VOL22_1.txt

   
      
         
            Politicking with Words: On Ideology and Dictionary Meaning



            To Polonius' query, What do you read, my
lord?, my answer would have been Words,
words and their final meanings if I had played
Hamlet in the latter half of the 18th century, with
Samuel Johnson's Dictionary in my hand.  I would
have taken in good earnest the definitions of those
entries that people usually quote for gratuitous
pleasure but dismiss as crotchety.  In the mid-19th
century, however, I should have replied, Words,
words and their provisional meanings, with reference
to the opposite and, at times, equally crotchety
definitions of the same entries, reading Noah Webster's
An American Dictionary of the English Language
(1828) on the stage.  On the second occasion I
would have grown somewhat circumspect about dictionary
meaning not simply because Johnson and
Webster diverge so widely, but because meaning per
se is determined by relative historical and ideological
conditions.

            It is a commonplace that dictionary is the mark of
authority and the standard.  That the standard is collectively
agreed upon through convention and practice
is another truism.  But collectivity can be a problematic
concept since it does not cover all in society
as far as fixing the linguistic standard is concerned.
Given that society is heavily stratified into classes and
ranks, all those living in it do not have a uniform level
of literacy and the same degree of access to the process
of linguistic standardization.  As this process is
controlled by the culturally and politically dominant
group or class, the ideology of dictionary adapts itself
to the dominant ideology at all points of time.  Since
wide acceptability is the goal of ideology, it makes its
cultural and political agenda invisible and makes itself
look natural and objective.  The giant publishing
houses in England and America turning out hundreds
of dictionaries of various sizes and kinds always regard
objectivity and fidelity to actual usage as ideals
and marketability as the end.  In practice, indiscreet
lapses from objectivity do occur nonetheless, and the
market suffers occasional setbacks.  A few years ago,
an edition of Longman's English dictionary had included
in its definition of Bangkok , a city with a lot
of prostitutes.  Provoked by this, Chulalongkorn
University in Bangkok and the leading bookstores
there decided to boycott the dictionary.

            Another event that clearly illustrates how ideological
conditions determine meanings of words in a
dictionary occurred when the twentieth edition of
the Duden dictionary came out.  This was the first
all-German dictionary to be published after the unification
of the two Germanys.  In those days, the definition
of capitalism , among many others, read in
conflicting ways in the Duden dictionaries in East
and West Germany, which was natural considering
their opposed political and ideological dispositions.
In English translation they are as follows:


a social formation based upon exploitation of
the labourers through private property and production
means

[East German Duden Dictionary]

            

            Then Webster goes on to hint at the notoriety of the
Tories by tracing the word Tory back to an Irish
word meaning robber or bandit.  As for Johnson,
he believed it to be a cant term, derived...from
an Irish word signifying a savage.  Here Johnson
confers on the Tories the distinction of being the
true representatives of English politics and religion,
although one should not forget that the Whigs, too,
believed in the constitution of the state equally well
and used the same rhetoric for their own publicity.
But Webster's role in this context was only to tarnish
the image of the Tories and brighten that of the
Whigs.

            Johnson dismissively defines Whig as the name
of a faction and spitefully remarks that the term
derives from whigamore denoting people from
south-west counties of Scotland, whose poverty
drove them to rise against the court and Scottish
royal authority etc.  Webster, on the contrary, stubbornly
maintains that the origin of the word is unknown
and shows the Whigs in a favourable light by
presenting them as the advocates of popular
rights during the English Civil War and as the
friends and supporters of the war and principles of
revolution during the revolution in the United
States.

            In 18th century England, Tories and Whigs
were engaged in a battle of rhetoric, each group
claiming monopoly of the custodianship of constitutional
democracy and national tradition.  In America,
similarly, the Federalist party and the Republican
Democratic party were contesting with each other
for the exclusive title of friends to the constitution
of the United States in the 19th century.  Thus polarization
in politics had led to proliferation of partisan
political meanings.  Claims and denials as well as vilification
of the opponents and self-glorification characterized
political discourse both in England and
America at different times.  Johnson and Webster
took up political positions that turned out to be antagonistic
irrespective of the gap in space and time.
For each one of them the dictionary was a site of
political struggle clearly signifying ideological underpinnings.

            Ideology surely informs meaning.  If meaning
appears neutral, as it does in the modern dictionaries,
it is only so following the dictates of objectivity,
an ideology in itself, and the politics of invisibility.


economic and social order whose driving force
is the individual earning profit

[West German Duden Dictionary]

            

            After the unification, the West German definition
predictably featured in the new dictionary, displacing
the East German counterpart.  Also, many
words and usages exiled from East Germany now
found a place as free citizens in the world of linguistic
glasnost, which this dictionary represented.  A
few of them are Republikflucht leaving the country
illegally, meinungs freiheit freedom of opinion,
Wettreise journey around the world, Freizeit leisure
time, and Stasi secret police.  Indeed, the
changing socio-political and historical conditions determine
origin, currency, and extinctions of words as
well as their meanings.  Conversely, the words and
meanings determine these conditions.

            To return to Johnson and Webster, we may cite
pension, Tory , and Whig as illustrative samples of a
good many politically charged entries.  In Johnson's
Dictionary, pension is defined thus:


In England it is generally given to a state hireling
for treason to his country.

            

            In Webster's American Dictionary , it reads:


An annual allowance of a sum of money to a
person by government in consideration of the
past services, civil or military.  Men often receive
pensions for eminent services on retiring from
office.  But in particular, officers, soldiers and sea
men receive pension when they are disabled for
further services.
            

            Johnson's terse and narrow definition reveals his
Tory opposition to the Whigs, who normally were
the government.  In his time they were seen as arms
of a growing and ever more intrusive governmental
institution, to quote Robert De Maria, Jr.'s The
Politics of Johnson's Dictionary, [ PMLA , Vol. 104,
No. 1 (Jan. 1989) p. 65].  But Webster's elaborate
and labored definition is an argument for pension.
In the 1780s there had been a nation-wide protest
against grant of pension by the Congress to officers
who had served in the Continental Army during the
American War of Independence.  The Convention of
the protesters at Middletown, Connecticut, demanded
repeal of pension.  Webster rose to its defense
and contended that the social unrest had been
caused by a misrepresentation of the word.  People
did not distinguish between pension granted as a
provision for old officers and pension granted for the
purpose of bribery for favor and support.  He maintained
that pension was half pay for ex-officers.

            
               Tory is defined in Johnson's Dictionary as


One who adheres to the ancient constitution of
the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the
Church of England.
            

            It contrasts sharply with Webster's definition:

The name given to an adherent to the ancient
constitution of England and to the apostolical hierarchy.
The tories form a party which are [sic]
charged with supporting more arbitrary principles
in government than the Whigs, their opponents.
In America during the revolution, those
who opposed the war, and favored the claims of
Great Britain were called tories.
            
         
         
            Horse Words in a Motor Age



            The replacement of animal power by motors has
vastly changed social life in many ways; yet language
is conservative, and horse words have survived
the loss of horses very well, remaining in the general
vocabulary to be widely used without horsey associations
even among people who have nothing to do
with horses.  Many of these words are used figuratively,
and others have simply transferred their meanings
to modern objects and conditions, especially
those having to do with rail and motor transport.

            Our most basic expressions for transportation
are traceable to horse imagery.  We drive motor vehicles
as we once drove horses; indeed, until 1900,
the very question Can you drive?  meant Do you
know how to drive horses?  We ride in vehicles as
we ride horses -- even the word road is rooted in
ride.  Street is from the Latin via strata , a paved road,
a phrase whose own history mirrors the relation of
ride and road: via road is cognate not only with our
way , but with a whole set of Latinate words suggesting
movement: vehement, convey , and even vehicle
itself; just as way is related to wag and wagon .

            We can scarcely talk about motor vehicles without
using words that originally applied to horse-drawn
ones.  Vehicle itself is Latin vehiculum a carriage;
and even the early automobilist heard his machine
called a horseless carriage , just as the early
railroader heard his called an Iron Horse , which of
course drew carriages of its own.  (Apt names, actually:
a chuffing steam train starting or stopping really
does sound like an excited horse; and the earliest
railway carriages, like the earliest motorcars, looked
very much like their horse-drawn counterparts, having
been built by the same craftsmen.)  Train recalls
the image of a pack-train , a string of the packhorses
who carried much of Europe's freight before good
roads; and the very strength of machinery has long
been measured in horsepower , significantly shortened
simply to horses .

