VOL21_2.txt

   
      
         
            Plane Speaking




            Nothing underscores the subtle complexities of
language more strikingly than the miscommunications
that occur among pilots, crew members,
and air traffic controllers.  An experienced flight instructor
reports noticing considerable power on, just
before touching down, while checking out a pilot in a
small airplane.  He had thought he was saying Back—
on the power , with a stress on Back and a pause before
on , but he was interpreted by the pilot as having said
Back on—the power , with the stress on on and the
pause after it.  A pilot who had been instructed to
maintain 7000 feet and who was then told,


traffic at ten o'clock, three miles,
level at 6,000, to pass under you,

            

            responded, We have him , and was then challenged
by the controller when he was observed descending
through 6800 feet.  The pilot had misconstrued the
phrase level at 6,000 imperatively, as an instruction
for himself, meaning [Descend to and remain] level
at 6,000, rather than understanding it declaratively,
as it had been intended, as an assertion about his
traffic, meaning [The traffic is] level at 6,000.  On
January 25, 1990, an aircraft over Cove Neck, New
York, ran out of fuel, and 73 of the 159 persons
aboard died in the resulting crash, including the
three crew members in the cockpit.  The flying pilot
had instructed the copilot Digale que estamos en
emergencia and the copilot had responded Si, senor,
ya le dije ; but what he had actually radioed to the
controller was We're running out of fuel .  The specific
English word emergency is required in the aviation
protocol to convey to the controller that the
disaster is imminent, but the copilot failed to use
that word, even though the pilot had used its exact
Spanish equivalent in telling him what to say.

            As I show in my book Fatal Words: Communication
Clashes and Aircraft Crashes (University of Chicago
Press, 1994), these examples are representative
of a wide range of accidents and near misses in
which language misunderstandings or omissions
have played a contributing and sometimes central
role.  An instructor reports responding to the tower
calling traffic by saying I got it , with the intended
meaning I see the traffic but being interpreted by
his student as meaning that the instructor was now
flying the aircraft.  In similar incident, a copilot reports
that the landing field was in sight by saying I've
got it , with the result that the flying pilot let go of
the controls.  The sentence Maintain runway heading
is interpreted sometimes as meaning that the pilot
maintain the heading indicated when lined up on the
extended center line of the runway and sometimes
as meaning that the pilot take a heading after liftoff
to keep the aircraft traveling on that line.  In some
situations this difference can lead to a conflict between
aircraft in a cross wind after takeoff.  At an
airport at which Local Control and Ground Control
were combined, a construction vehicle, B1, called,
At the localizer road to proceed to the ramp .  A controller,
knowing that B1 had called but not sure
what the request had been, replied B1, Ground, Go
Ahead and then proceeded to talk to aircraft while
waiting for a reply.  B1 misinterpreted the phrase
Go Ahead as referring to his driving, rather than his
speaking, and was halfway down his normal route of
travel before the controller realized what had happened.

            Homophony and, more commonly, near-homophony,
in which different words or phrases
sound exactly or nearly alike, can be just as problematic
as syntactic ambiguity.  For example, the
sentence Pass to the left of the tower is ambiguous
because left can mean either the speaker's left or the
hearer's left; but further confusion is also possible,
because left can sound very much like west .  A pilot
reports practicing short field landings in a small airplane
as a student when his instructor said Last of
the power , meaning to reduce to zero while flaring.
However, the pilot thought the instructor had said
Blast of power , fearing an imminent stall.  The result
was confusion and a longer landing.  A pilot who was
observed on radar to be somewhat higher than
called for and flying in the wrong direction turned
out to have misheard a clearance for a Maspeth climb
as a clearance for a massive climb .  Maspeth is a fix in
the New York metropolitan area, but the pilot was
unfamiliar with the local geography.  An outbound
pilot who was told to receive his clearance from the
Center when he was on the deck misheard this as off
the deck and proceeded with his takeoff, consequently
finding himself head-on with an inbound aircraft.
In another incident, one widebody airplane
barely missed colliding with another after landing,
because the pilot heard Hold short as Oh sure in response
to his asking the controller May we cross ? in
reference to a runway.

            An international carrier inbound to the United
States was handed off to a new Center after the captain
had read back the clearance Cleared to descend
to two zero zero, cross two zero miles south of XYZ at
two two zero and the First Officer had set the altitude
selector to 20,000 feet.  To the initial contact
from the flight, Leaving two two zero for two zero
zero , the new Center responded, Were you cleared
to two zero zero ?  The Center claimed later that the
clearance had been only to 220, that is, 22,000 feet,
but the crew had understood otherwise.  A Captain
who was flying with an assigned altitude of 10,000
feet while being vectored for a landing on runway
27L thought he heard the copilot say Cleared to
seven, took this to mean Cleared to seven thousand
feet, and started to descend.  The copilot had really
said Cleared two seven in reference to the runway.
Confusions between the identical sounding to and
two almost led to a mid-air collision, when a pilot
misheard Climb to five zero as Climb two five zero,
putting him on a collision course with another aircraft
that was just fifteen hundred feet above him; it
did lead to a fatal accident, when a pilot, in another
incident, read back the instruction Descend two four
zero zero as O.K. Four zero zero and then proceeded,
without correction from the controller, to descend
to four hundred, rather than twenty-four hundred
feet.

            To is not the only preposition that can kill.  On
March 27, 1977, the pilot of a KLM 747 radioed We
are now at take-off, as his plane began rolling down
the runway in Tenerife, the Canary Islands.  The air
traffic controller mistakenly took this statement to
mean that the plane was at the take-off point, waiting
for further instructions, and so did not warn the pilot
that another plane, a Pan Am 747 that was invisible in
the thick fog, was already on the runway.  The resulting
crash killed 583 people in what is still the most
destructive accident in aviation history.  The KLM
pilot's otherwise perplexing use of the very nonstandard
phrase at take-off, rather than the more standard
phrase taking off, appears to have been a subtle
form of what linguists call code-switching, a process in
which bilingual or multilingual speakers inadvertently
switch back and forth from one of their languages
to another in the course of a conversation.  In
the KLM pilot's case, what linguists call the present
progressive aspect, which is expressed in English by a
verb's -ing form, can be expressed in Dutch by the
equivalent of at plus the verb's infinitive.  Perhaps
because of fatigue or the stress of having to work in
conditions of no visibility, the Dutch-speaking pilot
switched into the Dutch grammatical construction
while keeping his words in English, as required.  The
Spanish-speaking controller had no clue that this was
going on and so interpreted the at in the most natural
way, as indicating a place, the take-off point.

            Code-switching can take place even within the
same language, when different dialects or variants
are available.  On February 17, 1981, at John Wayne
Orange County Airport in Santa Ana, California, Air
Cal 336 was cleared to land while Air Cal 931 was
cleared to taxi into position for takeoff, but the controller
then decided that more time was needed between
the takeoff and the landing and so told 336 to
go around.  The 336 Captain resisted this instruction
by having his copilot radio to ask for permission to
continue landing, but he switched from technical
aviation jargon to ordinary English and used the
word hold to express this request.  In aviation parlance,
to hold some action always means to stop
what you are doing and thus to go around in a landing
situation; but in ordinary English hold can also
mean to continue what you are doing and thus to
land in such a situation.  The resulting confusion
led to 34 injuries, four of them classified as serious,
and the complete destruction of the aircraft by fire,
for Air Cal 336 landed with its landing gear retracted,
the Captain having finally decided to follow
instructions to go around, but too late to do so.

            There are technological means of ameliorating
miscommunications in the aviation setting, as I discuss
in Fatal Words, but there are broader lessons to
be learned from these examples.  Not only pilots and
controllers, but people in general need to learn to
be more mindful of their own language use and to be
willing to use more words to get meanings across.
We all need to learn to listen with more care and to
ask for clarification, rather than assuming that we
already know what is going to be said to us in advance.
         
         
            
Available for priv parts [Legend on the marquee of
a cocktail lounge in Waltham, Massachusetts, Christmas-time
.  Submitted by .]
         
         
            
 I don't mind having my feet to the fire.  It focuses
everybody's mind, Mr. Doroniuk said of the short time
frame.  My problem is I've got so many balls in the air. 
[From the (Toronto) Globe and Mail , .
Submitted by .]

         
         
            What Is Dementia?




            
               Dementia is a term often used by laypersons and
by medical personnel, both of which have
employed the word in different ways at various
times.  The resulting confusion is furthered by inconsistencies
among definitions in medical dictionaries
and textbooks.  A survey of source material was
therefore undertaken to provide a history of the
word and of how its use has evolved.

            
               Dementia derives from the Latin, de - away or
from, and ment- , root of mens `mind.'  The OED incorrectly
attributes the initial use of dementia to
Philippe Pinel in 1806: the word was first used in an
English text in 1592 by Richard Cosin, Member of
Parliament, in defense of the hanging of a conspirator
against the monarchy.  Cosin defined dementia as
...a passion of the minde, bereaving it of the
light of understanding...  The word first appeared
in an English medical dictionary in 1775.
George Motherby ( A New Medical Dictionary ) said it
was madness, or a delirium and used the same
definition for insania .  Dementia, insanity , and madness
were synonyms throughout most of the 19th
century.  Robley Dunglison in his series of medical
dictionaries (1833—1903) echoes medical thinking
of the time when he says of dementia in common
parlance, and even in legal language, this word is
synonymous with insanity... It is characterized by
a total loss of the faculty of thought.  Medical use of
madness then disappeared, but the word was retained
by the laity.  In the 1900s, insanity also faded
from the medical vocabulary, and it is now used by
lawyers and judges when deciding on responsibility
for acts committed while mentally deranged: not
guilty by reason of insanity.

            Modern understanding of the meaning of dementia
began in 1892 with A Dictionary of Psychological
Medicine , by Daniel Tuke, where it was defined
as a state in which manifestations of mind are
to a greater or less degree absent in consequence of
disease or decay of the brain itself.  It is always an
acquired condition, and as such is to be distinguished
from amentia, which is either a congenital
state or one closely connected with that period.
Tuke's definition has a remarkably contemporary
sound.  It recognizes degrees of the syndrome rather
than the previously described total loss of mentality.
The condition is attributed to disease or decay of
the brain and is acquired.  Tuke also commented on
reversibility and dismissed acute dementia as really
instances of Melancholia cum stupore .  In the late
19th century he listed nineteen forms of dementia,
from acute and accidentalis to senile and toxica .

            The meaning of dementia frequently changed in
the 20th century; the word lost popularity in the
1940s and '50s.  Selected definitions from Dorland's
Medical Dictionary illustrate some of the shifts:


1917, 9th ed.: Insanity characterized by loss or
impairment of intellect, will, and memory.

1941, 19th ed.: A generic designation for mental
deterioration, less frequently used than formerly,
except in the term dementia praecox.

1957, 23rd ed.: A general designation for mental
deterioration.

1974, 25th ed.: A generic designation for mental
deterioration; called also aphrenia, aphronesia,
and athymia.

1981, 26th ed.: Organic loss of intellectual function,
called also aphrenia, aphronesia, and
athymia.

1988, 27th ed.: [DSM-III] An organic mental disorder
characterized by a general loss of intellectual
abilities involving impairment of memory,
judgment, and abstract thinking as well as
changes in personality.  It does not include loss
of intellectual functioning caused by clouding
of consciousness... nor that caused by depression...
Dementia may be caused by a number
of conditions, some reversible, some progressive...

