Wot's de rite spellin', den?
It does not require much effort to read the title
question as What's the right spelling, then?
though none of the words is spelled conventionally.
English has a wealth of modified spellings ranging
from wot and rite, comin' and 'ad, yuh and gonna ,
snax and pleez , to thru and Xpelair . And although
they may cause few problems for native English
speakers, they can baffle foreigners. Where do we
usually find these nonstandard forms? What purpose
do they serve? When are they right and when
are they wrong? Why do we usually read them so
easily? There are many questions to be answered,
so, 'ow 'bout takin' a kwik look a' sum o' de main
kindsa nonstand'd spellin'?
From the sheer numerical point of view, there
can be no doubt that literature provides us with
most examples of modified spellings, the vast majority
in fact being found in dialogues in novels. Authors
usually want to give readers an idea of not just
what a character says, but also how he says it. In
other words, they want to indicate how a character's
speech is delivered and how it may reflect social,
cultural, or geographical deviations from standard
forms. The author's purpose is to give a more realistic
presentation of speech, to provide a more vivid
picture for readers.
Alongside other features such as nonstandard
vocabulary (regional forms, slang, etc.), nonstandard
grammar (we was, he don't) and graphological features
(imPORtant, im-per-fec-tion) , modified spelling
is an essential ingredient in many novels. The use of
such modified spelling in literature is generally referred
to as eye dialect (see definitions in the Random
House Unabridged and the Oxford Companion
to the English Language) . An author may omit letters,
perhaps to show clipped gerund forms (singin',
goin', whistlin') , to indicate dropped hs ('ello, 'adn't,
'ome) , or lost final ds (husban', tol') . Extra letters are
sometimes added (hexpect, burg-u-lar, shuttup) . Letters
can be changed to mimic pronunciation, for example
d may replace th (dat, dese, dem) or a may
substitute a final ow (fella, sparra, tomorra) . Sometimes
words may be elided into forms such as kinda,
twer, wodja, gonna, tellem, owsya. The possibilities
are more or less limitless. Here is a fairly fertile example:
We done jest that. I cleant dat lantun and me
and her sot de balance of de night on top o dat
knoll back de graveyard. En ef I'd knowed of
aihy one higher, we'd a been on hit instead.
[William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury]
Opportunities to modify spelling may be more
or less limitless, but they may also be rather dangerous.
If an author tries to make a fairly accurate transcript
of, say, a regional accent by using a good deal
of eye dialect, the printed version may end up with
almost every word being altered. At this point,
readers will be faced with a barrage of unusual letter
combinations, a complex code that needs to be unraveled.
The consequences may be disastrous, with
readers forced to concentrate more on deciphering
the words than considering their meaning, losing the
thread of events. For many readers, certain sections
of Wuthering Heights have always been an irritating
puzzle:
Aw sud more likker look for th' horse, he replied.
It'd be tuh more sense. Bud, aw can look
for norther horse, nur man uf a neeght loike this
as black as t' chimbley! und Hathecliff's noan t'
chap tuh coom ut maw whistle--happen he'll be
less had uh hearing wi' ye.
[Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights]
To bring some order to this possible chaos, a set
of unwritten rules has emerged for the use of modified
spelling in direct speech in novels. The most important
rule of thumb is to avoid overburdening readers
with anything like a close transcript of what might
actually have been said. Since readers are already
using their imagination when reading a novel, a good
writer must simply encourage them to imagine what a
character's speech may actually sound like by providing
them with a smattering of eye-dialect markers.
In other words, just a handful of well-chosen modified
spellings indicating that a character's speech is
nonstandard should be enough to convince readers of
the mock speech reality the author is trying to create.
Most authors therefore limit nonstandard forms
to small sections of direct speech, and only rarely
are major characters given much nonstandard dialogue.
A sprinkling of dropped hs or modified conjunctions
is often quite enough. Indeed there are
certain common lexical items that are regularly subjected
to this treatment, and readers have probably
already seen them elsewhere or quickly become accustomed
to them. This group includes conjunctions
(an', 'n', 'cos) , prepositions (o', 'bout, b'tween) , common
verb forms ('ave, spok'n, woz, wuz) and pronouns
as shown in the table on the next page.
Other common lexical items that are often altered
include elided verb forms (wanna, canna,
dunno) and question words linked to verbs (wodya,
owja). A pattern emerges here: the words that are
written with nonstandard spellings are generally
short words which carry little essential meaning and
which are repeated often enough for readers to become
familiar with them. They remind readers of a
character's way of speaking without distracting from
what is actually being said.
When an author wishes to indicate a geographical
or regional variety, a few key markers are again
usually quite enough. The use of v instead of f (It's a
vine day) is almost enough on its own to indicate a
speaker from southwest England; repeated t in place
of the (It's in t' house) suggests a Yorkshire dialect;
the use of e instead of a indicates a South African
speaker (Shell I give you e hend); a long drawn-out
aw rather than a shorter o suggests a southern US
speaker (He's gawn fishin' with his dawg). Foreign
speakers of English can quickly be identified with
one or two key sounds: a v for a w suggests a German,
a z for a th pin-points a French speaker. Likewise
when English-based pidgins and creoles are
written down, the phonetic transcriptions use a similar
system of modified spellings to indicate pronunciation.
Examples abound in the writings of authors
from the Caribbean, West Africa, Oceania, and so
on. We come across dialogue extracts such as:
E better so. No be for umbrella we de roast for
sun since waka come here dis morning.
[Chinua Achebe, Anthills of the Savannah]
Most of the conventions established for representing
nonstandard forms of English are applied to English-based
pidgins and creoles when used in literature.
Writers can also use eye dialect to indicate social
class or level of education. A common practice
in novels is to show the speech of the lower classes
or poorly educated with dropped hs and other truncated
forms. A further device used to indicate a lack
of education is incorrect spelling--what we could
term pointless spelling changes. When an author
writes what as wot, no indication of pronunciation is
being given; the same is true for a number of other
words (woz, skool, gon, sez, sed, 'our, rite). In such
cases the writer is using a phonetic spelling that reminds
us of the incorrect attempts made by children
or the uneducated at spelling these words.
But wot as a modified spelling of what is not
restricted to novels. It regularly crops up in graffiti,
in press advertising, in humorous publications, in
signs. Its wrongness immediately attracts people's
attention and, at least as far as graffiti is concerned,
it helps to set up a kind of anti-establishment bond.
The proverbial writing on the school wall is Down
with skool! When such spellings are used in signs
and advertising for their eye-catching value, they
are usually referred to as sensational spellings. A
classic example is the much-quoted slogan Beanz
Meanz Heinz, used in Britain. Advertisements
along the roadside sometimes use sensational spelling
to an extreme degree, especially in the US. The
following table has some typical examples:
For similar reasons, trade names often employ
modified spellings, particularly when two or more
words are put together to make a brand name. Some
examples are Accurist, Dabitoff, Dunlopillo, Kleenex,
Kwiksave, Loctite, PlakOut, Playskool, Trufit, Westclox,
Windolene, Xpelair.
In a few cases, a modified spelling can move into
an everyday (standard?) area of usage. Though is
frequently seen as tho, and through as thru in thru-
way--the official spelling for many US state roads.
High spelled as hi is frequently found in compounds
such as hijack and hi-fi. Swop, the misspelled form
of swap has become so widely used that it is now
accepted as a standard variant by most dictionaries.
Similarly, few people--except perhaps some pedants--nowadays
frown on certain alternative spellings,
many of which has come about through misspellings.
Some common examples are given in the
following table:
Of course, some language purists object to all
forms of modified spelling outside dialogues in novels.
Leaving aside unintentional errors, spelling
some people claim that in Dickens' wot is acceptable,
while almost everywhere else it is wrong. Such
distinctions are hard to substantiate and deny the
fact that alternative spellings can serve the purpose
of being eye-catching or distinctive, or even creating
a social tie. A comparison with some other languages,
particularly languages with a largely phonetic
spelling system--(German, Italian, Spanish)--
shows that this range of nonstandard spellings is an
added bonus that our quirky English spelling system
has given to the language. It is often impossible for
translators, for example, to transfer the implications
and undercurrents suggested by modified English
spellings into another language. The multiplicity of
English spelling can therefore provide readers with
a rich source of extra information that should clearly
be looked on as a positive, enriching feature of the
language. In the right place, a wrong spelling is
often just the rite thing!
As I travelled the province, I found a bureaucratic
quagmire stewing in the ugly built-in racism that is an
echo of Canada's colonial past. [From a report by Barbara
McLintock in The Province (Vancouver, B.C.), . Submitted by ]
...next I add these ingredients to the margarine. I
don't like to use those artificial things--I use real margarine.
[From a cooking segment on the Today Show,
WDAF, F-. Submitted by .]
Expressions for Sexual Harassment: a Semantic Hole
At least as far as the media are concerned, sexual
harassment, as well as related issues, like pornography,
have now replaced both legalized abortion
and equal opportunity as the central issues of
the sexual politics of the '90s, with the obvious political
and legal ramifications.
It may be of interest, then, to consider the language
in which this debate is normally carried out,
an examination of which, I propose, will reveal
something of the assumptions and limitations governing
virtually all discussions of the issue.
Let me make my own ideological position explicit.
Although routinely denied, it is not always
clear whether what is being condemned is sexual harassment,
or just sex. Or, put differently, one's
views of sexual harassment are inevitably intertwined
with one's views of “healthy sexuality,” and,
as others have pointed out, the current debate has
been framed by the largely puritanical segment of
the women's movement.
Indeed, I would maintain that the language of
sexual harassment reflects this ideological bias. To
start, consider the expression to make sexual advances .
Clearly the term has a formal (and legalistic)
connotation which is hardly neutral. Although
someone might reasonably characterize one's own
behavior as “flirting,” for example, it is unlikely that
a person would report “making sexual advances,”
except facetiously. The term usually appears expanded
in one of two ways: univited sexual advances
and unwanted or unwelcome sexual advances . The
distinction is significant. What is an “invited sexual
advance?” If A invites B to make a sexual advance,
then A has made an “uninvited sexual advance”: any
initial step is `uninvited' by definition. To construe
uninvited sexual advances as a form of sexual harassment
is to condemn all sexual advances.
Unwanted sexual advances are rather different.
Whereas uninvited sexual advances can be identified
by both parties before they occur, unwanted sexual
advances are presumably identifiable by one party
only after they occur, i.e., when they have been rejected.
The party receiving the sexual advance may
know in advance that it is not wanted, but not the
party making the sexual advance. Indeed, it seems
likely that the behavior in question is more likely to
be characterized as a “sexual advance” if it is rejected.
One does not usually respond favorably to a
sexual advance. Furthermore, invitations that are
clearly nonsexual are rarely referred to as advances
at all. To make advances means to make sexual advances .
The word advances is itself emotionally
charged.
But, to repeat, the people engaged in the behavior
referred to rarely use such terms at all. So
what terms do they use?
Well, to court or to woo someone sounds absolutely
Victorian, whereas to seduce someone sounds
morally reprehensible. Expressions like to come on
to someone or to hit on someone, or to make a pass ,
being largely informal, seem to have a frivolous, or
sometimes even a threatening connotation. Young
people will sometimes talk of working (on) someone,
which sounds exploitative. Even flirting implies a
cavalier attitude which may be innocuous, but which
also may connote a lack of sincerity.
I have been intentionally vague regarding the
grammatical subject and object of these verbs. First,
it is clear that heterosexuality is assumed, unless
there is some evidence to the contrary. Furthermore,
women do not normally court men, and although
both men and women may flirt or seduce , a sentence
like My neighbor hit on my friend out of context will
typically be understood to refer to a male neighbor
and a female friend, and not vice-versa.
