond.

            According to the Branfords' own calculations
(made in 1988) the source languages for items in the
DOSAE were 48 per cent Dutch/Afrikaans; 29 per
cent English (i.e., neologisms); 11 per cent Bantu
languages, and 12 per cent other.  The high proportion
of Afrikaans words has frequently been singled
out for comment by critics.  Some of the items
in this category are words of long standing (since the
introduction of English in the Cape in the late eighteenth
century) that have often passed into international
English: trek, veld, laager etc.  Other uncontroversial
Afrikaans items include political and
culinary terms widely used in South Africa, e.g.,
apartheid and biltong strips of sun-dried lean meat.
The majority of Afrikaans items, however, are those
which appear in written English sources, but rarely
in colloquial South African English (even as spoken
by Afrikaners).  The authors themselves mention
that some Afrikaans critics of earlier editions of this
text felt that many entries were not really South African
English.  (They responded by reducing the
number of such entries and by marking others as
borderline cases).

            There is certainly a need for words of Afrikaans
origin that recur in English texts (often for local
color effect) to be glossed somewhere: a reference
work like the DOSAE might be more convenient for
readers than an Afrikaans or Xhosa or some other
dictionary.  Likewise, it might be necessary for novices
to gloss non-English words that recur in bilingual
road signs and other public notices: apteek
chemist, links left, and the now obsolete blankes
whites (only) might be truly informative for the
overseas visitor.  (To be consistent, the DOSAE
would have to indicate the word for left in all languages
that appear in road signs in different parts of
the country--Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho and Tswana).

            In their entry for slegs only the authors quote
an amusing anecdote in this regard:


Slegs Only A visitor's guide to S. African English.
What are slegs?  a puzzled visitor from overseas
asked me.  He had been driving along in a hired
car and had suddenly found himself entering a
lane marked SLEGS ONLY.  But how is a visitor
expected to know that?  he demanded after I
had explained its meaning [that it was a bilingual
sign].  With the population divided into Whites,
Coloureds and Blacks, how am I to know that
Slegs isn't another race group?

            

            
               Slegs is one of the relatively few items marked in the
DOSAE as Afrikaans, rather than English.  I would
argue that this particular signpost does not occur
frequently enough in the book.  For example, as this
marking is absent in the entry, tweetalig bilingual,
we must infer that the authors now consider this to
be an English item.  Yet, the citations they give afford
a clue to the real status of this and numerous
other items in DOSAE : This wall chart, attractive
... and tweetalig nogal [bilingual, what's more], is
to be distributed to all hospitals....  and  Four
years in the charge office as a fraud detective.  That
was where I learned to speak Afrikaans She is heel-temal
tweetalig [totally bilingual] and ... studied
art in Scotland.

            Surely we are dealing with code-switching here
--the use of words and phrases from two languages
within the same speech event for stylistic effect,
with an audience that is capable of appreciating the
play on words.  Many of the Afrikaans words in
DOSAE are similarly illustrated from examples involving
bilingual word play by creative writers.  The
problem for the lexicographer is that code-switching
is open-ended: almost any word or phrase from the
one language can be interpolated into discourse
from the other.  It is also in practice difficult to decide
between the process of borrowing (which dictionaries
must concern themselves with) and code-switching.
This is not a problem peculiar to DOSAE ;
rather, it is one of the strongest challenges facing
lexicographers of a vast number of languages in the
twenty-first century, as English continues to spread,
influence, and be influenced by languages all over
the world in situations of intimate language contact.

            On the whole, I recommend DOSAE highly for
anyone wishing to get to grips with English in South
Africa.  Visitors as well as locals who are faced with a
barrage of acronyms in everyday usage will find
many of them glossed in these pages.  DOSAE shows
attention to detail, provides extensive definitions
with detailed cross references, has broad phonetic
transcriptions and, above all, provides delightful illustrative
sentences from historical and contemporary
sources.

            Rajend Mesthrie
            
               University of Cape Town
            
         
         
            Indexing Biographies and other stories of human
lives
            Every literate person has had experience with
indexes and knows that there are good ones and bad
ones.  It often astonishes me that publishers--at
whose door such shortcomings must be laid--can
put out books that contain a huge amount of valuable
information, then effectively deny access to it by
providing, in the worst case, no index at all and, in
many instances, an improverished index.  As one who
has prepared indexes of great variety, I recognize
the many problems that one can encounter; still,
these are not insurmountable, and there is no excuse
for producing a work of some complexity without
accompanying it by a thorough index.  The important
thing is the notion of thoroughness: the indexer
must try to anticipate and provide for a variety of
users' needs in an index; users do not seek the same
sort of information, and the effort must be made to
imagine the uses to which a particular work will be
put, then to provide the users with as many access
points to the information as can reasonably be expected.
On more than one occasion in these pages
have I lamented the absence of an index (or of a
useful, usable one) in a book that contains much valuable
information.

            Probably the greatest offenders were those who
produced the earlier manuals accompanying computers
and software: many of us had the experience
of reading through a manual the first time only to
find, later, on seeking the format of a certain command,
that there was no index, that the index had
not been updated to conform to the latest (looseleaf)
version of the text, or that the item sought was not
listed; the only solution was to go through the entire
text, laboriously turning each page to find the lost
information.  Today's manuals are much improved,
but they still rely on the users' knowledge of the
jargon of the computer trade, and much frustrating
time is still spent trying to find a given bit of information
(while trying to imagine what a computer
programmer would be likely to have called it because
he was unfamiliar with the jargon of writing,
editing, styling, composition, or the other arts and
crafts associated with publishing).

            I have had considerable experience in preparing
indexes--some simple and straightforward, some
highly detailed and sophisticated--for a wide variety
of books.  As I have dealt mainly with texts that
were in machine-readable form, I have been able to
develop techniques for extracting an index from a
text, especially if the text is consistently styled typographically.
In other words, if information type A
is consistently set in italics, type B in bold-face
italics, type C in small capitals, and type D in
boldface roman, if type E always appears in single
quotation marks, and so forth, one can use this information
to extract discrete categories of data for a
variety of purposes.