            

            Each definition has deficiencies.  Will (1917)
is difficult to determine, and was soon abandoned.  If
dementia means only mental deterioration (1941
to 1974), it is not separated from neuroses and psychoses.
The word organic (1981) addresses this
problem.  The three synonyms cited in 1974 and repeated
in 1981 came from a lexicographer whose
mind was fixed in an earlier (19th) century.  The
1988 quotation of the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual (DSM-III) returned Dorland's Medical Dictionary
to the 20th century: DSM-III is the standard
psychiatric manual defining mental disorders.

            In the 1940s and '50s, dementia was seldom
used except for types of schizophrenia, e.g., dementia
praecox , or catatonic and paranoid dementia.
Psychiatrists during that time officially replaced the
word dementia with chronic brain syndrome , a useless
phrase now almost completely abandoned.

            Let us examine critically some representative
definitions of the word dementia to illustrate the
complex nature of the term and to marvel at the diversity
of words used to define this single concept:


Lishman, Organic Psychiatry, 1978: An acquired
global impairment of intellect, reason and personality
but without impairment of consciousness.

            

            
               Global , meaning all aspects of intellect, is used
by many medical authors, but is incorrect.  The decay
is not global at onset; discrete disorders of mention
may dominate the clinical picture in midcourse; and
even in the final stages cognitive impairment may be
selective.  Maintained consciousness is accepted by
modern authors as necessary to the definition, but
nothing is said here of the cerebral origin of dementia,
its organic nature, or its degree of permanence.


Butterworths Medical Dictionary, 1978: A form of
mental disorder in which the cognitive and intellectual
functions of the mind are prominently
or predominantly affected; invariably a
symptom of organic cerebral disease, and as a
rule, impairment of memory is one of the earliest
symptoms.  Dementia necessarily implies
some degree of permanent change; totally recoverable
confusional states in which cognitive
changes are prominent are thus excluded.

            

            
               Cognitive and intellectual are synonyms for the
faculty of knowing ( OED ): use of both words is redundant.
Of the mind is unnecessary—where else is
knowing located?  Impairment of memory is a frequent
early symptom of Alzheimer's dementia, but
not necessarily of other types.  The concept of irreversibility
arose from initially equating all dementias
with senile dementia.  Toxic and infectious dementias
can be halted or reversed, as illustrated by the
effect of penicillin on dementia paralytica , the cerebral
form of neurosyphilis.  It is therefore incorrect
to state that some degree of permanent change is
implied for all types of dementia.


Diagnostic and Statistical Manual DSM-III-R),
1987: The essential feature of Dementia is impairment
in short-and long-term memory, associated
with impairment in abstract thinking, impaired
judgment, other disburbances of higher
cortical function, or personality changes.  The
disturbance is severe enough to interfere significantly
with work or usual social activities or
relationships with others.  The diagnosis of Dementia
is not made if these symptoms occur
only in the presence of reduced ability to maintain
or shift attention to external stimuli, as in
Delirium; however, Delirium and Dementia
may coexist... an underlying causative organic
factor is always assumed... Dementia
may be progressive, static, or remitting...

            

            Emphasis on memory loss does not take into account
dementias other than Alzheimer's.  Insistence
on severity eliminates mild cases of dementia or instances
where a mildly demented person is able to
manage when little intellectual ability is needed.  All
mental and physical disorders may interfere with
work or usual social activities, hence these losses
are not diagnostic of dementia.  The assumption that
a causative organic factor is always present is not
proved in rare cases.  Complete studies including autopsy
may occasionally fail to disclose the cause.

            The definition of dementia has changed often
since it was used by Richard Cosin in 1592, and it
will continue to change as new information becomes
available.  Any definition, therefore, must be tentative,
but it should not contain outmoded concepts,
as occurs too often in medical dictionaries.  Current
meaning may be sought in articles published in recent
medical journals, but authors are contentious,
and judgment must be used.

            Dementia is not a single symptom but a syndrome,
a group of symptoms and signs that occur in
different combinations depending on the site and
nature of changes in brain tissue.  It therefore cannot
be properly defined in a few words.  A synthesis
of current uses of the word would include the following
concepts: an acquired syndrome of mental
deterioration without loss of consciousness; onset
often uncertain; early changes from normal to abnormal
frequently imperceptible.  Furthermore, dementia
is chronic and usually progressive, but it may
be static or reversible.  It arises secondary to structural
or biochemical alterations of the brain, hence
its medical description is organic.  Dementia is characterized
by changes in personality and behavior
with disturbances of orientation, memory, abstract
thinking, and judgment.  Altered cerebral function
may also result in disordered language and difficulty
in movements requiring dexterity.

            It should be noted that individual symptoms
may occur in normal persons at various times and
that memory commonly declines in normal old age.
Popular and medical use of dementia first associated
it with senility but since World War II has linked it
predominantly with the type first described by Alois
Alzheimer in 1907.  Alzheimer's and multi-infarct
dementia, the result of multiple small strokes, are
currently considered the most frequent causes of dementia.
The devastating and untreatable effects of
senility and of these two types of dementia excite
horror and pity.  Other causes of dementia, however,
although less common, can be treated effectively
and reversed.  These conditions include thyroid
deficiency, mercury poisoning, infectious
diseases such as neurosyphilis and meningitis, nutritional
disorders, including pellagra and pernicious
anemia that involve deficiency of elements of the
vitamin B complex, and chronic alcoholism.  Unfortunately,
AIDS is a recent addition to the list of
causes of dementia that lack an effective treatment.
         
         
            The True Meaning of Christmas




            Mistletoe and festivities, holly and ivy, peace to
the world, commerciality... Just what is
the meaning of Christmas?  This is a question asked
all too often these days.  A little research soon
reveals the true meaning of the season of good will
to all men.

            The word Christmas derives from the late old
English Christes mæsse , meaning the mass of
Christ.  That is easy enough to follow, but digging a
little deeper into the meaning of Christmas leads us
to a strange anomaly.  Mass has its roots, as already
noted, in the old English mæsse which itself derives
from the written Latin missa which means send,
send away, or dismiss.  The earliest occurrences of
the word being used to refer to a religious service
are to be found in the epistles of Saint Ambrose and
the itinerary of Silvia of Aquitania in the last quarter
of the fourth century, when it was applied to matins
and vespers; however, in its most eminent sense,
mæsse was used to denote the Eucharist.

            Some etymologists believe that missa at first denoted
the solemn conclusion of a religious service,
the words Ite, missa est Go, it is the dismissal being
uttered at the end of the ceremony but later applied
to the service itself.  And it is here that the anomaly
can be seen; in its most rudimentary form, Christmas
means Christ's dismissal, quite the opposite of its
meaning of Christ's birth today.

            The angel may well have sung The First Noel ,
but what exactly is a Noël?  A Noël originally was a
canticle or song sung at Christmas time in country
churches in France, but it soon became a general
term for a Christmas carol.  The English word
nowel is closely related to Noël , although there is a
slight difference in meaning: nowel was a word
shouted or sung as an expression of joy to commemorate
the birth of Christ.  Both words derive from
the Latin nātālis birth.

            Another term used to describe Christmas is
Yule.  Yule has its roots in both Christianity and paganism.
In Old English the word \?\eól was used to
mean Christmas Day or Christmastide.  It corresponds
to the old Norse jól which was a heathen festival
lasting twelve days, from December to January.
It was this festival that was adopted by the Christians
and later became known as Christmas, hence
the twelve days of celebration around the Christmas
period.

            Christmas is known as the Festive Season.  The
time of year when we remember the poor and needy
by spending wallets full of money and gorging ourselves
on turkey, sage and onion stuffing, and Christmas
pudding.  Indeed, the word festive comes from
the word feast which derives from the Latin festa
which was a feastal ceremony.  Festa itself derives
from festus which probably, according to etymologists,
had the same root as feria fair.

            Such is the true meaning of Christmas .  It is exactly
the same as it means to us now: twelve days of
ceremonial feasting.  Maybe Christmas has always
been the most commercial time of year, and it is just
our perception of it that has changed.
         
         
            Reading Non-Sequentially: The Peculiar Kanbun System




            European languages are written from left to
right, Hebrew and Arabic from right to left,
Chinese and Japanese may be written vertically, and
Ancient Egyptian was written multidirectionally.
The word boustrophedon is used to describe inscriptions
that run as the ox ploughs (left to right, then
right to left, and back again).  Despite the wide
range of directional options, all writing systems have
one thing in common: they are intended to be read
in the direction they are written.  Actually, there is
one significant exception to this rule, a written language
used in Japan called kanbun .

            
               Kanbun \?\ \?\ is essentially Classical Chinese
( wényánwén \?\ \?\ \?\ ) as read by Japanese scholars.
It began as a decoding system in which the
reader learned to read texts from China as though
they were Japanese, and developed into a way of
writing employed by Japanese themselves.

            In the Kanbun system, special punctuation enables
the reader to convert phrases presented in
Chinese order (usually subject-verb-object) to Japanese
order (usually subject-object-verb), and to
supply missing inflectional endings to produce
something approximating Classical Japanese.  For example,
let us consider the phrase:


             Mandarin    English translation
\?\   shào    young
\?\   nián    year
\?\   yì      easy
\?\   lăo     old
\?\   xué     study
\?\   nán     difficult
\?\   chéng   accomplish

            

            The Mandarin Chinese speaker from Beijing
would read this from top to bottom (it may also be
written left to right) as shàonián yì lăo, xué nán
chéng , and understand it to mean something like
It is easy for a youth to grow old, but harder to
complete one's studies.  Speakers of other dialects
would pronounce the characters differently but
would associate the same meaning with the sentence.
A Mandarin speaker from Chengdu would
say săonián y\?\ nào, xüó nán cén , while a Southern
Min speaker from Amoy would say siàoliân \?\ ló, hák
lân sêng .

            The Japanese speaker, educated in Kanbun
would punctuate this sentence with the aid of the
symbol:


           Japanese pronunciation
\?\   shō
\?\   nen
\?\   yasu(ku)
\?\
\?\   o(i)
\?\   gaku
\?\   gata(shi)
\?\
\?\   na(ri)

            

            The symbol indicates that the character above it is
to be read after the following character.  Parentheses
indicate inflectional endings not found in Chinese, inferred
by the Japanese reader.  The text would thus
be read shōnen o(i) yasu(ku), gaku na(ri) gata(shi) ,
which retains the meaning of the original, as much as
any translation can.

            Note that some of the Japanese readings are
very similar to the Chinese original: shō, nen , and
gaku are etymologically related to shào, nián and xué
(originally gak ).  On the other hand, the readings
o(i), yasu(ku), na(ri) and gata(shi) , are unrelated
to Chinese lăo, yì, chéng , and nán .  Characters are
either pronounced in a Japanized version of the
Chinese ( on reading), or else a synonymous Japanese
word ( kun reading) is read in place of the Chinese
word.  The choice of which reading to use for a specific
character is determined by context.