There is a whole range of behaviors which are
sexually ambiguous to a certain extent, almost by
definition, a fact which is reflected in expressions
like to ask for a date or to express an interest in someone,
where the sexual interest is tacit, but not explict.
Similarly, expressions like to (try to) connect
with or to (try to) get next to someone may or may
not express sexual intent
So, unless I have missed a range of expressions,
the conclusion one can draw from the above is that
the language we use to describe the initial attempts
to establish sexual relations is either puritanical, or
hostile, or frivolous, or ambiguous, hardly the range
one would expect in an open, sexually healthy, egalitarian
society. The “semantic hole” is itself a symptom
of the disease.
See, for example, Camille Paglia, “The Joy of Presbyterian Sex,”
The New Republic , December 2, 1991, pps. 24-27, or Susie
Bright, “The Prime of Miss Catherine MacKinnon,” In These
Times , pp. 39-40. I feel obligated to add that, as someone accused
of sexual harassment, my interest in these issues is not
purely academic.
I take the approaches made by prostitutes to be classic examples of
uninvited sexual advances . Whatever one's views of prostitution,
however, one would be hard pressed to seriously consider such
behavior as a form of sexual harassment. Incidentally, a related
linguistic usage, and one which I agree is pernicious, is illustrated
by the allegation that certain persons invite offensive behavior--
even violence--through, for example, their dress or appearance.
The contradiction is clear. If neither dress nor appearance constitutes
an invitation to make sexual advances, then it is difficult to see
how the fact that sexual advances are uninvited should be sufficient
basis for allegations of sexual harassment.
One obvious example of a “semantic hole” in sexual relationships
is the often-observed absence of neutral terms for unmarried sexual
partners. A colleague writes that his university is seriously
considering the expression spousal equivalent . The caricature has
now become the reality.
Language at Bay
Much of Rhode Island fronts on Narragansett
Bay, hence is called the Ocean State. Moreover,
her language reflects this association in subtle
ways. Take, for instance, the Rhode Islander who
pointed to a sparrow hawk (birders prefer to call it
a kestrel) and, perhaps being mindful the early colony's
questionable custom of profitable privateering,
called it a privateer hawk . Would that be understood
in Nebraska? Maybe not, but any Rhode
Islander aware of his state's predacious history
would get the idea.
Block Island, awash in Rhode Island Sound,
shares with Maine the term for double-ended vessels
large or small. The wooden, lap-straked boats go by
the name of peapods . Graphic to say the least, since
their hulls were not only so shaped but were often
painted green. Block Islanders, furthermore, have
tossed their share of nautical expressions into the
stream of Rhode Island consciousness, as when
Harry Allen, ancient seafarer, reported on his visit
to the doctor. Was Harry given a clean bill of
health? “ Clean as a quill,” came the reply. Again,
when asked how his wife, who had been bound over
to a nursing home, was faring, he lamented, “She's
been draggin' a fin.”
Narragansett folk might not have invented the
term shift wedding , but they practiced the custom.
When a widow, bereft of her husband, and deep in
his debts, sought to marry anew, she must first slough
off his obligations. To do this, she had first to appear
at midnight before the justice of the peace clad scantily
in nothing but a shift (a negligee). Next, if she
lived in Washington County, she must proceed to
Shift Corner , site of shift weddings, where three
towns come together, and there step through all
three towns to satisfy their inhabitants that she
owned nothing but the shirt on her back. Then and
only then was her new wooer free to marry this second-hand
wife sans debts. Very convenient for a
widow who had lost her first love at sea.
Everyone knows black flies, the pestilence of
May taking away the pleasures of the merry month,
because, as the fellow said with merry understatement,
when black flies bite, they do attract your attention.
But probably only in seagirt states do the
insects go by the name buckeye flies. The explanation?
The anadromous herring return each spring
and course up the streams to spawn, streams such as
Buckeye Brook in Charlestown. Herring? Yes, but
locally called buckeyes , and their return coincides
with the appearance of the unwelcome flies. But if
you pronounced buckeye as they do in the Buckeye
State, referring to the tree, you would be wrong: in
Rhode Island this would be pronounced, as it was in
England and Scotland in days of yore, “BUCKee.”
Chaucer, after all, probably pronounced eye “ee” to
rhyme with sea , as in “the smalle foules... slepen
all the night with open ee.” That pronunciation has
persisted here.
Pilots of the ferries on Narragansett Bay, like all
mariners, had ideal opportunities to observe meteorological
events such as sea turns and waterspouts.
Captain Arthur Knowles and his First Mate Harold
Sherman used a neat expression for the sky when a
cool northwesterly breeze swept over the bay clearing
out every vestige of cloud except those low to
the southeast, where the warm water of the Gulf
Stream condensed as a ragged range of billowy
clouds. These the ferrymen called the lee set .
The euphonious word skilligalee came ashore in
Narragansett bay as an alternative name for the marlin.
Webster's New International , however, defines
skilligalee as a “worthless coin,” while the form skillagalee
is defined as a “thin broth.” Any connection
here?
Picture small boats on the bay, each manned by
one fisherman tonging for quahogs (pronounced
“KOEhogs”). The tongs consist of two long poles
with rakes affixed and crossed at the nether end,
rakes many-toothed, curved and facing each other so
as to clench the catch of hard-shelled clams. The
fishermen toil at this job, working the poles in and
out, in and out, endlessly. It is muscle-building toil,
this opening and closing of the poles, and it has
earned for the tongs the name East Greenwich accordions .
The only music they produce is the whistle of
the tongers on the way to the bank.
To me the choicest of these maritime terms I
have heard only once, but I was not a little pleased
to hear it. Emory Bennett had been to a political
convention at Warwick. He described the Governor
Francis Farm where it took place, an idyllic farm on
land gradually sloping to the bay and margined with
what most of us would call a salt marsh. He called it
a sea pasture , a term absent as such from the dictionaries.
It brought to minds a phrase from Milton
“seaweed their pasture” ( Paradise Lost , vii, 404),
except that Emory meant the wide expanse of tidal
grass just up from the beach and inundated twice
daily. This grass, incidentally, was called thatch
locally, suggesting an early colonial use for it. Furthermore,
it enhanced the term to hear Emory pronounce
pasture “PASTOR.”
Let it not be said, then, that the smallest state
has not contributed to the richness of the mother
tongue.
“The Southeastern Georgia Alzheimer's Chapter
presents a dinner cabaret, `A Night to Remember'...”
[Submitted by .]
On Beyond Zebra, or, the No-Longer-Roman Alphabet
We speak of our twenty-six letter alphabet as
the “Roman” alphabet, even though the
Romans generally used nineteen of these letters.
The letters I, U and W were created much later,
while the letters K, X, Y, Z were used primarily in
transcribing Greek words. These days the Roman
alphabet is used for writing most of the world's
3000-odd languages, and it is no longer really Roman
any more. Take Hawaiian, for instance:
A a O o K ke N nu
E e U u L la P pi
I i H he M mu W we
' okina
Not only are such important letters as B, C, D, S,
and T missing, even the order of the letters has been
changed! And what is the apostrophe doing at the
end? (It symbolizes a glottal stop.)
Other languages pepper their letters with diacritics.
The Hungarian alphabet, even though it
omits the letters q, w, x, and y, still boasts a whopping
thirty-seven members: A, A, B, C, CS, D, E, É, F,
G, GY, H, I, J, K, L, LY, M, N, NY, O, Ó, Ö, \?\, P, R, S, SZ,
T, TY, U, Ú, Ü, \?\, V, Z, ZS. Pity the poor typographer
who has to keep the four kinds of o and u straight!
The phenomenon of digraphs (letter pairs) functioning
as single letters is not uncommon; Spanish dictionaries
routinely list Ch, Ll, and sometimes Rr as separate
letters. Even English address books sometimes
treat Mc as a separate letter, although that is a specialized
instance.
Some of the weirdest additions to the no-longer-Roman
alphabet are in languages that were first
transcribed in the twentieth century. Zhuang, a Tai
language spoken in Southern China, defies typographers
by employing letters resembling the numbers
2 through 6 to indicate syllabic tone: \symbol\.
Several languages of Southern Africa employ familiar
non-alphabetic symbols, like ! and # to indicate
the unusual click sounds. Also in Africa we find the
curly-tailed \?\ and \?\ to indicate ingressive sounds.
Surprisingly, even the English language requires
more than twenty-six letters to write. A
glance at the Oxford English Dictionary reveals
many archaic words written with the letters æ (ash),
ð (eth), \?\ þ(thorn), \?\ (wynn), and \?\ (yogh). Ash is a
ligature of A and E; there are many other ligatures,
like fi and fl, that are not considered letters in their
own right. Eth and yogh are graphic variants of d
and g respectively. Thorn and wynn are borrowings
from the Runic alphabet, once widely used in England
and Scandinavia.
In general, new additions to the alphabet fall
into the following categories: 1. letters with diacritics
(ä, é), 2. modified letters (\?\, \?\), 3. ligatures (œ,
æ, β, &), 4. digraphs (ch, sz), 5. numbers and modified
numbers, 6. punctuation marks and other non-alphabetic
characters (!, #, '), 7. letters from non-Roman
alphabets (þ, \?\). It is surprisingly hard to
think up any letters that do not come from these
easily identified sources. One possible exception is
the new name adopted by the popular singer formerly
known as Prince. He has changed his name to
\?\, a character of unspecified phonetic value, that (if
I may be permitted to hazard a conjecture about this
decidedly nonlinguistic symbol) seems to be a cross
between the female sign \?\, the male sign \?\, and the
Egyptian ankh sign \?\. Thanks to the magic of wordprocessors
and do-it-yourself fonts, the typographers
of many popular magazines have gamely incorporated
this new word into their repertoire,
sometimes in the possessive form “\?\'s.”
Mountain Talk
Since its inception in the early 19th century,
mountaineering and climbing have evolved
their own special language. A `way up a mountain or
cliff' is known as a route . Certain routes which are
not necessarily the highest, longest or highest ones
in the area are known as classics .
A pitch is `one rope's length of a route,' while
the most difficult part is called the crux . There is
always a belay or anchor point at the ends of each
pitch. Utilizing one of these or using the rope to
safeguard another climber is belaying . A psychological
belay is one that would not support a falling
climber. Loops of rope or tape, called slings , fitted
with karabiners or krabs `metal snaplinks,' are used
for running belays or runners . These are placed on
the rock face during the ascent and used to prevent
the leader from falling too far. Slings can be slipped
over points of rock, attached to pitons `metal spikes'
or chocked `fitted into cracks with shaped pieces of
metal.' These pieces are called chocks (small pebbles
were originally used for this purpose) or nuts
(the earliest metal chocks being nuts with the screwthreads
drilled out). A `small chock on a thin wire
sling' is a baby on a wire . Pitons have various names,
such as pegs, spikes, leepers, rurps, or bong-bongs .
The leader carries this equipment on a set of krabs
known as a rack .
Different ropes have names. The `climbing
rope' is the active or live rope . Coming from the rear
of a climber's harness it is a back rope ; fixed at chest
level to give the climber a rest it is a cow's tail .
Faults in the face provide the means for climbing
it. The easiest and safest method of ascending is
to chimney up a chimney , a wide crack that is
climbed in the fashion of a chimney sweep. Alternative
names for this maneuver are bridging or foot
and backing . Piles of stones ( cairns or stonemen ) are
built on peaks and along cols (a saddle or pass ). A
`sharp rock ridge' is an arete , sometimes only passable
by going a chaval [ à cheval ], that is, `sitting
astride the top as on a horse.' A crack with one protruding
edge can be laybacked `climbed by pushing
with the feet while pulling with the hands.' A prominent
ledge is a mantelshelf which is mantelshelfd
`climbed as if going onto a fireplace mantelshelf.'