            
               Car , the plainest of our motor-vehicle words,
has a complicated history.  Originally Celtic for
wagon , it was borrowed into Latin and thence Norman
French as carre , yielding not only the verb
carry and its abstract carriage , but also cargo,
charge, chariot.  (Cart and coach are not related to it,
the first being Anglo-Saxon and the second named
for the Hungarian city of Kocs , an early manufactory.)
Early modern English used car poetically for
the chariots of the sun and planets, as in Milton's
image of a maritime sunset in Comus: And the
gilded car of day / His glowing axle doth allay / In
the steep Atlantic stream.

            In Victorian America, car was quickly applied to
railway carriages, whence boxcars and passenger-cars ,
and also to tramways, first to horsecars and then
to electric-cars , otherwise known as trolley cars , or
streetcars , or simply cars (whence carfare ).  Until the
early 1900s, to ride the cars meant to take a tram,
and the man in the cars was used as sobriquet for an
average person, like the man in the street .  When
automobiles were introduced, someone coined motorcar .
When this in turn shortened to car , the word
assumed its modern sense, which soon overtook all
the others.

            Most other vehicle words transferred their
meanings from horse to motor with less fuss.  Rig
once applied to wagons; so did truck and its British
counterpart lorry .  Farming implements like plow
and hayrake have kept their old horse-drawn names,
and so have most utility vehicles, like fire engine,
Black Maria, paddy wagon, ambulance , and delivery
van --the last clipped from caravan living wagon,
which survives in full in England to mean a camping
trailer.  Bus is clipped from omnibus , which means
for everybody in Latin: it was a slang term for the
horse-drawn public transport of the early 1800s.
The cab of taxicab is from cabriolet , a light passenger
cart; and hack is hackney coach , a coach for hire,
hackney or hack being a hired horse and by extension
anything shoddy and overused, whence hack-word
and hackneyed phrases.  Liberal generous
yielded livery stables , which hired out horses as to-day's
livery services hire out taxis and limousines.

            In describing mechanical contrivances, the
Germans continue to use their word Wagen to mean
car, as in Volkswagen ; and American English has
the compound station wagon , originally a horse vehicle
for fetching people at train stations.  The British
call station wagons estate cars , but they refer to
freight cars on a train as goods wagons (borrowed
into French as plain wagon , also used in wagons-lits ,
the sleeping cars on old trains like the Orient Express).
Carriage and coach are also rail terms now;
but the British still use dual carriageway for the kind
of road Americans call a divided highway , and coach
remains in use both as a euphemism for a longdistance
bus and somewhat bizarrely as the name
for the cheap seats on an airplane.  French gives us
porte-cochère , originally a porch under which one
entered a coach.  We modernize this in the loan-translation
carport .

            With horses, wagons carry freight and have four
wheels; carts may carry anything but have two
wheels.  A passenger vehicle is a carriage ; if it has
four wheels and is light and cheap it is also a buggy ,
and if heavy and enclosed, a coach.  (Sleds are wagons
with runners, and sleighs are carriages with runners,
though the British use sledge for both.)  Two
points stand out about these words.  First, many are
still used in their own right, but in trivialized senses:
little red wagons for kids, go-carts and golf carts and
shopping carts (all more than two-wheeled, though,
called shopping trolleys in Britain),  Olympic bobsleds
and sleds for coasting down hills, dune buggies
for zooming around beaches, and even baby carriages
and baby buggies .  Second, the suggestion of
towing has vanished in the modern uses of these
words, except in the train senses, for we call anything
towed behind a motor vehicle a trailer .  We
even have horse trailers for transporting horses --
putting the car before the horse, so to speak, though
I have never heard anyone mention the irony in this.

            Most of the old names for vehicles' constituent
parts persist in our newer machines too: wheels and
tires and axles and brakes and springs , of course; but
also the collective name for all this stuff, the under-carriage
now applied to cars and trains and even
airplanes!  (The undercarriage was also called the
gear , whence landing gear .)  Steering wheels and
steering itself were originally boat words, and hubs
and spokes persist in metaphors and bicycles more
than in cars (except for hubcaps ).  But cartwheel was
kept as a nickname for a silver dollar, and it also
charmingly describes a playful whirling jump.

            Many names also survive from the body of a carriage.
Many carriages had folding tops , exactly like
convertibles.  The oldest enclosed coaches originally
had two passenger seats facing each other, an arrangement
preserved in the compartments of European
trains; but later coaches often had only one
enclosed seat, as if the coach had been cut -- or in
French, coupé .  Coachwork still means bodywork;
and at least in America the luggage compartment at
the rear is still called a trunk (it once really was a
trunk, as you can see in pictures of old coaches and
even old motorcars).  The horn is the literal and figurative
descendant of the post horn , the spiral horn
that was carried by a mail coach to announce its arrival
in a village and whose image is still the post
office symbol in much of Europe.  The strangest survival
is dashboard : on an open carriage this is a small
vertical shield by the driver's feet, and like the fenders
over the wheels, it keeps mud from being dashed
up as the horses go.

            When we say that luxurious little stores serve
the carriage trade , we commemorate the coachmen
who waited in the cold while the very rich shopped,
for only the very rich could afford to come in carriages
of their own.  If the public wished to travel,
they could take stagecoaches, which employed an
extra man besides the driver called a guard , who was
armed to protect the vehicle from bandits.  In England
the office survives figuratively on trains, where
the guard corresponds to the American conductor or
trainman .  In America we retain the notion more colorfully
when we say someone is riding shotgun on a
project, acting as a troubleshooter.

            
               Coach in the artistic or sports sense is an abstraction
of the vehicle sense; for as the OED explains,
an instructor was thought to convey his
students toward mastery.  Team , now also a sports
word, is rooted in tow , and originally referred to the
set of horses used to draw a vehicle.  A four-horse
team is called a four-in-hand , and this has given its
name to a necktie knot (the narrow kind, not the
wide Windsor knot).  A man who drives team is a
teamster , a word preserved in the name of the American
truckers' union.

            Following a trend we hop on the bandwagon , the
gaudiest wagon in a circus parade.  Giving up alcohol,
we are simply on the wagon , the water wagon
that sprinkled down dusty dirt roads in summertime.
You can't do business from an empty wagon -- an
empty peddler's wagon--and if you heed the advice
of the other Ralph Emerson, you will hitch your
wagon to a star .  Fixing someone's wagon is teaching
them a lesson, and pipe up about grievances: the
squeaky wheel gets the grease , because a wagon's
hubs rotate directly on the axletrees and squeak if
they are not greased constantly.  Taking something
away, we cart it off; and scandals fester until the
tumbrels roll, the executioner's carts of the French
Revolution.  The ordinary French cart, the charette ,
bedevils architects, who charette when they finish
drafting in a great hurry at the very last minute.  An
office doing this is said to be on charette -- literally
on the cart, as if everyone were stuffed in and frantically
working away till the very moment they clattered
up to the client's door!

            
               Leaning into the collar is working hard: imagine
a horse straining against the collar to pull a heavy
load.  The leather eye-patches sewn to the sides of
the halter ( blinders in America and blinkers in England)
keep a horse from shying by narrowing vision
to the road directly ahead, the sense implied when
we say that someone does something with blinders
on or has a blinkered viewpoint.  In tandem is often
used to mean simultaneously or even side-by-side,
but a tandem hitch is actually one or two horses
ranged one in front of the other, in a single line, with
tandem originally going back to a Latin pun.  On the
other hand, a troika -- three political powers working
together -- harks back to a Russian hitch of three
horses abreast.

            We coax balking people like reluctant draft animals
with carrot and stick , get them back into harness
after a holiday, yoke them to co-workers like
oxen, drive them hard as part of a team .  Companies
even keep stables of lawyers or designers or whatnot.
Marrying, we get hitched , like harnessed
horses; and we even try to harness wind and sun and
people's enthusiasm.  We whip up enthusiasm too, as
a horseman whips up his team to get them going.
And horsewhipping once settled many public arguments,
since whips were commonly carried on errands
so they would not be stolen from the parked
buggies.  An old catalogue from the Wadsworth Atheneum
Gallery in Hartford even read: Umbrellas,
Parasols, Canes and Whips to be left at the head of
the stairs.

            Of course, the buggy whip is rare enough today
to be a byword for anything hopelessly outmoded --
the buggy-whip industry being singled out with a
particular chuckle -- and horse-and-buggy days has
become the byword for a whole lost era.
         
         
            
The city streets are being decimated,' by illegal
dumpers, DiClaudio told the judge.  [From The Philadelphia
Daily News, page 10, n.d.  Submitted by .]

         
         
            
The goods on garlic:...Garlic shots are a vicious
measure of garlic-flavoured liquor.  [From The Globe and
Mail, .  Submitted by .]
         
         
            Chunnel Vision




            The desultory dialogue recorded below is a verbatim
rendering of the sort of conversation one
might overhear on Eurostar as it chunders towards
London.  As well as their duty-free plus, the two
English speakers have a selection of French vocabulary
to declare.  Many of these words and phrases
are here, even as we speak, but largely confined to
literary/academic circles.  With the advent of the
Channel Tunnel, however, we may expect a Gallic
idiom to enter common usage as the century itself
chunders towards the year 2000...


