Insulting Nicknames Give Journalists Something to Be Proud of
Raffish louts, cigar-sucking men who wear their
hats indoors, chain-smoking women with
voices like rusty gates, cynical muckrakers with one
eye poised on the nearest keyhole, one ear on the
latest whispered gossip, one nose on the nearest free
lunch. In short, news people.
Or, earnest professionals fresh from college,
technology freaks on the cusp between computer
games and the Internet, dedicated defenders of society
and protectors of truth, middle-class guardians
of all that is good and nice, power freaks and culture
groupies urgently seeking out the newest trend so
they can play hipper-than-thou at the next person to
notice it. In short, journalists.
Take your pick. But if you're in the modern
newspaper newsroom, you are more likely to encounter
the latter than the former. Carpeted, air-conditioned,
ergonometrically designed office decor
discourages floor spitting. Computer technology
discourages smoking, advances in interpersonal sensitivity
discourage profanity or even loudness, enlightenment
in personnel management discourages
the proverbial fifth of cheap bourbon in the lower
desk drawer.
From time to time, mind you, someone spills a
cup of cocoa onto the keyboard of a workstation and
utters something untoward. In the modern newsroom,
it stands to replace the legendary shout of
Stop the presses! But this is not to say that newspapers
do not maintain refreshingly cynical traditions--if
quietly. It if still dangerous to invite journalists
to free lunches. And with notes of pride,
those rags that have earned pejorative names in the
local lore use those sobriquets in private correspondence,
saloon chat, and unofficial résumés. No other
profession has so rich a tradition of self-deprecation.
Newspaper people have no self-respect, and they're
proud of it.
Some nicknames are promulgated by readers, of
course, though for other reasons. It may be a sop for
the few remaining grizzled veterans, sweating out
their pensions in the corners of the world's city
rooms at papers taken over by Perrier-quaffing yuppies.
Where once reputations rose and fell on the
ability to jump a fence in the stormy dark, now
something called a performance review scores
their affability in committee meetings. It isn't lost
on these dinosaurs that with respectability came vast
declines in newspaper readership. That, and insulting
nicknames, are all that is left of the old reporters'
pride.
So there is no danger that these names, no matter
how vigorously opposed by newspaper marketing
departments, will pass from use.
The Dayton Daily News? No, the Dayton Barely
News.
Phoenix Gazette? Phoenix Guess-At-It.
Seattle Slimes (Times).
The defunct Philadelphia Journal was an attempt
to bring European-styled street-paper tabloid
journalism to the City of Brotherly Shove--er,
Love. It did not go over and became known as
the Philadelphia Urinal.
The Grauniad (Guardian: the pejorative is said to
reflect something wrong with its proofreading).
The News of the Screws (News of the World).
The Indescribablyboring (Independent).
Journalism students and their campus readers
are not exempt from the cynicism. Consider the
University of Florida's Independent Florida Aggravator
(Alligator , the U. of F. mascot); Virginia Tech's
Dependent (Independent) ; the University of Illinois'
Daily Illiterate (Illini); North Carolina State U.'s
Tackynician (Technician); University of North Carolina's
Daily Tar Hole (Tar Heel); University of Maryland's
Dime-a-Stack (Diamondback; in fact they're
free); Southern Methodist University's Daily Compost
(Daily Post); Rice University's Rice Thrasher
(Rice Thresher); Ohio State University's Latrine
(Lantern); Baylor University's Hilariat (Lariat);
Michigan State University's Stale News (State News);
San Jose State University's Spotted Doily (Spartan
Daily); Southern Illinois U.'s Daily Erection (Egyptian);
and Indiana U.'s Daily Stupid (Student) .
York, Pa., supports The York Disgrace (Dispatch),
The York Sunday Snooze (News) , and the York
Daily Wreckage (Record) ...
The Aurora Be Confused (Beacon News).
The Portland Boregonian (Oregonian).
The San Jose Murky News (Mercury News).
Santa Monica Evening Outrage (Outlook).
San Francisco Comical (Chronicle).
Halifax Chronically Horrid (Chronicle-Herald).
Santa Barbara News-Suppress (News-Press).
San Antonio Excuse-for-News (Express-News).
Dallas Morning Snooze (News).
Austin American Real Estatesman (American-Statesman;
the pejorative reflects the Sun Belt
migration that has sent Texas' housing market
into a boom).
Pilfered Daily News (Milford, Mass., Daily News,
which may no longer deserve its reputation for
copying stories from other papers).
Worcester Dullagram (Telegram).
Aviation Leak and Space Mythology (Aviation
Week and Space Technology: it isn't good at
guarding secrets).
The Orillia Racket and Crimes (Packet and Times).
Toronto Sin (Sun).
Cornwall Standard Freeloader (Standard-Freeholder).
Kingston Substandard (Whig-Standard).
Owen Sound Stun Crimes (Sun Times).
Bloomington Horrible-Terrible (Herald-Telephone,
an arcane name from a time when
Indiana was impressed by telephones. It is now
the Herald-Times. Old timers recall when a
young reporter named Cheryl Magazine
worked there and they could listen to her
calling people and saying, Hello, this is Cheryl
Magazine at the Herald-Telephone ... no, the
newspaper, not the phone company ... Magazine
... no, it's not a magazine, it's a newspaper.
I'm Magazine ... hello? Hello?).
Chattanooga News-free Press. The masthead says
News-Free Press.
Arizona Repulsive (Republic).
Toronto Grope and Flail (Globe and Mail).
Green Bay Press-Gannett (Press-Gazette; it is one
of the Gannett chain).
Laramie Daily Boomerag (Boomerang, said to be
named after the first publisher's mule, but
some Wyoming news veterans say it's because
when the newsboy tossed copies onto the
reader's porches, the readers threw it back).
Carbondale Southern Illusion (Illioisan).
Bryan-College Station Buzzard (Eagle).
The Baltimore Stun (Sun).
Louisville Curious Jumble (Courier-Journal).
The Toledo Bland (Blade).
Bend Bullshit (Bulletin; Oregonians, in the American
westerners' tradition, are frank).
West Chester Lack of News (West Chester, Pa.,
Local News).
Huntington Herald Disgrace (Herald Dispatch).
Charleston Daily Snail (Daily Mail).
South Bay Brays (Breeze).
Bangor Daily Snooze (News).
Portland Pressed Herring (Press Herald).
San Diego Onion (Union).
Albuquerque Urinal (Journal).
Charlotte Disturber (Observer).
Busy Week (Business Week).
The Christiansburg News Mess (News Press).
Redding Wretched Flashlight (Record Searchlight).
Las Vegas Son (Sun, a dynastic ownership situation).
Saskatoon Star Kleenex (Star Phoenix).
Houston Pest (Post).
Orlando Slantinel (Sentinel).
The Euphoria Gazelle (Emporia Gazette, but its
Kansas staff in the flower-child era of the 1960s
settled on something more melodious).
Gay Bimbos (Bay Windows, a Massachusetts
newspaper serving homosexual readers).
Fitchburg-Leominster Emptyprize (Enterprise).
Useless News & World Distort (U.S. News &
World Report).
Chesterton Ribtoon (Tribune).
Fort Wayne News Senile (Sentinel).
Charlottesville Regress (Progress).
Kent Wretched Courier (Record Courier).
Raleigh News Gets Absurder (News & Observer).
Rochester Demagogue & Comical (Democrat &
Chronicle).
Columbus Distort (Dispatch).
Dover-New Philadelphia Times-Distorter (Times-Reporter).
Springfield Nuisance (News-Sun).
Columbia Manurian (Missourian).
Manassas Messy Journal (Journal Messenger).
Omaha Weird Harold (World Herald).
Waco Tribulation-Herald (Tribune-Herald).
Escondido Times-Adequate (Times-Advocate).
Santa Rosa Depressed Democrat (Press Democrat).
The Boston Glob (Globe).
Boston Hairball (Herald, but a newspaper given
to coughing up scandal and sin).
The New York Crimes (Times, most Timeses are
Slimeses, but important people at the Times
were delighted when Reagan administration
arms merchant Oliver North called it the
Crimes, so it stuck).
Philadelphia Inky (Inquirer, as opposed to the
Cincinnati Inky, or Enquirer).
Cincinnati Conspirer (Enquirer, when it's not
Inky).
Newsdaze (Newsday).
Fort Worth Startlegram (Star-Telegram).
Manhattan Turkey (Eagle).
The Canton Suppository (Repository).
Placerville Mountain Democrap (Democrat).
The Stars and Gripes (Stars and Stripes).
The New Orleans Times-Picka-You-Nose (Times-Picayune).
St. Louis Post-Disgrace (Post-Dispatch).
Miami Horrid (Herald).
Sioux Falls Argus Liar (Argus Leader).
Charlotte Disturber (Observer).
New Bedford Substandard-Times (Standard-Times).
Boulder Daily Chimera (Camera).
New Haven Rag (Register).
Palm Springs Desperate Sun (Desert Sun).
McPaper (USA Today; some purists consider it
somewhat overdesigned, overmarketed, and
occasionally arch).
PULL TO RIGHT WHEN FLASHING [Road sign on highway
outside Detroit. Submitted by ,
who reports that no light is visible in the vicinity of the sign.]
Due to the fact that the patient is an extremist and is
responding poorly to fluids, the patient will be taken immediately
to the operating room where exploratory laparotomy
will be done. [From a hospital chart
review. Submitted by pathologist.]
Endearment Elucidation, or Love By Any Other Name
A news item published in a British national
newspaper in February, 1995, gave details of a
ban applied to a northern England city council's
telephonists working in the environmental services
department by a senior director, stating the telephonists
should no longer add the endearment luv
while greeting a caller. The city's first citizen, the
Lord Mayor, a woman, was forthright in her condemnation
of the ban as petty. She said the word
would stay firmly in her vocabulary and added: I
use the word all the time. When I come into the
Civic Hall I say Good morning, luv to whomever I
meet, from the cleaning ladies to officials. To ban
luv would be like stopping the Geordies using the
term pet and Nottingham folk addressing people as
duck. My dad was a Yorkshire miner and he addressed
folk as old luv whether they were young or
old. Its a term of endearment and a word we have
used for years.
This situation brings to public notice what
words are used as terms of endearment in direct address
between the sexes, more so a man to a woman.
Some examples, however, are not quite what they
seem. It is more than likely that at least some of the
male humans using them are innocently unaware of
the true meaning of a word or words they perhaps
use daily. The word or words so used may not suit
the person being addressed, in character or anatomical
description, but, fortunately, the person thus
spoken to may also be equally unaware.
Sweetheart was two words, known to Chaucer in
Troylus (1374), as swete herte and in general can
now logically be accurate in statements: Yes, I
know sweetheart , when applied to a person with
whom one is in love, be she girl friend or wife or a
female who by her actions and looks sweetens the
affection in a man's heart. However, a previous
meaning is given in Grove's Dictionary of the Vulgar
Tongue (1796): sweet heart, a girl's lover or a
man's mistress. Not quite the same thing, the OED
takes this further as one who is loved illicitly, a
paramour. Few married sweethearts will consider
they are loved illicitly as a paramour or mistress!
Sweetie or sweety is a short corruption of sweetheart,
being in this sense a lovable person, a sweetie, or a
willing person in certain situations: Be a sweetie
and fetch me the mail. Sweet was also used as dear,
Yes, my sweet? I will do so, my sweet. That other
sweet commodity, sugar, got itself associated with
endearments for women with combinations, as sugar
baby, sugar babe, sugar pie.
Baby is still often used in endearing address, as
slang chiefly in the US, for a young woman or girl
friend, as in (sugar) baby, babe .
Honey fits here into an endearment classification,
perhaps also used more in North America,
where the British equivalent is darling. Yes, I
agree, honey” Yes, I agree, darling . Formerly, it
was chiefly Irish and Scandinavian, used in the form
of hinnie, hinney , but back in 1386, Chaucer, in The
Miller's Tale wrote of Alisoun, his honey deare.