            Sometimes, for additional clarity, kanbun writers
will add the inflectional endings to the right of
the line, using phonetic symbols called katakana :


\?\   Shō
\?\   nen
\?\   yasu
\?\   \?\
\?\
\?\
\?\   gaku
\?\   gata
\?\   \?\
\?\

            

            Of course, to get from Chinese to Japanese
word order, a simple transposition of two characters
may not suffice.  More complex reordering may be
indicated through punctuation as well.  A sequence
of \?\ signs means that the text so marked is read in
reverse order:


\?\   1
\?\   5
\?\           [Circles represent any character,
\?\   4       and numbers indicate
\?\   3       the order in which they are to
              be read.]
\?\   2

            

            In addition to the symbol, there are two other
devices for indicating that characters are to be read
out of sequence.  First, the characters - ichi , one
and= ni , two may be used:


\?\   1
\?\   4
\?\   2
\?\   3
\?\

            

            Note that these numbers may be used more than
once in a long phrase:  


\?\   1
\?\   2
\?\       [The first occurence of = fol-
          lows the first occurence of -,
\?\   3   etc.  That is, the application of
\?\   4   the reversals must be consecu-
\?\   8   tive, without overlapping or
          nesting.]
\?\   6
\?\   7

            

            In cases where reversals overlap, or nest, a second
pair of characters is used, namely, \?\ ue , up
and \?\ shita , down.  Here are two examples:


\?\  7      \?\   8
\?\  1      \?\   3
\?\  4      \?\   1
\?\  2      \?\   2
\?\  3      \?\   6
\?\  5      \?\   4
\?\  6      \?\   5
\?\  8      \?\   7

            

            In general, the reordering markers are easily understood;
the main source of ambiguity relates to the
choice of on or kun readings, and, if a kun reading has
been selected, the choice of inflectional endings intended.
Not surprisingly, this arcane system of reading
contrary to written order takes years to learn and
has fallen out of fashion in recent decades.  While
there are still many people who can read kanbun
texts, very few can actually write them.  In the nineteenth
century, however, kanbun was still widely
used, and it is interesting to note that some of the first
European language instruction books written in Japan
employ similar systems for reading English and
other languages in Japanese!
         
         
            A Balance of Trade




            I was amused and bemused by Martyn Ecott's The
Franglais Blues [XX, 3].  My bemusement led to
my wondering how many English words in the story
of youpie Marc, where the vocabulary has been selected
to illustrate the relentless incursion of English
expressions into modern French, were borrowed
into English from French, either the Old, Anglo-,
Middle, or Modern language.  Here is a copy of Martyn
Ecott's little story, with the Franglais expressions
left in italics but with the English morphemes
originally borrowed from French underlined in the
mainly English text.  My etymological authority is
the Random House Dictionary of the English Language .


A friend of mine, let's call him Marc, was finishing
his work for the day.  He consulted his
agenda diary, appointment book to check
whether he was keeping to his planning schedule.
His listing computer printout list helps him
keep track of his customers and is used by his
secretary for un mailing despatch of letters; mail
drop.  He picked up his brake (Brit. shooting
brake) Brit. estate car, US station wagon from
the parking (-lot) and drove home.  It had been
raining so he had to avoid un aquaplaning skid
on the slippery surface.  Marc is a bit of a youpie
yuppie and has to ensure he is keeping his
standing social status.  He has his own box private
garage.  His home, too, is standing conferring
status, as is his wife who regularly has her
lifting face-lift to make sure she is sufficiently
liftée to face up to his friends.  She does not want
to be snobée looked down upon.  He himself
goes in for a brushing blow-wave.

Their house not only has a sizable living
(-room), but also un dressing (-room).  For dinner
he will put on his smoking dinner jacket, tuxedo,
though he really prefers to be in by driving the
kids down to a snack (-bar), un fast (probably un
Mac Do) for un big (-Mac) or un cheese (-burger)
with French (-fries).  If the kids have been good
he might buy them un pin's (no, not possessive in
French!)—un badge would be too passé.  Sometimes
a magnet's fridge magnet, (again not a possessive)
might be given away.  The kids are very
hip hop (they like rap music) and spend most
of their time on their skate (-board).  But their
parents do not mind.  Anything, as long as they
do not se shooter take drugs, not just shoot up
like some children their age.  But, unlike other
children, they do have une nurse nanny to look
after them.

By the end of the week Marc is completely
stone dog tired, so he just wants to get away
from it all.  Saturdays and Sundays the family
spends time at le week-end weekend retreat, holiday
home by the sea, and the bobtail Old English
sheepdog gets more exercise than in town.
Marc gets his exercise by putting on his baskets
training shoes and probably un training or un
jogging track suit and goes out for un footing
a jog.

In the meantime, his wife pops along to the local
self self-service market for her favorite: un
cake (only ever fruitcake).  To work that off, she
gets her exercise down at le fitness gym.  She
also wears baskets, but with un body stretch fluo
fluorescent elasticated leotard.  During the
warm-up, she will wear un sweat `sweatshirt.'

            

            In this calculatedly selective text I count only a
few more Franglais words or morphemes, forty-four,
than English morphemes originally, in most cases
centuries ago, borrowed from French, forty by my
count.  However, of the sixty-six words in the closing
paragraph of the article, where the language is not
artificially loaded, I find seven words derived from
French, including Académie , which is French, but
not a single word of Franglais, nor would any Franglais
expression appear in the paragraph were it
translated into French.  The current balance of trade
may be in favor of English, but overall it is clearly
still heavily in favor of French.

            As Martyn Ecott cleverly demonstrates, francophone
purists have reason for alarm; the flow, absolute
flood of vocabulary from French into English,
once resulting in a kind of hybridization, has lately
been somewhat reversed, depositing in the elegant
French language such grotesque neologisms as un
pin's or hip hop.  Certainly, though, most of these
freaks will be dislodged and swept away by the passage
of time while those already rooted in the
French language, like smoking and week-end, have
become naturalized and no longer jar in the Gallic
ear.  The real threat to the French language is not
that some faddish expressions and technical terms
are invading French.  No, the real menace, already
almost a fait accompli, is that English will replace
French altogether in science and technology, commerce,
and international communication.  At the
present rate, French, which still appears along with
English in my American passport and which sometimes
still fills full-page ads in The New Yorker, may
wind up like Greek—a language providing access to
the roots of world culture but hardly worth learning
for the conduct of mundane affairs.
         
         
            
At Terrace [a restaurant], Chef Ossama Mickail
and owner Nada Bernic stepped in after the death of
Mrs. Bernic's husband and savored its best aspects.
[Caption of a photo in Restaurant Review in Crain's
New York Business , , page 10.  Submitted
by .]
         
         
            
...Please bare with us and I think everyone
will enjoy themselves.  [From the Harvard Heights
Apartments tenants' letter, n.d. Submitted by .]

         
         
            The Columbia Guide to Standard American English
            A reader, a former student of the author's at the
University of Connecticut, recently called this book
to my attention, and I am pleased that he did, for it
gives advice on a number of issues—6500, according
to the jacket blurb—that is stalwart, which is to
say, advice with which I agree.

            Before getting into that, I feel compelled to reiterate
my perpetual complaint about the prospective
users of such books: in order to look something up in
a reference book of any kind—dictionary, thesaurus,
usage book, encyclopedia—a person must either
acknowledge that he does not know something
or, at least, have doubts about the information he
already possesses.  Not everyone can always be sure
of everything, but it has always seemed to me that
one of the functions of education is to implant doubt
in a student's mind: in other words, it is not so important
that he remember, a dozen years after leaving
school, what a dangling modifier, split infinitive,
agreement between the number of a subject and its
verb, etc., might mean, but the process of education
should have created a (minor) circuit in the brain of
the pupil so that when a certain situation is encountered
later on, he acknowledge a nagging suspicion
that there might be something wrong and that it
would be best were he to look it up in an authoritative
source to see what is written there by people
who know such things.  Had the semi-educated computer
experts who gave us programmed, programming,
and programmer labored under any doubt
about their ability to spell according to standard
American practice, they might have looked it up in a
dictionary or other source and got it right.

            The proliferation of printed media and the
amount of text appearing on television screens these
days requires a lot of writers; the problem is that
writer is these days construed in its minimalist sense
of a person who is literate: that is, a person who
knows how to write but by no means necessarily a
person who knows how to write .  As the standards
slip in the marketplace, so they move on down the
slippery slope in the education place, with older,
wiser, more dedicated, better educated teachers
gradually but ineluctably replaced by those who
have not a scintilla of enlightenment regarding the
meaning of contrary-to-fact condition, comma splice ,
or double genitive .  The result is that quality and art
of expression continue to deteriorate, and we are
left with performers who spend five or ten minutes
to deliver a three-minute weather report on
television, housewives and househusbands who delight
in revealing intimate, revolting, and highly suspect
details of their childhood on national television,
and channels devoted entirely to charlatans perpetrating
psychic rubbish.

            Kenneth G. Wilson is clearly of the old school
(or, to make him seem younger, I should write
older school).  His advice, couched in language
that reflects the tolerance of one who has spent
years correcting English themes, flows from an enviable
intimacy with, confidence in, and control of the
language.

            Entries range from grammatical matters (like
agreement between various elements that ought to
agree), to questions of syntax (like the placement of
adjectives), to matters of semantics (like the discussion
of adequate ), to the meaning, usage, spelling,
inflection, and pronunciation of a large number of
words and phrases that might be confused ( adduce,
deduce ; plural/singular status of addendum, agenda ;
spelling of practice, practise ; plurals of words ending
in -o , etc.).  I agree with Wilson's comments almost
entirely, but he fails to criticize severely enough
those who say i.e. and e.g. (rather than confine
their use solely to writing), and, in general, he seems
to avoid condemning poor style; also, the pronunciation
system he employs may be a little crude for this
sort of book, being derived from the Moo Goo Gai
Pan school of phonetics.

            On balance, though, it is a relief to see a well-rounded,
sensible approach to the questions of
grammar, usage, and other aspects of language Wilson
covers.  Would that we could do something to
induce people to use it!

            Laurence Urdang
         
         
            
Wandering around the transformed city of Bergen,
Norway in search of old haunts, I felt like Gulliver waking
from a long sleep.  [From Going Home to/Retour à
Bergen, by Helga Loverseed, in Empress (C. P. Airlines magazine),
:52.  Submitted by .]
         
         
            
Regardless of anything to the contrary in this booklet,
if your medical insurance terminates for any reason
including death, you...may elect within 30 days...to
continue such medical insurance... [From Group Insurance
for 1-14 Employees , Consolidated Group Trust, The
Hartford, p. 70.]
         
         
            The New York Public Library Writer's Guide to
Style and Usage
            This welcome work is directed toward writers
and editors who have the wit to harbor doubts about
their infallibility (which ought to include just about
anyone worthy of consideration as a professional).
As I have said on numerous occasions, books that
inform are of no use to people who think that they
know it all, for it never occurs to them to look up the
standard American spelling of words like programed,
programing , and programer.
            

            But let me interrupt: what is a frontispiece?  I
always thought it was a full-page illustration at the
front of a book.  I checked in the RHD Unabridged
and found that definition.  What made me check was
a reference in the editor's Preface to names listed
on the frontispiece.  Sure enough, on the page facing
the title page is a list of, among other things, the
contributing editors.  Maybe I was out of date with
my understanding of frontispiece , so I looked it up in
the Writer's Guide itself.  Sure enough:


A frontispiece is an illustration that appears opposite
the title page.  If there is no frontispiece,
this page may contain a list of the author's other
works or information about other books in the
series.
            

            New to me.  I checked in what I consider one of the
best authorities on books, Glaister's Glossary of the
Book , by Geoffrey Ashall Glaister, University of California
Press, 2nd edition, 1979.  Glaister's has:


an illustration facing the title-page, either
printed with the prelims or separately pasted and
guarded into a book.

            

            From the wording, it is obvious that Glaister is British,
and either frontispiece might not be used that
way in Britain or perhaps this is a new sense of frontispiece
not in use in 1979.  I checked in MWIII and
in the OED 2e : neither yielded the definition sought
(though the OED2e has a definition, labeled obsolete
and obviously not the meaning sought, the first
page of a book).  That may not seem an auspicious
beginning, but we must not despair, for an authority—if
one is needed—must be lurking somewhere:
either we have not found it or we must recognize
the Editor's right to Humpty-Dumpty meanings into
existence at a whim.