Scene - A Eurostar coach.  ARTHUR sits next to
TIMOTHY, who looks rough.

            

            ARTHUR: Not quite the rendezvous with Destiny
the brochure claims, perhaps, but still--where once
there was a watery impasse, now there's Anglo-French
rapport and a Eurotunnel.  And very fin de
siècle it is, too.

            The train pulls out of La Gare du Nord.

            ARTHUR: (sighing) I'm always sad to leave.  No
matter how prodigious your joie de vivre, partir
c'est mourir un peu, don't you think?

            TIMOTHY: (blinking) Pardon?

            ARTHUR: Ça ne fait rien.  One too many nuits
blanches, eh?  The spirit is always willing, but for
the flesh -- especially under the eyes -- they can be
something of a bête noire...I bet you'll miss the
grub, though.

            TIMOTHY: Only the bread.  Those baguettes are
real bargain-stretchers -- and you can use them as
bâtons on the Métro, too.

            ARTHUR: But what about cordon bleu?  Didn't
you dine out while you were over?

            TIMOTHY: Burger King on the Champs Elysées,
mostly.

            ARTHUR: I'm talking about haute cuisine, not les
bas fonds!  I think you're missing something.  I had
myself some amazing blowouts...I particularly
remember some pâté de foie gras I sampled.  It made
all the pâté de foie gras I'd tasted previously seem
mere pastiche.  It was a tour de force.  Shame the
wine -- a parvenu Chardonnay -- proved to be a
weak link.

            TIMOTHY: I'm strictly a snacker at the best of
times -- I prefer vignettes to full-coursers.  I did try a
crêpe suzette once, but it tasted like paper.  I'd
rather spend money on a film than --

            ARTHUR: Ah, a film buff.  Tell me: when is a director
simply a director and when an auteur?

            TIMOTHY: Hey, I'm just a filmgoer.  Call me
passé, but if a movie has a decent plot and credible
characters I go home happy.

            ARTHUR: But after Godard's riposte to the raconteur,
no rapprochement is possible between --

            TIMOTHY: To be honest, a lot of the films recommended
by the critics make me feel more like a voyeur
than a spectator --

            ARTHUR: Of course -- a contemporary film narrative
(if it can properly be called a narrative) puts
voyeurism under surveillance.

            TIMOTHY: I see... They're never short of a
nude or two, that's for sure, but for my money there
are too many longueurs.  But I'd sooner a film than
an art gallery any day.  You never know what might
turn up as an objet d'art, do you?  ...Or maybe
you do.

            ARTHUR: If you mean that succès de scandale
where the artist showcased a border-control barrier
with a Cupid's arrow and Naomi Campbell 4 The
Elephant Man scrawled on it --

            TIMOTHY: No, it's just that I find all those objets
trouvés so recherchés.  The attitude behind them --
ça me fait chien.

            ARTHUR: Are you au fait with Jeff Koons?

            TIMOTHY: Koons?  The name rings a bell...
Yes, I'm nearly sure somebody answering to that
name tried to flog me a vacuum cleaner once.  I remember
because the price he was asking was so
outré.

            ARTHUR: Funny you should say that because
there are those who consider him a traveling salesman
manqué.  But for others he's vital link with a
tradition of impertinence dating back to dada in general
and Duchamp's urinal in particular.  Like yourself,
I have reservations about objets trouvés: I
don't think they become aesthetic simply because
they cease to be functional.  For me, Koons is the
latest manifestation of je m'en foutisme.  In short, so
much blague.  Duchamp's urinal was a pis aller after
which there should have been silence, broken only
by the occasional gurgle from the cistern.

            TIMOTHY: I'm partial to water-colors myself and
a bit dubious about anything since the Impressionists,
who might justifiably have prophesied, Aprés
nous, le déluge...

            ARTHUR: I share your wariness, to a point.  Too
many modern artists have a penchant for leaning
over backwards to tease critics, but forget all about
I'homme moyen sensuel who, more often than not,
likes his pictures in comics.

            TIMOTHY: Bien sûr.  Where are the punchlines in
painting?

            ARTHUR: Well, Picasso's work combines austere
geometry with ebullient jocularity: even his most
tormented images can seem like jeux d'esprit.  Contours
are broken and illogical simultaneous viewpoints
gleefully entertained.  But see the way he negotiates
the crévasses and avalanches of the image's
fragmentation -- quel éclat!  His was a brush with
lawlessness on its side; a brush as sure-footed as a
chamois--

            TIMOTHY: But a bit of a bounder in his private
life, by all accounts.  Revenons à nos moutons, however
--

            ARTHUR: Revenons à nos moutons, if it's
punchlines you're after, look no further than that
quiff on Picasso's La Femme dans le jardin or the
sculptures in --

            TIMOTHY: Maybe au fond I'm just a philistine,
but I can never quite convince myself that artists
obsessed with the naked human form aren't pornographers,
by any other nom de plume.  I know loose
morals are de rigeur for la vie de Bohème, but --

            ARTHUR: Pornography may be risqué, but it
takes no chances, aesthetically speaking.  It's a question
of style --

            He raises a hand to quell TIMOTHY'S protests.

            ARTHUR: I know -- but what is style?  Bon ton?
Flair?  Panache?  Aplomb?  Verve?  Chic?  Élan?  The
trouble with all those terms is they associate style
with élégance and ignore its jolie-laide dimension.
Any discussion of what constitutes style must encompass
tributaries as diverse as the lavatory humor
found in Gargantua & Pantagruel and the exquisite
diction presiding over Belinda's toilette in The Rape
of the Lock .  À propos of this diversity of styles, it
might be remarked that diversifiers have often been
discriminated against by critics, who would have
would-be Renaissance-men specialize; they throw a
cordon sanitaire around respective artistic endeavors
with a rapidity and thoroughness that is most
unhealthy.  Any genre-hopping is strongly discouraged.
And if these pogo-stickers are acknowledged
at all, it's their fate to be fêted in one medium and
disparaged in others, although they may (like Wyndham
Lewis, say) have been accomplished in more
than one.  In this way, first-rate peripatetic artists
are consigned to the pantheon's banlieux rather than
its 7th arrondissement.

            TIMOTHY: I wouldn't know about that, but I
think the work should speak for itself.  Any critiques
are de trop.

            ARTHUR: Certainly the work should speak for itself,
ç a va sans dire.  Despite the plethora of synonyms
for it, style continues to elude definitions with
finesse.  It's maybe three-fifths savoir-faire douched
with two-fifths je ne sais quoi--if that's the mot
juste.  I'd say, le style, c'est l'homme, but look at
Eric Cantona --

            TIMOTHY: What, you mean the Manchester
United ace given to contretemps with footballing authorities
and fits of Gallic pique?

            ARTHUR: I was thinking more of the Rimbaud
scholar whose arabesques cause defenses to wobble
like blancmanges.  How can we reconcile the boorish
drop-kick aimed at the Crystal Palace fan in the
stands with Eric's suave skills on the pitch?  He's
been banned till October so the rest of the season
will be a real saison en enfer for him -- he'll have
plenty of time to write a dissertation on everybody's
favorite poète maudit.  For me, Rimbaud never graduated
from being an enfant terrible to become a major
poet; he only compounded the cliché inaugurated
by Villon, that is, combining absinthe-fueled
dissipation on slender means with a vacillating devotion
to his art.  He wound up trading it in for gunrunning
and died of a gangrenous tumor, but chacun
à son goût, as one amputee said to another.

            ARTHUR's monologues are taking effect; TIMOTHY
feels quite drained.

            TIMOTHY: I think I'll nip out to the buffet-car--

            ARTHUR: I'd approach the French onion soup
with a soupçon of distrust, if I were you.

            TIMOTHY: Thanks for the warning.  It was nice
listening to you...Adieu.

            ARTHUR: Pas du tout -- we must do it again
sometime.

            But next time TIMOTHY resolves to fly.  OK, so
on a good day Chunnel is faster than flying on a
bad day, but the monologues on Air Liberté are
shorter.
         
         
            No Boys Named Sue, But...




            The most popular name in my (all-female) class
at school was Ann/Anne.  There were four or
five of them.  Also two Susans and one Suzanne.  To
even think of using any of the variations for a boy
would have raised both a laugh and an eyebrow.
Which is the whole point of the song A Boy Named
Sue.