As with sugar there are also honey-baby, honey
bunch, honey bun.
Dear is very, very common in use and overheard
daily in many street, supermarket, or shopping center
conversations. It was formerly applied to a
woman who had an endearing personality, who was
beloved, esteemed, a person on whom to lavish affection,
the man's cherished dear. But do they always
mean this when a man uses it now? Or is it, as
seems to be, often said Yes, dear. No, dear, to
obtain uncontradictory agreement with the partner?
Now, as dear, darling is in common use by anybody
for anyone: Yes, I know, darling, it is such a
bore. It is also used in the same context as sweetie:
Be a darling and fetch me the mail. A darling was
a young, lovable, charming, usually young, woman
who was admired and desired, prized among eligible
men because the woman was (supposedly) of good
morals, thus chaste and a good catch to woo and
win as a wife. Dearing and dearling are both forms
of darling, but much less often heard nowadays.
Popsy, popsie, popsy-wopsy may sound North
American in origin because of their use in radio and
music-hall songs, but they are much older than that.
Popsies date back to 1862 as an endearing designation:
Popsy have you seen my toothbrush? and,
according to the OED is a kind of running extension
of pop , an endearing appellation for a girl
friend, woman, a casual female acquaintance.
Pop, have you seen my toothbrush does not have
the same endearment to it somehow, possibly because
of its use as a term of address for father or an
old man. It is also possible they are a corruption of
poppet, poppit, poppette, poopet, from the French
poupette doll, an endearment still used though ancient,
poppet being the name for a pretty child or
a dainty young woman. Just a minute, poppet, and I
will mend it. In 1386, Chaucer, in Sir Thopas,
states: This were a popet .... For any womman
smal and fayre of face.
Yes, my precious is a term of endearment occasionally
used, precious being from the Old French
precios, precieus valuable, having a high price and a
beloved person held very dear. When applied to a
woman could this be what the Bible means when it
states: A good woman is above rubies?
As a term of endearment girlie and girly are in
the same category as popsy: Girlie, have you seen
my toothbrush? in the sense of being less often
heard, although it goes back to the 19th century. A
reference to it is in a book, The Artist and Craftsman
(1860), which has a mysterious comment: The little
half clad girlies ran off to hide themselves. With
tongue in cheek I am tempted to suggest this may be
the origin of the name for certain publications that
feature half-clad and nude young women and known
now as girlie magazines.
The Geordies do use pet as an endearment for
wife or girl friend: I won't forget, pet, also in
more general terms in conversing with people of all
ages. Pet is a name for a woman treated with special
kindness, indulged as a favorite companion. Samuel
Johnson possibly had something similar in mind for
his Dictionary (1755), when he classified peat , a
darling, a little fondling, a dear plaything.
Duck, as in Nottinghamshire and elsewhere in
Britain, seems an odd word to use as an expression of
affection. However, it has been around a long time,
too. In 1590 Shakespeare used it in his A Midsummer
Night's Dream, v. i 282: O dainty ducke, a
deere. Duck, sometimes ducks, tended to be used
by older men to a girl friend or wife, sometimes a
woman of casual acquaintance, such as a barmaid or
waitress. Duckie, duckey, ducky is a diminutive of
duck. Today it is used occasionally in affected, familiar
speech: Yes, I know, duckie, exactly how you
felt, here being in place of dear or darling . A
sweet, pretty affectionate girl or young woman was
said to be duckie.
So we come back to where we started, with luv
and love. It has had a varied history. Originally a
love was only a widow, the love of the dead husband.
Old English church burial records often contain entries
as paid to John Stokeley's love two pence. A
later use was for an attractive, lovely woman, then in
another context as a paramour, from the Old French
par amour by love, a woman of passion. Then it
came into general use, as it still is, for a beloved
person, in particular a sweetheart, but also as a term
of endearing address to a casual acquaintance, as the
lady Lord Mayor of the northern city.
There are, of course, many words used by men
in actual reference to women, such as bird, dolly ,
doll, tart, boot, plum, strumpet, jade, quean, and so
on. Being a gentleman I wouldn't think or dare to
explain them here.
Crossing
Crossing language boundaries is not uncommon
in literature, the performing arts, or for that
matter in everyday speech. There is more than one
way of doing it. The comedian Sid Caesar used to
utter gibberish that sounded like Japanese or German
without meaning anything in any language. Ernest
Hemingway in such books as For Whom the Bell
Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea wrote some
dialogue in language that was phonetically English
but suggests Spanish by its simpler, more formal
grammar.
More common, however, is the insertion into a
work in one language the words, phrases, or passages
from another language. In literature this kind of inclusion,
besides having snob value for writer and
reader or audience, lends authenticity. These are the
very words; e.g., Eli, Eli, lama sabach thani? (Matthew
27.46). Shakespeare included some dialogue in
French in Henry V, Act III, Scene V:
KATHE. Alice, tu as este en Angleterre, et tu bien
parlas le Langage.
ALICE. En peu Madame.
KATHE. Ie te prie m ensigniez, il faut que ie apprend
a parlen: comient appelle vous le main en
Anglois?
(The errors in this French dialogue as it appears in
the First Folio, some or all of which may be typos,
have been edited out of subsequent editions, such as
The Annotated Shakespeare, edited by A.L. Rowse.)
Tolstoi introduced whole pages of impeccable
French into the Russian text of War and Peace , as did
Goytisolo, for a more recent example, into his Señas
de Identidad . French, perhaps because it is a language
of prestige, seems to be transplanted more
carefully than other modern languages. Ramón J.
Sender has quotations in three languages on the
frontispiece of his novel La Tesis de Nancy:
Es tarea de discretos hacer reír.
Cervantes
Je me presse de rire de tout, de peur d'être
obligé d'en pleurer.
Beaumarchais
(So far, so good; but:)
Does thou laugh to see how fools are vexed?
T. Dekker
English generally fares rather poorly in Spanish
texts, and vice versa.
Ezra Pound, for all his provincial pedantry, in
his Canto LXXXI as printed on p. 526 of The New
Oxford Book of American Verse, writes didactically:
Hay aquí mucho catolicismo [pronounced
catolithismo] y muy poco reliHion
The o in reliHion ought to carry a written accent, as
does the i of aquí , and poco ought to be poca.
As far as I know, the most recent example of
extensive switching to Spanish--or for that matter
to any foreign language--in an English-language
text is to be found in the two already published
books of Cormac McCarthy's much-acclaimed Border
Trilogy, All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing,
especially the latter. McCarthy excels in the laconic,
colloquial dialogue of his Texas and New Mexico
cowboys, and the untranslated lingo of his Mexican
characters generally rings true as well. He does
occasionally err, though, and one cannot help wondering
what arrogance keeps an author like Sender
or McCarthy from having his text proofread by a
competent native speaker. First let us scan the first
novel of the trilogy, All the Pretty Horses.
Cuánto, said John Grady.
Para todo? [p. 51]
Por todo? is correct and usual. Since almost any
grammatical rule that can be broken in any language
is sometimes broken, I cannot say that McCarthy has
never heard a Mexican say Para todo, meaning for
the whole [purchase]? But I tested the two phrases
on a New Mexico Hispanic of about the same type as
the clerk in the book and confirmed that por , not
para , is not only the correct word but also the usual
word in Spanish meaning for in the sense of in payment
of.
Soy comandante de las yegunas ... yo y yo
sólo. Sin la caridad de estas manos no tengas
nada. [p. 128]
I see no reason to use the present subjunctive ( tengas )
here. No tendrías or possibly even no tuvieras
sounds more grammatical and more likely. Here
McCarthy spells comandante right, but on pages 208
and 228 his English misleads him into misspelling
the Spanish word with two m's .
Digame, he said. Cuál es lo peor. Que soy
pobre o que soy americano.
The vaquero shook his head. Una llave de oro
abre cualquier puerta, he said.
Tienes razón, said John Grady. [p. 147]
Here and elsewhere in the two novels we find a
shuttling between familiar and formal verb forms
( Digame/Tienes ) that certainly happens in Spanish,
as it did in Elizabethan English as evidenced in King
Henry IV, Part II, Act II, Scene IV:
Dol. Captain! thou abominable damned cheater,
art thou not ashamed to be called captain! An
captains were of my mind, they would truncheon
you out, for taking their names upon you before
you have earned them. You a captain!
And I once heard a Segovian graduate of Salamanca
University say Venga to a small, timid dog. Still, in
McCarthy's Mexican dialogue he shuttles between
familiar and formal verb forms with an abandon that
I find a bit excessive. There are other examples of
this inconsistency on pages 202 and 259 in the first
novel.
On page 151 and on pages 174 and 175:
ciénaga, the Iberian form of the noun appears instead
of the Mexican form, ciénega . Also, the place
name that McCarthy has as Cuatro Ciénagas appears
on the AAA map of Mexico as Cuatrocienegas.
Quién és usted? [p. 205]
The written accent on the verb is wrong here. As we
shall see, McCarthy gets quite wild with his accents
in the more extensive Spanish of his second novel.
Gracias.
De nada. [p. 222]
I have heard Mexicans say de nada (you're welcome),
but por nada is particularly Mexican. I have
had Spaniards identify my Spanish as of the Mexican
variety, more or less, because of my saying por nada ,
the more typical expression in Mexico.
Cúal caballo? [p. 262]
Now, here is an expression where McCarthy is at
odds with grammar-book usage, which would prescribe
Qué caballo? , but right for popular Mexican
usage.
In The Crossing McCarthy hits his stride in dialogue
in colloquial Mexican Spanish and does himself
proud. Some readers might think him a bit presumptuous.
I am not sure that his Spanish here, any
more than in the first novel, is faulty at all, except
for incorrect written accents, in the sense that Mexicans
would never say what he has them saying.
Sometimes, as noted above, his Spanish dialogue in
being technically ungrammatical faithfully reflects
popular usage, as is the case with his English dialogue.
For instance Estoy regresándole a mi país
[p. 412]. The Pequeño Larousse Ilustrado dictionary
brands this transitive use of the verb regresar as a
barbarismo . But McCarthy's characters are barbaric--sometimes
nobly so--if nothing else, and
regresar is exactly right here. And speaking of popular
expressions, on page 275 we find blanquillos , the
euphemism for eggs that has been the subject of
three recent EPISTOLAE in VERBATIM.
On pages 43 and 414 appears the more common
Mexican expression por nada instead of de nada .
On pages 44 and 47: matríz. There should be
no written accent here. McCarthy, who seems to be
contemptuous of punctuation in any language,
rarely writes accents where they are not needed but
often omits them where they are, e.g., mia [pp. 90,
117]; borrachon [p. 227]; mascara [p. 229]; perdida
[p. 283]; asi [p. 284]; haran [pt. 290]; and que
[p. 318].
Tan como preguntar lo que saben las piedras.
[p. 45]
I think that the substantive tanto ought to be here
instead of the adverbial tan .
Todos que vengas alrededor. [p. 88]
To agree with its subject the verb should be vengan .
The second-person singular form is probably a typographic
error.
Es lejos? [p. 102]
I think that está for location should be here, as it is in
a similar context on page 236.
No le molesta. [p. 123]
I cannot say that Mexicans never use the second-person
imperative negatively in real life as here and
on pages 281, 305, and 312. But correctly and popularly,
too, and as on page 306 (No te preocupes) , the
subjunctive is used for a negative imperative in the
second-person singular. Canta y no llores ... the
old song goes.
Tengo miedo es verdad. [p. 138]
Here the subjunctive sea is called for.
Los hombres han salido por Madero? [p. 225]
Is the Madero here the same place as the Madera on
page 404? In any case, if Madero is a place, para or
pa ' should be here instead of por . The leader Madero
died in 1913.
Ya nos hemos encontrado la mujer y el hombre.
[p. 284]
Here, on page 292 (... no podemos ver el buen
Dios ), and on page 297 ( Busca el herido, no ?), both
grammar and custom call for an a before the personal
object of the verb.