            The foregoing is not very important, but it does
show what can happen when a person keen on words
is let loose.

            A few of the names on the so-called frontispiece
are familiar, particularly that of Priscilla S. Taylor,
consultant editor to the Editorial Eye (or to EEI, in
Alexandria, Virginia) and editor of the Phi Beta
Kappa Newsletter , a person of formidable qualifications
and one whom I trust.

            The Writer's Guide is divided into five parts, Usage,
Grammar, Style, Preparing the Text, and Production
and Printing.  There is an annotated bibliography,
which lists my Oxford Theasurus but fails to
include notice of the myriad illustrative sentences it
contains.  I trust that I shall be forgiven for skimming
over the Usage chapter, partly because much of it is
cut and dried and the parts that are not confuse the
issue of avoiding prejudice with political correctness,
a subject that gives me dyspepsia.  (It is beyond
me, for example, why people in eastern Asia should
be offended by the word orient , which is no more
than a reference to the place where the sun rises.)  I
shall also skip Grammar, which seems quite straightforward
and predictable.  Scattered here and there
are helpful vignettes that focus on ancillary matters—SPOTTING
A RESTRICTIVE CLAUSE, THE HISTORY
OF THE SEMICOLON, etc.

            In the chapter on Style, I expected to find under
punctuation a fuller treatment than that afforded: I
looked in vain for two things, the wisdom offered regarding
serial commas (whether or when the second
comma is required or desirable in A, B, and C, and
what the position is on the use of a comma following
etc. in the middle of a sentence).  I found neither, nor
did I find the common editorial term serial commas in
the Index, which seems a little thin.  It seemed best
not to try to go through the book systematically but
to dip into it here and there.  Good advice is given
about hyphens and adverbs ending in -ly preceding
adjectives: were I being pernickety, I should say that
the word modifier is not necessarily applied only to
words that precede a noun, and that the rules change
when a modifier is in apositive or predicative position,
as in a well-known man vs. a man well known for
his generosity .  Would that it were possible to distill
the vagaries of English compounding into a five-page
table: the editors are forced to offer comments like
equal titles of functions (equality is not always easy
to decide), words go together naturally (naturally
for whom?), etc., and even then to include a column
of exceptions.  (If you want my advice, settle on one
large dictionary as a standard and look up any compounds
it contains, following it slavishly: your writing
is more important than whether vice president has a
hyphen or not.  However, that does not apply as consistently
to editors as to the authors of what they are
editing.)

            I disagree with the suggested treatment of fractions,
in which we are told to write two-thirds, three-eighths ,
etc.  Nonsense!  Two thirds and three eighths
are exactly the same in construction as two thousand,
three millions , and four birdhouses.  Third and eighth
are perfectly legitimate nouns in English and do not
conform to the convention that requires eighty-six.
            

            In the section on Computers, I was particularly
interested in reading a vignette on spelling checkers
(p. 695), made to appear ludicrous, and on scanning
(p. 705).  I agree that no nonparsing checker could
find the error of writing ewe for you , wile for while ,
bin for been , or sum for some .  Such errors—but not
halve for have—are unlikely if the text was written
by a literate person.  In any event, I have found that
spelling checkers do find typographical errors that
result in nonwords (like fulkly for fully ), which result
from fast hunt-and-peck typing.  As far as scanning
goes, I have been shopping for a flatbed scanner
because there are many sources I am now using
that I should like to have in machine-readable form
for sorting and other processing.  The hand-held
scanner I have used is very tricky and sensitive, and,
as the Writer's Guide admonishes, creates as many
problems as it solves; but I am going to pursue the
subject nonetheless, hoping that a useful balance
might be struck in which less time is spent correcting
than in initial keyboarding plus correcting.

            In the chapter on Typography, information that
appears in an illustration (p. 730) is somewhat misleading,
for the inference is that small capitals are
the same height as x-high letters of a given font.
That might not have been the implication, for small
caps are usually sixty per cent of cap height (though
there is no standard).  In the example shown, a sansserif
face, the x-height of the characters is quite
large; in different faces, the x-height to cap-height
ratio varies, as does the small-cap height.  I have my
own notions of typographic design which are likely
to be at odds with those of many designers, and I
have seen fit to comment on particularly heinous examples
of design encountered in reviewing.  This is
not, however, the place to embark on a disputatious
wrangle leading nowhere.  Suffice it to say, I find
nothing serious to quibble with in the basic advice
given, though I would caution against using the
Guide as a quick course to typographic design.

            The Writer's Guide contains a huge amount of
useful information, and if one does not already have
a style manual, it might be as good as another,
though many would argue that nothing could equal
(let alone surpass) the Chicago Manual of Style .  If
one has become accustomed to a particular manual,
the temptation is to stay with it: it is like a comfortable
old shoe; even when a new edition becomes
available, the information appears in approximately
the same place and in a familiar format.  Things are
changing, though, and I am a little surprised that I
have heard nothing about the availability of a style
manual integrated with the software of a word processing
package.

            Laurence Urdang
         
         
            Random House Historical Dictionary of American
Slang
            To refer to the publication of the first volume of
the HDAS is long-awaited would be to give away
no secret, for many linguists have long been aware
of Jonathan Lighter's announcement of his project
several years ago, and it was Stuart Flexner's coup to
grab it for Random House.

            In his substantial Introduction, Lighter treats
several aspects of his subject, from What Is Slang?
through Slang in Its Cultural Environment, Some
Features of Slang, The History of Slang, Influences on
Slang: Military and Civilian, Slang in Other English-Speaking
Countries, to Motives for Using Slang and a
final word, History of the Project, the last revealing
that the editor's initial interest in such a project went
back to 1968.  The Introduction is followed by a Bibliography
with useful, brief annotations; the following
pages are occupied by the usual paraphernalia involved
in a Guide, etc.

            So many reviews of the HDAS will have been
published in the press by the time this appears that
most of our comments will seem redundant.  Still, it
is useful to note a few things that journalists are
likely to overlook or pay little or no heed.  For instance,
it is worth noting that although the Dictionary
of American Regional English , edited by Frederic
G. Cassidy, serves as a source for Lighter, it is
not listed among the titles in the Selected Bibliography.
It is not in the slightest way suggested that
picking up citations from other works is in any way
curious or reprehensible—anyone would be a fool
to research any subject without relying on the scholarship
that has gone before—but one would have
expected the DARE to be found among books like
Farmer and Henley's Dictionary of Slang and Its
Analogues , Chapman's New Dictionary of Slang ,
Wentworth and Flexner's Dictionary of American
Slang , and the others listed.

            A dictionary is a reference book, not a text, and,
with few exceptions, its purpose is to provide a reliable
source of information about the words and
phrases one looks up.  It is not a text whose purpose
is to teach users words that they do not already
know.  Yet the writing of a review puts a different
complexion on the use of a dictionary, and I have
often remarked that the most useful, realistic reviews
of such works can be written only after one
has lived with the subject book for many months,
using it all the while.  It is thus with some of the
reference books that I have edited: users have told
me that although the style of a given work was unfamiliar
to them at first, they made the effort to master
it and were rewarded by information (and its
treatment) not available from books previously used.

            For many, slang and its treatment—however
clinical—is taboo, for it is loaded language, not so
much with the expected four-letter words (of which
there are only a handful) but with racial, religious,
and ethnic slurs, which are both derogatory and offensive
and are shunned like the plague by liberals.
A high percentage of slang consists of such matter.

            Like other reviewers who have not had the leisure
to become acquainted with the HDAS gradually,
I am compelled to browse through, snatching
at pieces here and there.  Because of a recent criticism
I was recently moved to express concerning the
spelling of flack for press agent, I looked it up and
found it under flack , where the fancied etymology is
quoted from Better English ([June 28] 1939):


That alert weekly, Variety...is trying to coin
the word flack as a synonym for publicity
agent.  The word is said to be derived from Gene
Flack, a movie publicity agent... A Yiddish
word similar in sound means one who goes
around talking about the other fellow's business.

            

            The editor's comment is, the Yiddish word referred
to is unkn.; the closest words available are unlikely on
various grounds.  I have known the term for most of
my life, and its source was never a mystery to me;
still, I must allow that, like others, I am not immune
to succumbing to the trap of believing in the infallibility
of a fact that is simply not so.  My own etymology,
which seems painfully obvious, is revealed if
one acknowledges that the proper spelling is flak ,
which at once clarifies the etymological origin: flak .
The metaphor is too transparent to waste the space
for an explanation.

            I confess to being less gregarious than the rest
of the population: much of my contact with the
world comes through periodicals, radio, and television.
Consequently, I am known to vent my spleen
with a hearty Caramba!, a loancurseword not to
be found in the HDAS .  Neither is the (so-called by
puzzlers) minced oath Egad! , which was uttered
by a blimpish comic-strip character whose identity I
am too lazy to look up.  These interjections could be
considered marginal slang; but they are not so labeled
in dictionaries and do not meet Lighter's criteria.
On the other hand, egg in the good/bad egg
context is in, and I should not expect many dictionaries
to label that sense (in contrast to the aerial
bomb sense, which is slang) anything but Informal
or, depending on their style, Colloquial .  Still, the
labeling in dictionaries is not only erratic but internally
inconsistent.  The Random House Unabridged -
Second Edition labels fuck as Vulgar , but none of the
definitions given for that term in the dictionary itself
seems to fit.  The label for cunt is Slang ( vulgar ), and
the distinction is lost on me.  My vote would have
been for Taboo for all such terms (and these days
there are fewer and fewer).  The pattern of labeling
at shit in the RHD is quite arcane.  (I ought to mention
that, as Managing Editor of the First Edition of
the RHD , such matters fell into my purview, but
only shit (labeled Slang (vulgar) ) was entered in that
book.  I cannot recall the reasoning behind the label,
over which we agonized for many hours, but it
means nothing to me now.)

            Noteworthy are shifts in language levels.  Dingbat ,
in the printing sense of a typographic ornament
[like the open book symbol at the end of this
review], was once slang but is now standard English.
Cook , in the sense of juggle (the books), was once
standard but is now slang.  It would be interesting to
find more of these.

            Humility is a desirable attribute of those who
deal with language, and it ill behooves purists
and precisions to turn their noses up at vulgarians
and others who fail to preserve the language in its
supposedly pristine condition.  People who cleave to
such attitudes may also scorn slang, but they are
very often unaware of the true pristine condition
of the language or of the origins of words that are
standard in contemporary speech.  Such people
should be advised that much, if not most slang is
metaphoric in origin and that much of it can be quite
subtle.  True, there is not much subtlety in calling
a gun a cannon , a ship a canoe , or an incompetent
prizefighter a canvasback ; but that a canoe inspector
is a gynecologist is not immediately obvious, that Cement
City might be thought picturesquely oblique
for a cemetery, and that chain lightning is certainly
as descriptive as rotgut for cheap potent liquor cannot
escape anyone's notice.  When overworked,
such images cloy, which is why slang is constantly
shifting and why some of its elements (like neat and
keen ) are occasionally recycled—why waste a good
word?  It must also be said that the 20th century
more than any earlier time has seen the accumulation
of a more detailed documentation of life, as anyone
knows from the plethora of scratchy, saccadic,
often soundless images thrown on our television
screens: a series on American gangsters, for instance,
repeats radio broadcasts of the 1920s and
30s, bringing to us vividly not only the pictorial
images of the day when, to modern youth, everyone
wore black and white clothing and makeup but the
words and accents of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Huey
Long, Walter Winchell, and others who epitomize
the era.  Such language ought not be allowed to go
to waste; it is ripe for recycling.