            Not all text is so highly stylized, and the present
work deals with biographies, autobiographies, and
fiction, which offer little opportunity for automatic
extraction because the subjects suitable for indexing
are often paraphrases of the words used in the text.
Mrs. Bell cites this example from Elizabeth Longford's
biography, Byron (Hutchinson/Weidenfeld &
Nicholson, 1976):


Byron, George Gordon, 6th Lord:... his
courtship and marriage, 60-79

Byron, Annabella, née Millbanke, wife of B.
... vicissitudes of her marriage, 71-7

            

            Mrs. Bell comments that the term vicissitudes
does not occur in the text (and, I daresay, courtship
and marriage do not occur as chapter headings,
either).

            This booklet contains many fascinating insights into
the art of indexing, including, for example, the observation,


... while authors can be subtle and discreet in
their writing, indexers have to condense their implications
to a blunt label--HOMOSEXUAL TENDENCIES,
for instance; we cannot hint in indexes.
[p. 19]
            

            As this is a rather specialized work, we cannot
devote the space to the full description that it merits
among those who pursue its concerns.  Those who
are involved in indexing and are unaware of the existence
of the Society of Indexers would be well
served to join.  Information regarding membership
(which includes a subscription to The Indexer , published
semiannually) can be obtained by writing to
the Society of Indexers, 139 The Ryde, Hatfield,
Herts.  AL9 5DP, England.  The Indexer is also the
official journal of the following affiliated societies;
information about membership can be sought at
their respective addresses: American Society of Indexers,
P.O. Box 386, Port Aransas, TX 78373, USA;
Australian Society of Indexers, GPO Box 1251L,
Melbourne, Victoria 3001, Australia; IASC (Indexing
and Abstracting Society of Canada, P.O. Box 744,
Station F, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4Y 2N6.

            Laurence Urdang
         
         
            A History of the English Language,
            Too often, the best books of the past are cast
aside to be replaced by nothing more than a rehash
of them, frequently rifling earlier material on the
legalistic grounds that it is out of copyright.  To
those wont to steep themselves in the writings of the
19th century, a period marked by an emergence of
scholarship and of the broad dissemination of knowledge,
plumbing the delights of those writings not
only for their content but for their controlled and
mannered style yields great satisfaction.  One must
be especially grateful to those who, rather than cast
it aside as old-fashioned or outdated, undertake to
modernize a classic, a policy that too few publishers
pursue.

            For me and scores of thousands of other students
of language and literature, A.C. Baugh's book
was the primer, the basic grammar on the history of
English.  Long before the invention of the cliché
user-friendly , that was an apt description of the
Baugh , a work to be relied upon for substance, accuracy,
readability.  Later, it became a useful reference,
always handy on a nearby shelf, to which one
could turn in those irritating lapses of memory of the
niggling detail.

            The first edition of Baugh's History was published
in 1935; because so much has happened to
English since then, it is fitting that its history be updated,
not only to reflect more recent developments
in dialect, lexicon, grammatical theory, and the universal
adoption of the language as a lingua franca,
but also to revise scholarship in the light of later
research that either elaborates or confutes information
that is now more than half a century old.  Although
I was surprised to note (on the title page)
that this is the fourth edition of the work, ignorance
of the second and third editions must be put down to
my own failing.  The present editor, Professor of
English at the University of Texas at Austin, has exercised
restraint in meddling with Baugh's original
text, having focused mainly on those areas--dialect,
modern grammatical theory, and, generally, the
work of later scholars--that could not have been
treated in 1935.  It is suggested that the next edition
include a more comprehensive section on dictionaries,
perhaps of lesser importance in earlier times but
increasingly the chief source of information about
language for most people, reflected in a recent report
that more people own a dictionary than a Bible.

            Laurence Urdang
         
         
            A Dictionary of English Place Names,
            This book, already reviewed in VERBATIM
[XVIII, 4], is now available in the United States.
         
         
            Act of Worship...


            Now that everyone has had the chance to listen to
the Beatles' I Saw Her Standing There , it is time to
take a deeper look at the meaning of the lyrics.
Sometimes a more critical and profound analysis can
be unexpectedly rewarding.

            Let us look at the first line:


Well, she was just seventeen

            

            A girl has recently had a birthday; there may
be--though we cannot be sure--a veiled reference
to her now being old enough to drive a motorcar.

            The second line:


You know what I mean

            

            is pure emphasis.  The writer is in some doubt as to
whether the listener has paid sufficient attention to
the first line.  Concentrate, he appears to be saying,
every word counts.

            The third line:

            And the way she looked was beyond compare
implies that the girl's appearance was unique.  It is
impossible to say what she is like, because she is like
nothing else.

            In line four,


How could I dance with another?

            

            we are introduced to the dilemma caused by the
girl's singular looks.  Other girls cannot be contemplated
as partners: this is a poignant predicament.

            But there is hope in lines five and six:

Oh, when I saw her standing there,
Well she looked at me
            

            Is there a chance that the girl reciprocates the
boy's admiration?  Is this looking the means by
which the boy may be induced to request the girl's
company on the dance floor?  Is she perhaps as enamored
of him as he is of her?  And if they do
meet--and we sense they will--can their relationship
endure?  The answer is in verse two, which we
shall be looking at tomorrow.  Please stand for the
hymn....
         
         
            Is it doable, do you think?



            Not long ago in an article on word-processing I
came across the word doable .  I could not remember
having seen it before--but, then, my memory for
words frequently lets me down these days.  I wondered
how it is pronounced.  And what does it
mean?