Los aspectos de las cosas son engañosas. [p. 290]
Here the adjective fails to agree in gender with the
noun it modifies.
Quizás hay poca de justicia... [p. 293]
Either the de should be omitted or poco instead of
poca should be here.
Que joven tan enforzado. [p. 318]
The adjective here may be a dialect form unknown
to me, but more likely it is a typographical error for
esforzado.
In a way this essay is complimentary. If McCarthy's
Mexican dialogue were not so close to perfection
as it is, one would not be challenged to nitpick
through it but would simply dismiss it as incompetent.
English Arrivals in Hungary
Hungarians have always been fiercely proud of
their language, a non Indo-European island in
a sea of Slavic, Germanic, and Romance tongues. Its
origins are obscure, but we know that it is distantly
related to Finnish and belongs to the Finno-Ugric
group of languages.
Part of the fun for the visitor to Hungary is the
battle to understand anything at all, whether the
words are spoken or written. I remember how
delighted I was, on my first visit to Budapest some
years ago, when I spotted the word szendvics on the
menu of a small restaurant. Yes, it meant sandwich
and was at least one word I could recognize. Mind
you, it was difficult to find a restaurant in the first
place, the word for restaurant being étterem in
Hungarian.
Until recently, the Hungarians accepted foreign
words only grudgingly, preferring to create new
ones of their own. At one time they even invented a
Hungarian word for telephone: távbeszélö (literally,
distance talker; a calque of German Fernsprecher).
But, although this word can be found in
the dictionary, it is hardly ever heard. Telefon is the
more popular term and the one which, fortunately
for the tourist, can be seen on every kiosk.
Since the fall of the Berlin wall and all that came
after, there has been an unstoppable flood of English
words pouring into Hungary. It is no surprise to
find that the new language of computers has been
fully integrated into Hungarian: words like hardver
and softver are commonplace. But over the last few
years a stream of everyday English words has
stormed through the language barrier. This is not
only because the country is now bombarded with
English language TV programs on various European
channels, but also because western pop culture has
taken such a strong hold among the young.
A random selection of English loanwords--with
no Hungarian translation given--taken from recent
newspapers, magazines, and conversations, includes
the following:
mani money; kes cash; menedzser manager;
deler dealer; biznisz business; marketing; lizing
leasing; frencsajz franchise; holding; diszkont
discount
bébi szitter; drink; heppening; hostess; New Age;
jogging; dizajn design; toples; jackpot; horror;
tinedzer teenager; fitness club
And on Budapest shop fronts you can now see
strange szlogans displayed in English: Non-Stop
open 24 hours; and the mysterious Goods Made
in World
It will be interesting to see how many of these
words, reflecting current preoccupations in Hungary,
will be accepted permanently. I think most of
them will, and I, for one, regret this. Something of
the uniqueness of the Hungarian language will be
lost for ever. Besides, what challenge will there be
for the enterprising tourist?
The sound of snoring is due to vibration of the soft
palate and the vulva at the back of the throat. [From the
Evening Times Globe of St. John, N.B., .
Submitted by ]
Bespeaking a Muse or What?
Surely a lot of the joy of learning a new language
lies in observing how it expresses everyday objects
and operations. (This does not apply to British
pupils forced to learn French by rote in mediocre
schools and vice versa, nor to Asians learning English
in the same way, for that matter.) This is particularly
true for me of a language like Thai, which is
geographically and grammatically half a world away
from my mother tongue, English, such that many
Thai locutions give pause and delight.
In Insight Guides' Thailand one reads:
Many common Thai words when translated bespeak
a muse or a minstrel. Some examples:
spirit's clothes = butterfly; slow forest = cemetery;
sky cries out = thunder; sky fire = electricity;
walking stomach = diarrhoea; rice scarce and
fruit dear = famine.
Hyperbole or not? Some may see the prosaic
where others see the poetic. I tend towards the latter.
And when the Thai-language wrestles with new
words for alien imports like ice hard water or parachute
umbrella for supporting life, some might be
amused at how downright literal Thai can be or impressed
at how admirably sensible it so often is.
In the following list, the Thai words are glossed
literally, then are given their English equivalents. A
little imagination may be all that is required in the
minstrelly mode to discern the poetic connection.
[N.B.: Thai is very economical with articles, prepostions,
and conjunctions so I have added these where
necessary for the sake of clarity. Lit. = literally;
Euph. = euphemism; Sl. = slang; Obs. = obsolete]
see daeng leuat nok, Lit. bird's-blood red:
crimson
see leuat moo, Lit. pig's-blood color: scarlet
see chompoo, Lit. rose-apple color: pink
see fah, Lit. sky color: light blue
see nam tarn, Lit. palm-sugar color: brown (Before
white sugar arrived from the West, Thais
refined sugar from the tarn tree: nam tarn water
of the tarn tree refers to sugar, and, the
Thai word for brown refers to the color of the
water of the tarn tree)
.bqe
see kee mah, Lit. horse-shit color: dark green
fuk tong, Lit. squashed gold: pumpkin
mare nam, Lit. mother of water: river
mare lek, Lit. mother of iron: magnet
mare bahn, Lit. mother of a house: housewife
mare [pore] kar, Lit. mother [or father] of trade:
street vendor
ying rap chai, Lit. woman who is the recipient of
use: maid
look peun, Lit. child of a gun: bullet
look fai, Lit. child of fire: spark
more doo, Lit. doctor who can see: fortuneteller
yah see fan, Lit. medicine for rubbing the teeth:
toothpaste
yah soop, Lit. sucking medicine: tobacco
yah mah, (Sl.) Lit. horse medicine: amphetamines
(Presumably because they give one the
strength and endurance of a horse.)
noey keng, Lit. hard butter: cheese
malaeng wan, Lit. day insect: fly (They are
seen only in the daytime)
malaeng mum, Lit. corner insect: spider
malaeng sahb, Lit. foul-smelling insect: cockroach
(After being crushed.)
pla meuk, Lit. ink fish: squid
kreuang len jarn siang, (Obs.), Lit. machine for
playing a sound plate: record player (Now hifi
or sataireo is used.)
kreuang yep kradart, (Obs.), Lit. machine for
sewing paper: stapler (Mak, from the Japanese
company MAX is now used. The Japanese
for stapler is Hotchkiss, after the American
maker.)
rok poo ying, Lit. women's disease: syphilis
(Formerly, syphilis was transmitted through
brothels, where it was spontaneously generated.
This has been replaced by sifilit.)
nam nom, Lit. water of the breast: milk
hua nom, Lit. head of the breast: nipple
hua mare meua, Lit. head mother of the hand:
thumb
nam man, Lit. oily water: gasoline
nam man moo, Lit. oily water of the pig: lard
seua nam man, Lit. oil mat: linoleum
gang geng nai, Lit. inner trousers: underpants
gang geng ling, (Sl.), Lit. monkey trousers: underpants
(Formerly, traveling shows featured
monkeys dressed in diapers/nappies.)
seua nork, Lit. outer shirt: jacket
seua nao, Lit. cold shirt: sweater, pullover,
jumper
seua kloom, Lit. enveloping shirt: overcoat
seua yok song, Lit. shirt for raising or supporting
the figure: brassiere (Now blah, from bra, is
almost universal.)
arkart sia, Lit. broken air: air pollution
look kit, Lit. thinking balls; abacus
dao nee sin, Lit. master of debt: creditor
look nee sin, Lit. child of debt: debtor
ngern cheua, Lit. money believed in: credit
ngern sot, Lit. fresh money: cash
nam tarng, Lit. stranded water: dew
fah poh, Lit. flash of the sky: lighting
reva bai, Lit. boat with a leaf: sailboat
tung yahng arnamai, Lit. (Euph.), Lit. hygienic
rubber bag: condom
pah arnamai, (Euph.) Lit. hygienic cloth: sanitary
napkin (Kotek from Kotex was generic for
a time, as was earlier Tam from Tampax; with
so many rival brands available, path arnamai has
been reverted to.)
nang seua dern tahng, Lit. book for walking a
path or route: passport
dtit gap, (conjunction), Lit. stuck with: next to
ngern sin bon, (Euph.), Lit. money for increasing
wealth: bribe
Classic Wit
At a time when dumb one-liners and tasteless
jokes can be tossed off on TV and elsewhere as
examples of wit without causing anyone to cringe,
perhaps the moment has arrived to make some distinctions
and straighten out the nomenclature among
those terms that fall under the umbrella of eliciting
laughter.
We might start with the criteria for classic wit ,
the highest form of humor, that is set up by Walter
Nash in the Oxford Companion to the English Language .
According to Nash, true wit must meet the
following standards: (1) The practitioner must have
a quick mind, (2) The witticism must be stated
within a very tight framework, and (3) It is characterized
by four common rhetorical devices: parallelism,
antithesis, definition, and quasi-philosophical
propositions, an example being Woody Allen's line,
Not only is God dead, but try getting a plumber on
Sunday. One might add that classic wit is usually
motivated by malice, which must be stated artfully,
and the malice is frequently at someone else's expense.
To this, I would attach my own definition: To
qualify as wit, a retort must be no more than five
words.
Clearly, then, what sets wit apart from humor is
its cerebral quality and its verbal conciseness. Other
terms that elicit laughter are lower on the pecking
order because, although they may display quick
thinking, they may lack the tight framework. Others
pass the conciseness test but may be too contrived.
Gentle or kindly humor fails the test for obvious
reasons.
Scores of lines that meet these criteria come to
mind. My favorite is a retort by former college football
coach, Duffy Dougherty, to a remark that football
is a contact sport. Duffy cracked, Dancing is
a contact sport. Football is a collision sport. This
strikes me as remarkable because, although Dougherty
was not a literary person, he managed to combine
an ironic analogy and parallelism to come up
with a line that could be called pure wit.
Another broad term under the eliciting laughter
premise is joke . In a way a joke, in its structure,
is the antithesis of a witticism in that is usually
placed within a narrative framework and withholds
any response until the punch line is reached. In this
sense, timing is extremely important. We know that
if any joke begins with A guy walks into a bar with
an iguana on a leash, sits down, and orders a zombie
..., we may be in for a long detailed narrative that
may or may not be funny.
Two terms that come close to being classic wit
are quip and wisecrack , both of them Americanisms.
These slangy expressions meet Nash's standard of
conciseness in that they are pointed come-backs to a
situation or a remark. However, they fall short in
that their tone is sarcastic rather than malicious.
Dorothy Parker once noted that Wit has truth in it;
wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words. Although
the quip and the wisecrack are usually quite
shallow, George S. Kaufman, a member of the Algonquin
Round Table, managed to turn the wisecrack
into an art form. At one point he told Groucho
Marx that a line he was supposed to deliver in a
movie which Kaufman had scripted was not funny.
Groucho, urging patience, replied, Remember,
they laughed at Fulton when he invented the steamboat.
To which Kaufman cracked, Not at matinées.
Even farther down in the pecking order is the
term, gag. Again, some distinctions are called for. In
American theater parlance, the term gag is used frequently
to differentiate funny lines in a movie
script or stage comedy from mere jokes that are exchanged
indiscriminately in everyday life. Neil Simon,
the chief practitioner of the theatrical gag, has
given this form of humor a new respect, if only because
of its frequency in his comedies. In fact,
punchy ripostes are sprinkled so heavily throughout
Simon's comedies that people have been led to believe
that he writes the gags first, then fleshes out
the rest of the play around them. All this has placed
a monkey on Simon's back. He would like to be considered
a wit, perhaps the Samuel Johnson of American
letters, but he will never achieve such eminence
so long as he churns out gags, assembly-line fashion.
Two terms, now considered somewhat archaic,
that fit into the category of eliciting laughter are
jest and sally . Most people associate jest with Shakespeare's
clowns and that over-quoted line from Romeo
and Juliet , He jests at scars that never felt a
wound. In current American usage, the term resembles
what we call kidding: that is, making fun
of someone or some thing in a frivolous manner,
such as in the obligatory banter at roasts of famous
people. What separates a jest from a witticism
is its lack of malice. A jest is never uttered at someone
else's expense.