            What is also brought dramatically to the attention
of a reader of the HDAS is the relatively large
number of words and expressions that have remained
current in the language over the years.
Some have been retained by becoming standard, often
because there is no other convenient or adequately
descriptive standard term for the same
thing, like Charley horse for a leg cramp; others are
genuinely standard words but were applied in a
slang context, like chassis for a woman's body; many
are not frequent enough to have bored their users
sufficiently to drop them, like chew out for scold;
some might have been dropped by those who are in,
only to be picked up by the squares to make themselves
appear to be in, like cheeba for (a) cannabis
(cigarette).  Many have little use today but are colorful,
like Chicago piano or typewriter for machine
gun.  Some have experiential reference for some
people but are obscurely metaphoric for others, like
catbird seat vantage point, which is often treated as
arcane but which is meaningful to anyone who has
seen the way a catbird alights on a tree branch from
where the surrounding territory can be surveyed for
provender or predators.

            As one might expect, I enjoy reading dictionaries,
but some make more interesting reading than
others.  The HDAS should serve not only as superb
documentation of an aspect of the language too often
left to amateurs among whom most professional
lexicographers, including me, must be counted but
also as an engaging colorful source of the pleasure to
be derived from revelation and reminiscence.  Further
volumes are eagerly awaited.

            Laurence Urdang
         
         
            Ship to Shore
            Those of us who deal with the lexicographic
side of language are well aware of what Jeans characterizes
as the astonishing debt that our idiomatic
speech owes to the nautical language of the past.
(Preface, p. ix) There are the obvious examples—
come adrift, go overboard (about something), get under
way , even skyscraper —but there are far more
common words and expressions that have a far more
subtle, less direct connection with maritime affairs,
some of which I shall come to.  The only quibble I
might have with Jeans's statement is with his use of
astonishing , for English was born and nurtured on an
island culture that depended heavily on the sea for
food, commerce, and transport.  Perhaps what is
astonishing is the increasing distance, chiefly during
the past century, that landlubbers have put between
the sea and themselves: knowledge and awareness of
such matters now rests largely among naval types,
those yachtsmen who enjoy the leftover jargon of
the sea, and a handful of eccentrics, like Jeans, a few
others I could mention, and me.  My own connection
stems from a lifetime of sailing, a brief stint in
the WWII US Navy, and an abiding lexicographic
concern for terms nautical, the last of which is manifesting
itself in the preparation of a historical nautical
dictionary.

            Jeans, an Australian as his spellings confirm,
has ferreted about in the language to uncover words
and phrases that have—and might have—some nautical
provenance.  He has not always been successful,
but, undaunted, he soldiers on.  In a random
browse through the book jerry-built caught my eye,
mainly because, recalling it as a reference to buildings
ashore, I was surprised to find it among nautical
words.  Jeans does not deny that—indeed, provides
his own quotation from the Pall Mall Gazette of February
15, 1884, (not listed in the OED2e ) to support
the architectural reference—but he persists in offering
the opinion that because the word is used in association
with buildings in Liverpool, this makes it
... likely that the word is of nautical origin.  That
is imaginative but unsupported by the evidence, and
I fear that Jeans has stretched a point.  My suspicions
aroused, I found that a number of entries had
neither a nautical origin nor, perceivably, any nautical
connection: jingo , offered as probably a Basque
word, acquires a nautical connection because
Basques were among the earliest organised whalers
in Europe, and as harpooners their expressions
would have carried some weight with other seafarers.
That is a fancied nautical origin at best.  Kedgeree ,
a vegetable curry, popular with seamen,
has, notwithstanding tarry appetites, not the remotest
connection with matters nautical; kickback is
shown by the OED2e to be a 20th-century coinage,
and there is not evidence to suggest it ever had anything
to do with maritime affairs; and kite , for which
the OED2e includes a 7th-century quotation for the
(original) bird sense, found a metaphoric application
to sail not much before the middle of the 19th
century.

            I must say that I was quite disappointed to find
the foregoing examples; alas! there are many more.
Of course, there are genuine nautical expressions as
well, some of which have been given thorough treatment:
I have not seen elsewhere as complete a discussion
of loggerheads , but it is offset by the very
inclusion of mind your p's and q's , about which Jeans
writes, the phrase is not nautical in origin.  If not,
then why is it here?  Why is space devoted to entries
like misfire, Morse code, muster, nickname, nip short
drink, nous brains, slate , etc.?  Either the author
lost his way or, as often happens, the (original, probably
Australian) publisher was dissatisfied with a
shorter book for which less could be charged.  As it
is, the book is greatly bulked up: its wide hanging
indentions, large type, ragged-right setting, open
spaces make for an attractive package; the illustrations
are pretty and, in some cases (various sails),
useful, but many of them are gratuitous and purely
decorative ( helm, scrimshaw , five pages of different
rigs).

            Consequently, I did not expect much when I
looked up my favorite entry, horse latitudes , for
which Jeans repeats the conventional theory (to the
effect that the Spaniards used to throw starving
horses overboard when they were becalmed, which
I maintain to be an incredibly poor fiction); he also
brings in Golfo de las Yeguas gulf of mares, which I
have been able to find, with the help of the Royal
Geographical Society, only inland in Spain.  Jeans
mentions one modern authority, whose identity I
should like to know, who makes the intriguing
suggestion that horses aboard sailing ships often
had to be lifted overboard into the sea to relieve
their thirst, a theory that even Jeans regards as ludicrous.

            There are four appendices: Nautical Prepositions
(many of which would be classed (also) as adverbs
by a grammarian); Changed Spellings and Corrupted
Word Forms; Nautical Terms Related to
Human Anatomy; Nautical Terms Derived from the
Land.  There is also a Bibliography of sorts: the OED
was, but the OED2e was not consulted; Brewer's
Dictionary of Phrase & Fable was, perhaps somewhat
uncritically; and, among works that either fail to reflect
the latest scholarship, are not pertinent to the
task set, or are just plain awful, the following are
listed: Wilfred Funk's Word Origins and Their Romantic
Stories , (a 1978 reprint of a 1950 work); Universal
Dictionary of the English Language (1897); a
modern selection from Johnson's Dictionary (1755);
Partridge's Origins (1977), a work long criticized for
its errors; and Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary
of the English Language (1965), which is a
$15 reprint, cursorily updated, of the 19th-century
Ogilvie edition of Annandale's Dictionary .  Some of
these are useless and inaccurate, others are picturesque
but useless.  In all, aside from the dictionaries,
Jeans lists twenty-eight books plus fifteen of Patrick
O'Brian's novels; no mention is made of the Mariner's
Mirror , the journal of the Society of Nautical
Research, or of other essential source materials.
Nautical language deserves more respect.  By contrast,
the bibliography for my historical nautical dictionary
already numbers close to 285 works.  Readers
should not for a moment think that my adverse
criticism of Jeans's book has anything remotely to do
with my own: the two are of entirely different purpose
and scope, and I would have welcomed any
help or new insight into some of the problems and
questions that vex anyone trying to deal with such
an elusive subject as nautical language.

            Laurence Urdang
         
         
            
Through the use of ultrasound, University of Washington
researcher ... studies women who develop high
blood pressure during pregnancy with the assistance of
AHA-WA funds.  [From Heartlines , a Washington affiliate
newsletter of the American Heart Association, Vol. VI, No.
2, .]
         
         
            
A woman gave birth to two of her triplets a month
after delivering the third, a rare occurrence, physicians
said Thursday.  [From The Philadelphia Inquirer , .  Submitted by .]
         
         
            
... photographs of the very, very young girls with
which Peter Altenberg, poet in prose, lined the walls of
his room at the Graben Hotel.  [From Art View, by John
Russell, in The New York Times , .  Submitted
by .]
         
         
            Sound and Sense




            Two women in the supermarket were talking
about somebody else's child.  And then, said
the first woman, after all the money she gave him,
he asked for another five dollars!

            Tisk tisk, said the second.

            I know because I was five feet away and I heard
her.  Only after I had ferried my cart to the next
aisle did I figure out what she meant: tsk tsk , that
half-pitying, half-disapproving sound made by pressing
the tongue against the upper palate and teeth
and sucking in slightly.  She had obviously read the
expression tsk tsk somewhere, and this was how she
concluded that it should sound.  Or her mother had
made the mistake and passed it on.  The British often
spell it tchah , and I wondered whether some British
matron in Harrod's wasn't even now saying cha
for the same reason.

            The alteration of tsk to tisk is like the back-formation
of certain words.  Someone comes up with
a spelling to approximate a sound, which someone
else eventually reads, mispronounces, and thus turns
into a new sound.  Over the years, the new sound
may acquire its own distinction: a dignified gentleman
announcing Ahem! to gain attention, rather
than actually clearing his throat, or someone cackling
Yukkety yuk yuk! at a lousy joke.

            Onomatopoeia adds zest to language, from
aagh! to zzz ..., but somewhere between print and
enunciation, the exact equivalence between sound
and sense can get lost.  In fact, I recently heard
someone pronounce zzz ... to mimic sleep, and it
sounded nothing like the faint sussurus that the
word implies.  There are linguistic terms for these
sorts of sounds, from bilabial implosives—a kiss becomes
a smooch —to dental or alveolar stops— tut
tut , scolds the cautious professor.  In a few rare instances,
one can actually see the transmogrification
at work.  The childish exclamation peeyoo! , for instance,
probably stems from a distorted rendering of
phew! , just as another air-and-spit expression of disgust
was once rendered as pfui! but gradually turned
into fooey! , which is both easier to read and pronounce.
A near relative, the mucus release known as
something like huk-ptui , has similarly eased into the
accipitrine hawk patooie.  The polite forms may still
be hem and haw , but the polite forms are from a
bygone era.  Others have supplanted them.

            In fact, the amount of back-formed onomatopoeia
devoted to sounds of human manufacture is
astounding.  People now exclaim whew! after a close
call, or humph or harrumph when impatient.  But
these sounds are meant to be said in haste and
slurred slightly, so that whew comes across as a half-whistled
expulsion of breath, not a precise word
with the wh of what and the ew of ewer .  The same is
true of humph , a nasal snort of derision rather than
something akin to what a camel has on its back.
When you become disgusted, the sound from your
throat sounds like a gathering of phlegm, variously
rendered as ugh, yuk , or Mad magazine's famous
yecch —but often when people repeat those sounds,
what comes out is ug, yuck , and even yetch .  Ick also
belongs somewhere in there.  Certain aspects of revulsion,
such as eeeuew! (a guess as to the spelling),
still have no agreed-upon form.

            Other spelled-out bodily reactions range from
eructation to fright, though admittedly people
sometimes over-pronounce the sounds for a humorous
effect.  L'il Abner's Gulp! might have shown that
his heart was in his throat, but these days when
someone says gulp , it is more likely tongue in cheek.
Gasp! says someone is more amused than scared.
Yikes, yipes, eek , and eep now function similarly, the
last two originally mimicking the response of someone
encountering a mouse in a darkened kitchen.  In
fact, the sheer pronunciation of the letters in sounds
like the lip-smacking yum yum or the postprandial
urp and sigh provokes a chuckle.