            So to the dictionaries.  First, to my trusty Gage
Canadian , which defines it as that can be done
and gives the pronunciation as [doo-uhb'l].  The
same definition and pronunciation are given in Webster's
New World and in the recent edition of the
Concise Oxford .  I then went to my 3rd edition of the
Concise Oxford (1934): it does not give the word,
which caused me to think that it probably is a recently
fabricated one and that I should not worry
about it.  Surely, I thought, the OED Supplement will
have something on it.  Nothing.  So to my magnifying-glass
edition of the unsupplemented one.  It had
doable , with the same definition and pronunciation
given in those other dictionaries, with this additional
definition, practicable.  It also gives a second definition:
Capable of being done or victimized.  The
earliest instance of its use given is A law ... which
is doable--from 1449.

            All this sent me into intense research into the
word do .  Dr. Basil Cottle, a scholar at the University
of Bristol, in his useful little book, The Plight of English ,
devotes nearly four pages to it, describing it at
the beginning as a deplorable little syllable.  The
emphatic use of do has long been used in our language.
Samuel Johnson deplored the superfluous,
emphatic use of do , as in I do love: he
considered it vitious.  We all use the emphatic do ,
and that is not always undesirable: I do believe ... ;
I do so want to see her; Do have a drink.  The
Gage Canadian gives 15 distinct definitions for do,
along with 10 common idiomatic phrases using it.
The abridged edition of Eric Partridge's A Dictionary
of Historical Slang gives more than five columns
to idioms beginning with do , from do a beer to do
you see the green in my eye?
            

            Then there is How do you do? --which actually
is not a question but a genteel response between
persons who have just been introduced to one another.
Quite different from it is How are you doing?,
although the grammatical difference seems slight.
Do is a remarkably versatile verb.  You can do your
washing.  Or the Rocky Mountains.  Or your income
tax.  Or your thing.

            And there is the simple interrogatory do: Do
you see what I mean?  Do you have the time?  (That
apparently is North American; the Brits, one of them
told me, say Have you the time? )

            
               I lisped in numbers ...

            A recent news item in The Times [November
1992] published in the international press presumably
to call delighted attention to the obtuseness of
the chief of police of Dearborn, Michigan, concerned
an officer who was suspended for three days
to seek psychiatric help in disabusing himself of
his obsession for writing the figure 7 with a bar
through it to distinguish it from the figure 1, a disambiguating
practice long followed in Europe where
it is the practice to write 1 to look like the left
half of an upward-pointing arrow.  The incident reminds
me that for some time I have intended to comment
on the way numerals are said in the UK and in
the US, though I am not entirely sure whether the
subject is properly linguistic, cultural, or categorizable
into some other area of behavior.  In any event,
I cannot recall ever having seen any comment on it
(but then I do not read books on the teaching of
English as a second language).

            In Britain, when a numeral is repeated in, say, a
telephone, credit-card, house, or other number, the
word double is used to describe it: thus, for instance,
the VERBATIM telephone in Aylesbury, 395880 ,
would be uttered as, three, nine, five, double-eight,
oh (or zero, but oh is more common).  If
there are three identical numerals in a row, as in
267444 , they would be read as, two, six, seven,
four, double-four; four sevens in a row would be,
double-seven, double-seven.  Occasionally, I have
heard a string like 666666 expressed as, treble-six,
treble-six, but double-six, double-six, double-six
is probably more frequent, and six, double-six, six,
double-six can be heard.  A recent radio advertisement
contained the number 888777 , read as eight,
double-eight, seven, double-seven.  The exception
that I have noted is in the naming of 0800 (free)
numbers, where the practice in Britain follows that
in America: oh, eight hundred.

            This style takes a little getting-used-to; I find
that when I say, out of habit, three, nine, five, double-eight,
oh, to Americans, they hesitate ever so
slightly before fully understanding.  Gone are the
days when one picked up the old upright phone, was
greeted by an operator, and told her--it was always
her--the number one wanted; with that antediluvian
routine went such memorable tunes as, Hello,
Central?  Give me haven, for my mother's there.
(One might also observe that, despite inflation,
other American telephonic archaisms persist in the
culture, like, I put a nickel in the telephone to dial
my baby's number, It's your nickel, etc.

            Readers outside North America may not be
aware that American telephone dials (now pads ) still
retain alphabetical sequences from the days when
local telephone numbers contained names, like
PEnnsylvania Six, Five Thousand and BUtterfield 8
(usually so written): everyone knew that the first
two letters of the name were to be dialed--PE 6-5000,
BU 8-.  In its infinite wisdom, the telephone
companies long ago abandoned words for numbers,
having perceived that there were some number
combinations (like 95) could not be readily yielded
by familiar names.  The letters were, however, retained
on the instruments, and North American telephones
group them this way (wisely, there is no Q):)


1    2    3    4    5    6    7    8    9   0

    ABC  DEF  GHI  JKL  MNO  PRS  TUV  WXY  Z

            

            Also, in those days, the zero could not occur among
the first three digits, and today, in North America, it
cannot be the first digit (in contrast to Britain, where
all dialling codes (US: area codes ) begin with a zero,
as, I believe, do all international codes, universally.
In my memory, European telephones have never
had letters, but I am sure that I will be quickly corrected
by readers if I am wrong.

            There must have been confusion--perhaps it
persists--about the alphabetic O [oh] and the numerical
0 [zero], for the telephone companies often
made a special point of emphasizing which was
meant: I assume that they have statistics on the number
of wrong numbers dialed when one was substituted
for the other.  But in these days of all-digit
telephone numbers, the tendency, particularly
among younger people, who seem to get confused
about such things, is to make certain that the word
zero is used, rather than oh.  I admit that zero
does remove any ambiguity in North America; but,
without letters on telephones, how could it arise in
Europe?