            Yet some centuries before there was a boy
named Anne : the full-bearded face of Anne de
Montmorency 1493-1567, soldier, courtier, Constable
of France, gazes from his portrait with supreme
aristocratic confidence.  Head of a powerful clan,
winner of wars, adviser to kings, father of five (legitimate)
sons, he was also, reproves the Encyclopaedia
Britannica , irascible and a ruthless authoritarian.
It deplores his scorched earth policy and
ruthless crushing of a peasants rebellion.  Just the
ungentle times in which he lived?  Or something to
do with his name?  Did he, like the mythical Boy
Named Sue, continually have to prove himself?
His godmother was Anne, Duchesse of Brittany and
Queen of France (twice).  Anne, from the Hebrew
Hannah God-favored and reputedly the name of
the Blessed Virgin's Mother, has always been popular
with European royalty.  The derivative Nancy , although
used for girls at least since the time of Queen
Anne (d. 1714), is not found for catamite until (says
Partridge) about 1810.  It therefore seems unlikely
to be in any way connected with the excessively macho
Constable.

            We had no female Michaels nor even a Michal ,
although they were not unknown.  John Barrymore's
long-suffering wife was Michael Strange.  Miss
Michael Learned delighted TV viewers in The
Waltons .  Did she have to battle with her agent in
the early stages of her career?

            
               Also high in the female popularity stakes in
1940s' England were Shirley and Alison : Shirley
Temple reigned supreme and Charlotte Bronte's
heroine gave intellectual respectability.  Originally a
Yorkshire place and surname, it had mainly masculine
associations for centuries.  Alison , the Gaelic
form of Alice , actually means  son of Alice.  The only
other Gaelic name widely acceptable to the middle
classes that I remember was Deirdre.  Fiona lay in
the future, together with Karen, Sinead , and a host
of others, all unequivocally female.

            In the school were two red-headed sisters, Carol
and Noel (not Carol e  or Noel le ).  Were they the
daughters of a clergyman who surely admired neither
Carole the Cad one-time King of Romania,
nor Noël Coward; but perhaps yearned for sons?

            There was a Vivien who could be comforted by
sharing her confusing name with a major star, Vivien
Leigh.  Some boys carried the fanciful variant
Vyvian .

            The Leslies were more fortunate, for their sex
was distinguished by the spelling.  This was before
Humphrey Bogart muddied the waters by calling his
daughter Lesley after Lesley Howard.  It has been
suggested to me that this name has lost a great deal
of its popularity for girls due to its diminutive, Les ,
too easily confused with lez (for lesbian ), which
seems a pity.  It has a pleasing sound once used by
the poet Burns with his Bonnie Lesley , and its
French form is immortalized by the delightful Leslie
Caron.

            Howard's character Ashley in Gone With The
Wind is now unisex.  In 1989 it was recorded as the
second most common girl's name in the US.  Indeed,
in the less tradition-bound atmosphere of the New
World, dual-purpose Kellys, Caseys, Beverleys,
Madisons , and Dales abound.

            It seems that just as English spelling in general
became more formalized with the spread of literacy,
so the gendering of names also became more defined.
For example, I have an 18th-century ancestress
shown in contemporary records as both Christian
and Christina -- never, until an inaccurate
1920s' copy of the family tree, as Christine .

            The use of surnames as given names is worthy of
note.  The patronymics of powerful tribes such as
Howard, Clarence, Cecil, Percy, Douglas, Bruce, Tudor ,
and Stuart are all seen as masculine.  Yet Cecil
was initially a girl's name.  One of the poet Edmund
Spenser's (d.1599) most poignant elegies commemorates
Douglas Howard Georges , the wife of Arthur
Georges.  Similarly, the mystic, Lady Julian of Norwich
(1342-post 1416) took her masculine name
from the Chapel of St. Julian where she had her
Hermitage.  (Surely not from the apostate emperor?)
It is true that from the earliest times she was also
known as Juliana , and all variants of this great Roman
clan name have always been popular, from a
former Queen of the Netherlands to the delicious
Julienne soup, named after a female cook.  The apparently
straightforward transference of clan names
can, however, lead to confusion.  The Irish practice
of bestowing a maternal grandparent's surname
upon a first-born son, gives us Joyce Carey (the male
writer).  Joyce Carey (the actress) more likely got
her name from an adaptation of joyeuse .  Much the
same thing occurs with Lucy (often Latinized to Lucius ),
another surname, but when used for girls more
likely to be from the popular saint, or for its meaning,
light.

            This ambiguity could have extended to Rose ,
coming either from the flower or from the Teutonic
for horse.  Yet the only male Rose I can discover is
the nickname of the unlovely villain, Rose Noble , in
Dornford Yates's 1930s' thriller Blind Corner .  Perhaps
there is a Boy Called Rose somewhere in the
States?  There was after all, that male Carmen Cavallero,
conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra,
whose unusual name never failed to intrigue British
television interviewers.  His successor as a transatlantic
purveyor of popular classical music was André
Previn, whose French first name is also occasionally
used for girls, without a qualifying extra e .

            Still in America, Sydney is (according to Collins
Dictionary of Babies' Names ) predominately female,
though an American authority queries this.
Whether it originates with the French Sidonie or the
British Viscount Sydney who gave his name to the
Australian capital, is problematical.  Certainly Nancy
Mitford's mother was so called, and in the 18th century
Sid was even a generic term for girl.  From the
days of the heroic Sir Philip (d. 1586) Sydney
(d. 1586), this has been a popular name, transcending
class barriers: Dickens' Sidney Carton; the comic actor,
Sid James; Sid of the huge government advertising
campaign when privatizing British Gas.

            Privileged families are not a European prerogative:
American Cabot, Lodge , and Winthrop appear
to have been largely used for boys, but Lee is generously
even-handed: J. Cobb; Harvey Oswald; Remick;
and Radziwill.  Transported by the Gulf Stream,
it has even landed on my eldest grandson.  Whether
this widely popular use has anything to do with any
close association with the General Robert E., the distinguished
Virginian family, or even the foundress of
the Shakers, is perhaps unlikely; it is just a very nice
name.

            Most names seem to drift from male to female
(perhaps reflecting a deeper trend).  Not so Evelyn .
In the form Aveline , it was introduced by the
Normans.  Female until the 17th century, it became
a surname and was then widely, but not exclusively
used for boys, generally of the upper or professional
classes: Evelyn Baring the banker; Evelyn Henderson,
brother of a 1930s' British ambassador, and,
most famously, Evelyn Waugh.  His first wife, together
with the mystic Evelyn Underhill, kept up the
female usage.  A slightly differing pronunciation
sometimes distinguishes the gender.  At about the
same time that Aveline/Evelyn crossed the Channel,
it became acceptable to christen children Mary .  Previously
thought too holy for mortal use, once established,
there was no stopping it: Marie; Mairi; Mair;
Ria; Marise; Moira; Marietta; Marion (or Marian ).
Nor, in Europe, was it confined to girls: Carl Maria
von Weber; Eric Maria Remarque; Howard Marion
Crawford.  And, in America, (See Here Private) Marion
Hargrove.

            Once across the Atlantic, however, doubts set in.
The French Constable Anne Montmorency bestrode
French history without apparent difficulty, but it was
feared that no Marion could ride tall in the saddle
however rugged his appearance.  So the studio chiefs
repackaged their discovery, Marion Wayne, as John.
Could he, by the remotest chance, have been the inspiration
for A Boy named Sue?
         
         
            Proper Words in Proper Places




            
               Latin is a language as dead as dead can be.
               It killed the ancient Romans -- and now it's killing
me.
            

            I daresay there is truth in the rhyme we chanted
at school with such feeling.  In our language, dead
words are continuously discarded.  There is considerable
replacement, mostly of high technology words
and changes of meaning.  As new processes are discovered,
there must be a vocabulary to match.

            Some of these dead words are delightful.  Here
are a selection of measurements used when England
was totally agricultural:


broad and narrow oxgang the amount of land
that could be cultivated by an ox, between eight
and ten acres

fardel (farthingdeal) 1/4 acre

landyard Somerset measure for a rod

math the amount of crop mowed

nook corner of a square, small triangular field

quarentena a furlong

            

            A furlong was an eighth of a mile and a rod four and
a half yards in pre-metric times when I started
school.

            The ancient field names are bizarre:


assart land converted into arable

bawn Irish dialect for fortified or cattle enclosure

booly Irish: temporary enclosure where itinerant
herdsmen keep their animals

cockshoot/cockshut clearing through a wood

pightel small enclosed plot

pingle Midlands: paddock

spong Midlands: narrow strip of land

wong a portion of unenclosed land

            

            Even nowadays one comes across dialect words
whose meaning is obscure.  On coming to live in
Gloucestershire, I was puzzled by tump, daps , and
shrammed (hillock, gym shoes, and cold) just as,
no doubt, many visiting the north are confused by
skinch and clarty.  Clarty is such a suitable word to
describe sticky with mud.  Skinch is used in childhood
games to call a truce, usually with crossed
fingers.