A sally is defined in the American Heritage Dictionary
as a sudden quick witticism. In other
words, it is a line that is uttered off the top of one's
head and, therefore, may or may not be funny.
In the last few years, the expression one-liner
has developed into an all-purpose usage. It seems to
be an outgrowth of sound bite , a phenomenon of
television communication in which politicians and
pundits are required to reduce complex ideas to one
concise sentence. For example, Ross Perot expressed
his disapproval of NAFTA and GATT by saying
that, relative to jobs in this country, these trade
agreements would create a giant sucking sound.
In a political context, You're just rearranging the
deck chairs on the Titanic is another sound bite
that now seems firmly established in the language.
While the leap from a sound bite to a witticism appears
to be easy to manage, few politicians have
been inclined to take the risk and be labeled as a
wise-guy or a smart-ass .
To conclude, we might note that there is no
shortage of Americans who have an urge to say
something funny. What is missing is a standard for
judging funniness. Perhaps these distinctions I
have made will help in that direction.
No Nicknames in the Valleys
Jones The Meat, Dai Scab and Evans Above should
be preserved for posterity, says a leading sociologist.
Traditional Welsh nicknames, on the decline
with population changes and the break-up of communities
once dominated by the coal industry, need
to be collected before they are lost forever, says
Christie Davies, Professor of Sociology at Reading
University. Increased migration, with Welsh people
moving out and English people moving in, has
played a large part in the demise of the nicknames
which were once in widespread use and which many
regard as a unique art form.
Humorous nicknames such as Dai Bungalow for
a man with little upstairs mentally, Dai Bolical, the
miner who never washed, and Evans Above, the undertaker,
are the most savoured examples. Others
stem from events or habits, like Dai Scab, whose
grandfather worked during a strike 70 years ago and
Amen Jones, who made the loudest responses in
church.
Traditional nicknames in England like Dusty
Miller and Chalky White tended to disappear some
time ago, and it is simply happening later in Wales,
said Prof Davies. There is not the need for them
that there was. I would very much like to see them
recorded.
The nicknames developed from the need to distinguish
between people in the same village with the
same name. It was not unknown for a single community,
for instance, to have 10 men called David
Jones, largely as a result of the limited choice of surnames,
Jones, Williams and Evans, coupled with a
passion for Biblical Christian names, David, John
and Thomas.
As a result of this need to distinguish, some
very humorous names developed. There was one
man who had only two front teeth in the middle and
was known as Dai Central Eating. Another man was
one of those people who keep repeating the same
word in almost every sentence and he as known as
Evans Absolutely, said Professor Davies. In many
of the valley communities the nicknames, usually reserved
for men rather than women, arose from their
job, or an unfortunate incident, or a physical or
speech defect.
Robin Gwyndaf, assistant keeper at the Welsh
Folk Museum, said: In the old coal mining communities
you had to distinguish between the David
Joneses. They were characters and they did not
mind being called nicknames; it added colour to life.
Areas where people have moved away or commute
to work outside the community are the most likely
to be affected.
John Walter Jones, chief executive of the Welsh
Language Board, says that widened horizons may
also be to blame: The world has widened and some
of the things that used to be local have been lost in
that widening process.
Gus Jones, a retired lecturer in Cardiff who has
studied the nicknames, said: They are on the decline.
These days people jump into their cars, go to
work out of the community and you don't have this
close-knit society which breeds these nicknames.
He added: We have quite a few examples of humorous
names. There was, for instance, a miner in
the Swansea valley who 30 years ago started playing
golf, which was something unheard of. He was ever
after known as Dai Swank. There was also a fashion
that men with common surnames were known by
their mothers' names. There was a mine manager,
David Evans, who was known as Dai Hannah. One
day he was working underground and ordered the
miners to replace all the ventilation doors. After
that he was known as Dai Hannah Dors.
An example that I particularly like is a man
who got married during the Thirties recession and
wore daps, or plimsolls, during the ceremony. He
has always been known as Dai Quiet Wedding.
©Copyright 1994. The Sunday Independent , 4 December 1994.
Reprinted by permission.
William Tyndale: A Biography
In his immensely popular A Short History of the
English People (1874), John Richard Green described
the profound moral and cultural change that
transformed the country in the late 16th and early
17th centuries. England became the people of a
book, he wrote, and that book was the Bible.
Although he does not specify, it seems likely Green
means the 1611 Authorized (or King James) Version,
for he goes on: As a mere literary monument, the
English version of the Bible remains the noblest example
of the English tongue, while its perpetual use
made it from the instant of its appearance the standard
of our language.
Green was neither the first nor last to sing hosannas
to the AV, and most extollers have especially
praised the awesome consistency of its excellence,
considering it was the work of 47 scholars and divers
divines. Astonishment is still voiced that the dignitaries
... spoke so often with one voice, says Bible
scholar David Daniell, professor emeritus of the University
of London. And the reason, Daniell quickly
adds, is that it was virtually one voice: that of William
Tyndale, one of the most influential--and certainly
one of the least known--writers in English history.
Unsung Tyndale certainly is. According to a chronology
of significant literary works, only one important
book was published in the 1520s, John Skelton's The
Garlande of Laurell , in which the author allegorically
enthrones himself among the great poets of the
world. But in 1526, smuggled copies of Tyndale's
heretical translation of the New Testament began
appearing in England, to the great consternation of
the establishment, including Henry VIII, Cardinal
Wolsey, and Sir Thomas More, and to the lasting
glory of the English language.
To those lucky and adventurous citizens who got
their hands on copies before they were seized and
burned (the books, that is, but also sometimes the
citizens), this was a Bible with a belt. It was lively
and colloquial, meaningful and memorable. But most
of all, it was in plain but powerful English. Until this
point, the only Bible that anyone knew was the Vulgate
Latin version translated by St. Jerome a millennium
before. John Wycliffe had rendered this in English
in 1382, but that was pre-printing press, and
hand copies of this stilted, verbatim Lollard construction
were scarce.
But here, in the spring of 1526, was a book that
rang out the scriptures as sounding brass. Here
was gospel that cut to the chase: Ask, and it shall be
given you; seek and ye shall find; filthy lucre;
Eat, drink and be merry; salt of the earth; signs
of the times; a law unto themselves. In the beginning
came five years later, when Tyndale's similarly
contraband Pentateuch started arriving from Europe.
In this, too, the stunning simplicity of Tyndale's
words caught the public's imagination.
If England became the people of a book and that
book was the Bible, then that Bible was for the most
part Tyndale's--a claim argued persuasively and passionately
by David Daniell in William Tyndale: A Biography ,
published in the fall of 1994, the quincentenary
of the translator's birth. Daniell warmed up to
the task by publishing modern-spelling versions of
Tyndale's New Testament and Pentateuch, also produced
by Yale University Press, in 1989 and 1992.
Daniell's book, the first serious biography since J.F.
Mozley's William Tyndale in 1937, travels familiar
paths. But it is like cruising a smoothly paved freeway
in a Mercedes, as opposed to jolting down a
country lane in a Model-A Ford. The same can be
said of Tyndale's poetic prose. In the Vulgate, Genesis
1:3 says: Dixitque Deus: Fiat lux! et facta est
lux. Wycliffe's painfully literal first edition has this:
And God said, Be made light; and made is light.
Compare that to Tyndale's enduring rendition: Then
God said: Let there be light and there was light.
Tyndale was born in Gloucestershire and attended
Oxford and Cambridge, where the spirit of
the recently departed Erasmus still glowed. He became
a priest, but his reformist zeal soon earned him
enmity in high places. He believed religion was atrophying
under the deadly dogmatism of the Roman
church. What proved even more dangerous to his
health was his frequently and loudly aired opinion
that the truth lay in the scripture, not in the pope.
The only way to regenerate a flagging faith was to
allow people to read The Word in their own language.
This could not safely be done in England--
nor, in the end, even in Europe, in spite of its more
advanced reform, mainly under the influence of Luther.
Tyndale had finished the Book of Jonah, on his
way to completing the Old Testament, when he was
betrayed, arrested, and convicted of heresy. On Oct.
6, 1536, he was strangled at the stake, and his body
burnt. His last words were, Lord, open the King of
England's eyes. Shortly afterward, Henry VIII,
whether in answer to that prayer or because of his
own marriage-related difficulties with Rome, made
himself head of the English church. One of his first
acts was to commission an English-language Bible. It,
and all its successors, bore the unmistakable imprint
of Tyndale.
What distinguished Tyndale's work from earlier
English efforts was that he translated the New Testament
straight from its native Greek and his Pentateuch
from Hebrew, without the distorting filter of
Jerome's Latin. Aside from setting down dozens of
enduring clichés. Tyndale wrote in a timeless vernacular,
not all of it echoed in the AV. When Noah's
survivors decide to climb to heaven, the AV tells it in
this archaic, Elizabethan way: And they said to one
another, Go to, let us build a city and a tower. In
Tyndale's version, the builders of Babel, with surprising
modernity, say: Come on, let us build a
tower.
Fortunately, and contrary to King James' instructions,
the compilers of the AV did keep a lot of Tyndale,
while taking care not to divulge that source.
Some say up to 80 per cent of that glorious text is
from the pen of the great but uncelebrated translator.
Others say that, of the really glorious parts, it is 100
per cent.
Robertson Cochrane
Toronto
Those readers who have been paying attention
know that I have high praise for the Oxford English
Dictionary Second Edition on Compact Disc , a CD-ROM
edition of the great dictionary that enables users
to search the entire text in a matter of seconds--
depending on the complexity of the search and the
number of results turned up--far less time than it
takes to get up, walk over to the bookshelf, take
down a volume, and find what one is seeking. Now
something called Version 1.1 Upgrade has been
made available for about ¥60 (including shipping),
and I have been using it. To quote from the manual:
There are three principal enhancements: (i) the
addition of a Windows installation program, (ii)
the ability to display and print out using
True Type™ fonts, (iii) the inclusion of an RTF
(Rich Text Format copying facility to MSWord for
Windows 2.0 (or higher) and a DDE (Dynamic
Data Exchange) link to MSWord for Windows 2.0
(or higher).
As I do not have MSWord 2.0 (or higher), the last
item means nothing to me; as the system is already
installed into Windows on my computers, some installation
program must have come with the original,
so I do not know what item (i) refers to. Item (ii) is a
marvelous addition, though, for I have been able, in
the past, to get some data printed out from the file,
but it seemed to work at whim, and I could never be
sure that I would get anything, let alone what I was
after. Now all doubt in that department is at an end:
call up an entry on the screen, invoke the FILE, and a
menu opens to reveal a number of choices that allow
one to print the entire entry or only the part that has
been highlighted. It is extremely rapid, and the entries
are printed out fully styled typographically.
Without going into too much detail about previously
existing programs, suffice it to say that one
has to write a command in the proper query language;
once invoked, that command produces a file
called a results file, which may now be printed
using a menu similar to that for the entries. There
are a few other enhancements, as well, but they are
too detailed for comment here. It is assumed that all
present owners of the OED2e on CD have registered
and, if so, will receive notice of the enhancements.
Those who have not or wish to learn more about the
entire package should write to Oxford University
Press / Walton Street / Oxford OX2 6DP / England.
I must take the opportunity for criticism of a
section of the original manual which has not been
enhanced in the new one: I have always found the
query language instructions quite cryptic; indeed,
when I followed them character for character I often
got no results at all. There are some examples given,
but more examples of each type would prove helpful,
and one hopes that OUP will take heed and issue
even a two-page typewritten addendum. The problem
stems in no small part from the fact that--as
usual--by the time the manual is written, the programmers
are so familiar with the terminology they
have been using while writing the programs that
they lose sight of the users' ignorance. Also, it
would save time if there were a command allowing
the user to Save and Run a query with one command:
at present, after Save, one must call up the
query again from the FILE menu, just another bit of
rigmarole. Perhaps there is a way of doing that, but
the manual is silent on it.