Routes are graded in terms of height, difficulty,
and exposure, the vertical distance below the
climber. The grades are easy, moderate, difficult, very
difficult or v. diff, severe, very severe or VS, hard very
severe or HVS, extremely severe or ES, and exceptionally
severe or XS. Holds range from friction through
thin to jug handles . A large hold at the end of a hard
pitch is often called a thank-God hold . A very small
hold that depends on the friction between the
climber's boot and the rock is a smear . When the
climber uses the inside edge of his boot on a very
narrow hold, he is edging .
Over the years climbers have developed a system
of calls. Tight rope means `take in any slack
rope,' while slake [`slack'] means `let out a little
more rope.' The leader shouts “Taking in” when he
reaches the top of a pitch and begins gathering in
the slack. When the rope goes taut, the second answers
“That's me”; the leader will then belay and
instruct the second “Climb when you're ready”; the
second says “Climbing,” and the leader acknowledges,
“Aye, aye.”
Someone who is `taking risks' is feeling brave ,
and when he falls, he is peeling . Any climber who
comes to a stop through `lack of energy' is bonked
out . If this is caused by a `lack of food,' he is suffering
from hunger knock . A climber who is feeling nervous
is being gripped .
Helmets which are now worn by almost every
climber are dubbed bone-domes .
Brian Davis's letter in VERBATIM [XX,4] was very
interesting and dealt with a sad and serious situation
in present-day use of the English language, viz., tautological
modes of expression. But I do not agree
with the statement in his first paragraph that one
cannot enclosed an item anywhere but “herewith.”
His solicitor could well have stated, “We have pleasure
in enclosing--with a statement that we are mailing
separately.” A field may also be enclosed in a
barbed-wire fence and not in any way “herewith.”
I also take exception to considering “They gave
us a number of donations” as tautological. The
phrase a number of is one of several that are commonly
used, at least in American English, with reference
to indefinite numbers, each of which has a
slightly different significance: a few, several, a great
many, numerous , etc.
[There is no dispute about the second point. With
regard to the first, it must be noted that without
specifying where an item is enclosed, it would usually
be construed as accompanying the message,
hence I should agree that enclosed herewith is redundant.
As for fence enclosures, that is another
sense of enclose .-- Editor ]
Regarding Brian Davis's EPISTOLA [XX,4] and
his list of tautologies, I believe that enclosed herewith
is but a borderline example if one at all. My
understanding is that when a check, for example, is
placed within the fold of its cover letter, it is properly
referred to as being enclosed --or enclosed
herein . If an enclosure is not within the letter but
separate from it in the same envelope, it is enclosed
herewith .
Anyone with half an eye will be able to find as
enclosure, whether it is in or with the covering letter;
but it is my belief that, while adequate English
can be readily understood, good English precludes,
if possible, any misunderstanding.
[We would not dare to disagree, but the distinction
between enclosed [herein] and enclosed herewith
seems a finicky needle's-eye of pedantry, and it
smacks of “reconstruction” of something that was
never structured to begin with. Besides, the great
difficulty encountered in finding checks occurs when
they were not enclosed to begin with (or arrive unsigned).--Editor]
As usual, the latest issue of VERBATIM is stimulating
to the point of making one laugh or grunt
aloud, alarming fellow-passengers on the Sheringham
train.
I think you are unfair to mock Carver about his
derivation of raccoon . A raccoon scrabbling on the
bottom of a stream is not, as you put it, “unnatural.”
Away from the suburbs, shallow water is its natural
feeding place, and “crabs and other tidbits” (why do
we call them “titbits” over here?), which it finds by
touch, are its natural food. The scientific name for
the raccoon, Procyon lotor the `doglike washer,' describes
this behavior. The Algonquins had it right.
I write about natural history for a living. One
book in particular resides on my desk as a regular
source of inspiration: Edmund C. Jaeger's Source
Book of Biological Names and Terms , first published
in 1944 by Charles C. Thomas, Springfield, Illinois.
I have the revised third edition, 1959. Many animals
were--and are--wonderfully well-named by taxonomists,
following in Linnaeus' footsteps: this book is
the key to their wisdom, and often their humor. It
brings scientific names to life.
Consider those who would give the gentle and
intelligent killer whale a less pejorative name. They
went to its binomial Orcinus orca (Linnaeus 1758) to
find a softer synonym and chose “Orca.” Had they
consulted Jaeger, they would have found that
Orcinus is the adjectival form of Orcus ; the Latin
name for Hades. Although orca can mean a `dice
box' (or a `little barrel'), it also means a `kind of
whale, the great killer,' perhaps derived from Orcus .
Surely it was in this sense that Linnaeus used it.
Orca functions as a euphemism only because its true
meaning is forgotten. More suitable would have
been the name used by the Tlingit of northwest
Alaska, who hold the animal in high esteem. They
call it keet : not very euphonious, but friendly.
I was interested in Ronald Verrall's letter [XX,4]
regarding hagas for haws , `berry/fruit of the hawthorn.'
If Mr. Verrall had crossed over the Sussex
border into Kent, he might still hear a curious variant.
In the Weald, haazes , the h dropped, is still
used for haws . Occasionally, the close listener in autumn
may also hear the pre-1939 generation call
them harves . I am sixty-five, but when I was a boy
living in the North Downland area south of Sittingbourne
up to Maidstone, it was common to hear
children calling haws arzey-garzeys , sometimes varied
to azzy-gazzies . I haven't heard this for many
years and I fear when my generation has “crossed
over” this description, like my generation, will be
defunct.
The report below includes subscriptions in
North and South America only.
In commenting on the report of the banning of a
dictionary in Thailand [XX,4,20], you are reminded of
the California teacher groups “who... campaigned
to ban the Dictionary of American Slang ...” Surely
this is an injustice. All teachers' organizations here,
most notably the American Federation of Teachers and
the California Teachers Association, campaigned strenuously
and successfully against the proposed ban,
which was sought by assorted prurient-minded prudes
and obscurantist political zealots only. (Although for
the most part ignoramuses, these did know where to
look for the naughty words.) Teachers have been
made scapegoats for many social ills; it would be a
service to acknowledge their occasional courage and
virtue in opposing the flatheads of the world, rather
than lumping them in with the fools.
Some homosexual men may indeed use terms
like divine, adorable , or mauve [XX,4,7 BIBLIOGRAPHIA],
but that surely does not include all homosexual
men. I, for one, can barely tell you which of
the colors I dislike is mauve and which is fuchsia. I
don't like Garland or disco either. And never mind
that it's taken me almost 50 years to learn how to
put a reasonable outfit together: I may be in danger
of losing my gay accreditation.
My point, however, is serious. Sexual orientation
does not confer taste, the lack of it, or a set of
socially approved (or disapproved) styles or--more
important--values. Your closing comment on the
research suggesting homosexuality is gene-related
seems well off the mark in this regard.
The entire drift of your article on sexism in language
is that much sexual behavior is shaped by
nature. Since the sexual orientation heterosexual is
genetic, it stands to reason that the eternally recurring
variant sexual orientation homosexual likewise
has a genetic base.
Acknowledging that, however, frees no one
from accepting responsibility for her or his behavior.
Nor does the hypothesized genetic link explain
the awesome variations within the different sexual
orientations. Chromosomes do not exculpate the
predators Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy, and they
certainly cannot reductively account for the prose of
Hemingway or Proust.
[My point about mauve was that it has no particular
usage associations but that devine and adorable ,
among other words, are “associated with ways in
which some women but probably no men (except
those imitating women sarcastically, homosexuals, or
interior decorators) express themselves.” I certainly
did not say or suggest that all homosexuals or, indeed,
all of any group of speakers use any particular
word with any consistency. Being either homosexual
or heterosexual, male or female, or fitting into
any one of the myriad gradations between those extremes
has nothing whatsoever to do with taste or
values, and I did not imply that it does.
My closing comment referred to current research
that attempts to show that homosexuality is
gene-related, which I termed “fatalistic” because it
would appear to relieve any individual of responsibility
for his actions: as we learn from frequent press
reports, defense attorneys are seeking exoneration
for their clients on the grounds that although they
committed the crime in question, it was circumstances--abuse
when they were children is quite
popular--that were responsible for their actions,
and they should be let off.
I did not write anywhere that “much sexual behavior
is shaped by nature.” I wrote: “one must be
careful to distinguish between nature, in which we
must recognize that there are differences between
males and females, and bias, which ought not be tolerated.”
I keep an open mind on the question of the
genetic origins of heterosexuality and homosexuality.
I regard efforts to stereotype or categorize people
as futile as they are tedious.--Editor]
Re your recent OBITER DICTA [XXI,1], I'm sorry
you did not delve further into the idea that the word
black is on its way out. I hope not, though I have
seen people of color , a far better descriptive term,
being used more frequently. I do, however, pray
fervently that the use of African-American would
vanish completely. It is cumbersome and greatly
misleading, and it sounds sycophantic. Whenever I
hear a white person use that term I feel he is
proudly intimating an obvious lack of prejudice. I
draw an analogy between that and the time I heard
my German landlady announce that she was going to
a wedding between her niece and a “very nice Jewish
boy,” suggesting strongly that “this German”
harbored no prejudice towards Jews.
Whenever I see the term African-American ,
with its sixteen letters, in print twelve times in a
single article, I wonder if the writer realizes how
much space is wasting and how pedantic it all
sounds.
Let me put a few cases, as the lawyer said to
Pip, in Great Expectations: Suppose the following
people came to the United States and became citizens:
a Moroccan Jew from Casablanca
a Rhodesian policeman
a Boer farmer from just outside Johannesburg
an Egyptian taxi-driver
Are they all African-Americans? The word is a hyphenated
misnomer.
[The problem lies in the fact that people lack a sense
of history. Black , used by Americans, refers to Negroes;
but (colonial) Britons have used it to refer to
any dark-skinned people, particularly southeast
Asians. People of color is an old facetious euphemism
for Negroes: it is the plural of gentleman of
color. Colored (man, woman, person, people , etc.) all
seemed quite satisfactory and have been used by
Negroes to refer to themselves. The picture is further
confused by the term Cape coloured , South African
English for a `person of racially mixed parentage.'
(But then, there was the old vaudeville
(minstrel?) tune, My gal's a high-born lady / She's
black but not too shady /.../ She ain't colored--she
was born that way ... which would invoke great
wrath today.) The problem with colored is that,
taken literally, it can be used to refer to anyone who
is not white. There is--or was--a US newspaper
called The Afro-American , and there is a popular
magazine called Ebony . As Mr. Livingston points
out, African-American is--or can be--ambiguous
and is a poor choice solely on that ground. The
press in the US is virtually enjoined these days from
identifying people by race in the text of articles, a
practice that has extended to the banning of songs
and spirituals like Ol' Black Joe . But that is got
round either by showing a photograph or by making
certain that we learn the subject's name is Wong Fu,
Takashimaya, Goldberg, O'Rourke, Nielsen, Gandhi,
Rashid, Zbigniew, Molotov , etc., though one is less
likely these days to be able to identify race, color, or
ethnicity from certain names (like Livingston, for example).
These are linguistic clues, and can be misleading:
cf. Whoopi Goldberg . The problem lies not
in the name but in the prejudices of bigots and in
the perception of those who are discriminated
against. Undeniably, there is prejudice against Negroes
in many Western societies, and, as long as that
prejudice exists, it will attach to the name of those
against whom the prejudice is felt or practiced.