            Laughter itself has its own onomatopoetic
codes.  Ha-ha, he-he , or hee-hee may be the closest
spelled-out equivalents, with te-hee as a feminine
version, dating back to the laugh that Chaucer assigned
the reeve's wife in the Miller's Tale.  Hardy
har har is the hearty masculine equivalent, a guffaw
compared to a titter.  But retro-punk culture now
dominates the arena of cachinnation, with Beavis
and Butthead's heh-heh ... heh-heh ... echoing
from MTV to the schoolyards.  The only appropriate
response is boo-hoo .

            Comic books also contribute a lot to this fracas.
Much comic-book onomatopoeia comes from the
fights of good guys versus bad guys, specifically the
sound of fists against bodies.  Bif and bam were early
favorites, followed by an off!  Then newer impacts
came along, pow and kazowie , and in this age of electronic
armaments, whoosh and zap have replaced the
standard artillery bang bang and rat-a-tat-tat .

            
               Bloosh , spotted in both X-Men and Superman , is
the sound a body makes when hitting the water and
sinking.  Fzzssh and fwwwp indicate sudden appearance
and disappearance (or materialization and dematerialization)
in Captain America comic books.
And while Archie comics are still using the old standbys
of crunch and swish , the heavier impacts of action
comics have gone beyond boom and kablooie to
ktoom, bdoom , and even skrakataboom for the detonation
of an entire building.  Similarly, the old elastic
collision of boing sounds tame compared to the
clash of metal on metal: bladang .  Of course, these
words appear simply as large colored letters within a
given frame, but if you have ever read a comic book
to a young audience perched on your lap, you have
had to figure out a pronunciation key.  Luckily, since
most comics are aimed at those with unsophisticated
reading skills, most of the onomatopoeia inside is
spelled the way it sounds.  The one puzzlement is
how to pronounce comic puzzlement, variously
spelled as ??? or ?!
            

            Beyond the realm of human ken lie animal
sounds, a fine mess for most people.  Again, the villain
is precise pronunciation: with the possible exception
of Little Orphan Annie's dog Sandy, no mutt
barks arf .  The same is true of woof and bow-wow ,
though all dogs can be heard to approximate these
sounds.  If only dogs could spell.  Cats only vaguely
cry meow (James Joyce bravely tried mkgnao ), hapless
pigs have the choice of only oink or ooee , horses
bray neigh and mules hee-haw .  The rooster crows
cock-a-doodle-doo , which for anyone who has spent
time on a farm is a sad travesty of the deep, throaty
ur-ur-ur-ur-urrh!  In other countries, animals are
similarly saddled with precisely imprecise sound effects,
such as gnaf-gnaf for a French poodle, or wanwan
for a Japanese akita.

            Of course, these vile approximations are not always
the reader's fault.  The ruminative uh , which
most people can faithfully reproduce, used to be
spelled as unh , in an attempt to get in that glottal
effect, but all it did was mislead youngsters into pronouncing
an n where none was intended.  Some old
novels similarly have characters expressing surprise
by hanh? in the days before the ubiquitous huh?
Pepsi-Cola's famous Uh-huh! commercials have
made bare assent into a ringing affirmative, though
no one has yet done a similar campaign on uh-uh .

            Nowadays the unh or ungh combination tends to
convey exertion or being stifled.  But then, Americans
have always had trouble with ch and gh .  Blame
the Scottish and their Loch Lomond, or the English
language that produces such sentences as The
tough cough ploughs him through.  This may be
one reason, besides orthographic brevity, that
American English has changed doughnuts to donuts
and hiccough to hiccup .

            Even sounds that should be simple to execute,
such as ah , and oh , have hidden traps.  Is it eh as
in pest , or eh as in pay ?  It depends on whether you
are in Canada or Britain.  When ah is drawn out to
ahhhhhh! , it evokes deep satisfaction, but spelled as
aaaaaah! , it is more a sign of fright.  In the same
way, people often try to convey a drawn-out oh by
writing oooooh , which should be another sound entirely,
with the u of tube .  Maybe those who want to
prolong oh by more than a breath should learn to
write ohhhhhh .

            Perhaps the logical endpoint of onomatopoetic
spelling is eye-dialect, as in wimmin for women,
gotcha for got you , and so on.  Victuals , still the correct
spelling, has yielded an alternate version
spelled vittles .  Will solder spelled as sodder come
next (for the American pronunciation)?  It would be
a shame to lose the etymology buried in the original
spelling, though it would be a boon for easy pronunciation.
Or maybe some sounds will never have absolute
phonetic accuracy bestowed on them, as in
ring —or is it rrring , or some other sound altogether?
Can a sudden intake of breath be shown
as hi , or does that monosyllable have too friendly
associations?  Mood and personal intonation also
play a part in many sounds: is oops meant to be ups ,
ups , or whoops ?  And what should one make of the
rappers' cry,  Whoomp! —there it is!, when they
spot a woman with big breasts?

            Questions multiply quickly— sproing .  What really
is whir meant to imitate?  Where does wow
come from?  How does whoosh! manage to maintain
its phonic integrity?  Is the u in buzz really necessary?
Gaak is often used for gagging, but gag itself
was originally onomatopoetic, which raises the
thorny issue of how much language was all imitative
at one time.  In place of answers, a thoughtful hmmm
... will have to suffice.
         
         
            
... Lewis's sparse prose gives her tale the mysterious
inexorability of an ancient saga.  For many years I have
seen her name championed by other writers in lists of neglected
authors: now I know why.  [From book catalog,
A Common Reader , Spring , page 65.  Submitted by
.]
         
         
            
 Incredible is too conservative an adjective.  They
are unbelievable!  [From a sportscast on Channel 4, .  Submitted by .]
         
         
            How Manieth?




            I am very fond of the English language, to which I
took a great fancy when I was twelve years old.
It is no exaggeration when I say that I prefer English
to my native tongue, Malayalam, the language spoken
by the people of Kerala, a southern state in India,
the language which has entered the pages of the
Guinness Book of Records as the longest palindromic
language in the world.  To tell the truth, it is the
little knowledge that I have of the English language
that has made me what I am now.  Had it not been
for this knowledge, I would not have been a teacher,
a writer, an English language columnist and an author.

            I know that English has merits and demerits.
Not all ideas that arise in my mind in my own tongue
can be expressed in English as well because not all
words, phrases, sayings, and usages in my mother
tongue have English equivalents.  It was when I was
a high-school student that I became convinced of
this fact for the first time.

            A classmate of mine came to me one afternoon
with a question.  As I was the best student in English,
he expected a correct answer.  What he asked
me was, How can we ask a question in English that
elicits an ordinal number as answer?  Abraham Lincoln
was the 16th President of the US; try to form a
question to which the answer is the 16th.  I was—
still am—at a loss for an answer.

            When, seven years back, I started writing an
English language column entitled English Corner in
a well-known Malayalam magazine for students and
candidates, it became evident, from the letters of
my readers, that most of them wanted to know how
to ask such a question.  I had already learnt that although
there is no idiomatic way in English of asking
such a question, it is very common in Malayalam and
also, I think, in other Indian vernaculars.  Unlike
English, those languages do not distinguish between
order or position.

            As a consequence, we have found our own ways
of asking such questions in English.  I have collected
the following ones:


1.  What is the rank/position/ordinal number of
Bill Clinton as the President/among the
presidents of the US?

2.  What is the chronological/numerical order
of Bill Clinton as the President/among the
presidents of the US?

3.  Which of the presidents of the US is Bill
Clinton?

            

            But none of them is really acceptable as idiomatic to
English speakers.  The second one would be acceptable
to them if it is changed into Where, in the
numerical order of the presidents of the US, does
Bill Clinton come?

            Sir Randolph Quirk, the most famous British
grammarian, says that the ordinal question can be
obliquely asked in English like this: How many
presidents were there before Bill Clinton?  But
such a question does not satisfy us.  Our answer to
that question will be the total number of former
presidents.

            I have recently come to know that it is correct
in colloquial British speech to ask What number
president of the US is Bill Clinton?  In my estimation,
this question is undoubtedly the best solution.

            Recently, a reader of my column sent me a letter
asking me whether it would be correct to use
How manieth to form an ordinal question.  How
many yields answers with cardinal numbers like
five, ten, fifteen: How many children have you?  I
have five .  Then, what about using How manieth/
How manyeth for an answer that contains an ordinal
number like fifth, tenth, fifteenth?  Unfortunately,
How manieth president of the US is Bill
Clinton? does not exist in English.

            Do you know any other good ways of asking
such a question in English?  If you do, please let me
know of them so that I can include them in my next
book on enjoyable English.  I will give you credit.
Please send your letters to O. Abootty/ K.T.82/
Cannanore City- 670 003 / Kerala, India.
         
         
            
               AUTHOR'S QUERY
            

            In Tender Is the Night , F. Scott Fitzgerald uses
the expression he saw with his heels .  Does anyone
know of other appearances of the phrase?


Matthew J. Bruccoli
2006 Sumter Street
Columbia, SC 29201-2157

            
         
         
            Isms
            As the authors acknowledge in Notice to Readers,
Part 2, almost any word can become an Ism.
Rather than turn this into a 12-volumes set, they
continue, we decided to limit the words included
to those noted in one of our source dictionaries or
used in a recent book, magazine, or newspaper.  All
the more surprising, then that they missed, among
the available sources, -Ologies & -Isms , Urdang,
Laurence, Gale Research Company, published in
three editions (1978, 1981, and 1986).  Considering
the fact that there are not a lot of books dealing with
isms, one might have expected the Altendorfs to
have found that one.

            Still, that has nothing to do with the present
work, which focuses on isms alone and is far more
thorough in its detailed treatment and explanations
of the nature of isms not treated in -Ologies & -Isms .
The selection does not exclude ordinary language,
for Goldwynism, hermaphroditism, iotacism, opportunism,
optimism , and toadyism are included among
the scores of entries.  I am not sure whether to categorize
the first three of the preceding as Concepts,
Doctrines, Traits, or Beliefs, but no matter.  The
definitions are quite good and straightforward, despite
the facetious tone of the prefatory matter and
the illustrations.  It seems that the authors enjoyed
their labors, and they have produced a work which
I consider a valuable, useful addition to anyone's
library.

            Laurence Urdang
         
         

            
SIC! SIC! SIC!

Readers who have submitted SIC!³ items, never
to see them again are owed an explanation.  We do
not use items that are simply errors: they have to be
funny or, to clarify that point, the Editor has to find
them funny.  Some slips that pass in the type might
send their clippers; into paroxysms of hysterical
laughter, but if they have no effect on the Editor,
they are consigned to oblivion.  Submitters should
include their names and addresses, so that we can
properly acknowledge their eagle-eyed acumen.
Also, we must have the name of the periodical or call
letters of the radio or TV station and the date of
perpetration.  The name of the program for radio
and TV citations is essential.

SIC!³s are usually saved up for typesetting in
batches.  Because they are used as fillers, they might
not be used for some time, depending on how long
they are and on filling needs.  If they start looking a
bit hoary, we discard them on the grounds that there
are always new ones appearing, and, these days, language
changes are so rapid that a usage might have
become standard by the time a five-year interval has
passed.

To those whose SIC!³s we have not used, our
thanks for sending them.  To all, please understand
that SIC!³s arrive in such profusion that we cannot
acknowledge their receipt.

Laurence Urdang



         
         
            Reflections on Unitedstatesese and other-eses



            Arnold Toynbee, distinguished philosopher of
history, in his old age wrote about his having learned
about the difference between the American language
and my native Unitedkingdomese.  He said
that as a young man recently out of Oxford in 1911
he encountered Americans other than the few
highly educated Rhodes scholars he had met at Oxford.
He then became aware of the significant differences
between the two Englishes and of the increasing
dominance of American English.  He told about
this in his book of reminiscences and reflections, Experiences,
which was published in 1969, seven years
before his death:


England was now in a minority in the English-speaking
World.  The majority of the people whose
language was English were now living in North
America; and North American English had become
the standard form of the language.  It was irrelevant
that English had been spoken in England long before
America had been heard of in Europe.  History
never stands still; and this had reduced my Unitedkingdomese
dialect to the status of being a bizarre
provincial brogue.