The enormous convenience of the OED2e on
CD is unmatched by any other CD in my files: I use
it almost daily with refreshed delight and wonder.
Laurence Urdang
Through the use of ultrasound, University of Washington
researcher ... studies women who develop high
blood pressure during pregnancy with the assistance of
AHA-WA funds. [From Heartlines , a Washington affiliate
newsletter of the American Heart Association, Vol. VI, No.
2, .]
As a newsletter editor I find myself looking up
acronyms and initialisms. Here are three recent
books I found useful.
Acronym Soup: A Stirring Guide to Our Newest
Word Form
This quirky tome was compiled by a husband
and wife team who used the Los Angeles Times database.
By no means a complete list, it is Hollywood
hip and maybe even funny. The Feldmans suggest
that other acronym books take themselves too seriously.
I gave this book a test. Did it have some acronyms
I came across in my reading? Nothing about
IDRIS [Integrated Data Retrieval System], which I
found in a Treasury Department manual. ATM
[asychronous transfer mode, a term used in the computer
world] was not listed. FTP [Folded, Trimmed,
Packed?], listed on the dust jacket was not explained
inside.
Acronyms, Initialisms & Abbreviations Dictionary
I found this in a Washington library that received
it on June 28, 1994. This study comes out
every year with more than 500,000 listings.
Dictionary of Military Abbreviations
At least three publishers are betting there is
money in acronyms. Some government entities publish
acronym lists. The Federal Election Commission
recently got out a 41-page directory of 709 pactronyms.
Notapac [not listed in Alphabet Soup ] made
it into this official listing. Glenn R. Simpson, a writer
at Washington's Roll Call newspaper and Notapac's
creator, says he chose the name as a clue that his
committee is not a real fund-raising political action
committee [PAC]. He says he started Notapac
mainly to get on mailing lists. I find it amusing that
no one has bumped me off the Federal Election
Commission list, Mr. Simpson told The Wall Street
Journal. I never even set up a bank account. The
third edition of the Federal Election Commission's
directory of pactronyms lists groups active in the political
arena.
Hunter Holmes Alexander
Editor, RTC Spectrum
Cambridge International Dictionary of English
It is important to note that Paul Procter, in his
Foreword, describes this dictionary as designed for
the foreign learner of English in any part of the
world; thus, it should not be judged on the same
terms as are other monolingual dictionaries of like
size, 100,000 words and phrases defined,... under
50,000 headwords. To put the extent of the work
into perspective, the average college (or desk)
dictionary, like the Random House Webster, Webster
New World, American Heritage , and Collins English
dictionaries, contain about 175,000 entries, which
translates into approximately 85-90,000 headwords.
Paul Procter, after working as Chief Defining
Editor on the Collins English Dictionary , pioneered,
in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
[LDOCE] , in the preparation of dictionaries with controlled
defining vocabularies. In the case of this work
[ CIDE ], a limit of 2000. The true import of that claim
merits examination, and we shall turn to that shortly.
First, a quick thumb-through of the text reveals a
neat layout, punctuated here and there by catalogue-or
Dunden-type illustrations (as at containers, cooking,
coverings , and scores of other entries), vignetted
collections of nonlexical information (e.g., PORTUGUESE
FALSE FRIENDS, PRONUNCIATION OF WORDS WITH
-OUGH, NATIONS AND NATIONALITIES, salutations and
closing of business letters, HOMOPHONES AND HOMOGRAPHS,
separate items on the marks of punctuation,
grammatical constructions, and numerous other miscellaneous
matters often confined to grammars, style
books, and other works). On each page, the lines are
numbered (in fives) down the center gutter between
the two columns, the purpose being to make it easier
to find the references in the 30,000-strong Phrase
Index (pp. 1708-71).
In passing, we cannot refrain from reiterating
our perennial complaint about the typography of
the newer dictionaries: although the body text is a
paragon of clarity, the headwords are set in bold
sans-serif type, which makes the characters of some
words indistinguishable. Because centered dots are
used to mark syllable breaks--a useful practice
abandoned in an access of sheer stupidity by the editors
of the Collins , this does not present problems
except in monosyllabic words, like lilt, till , and ill.
Also, the alphabetical order might prove a bit off-putting
for some, for phrasal verbs are set flush left
with a hanging indention (like headwords) immediately
after the main verb: for instance, take , which
has fifteen main entries of its own (for reasons we
shall get to), is followed by headword-style entries
for take after, take against , etc., through take up
with ; it is only then that one reaches the entry for
takeaway . As with any reference book, its users
must become familiar with its organization of information
before being able to derive its benefits; still,
this arrangement takes some getting used to.
In every larger dictionary, the entries for words
like back, set , and take are especially complex. In the
CIDE the effort has been made to simplify such
entries in limiting the number of senses dealt with
by writing a few definitions--fifteen, in the case of
take --that are intended to encompass semantically
the basic range of meanings the editors deem to be
required by typical users of the dictionary. In each
case, the selected meaning is illustrated by many contextual
examples. Choosing a short example from the
often lengthy array:
take obj CATCH /teIk/ υ [T] past simple took/
t\?\k/, past part taken /\?\/ to catch or get possession
of · Rebels ambushed the train and took
several prisoners. · Government forces expect to
have taken the city by the end of the week. · In
chess, if your opponent takes your queen you're
usually in trouble. · There was a report of a baby
taken by a wolf. · The Liberals needed just 200
more votes to take the seat from Labour. · The terrorists
took him prisoner. [+ obj + n] · The rebels
have taken power. · The new director took (up)
office (=started their job) in December.
In each case, a word or phrase that provides a synonym
appears in a box, followed by the pronunciation(s),
followed by a part-of-speech label, followed
by a symbol in brackets keyed to grammatical information
given in the forematter ([T] being the symbol
for “transitive verb, which has an object”), the definition
and a series of collocational examples. (The
British practice using a politically correct plural pronoun
of reference for a singular antecedent is followed,
explaining their job in the last example; the
awkwardness could have been spared by a change to
directors .) Boldface type within an example (e.g.,
power) identifies words commonly found associated
with the headword.
Fifteen is not a lot of senses for take : in the Ox-ford
Thesaurus we listed twenty-seven senses for
which there were viable synonyms before reaching
the phrasal verb section; the phrasal verbs yielded
another twenty-five common senses for which synonyms
could be adduced. One might have expected
even more thorough coverage in a general dictionary.
Were space not a limitation, it would be interesting to
study which senses have been omitted in the CIDE .
As can be seen from even this cursory description
of only one short entry, the CIDE contains a
great deal of information that might well prove useful
to a learner of English. Those who are not familiar
with this type of dictionary--that is, one that provides
learners with grammatical, collocational, and
idiomatic information far beyond what might be expected
in an ordinary monolingual dictionary--
should familiarize themselves with the well-known
precedent, the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary
of Contemporary English , by A.S. Hornby, long a
classic in the field. It is that dictionary (and the
LDOCE ), chiefly, with which the CIDE was designed
to compete.
The attempt to cover British, American, and Australian
English in a single work creates occasional
problems. I am not enamored of the treatments of
lift and elevator , for instance, where the former is
defined as a box-like device which moves up and
down, carrying people or goods from one floor of a
building to another or raising and lowering people
underground in a mine, and the latter as a piece of
equipment which moves things from one level to another
· ( Am ) An elevator ( Br and Aus ) lift is a small
room which carries people or goods up and down in
tall buildings. & An elevator can be a moving strip
which can be used for unloading goods from a ship,
putting bags onto an aircraft, moving grain into a
store etc. If they are the same, why are they defined
differently? And isn't that moving strip more properly
A conveyer (belt) is a continuous moving strip
or surface that is used for transporting a load of objects
from one place to another? (And the preferred
spelling in British and American English is conveyor .)
One would have expected the same treatment seen
for boot/trunk and bonnet/hood . But matters get
more complicated when British lexicographers assume
that American English pavement means the
surface of a road if it has been specially put there,
esp. if made from concrete or tarmac. That is better
than the treatment in Questions of English (see the
review elsewhere in this issue), but it ignores the fact
that the word is used in AE to describe any paved
surface: when an American says, I remember nothing
after my head hit the pavement, the site of the
paved surface could be a road, sidewalk, or any other
paved area. Also, AE uses washing powder or liquid
and soap powder as well as laundry detergent . Either
a poor choice of American editor was made or, as is
often the case, the British editors didn't believe what
they were told.
Of great interest is the defining vocabulary,
which is said to be limited to 2000 words. These are
listed in the back matter (pp. 1702-07), where it is
revealed just which senses of the forms are used in
the definitions. Here we find, for example, that
back , presumably one word, is used in four senses:
return, farther away, farthest part, and body,
part; take is listed with five: act, accept, hold,
move, and need. As there are more than 4400
items in the list, one must assume that only forms are
counted among the 2000, that is, take is counted
only once, although its polysemy yields a semantic
distribution of five. One might object that the figure
of 2000 is just so much puffery, but it must be conceded
that defining 100,000 words and phrases using
a vocabulary of even only 4400 is no mean feat.
Those who accept the rationale behind teaching
foreigners to learn English using a restricted vocabulary
should be delighted with this dictionary, especially
with the many ancillary features it offers.
Laurence Urdang
Questions of English
A dozen years ago, the Oxford dictionary department
launched The Oxford Word and Language Service
[ OWLS ], devoted to answering queries about all
aspects of the English language. Inevitably, a large
percentage of questions received could have been answered
by referring to a dictionary, even a relatively
modest work. But some have dealt with subtler matters,
and, in some cases, questions relating to details
of the language not readily derivable even from the
massive OED , in either of its editions.
In this book, the editors have occasionally undertaken
to answer questions that have not been asked
specifically but might reasonably be anticipated, like,
What is the difference between American and British
English? As they acknowledge, the subject is
huge, not encompassable within the six or so pages
given over to it here; the main areas are touched
upon--pronunciation, spelling, vocabulary, and a bit
on grammer--which is all one might expect in a brief
work. Still, it would have been wise to have consulted
a (knowledgeable) native speaker of American English
before setting forth the misinformation about
some differences in vocabulary. For instance, adrenalin
is also the common term in AE (not epinephrine ),
though the latter is known; BE
bath can be tub in AE
but is usually bathtub ; an AE
cookie is a BE
sweet
biscuit , but biscuit is a common alternative term in
AE for a dry cracker (Remember Uneeda Biscuits ?
They are crackers.); Americans bring up their children,
as the British do, but they also raise or rear
them; AE has both curtains and drapes , but they are
different things: BE uses curtains for what AE speakers
call drapes ; AE has both deck chair and beach chair ,
not, as implied, the latter instead of the former; likewise,
AE has dressing gown as well as robe and
bathrobe , but a dressing gown is more likely to be
somewhat fancier; Americans know many games of
solitaire , of which patience is just one; both crayfish
and crawfish are used in AE, and it is about time that
the old (British) fiction that Americans say railroad
for what the British call a railway was put to rest: for
at least two generations, one of the biggest companies
in the US was called Railway Express . Other fables
are perpetuated, to wit:
BRITISH AMERICAN COMMENT
a quarter to a quarter of five AE has both
five
a quarter past a quarter after AE has both
five five
apart from aside from AE has both
at school in school AE has both
behind (in) back of AE has both
different different than See note 1
from or to
have got have See note 2
have not got do not have See note 2
I have just I just ate AE has both
eaten
in the street on the street AE has both
teach be a teach school AE has both
teacher
up to and through AE has both
including
(have a) wash up See note 3
wash, get
washed
Notes: 1. The preferred form in AE is different from,
the alternative is different than; in BE, the preferred
form is also different from, but the alternative is dif
ferent to.