Thus, we can be confident that as time passes, the
term African-American will be exchanged for something
else: perhaps Negro will again become the politically
correct term. Other words, like darky , are
taboo, leading to a change in the lyrics of Jerome
Kern's Ol' Man Ribber (now probably “Old Man
River”).
Racial and religious slurs and epithets abound;
sometimes those who use them are not even aware
that they are offensive (like the term Hebrew for a
Jew). Older dictionaries labeled the term Jewess as
offensive, but I have heard Jewish women refer to
themselves using the word, evidently oblivious to
what lexicographers identified as insulting.
I quite agree that African-American is both cumbersome
and undescriptive; I am also aware that
many blacks do not use the term: Jesse Jackson uses
black , and the NAACP has retained Colored People in
its name. Not the smallest part of the problem arises
between those who seek the general acceptance of
anonymity in which any identifying reference is eschewed
and those who stridently voice their ethnicity
and race.-- Editor ]
“ `Blessing of the Animals'...Pets of all denominations
welcome.” [From an advertisement by The Basilica
of Saint Mary, “Your Downtown Catholic Cathedral,”
in the Minneapolis Star Tribune , . Submitted by .]
“DRUG USE IN SPORTS ON RISE, SAYS WHO: Use of
performance-enhancing drugs in sports is rising and
more must be done to stop it, the World Health Organization
said.” [From the San Bernardino Sun , . Submitted by .]
ANTIPODEAN ENGLISH
Of Surf and Such
There are several customary formulae applied
to words whose histories remain unclear. “Of unknown
origin” and “origin uncertain” are blank
walls beyond which few can go. “Perhaps” indicates
the lexicographer's wish to be helpful or to solve a
problem or not to be beaten; “probably” a slightly
firmer resolve or, more dangerously, tidiness of
mind. But the fact remains that some hundreds of
words that have entries in a standard dictionary remain
etymological mysteries. And some of these are
our everyday companions, whose credentials we do
not doubt and whose very ordinariness leads us to
take them for granted.
Take surf , the `swell of the sea which breaks on
the shore and slides back' with Arnold's “slow, forgiving
roar.” Surf is first found in 1685, on the coast
of India and, bearing a strong resemblance to suff ,
found 100 years earlier on the same coast and with
much the same meaning, may be presumed to be a
variant form of the same word; it may also be assumed
to be of Indian origin. In fact, as late as 1840,
crossing the surf can be described as “an expression
equivalent to `entering or leaving India,' as a person
is never supposed to venture across this tremendous
barrier of the Coromandel coast, unless on such momentous
occasions.” But, from the middle of the
18th century, this sense had been supplemented by
a more generalized but at the same time more precise
sense of the `mass or line of white foamy water
caused by the sea breaking upon a shore or a rock.'
Surf in Australian English, of course, has this general
meaning but is used mostly of the sea, and particularly
the surf, as a place of recreation. It is earliest
recorded in 1908, in a couplet Arnold would have
been proud to claim:
The Manly maidens shoot the surf,
Or bake their bingies on the shingly shore.
In this sense, and with a host of compounds amplifying
and asserting the recreational possibilities,
we tend to think of it as our own and as an important
part of our social history. But it is as much a part of
international English as it is of Australian, as the
provenance of the range of compounds suggests. So,
to take only a selection of the more common terms,
surfbathing dates from 1884, surfboard from 1826,
surfboat from 1856, surfriding from 1882, and surf-swimmer
from 1845, all long before the first Australian
enjoyment of the surf is recorded in the early
years of this century. What is our own and what
light do the terms collectively throw on our society?
First, surf as a verb [1913] seems to be an abbreviation
of the now obsolete surf-bathe [1906]. And
surf-bathing was not always respectable. As a writer
in the Sydney Truth observed in 1912, “I think respectable
people may go surf-bathing and still remain
respectable, but people who aren't moral and
respectable do not become so by shooting the breakers
and airing their figures on the beach.” Or, in the
terms of a dialogue reported in the same journal.
“ `Oh, Auntie,' said the child, `what's surf-bathing?'
`Something the savages do on boards,' replied the
aunt vaguely.” The difficulty lay in the garments
worn and the degree of exposure they allowed. As a
local government ordinance put it in 1902:
All persons bathing in any waters exposed to view
from any wharf, street, public place, or dwelling-house
in the Municipal District of Manly, before the
hour of 7.30 in the morning and after the hour of
8 o'clock in the evening, shall be attired in proper
bathing costume covering the body from neck to the
knee. Any person committing a breach of this Bylaw
shall be liable to a penalty not exceeding one
pound.
The existence of surf beaches within the environs of
Sydney--at Bondi, Bronte, Coogee, and Tamarama
in the south and Manly to the north--meant that the
battle of the beaches was fought in Sydney, and,
when respectability was obtained, that it was in the
terms of an activity very much associated with
Sydney, surf-life-saving. Surf club , glossed as `lifesaving
club,' is first found in 1913, Surf and LifeSaving
Club in 1915. The surf carnival [1914] was
initially as much a public-relations exercise as a competitive
occasion, the iron man [19??] unheard-of.
The earliest term for a swimmer who preferred
swimming in the surf to swimming in the baths at,
for instance, Coogee was surf-bather [1906]. This
was soon joined, and ultimately replaced by surfer
[1913], and the earliest quotation for surfer , being
part of an account of “a surfer's companion,” a
dainty article intended to hold bathing suit and wet
towel in a water-proof case, suggests that there was
a potential market amongst the fraternity (a writer in
1919 saying emphatically that “Surf-Bathing is dangerous
for women”). The surfer's companion , incidentally,
was irrefutably Australian, being made of
dingo skin! The contemporary surfie [1962] at least
partially replaces surfer in its turn though it invokes
the image of the “monosyllabic cretin” who speaks
two words of English-- yeah and man --streaks his
hair with Clairol, and, worst of all, drinks milk. In
other words, a Bondi surfie , dated as it now is, is for
many still predominant.
Frequenting the surf entailed sun-baking [1910],
without fear of the consequences, and shooting
[1912] waves, with the ambition of “scraping your
nose, after a shoot, on the sand of the beach itself,”
or cracking a beacher [1949]. Refinements of both
activities have been made over the years, as body-surfing
[1956] is distinguished from board-surfing
(or board-riding ), though the latter use of board ,
first recorded by Captain Cook in 1779, cannot
really be claimed as Australian.
VERBUM SAP
Par for the Coarse
When my eye came a cropper on the word
ornariness in a headline in the (Toronto) Globe and
Mail , I was pretty sure it was either a misspelling or
an editor's plain orneriness. Nearly all current dictionaries
bore out my first suspicion. They gave the
root word as ornery , admitting no variants. The exception
was the Oxford English Dictionary , which
listed four obsolete variants, including ornary which,
as it turns out, is the most etymologically logical.
The adjective, which now means `contrary or obstinate,'
was originally just a lazy pronunciation of ordinary .
That is also what it meant. The earliest recorded
use is an 1816 quotation from the Maryland
Historical magazine: “The land is old, completely
worn out, the farming extremely ornary in general.”
An 1849 citation mentions a “one-horned cow,
mighty onnery-lookin'.” By the 1920s, the spelling
had regularized to ornery , and the meaning had degenerated
to `disagreeable' or `cantankerous.' This
pejorative development was not extraordinary, because
the word ordinary had itself taken on a debased
sense. Among the definitions listed by Samuel
Johnson in his 1755 dictionary were, “mean, of low
rank, ugly, not handsome.”
It is probably a characteristic of humanity's
eternal upward struggle that good enough is never
good enough, and neutral terms like ordinary, mediocre,
average, so-so, run-of-the-mill , and indifferent
tend to take on negative connotations. A classic, of
course, is coarse . This word seems to have popped
up in the early 15th century, as an adjectival form of
course `ordinary order' or `normal manner.' For
three centuries there was no spelling distinction between
the two, but the noun was pronounced with a
long “u” sound (COORSE). The earliest uses of the
adjective referred to fabrics, to distinguish ordinary
or run-of-the-mill cloth from finer weaves. But even
before that century was out, the sense had depreciated
to denote inferior--not just average--quality.
When the vowel sound in the noun changed
from long “u” to the same sound as in coarse , a need
was evidently felt to have a spelling distinction so as
to tell the two apart in print. Isaak Walton is the
earliest known to have used the modern spelling
when, in The Compleat Angler , he wrote of “the
worst or coarsest fresh water fish.” Coarse has undergone
a thorough pejoration; once it began to be
used for people, in the sense of `unrefined' or `indelicate,'
full stigmatization was probably guaranteed.
Now it passes as a synonym for indecent, obscene , or
gross (three words that have also gone through some
downward sense development).
Ornery is one of a clutch of bristly words with
odd and often controversial etymologies. Johnson
believed that ugly , which was sometimes spelled
oughly , derived from ouph , a variant of elf . Modern
experts are satisfied that it grew from Old Norse uggligr
`to be feared or dreaded.'
Cantankerous is even more moot. Ernest Weekley
speculated in 1921 that because the earliest written
uses are in Goldsmith and Sheridan in the 18th
century, it might have been Irish in origin. Earlier,
J. C. Hotten's Slang Dictionary suggested it might be
a corruption of contentious . Most dictionaries today
accept the theory that it arose from a Middle English
word conteck `quarrelling' or `contention.' The
agent-noun would have been contecker and the adjective
conteckerous . The latter, according to the
currently accepted theory, became contankerous ,
and then cantankerous , influenced by cankerous and
rancorous .
It is well known that once-ordinary words for
farmers or people of low birth became debased
through class contempt-- knave, villain, boor , and
churl are only a few examples. Surely is one of the
very few words to result from the same process, but
in reverse. In the mid 14th century, it was sirly `like
a sir,' or `lordly, haughty, imperious, arrogant, supercilious.'
The modern sense of ill-humored or
rudely morose dates from about the mid-17th century,
but the “u” spelling had taken over about a
hundred years earlier, perhaps, one fancies, as an act
of revenge by the churls.
If surly is a product of class contempt backwards,
obnoxious is a thoroughly democratic error;
everybody got it wrong. The main word noxious is
the harmful or injurious one. Obnoxious means, or
rather meant, `exposed or liable to harm, vulnerable.'
This sense is clear in John Evelyn's French Gardener
(1658), which recommends covering certain
plants with straw in winter, “to secure them from
the frosts, to which they are obnoxious.” This meaning
is obsolete, but it hung on until late in the last
century, even though the current sense of `offensive
or highly disagreeable' began to make inroads as
early as c. 1600.
Perhaps the most vexing of all these crossgrained
words is peevish. Oxford just throws up its
hands and cries “Derivation unknown,” adding,
“None of the etymological conjectures hitherto offered
are compatible with the sense-history.”
Conjectured ancestors include the Lowland
Scottish peu to `make a plaintive noise' and the Danish
piave `to whimper, whine or cry like a child.' It
may also be related to the bird pewit (or peewit ),
imitating its cry. Peevish , from which the noun and
verb peeve appear to have been back-formed, has
been used since the 14th century with a wide variety
of senses, including `childish, silly, wayward,
thoughtless, froward, uncouth, perverse' (which
some think is the source), and even `witty.'
A word with that many diverse senses is about
as extra-ornary as they come.
German Loanwords in English
Now that Sidney I. Landau has become entrenched
as Editor in Chief at Cambridge University
Press in New York, we are begining to see reflexes
of his expertise in lexicography and linguistics. The
first two parts of this work, the third part of which is
a dictionary of 5380 German loanwords in English,
begins with a useful Introduction that provides the
book with just the right setting, then goes on in Part
I with An historical overview by semantic fields and,
in Part II, with a Linguistic overview, which treats
matters like Phonology and Graphemics, Grammar,
Word-Formation Processes, Semantics, Naturalization,
and Dialect. Part IV consists of an Appendix
and a supplementary list of loanwords.