            

            Toynbee's dialect actually was Englandese: Scotlandese
and Irelandese are quite distinct from that
dialect.  And Unitedstatesese had become a linguistic
reality before the thirteen American colonies had rebelled
and declared their independence.  Soon after
the American Revolution several of the founding fathers
of the new nation advocated establishing an
academy, similar to those of France and Sweden, to
standardize and, in effect, enshrine an official American
form of English.  The academy was not established.
Soon after the independence treaty between
Great Britain and the United States had been signed
in 1784, Noah Webster, then in his mid-twenties, issued
his book, Grammatical Institute of the English
Language.  This was the first of the several books
which made him a leading authority on Unitedstatesese,
and in some ways a creator of it.  His most
important work, The American Dictionary of the English
Language, was published in 1812.

            Today—as English-speaking people in all parts
of the world should be aware—there are several distinct
dialects in American English.  The predominant
one, which in itself has sub-dialects, is conveniently
called General American.  Experts estimate that
about two thirds of the American people, living on
about 80 per cent of the land area speak this dialect—or
with this accent, if one prefers that term.
(The terms are not quite synonymous, but in this
context they can be taken as such.)  Recently a polished,
precise form of General American has come
to be called Network Standard: it is the speech of
many of the prominent announcers and commentators
on national television.

            General Canadian English—Canadese?—is closer
to General American than it is to any of the British
Englishes, but it is distinct from the American ones in
some spellings, usages, and pronunciations and in a
few peculiar intonations.

         
         
            Borrowings




            Borrowed words fill gaps in a language for which
they were not designed, much as if one were
to take pieces from one jig-saw puzzle and use them
in another which happens to be missing a few.  Or,
to use another simile, they are like shrubs transplanted
to an alien climate: sometimes the shrub
loses its spreading habit or becomes dwarfed; sometimes
it expands luxuriantly, taking up more space
than when on native ground; occasionally, it keeps
its original shape and size.

            These were some of my reflections as, more
than a decade ago, I watched the evening news
broadcasts and accompanying advertisements.  By
then.  I had lived in Greece for more than two decades
and was aware of the many English words also
at home there; but now, I was struck not just by the
large number but by their use in official Greek.
Until then, I think I had assumed that only the
everyday speech of the man in the street and
the very demotic Greek of some magazines and
newspapers had incorporated these borrowings.  In
the space of a few weeks, I jotted down several hundred
English loanwords, most of which could be
grouped under the headings of Entertainment,
Food, Games and Sports, Technology, and Transportation.

            Predictably, Hollywood has given a good many
words to Modern Greek.  Cowboy, detective, gangster,
thriller, western —all refer to film categories,
though gangster (or, rather, gangsterism ) can be
many kinds of coercive behavior, even schoolyard
bullying.  Picnic, rock, striptease , and video have entered
Greek with their meanings intact, rock considerably
narrowed, confined as it is to rock music.
Camping , however, is a place, not an activity, and
cocktail party has shrunk to koktél , while show and
star refer only to the theater.

            In the area of food, bacon, bar where drinks are
served, cake, cornflakes, cornflour, custard powder
pudding mix to Americans, ketchup, popcorn , and
rum have retained their English meanings.  Baking
powder has been shortened to mpékin ; Quaker oats
is kouáker ; American style potato chips are tsíps ; and
anyone who orders tóst in Greece will be served not
toast but a grilled cheese sandwich.  Sántouïts itself—two
thick chunks of bread with nothing between
them but a thin slice of cheese or salami—is
not exactly what Americans have in mind; and, although
there are snákmpar in Greece, there are no
snák , for the very good reason that Turkish meze was
in use long before snackbars arrived on the scene.

            But perhaps the greatest number of loanwords
has been provided by games and sports.  Some have
been trimmed: basketball , to mpásket .  Others are
unaltered: baseball, football, golf, jogging, ping
pong, soccer, surfing, tennis, volleyball, water polo .
But bridge, foul, goal , (team) manager, match, out ,
and rally have, in Greek, none but the meanings
pertaining to games and sports.  A record-breaker or
-holder is a rékorntman (or rékorntgouman) , no
doubt coined by some enterprising sports repórter
or spíker ( speaker announcer).

            Technology and transportation have yielded
computer, laser, transistor , and watt , all unchanged
in Greek, as are bulldozer, ferryboat, tunnel , and
yacht.  Pullman , however, is a large, long-distance
bus most of the time (occasionally, a city bus), and
station-wagon has lost its wagon .

            Allowing, as always, for a difference in pronunciation,
many other words are perfectly recognizable
and many acronyms, too ( BBC, CIA, FBI, FOB,
NASA, NATO, UFO , et al.).  Nevertheless, the usage of
some recognizable words can certainly muddle conversations
between foreign English-speakers and
Greeks.  Flirt (Gk. phlért ) is no longer a person who
indulges in harmless dalliance but a lover, male or
female or the love affair itself (more often than
not, illicit); hula hoop means leotards; nylon is the
transparent kind of plastic; shocking, used as a plural
noun (Gk. sókin ), means off-color or risqué stories;
and Texas , as in the sentence, It has become texas,
means out of control, maniacally chaotic and violent
(though this may be an idiosyncratic use by a
small group of people).

            Words that are or become nouns in Greek are
assigned articles indicating gender, and some words
are also inflected like Greek nouns; but the majority,
become uninflected neuters, which, anyway, have
fewer inflections than feminines or masculines, so
that a change in the article is often the only indication
of case and syntax.  One inference to be drawn
from this might be that the choice of neuter is inevitable
since the gender of most English nouns is inscrutable.
Another inference might be that the same
tolerance displayed by Greeks in their dealings with
resident foreigners—at any rate, American and European
ones—has been extended to English words
which are, as noted, largely exempted from the
strictures of Greek grammar and allowed to retain
their alien habit.  A third—perhaps only a corollary
to the second—might be that the longer a borrowing
remains in use, the more likely it is to be treated
like a native.  Recordwoman , if it was not a nonce
word and is still in use, may be an example of this:
though obviously feminine, it was uninflected,
whereas lady , a Greek resident of much longer
standing, has acquired all the inflections of a feminine
noun.  Further evidence is that the many Turkish
loanwords, in use for centuries and with no obvious
preponderance of one gender, are, with very
few exceptions, fully inflected, as are Italian musical
and nautical terms, likewise of long standing.  In
short, it seems that a process of naturalization has
been and may still be at work.

            If, in the future, Modern Greek continues to be
as hospitable to English words as it has been in the
recent past, there are likely to be more and more
neuter nouns with few inflections or none at all, at
least until the new words have put down roots.  Still,
because these borrowed, aberrant words represent
relatively rare infractions of the time-honored rules
of grammar, I doubt that matters will ever reach the
point where literate Greeks would be driven to
gnashing of teeth and tearing of hair by Greek
equivalents of barbarisms such as to you and I and Us
teachers are ....  Such trials and temptations to mayhem
are reserved for the literate—and hapless—
speakers of English.
         
         
            Living with Fossilized Ears




            I returned to England in 1989 after spending 17
years in Canada.  Since then, I have had to do
almost as much readjusting to this changed England
as I did when I moved to Canada for the first time.  I
expected many details of daily life to have changed
or to be unfamiliar, but I was not prepared for the
alterations in the pronunciation of words which had
occurred in such a relatively short time.  I have also
noticed a sharp acceleration in the decline of dialectal
usages, less in pronunciation than in vocabulary: I
find that many people in my own county of Suffolk,
for example, no longer know dialect words and expressions
that were universal currency as recently as
the 1950s.

            Some quite common words have undergone
striking changes.  I am still waiting for somebody to
explain to me just how and when yoghurt , which had
always been pronounced YOH\?\gert, mysteriously
metamorphosed into YOG\?\ert.  At first I suspected
that some television advertising campaign had
caused the change, but then I remembered that the
Blue Band Margarine commercials of the 1950s and
1960s never did succeed in reviving the old pronunciation
of margarine with a hard g .

            It seems that nobody calls the police any more;
they dial 999 for the pleece .  If houses sink into the
earth, the cause is no longer subsidence , pronounced
SUB'sidence, it is subSIDE\?\ence, an obvious back-formation
from the verb subside .  The inhabitants of
my own home county of Suffolk used to be noted for
pronouncing the word wholly to rhyme with bully ,
just as Elizabeth I would have done, while everyone
else rhymed it with holy .  I keep hearing it pronounced
as HOL\?\ly.  How did this start?

            It is possible that radio and TV announcers are
to blame, although the Blue Band example shows
that TV is not accepted as an authority on pronunciation,
when the purchasers of the product kept on
calling it marjoreen in spite of the manufacturer's
instructions to the contrary.

            TV and radio announcers seem to obey changes
in pronunciation rather than initiating them.  I find
myself often confused by the accelerating trend
towards adopting back vowels in diphthongs to replace
front vowels.  I was baffled for quite a long
time by a conversation on a bus, in which someone
announced that because the cool autumn weather
had arrived they were going to buy a kite .  I was
trying to speculate on how a kite could keep you
warm when I finally realized from the context that
they were planning to purchase a coat .

            This particular alteration in pronunciation seems
to have been widely accepted.  Many people now
seem to live in a hice rather than a house, and this
pronunciation is by no means confined to Royalty and
the aristocracy, speakers of the famed Received Pronunciation
Plus.  The BBC announcer Michael Buerk
is an invariant user of this diphthong for what was
formerly a low back diphthong.  He stumped me
when reporting that the dissident physicist Andrei
Sakharov had been shited dine when trying to
speak in the Soviet Parliament.  Sakharov had of
course, been shouted down.  It would be an interesting
experiment for phoneticians to ask Michael Buerk
to recite the line how now brown cow .

            There seem to me to be numerous explanations
for these phenomena.  The continuing drift from back
vowels to front vowels is surely no more than the
continuation of the Great Vowel Shift, which began in
the fifteenth century.  Like the building of the Alps
and the Himalayas, it is a process that is so slow that
we cannot perceive it happening.

            Another factor, not quite as old although not a
novelty, either, is the pressure of the speak-as-you-spell
movement first described by the Fowler brothers
in Modern English Usage .  The pronunciation of
place names has been tending to conform to their
written appearance ever since the coming of the
railways, and I notice that the letter t is now always
sounded in Hertfordshire , as is the letter l in Colchester .
The speak-as-you-spell faction have definitely
won a final victory over the Fowlers when it
comes to the word conduit .  The pronunciation
KON\?\dewit has now established itself as the standard
form, and there is no point in trying to revive
KUN\?\dit.  The same applies to untoward: the once-correct
pronunciation unTOE\?\erd is dead and might
as well be buried.

            Now of course conduit and untoward are not
words common in everyday conversation, so it is
hardly surprising that when people have to say them
for the first time they guess the pronunciation from
the spelling, always a dangerous procedure in English.
It is a puzzle, though, that the verb conflict
should have had its stress changed to CON\?\flict so as to
conform to the stress in the noun conflict .