2. In both AE, and BE, these appear as contractions.
The forms I've got money and I've got no
money (or I haven't got any money) are far more
common in AE than I have money and either I have
no money or I don't have money, though I believe
that AE speakers might detect a difference in emphasis:
I have money is more likely to be said after
someone else has said I haven't any money, I've not
got any money, or I don't have (any) money when
confronted with having to pay for something, as in
That's okay, I have money.
3. AE speakers are less likely to say, I'm going
to have a wash; but they certainly do say I'm
going to wash up (before dinner).
The problem with the way these distinction have
been presented is that the BE speaker might be unlikely
to use the forms listed under AMERICAN, but
what is implied, incorrectly, is that the AE speaker
does not use those listed under BRITISH, which is incorrect.
The information provided in response to real
questions is less controversial. In some instances, the
questioner might have been better served by being
referred to another source. For instance, those who
are curious about collective nouns (like gaggle of
geese, pride of lions ) are referred to Ruth Rendell's An
Unkindness of Ravens and James Lipton's An Exaltation
of Larks , but no mention is made of Ivan G. Speakes's
Dictionary of Collective Nouns , Gale Research Company,
1975, which is not only the most comprehensive
work on the subject but provides citations, as well.
And it might be worth noting in answer to the query
about flammable/inflammable that inflammable is no
longer legal on labels in the US because of the ambiguity.
Many people want to know if tomatoes, bananas,
etc., are vegetables, fruits, plants, trees, herbs--or
what. Yet there are some questions that are becoming
almost universal: with the disappearance of telephone
dials, do we enter, key, punch in , or (still) dial a
number? It is also useful to have the longish note in
response to a query about the universal applicability
of i before e except after c . There are similar questions
answered in the section entitled Curious and
Interesting Facts, and the chapter called I've Made
Up a Word contains some interesting material. But
the replies given to some questions are not entirely
satisfactory, as in the case of Why is there no separate
plural for the names of many animals ? Here, the answer
should have touched on the fact that in some
cases a plural like fishes , as distinct from the plural
fish , sreves to identify the existence of a number of
varieties.
In sum, this must be construed as a mixed review.
Perhaps we are grumpier than usual because
the two-volume Grammar of the English Language ,
by George O. Curme, Verbatim Books, (which is
more comprehensive than A Comprehensive Grammar
of the English Language , by Quirk, Greenbaum,
et al.), and VERBATIM itself are omitted from the section
called Suggestions for Further Reading. At least
the Oxford Thesaurus is included.
Laurence Urdang
ANTIPODEAN ENGLISH
Probably, possibly, perhaps
Why is it that the closer in time one gets to the
putative earliest use of a word the more tantalizingly
obscure its connections become? Take jackeroo , for
instance, the name given to a young Englishman of
independent means who came out to Australia to
gain colonial experience by working in a supernumerary
capacity on a sheep or cattle station, who
enrolled in the nineteenth-century equivalent of a
senior management course, either genuinely to learn
self-reliance or gracefully to take himself off his family's
hands. In this sense it dates from the 1870s,
and, of the several conjectural etymologies, those
that link it with the Spanish vaquero or the English
Jacky Raw seem at least possible. But then an earlier
life was revealed: from the 1840s, and in Queensland
especially, jackeroo had been used of a white
man who lived beyond the bounds of close settlement
and had taken on some of the not so savoury
connotations of frontiersman. The possible model
of kangaroo suggested an Aboriginal origin, and, in
the 1890s, one of the more indefatigable recorders
of the Aboriginal languages, Charles Meston, came
up with an etymology that fitted the chronology--
and the geography--perfectly. He suggested that it
was a transferred use of the Queensland Aboriginal
word for a particularly noisy bird and that the connection
was made by percipient Aborigines who applied
it first to the German missionaries of 1838,
having noted their garrulousness. From the specific
to a general application was but a logical and consequent
step. This rather pleasing etymology stood for
a while but was discredited when R.M.W. Dixon
failed to find an etymon in a Queensland language,
despite a brave attempt to locate the origin in a putative
Jagara word which was glossed as wandering
white man. And so we were back to square one and
one of the more colorful words in Australian English
had to suffer the indignity of having an uncertain
origin.
Wowser is another case in point. And again the
history has thrown up more than the odd red herring.
This time a prominent journalist claimed the
word as his own invention, and the lack of any evidence
to the contrary meant that the claim rested
unchallenged. The editor of the Sydney Truth during
the period 1895-1906, John Norton was one of
those dynamic one man bands who not infrequently
seemed to have written whole issues on his
own and who was certainly very influential in determining
the style by which Truth came to be known.
One of the features of this style was the alliterating,
punning phrase, often used as a headline--wasted
wowsers vied with watery wowsers and indeed
with weird and worried wowsers, and the exercise
was often carried to extremes--witness collocations
like pious, Puritanical, pragmatical, pulpit-pounding
self-pursuers whom we call wowsers, or
bald-headed, bad-breathed, bible-banging bummer,
who ought to be banged with a bowser. And certainly
he overworked the word in the sense it has
now of one who is publically censorious of the behavior
of others.
But there was an earlier sense in that, for as little
time as a decade, it has been shown to have been
used in Australia, still as a pejorative term but with
much less definition, more as a label for someone
who is in some way disruptive of social mores, a public
nuisance whose field of activity was left open.
The word was clearly felt to be a low word and there
remains the possibility that Norton's role was more
that of a promoter than of an inventor, that there
was an existing word, probably a regional dialect
word, that he brought to the surface and to which he
gave a new currency. Rather like the more recent
scungy which, after years of use in Scots and Irish for
a sly or vicious person, a sponger, suddenly found
itself in vogue as a word connoting the general sordidness
of modern youth. In the case of wowser
there is the tantalizing possibility that a conjectural
use of the word occurs in 1879 in just the sort of
context that would fit this theory and make its subterranean
existance a reality: but all we have to go
on is w--s , and not many lexicographers would
chance their arm on that! [For the quotation see the
Australian National Dictionary [AND], whose editor
had a bit both ways.]
Like scungy , and possibly wowser , is spoof , a
slang word for semen, which turns up in a WWI
context and then goes underground for the best part
of 60 years. And perhaps this happened also to
molo , meaning drink, although the evidence is
shaky to say the least [see AND again]. And bottler
something or someone that excites admiration, earliest
recorded in 1855 in a quotation which carries
the gloss as the saying is and then not again for 20
years.
This raises in my mind bonzer [ bonza, bonser , or
bonsa ] which first makes its appearance with the
gloss that bulwark of Austral Slanguage, or its synonyms
boshter and bosker , all three of which are first
recorded in 1903 or 1904. Or snodger , another synonym,
which had 60 years of vigorous life and then
left as it had come, without a trace. Or cobber , a
now obsolescent word for a friend, or digger ,
which began as a term for a goldminer, then inexplicably
became a term for an Australian or New
Zealand soldier in WWI and is now similarly obsolescent,
even in the abbreviated term of address dig .
Who was Larry in happy as Larry or Hughie in
send her down, Hughie [an invocation to the rain
god]? Why is a brothel called Timothy ? Why is a
tropical storm in the north and west called a cock-eyed
bob ? How does the game of two-up come to be
referred to in its earliest citation as the national
game? Will we ever be able to say with confidence
probably, or even possibly, or perhaps?
David Galef in his article Sound and Sense
[XXI, 2], says that the childish exclamation Peeyoo !
probably stems from a distorted rendering of Phew !
Where I grew up the expression phew was one of
relief: Phew! I passed the test; Peeyoo ! was an
exclamation of disgust upon smelling a bad smell.
Years later I read that the expression comes
from the first two letters of Puteoli (Pozzuoli), near
Naples, whose refineries produced such a stench in
ancient times that seamen entering the Bay of Naples
could smell the town long before they set eyes
on it. This, of course, may be purely apocryphal.
You write, in your review of the Pronouncing
Dictionary of Proper Names [XXI, 3, 18], It seems
that in the southeastern US words beginning with
shr - are pronounced as if spelled sr -, something I
never knew.
Reading these words I first thought neither did
I, but further thinking conjured up the longdormant
memory of a woman, originally from northwest
Alabama, who invariably pronounced shrimp as
srimp, the only person I have heard do so. She
lived in, and had no difficulty pronouncing, Shreveport.
Nor do any of the natives, among whom I (obviously)
circulate regularly. The worst any of the local
dialects can do is to render it as SHREE-pot,
although the occasional ancient will come up with
SHREE'S-port.
Enrique Lerdau's letter on shuttle rhymes [EPISTOLAE,
XX,3] led me to try my hand at concocting a
few. Here are some samples:
A castle's moat its border flanks
who enters in must ford her banks.
Her escort was a banker tall
He took her to a tanker ball.
In winter baby's frolic cost
A whopping bout with colic frost.
The tigers kept on running straight
Twas truly at a stunning rate.
If dogs and cats you tickle, friend,
You may begin a fickle trend.
I don't think that seating matters
when involved with meeting satyrs.
When that actress deems to sigh
Then it is she seems to die.
With naughty pranks a tricker sighs
But cries aloud with sicker tries.
Dave's leather sling the tallest smites
But David wears the smallest tights.
If fans will help her find her man
She certainly will mind her fan.
The steep hill's slope inclined her walk
And made it tough to wind her clock.
Barefoot she'd never cope with sandals
While she burned her soap with candles.
She'd rather raise a stein with Dan
Than venture out and dine with Stan.
But then when Stan aligned her kite
She saw him in a kinder light.
Pope Sixtus' chapel's pristine since
That pope he was the Sistine prince.
It was his cross to cope with pain
As slowly limped the Pope with cane.
The little pig she would not kill
The piglet's death she could not will.
So with her truck she raced her pig
The pig in turn he paced her rig.
I close with a shuttle rhyme which is about writing
things like shuttle rhymes:
It's hard to keep a running pace
In this stupid punning race.
As a Rhode Islander, I naturally paid particular
attention to Mr. Champlin's article, Language at
Bay [XXI,3]. It might be of some interest to readers
that even in such a small state all but one of the
words and expressions he cited are unknown to me
(as well as to most urban Rhode Islanders) even
though I was born and raised in Rhode Island. Mr.
Champlin was writing about Yankee fishermen and
the like who were a world away from the city with
its varied population. ( Yankee in Rhode Island refers
to descendants of the English who came here before
the immigrants. )
The one word I recognized is quahogs . However,
the pronunciation he cited, KOEhogs, is not
common in the city. While there is a lot of variation,
the word is generally pronounced KAWhawgs. A
final point is Mr. Champlin's reference to Washington
County. Rhode Islanders, except lawyers, refer
to the County by its nickname South County.
There is even a hospital with the latter name.
As another former reporter, I was surprised to
read from one of your correspondents [Martin Wald,
XXI,3] that The Associated Press Stylebook advised
reporters to Use innocent , in describing a defendant's
plea or a jury's verdict, to guard against the
word not being dropped inadvertently from Not
Guilty. Innocent does not mean `not guilty' and I
was always taught to write Guilty (repeat Guilty)
or Not Guilty (repeat Not Guilty).
The difference between the two terms was best
illustrated in the 1886 Old Bailey trial of Adelaide
Bartlett, charged with murdering her husband by
chloroform poisoning. The foreman of the jury,
asked if they had agreed upon their verdict replied,
We have well considered the evidence, and, although
we think grave suspicion is attached to the
prisoner, we do not think there is sufficient evidence
to show how or by whom the chloroform was administered.
She was found Not Guilty. Sir James
Paget, sergeant-surgeon to Queen Victoria, was then
publicly quoted as saying, Now it is all over, she
should tell us how she did it.
Recently there came into my possession a photocopy
of an article What Gall that appeared in VERBATIM
[XVI, 3; by Joe Queenan]. It concerned the
shocking case of M. Lucien Maître-Crèche, a Parisian
copywriter sentenced to eight years in prison for using
the imperfect subjunctive case of a prohibited
verb, jumbo frankfurter , in a series of ads posted in
the Paris Metro. Specifically he received his sentence
for causing to appear in print the sentence Que
j'eusse bien aimé jumbo frankfurter aujourd'hui .