            Ever resourceful, Americans quickly recognized
that they could use part or all of their telephone
letters as a mnemonic.  For example, a dealer in stolen
automobiles with the telephone number 468-2277
could tell customers to dial HOT CARS; a psychiatric
clinic with the number 578-6887 could tell
patients to phone 5, R U NUTS (or U R NUTS); dial
PLUMBER (758-6237) if you have a leak, COLLEGE
(265-5343) to register for extention courses.
PASSION (727-7466) to satisfy cravings, KWIKFIT
(594-5348) (but not ZIPPER, because a number
cannot start with a Z or zero) for emergency
tailoring services, etc.  Indeed, Omnigraphics, a
company in Detroit, has published a fat book,
Phonames, that lists all the possible four-letter combinations
in numerical order and, for those who
might persuade their local telephone company to
change their number to coincide with a desired
word or command, alphabetically as well.  I understand
that the US Coast Guard emergency number
was to have been changed to 746-5464 (SINKING),
but it was decided that it might be too late by the
time the call went through.  In an earlier issue of
VERBATIM writers have commented on what have
come to be called bacronyms, names of companies,
products, charities, and other institutions that
have been chosen solely because their acronyms
yield words that are pronounceable, meaningful, or
both.  Here we have the numerical equivalent.

            It will be noted, that the grouping of the numbers
differs from country to country: the US retains
xxx-xxxx, presumably as a hangover from the old
days of telephone name-calling; in Britain, the
(older) five-digit and the (newer) six-digit numbers
are written solid: xxxxx(x); on the Continent, six-digit
numbers are written in sets of two: xx-xx-xx.
Newer seven-digit numbers in Britain are written
xxx-xxxx, as in the US.  Which of these patterns has
a better mnemonic advantage it is hard to say.  Does
anyone use xxx-xxx?

            The literal-minded among us have fastened on
the inaccuracy of the retained word dial for what
many now have on telephones.  The noun presents
no real problem, for the term (number) pad already
exists to describe the calculatorlike array.  But pad
proves unsatisfactory as a verb.  Press seems to have
been pressed into service: but I put a quarter [ or
ten-pence (or ten pee)] in the telephone to press
my baby's number just does not seem to have the
old ring.

            Laurence Urdang

         
         
            ... [A]s Judges shelter their knavery by precedents,
so do scholars their ignorance by authority:
and when they cannot reason, it is safer and less disgraceful
to repeat that nonsense at second hand,
which they would be ashamed to give originally as
their own.
John Horne Tooke, Epea Ptepoenta,
or The Diversions of Purley, Part I,

            Second Edition, London, 1798, p. 120.
         
         
            In response to a reader's complaint that his restaurant
reviews were becoming increasingly pretentious,
with descriptions of the ... food ... sublimated
to [his] profound architectural knowledge and
appreciation of interior design, Jonathan Meades,
the subject reviewer of The Sunday Times suited the
word to the action:


I admit to an interest in architecture and interior
design.  But then so do many restaurateurs.
I do not, however, allow the sublimity or bathos
of a setting to blind me to the attributes of its
kitchen.  Points are awarded for cooking--
although the cooking, bad or good, is often not so
fascinating as the tectonic or social aspects of a
particular place.  Making an inventory of a menu
is a task for guidebooks.  Me, I write only about
what I've tasted.

The average reader, who might require a
dictionary, and the normal customer, with an
antipathy to pig's head and sweetbreads, strike
me as being the putative gastro-brothers of
Toniben's ordinary working man or the man
on the Clapham omnibus.  These epithets grow
ever more presumptuous, ever more patronising
in the context of an ever more factional, furcated
society.  Whose palate and attitudes other than
my own could I possibly use?

            
         
         
            As some readers are aware, the teaching of English
to schoolchildren in England has been undergoing
great upheaval of late: the National Union of
Teachers, the largest in the UK, recently voted overwhelmingly
(nine out of ten) to boycott a compulsory
English test for 14-year-olds by refusing to
mark, administer, or invigilate [proctor] them.
John Patten, the Education Secretary, is, according
to The Times [4 February 1993], said to be anxious
for standard English to be introduced without endangering
regional variations.  Ian Small, headmaster
of Bootham School in York, a specialist on English
in the leading independent schools, is quoted
as saying, Thousands of English teachers have been
working their socks off to encourage youngsters to
write well and effectively, and if all that work was in
vain, it will be a great pity, a footling remark in the
circumstances.  The Times reports that the new curriculum
will include a reading list of classic works,
and children will be expected to use capital letters
and full stops [periods] correctly by the age of
seven, commas by 11, apostrophes and speech marks
by 13, and colons and semi-colons by 16.
         
         
            
               innocent vs. not guilty

               
 ... for the first time a prime minister had
used the word innocent rather than not guilty
when referring to the victims [killed in 1972
in Londonderry in the Bloody Sunday massacre]....--The
Times, 22 January 1993, p.5.

            

            Perhaps one of our readers steeped in legal lore
would care to comment on whether there is a legal
distinction between these terms or whether the distinction
resides solely in the minds of lay speakers.
         
         
            
               Man does not live by bread alone
            

            In a letter to The Sunday Times [21 February
1993], a reader in Leicester called attention to a bit
of a cockup in which an article on the delights of
Sardinia recommended a certain dish.  He wrote
about pene frattau, which means penis with
sheep's cheese, tomato, and eggs.  I hope he meant
pane frattau.
            
         
         
            
               Cliché of the Year?  [...so far, anyway]

            [From the Letters section of The Times. ]

            During the recent Commons debate on the
second reading of the National Lottery Bill,...
playing fields in general, and level playing fields
in particular, were referred to no fewer than 100
times.

            As chairman of the national association dedicated
to the protection (and improvement) of playing
fields, I am delighted they feature so prominently
in the rhetoric of politicians, but concerned
that our charity derives no direct benefit from the
extensive use of what seems to have become the
most popular cliché of our times.

            Would MPs, and others, consider making a small
donation to this association every time they use the
term level playing field as a figure of speech?