            There was a huge vocabulary, now dead, concerning
ancient roads.  Borstal was a hill path,
chare an alley, chimin a legal term for a road
(<French chemin ?), and leet was a crossroads.

            Years ago, while on the Parochial Church Council,
the owner of a cottage adjacent to the churchyard,
had problems with the church wall bulging
onto her path.  A humorless secretary entered this
event in the minutes as The bulging of Miss B's
back passage.  If only he'd had the correct word,
this uncomfortable event could have been referred
to as a tewer , a Midlands term for alleyway.

            Coins and taxes had their own vocabulary too.
An angel was a coin worth 6/8 (34p) in 1464.  A
dandiprat was a 16th-century coin worth 1½p, and
a testoon was 5p.

            
               Pavage, pontage, avenage, beaconage , and furnage
were taxes or tolls for, respectively, paved
roads, bridges, rent in oats, upkeep of beacons, and
the use of the lord's oven.  Childwite was the fine
paid by the father of a bastard.

            The British have always been free with their use
of nicknames, which, being descriptive, are useful to
historians.  As the population grew, Christian names
became insufficient for identification purposes.  A
man's trade became incorporated -- Smith blacksmith,
Cooper barrel maker, Gardener, Farmer ,
and the less obvious, Pinder keeper of the pound,
Parker and Hayward officers responsible for the
care of game and of fences.  Place names often have
developed in the same way.  It is not difficult to see
how Sevenoaks, Newcastle , and Coldharbour developed.

            Sometimes spelling changes obscure the meaning.
Deptford started life as a Deep (Depe) Ford
(across the River Ravensbourne).  Hounds Ditch is
supposed to have been a great pit where hunting
dogs, kenneled in the area, were thrown when dead.
Smithfield was originally Smethe smooth field , flat
enough for local fairs and markets.

            Over the years, meanings change.  Generations
of children must have puzzled over Without a city
wall, from the hymn,


There is a green hill far away,
Without a city wall...

[C.F. Alexander 1818-95]

            

            As used here, the meaning of without outside is
archaic, as in the well-known stage line, The carriage
awaits without.

            It is difficult to believe that treacle was once a
wild animal, that cheater was a rent collector (more
credible), and that a publican was a public servant.
(Publicans and sinners were not people who kept
pubs).  A gossip was a sponsor at a baptism.

            Recent word changes are snuff an illegal film
and gay .  I, for one, mourn the unhappy mutilation
of meaning.  In my youth, one said Goodbye God be
with you on parting.  Nowadays, we just say Cheers ,
an all-purpose word used indiscriminately.
         
         
            All in the Family



            When the National Trust brought out a Country
Craftsmen Happy Families children's
card game some years ago, the names, such as Mr.
Reed the Thatcher, were neatly matched to the occupations.
This has been the tradition since 1851,
the year in which the firm of John Jaques of Hatton
Garden, London, commissioned John Tenniel, the
Punch cartoonist and future illustrator of Lewis Carroll's
Alice books, to design the eleven families of
four members each in their highly successful and
long-lived juvenile pastime.  The main change by
other makers has been that while the original family
names had a clear alliternative link with those of the
jobs, this has not always been observed in later versions.

            The Jaques families were nearly all tradespeople,
in mid-Victorian terms, and even the doctor was
given the title Mr. to fit the format.  The names
were Block (barber); Bones (butcher); Bun (baker);
Bung (brewer); Chip (carpenter); Dip (dyer); Dose
(doctor); Grits (grocer); Potts (painter); Tape (tailor);
Soot (sweep).  A twelfth four-card family, drawn by
Lewis Carroll's niece Irene Dodgson, who married
John Jaques III, was included in the game during
WWI and lasted till just after WWII.  This was Mr.
Mug the Milkman, depicted with slopping-over pail
and hand-bell, who maintained the alliterative pattern.
A majority of the names still work today,
though Block, Chip, Dip , and Grits might well be
opaque to modern children or taken in a different
sense without the accompanying illustration.  Perhaps,
too, Mr. Bung would be a football manager in
recent times.

            In the versions that abandoned the alliterative
connection, it was possibly easier to give a satirical
slant to the names, as with Mr. Sand the Grocer,
probably alluding to the same suspicions of adulteration
in the trade voiced in G.K. Chesterton's verses,
The Song Against Grocers:


He sells us sands of Araby
As sugar, for cash down...

            

            The format was taken up for advertising purposes,
with families of dogs and personified cigarette
brands and was given an ingenious verbal twist
in the 1950s in a large Happy Families set produced
by the drug firm Wyeth to publicize a cough linctus.
All the families had names related to types of cough.
There was thus the Bark family of dog breeders, the
Hack family of woodcutters, the Hoarse jockeys, and
the knife-grinding Rasps .

            Exposure to Happy Families at an early age perhaps
leaves us ever afterwards sensitized to apt
matches -- or mismatches -- of name and profession,
which may be why they seem so easy to spot.  Among
the many treasured examples that have come my way
are Mr. Scales , a deep-sea fisherman, Mr. Main , a
plumber, Mrs. Bridge , a dentist, Mr. Hewitt , a forester,
and Mr. Down , a demolition contractor, who
even manages to alliterate.  But a name may also connect
with the bearer's work in a less fortunate way.  A
glance through the largest occupational group in my
local Yellow Pages turns up farmers with suitably
evocative names like Bale, Bull, Sheaves , and Steer ,
but others called Blight and Greed .  No doubt Farmer
Blight can stand it, and has got used to the jokes produced
by a not altogether happy conjunction of name
and business.  He may be taking some pleasure in the
possible recent discomfiture of the previously appropriately
named Farmer Veale , in the wake of the campaign
against live calf exports from the United Kingdom.
Similar thickness of skin may be required by a
friend's accountant, who is a Crook , and physicians
called Blood and Coffin .

            So familiar is the phenomenon that it was capitalized
on in the late 1980s by the small community of
Dartmouth in Devon to raise money for the town's
swimming pool.  Two separate sets of Happy Families
cards were published using authentic local business
people's names of both the congruent and clashing
kinds, such as Mr. Drew the Artist, who helped with
the production, Mr. Pillar the Builder, and Mr. Killer
the Chemist.

            Despite the total symmetry of farmers actually
called Farmer , most names which either historically
relate to a trade or merely suggest one to us through
some association are carried by people in completely
different occupations.  In this way Mr. Shepherd
may be a jeweler, Mr. Glover a carpenter,
Mr. Bridle a joiner and not a harness-maker, and
Mr. Fudge an estate agent rather than a confectioner
or politician.  There are several Bakers who are
butchers by calling and may even draw attention to
it with advertisements highlighting Bakers the
Butchers , though I have yet to record a Butcher trading
as a baker.  I shall continue to look out as well for
a Smith who actually works as one.
         
         
            On Good Terms




            The shift away from agricultural life progresses
apace.  With this shift also fades the rural idiom
that accompanied it.  All the more reason, then, to
focus on this idiom as seen in colorful terms before it
drops below the horizon.

            Near the highest elevation in Rhode Island in
the woods stands a heap of rocks, a marker, about six
feet high surmounted by a flat, upright slab adding
another two feet to its height.  Such a marker goes
by the name merestone (also meerestone or mear-stone) .
According to the OED2e that term harks
back to a Saxon text dating from 956 AD .  A millennium
later when I asked a nearby resident about the
land marker, although he had not seen it, he without
hesitation called it a merestone .  Few others knew
that term, although John Holdsworth added that it
turns up in old deeds.  For me it served as a milestone
prompting me to collect rare words.

            What would you call a low, narrow strip of land,
for instance, a flat stretch running between a hillside
and a brook?  Answer: a slang.  Webster's Third calls
it dialectal.  OED2e offers a quotation dating from
1610: There runneth forth into the sea a certaine
shelfe or slang, like unto an out-thrust tongue.

            The Auchincloss family dwelling, Hammersmith
Farm at Newport, R.I., originated on the drawing
boards of architect R.H. Robertson, and landscape
architect Frederick Law Olmsted.  The plan as executed
included a barrier, a ha-ha , to prevent livestock
from straying too close to the dwelling.  Though now
in disuse, it consists of a trench three feet deep, on
sloping land, with a retaining wall on the uphill side.
This ha-ha was constructed so as to be completely
invisible to the occupants of Hammersmith Farm.
The ha-ha is probably encountered more often now
in crossword puzzles than in the landscape.

            Five likely dictionaries omit the word tug as it is
used locally.  Block Islander Ellsworth Lathan assured
me that his fellow-islanders refer to peat, once
widely used for fuel, as tug .  To them winning peat
consists of digging tug from bogs and hauling it out
to dry before burning.  Who knows, perhaps the arduous
haul gave rise to the term tug?  Peat bogs,
where tug lies waiting, occur in the lowest land
around.  Hence it comes as no surprise to find in the
town of Exeter a lowland called Tug Hollow .  In such
places, too, is found bog iron , sometimes concentrated
enough to deflect compasses.  Bog iron has
found its way into the dictionary (viz. Webster ), and
so, too, should tug .