I have of course no sympathy for M. Maître-Crèche.
As Calvin Coolidge once advised that those
who do not share the American dream ought not to
settle in America, and as in Singapore one does not
vandalize cars, so in France one does not use convenient
expressions. C'est la vie , one might say, and
those who disapprove are free to leave.
However, if M. Maître-Crèche is to serve eight
years, the judges must get life, or even death. For
what M. Maître-Crèche used was not the imperfect
subjunctive of the verb jumbo frankfurter but of the
verb aimer.
Aimer then serves, in the imperfect subjunctive,
as the auxiliary verb and is followed by
jumbo frankfurter , which is of course an infinitive.
Who, indeed, shall guard the guardians?
I was intrigued by William Dougherty's comment
[XXI,2] on Martyn Ecott's article The Franglais
Blues [XX,3]. I appreciate a Frenchman's disappointment
when he sees English gradually taking
the place of French as an international language.
But perhaps the francophone purist does not know
how lucky he is. In the early decades of this century
Frech was still the lingua franca of educated people.
These people took great care to use the language,
which they had acquired at great trouble, expense
and personal inconvenience, with care. But
whereas learning French required a disciplined
mind, anyone with a vocabulary of a few hundred
words can make himself understood in English.
Partly due to the influence of cinema and television,
many of these new English speakers are not aware of
the differences among English, American, and Australian.
They will use any English-sounding words
and only half-understood English phrases indiscriminately.
A favorite is using the present participle as a
noun ( parking any parking facility; dancing dancing
hall; camping camp site; planning budget or
plan of action; mailing batch of junk mail; living
living room). These phrases are used in many European
languages. These new English speakers do
not hesitate to inflect borrowed English words as if
they owned them. (French shooter, shootais, shooté ;
Dutch remainderen, remainderd, geremainderd, a
trouser .)
I am afraid that, if what many citizens of the
European Community either hope or fear comes
true, and English becomes the second language in
every country of the Community, there is a good
chance that many of these hybrids ( shopper for supermarket
trolley, processimulator for simulator,
and compacdiscontainer ) will eventually find their
way into the English as she is spoke.
Enrique Lerdau gives examples of German
Schuttelreime [XX,3] but finds them refractory in
English. As an Englishman long addicated to spoonerisms
and living in German-speaking parts, I have
inevitably succumbed to the spell of the Schuttelreim .
Most of my productions have naturally been
in German (as when spring skiing in rapidly melting
snow became Skifahren zwischen den Viehscharen ),
but since Enrique Lerdau is chiefly interested in
English specimens, here are a couple of those I have
recorded:
You just can't wear your boater, mike,
When riding on your motor bike.
Or a little more ambitious:
On his dutiful bay
He rode away,
Needless to say
On a beautiful day.
Admittedly, I never expected such fugitive elucubrations
to see the light!
In your review of The New York Public Library
Writers Guide to Style and Usage [XXI, 2], you mention
looking in vain for wisdom regarding the use
of the serial (or series, as I've always called it)
comma. One has no problem finding that wisdom in
The Chicago Manual of Style , as you undoubtedly
know. In fact, you would have no difficulty finding
the series comma used at any college or professional
division editing department at any major New York
publisher. As a long-time employee and now associate
of New York publishers, I can assure you of that
fact.
In an On Language column (April 26, 1993),
William Safire called for doing away with the serial
comma to save a projected 12 billion commas nationwide.
I wrote to him then and thereafter, giving
examples from the Times of reading comprehension
impeded by lack of the comma. I mentioned also the
potential saving by Times writers by doing away
with such hyphens as the one in teen-ager , which the
Times insists on using.
In a gem of a little book called The New Well-Tempered
Sentence , by K.E. Gordon (Ticknor &
Fields, 1993), the author writes that in a series of
three or more elements, ... a comma comes before
the conjunction-- unless you're a journalist .
(emphasis is mine). Why is this so?
As a nonspecialist, simply a lover of words, an
amateur precisianist and a crossword addict--alas, I
find yours too easy--I am spurred to take issue with
Tony Day [XX,4,21] on the subject of rhyming slang.
My only credentials are that I am a native-born
Londoner now in my mid-sixties and have lived all my
life until now in London, including a number of years
in the East End. Even now, here in Clerkenwell, five
minutes' walk from the northern edge of the Square
Mile, I am less than a mile from Hackney. I have,
willy-nilly, frequently been nudged into the use of
such slang simply in order not to stick out like a sore
thumb among others using it.
First, perhaps, we ought to establish what is the
East End: roughly, it covers Hackney, Stepney (now
known as Tower Hamlets), the Isle of Dogs, and
parts of Bow and Poplar. Post-war slum clearance
and rehousing broke up the old Jewish communities,
and these have been replaced by subsequent waves
of immigrants. Hackney now has many Cypriots and
even more West Indians; and Stepney houses an
enormous number of Pakistanis and other Asians.
None of these groups has contributed to rhyming
slang. There are therefore no neologisms in rhyming
slang and it is definitely moribund. Non-English
readers should take very much cum grano salis Mr.
Day's claim that Finsbury Park is just down the
road from Mile End: it is a crow's-flight distance of
4½ miles away and consequently probably nearly
twice that by road, given the nature of London's
roads and its density of housing.
Most of the expressions cited are totally unfamiliar
to me, and I suggest that Mr. Day has played
with a rhyming dictionary and dreamed many of
them up for himself--harmless enough, but he
ought not to pass them off as being in common usage.
Of those that are known to me, I would point
out that even his usage of them is not what one
would meet in everyday conversation with East
Enders. Potatoes in the Mould certainly clarifies the
words used, but we would expect to see, even in
print, Talers in the Mould ; and in speech we would
always say, Isn't it taters today when discussing the
temperature.
It has always, since long before my time, been
the custome for only the first part of a compound to
be used, such as my old china (=china plate=mate)
or up the apples (= apples and pears = stairs ), and it
is generally believed that this practice first began
among the semi-criminal classes to render their
speech less easily comprehensible to outsiders. This
may or may not be so, but the habit has persisted.
Mr. Day might once have lived in London, but
so have millions of others, and it doesn't necessarily
make Londoners of them, nor does it give them
more than a passing knowledge of our native speech.
I thoroughly enjoy VERBATIM and have always
tended to regard articles published therein as reasonably
authoritative; but I shall take the liberty in
the future to doubt the experts. As far as I am
concerned, Mr. Day's article is a load of marbles
(=marble balls=balls) !
[Mary Imber went on to chide the Editor for a number
of typographical errors-- literals in English English--(e.g.,
Ford Maddox Ford for ... Madox
...) for which only apologies, no excuses, are
offered.--Editor]
I May Not Have Gotten This Right
One of the joys of retirement is the freedom to
indulge in utterly inconsequential little endeavors.
Recently I have joyfully spent at least two hours in
intense research into the word gotten . It is not a
word I use, but I recently heard a Canadian broadcaster
use it, and that has set me to delving and
grubbing in dictionaries and other reference books.
And here is some of what I have got, or gotten, out
of my research.
I have not conducted any kind of survey on this,
but I can report that I have rarely been aware of
gotten in written Canadian English, in conversation,
or on radio and television. But, then, I haven't really
being paying attention to such things.
The verb get has two distinct variants between
British and American uses as a past participle. American
English generally prefers gotten , whereas English
English is ordinarily content with simple got .
And the Brits tend to use have got as meaning to
have acquired or to possess or even to own,
whereas in American usage that is considered somewhat
informal in speech and not generally used in
writing.
Although gotten seems to have disappeared
from English English except in some dialectical
forms, it is still used in forgotten and begotten . But
the word is very much alive in American usage. In
The American Language , Mencken has seven references
to gotten , which he says is now (1945) almost
absolete in England. And he contends that
gotten is one of the hallmarks of American speech.
Margaret Nicholson, in her 1957 book, A Dictionary
of American-English Usage (based on Fowler),
pointed out that Gotten still holds its ground in
American English, and she adds that there is a
popular superstition that got is less refined than
gotten .
The Concise Oxford defines gotten simply as US
past part . of GET. That seems the position in all
Oxford dictionaries. The Collins English Dictionary
takes the same position. A third British dictionary,
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1987
edition) points out that the word is standard in
American English, but is not used in British English.
Chambers 20th Century has gotten as arch .
Scot. and U.S.
In the only two dictionaries which can be taken
as essentially Canadian and not simply British and
American ones that have been slightly jigged up a
little for Canadian editions, Gage Canadian (which
grew out an American dictionary but was thoroughly
Canadianized) and The Penguin Canadian Dictionary
list gotten , simply taking it for granted and not worrying
about whether or not is American or British.
Basil Cottle, a British scholar, in his book, The
Plight of English (1975) [reviewed III,3], says that
he likes gotten and feels that it is an improvement on
mere got which he says is a nasty verb.
Gotten was standard English as late as 1820, but,
somehow, came to be abandoned. James Orchard
Halliwell's Dictionary of Archaic Words (1850) gives
GOTTED as a form of gotten .
A Billingsgate in Kerala
Etymology of English words is really interesting.
So many people in bygone days, both famous
and infamous, have enriched English vocabulary
through their names. When you use boycott, bowdlerize
or bloomers , you must remember that these
words owe their origins to the persons who lived in
the past under the names Charles Cunningham Boycott
(1832-97), Thomas Bowdler (1754-1825) and
Mrs. Amelia Jenks Bloomer (1818-94) respectively.
Besides these persons-words, commonly known as
eponymous words, there are also place-words,
commonly known as toponymic words, which derive
from place-names. When you use calico, magnesium
or hamburger , you must remember that these
words owe their origins to the places under the
names Calicut (a district and famous city in Kerala
State, India), Magnesia (a metal-bearing region in
Greece), and Hamburg (a city in Germany), respectively.
Years back a toponymic word-- billingsgate --
caught my attention, because it had something to do
with my native place, Kannur City . Today billingsgate
is used to mean foul and abusive language:
The Chinese themselves have not yet got around
to denouncing Kosygin and company by name;
but that will come soon, no doubt, since the Albanians
are already publishing billingsgate attacks
on the Brezhnev-Kosygin-Mikoyan trokia.
Billingsgate , a former fish market in London,
was known for the abusive language heard there.
The fish-wives and their fishmongering husbands got
a reputation for their lusty and lurid eloquence of
speech. Thus Billingsgate became so notorious that
in 1652 it became a common word in English. Today
we use billingsgate to mean any kind of profane and
abusive talk or language.
There is a conspicuous connection between billingsgate
and my native place. I am a native of Kannur
City , a thickly-populated Muslim area in Kannur
Municipality, Kannur District, Kerala State. Outside
Kerala, Kannur is known as Cannanore. Kannur City
is no longer a city. In bygone days, it was a major
business center in Kannur District. Now Kannur
Town, lying about 3 km away from Kannur City , enjoys
this status. Formerly, there was a fish and meat
market in the heart of Kannur City , now known as
City Center. The language heard there at that time
was just like that heard at Billingsgate . So Kannur
City got a reputation for her bad language.
Although the 17th-century Billingsgate no longer
exists, Kannur City still does. Today Kannur City has
changed a lot. In the heart of the city one can now
see businesses, barber shops, restaurants, ice-cream
parlors, medical shops, etc. Today's residents of Kannur
City are educated and cultured. There are several
educational institutes, including two Malayalam
medium high schools and one English medium
school, charitable institutions, and public libraries.
Notwithstanding the tremendous changes, Kannur
City still retains the bad reputation that she got ages
ago. Even today one still hears the old chestnut:
Excuse me, how do I get to Kannur City,
please?
Get on No. 10 bus and get off where you hear
people say sonofabitch!
Alas, Kannur City is still haunted by that old bad
reputation that she is the Billingsgate of Kerala.
Impossible!