            One important lesson to be learned from these
changes is that the expected tendency of recordings
to stabilize pronunciation has not in fact happened.
When sound recording was first invented, many people,
remembering how the invention of printing had
frozen grammar in its Renaissance forms, thought
that recordings would do the same for the spoken
language.  I can remember that as late as the 1950s
many people conscientiously pronounced glue as
glyoo, and went to the office wearing a syoot.
I have not heard suit pronounced that way for
decades.

            One might look ahead a hundred years to imagine
the squeaky English pronunciation of the late 21st
century, all front vowels, and with a heavy rhythm
caused by habitual stressing of the first syllable in
words.  Perhaps Old English sounded something like
that.

            My French mother, who has lived in English-speaking
environments since 1947, still uses the
French pronunciations and expressions from that period,
to the great amusement of her younger relatives.
I find it fascinating to observe the parallel
changes in English pronunciation, particularly so
because everyone I ask assures me that no such
changes have taken place and that everyone has always
called yoghurt YOG\?\ert.  It is strange that a back
vowel has displaced a diphthong there: I would have
expected YIE\?\gert instead.  Where is there a Ph.D.
student, some latter-day Grimm, who will propound
the laws by which our pronunciation is still evolving?
         
         

            Titillating Titles, Allison Whitehead's engaging
exploration of schools of titling [XX, 4], cautions
against titles that give the game away.  However, it
has been postulated that the best titles are those
that manage to embrace an entire plot (without, of
course, tipping the ending).

            Titles that reveal (without giving away) the are
of the plot are typified, quite randomly, by: Witness
for the Prosecution, Don't Look Now, Beware of Pity,
Deliverance, Portnoy's Complaint, Crime \?\ Punishment,
The Informer, A Doll's House, Hunger, Pygmalion,
The Ransom of Red Chief, Before the Fact ,—
once started, the list is endless.

            Supreme at this art are Austen, Dickens, Conrad,
James 'n Wharton, Trollope, Collins,... and
there are many, many more of these not so terribly
strange bed-fellows.

            Name titles, a category Ms. Whitehead supports,
present an even greater challenge: to delineate
plot trajectory via. a name.  It can be done.
Think Rebecca .  Or try Hedda Tesman .  Parse Cousin
Bette .  Encompass Anna Karenina : while not as revelatory
as War \?\ Peace , that title is every bit as
sweeping in a related arena: do not forget that the
eponymous character departs the book some fifty
pages before it ends, leaving her name as a metaphor
for the deadly effects of society's conventions, as
Tolstoy saw them, on the soul.  Thus, the title becomes
equally appropriate as an umbrella for Anna's
story, its consequences on her contemporaries, and
the novel's preoccupation with the agrarian defection
from that society of (Tolstoy's stand-in) Levin.

            Subtitling, also encouraged by Ms. Whitehead,
can conspire magnificently with a plot-revealing title:
A Novel Without a Hero says it all; Or, The
Modern Prometheus tells us what Mrs. Shelley had
in mind; A Tale of the Christ prepares us for more
than chariot races, and so on.

            Opening lines of a novel, play, or short story can
also reveal plot schema.

            Punning titles, I would suggest, as titillating as
they may be, have become an editorial addiction of
popular magazines.  If they are not fed to us with
restraint, they can soon render us dangerously
overgorged on pop corn.




         
         

            When I first read [in XX, 3, BIBLIOGRAPHIA that
A Dictionary of American Proverbs contains data on
the recording of the proverbs and that it contains
historical information on earliest appearances: for
example, Money is the root of all evil is traced to
Aelfric's Homilies (c. 1000), I assumed that the
original statement, The love of money is the root of
all evil, was not being traced back there.  That,
clearly, would have produced a date nearly a millennium
earlier, for it is a quote from the New Testament
(I Timothy, 6:10, KJV).  I supposed that since
the quote is given as Money is the root of all evil,
the editors of the Dictionary were tracing back the
American misquotation-as-proverb that one usually
hears.

            When, however, I looked up Aelfric in The
Reader's Encyclopedia (Benét) I found:


Aelfric, called Grammaticus, or the Grammarian
(c. 955-c. 1020).  English clergyman and scholar, a
prolific writer in both Latin and Old English....
Concerned with the revival of learning, he wrote a
Latin grammar and Latin-English glossary.

            

            Surely, this man could not have mistranslated Radix
malorum est cupiditas as Money is the root of all evil!
He might have translated it Cupidity is ...,Avarice
is..., or even The love of money is ..., but
never Money is ...!  The Old English word for
cupiditas is gitsung avarice, greed, a word not easily
confused with feoh cattle; property; money.  Having
no copy of Aelfric's Homilies available to me, I am
unable to see exactly what this cleric and grammarian
wrote c. 1000, but I will lay you dollars to doughnuts
( low colloq ., ca. 1920, Partridge) that the Grammarian
is not the source of the misquote qua proverb,
Money is the root of all evil.




         
         
            [As far as the English quotation is concerned, one
would expect it to be traceable to the Tyndale or
King James Version, not scripture of a date nearly a
millennium earlier.—Editor]
         
         
            
               VERBUM SAP
            
         
         
            To Verb or Not to Verb



            Language, like water, tends to seek the path of
least resistance—not, I think, because tongues
are naturally indolent, but because their owners are
instinctively efficient.  Nowhere in English is this human
impulse to simplify and streamline more evident
than in the formation of verbs.

            One of the oldest, tidiest and least ambiguous
methods of verbification is to take a noun and put it
to work, either by adding a prefix or suffix as in simplify
in the paragraph above, or by merely activating
an unadorned and unaffixed substantive, as in streamline .
When the Anglo-Saxons wanted a word to express
the activity of traveling in a ship powered by
wind in sails, they saved themselves a lot of breath by
forming the verb sail .  When they wanted to moor
the ship, they dropped a heavy object attached to a
line, and they termed this anchoring , because the object
was called an anchor (rather ankor, anker , or
ancre ), When it was time to return to terra firma,
they chose a short, appropriate noun to describe that
action, to land .

            Through the easy and logical expedient of converting
nouns to verbs, our linguistic forebears established
a tradition that has continued through every
age.  Probably somewhere in the English-speaking
world, a noun was verbified yesterday.  And undoubtedly
today it is being greeted with gasps and sputters
of incoherent outrage.

            Why is such a time-tested device viewed with
such utter revulsion?  In an article in the September
1978 VERBATIM [V,2], Prof.  Noel Perrin explained the
technical reasons behind the verbification of other
parts of speech—why, for example, we breafkast and
lunch , but do not dinner .  He did not, alas, illuminate
the inexplicable horror with which modern English
speakers regard this venerable practice.

            What brought the phenomenon to mind was the
recent publication of a new BBC Style Guide for
News and Current Affairs Programmes.  It was written,
or at least endorsed, by Tony Hall, Managing
Director of Current Affairs, and is for the most part
a reasonable exposition on the need for plain English.
But in a chapter entitled—make that titled—
Americanisms, the manual betrays both an unseemly
nationalistic bias and an ignorance of the history
of its own language.

            While admitting that some Americanisms, such
as teenager, babysitter, know-how, gimmick, stunt,
commuter , and blurb add vigour and dynamic expression
to the language, the book draws the line at
diaper, drug-store , and sidewalk (for which the English
have the patently superior nappy, chemist's and
pavement ), and at the American habit of turning
nouns into verbs (to hospitalise) [ sic ].

            Mr. Hall may be pleased to know that the OED
does not list hospitalise.  On the other hand, he
may be surprised to learn that it does contain hospitalize,
a verb with no stigmatizing labels like
orig.  U.S. slang or U.S. colloq.  In fact, all six
illustrative citations, dating from 1901, are from
British sources.

            As is usual with such quasi-official language arbiters,
the BBC guide falls into the deadly snare of
inconsistency.  Tut-tutting the fixation of newspaper
sub-editors on short words like probe and
row because they fit in headlines, it adds, somewhat
pompously: These words usually hype the story,
and that is never our job.

            
               Hype ?  Egad, sir!  This one is labeled by Oxford
as U.S. slang.  What is more, it is probably a verbified
short-form of hypodermic ( needle ) or hyperbole ,
both of which are nouns!  The next thing we shall
hear is that Mr. Hall and his colleagues use such
noun-verb abominations as film, record, tape, schedule,
plan, program(me), screen, air, monitor , and
view .

            This erratic neophobia is by no means restricted
to those blessed and sometimes smug beneficiaries
of Received Standard English.  Benjamin Franklin, a
Yankee, returned home after nine years in France to
find an infestation of nefarious noun-verb weeds, including
advocate, notice, progress , and oppose .  In a
1789 letter to Noah Webster, he pleaded: If you
should happen to be of my opinion with respect to
these inventions, you will use your authority in reprobating
them.

            
               Harper's magazine in 1955 rebuked a government
official for using re-think , and another publication
pilloried the monstrous verb unfreeze in
1933.  In 1859, the Edinburgh Review excoriated
another party, who are [sic] striving to debase the
language by introducing the verb to wire instead of
the word hitherto used, to telegraph.   That
writer's puritanical heirs today rail against the verb
fax, even though they likely think nothing of cabling,
telexing , or the dialing and ringing involved in
telephoning .

            Certainly, some verbifications sound sappy.  I
admit I did a double-take when I read that a New
Jersey Nets basketball player, accused of rape, said
his involvement with the woman never got beyond
conversating.  Oxford would probably call that
an ignorant back-formation, as it does the useful
and unambiguous enthuse .  But Oxford provides no
reliable guidance in the whole matter.  It labels the
well-established verb contact , meaning to figuratively
get in touch with a person, as U.S. Colloq.,
even though it has citations going back to 1927.  The
much newer (1962) transitive verb access , as of a
data base, bears no such oblique opprobrium in Oxford ,
even though it induces epidemic apoplexy
among the self-appointed sentinels of linguistic correctness.

            What are the criteria?  William Safire took a futile
stab in 1980, opining that when the purpose of
turning a thing into an act is trendy brevity, or chicspeak
[!], the practice is bad style.  He mentioned
to host, to enthuse , to critique , and to author among
these affectations.  But what has intent to do with
it, even assuming you can accurately impute motive?
I argue that all four of Safire's examples, no matter
how vile the coiner's design, serve useful purposes.
Certainly, to critique fills a gap left by the pejoration
of criticize , and in any event is not new, having appeared
in 1751.

            Safire's prissy and presumptuous subjectivity is
exemplified by the experts in the public relations
department of Lake Superior State University in
Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan.  Each year since 1976,
they have published a List of Words Banished from
the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use or General
Uselessness, and each year news media across
the continent gleefully and unthinkingly report their
edicts—which this year included the fairly innocuous
verbs skyrocket and spearhead .  These may be
overused, and they are certainly noun-verbs; but
they most decidedly are not non-verbs, as the
LSSU P.R. pundits declared.

            So one knee-jerk reaction begets another, and
our peculiar penchant for verbal infanticide—or infantile
verbicide—continues.  It is probably bootless
to beseech that the noun-verb nay-sayers withhold
snap judgments at least until a new, verb's utility has
been duly usaged.
         
         
            
Due to the fact that the patient is an extremist and is
responding poorly to fluids, the patient will be taken immediately
to the operating room, where exploratory laparotomy
will be done.  [From a  hospital chart
review.  Submitted by .]
         
         
            
Every minute was more exciting than the next.
[From an on-camera interview with Linda Evans, commenting
on Night of 100 Stars party in New York to
promote Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous.]
         
         
            
In keeping with Hershey's commitment to excellent
products, please call us if this product does not meet your
expectations....  [From the text on a pint container of
Hershey's Chocolate Milk.]
         
         
            
               Answers to Anglo-American Crossword No. 68