            Yours faithfully,

            Gyles Brandreth
            (Chairman),
            National Playing Fields Association,
            25 Ovington Square, SW3
            February 2 [1993].
         
         
            Small Thing


            For many years I was under the impression that
John Dryden had inveighed against the ending of a
sentence with a preposition, and I have included
mention of it now and then in my writing.  The interdiction
is meaningless for English grammar (or
style), having been carried over from Latin, where a
preposition must accompany the word it is connected
with syntactically and semantically; like the
caveat concerning split infinitives, which cannot be
split in Latin because, as in most other Indo-European
languages, they are single words, unsplittable
nuclei, unlike the atom,

            A few months ago, a colleague wrote saying that
he had encountered my mention of it but had been
unable to find any reference in Dryden's writings.
At the time I did not reply, because I did not have
the time to search for it.  Now that I have found it, I
cannot remember who queried me about it, but I
might as well present the information once and for
all in these pages in case anyone else wishes to
know.  The source is The Defence of the Epilogue,
or, An Essay on the Dramatic Poetry of the Last
Age, published in 1672 with Almanzor and Almahide,
or, The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards,
which had been roundly criticized, especially for its
language.


A synchysis, or ill-placing of words, of which
Tully so much complains in oratory.

The waves and dens of beasts could not
receive

The bodies that those souls were frightened
from.


The preposition in the end of the sentence; a
common fault with him, and which I have but
lately observed in my own writings.


What all the several ills, that visit earth,
Plague, famine, fire, could not reach unto,
The sword, nor surfeits, let thy fury do.


Dramatic Poesy & Other Essays,
John Dryden, Everyman's Library,
J.M. Dent, 1912, 1950, p. 100.
            

            The quotations are from Catiline, by Ben Johnson,
whom Dryden held in very high regard, a most judicious
writer.  Dryden, if not a purist, was certainly
a traditionalist and a precisian in language:


To begin with Language.  That an alteration is
lately made in ours, or since the writers of the
last age (in which I comprehend Shakespeare,
Fletcher, and Jonson), is manifest.  Any man who
reads those excellent poets and compares their
language with what is now written, will see it in
almost every line; but that this is an improvement
of the language, or an alteration for the better,
will not so easily be granted.  For many are of a
countrary opinion, that the English tongue was
then in the height of its perfection; that from Jonson's
time to ours it has been in a continual declination,
like that of the Romans from the age of
Virgil to Statius, but Quintilian himself so much
complains, under the person of Secundus, in his
famous dialogue de Causis corruptae Eloquentiae.

But, to show that our language is improved,
and that those people have not a just value for
the age in which they live, let us consider in what
the refinement of a language principally consists:
that is, either in rejecting such old words, or
phrases, which are ill sounding, or improper; or in
admitting new, which are more proper, more
sounding, and more significant.

The reader will easily take notice, that when I
speak of rejecting improper words and phrases, I
mention not such as are antiquated by custom
only, and, as I may say, without any fault of
theirs.  For in this case the refinement can be but
accidental; that is, when the words and phrases
which are rejected happen to be improper.  Neither
would I be understood, when I speak of impropriety
of language, either wholly to accuse the
last age, or to excuse the present, and least of all
myself.  Ibid., p. 97. [Italics not mine.]

            

            It is interesting to observe that Dryden, born only
fifteen years after the death of Shakespeare, should a
mere forty years later regard him as being of another
age: clearly, three centuries ago people had quite a
perception of time different from our own, largely, I
believe, brought about by our more thorough documentation
of the past hundred years in books, newspapers
and other periodicals, photographs, films,
and, more recently, videos.

            He comments on the errors in the writings of
the great masters that are cited today either in a
derisory tone or as an excuse for our own shortcomings:


[A]ll writers have their imperfections and failings:
but I may safely conclude in the general,
that our improprieties are less frequent and less
gross than theirs....  [M]alice and partiality set
apart, let any man who understands English, read
diligently the works of Shakespeare and Fletcher,
and I dare undertake that he will find in every
page either some solecism of speech, or some notorious
flaw in sense; and yet these men are reverenced,
when we are not forgiven.

Ibid., p. 98.
            

            Lest the reader think of Dryden as a stuffy purist,
here he is on neologisms:


As for the other part of refining, which consists
in receiving new words and pharases, I shall not
insist much on it.  It is obvious that we have admitted
many, some of which we wanted, and
therefore our language is the richer for them, as
it would be by importation of bullion: other are
rather ornamental than necessary; yet by their
admission, the language is become more courtly,
and our thoughts are better dressed.  These are to
be found scattered in the writers of our age, and
it is not my business to collect them.  They, who
have lately written with most care, have, I believe,
taken the rule of Horace for their guide;
that is, not to be too hasty in receiving of words,
but rather to stay till custom has made them familiar
to us:


Multa renascentur quae nunc cecidere,
cadentque;

Quae nunc sunt honore in vocabula, si volet
usus,

Quam penes, arbitrium est, et jus, et norma
loquendi.

Ars Poetica, 70-2.

[Many words which have now fallen out of
use will be reborn, and many now prominent
will disappear, if usage, which owns the right
to decide, and the law, and the canons of
speech, so choose.]


For I cannot approve of their way of refining,
who corrupt our English idiom by mixing it too
much with French: that is a sophistication of language,
not an improvement of it; a turning English
into French, rather than a refining of English
by French.

Ibid. p. 101f.
            

            (The 17th-century sense of sophistication was
closer to smacking of sophistry.)
         
         
            Description/Proscription/Style


            As we have observed in these pages on numerous
occasions, the professional linguist's avowed position
with regard to usage is similar to that of a
medical doctor's in relation to a patient: both are
charged with the responsibility of observing the
phenomena they encounter without expressing qualitative
opinions about them.  That is, the doctor is
not supposed to express his loathing or disgust at the
manifestations of some horrible affliction, nor is it
deemed proper for him to assume an accusatory posture
reflected in expressions like, What a fool you
are for having exposed yourself to the Malay waste-away
!