The dictionary section contains dates (where
applicable), etymologies, and descriptive definitions.
As is to be expected, most of the entries are
scientific--that is, not particularly gemutlich ; some
may be disputable, as in the cases of words like geochemistry,
geomedicine, geophyte, geoscience, etc.,
which are described as translations from German
Geochemie, Geomedizin, Geophyt, and Geowissenschaft ,
respectively: unless such formation is acknowledged
by an author in their first manifestations
in English text, these (and others) could just as well
have been English coinages and many are so characterized
in English dictionaries. An outstanding exception
is geopolitics , acknowledgedly from German
Geopolitik , but even in that case there are antedating
overtones from Swedish and French. Such
things are arguable, and it is neither useful nor interesting
to try to settle trivialities. But one is given to
wonder about the treatment of Geiger counter ,
which we know is a radiation counter developed by
the German physicist Hans Geiger (evidently working
with someone named Müller, whose given name
appears to have disappeared but who once shared
the honors, as the former name of the device was
Geiger-Müller counter ): this is described as a translation
of Geigerzahler [lit. `Geiger counter'] (replacing
Geigerrohr [lit. `Geiger tube']), but how it can be so
analyzed, when the counter sense is inherent in the
function of the device, and `Geiger' can scarcely be
said to be a “translation” of Geiger , is a little hard to
justify. As the term arose only about seventy years
ago, it is probably well documented. (W.) Müller
crops up again in Geiger-Muller threshold (also
called Geiger threshold ), not listed in the book, and
in Geiger-Muller tube (which is the heart of the
counter ).
Curiously, there are only 118 words pertaining
to Physics among the loanwords cited, and one
would have expected more. Geology, for instance,
yields 318 terms, Mineralogy 857, Chemistry 687,
and a surprisingly meager 37 in Pharmacology. Aspirin
is, of course, of German origin but appears in
the Medicine rather than the Pharmacology listings.
Including Miscellany, there are 69 Semantic Fields
listed, by category and alphabetically.
Although almost all dictionaries are organized
alphabetically, there are many ways to look at lexicon,
and the analytical categories set forth by Pfeffer
and Cannon in this book are interesting and useful.
Other semantic categories have been set forth by
Roget; still others by March in his Thesaurus ; and
thematic arrangements have appeared in words like
Picturesque Expressions, Allusions , and other books
prepared by and under the direction of this reviewer.
How interesting and useful it would be to
see a substantial segment of “ordinary” English subjected
to such treatment--and it is not difficult to
imagine still more categories into which words could
be divided.
If I have one cavil with the book, it is that there
is no conceivable reason for the subtitle to use an
before historical.
[Those who are aware of Loanwords Index and
Loanwords Dictionary , by Frank R. Abate and this
reviewer (Gale Research, 1983, 1985), should be reminded
that those works are restricted to “Foreign
Words and Phrases That Are Not Fully Assimilated
into English and Retain a Measure of Their Foreign
Orthography, Pronunciation, or Flavor,” to quote
from the suitable of Loanwords Index. ]
Laurence Urdang
A Dictionary of Wellerisms
Wellerisms are, essentially, what Americans
would call Tom Swifties. For instance:
“Laugh that off,” said the fat man's wife, as she
sewed his vest button on with wire.
It gets worse--far worse. Not only are the puns
atrocious (which is not a legitimate complaint, I suppose),
but they are often obscure, many having been
dredged up from collections that include 18th- and
19th-century examples:
“Bar that,” as the Sheriff's officer said to his first
floor window. [1841]
“I have risen from the bar to the bench,” said a
lawyer, on quitting the profession and taking up
shoemaking.
Pretty bad, eh? How about:
“I have to hear people talk behind one's back,” as
the robber said when the constable called, “Stop
thief!” [1861]
It seems clear from the above that one must be seeking
something other than amusement from collecting
such material. Mieder and Kingsbury are highly
respected par(o)emiologists (`experts in the field of
proverbs' for those who have the RHD Unabridged ,
which does not list the word or any of its congeners),
hence one would assume that such a collection is not
entirely a waste of time. The Preface describes the
book as “the first book-length collection of wellerisms
in the English language”; unless reasoning man
can find a way to put this information to good and
useful purpose, it may well be the last. Proverbs can
be interesting because they are a key to human wisdom
and folly; wellerisms seem to have no redeeming
qualities.
This reflects an admitted prejudice against the
material, which is about as quippy and clever as the
brick-wall comedians one must suffer on odd nights
on obscure cable channels in the US. Further on in
the Preface one reads that “major collections of wellerisms
in some of the European languages are
readily available” and the implication that what we
have here is representative of the “rich British and
American materials.” According to the OED , a wellerism
is “a form of comparison in which a familiar
saying or proverb is identified, often punningly,
with what was said by someone in a specified but
humorously inapposite situation.” It is on a par with
the literal interpretation of idioms, as in the cartoon
of someone puffing on a chain with the caption
“Chainsmoker.”
There are many things about modern life--air
conditioning (in particular), electricity, indoor
plumbing, supermarkets--that make me grateful to
be living in the latter half of the 20th century and
not back in the antediluvian or “good old” days so
often pined for, and one of them is the knowledge
(gained from the Introduction) that American newspapers
and magazines published numerous short
lists of wellerisms during the 19th century. It ineluctably
reminds me of the favorite execrable pun
perpetrated by those who seem to be in the throes
of learning English: “Let's throw a little light on the
subject,” said the man as he turned on the lamp. It
is one thing to utter little truisms here and there
during one's lifetime, sprinkling them about like sesame
seeds on a bagel; it is quite another to make a
fetish out of collecting such tripe.
In my role as Editor, I must be scholarly and
democratic, so I shall be happy to publish in a future
issue of VERBATIM a rebuttal either from the editors
of Wellerisms or from a champion of their cause. It
may not exceed the length of this review: 580
words.
Laurence Urdang
Dictionary of Idioms and their Origins
This is a small book containing a few hundred
common idioms with standard definitions, citations,
and suggested origins; adding to its value are the
twenty-two brief essays on various aspects of the formation
and characteristics of idioms. Roger Flavell
is a linguist, a scholar who has been interested in
idioms for many years and was co-author of On Idioms ,
in the Exeter Linguistics Series. His chief occupation
is teaching language teachers at the University
of London.
It is odd to note that Idioms and Phrases Index
(Gale Research Company, 1983), a compendious
work indexing some 250,000 idioms and phrases, is
missing from the rather eclectic Bibliography
(where Logan Pearsall Smith, quoted at the beginning
of the book, merits no mention either).
The treatment of idioms is pretty much standard,
with the origins that can be found in other
works repeated: but they are couched in user-friendly
language. For me, the treatment has the redeeming
feature of describing conflicting arguments
about origins: too often compilers of such books feel
obliged to take a position on one side or the other in
pursuit of “the truth,” seldom attainable in matters
of language. Each entry is illustrated by citations,
many more up-to-date than one can find in other
sources. More important, each offers--of special interest
to learners of English--valuable usage notes.
For example, at the devil to pay (and no pitch hot ),
the note reads, “Colloquial. The full form of the
expression is no longer in use.”
Laurence Urdang
Cassell Dictionary of Proper Names
It is hard to see what has got into the people
at Cassell's, for here is another book--this time a
superior one--on which they have practised their
onomancy: the original title (1992) was Brewer's
Names . At least they have not taken to changing the
names of the authors of these books, and this one
bears that of the estimable lexicographer and
onomastician, Adrian Room. From the origin of
Chaucer to that of Buffalo Springfield , Room covers
them all. Although the jacket copy is appropriately
dignified, twenty lashes to whoever wrote the release
accompanying the book, which cites its appeal
to “trivia buffs and curiosity seekers,” rather a
down-market crowed compared to the higher echelons
of literati to whom Adrian Room's books usually
appeal.
The treatments are brief but not skimpy: as
usual, Room says much in a few words, and his terse
treatments are welcome after the long-winded explanations
of self-evident clichés one must wade
through in reviewing. There are not a lot of such
works available, especially ones as up-to-date as this
one. Because general dictionaries either omit
proper names altogether or, if they are included,
give them short etymological shrift, Room's book
deserves to stand on the shelf alongside the best dictionaries
in a reader's library.
Laurence Urdang
Everyday Phrases
Originally published in 1983, here is another
book in Cassell's attempts at breathing a little life
into what should have been left to molder on the
shelf. Some of the explanations are downright silly:
Too many irons in the fire... The phrase refers
to the blacksmith's forge, where if the smith had
too many irons heating in the fire at the same
time, he couldn't do his job properly, as he
was unable to use them all before some had
cooled off.
crocodile tears...When crocodiles open their
jaws wide, tears are shed automatically from their
eyes... from a natural reflex action.
It is undeniable that to have egg all over one's face is
an “everyday expression,” but is there really any
justification to waste space on such a self-evident
metaphor in such a small book?
Laurence Urdang
The Twelve Days of Christmas: The Mystery and the
Meaning
Professor Bernard, who teaches at Springfield
College, became intrigued with the lyrics to the
Christmas song, The Twelve Days of Christmas , when
he first noticed the virtual redundancy of partridge
and perdrix , the Latin word for the bird, leading him
to surmise that the words in a pear tree could well
have been Norman French for `en a perdrix,' or
words to that effect. He allowed himself to succumb
to the intrigue and, using his imagination and talent
for research, traced out the other eleven days' worth
of gifts as a solution to a conundrum.
Although there are several versions of the song,
its earliest record is in a 13th-century manuscript in
the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. Bernard
not only carefully documents his ideas about the various
interpretations that might be given the curiously
anomalous references in the song but suggests
possible variants. At bottom, his conjecture is that
the entire song relates to a pilgrimage to Jerusalem
from England, where (two) turtle doves is interpreted
as `de tour Douvres,' whither one must go to
cross to France, to `lors de Liban,' yielding (eleven)
lords a-leaping . Each step of the way the reader is
increasingly persuaded that Bernard has taken the
right road, but I shall leave the remaining details of
the expedition to buyers of the book. The entire
theory is so engaging, charming, and delightful that
one hesitates to find fault with any one of it; doing so
would be like denying the existence of Santa Claus.
Each of the Twelve Days is illustrated by suitably
warm and friendly drawings by Scott Partridge
(warranted personally by Bernard to be neither a
nom de plume, de guerre, nor de chanson). The
book, slightly less than 8½”× 11”, can be ordered
directly.
Laurence Urdang
In Love with Norma Loquendi
Like clockword--I mean clockwork , of
course--Bill Safire's books come down the pike,
each inscribed with a friendly greeting from the man
described as “the language maven.” One of the
great advantages of having Bill's articles in book
form is that associated with them are the letters he
has received from readers which rarely (if ever) appear
in the newspapers where his column is syndicated.
The names of these correspondents are indexed,
enabling potential book-buyers to confirm
their immortality before sacrificing their ill-gotten
gains. Jacques Barzun should, accordingly, buy six
copies.
Those who think that Safire writes only about
politics from the Washington Bureau of The New
York Times should be aware that he also writes a
widely syndicated weekly column on language for
the Sunday Magazine of the N.Y. Times. Lately, this
column has been focused, a bit too frequently for my
tastes, on the jargon that echoes within the Beltway--that
is, insiders' Washington, DC, for the uninitiated.