            Rhode Islanders have been ridiculed for their
eccentric pronunciation, leaving rs out of words or
adding them at random.  Witness the bumper-sticker
that reads, In Rhode Island Drunk Drivers get
Court.  Or the native son who quoted the Bible
phrase the law of the Lord in such a way that it
came out the lore of the Lawd.  Something like
that happened when a tried-and-true Swamp Yankee
pointed to a tree with an abnormally wide-flaring
bole, saying, It's a churn-buttered oak.  That
needed unscrambling.  Churn because like a butter
churn the tree flares widely at its base.  Since churns
are associated with butter, the word butted , which is
what he meant to say, became converted into buttered .
As a term, churn-butted has identical twins,
swell-butted and the more graphic bell-butted .

            While considering boles, butts and churns, let's
take the word haggle .  Of course, you may say, it
means to argue over a price, hopefully to whittle it
down to size.  That is literally what my friend, Leon
Peckham, meant when he spoke of haggling a stick
of wood .  And that is exactly how the Century Dictionary
defines it: variant form of heckle to hack;
to cut or chop.  Further, OED2e supports this with
its definition, to make cuts, hack.  Leon was right.

            Leon's father had a sawmill where he frequently
spoke of dozy wood, a term seldom used on Times
Square.  As the OED2e delicately puts it, of timber
or fruit in a state of incipient decay.  Akin to dozy is
the term wany (or waney ), used to describe a board
as cut at the sawmill, imperfect because it ran into
bark of the log from which it was cut.

            Once again from the sawmill or more correctly
the planing mill, the term pickwick in the following
sense has nothing to do with Dickens.  When knotty
pine panels are installed, their boards nailed side
by side form quirky joints.  These may be simple
V-shaped grooves or more fancy ones such as a molding
with an ogee curve.  The plane was equipped
with a pickwick , a sharp distinctive cutting edge to
gouge out the desired groove, and the term came to
be applied to the wood as well as the tool.  Pickwick
comes to us from the age of oil lamps: when the wick
burned down too low to give a good flame, it had to
be raised, often by use of a sharp-pointed instrument
designed expressly to do that, a pickwick .  Was a pickwick,
then, the prototype of the sharp-profiled attachment
on a plane?

            After lumberjacks snaked the logs out of the
woods, one log behind another, linked by chains and
horse-drawn, they set aside some logs to be hand-hewn.
Before hewing with the broad ax, they first
scored the logs at intervals to prevent deep, damaging
cuts.  This scoring process they called skaffing ,
and the marks so made, skaffs -- at least so my informants
tell me.  Webster , however, defines skaff as a
saw kerf, labeling the term colloquial New England.
Granted, saws leave kerf marks, uneven
ridges which are straight if they came from the old
up-and-down saws, circular if from the later circular
saws.  But kerf marks on milled timber are hardly the
same as skaffs on hewn logs.  Perhaps the term varied
from place to place and in different ages.

            
               Hay poles as a term would never win a popularity
contest with computer terminology, but lest we
forget, they were poles used in pairs by two men,
one out from with a pole in each hand, the other,
holding the opposite ends, bringing up the rear, and
carrying bales of hay cut by scythe from the hummocks
of a bog.  Making the poles of light-weight
poplar reduced the overall burden.  Horses were of
no use in swamp or swale, but hay poles did the
trick.

            On a dairy farm, if the farmer overworked the
same bull in breeding cows, the cattle would at
length become too inbred.  In such a case Willoughby
Young would observe, There's too much
snipper in the stock.  The nearest I could find to
that in a dictionary was in the Century , which defines
a snipper-snapper as a small, insignificant fellow.
The OED2e defines snipper as a cattle dealer
on a small scale.

            The term dandling board means a seesaw.
This one came to me from a countryman with a remarkable
name, Resolved Waterman, who pronounced
his first name with three syllables.  Solvey,
as everyone called him, kept Holstein oxen and Suffolk
sheep.  Nothing unusual about that, except that
he trained them to perform on a dandling board at
county fairs or before other awestruck audiences.  It
seems doubtful that Disneyland would carry on this
tradition.

            Colorful names from the plant and animal kingdom
are rife.  A few examples follow: dipper duck
for the pied-billed grebe; jakes for young male turkeys
(their elders are toms); loopwood or witch
hobble for the hobblebush ( Viburnum alnifolium )
because the stems bend over and grow roots at the
tips creating a loop that can abruptly trip a hiker in
snowy woods; pippin , not for the apple, but for the
tangy, red berry of wintergreen (Gaultheria procumbens);
pugger for ferret; quong-queedle for the
bobolink; rain crow for the cuckoo, often heard
before rain; scoke (or skoke ) for pokeweed ( Phytolacca
americana ) of Massachusett Indian origin; skipper
for a young deer; and finally an imaginative
one, whippoorwill shoes for the lady's slipper orchid
(Cypripedium acaule) .

            In the kitchen the baker before baking her
bread must make the dough gaumy, by which she
meant moist enough.  OED2e calls gaumy a rare
word and offers the alternate spelling gormy .  One
wonders how gaumy the dough was that Thoreau
mentions when he tells us that his mother left a bowl
of dough overnight to rise, only to find the cate the
next morning comfortably enthroned on the dough.
We trust she rose to the occasion.

            If a forest fire ravaged the trees leaving them
twigless and limbless, the above-mentioned Willoughby
Young would call them dead staddles.
Country people understand this; city people do not.

            Members of the Kenyon family are so numerous
in Rhode Island that one of them commented, If
you lift up a stone in Hope Valley, Kenyons will go
scuttering off in all directions.  Picturesque, and
the meaning is perfectly clear.

            Finally, Willoughby, who was my mentor in matters
of country language, explained the term scythe
rifle.  He had shown me his boiling spring, a spring
that boils up from the depths and also bubbles.  He
and his folks used to collect the sand from a boiling
spring to make scythe rifles.  This tool was used for
sharpening scythes on the hayfield in hot July.  A
scythe rifle consisted of a stick of wood flattened on
two sides like a paint paddle, then smeared with Le
Page's glue and sprinkled liberally with the dried
sand from a boiling spring.  So said Willoughby.
Pleased with my new knowledge, I paraded if before
another old-timer, John Lester Brown, who caught
me up short.  That's the new way of doing it. quoth
he.  The old way was to take a flat stick, hickory was
good, and jab it with an ice pick hundreds of times,
spread beef tallow over the pits, and finally sprinkle
boiling spring sand on and work it in.  That, he
concluded, would last two or three years on the hayfield.
Surprisingly even Ralph Waldo Emerson Knew
about scythe rifles.  In his essay on Prudence he remarks,
...what is more lonesome than the sound
of a whetstone or mower's rifle when it is too late in
the season to make hay.

            The words or terms included herein comprise a
mere cross-section, a sampler of the language of rural
America, these coming only from the smallest state.
The people who use them use a language far richer
than that of simple Basic English.  Old words fade
out.  New words take their place.  But isn't that the
difference between a dead and a living language?
         
         
            
Whenever there is something that is a concern to
me, I peddle my butt up there,' [Taborsak] said, referring
to the senate chamber... [From The News-Times (Danbury,
Connecticut), .  Submitted by .]

         
         

            A Discouraging Word




            A few months ago, when I installed and turned
on my new computer, the name of the startup program
that appeared on the screen was not Macintosh
HD, as the manual assured me it should be, but
Balagan.  Nowhere in the manual (and I searched repeatedly)
was this term cited.  More frustrating, Balagan
allowed me to proceed nowhere.

            New users of newly bought software are especially
vulnerable when seeking help.  They are easily
persuaded that their inability to work with the computer
lies not with hardware, software, or any ware.
The fault, dear computer user, is not in our wares
but in ourselves, to coin an expression for computer
salespeople.  To get rid of Balagan, change the name,
I was told, to any name you want.  I might have replied
that that program by any other name would be
as sinister.  For a time, balagan was the most discouraging
word in my vocabulary.  Store staff finally took
back the computer, grudgingly.  There weeks later,
they gave it back, de-balaganized somehow.  They
wouldn't say.

            Was there in the store, I asked, a mischievous
employee, a Mr. or Ms. Balagan, who playfully infected
my machine with a computer virus (whatever
that is)?  Among the many I queried, merriment at my
discomfort was evident.

            Last week, I started a book, The Hope, by Herman
Wouk.  Imagine my frisson when, after only a few
pages into Chapter 1, I came upon this exchange between
characters:


What's happening?
Utter and complete balagan! That's what's happening
!