            The analogy is not entirely apt, however, for the
patient cannot always be held responsible for catching
the disease and might not be able to do anything
about its cure, while the person who misspells a
word, utters grammatical solecisms, or uses infer for
imply has resourse to remedial measures.  In many
cases, it must be acknowledged, the speaker or
writer has not been exposed to the opportunities
that would enable him to distinguish between what
is regarded as standard usage versus nonstandard,
hence, it might be said that he is not responsible for
using nonstandard English.  But, surely, someone
must accept the blame, and that someone ought to
be the person who employed what we have learned
from innumerable cop shows on television to call the
perp.
            

            The cable television service in the Old Lyme,
Connecticut, area is (apparently) forbidden to transmit
certain programs because the transmission rights
have been preempted by another station.  In such
circumstances, a message appears on the screen that
explains, in quasi-legalistic terms, why the viewer is
looking at the message instead of the program.
Among the words used is pursuant , which is spelled
persuant.  This message has been appearing on
the screen with that misspelling for the past two
years (or more), and the cable company maintains
that the card bearing the message is provided to
them with the proviso that it be transmitted as is.
Because the notice appears almost every evening on
at least one channel and remains on the screen for at
least thrity minutes on end, its exposure is far
greater than that of a fleeting utterance by a newscaster
or a similar written message that appears only
fleetingly.  One cannot help thinking that an entire
generation of viewers--assuming they are able to
read at all--is growing up learning how to misspell
pursuant.  Pursuant is a legal term, of course, not one
that drops readily from the lips of the housewife or
casual observer of the rock 'n' roll scene on MTV.
Thus, with some justification, one might well ask,
Who cares?  And there are always those who will
accuse me of being a purist, which I do not think I
am.  On the other hand, I try not to be a linguistic
slob, either.

            If one asks a professional linguist why he doesn't
say things like He don't or spell pursuant persuant,
the reply is likely to be,  He don't is not
part of my speech pattern, and I simply do not
spell pursuant that way.  One may accept that sort
of statement at face value; in my view, it would have
been more accurate (and honest) to say, I wouldn't
be caught dead saying He don't,  etc.

            Last evening (26 November) I was watching Biography
on the Arts & Entertainment network.  In
the course of the program, which was about the British
royal family, there appeared on the screen a
number of titles identifying the person or place pictured.
In one such title, Prince Andrew's father-in-law
was identified as Furguson; in another,
the site of Prince Charles's wedding was
identified as St. Pauls [ sic ] Carhederal [ sic ].  Aside
from the fact that the program was rather poorly
done, how are we to react to this sort of thing?
Should we throw up our hands, saying, Anyone can
make a mistake or What difference does it
make?  or You are the one to talk: look at all
the mistakes in VERBATIM?  As for the last, I would
protest that the A&E network has resources far beyond
those available for the proofreading of VERBATIM.
The first is merely a vapid truism.  But what
about the second?

            I am moved to offer some armchair psychological
analysis.  For many people, their ability to relate
to reality is inexorably tied to their control of language,
the greatest common denominator of our understanding
of the real world.  (Berkeleian philosophers
need not waste their time writing me on this
subject.)  For such people, we might say that their
very grip on reality depends on their control of language:
it is their security blanket, the corners of
which they chew with everlasting self-satisfaction
and in which they wind themselves for protection
against the hostile forces that would shake the foundations
of their traditionalism.  If their language is
threatened, they are threatened.  Put another way,
the acceptance of nonstandard language to replace
the comfortable protection offered by linguistic purism
amounts to moving the goalposts in a game that
they have been playing for their entire lives according
to a different set of rules.

            As readers of these occasional notes on English
are well aware, British standard usage now condones
the use of the indicative where the subjunctive formerly
reigned and, to mention just one other obvious
phenomenon, the use of the plural pronouns of
reference for what have traditionally been regarded
as singular referents (as in Everyone should bring
their book to class tomorrow ).  The two changes are
different, of course: the former marks a final succumbing
to the relentless forces of the indicative:
the weakening of the subjunctive might be regarded
as a rejection of the tolerance of uncertainty on the
part of the speaker, perhaps a product of the late-20th-century
obsession with the facts, resulting in insecurity
when faced with doubt, with low probability,
or with contrary-to-fact situations.  The issue of pronoun
agreement might be laid at the door of the
feminists' misguided interference with the forces of
language, resulting in a nervous rejection of the
masculine pronoun as the neutral one; but, in truth,
the sustenance of the singular nature of words like
each, everybody, everyone, etc. is probably pedantry,
for sense and logic are not sacrificed by
changing them to plurals, with the added benefit of
avoiding the dreaded he/his/him, regarded by feminists
as the bearer of the stigma of male machismo.
In many cases, the paraphrase, All students should
bring their books to class tomorrow , and similar pluralizations
will conveniently turn the trick without
distorting the meaning.

            One is led to considering the establishment of a
hierarchy of the heinousness.  For instance, I have a very
low tolerance for spelling errors and grammatical solecisms
in letters of application from those soliciting
work: job applicants who are too careless to correct
the capitalization of california and the spelling
Britian get short shrift, though I am more tolerant
of those using presently for now .  A great deal can be
determined from a personal interview--somewhat
more complicated with an applicant a thousand
miles away--but dialect differences must be accounted
for, too.  For instance, the British use the
word machismo (but pronounce it, almost invariably,
as if it were a loanword from Italian, with a - k -where
the Spanish has a - tch -).  Yet macho is uttered
with a - tch -, possibly to distinguish it from one of the
pronunciations of the word for a variety of shark.
The OED2e is not tuned in to this pronunciation of
machismo , showing only the - tch - pronunciation; the
Longman and the newer Oxford Concise show both,
but with - tch - first; only the Collins , of those British
dictionaries I checked, shows the - k - pronunciation
as prevalent.  One professional British lexicographer
told me, categorically, that no one uses the - tch - pronunciation
in Britain, where it would be regarded as
wrong or pedantic.  If he is right, then those who
show it at all are merely genuflecting in the direction
of the purists.
         