It is a pity the English language does not come
equipped with a user's guide, for this would surely
put an end to the numerous impossible clangers
made in everyday speech.
Good examples are sentences like those your
parents used to scream at the tops of their voices
when you were an angelic four-year-old: If you fall
out of that tree and break your legs, don't come running
to me! They are also called Irish bulls.
Perhaps this explains why, as adults, we still say
impossible things: we surely heard enough of them
when we were young and impressionable. Look at
your face! was another classic retort that greeted
you even when there wasn't a mirror to hand, along
with: Can't you see how dirty the back of your
neck is? or What's that on your back?
Answer that one truthfully and you'd have got
a clip round the ear for your honesty--otherwise
known as sarcasm until you're an adult.
And what about, If you don't eat your greens,
you'll sit there until you do eat them!?
All such orders were no doubt meant in good
faith--even though they were impossible to obey--
yet they did make their mark. We still encounter
similar impossibilities with amusing regularity in our
adult lives, along with their exact opposites--signs
which more than state the obvious, such as Ears
pierced while you wait.
As some people might say, If Shakespeare
were alive today he'd turn in his grave.
Permutations
Take three factors: pronunciation (P), spelling (S),
meaning (M).
Take two variables: same (S) and different (D).
Permute them, apply them to words and give examples
of each category.
(1) PS, SD, MD. homophones: creak/creek; plain/
plane, bow/bough, tear/tare, tear/tier, roe/row, allowed/aloud ,
etc.; triplets: bawd/bored/board,
sword/sawed/soared, cite/sight/sight ; quadruplets:
write/right/rite/wright, or/oar/awe/ore --a quintuplet
if you allow Aw as in US expression Aw gee!
(2) PS, SS MD. usually called homographs: quarry,
row, well, quail, down, truck, cleave, let , list. Note
that the word(s) should be etymologically distinct,
not merely have different meanings, so fast quick/
firm does not qualify.
(3) PD, SS, MD. called heteronyms: row, bow, tear,
entrance, wound, wind, dove . Note that the words
should be etymologically distinct, so refuse, minute,
contract do not qualify.
(4) PS, SD, MS. variant spellings: center/centre, enquire/inquire,
-ise/-ize. (Flower/flour used to qualify,
but should probably now be put in category 1.)
(5) PD, SD, MS. synonyms: neigh/whinny, allow/
permit, change/alter, transform/metamorphose , or to
a word that has two accepted spellings which are
somewhat different in pronunciation, as negotiate/
negociate, dived/dove, wold/weald, strap/strop .
(6) PD, SS, MS. variant (dialectal) pronunciations:
controversy, exquisite , with variant stress; path with
long or short vowel; often with or without the t
sounded; garage .
(7) PS, SS, MS. This category is simply the same
word (included here only for completeness).
(8) PD, SD, MD. This applies simply to two completely
different words (included here only for completeness).
Spoonerism
Two guests were arriving late for a party being
held at our home in rural Pennsylvania. Coming into
the room full of friends, Bill Harris announced
Hey, I'm really not late, look, he shoved up his
sleeve to show them his wrist watch and then, in
surprise he shouted, Oh, damn, I've broken my
crotch whistle.
VERBUM SAP
Me and Empathy
My morning newspaper has a feature called the
Facts & Arguments Page, wherein articles are
normally fairly factual and tenably argumentative. A
glaring recent exception was a misguided missive
that railed against the perceived (by the author)
rising popularity of empathy at the expense of good
old fashioned sympathy . It was not entirely clear
whether the article was meant to be philosophical or
philological. But since it meandered erratically and
erroneously for more than half of its length through
the realm of semantics, I of course took both an interest
and umbrage.
The article's was meant thesis seemed to be that we
should not attempt to empathize with others--that
is, really to try to feel their experiences and share
their burdens. To claim to do so, it was argued, is an
invasion of privacy and an insupportable claim.
The most we can or should do when confronted or
affected by someone's wretchedness is sympathize,
or commiserate.
Exhibit A was a story about a rich American lawyer
who, according to the writer, claimed her Native
American clients love and respect her because
she empathizes with them. When I suggested that
such empathy was unlikely given that, at the end of
the day, she climbs into an air-conditioned BMW
and drives back to her Malibu mansion while her
clients return to stinking penury, I was told that she
could empathize because her grandparents' cousins
died in Auschwitz. This, it was argued,is the
most common, and the most outrageous, of empathic
claims. It is most certainly outrageous. It is also
incredible. And it left unexplained how anything can
be at the same time the most common and the most
outrageous, the latter strongly suggesting something
quite outside the usual. This was the least of my
quibbles.
The article began by stating there is a Gresham's
Law of Language in which bad words drive out good.
Oh, really? The 16th-century financier Thomas
Gresham was talking about money, not language. The
word phenomenon is called pejoration , or degeneration ,
and it usually involves a change of meaning,
rarely the disappearance of a word. But the article's
illustration of this assertion is even more fallacious.
Because of the search for false importance, it alleges,
the useful old English words burgle and burglar
have led by inflation [may be this was, after all, an
economics essay] to the unnecessary verb burglarize .
The fact is that burgle and burglarize saw the
light of day at about the same time, 1870-71, and it is
the useful old burgle , not burglarize that has been
disparaged by usage critics, many of whom have argued
that rob could have served for all of them.
While sympathy is the most important word to
have been murdered in the late 20th century, we
were also given the sad, so-called facts surrounding
the recent demise of discrimination and disinterested.
Discrimination, we read, was the first to go
in modern times. Fact: the word was already taking
on prejudicial overtones a century and a half ago.
On March 27, 1866, U.S. President Andrew Johnson
said, Thus a perfect equality of the white and colored
races is attempted to be fixed by federal law in
every state of the union over the vast field of State
jurisdiction covered by these enumerated rights. In
no one of these can any State ever exercise any
power of discrimination between the different
races. This pejorative sense has been used regularly
ever since, but it has not succeeded in driving
out the discerning sense of discriminating .
Disinterested went next, the eulogy continued,
becoming a posh synonym for uninterested , because
we no longer choose to believe that anyone can put
aside their own interests to review a situation dispassionately.
Yet the author proceeded to give recent
examples of disinterest (impartiality, fairness, dispassion,
neutrality, unbiasedness) in action--proving
that behavior can continue to exist unaltered even if
our words for it change, and disproving the writer's
own contentions. Fact: Disinterested went a long
time ago, and not in the direction deplored. When
this word was first used in the late 16th and early
17th centuries, it meant unconcerned, lacking interest,
apathetic, uninterested--the very senses it has
been struggling to return to in this century, against
great opposition. The sense of impartiality or an absence
of self-interest did not develop until the middle
of the 17th century, after which the original sense
disappeared for about 200 years.
Why is it, as etymologist Walter Skeat asked frequently
in the last century, that people will not hesitate
to proffer publicly their guess-work on word origins
and other language matters, when they would
not similarly dare to explain the ordinary facts of
botany and chemistry?
On the question of empathy versus sympathy , I
am not competent to comment, except on their etymological
and semantic distinctions. But I seem to
recall reading, more than once, that people coping
with various forms of distress do not want sympathy.
Instead we are urged to walk a mile in their shoes,
which I believe is a metaphor for empathy, or at
least an understanding based on something more
profound than arm's-length pity. In any case, the
writer seems to have based his case more on etymology
than sociology. Empathy , he maintained, is a legitimate
technical term, but only in psychotherapy
and in the arts. And we were admonished that to
claim empathy outside those two special areas is an
enormity--a word he described as another dead
word, but used anyway.
While we're at it, why not outlaw all words and
expressions we've purloined over the years from
specialized fields--such as melancholy, hectic,
chronic , and allergic (medicine); leading question ,
time is of the essence (law); by and large, high and
dry, slush fund, round robin, aloof (sailing); ego, extrovert,
complex, phobia, psyche, depression, trauma,
subconscious (same place as empathy); and many
more of what Fowler called popularized technicalities.
But I doubt that will deter some legitimately
interested, sympathetic, altruistic, caring people
from trying to get inside other people's heads and
hearts, in order to share their pain. It may not be
possible to do it, but I don't see anything wrong in
trying--no matter what word we use to describe the
attempt.
Full Thirkell
Just as speakers of British English are mistaken in
their assumption that Americans never say railway
but always railroad , Americans (and others) are mistaken
if they believe that Briticisms are used by
speakers in Great Britain to the exclusion of words
used in, say, America. It is wrong to think that British
speakers never say truck for lorry, escalator for moving
stairway , and so forth. Not only do they know the
words and phrases, to which they have been exposed
through travel, tourists, movies, television, reading,
and ordinary commerce--the properly descriptive
word, intercourse , comes to mind only to be suppressed--but
they use them, sometimes as free variants,
sometimes with specialized meanings: there are
some who might say that a truck is different from a
lorry , but practice varies. In some instances, the British
enjoy twitting Americans about some of their taboos.
Certainly one of the--dare I say?--prominent
examples is cock , which means both male bird and
penis in both dialects; the situation arises because
it meant male bird more commonly in British English
and penis more commonly in American English,
a fairly clear case of distribution. This gave rise to
what Brits, who evidently had little to laugh at,
thought was hilarious: roostertail for cocktail . One
notes today, though, that American prudery might
have had some effect in Britain, where one now encounters
cockerel as often as cock in direct reference
to male bird. While at one time the sense of penis
was relatively far down the awareness scale of those
who had occasion to refer to cocks (as male birds),
its sense of penis has increased in frequency and
awareness level in recent years. Proof of this can be
seen in a recent Diary article by Ruth Dudley Edwards
[ The Independent , 23 January 1995, p. 13] in
which she quotes, with inexpressible joy, the following
passage from Angela Thirkell's The Brandons :
Mr. Grant, really quite glad of an excuse to
dismount, offered his cock to Lydia, who immediately
flung a leg over it, explaining that she had
put on a frock with pleats on purpose, as she always
felt sick if she rode sideways.
Testefyin'
Purists who insist that the only proper meanings
of words are their original, etymological senses
should know, by that token, that women cannot testify
or give testimony and that men cannot become
hysterical .
Is it correct to describe rule by Houynhms as
hippocracy ?
You're obviously in denial.
No, I am not!
Maltese Cross to Bear
Representatives of the fifty-two nations that met
in Budapest in December voted to change the name
of their organization, the Conference on Security and
Co-operation in Europe, to the Organisation for Security
and Co-operation in Europe, creating a new
abbreviation, OSCE . According to Peter Walker,
writing in the Independent on Sunday [1] December
1994, p. 12], OSCE means something so extremely
vulgar in the dialect of one of the members, Malta,
that we are almost loth to print it. Omit almost, for
Walker does not reveal the meaning.
Mysterious Orient
According to a Reuters dispatch from Peking [8
December 1994], China's 1.2 billion people are
running out of names. In the northern port of
Tianjin, more than 2,300 people are called Zhang Li
and 2,100 are called Zhang Ying. (Readers are reminded
that in Chinese the family name comes first;
thus there are 4,400 people with the family name
Zhang .) Perhaps they can be recruited for membership
in a Chinese chapter of the Jim Smith Society.
Although small, the Flint plant produces several
million rivets of varying size each week. [From an article
by John Griffiths in The Financial Times , . Submitted by .]
Refugee convoy carrying 900 creeps to safety.
[Headline in the Schenectady Daily Gazette , . Submitted by .]
Your subscription is about to expire, and delivery
will stop. Please remit payment now to avoid uniterrupted
delivery. [From a renewal notice sent by The Courier-News ,
. Submitted by
.]
...Hosokawa finally explained on national television
at 4 a.m. that Japan, an export superpower, must accept
rice imports for our sake and the world's sake.
[From The Sun , Gainesville, Florida, .
Submitted by .]
Cinderella... Fairytale Heroiness. [From
an advertisement for Genna's in the Detroit Free Press Magazine ,
. Submitted by
.]
Anglo-American Crossword No. 70