Another complaint is his detailed treatment
of the semantics of a word, appropriate,
perhaps, to synonym studies in dictionaries (but only
too rarely well done there) but telling most readers
more than they ever wanted to know about a given
handful of terms. One more adverse comment, this
time for whoever wrote the jacket copy: when Bill
(or anyone else) mentions that long in the tooth was
“first used in print in an 1852 novel by William
Makepeace Thackeray” (p.287), it does not mean
that Thackeray “originated” the phrase.
Accumulations of Bill Safire's books (of which I
think this is the tenth anthology of his language articles)
afford us with articulate commentary on American
usage in the last quarter of the 20th century.
Other books, written with his brother, deal with
other aspects of language; in addition to two novels,
he has written five books on politics among which--
curiously--is not included his Dictionary of Politics ,
entitled Safire's New Political Dictionary in its later
incarnations. I cannot repress a personal comment
or two, for I have known Bill since the early 1960s, I
when his Dictionary of Politics was edited under my
direction at Random House. In the early 1970s, I
wrote to The N.Y. Times managing editor, Arthur
Rosenthal, suggesting that he consider a regular column
on language (to be written, of course, by me).
The idea was accepted, but not the author, for Safire
was regarded by the Times as its “resident lexicographer,”
the man properly qualified to do the job.
Laurence Urdang
Cursing in America
Language taboos seem to be persistent in American
English--more so than in British English,
where, although one cannot say that anything goes,
one encounters more dirty language on television (in
particular), especially after the so-called “watershed”
hour of nine o'clock (which some are trying to
put off till ten o'clock). In this comprehensive study,
Timothy Jay, who teachers at North Adams State College,
in Massachusetts, divides his subject into several
subcategories: Cursing, Profanity, Blasphemy,
Taboo, Obscenity, Vulgarity, Slang, Epithets, and
Scatology. Although he defends these classifications
by detailed discussion and definition, it is not easy to
apply them, for the distinctions tend to be blurred.
Blasphemy and profanity , for instance, are differentiated
on the grounds that the former treats “(something
sacred) with abuse, irreverence, or contempt,”
while the latter “is an attack on religion or religious
doctrine.” These are points too subtle to be readily
grasped. The term taboo in linguistics means, simply,
`proscribed by society as improper or unacceptable'
[RHD2] , but Jay prefers the narrow, somewhat
archaic, anthropologist's definition that focuses on
“supernatural” and “ritualistic” interdiction. The
definition he accepts for obscenity is as alegal term,
which he expatiates on to confusion. In the same
way, he accepts a traditional definition of vulgarity --“language
of the common person... not necessarily
obscence or taboo”--but that is not the
meaning most people would apply in the context of a
book on cursing. The perception and usage of these
terms is personal, and I, for example, prefer to use
vulgar to describe current manifestations like Roseanne,
Butthead and Beavis , and other television
shows that exhibit crude situations encountered by
rude people; drawings and graphic style, as in
Butthead , some of the “artwork” in Mad Magazine ,
and many of the new cartoons on the television are extraordinarily
vulgar and tasteless, without any redeeming
quality.
It is likely that one's taste deteriorates under the
continuous barrage of vulgarity: many who today admire
the dadaists, cubists, surrealists, hard-edge realists,
nonobjective and abstract artists would have reviled
them, along with a significant percentage of the
population, had they been dalive when their paintings
first appeared, just as staid, conservative critics
condemned the impressionists and advocates of other
nouvelles vagues . Is it that we gradually become accustomed
to what we first perceive as trash--as vulgarity--and
become inured to it, or that we come to
understand and, if not enamored of it, at least tolerate
it as a legitimate form of expression?
To be sure, one is no longer shocked at hearing
hell and damn on radio or television or even reading
it in the press, although both were taboo a scant
twenty years ago. Programs and films that are broadcast
on television after ten o'clock in the evening are
no longer censored--even in the United States--for
mentions of shit and piss , though fuck , which can
occasionally be heard on British television, has not,
as far as I know, made it to the American media.
Still, it is worth pointing out that the shock felt was
not at hearing these words but at hearing them on
radio and television, where everyone knew they
were banned. In other words, the context was inappropriate:
as if one heard his priest say “Goddammit
!,” despite the fact that one said it oneself whenever
something went awry. The 1930s' Hollywood
censors' ban on showing even a married couple in
the same bed or a man putting on his trousers and
zipping (or buttoning) his fly seems ludicrously
prudish to us today. But the motivations of those
censors, driven by powerful conservative religious
groups, were quite different, and we ridiculed them
even then because of their interference with the everyday
facts of life. It is difficult today to find a film
made in the past decade that does not contain what
must be regarded as an obligatory nude scene, and
in many instances such scenes have no integral part
in the plot. To me, vulgarity means `bad taste,'
whether deliberate (as in the case of Roseanne ) or
unintentional (as in the case of crude drawings
foisted on us as “art”).
The chief problem with these and other definitions
is that some are based on semantics (the intent
of the speaker and the understanding of the hearer),
others on usage, and others on referents. In a subject
where there are no fixed criteria of definition, it
is unfair to criticize an attempt at classification: after
all, we have been putting up with ambiguous definitions
for the eight parts of speech for as long as anyone
can remember, yet we find their occasional application
convenient. In short, the perception of
these terms is culture-dependent, and culture is akin
to language in the sense that while a large number of
people might be said to speak a language, we know
that it is made up of a larger number of dialects
which, in turn, are made up of a still larger number
of idiolects.
To some extent, these social aspects of language
are accounted for in Cursing in America , but the
study is married by the lack of up-to-date data: some
of the more interesting tables result from surveys
done in the late 1970s, and one can be certain that
things have changed markedly since then.
On the other hand, I found utterly fascinating
the chapter Censorship, which describes--rather
cursorily, I regret to say--several US court cases in
which defendants were charged with various violations
stemming from their use of bad language. In
the case of the State (unspecified) vs. Dreifurst,
more detailed comments is forthcoming, but it is difficult
to understand whether the source of the exposition
that follows is the author's or a rewording and
digest of the proceedings.
The writing is easy to read and colloquial (by
which I mean it contains the classic solecisms that
purists deride). Disturbing are the gaps in information:
Appendix I consists of several lists of films from
1939-1960, 1960-69, etc., totaling 73 in all and
showing for each the “Total number of [twenty-seven]
Bad Words” as checked by an unspecified
number of “film reviewers [who] were volunteers
from a college psychology course on the topic of human
communication,” scarcely a representative
cross-section of the population. No comment is offered
on the selection of the films. Other manipulations
of the data are described in general but are not
reflected in detail in the statistics.
On the whole, Cursing in America , while an interesting
book, does not go very far in presenting a
cogent analysis of the present situation or its history.
The fault lies partly in the difficulty in securing
funding for proper studies in the area; on the other
hand, one cannot help feeling that studies that have
been done could have been better conceived and
organized. There is a miscellaneous Bibliography,
which seems to include every linguistics book and
article the author has ever read, and a pitifully poor
Index, containing about seventy items.
Laurence Urdang
Pronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names
The lengthy subtitle is given above because it is
the most succinct way to describe the contents. An
interesting additional bit of information is buried in
Bollard's Preface, to wit:
...[P]ronunciations were actually “proof-listened.”
Through facilities made available by
AT&T Bell Laboratories of Murray Hill, New
Jersy, all pronunciations were actually heard
using speech-synthesis technology.
That is probably the first time such a procedure has
been followed.
The Introduction constitutes a brief but comprehensive
course in pronunciation and a detailed description
of the symbols used, both for English and
for foreign pronunciations (like that of the Welsh
ll -sound, the German ü-sound and ö-sound, etc.).
The transcriptions are, mercifully, what phoneticians
call “broad,” which provide the basic information
needed to be able to reproduce the pronunciation, as
compared with “narrow,” in which detailed phonetic
features are reflected that are useful for specialists
but clutter up the field for ordinary users. The so-called
simplified respelling is what I usually refer to
as the Moo Goo Gai Pan school of phonetic transcription,
concoted for those too lazy to learn even the
simplest rudiments of phonetic transcription (which
used to be taught in high-school English Courses during
the few hours spent on How to Use the Dictionary).
The schwa is anathema in this pattern: uh substitutes
for it. Still, the user must contend with
macrons over some vowels and with the intrusive h ,
which crops up here and there in order to lengthen a
vowel. Although it might be seen as commendable to
make the interpretation of pronunciation symbols as
easy as possible for the laziest users, I have little
sympathy for the policy: in most cases, those who are
too lazy to learn even the rudimentary respelling systems
used in popular dictionaries (like the various
college and desk dictionaries) are also too lazy to look
up the pronunciation of a name or word, as is evidenced
daily in the utterances of newscasters and
announcers.
Of some complexity in English is the pronunciation
of r: it disappears entirely in syllable-final and
preconsonantal positions in some dialects of English
( harbor /häb\?\/); in others, it is reduced to coloring
the preceding vowel or diphthong ( card /kä\?\d/)
Cuba /ky\?\'b\?\/); it crops up in words and phrases
that are spelled without it ( law and order /\?\/).
I find Bollard's superior \?\, used to transcribe both the
“optional r ” ambiguous. Also, he writes, “the r is not
always completely dropped.” I would defy him to
find any r quality in the British Received Pronunciation
of air fare , etc. Admittedly, the r might be the
cause of the “lengthening or prolongation of the [preceding]
vowel without dipthongization,” as Bollard
puts it (p. xxxii), but that cannot be said to be r -coloring,
which we ought to restrict to a sound that has
some resemblance to the pronunciation of r .
These are detailed, petty matters of individual
interpretation, matters that should not concern
those for whose use this book is intended. One
could quarrel with occasional entry choices: Steinberg
David, Canadian comedian, actor , is in but not
Saul Steinberg, the artist, who is far better known--
at least in some circles; we find Ralph Waite, US actor,
but not Terry Waite, British hostage; Sir John
Hicks, English economist who won a Nobel prize, is
in, but Edward, the American painter, is more important.
The syllabication of Modigliani is shown as
\?\ rather than/, \?\ and the execrable)
often-heard \?\ is not shown.
The former Japanese prime Minister, Takeshita, is in,
but, as I once observed, nobody pronounced his
name /take\?\/ (with no stress at all, a difficult patterns
for English speakers): he was called \?\,
with a hint of a break before the final /t/. Whatever
the “correct” pronunciation, no one could argue
that in English the second is more “proper.” (What
we need is an American politician named Takapouda ).
The form of entry is not uniform: for instance,
Pynchon Thomas,...; Park would lead a literalminded
user to understand it to mean “Thomas
Pynchon” and “Park Pynchon”; as the latter is a
ballpark, it is probably Pynchon Park. Owing to the
broad transcription, no attempt is made to duplicate
the Arabic voice pharyngeal fricative qaf (as in
Qatar ).
There are not many sources that come readily to
hand offering pronunciations of Tán Bó Cualinge .
The choice of entry is eclectic: Kotex is in, but not
Tampax (no pun); many common names whose
pronunciations are unlikely to be in doubt are in
also: Kennedy, Johnson (though the Swedish author
ought to remain), John (with a French pronunciation
shown), John Bull, John Doe (but not Richard Roe),
Heston, Hicks , etc. Rembrandt van Rijn is in, but at
Rijn one is directed to Rhine. I doubt that the Italian
pronunciation of Rodrigo is /\?\/ rather than
/\?\/ and there are inconsistencies between
the Spanish pronunciation of Rodrigo and that of
Rodriguez .
These details are not likely to affect the usefulness
of the book, however, and it contains curious
items like the pronunciation of Roh Tae Woo , S. Korean
leader: /no\?\ te\?\ wu\?\/ following which it was
deemed wise to put a “sic.” It seems that in the
southeastern US words beginning with shr- are pronounced
as if spelled sr- , something I never knew.