         
            
Proceeds from sales of carved ducks go to handicap
children.  [A sign in a Greek pizeria in Peabody, Massachusetts.
Submitted by ]
         
         
            
Hot Cod Pieces are Perfect for Little Soldiers.
[Headline in The Australian , .  Submited
by ]
         
         

            Responding to Douglas S. Dodge's article on binomial
nomenclature, Why All Living Things Have
Latin Names [XIX, 3,44], it would be appropriate to
point out that bacteria also have genus and species
names, adjudicated by a separate International Code
of Bacterial Nomenclature.  Some years ago a Congressman
introduced a bill to change the genus
name of the bacterium Salmonella, which includes
the species causing typhoid fever and other diseasecausing
species.  He thought it gave offense to the
salmon industry, and he proposed to right this dreadful
wrong.

            Microbiologists laughed and laughed: in the first
place, nobody but the official committee on nomenclature
is authorized to change a bacterial name;
second, Salmonella is recognized internationally, not
just in the U.S.; and third, the bacterium was named
not after the fish but after an American bacteriologist,
Daniel E. Salmon (1850-1914).


         
         

            Ornithorhynchus (not, as printed, Ornithorhyncus)
anatinas is a hybrid of two binomials: the
first is the accepted Ornithorhynchus paradoxus, the
second, the earlier (by one year) Platypus anatinas,
which was discarded because it had already been
used for a genus of Coleoptera (beetles).  Perhaps
the final word on this should be Oliver Herford's
poem (from This Giddy Globe, George H. Doran,
1919):


My child, the duck-billed platypus
A sad example sets for us.
From him we learn how indecision
Of character provokes derision.
This vacillating beast, you see,
Could not decide which he would be--
Fish, flesh, or fowl--and chose all three.
The scientists were sorely vexed,
To classify him so perplexed
Their brains that they with rags at bay
Called him a horrid name one day,
A name that baffles, frights, and shocks us,
Ornithorhynchus paradoxus.
            



         
         

            Further to the letter of Douglas S. Dodge
[XIX, 2,18] regarding tripes á la mode de Caen,
please note that the Caen referred to is not the
French place name but the name of the San Franciscan
writer and journalist, Herb Caen.  The dish in
question in his invention, first prepared at Trader
Vic's restaurant.



         
         

            John Kahn's article, Lexicographic Quirks and
Whimsy [XIX,2,10], which touched on the definitions
of animals in early dictionaries, reminded me
of one of my favorites, from Edward Phillips's New
World of Words (1720):

            
               APOSTA, a creature in the island of Tobago, in
America, so much in love with men, that it often
follows them and delights to gaze on them.

            Nathan Bailey modified it to:

            
               APOSTA, a creature in America, so great a lover
of men, that it follows them and delights to gaze on
them.



         
         

            John Kahn's article sent me back to my old English-Russian
Illustrated Dictionary (A.G. Yelisseyeva,
Ed., 2nd ed., Soviet Encyclopedia, 1964), in
which each word is illustrated by examples in both
languages.  My favorite is:

            
               REST-HOME, I spent my vacation at a rest-home.



         
         

            Your breezy note on street names [OBITER
DICTA, Name Withheld, XIX,2,20], suggested certain
categories that might lend more pizzazz to the
scene.  As the result of observation over a period of
many years of driving through or past suburban residential
developments within a half hour of my
home, I have induced principles of street taxonomy,
by sheer inference, that demonstrate that streets in
such places are designated by:

            (1)  Surnames of friends or business associates of
the developer which, for some reason tend to be less
than euphonious--at least in my universe: Unruh,
Hoffnagle, Gilham, Solly, Alburger, Napfle, Knorr,
Borbeck.
            

            (2)  Given names of family members of the developer
or his friends, primarily to celebrate wives
and children: Christopher Drive, Lee Lynn Lane, Arthur,
Marvin, Jane, and Elizabeth Road, Delia and
Alexis Lane, Andrew [and] Shelly [Street].
            

            (3)  Names of trees, presumably to memorialize
those that the developer has just caused to be
chopped down: Maple, Birch, Walnut, Sycamore, Ash,
Beech, Spruce and Locust Street/Roads/Avenue/Lane .


            Of course these principles do not account for all
the streets in a particular development and do not
necessarily apply in all developments, but I cannot
be responsible for a developer's ignorance of my
findings or for his aberrant conduct in disregarding
them.



         
         

            The comment about street names reminded me
of a punning name in Ohio for which credit must
probably go to the Ford Motor Company.  Several
years ago they built a transmission plant near Cincinnati
and had to make a new access road, for which
some genius chose the name, Front Wheel Drive.
            



         
         

            I was intrigued by Leslie Brunetta's description
of Italian surnames, Frailty, Thy Name is Bevilacqua
[XIX,2,1], in particular of Bevilacqua and
Bévivino.  It recalled a meeting, some years ago, of
the Journal and Publicity Committee of the Professional
Institute of the Public Service of Canada.

            It was revealed that the editor, Bill Drinkwater,
had been hired by Dr. Boivin , of the Board of Directors.
At that point, someone remarked that The
fact that Dr. Boivin hired Mr. Drinkwater surely
must tell us something about the two predominant
linguistic groups in this country.

            
               Boileau is also a common French name.  Yet, despite
the existence of English names like Winthrop,
Windsor, Winston, Winchester, etc. appears to reveal
vestigers of a one-time thriving English wine industry,
one has yet to come across a Mr. Drinkwine,
surely a deficiency in English as a world language.