            

            The author helpfully dropped this footnote:


Balagan.  In modern Hebrew, mess, foulup, snafu,
fiasco.  A loan word from the Russian, used in
Israel with extraordinary frequency.

            

            I congratulated myself.  I was evidently correct.
Balagan was planted in the computer to foul it up.
Having read enough fiction for the day, I turned to
the New York Times.  In the Arts and Leisure section,
I was drawn to a headline about the Holocaust.  The
article, datelined Florence, Italy, described a documentary
about the legacy of the Holocaust called--
you guessed it-- Balagan.  The film takes its title, the
article said, from the Hebrew word for chaos.

            Can English be far behind?  Announce the coming
so that VERBATIM readers can say I know, I know.

         
         
            You can have your cake and eat it




            There is a notion favored by the bureaucrats in
Brussels that products should not be named after a
place or sound like some original thing such as champagne
or cheddar cheese unless they come from that
place.  The obvious one is of course the humble Brussels
sprout, although I am unsure if this little green
monster should have a capital to denote it's capital.  I
don't care for sprouts much, and don't buy enough of
them to worry about their correct form of address.

            This subject often arises in pubs and restaurants
where food is served.  Food is the most obvious subject,
but the range of everyday things which might at
some time have to be renamed is extensive.  First,
there are obvious and widespread things like Eccles
cakes, Lancashire hotpot, Cornish pasty, and Welsh
rarebit.  This is part of a much longer geographical
list of foodstuffs which can be expanded to include
some sublime candidates such as Turkish delight,
French toast, Indian tonic water, chicken Maryland,
and Tiger nuts, although the last might defy such easy
categorization.  Bombay duck (which is some sort of
fish) seems to be like a double fault, but just think of
all those dishes on the menus of your favorite restaurants.
Does Bombay alloo come from Bombay?  Is the
Madras flown in specially that day?  Where is
Vindaloo?
            

            Another (rather dubious) category is anatomy
with tennis elbow and housemaid's knee .  Then
there's Derbyshire neck, which is a complaint, not an
activity.  We also have bow legs, Roman noses, pigeon
chests, not to mention German measles, chicken pox,
and crow's feet.
            

            One might want to include clothing with anatomy
one the grounds of proximity.  Oxford bags, like
flares, might one day come back into fashion, while
Wellington boots obviously won't.  Arran sweaters are
both attractive and fashionable, but the idea of a
Guernsey Jersey is rather difficult to cope with.  Codpieces
are definitely out, which is a good thing since,
like the Chelsea bun, they fall into a category called
could also be food.

            Sometimes, one encounters exotica.  The last
Venus flytrap I saw was in Kew, and I've seen Mars
bars in a shop in Basingstoke.  Canterbury bells are
nothing like Westminster chimes, Manchester tart is
different from Bakewell.  Black Forest gateau competes
with chocolate log.  Swedish massage is performed
in Turkish baths.  Roman candles, Greek yoghurt,
Spanish fly, navel oranges --they will all have
to be changed.  A Mountain bike or a Hackney cab
could be used to go to Cumberland for a sausage,
passing through Barnsley for a chop with, of course,
Yorkshire pudding .  Will we be able to have the same
meals riding in a Surrey ?  One of my friends has a
Panama hat which he swears he wore in Vienna.  He
wants to know if Victoria sponge with a Bath bun and
Malvern water is of interest.  He is a consumer of the
Indian tonic water with the famous London dry gin,
which explains the tortuous logic in his offering.  His
drink has, in fact prompted the lemon washing up
liquid category into which we should put oddities
like Tiger balm, Manila envelope, French kiss, Chinese
burn.
            

            Although we have clearly invented a new and
potentially dangerous way to look at the world
through the eye of the Brussels Can't Have This
department, we can now design whole menus of the
forbidden food variety.  Breakfast could be Canadian
bacon, English muffin with Seville marmalade, Irish
breakfast tea .  Elevenses might be a bit of Dundee
cake and a Granny Smith apple.  Lunch could be York
ham with Worcester sauce washed down with a nice
drop of India Pale Ale.  In the afternoon you might
want to suck an Everton mint to tide you over until
dinner, which could include: Dover sole with Leek
puree; Turkey with the usual bits and pieces, including
the dreaded Brussels sprouts; Spotted dick with
custard and a variety of cheeses such as Scottish
cheddar, Somerset brie, and Wensleydale from
Wales, not forgetting the Bath Olivers.  Of course,
you would have to drink something, and I suggest a
nice Suffolk Punch as an appetizer, followed by a
French Pilsener with the fish and a good Australian
Shiraz with the turkey, finishing with a spot of Kendal
mint cake .

            I don't want to provide any more bureaucratic
grapeshot (oops!) to restrict our freedom, but we
must remain alert when shopping for food: that Danish
pastry sitting next to the Battenburg cake could
have been baked by a man wearing Argyll socks with
a Windsor knot in his tie.  Stick to the farmhouse loaf
instead!
         
         
            
Regardless of anything to the contrary in this booklet,
if your medical insurance terminates for any reason
including death, you...may elect within 30 days...to
continue such medical insurance....  [From Group Insurance
for 1-14 Employees, Consolidated Group Trust, The
Hartford, p. 70.]

         
         
            The New York Sansculottery




            Writing styles have changed greatly from Victorian
days when, as Phyllis Cunnington observes
in Costumes of the Nineteenth Century, to talk of
trousers was considered vulgar, and some extraordinary
names were given to them, such as unmentionables,
inexpressibles, unwhisperables, nether
integuments, and others.  But at The New Yorker
this Victorian attitude persists, albeit with a new
twist: time and again men's trousers are not given
substitute names but are left out of otherwise quite
detailed sartorial descriptions.  Pants are, as it
were, repeatedly dropped.


...during the shooting of the movie I.Q.,
...Walter Matthau, who plays Einstein, was
standing around in an auto-repair garage (the set)
in Hopewell, New Jersey.  With him were three
actors playing the parts of Einstein's fictional
pals....  Matthau had on his Einstein clothes
(floppy brown wide-wale corduroy pants, brown
suspenders, a gray striped cotton-short-sleeved
shirt, Rockport shoes) and his Einstein makeup
...Saks was costumed in a Panama hat and
cream-colored jacket and pants; Jacobi in cap,
gloves, spats, and a too tight vest over a big belly:
Maher in a white-and-black-checked coat, tweedy
pants, and round-rimmed glasses.

[The New Yorker, December 19, 1994]

            

            Poor Jacobi's pants were left off.  Is this why the
headline of the piece was They All Laughed?


Whittle himself greeted me, dressed, as he almost
always is, in a sweater and bow tie.  He
showed no sign of being engaged in the struggle
of his career... [ibid., October 31, 1994]

            

            But the struggle seems to have turned physical.


[Francis Graeve] goes to the Center every day
...dressed quietly in a sports jacket and a
striped tie...[ibid., October 11, 1993]

Quiet, indeed!

...Mr. Thieu would step in.  He was wearing
a bright-yellow shirt and white leather sneakers
with pink tongues...

[ibid., August 2, 1993]

When Tom Jones appeared on the small stage,
he was wearing what seemed to be a uniform--a
black jacket with fourteen red Xs on it.

[ibid., May 24, 1993]

Irving [Link], dressed in a black cashmere Edwardian
coat, chocolate kid gloves, and a camel's
hair scarf...  [ibid., February 22, 1993]

Whenever Schultes was at the Botanical Museum,
he opted a striking costume: suspenders
(braces to him), a crimson four-in-hand, and a
starched, spotless, snow-white lab coat.

[ibid., June 1, 1992]

In contrast to Shigeru, who was wearing a
stained T-shirt and rubber boots, Yasumasa was
dressed in a clean white sports shirt and street
shoes.  [ibid., October 14, 1991]

            

            In an interesting switch on pants-dropping, The
New Yorker has on occasion kept in pants but omitted
a key top garment.


They had sized each other up at the start,
in the ruins of Troy.  She was standing in khaki
safari slacks and a lime-green tennis visor on
Level II...  [ibid., April 4, 1994]

            

            It is not clear whether this is an example of prudery
or of prurience, which has been exemplified by such
new-editor innovations as the magazine's long excerpt
from The Story of O and a cover featuring a
man's crotch.

            
               The New York Times also often resorts to old-fashioned
stripping off of pants.  Even a cursory
reading of All the News That's Fit to Print turns
up examples of males appearing bare-legged, not to
mention bare-bottomed.  From a description of
Jimmy Carter's meeting with Radovan Karadzic:


...former Sarajevo psychiatrist with his pile
of Elvis hair, and Sonja, his sturdy daughter,
dressed to the nines in a broad-brimmed hat and
stiletto heels.  [The New York Times Magazine,
January 29, 1995]

            

            She was dressed not to the nines, but to the zeroes.