This yields a string of entries, from Shreveport to
Shrovetide , in which an additional pronunciation, labeled
“esp. southeastern US,” is given; I understand
Shreveport, Shriver and Shrove being given these
variants, but who cares how people in the southeastern
US pronounce Shrewsbury and Shropshire,
which are English place names? Also, the preferred
pronunciation of Shoreham , the English port, is
shown as \?\, which is unlikely to be heard anywhere
in England. The preferred British pronunciation
of Connecticut , with the c before the t pronounced
as k , is not shown, so why shown US
dialectal variant pronunciations? On the other hand,
Thor Heyerdahl's name might be properly pronounced\?\,
but I have never heard anything
but “higher-doll.”
Many years ago, Cabell Greet, professor at Columbia
University and widely recognized authority
on phonetics, was consultant to CBS (as I recall) on
pronunciations. He had his hands full fielding telephone
calls from them during WWII, when newscasters
were daily faced with the problems of how to
pronounce the names of people and places like von
Ribbentrop, Sidi Barani, Ploesti , and Irriwaddy . Little
has changed, but Cabell is long gone, and newscasters
(or broadcasting networks), if they want to
learn how to pronounce a name properly can usually
find out by listening to BBC World Service. They
take a chance, not because the BBC is in any way not
reliable but because they might not say the name on
command. For them, for speakers who want to make
certain they are using an acceptable pronunciation,
the Pronouncing Dictionary of Proper Names will
prove indispensable.
Laurence Urdang
Happy Trails
This is the second volume of Facts On File's series,
Dictionary of American Regional Expressions,
the first of which, also by Hendrickson, was
Whistlin' Dixie , which we have not (yet) reviewed.
Announced for future publication are dictionaries of
New England, Mountain, and New York expressions.
Hendrickson is a poet and a productive author of
books on language, among them Literary Life and
Other Curiosities (Viking, 1981), American Talk (Viking,
1986; Penguin, 1987), and the Facts On File
Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origin (FOF,
1987), the last of which was favorably reviewed in
VERBATIM [XV, 4,27]. (Had we been sent a review
copy of Whistlin' Dixie , we would have reviewed
that.)
Hendrickson does his research carefully and he
writes definitions that are eminently informative and
readable, often including a useful quotation; his entry
for hogan :
hogan A Navajo dwelling, usually earth-covered
and built with the entrance facing east.
“The Navajo hogans, among the sand and willows.
None of the pueblos would at that time admit
glass windows into their dwellings. The reflection
of the sun on the glazing was to them
ugly and unnatural--even dangerous.” [Willa
Cather,Death Comes for the Archbishop, 1927]
Admittedly, hogan is not one of the more interesting
entries, and, inevitably, there are quite a few such.
One problem the author had to grapple with was the
very identification of a word or phrase as Western:
hightail it , for example, refers to “mustangs, rabbits
and other animals [that] raise their tails high and flee
quickly when they sense danger. Trappers in the
American West noticed this, over a century ago,
probably while hunting wild horses, and invented the
expression to hightail it , to leave in a hurry, to make a
fast gataway.” Everything is plausible except the
business about trappers: the expression could just
have easily originated in the parts of America settled
earliest, for deer exhibit the same behavior (and, indeed,
their tails are called flags for that very reason);
also, deer, antelope, and many other animals in Europe
have “hightailed it” for centuries. I fear that
Hendrickson relied too readily on the OED2e , in this
instance, for that source mentions mustangs in its first
quotation, from American Speech , Volume I, 1925.
After a diligent search, I could find no earlier mention.
Mencken ( The American Language , Supplement
Two, p. 138) refers to an article on Idaho speech; the
AS article was written by a resident of Seattle (and
mentions mustangs), but that is of no significance. It
is just curious that what one might assume to be a
fairly obvious coinage cannot be documented to an
earlier date. One might contend that before 1925
writers were not writing much about the West; although
the western was popular in motion pictures
long before 1925, talkies did not arrive till 1926.
Zane Grey (1875-1939) and James Frank Dobie
(1888-1964) might have used the phrase in their
writings, but evidence is lacking.
The entries make interesting reading, but one is
given no indication of the frequency with which
they occur and whether they are current. Do people
still use a Jesse James as a metaphor for any
(bank) robber? We also find a Bat Masterson and a
Wyatt Earp . Do courting couples still use jimpsecute?
Do cowboys call farmers plow-chasers?
Many know the tale behind dead man's hand (aces
and eights, though their distribution is not specified).
Hendrickson cannot be held accountable for
failing to trace many of the expressions to their
source: even though many are not much more than a
hundred years old, there is no way to document
them. Still, I should be surprised to find that cosh
`kill, mutilate' is anything more than an extension of
cosh `use a cosh [`blackjack'] on.' Other terms, like
count coup and coup stick , look as if they were derived
from French. Does a cowboy all the way down
to his liver `a full-fledged 100% cowboy' derive from
the damage done to one's liver by the jarring suffered
in breaking horses?
These are questions that will have to be resolved
by others. Hendrickson has performed a useful
function in gathering the words and expressions
in one place, but it would have been helpful had he
given some indication as to how some entries were
uttered. For example, 6666, The , name of a cattle
ranch: was it six-six-six-six? double six double six?
sixty-six sixty-six? And were (or are) the js pronounced
like h in the scores of loanwords from Spanish?
Happy Trails raises as many questions as it answers:
I have trouble believing that gunsel is a
“cowboy word for a braggart,” for which no evidence
is adduced. Some of the terms are old, some
are quite recent, but, in all fairness, it must be emphasized
that no claim is made that any have been in
use for a long time.
I am ambivalent about the book. It makes good
reading and those who are interested in dialect dictionaries
should add it to their collection. But it
adds little to the scholarship about the West and, if it
had a language, what it might have been. I fear that
this is merely another in the long series of specialized
dictionaries of questionable value published by
Facts On File.
Laurence Urdang
Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins
This book first appeared in 1987 under the title,
Why Do We Say... ? , and nothing has been done to
it since except to put on a new cover and title and
copyright pages: even the running heads on each
page bear the original title. Bringing out a book
with a changed title is not strictly kosher: caveat
emptor .
Laurence Urdang
Name-calling
St. Hilaire was a 4th-century French bishop. All
those named after him were male, until the 1930s,
when the fashion for uni-sex names exploded.
The even-handed, Continental use of Maria
never caught on in Britain, but the dual Evelyn was
already established, as was Leslie/Lesley . In
America, Lee made no distinctions: Lee Radziwill,
Remick, J. Cobb, and Harvey Oswald. There was a
flood of Billies, Bobbies , and Bunnies , a short-lived
attempt at a female Michael and, of course, Hilary .
By the time I reached the sixth form, one or two
juniors were called Hilary , but I was a pioneer. Not
always a comfortable position. Very soon after the
War, I was sent on a “Friendship Exchange” to a
Dutch family. They had three sons and a smallish
house. The arrival of a pre-adolescent girl, inteligible
to share a boy's room, threw a spanner into the
works (and probably confirmed beliefs in English eccentricity).
They shared a surname with a notorious
collaborator. In spite of the frantic bed-shifting,
they were delighted to have an English guest to
display.
Britain, not having been invaded, had no collaborators,
unlike Norway, where Quisling gave his
name to the whole breed. Not many people (male or
female) are named after him.
African Applications: To Z or not to Z
Z, as the last letter of the alphabet is one that is
not high on the popularity scale in the English language.
To an outside observer, however, Z seems to
have particular appeal to the inhabitants of subequatorial
Africa. In the toponymy of this region (especially
recent national designations), Z seems to have
been accorded a special place of honor unmatched
elsewhere.
The changeover from colonial to “African”
names has accentuated the use of Z and demonstrated
its unique appeal. For example, we now have
the contiguous nations of Zaire, Zambia , and Zimbabwe
,
countries that previously didn't have a single
Z to share amongst them. Also in this general
geographic area flows the mighty Zambezi .
Recent reports in the popular press have hinted
that a name change may be in the works for South
Africa, with the possible remaining of that nation as
“Azania.” This is the country that once went by the
name of Zuid Afrika --an important and well-known
region of which is Zululand (also known by its ethnic
name of Kwa Zulu ). Contiguous countries with
South Africa are Swaziland and Mozambique . Further
up the East coast is Tanzania , one of the constituent
parts of which is the formerly independent island
state of Zanzibar .
There are many African town names that contribute
to this linguistic stereotype, places such as
Zongo, Zumbo, Zawi, Zaria, Kolwezi, Mulobezi,
Solwezi, Ulvinza, Mazabuka, Mwanza, Ngunza,
Nzeto, Nyunza , and many others. Not many European-based
toponyms in Africa fit in with the theme,
but some that do would include Brazzaville , Luderitz ,
and Pietermaritzburg .
In concluding, and with apologies to Robert
Frost, it seems that Africans in the subequatorial
part of the continent would have been attentive to
the observation he might have made that, “Something
there is that doesn't love a Z.”
Escobarring
It is no longer news for the people of India
when their media report that English is, again, under
attack, for it has been part of Indian politics to
denounce English in public forums but seek its socio-economic
benefits in private. A language of “opportunity,”
English is certainly the first preference
of Indian parents who do not let their children go
without it in their school curriculum.
Any attempt at imposing English on children,
however, is met with very strong resistance. This
applies even to the south Indian state, Tamil Nadu,
whose intolerance of our official language, Hindi, is
matched evenly by its predilection for English. The
state's capital, Madras, as a matter of fact, has an
excellent track-record of having fostered English education
and the publication of educational materials
in English for more than 150 years. A month ago,
however, a massive wave of anti-English protest
swept across this state following a governmental directive
urging students and teachers of schools to
converse only in English on at least two days of the
week. This directive, according to the state's Director
of School Education, was meant to improve the
abysmal standards of English, both written and spoken,
at the school level.
The Directorate had earlier supplied small
handbooks in English for use in government-funded,
Tamil-medium schools. Tamil zealots threatened
statewide strikes and a demonstration before the
Chief Minister's residence seeking immediate withdrawal
of the directive. (Interestingly, the Tamils
who have renamed practically every public landmark,
road, and bylane after their national and regional
heroes and heroines prefer to retain “Poes
Garden,” the name of the locality to which the Chief
Minister's official residence belongs.)
This ambivalence towards English is most discernible
in the columns of such English national dailies
as The Times of India, Indian Express, The Hindu,
and The Hindustan Times. The Hindu , for example,
with its headquarters in Madras, dutifully reported
the anti-English protests but also carried in its weekend
supplement for October 2, 1994, a note on “Escobarring,”
by A. Sathyamoorthy, presumably a
Tamil. “Variety and vitality of the English language
is worthy of admiration,” begins this note. It goes
on to play with some well-known words and situate
them in familiar Indian contexts, mentions the language's
adaptability and resilience as borne out by
its record of borrowings from such languages as Persian,
Arabic, Tamil, and Sanskrit. Sathyamoorthy
concludes his brief exercise with a suggestion that
merits some attention by VERBATIM readers:
If English is playful can it be sporting too? Are
there many words and phrases which have roots in
track and field games...? Has it honoured sportsment?...
If not why not start with a footballer?
[Andrés] Escobar could be the lucky one. And a
timely one too. This rising star of Colombia was shot
dead outside Medellin. His sin was to deflect a ball
to his goal.... Death was decreed as his wage. He
was kicked off. [sic]
That was in the heat of the moment. In cooler
times can we make amends? Can we immortalise
him with a new word--Escobarring? It could mean
tripping [up] your team or scoring a point against
your colleagues[?]. Judas did that. Perhaps Brutus
too....