            The comments on street names [XIX,2,20] recalls
that I live on Nepean Street, but the mailing
label of my New Yorker subscription persists in
showing it as NE PEAN (suggesting Northeast
Pean?), despite attempts to have it corrected.  On
the other hand, that error comes in handy when I
receive junk mail, for I now know who is selling my
name to the distributors of such mail.



         
         

            A correction to the statement in Leslie Brunetta's
article, Italian Amerigo is simply Henry in
English.

            
               Amerigo is from Old German Amalricus (Latinized
form), from amal work + ricja rule; it was
introduced into England at the time of the Norman
Conquest.  In the Domesday Book (1086) it is
Amalricus, and such forms as Amauri, Amery, Emery
developed later.

            
               Henry is from Old German Haimirich, Latinized
as Henricus , from haimi home + ricja rule.  On
phonological grounds alone the first elements indicate
different roots.

            The foregoing is chiefly from the Oxford Dictionary
of English Christian Names, E.G. Withycombe,
Oxford University Press, 1947.



         
         

            I missed two classic spoonerisms in XVIII, 4: the
one that spells the difference between a game cock
and a shysters lawyer (a game cock clucks defiance),
and the difference between a lady in the bath and a
lady in the church (the latter has a hope in her soul).  I am
writing to add to Mr. Douglas S. Dodge's contrepèteries ,
as he requested [EPISTOLAE,XIX, 217]: after
smoking France's favorite cigarette for the first
time: Qu'est-ce que c'est une Blauloise Gueue?  Ça
sert de mèche.

            If Mr. Dodge managed to twist the subject from
spoonerism to contrepèteries, allow me to expand
the game to a third language and bring on Schüttelreime,
the delightful German equivalent.  Schüttelreime
range from a simple Du bist / Buddhist to
such awesome four-liners as the following one that
deals with the ultimately end of two small, overly
noisy bulldogs:

Weil die beiden Moppel dort
Gar so grässlich zwiegesungen,
Hat zu einem Doppelmord
Der Besitzer sie gezwungen.
            

            ... or the one that takes place in the town of Gossensass
after a heavy rain:

Ein Auto fuhr durch Gossensass,
Und zwar durch eine Sossengass'
Sodass die ganze Gassensoss'
Sich auf die Insassen goss.
            

            ... and finally the righteously indigiant one about
an ill-mannered youngster at the Spanish court:

Unerhörte Finten, das!
Schüttet er ein Tintenfass
Über alter Tanten Füss!
Schikt such für Infanten dies?
            

            I trust that Mr. Ford, who started it all by Spiking
Lunars [XVIII, 4, 6] is not going to take umbrage
at the turn of this multilingual coda.



         
         

            Do you have a Department for or an Anthology
of Bilingual Puns?  Here is one of my own spontaneous
creations, uttered while dining at a French restaurant:
the menu item oeuf russe was described by
the waiter as a hard-boiled egg having its yolk
chopped, seasoned and restored into the cooked
white.  I ordered it and it was served as a half white,
duly stuffed, prompting me to exclaim, A half an
egg is not an oeuf .



         
         
            [ In my (vast) culinary experience, the term is oeuf à la
Russe, and it consists merely of a hard-boiled egg, cut
in half lengthwise, served with a mustardy mayonnaise
sauce and, if one is lucky, a caper or two.  The
stuffed egg dish is described, within the cordon culinaire
that I frequent, as deviled egg and is usually
associated with canapés served bugget style at picnics,
and similar al fresco affairs. --Editor]
         
         

            In Mr. William Brashear's Hocus Pocus [XIX,
1, 1], the nonsensical magical words from Goethe's
Reineke Fuchs, nekrast negibaul geid sum manteflih
dnudna mein tedachs make sense when the words are
read backwards (with some anagrammatical liberties):

            
               Schadet niemand und hilfet, Man mus(s) die Gläubigen
stärken, which freely translates into Harm nobody
and help, one must strengthen the believers.



         
         

            I enjoyed David Galef's What a Cliché!
[XIX, 3, 1] and offer for the archives Jacqueline Adams's
They're both tarnished with the same brush,
uttered on a recent CBS Nightly News (February
1993).



         
         

            Additions to the list of What a Cliché!  separate
the wheat from the shaft and green behind the
ears.
            



         
         

            What a Cliché!  recalls the mixed metaphors
quoted in The News [Boca Raton, June 8, 1992], attributed
to a University of Florida professor of political
science, Walter Rosenbaum:


Because Florida is on the leading edge of the
graying of America, this study raises new concerns
about a growing gulf between young and
old and the possibility of a national backlash
against the aging.

            

            Karen Marcus, Chairwoman of the Palm Beach
County Board of County Commissioners, issued a directive
at a meeting in June 1992 (evidently a good
vintage year for mixed metaphors) in which she said,


...so that you don't need to spin your wheels
until you have something to sink your teeth
into.

            

            At the same meeting, the lone male commissioner
noted that something would open up a whole ball
of wax.



         
         

            Alex Berlyne, in Front Back-axle [XIX, 3, 29],
finds it beyond understanding how the Hebrew word
pony (which he believes to be borrowed from ponytail )
has come to stand for fringe or bangs in the
sense of hair combed forward over the forehead.
However, in German, French, and Dutch, pony (or
pony hair ) has always signified that hairstyle, even
long before the ponytail came into fashion.  Pony is
not a shortening of ponytail but an immigrant in its
own right, and undoubtedly the older of the two.



         
         
            Sarasate had the fastest fingers ever to set foot on
stage.  [From St. Paul Sunday morning, MPBN, .  Submitted by ]
         
         
            
Movie: Of Human Bandage.   [From TV Supplement
to the St. Petersburg Times.]
         
         
            
Born in Minden, Neb., in 1886, she was one of five
children of a Congregational minister, who also ran a grain
elevator, and his wife.  [From the Northglen-Thornton
Sentinel , .  Submitted by 
]