Sathyamoorthy's examples do not seem to convey
Escobar's unenviable distinction. His fatality
brims with a far sadder irony than either Judas's or
Brutus's. Escobarring may well be that rare sin of
commission and omission all at once. One ought to
recall, alongside, Escobar's words, which closed his
column in the newspaper that carried his obituary:
“Until later, because life doesn't end here” (quoted
in Time , July 19, 1994, p. 39.).
At the end of his article, “Some English Loanwords
in Thai” [XXI, 1], Paul Blackford notes he has
been unable to find out why the name for the Beatles
in Thai is Sii Tao Tong `The Four Golden Turtles.'
I can't respond to why Beatles was translated into
Turtles , but Mr. Blackford may wish to note that the
original name for The Beatles was The Golden Beatles .
Paul McCartney advised in an interview well
over twenty years ago that the word Golden was
dropped because it was, in his words, “too clumsy.”
Your review of A Dictionary of Fly-Fishing , by
C.B. McCully [XXI, 1], refers to the “single turle,
grinner, blood, needle, and nail --all knots used in
tying files.” This is incorrect. The single turle is
used to tie the fly to the leader tippet. The blood is
used to tie two strands of leader material together.
The needle and nail are for attaching the leader to
the fly line. None of these is used in used in tying flies. I
have never heard of a grinner , but have seen many
on the face of a companion after landing a beauty.
This note concerns your remarks anent AWOL .
My long-past military duty leads me to recall that
the O stands for Official , and is not meant to be a
part of without .
[Similarly from Robert L. Glasser of Beverly Hills
and a few other correspondents.-- Editor ]
As a lawyer, I agree with your correspondents
[XX, 2] that not guilty does not mean `innocent.' A
verdict is not an absolution. But as a former reporter,
I can provide some insight about the journalistic
usage. The entry in The Associated Press Style-book
for innocent says: “Use innocent , rather than
not guilty , in describing a defendant's plea or a jury's
verdict, to guard against the word not being
dropped inadvertently.”
Cassell Dictionary of Cynical Quotations
Considering the political climate the world over
and the political individuals who make certain that
into each life a little rain must fall, it would behoove
all of us to become familiar with the quotations in
this book, most of which seem apt at the moment:
POLITICIANS
When I was a boy I was told that anyone could
become President. I'm beginning to believe it.
Clarence Darrow
Politicians are the same all over. They promise
to build a bridge even where there is no river.
Nikita Khrushchev, 1960
Since a politician never believes what he says,
he is surprised when others believe him.
Charles de Gaulle, 1962
POLITICS
Politics, as the word is commonly understood,
are nothing but corruptions.
Jonathan Swift,
Thoughts on Various Subjects, 1706
Politics are ... nothing more than a means of
rising in the world.
Samuel Johnson, 1775
The duty of the opposition [is] very simply--to
oppose everything and propose nothing.
Lord Derby, 1841
Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.
Henry Brooks Adams,
The Education of Henry Adams, 1907
Politics, n. The conduct of public affairs for priyate
advantage.
Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary, 1911
All politics are based on the indifference of the
majority.
James Reston, 1968
I used to say that politics was the second oldest
Profession, and I have come to know that it bears
a gross similarity to the first.
Ronald Reagan, 1979
I could easily go on--and on, and on--but I
would probably be violating the permission to reproduce
text from a copyrighted work for purposes
of review. Although some of those whose quotations
have been collected here are tediously longwinded,
most have been brief in their dismissal of much-cherished
and much-criticized institutions--LAW-YERS,
NEIGHBORS, HOLLYWOOD, PSYCHOANALYSIS, THE
YOUNG--scores of categories are covered. This is
truly a quotable book of quotations, many from more
modern writers than one might expect to find in
other sources.
It would be difficult to compile such a work
without ready access to Mencken, Wilde, Shaw, and
others of their sort. This book (the possession of
which may become a substitute for reading it, to
paraphrase Anthony Burgess in The New York Times
Book Review ) should appeal to anyone over the age
of thirty who has developed a sufficiently mature
sense of reality to become a cynic.
Laurence Urdang
Chin-banging: Tough English Words in Japanese Teen Slang
Misuta Kôdo `Mr. Cord,' sannadabichi `son of
the “bitchy”,' hando pampingu `hand pumping,'
fakku-mêto': visit a Tokyo high
school, and you will quickly realize that much of the
fast-flowing teen lingo is in actual fact English. Inventive
puns and coded metaphors abound, and new
words, phrases, and grammatical twists surface each
year. What was naui “now”--`cool, awesome,
rad'--a year ago is suddenly annui --“un-new”--
`definitely out, uncool, weak.' Those who dare to
use last year's words find themselves ostracized by
their clique-mates.
When teens congregate in tough inner-city
schoolyards, their roughneck slang is called agotataki
`chin banging.' And each year, as a new generation
of chins bang, ever more inspired English
words surface: son-play, me-man, C.I.A., CD boy,
cassette boy, super-candy, wrestling, bible game .
“But where do all these eccentric English words
come from?” the confused observer might ask. The
answer is that they are not English words but English-inspired
words, inspired by expressions heard
on television and by half-understood words picked
up in English class, then bandied about with tilted
semantics.
Son-play, for instance, is `masturbation.' Take
musuko `son,' the standard Japanese slang word for
penis, translate it into English, add play , and you
have a sprightly and newfangled neologism. When
tough modern girls say me-man , they mean `my vagina':
the me- part is from the English me (for `my')
and man is short for manko `vagina.'
The initials C.I.A. are a form of S.O.S., used by
girls who are caught unawares by their period. The
deceptive letters stand for Chotto Ima Are! `That
just came!' A CD boy is a boy who is one hundred
per cent straight: CDs play on only one side; a cassette
boy has bisexual interests.
Among the rougher teens, super-candy means a
`good blow-job,' and wrestling is a synonym for `violent
and coerced sex.'
Tosuto (toast), another popular word of nebulous
background means `jealousy': toasting bread in
Japanese is known as pan o yakeru; the verb yakeru
`toast, bake, scorch' is also used in standard Japanese
for `jealousy'; the teenagers computed: `burning
with jealousy ... burning ... burning bread ...
toasting ... toast.
Another powerful source of new expressions is
the English alphabet, where letters, alone or in secret
configurations, are used to convey hidden messages:
AAS: Aitakute Aitakute Shigata ga nai. `I want
to meet him, I want to meet him, what am I to
do?'
TDK: Tende Dame na Ko. `totally gross guy/
girl'
HT: Half Think `One-sided love'
HB: Honto ni Busu `plug-ugly'
F: Feminine `Beautiful girl'
FM: Fuck Mate
SM: Sex Mate
M: Masturbation; Masochist
CS: Car Sex
IC: Instant Couple
BF: Boy Friend
GF: Girl Friend
New words can also be created by playing with
metaphors. Fakku `fuck' is used quite innocently to
refer to a major frontal collision between two vehicles,
while in the gentler kissu `kiss' the cars just
bump lightly. Bûmeran `boomerang' is the dumped
lover who incessantly keeps returning, and morumon
`mormon' is the active high-schooler with multiple
girlfriends. Bonuresu hamu `boneless ham' is a
school girl with a figure like a chunk of boneless
ham.
The metaphor comes in particularly handy
when conversations turn to matters of delicacy.
Tampons, for instance, can be delicately referred to
with English words such as `tea-bag' tiibagu ,
`cracker' kuraka , `wireless microphone' wairesumaiku,
or `vanilla (ice-cream cone)' banira . Another
taboo subject, condoms, can be touched on with
playful metaphors such as: `globe' gurôbu, `raincoat'
reinkôto, or `cover for Mr. John' jon-kun kaba .
An even more idiosyncratic trend has been to
spawn new blends by using syllabus of Japanese
words with English syllabus:
shite-bôi `horny adolescent': Japanese shitê
`wants to do' + English bôi `boy'
orudo-busu `ugly old bitch': English `old'
(ôrudo) + busu `plug-ugly'
gyaru-bôi `effeminate schoolboy': gyaru `girl +
bôi `boy'
gyaru-oyaji `girl daddy': middle-aged man with
the airs and interests of a teenage girl'
tero-ko `violent teen': tero, English `terror' + ko
`child'
oran-kori `without a date': oran `no one's there'
+ kori, the “-choly” part of melancholy
urutora-naon `a woman with large breasts':
urutora `ultra' + naon, a playful inversion of onna
`woman'
masu-kagami `masturbating in front of a mirror':
“mas-” of masturbation (pronounced
“masutabeeshon>”) + kagami `mirror'; it is also a
fertile pun on the title of the medieval Japanese
classic, Masukagami, “The Pillow Book,” by Sei
Shonagen
bai-nara “Bye, see you later': Bye + Sayonara;
Sometimes pronounced “bayonara”
mesu-teriku `neurotic bitch': mesu `female' +
the “-teric” of hysteric
The rapid spread of the American fast-food mania
brought with it even more eccentric words of
English extraction: nakkuru , short for snack-uru `to
snack,' chii-too `cheese toast,' ai-ko `iced coffee,' aitii
`iced tea,' and ai-mi-tii for `iced mint tea.'
Kentucky Fried Chicken appears in teen slang as
Kencha no Furachin , which produced the verb kencharu ,
`to hang out after school at a Kentucky Fried.'
Hageru means `to go and get some Häagen Dazs ice
cream.' Denny's was playfully changed into zudenii ,
and Mr. Donut became misudo .
The single most successful fast-food operation in
Japan has been Macdonald's. Since 1971 the chain
has mushroomed nationwide into over 1200 stores.
High-schoolers call Macdonald's makudo , or makku
for short, and eating the burgers is succinctly known
as makkuru .
The most sensitive among this foreign batch of
words is bible play , a clever metaphor imported into
high-school slang from red-light clubs and porn
tapes and magazines. Bible , pronounced BYEBURU, is
a playful extension of baibu `vibe,' short for vibrator .
The Japanese club crowd is astonished at the
flash flood of new expressions that year after year
pour out of the schools and surge through Tokyo's
trendy computer-game centers and fast-food hangouts.
Even today's twenty-somethings, still hot on
the club scene with their flamboyant teen slang from
the late eighties, find it hard to keep up with the
latest waves.
One of the most inventive sources for neologisms
is the cross-cultural pun: the expression that
pretends to be English but is in fact Japanese. A
white kick , for instance, is a `killjoy': the teens took
the Japanese shirakeru `to be a killjoy,' split the
word in two, and ended up with shira `white' and
keru `kick.' Parkinson means `gullible, a push-over':
it is a contraction of pâ de kin o son suru `Losing
money out of sheer stupidity.'
“Palm Desert employees charge that their manager
created an atmosphere of hatred and tolerance.” [From
the San Bernardino Sun , . Submitted
by .]
“Viewed from a strictly humanitarian point, Mr.
Bush's aides said this week, the White House's decision on
Nov. 25 to commit troops to Somalia was forced by a
steady decline in the country's military and social condition
that began in mid-October and reached a peak days
before Thanksgiving.” [From an article by Michael Wines
in The New York Times , , page A-14.
Submitted by .]
CORRIGENDA
In a review of The Endangered English Dictionary
[XXI, 1,22], we misattributed authorship of Poplollies
and Bellibones . As many readers probably
know because the book is in their libraries, Poplollies
and Bellibones is the work of Susan Kelz
Sperling.
In David Galef's “Sound and Sense” [XXI, 1],
please note that the reference in “The Miller's Tale”
should have been to Alison, the wife of John the carpenter,
not to the reeve's wife; also, for “sussurus”
read susurrus .
Answer to Anglo-American Crossword No. 69