Arthur, in a green knit cap and tan winter
jacket,...rise[s] in morning darkness to begin a
90-minute trip to school.

[ibid., October 9, 1994]

Sheriff Jones, a huge 64-year-old white lawman
who dresses for work in plaid shirts and suspenders,
was one of the most feared law officers during
the civil rights era.

[ibid., February 21, 1993]

            

            The author Allan Gurganus, reading at the Museum
of Modern Art, was described as



...wearing his trademark reading outfit: Converse
high tops, a formal shirt with black studs
and bow-tie, beneath a ratty old sport coat.  A
mess, but a considered one.

[ibid., December 6, 1992]

            

            More of a mess than the editors admitted.


As Martin, attired in an exquisite light-blue
dress shirt buttoned at the neck, watches from a
couch, sipping cranberry juice,...Martin on
screen is making a weird birthing grimace and
taking eggs out of his pants.  [ibid., May 3, 1992]

            

            At least his TV attire was more complete than his offstage
wear.

            An article about Syria, a nation known for its
rigid Islamic dress code, states that


The banner was eventually translated by one of
the many young men there dressed in black
leather jackets and white bobby socks, standard
attire of the Mukhabarat...

[ibid., January 26, 1992]

Whenever I feel tempted to wear something
aggressively inappropriate for the occasion, I remind
myself of the period in the early 70's when
my bold party look was a black shirt and white
tie, along with a pair of Tretorn sneakers that I
repainted white before every outing.

[Thurston Clarke, September 15, 1991]

            

            Not too bold for the editors of Men's Fashions of
the Times.

         
         
            English on the Serbian Front



            War inevitably brings with it vigorous surges
in language creativity, as people from all
corners of the country and from vastly different
walks of life are hurled together under extreme, often
bitter conditions.  In the case of Serbian, language
change in the nineties has been particularly
active as Serbia has taken energetic measures to distance
itself from its Serbo-Croatian past.  Today only
the Cyrillic alphabet may be used, and new language
edicts dictate which words are acceptable and which
are taboo.  Throughout Serbia, old and young, front-liners
and mountain villagers, find themselves regularly
overrun by new official vocabularies and new
slang as the status quo of the country tilts and
changes.

            But the newest and most radical trends in Serbian
sweep through the fast-spoken slang of Serbia's
first generation of youngsters--those who have
come of age since the breakup of the former Yugoslavia.
We find, for instance, that the wild new
words for cool!, red!, and brilliant! are krvavo!
(bloody!), mrtvachki! (deadly!), bomba! (bomb!),
ludo! (crazy!), and grom! (thunderclap!).  A hiphop
word for alcohol is supa za teturanye (staggering-soup),
and the clandestine drug words of the
moment are:


mara, mariya, mariyana, maritsa, marish, marishka,
meri, and the American Meri-Jein (Mary
Jane) for marijuana

koks, koki, kokitsa, kokos, kochke, koka, coca-cola,
and aspirin for cocaine

hash, hasha, haki, haksli, hale, hatsa, and the
American shit, for hashish

horn, hero, hop, kon' (horse), and the American
doup (dope) for heroin

morfo, moka, moki, and mokitsa for morphene

            

            Sex is alliteratively called keks and group-inter-course,
playfully, kontsert concert, palachinka
pancake, and grupich grouping.

            But on a more sinister note, rough new bellicose
words have flooded into Serbian slang.  Quick rough
sexual intercourse, for instance, is called patrola, as
in patrol.  A rapist is called borats soldier,
mehanichar mechanic, buldozer bulldozer, and,
strangely, turist tourist.  A military raid is called
orkestar orchestra.  Hundreds of slang words for
firearms have cropped up: the common revolver
alone is known as rovelo revats, reva, revar, and
actor.
            

            One of the interesting phenomena in Serbian
slang is the rapid influx of English.  Different groups,
ranging from urbane students to cliques involved in
drug smuggling and prostitution, pepper their language
with English or English-based expressions.  If
a drug dealer were to rattle off lists of narcotics
words, the English speaker would be surprised at all
the familiar sounds: California, sunshine, gelatina
(gelatin), and gelé jelly, for instance, are cryptic
nicknames for drugs in general.  The word for joint
is tvist twist. Spid speed, esid acid, amfi amphetamines,
dast dust, and met methedrine are
all drug names that have been directly imported
from the international drug scene.  Snifati to sniff
drugs is a serbification of the English sniff.  Fiks is a
fix, as in an injected dose, and sherbet is the Serbian
insider word for the actual liquid that is injected.
Stereo means that the user is injecting in
both arms at the same time.  Drug rushes are called
flesh, as in a flash, or simply trip, and to have a
super-strong drug-high with visions and hallucinations
is known as imati film to have a film.

            
               Autsaid outside signifies that the drug user is
out of it, totally stoned; paranoia is the word
for bad trip.

            The trick of storing a narcotic in a condom and
hiding it in one's anal canal is called finger, and the
individual who transports drugs in this way is called
a transformator.
            

            In sex-trade circles, English has made even
stronger inroads.  Penises are called banana, fuckalo,
priki prickie, Joni Johnny, karakter character,
and tvrd karakter hard character, while vaginas
have anglicized names like rozbif roast beef,
banka bank, fuck-itsa, and tunel.  Prostitutes are
playfully known as gerla girl-a, super-gerla, spermatorka,
spermara, sperm-usha, stewardess, and, because
they walk the pavements, granit.  Another
trend is to give them English-sounding names, such
as Martha, Ophelia, or Laura.  The unkindest word
on the scene is Volksvagina, a pun on the German
Volkswagen.  Prostitutes, Serbian sex-traders argue,
can be thought of as vaginas of the folk.

            Scene words for homosexual hustlers display
even more anglicisms.  Individuals working in drag
are often given the names Margot, Mary, Fifi, or
princessa princess.  Other words are used more
specifically to indicate the nature of an individual's
sexual tendencies: the passive homosexual is known
as pasivats or pelican (because of his funny walk)
while active homosexuals are called aktivist, activats,
and draifer driver.  In the wake of ecclesiastic scandals
involving priests and their young charges, older
homosexuals who prefer sex with adolescents are
known as pater.  Bisexuals are called amphibia.
            

            Other more general slang words for homosexual
are variations on homo: homos, homosapiens, homic,
homin, and the vicious homokenyats homo-ass, or
variations on sissy: sisi and sisikur.  But the largest
group of gay taunts can be classified as the ped-
group, all words inspired by pederasty: pederaj,
pederash, pederishka, pederin, pederko, pedal, pedalo,
petsa, pechurka, pepos, pedos, pepi, pedikir (a
pun on pedicure ), peder, and its facetiously French-sounding
inversions derpé and depré.
            

            The strangest Serbian slang word for homosexual
is Shekspir Shakespeare.
            The orthography used here for the Serbian slang-words is
not a standardized transliteration of today's Serbian Cyrillics, and
not an official Latin spelling--which would be Croatian, and
therefore taboo.  My aim was to capture the sound of today's Serbian
slang for the English-speaking reader.
         
         
            A Shakespeare Thesaurus
            For a large part of the world--and not only the
English-speaking world--Shakespeare remains the
inexhaustible source of inspiration for writers, actors,
directors, composers, historians, learned societies,
linguists, drama schools (where, in America, he
is honored more in the breach than the observance),
films, academia, literary criticism, bibliographers,
translators, painters, pilgrims, philosophers, and
psychologists.

            An impressive and thoroughly engaging addition
to Shakespeare scholarship, Professor Marvin
Spevack's A Shakespeare Thesaurus deserves to take
its place in the canon of eminently useful books
about the world's greatest dramatist.  Subtitled, after
Florio, The World in Words, this is the first work to
organize and classify the entire Shakespeare vocabulary,
a formidable undertaking, and an eminently
successful one.  For the Shakespeare maven, this
one-volume lexicon could become habit-forming.  In
Professor Spevack's concise (6 pp.) and witty Preface,
he defines his broader purpose in compiling this
treasury of Shakespeare's idiolect as an attempt to
mirror, not only the figurative universe of Shakespeare's
words, but the literal world of the Elizabethan
age as well.

            Shakespeare and his contemporaries regarded
speech as God's greatest gift to man; and speech, in
Elizabethan thought, was the ultimate test of power.
It was also piously believed that speaking truth
would always prevail over evil; language was not
only a moral weapon, but in Shakespeare's fecund
and often irreverent imagination, occasion for exuberant
revelry:


Moth: They have been at a great feast of languages,
and stolen the scraps.

Costard: O!  they have lived long on the almsbasket
of words.  I marvel thy master hath not
eaten thee for a word; for thou art not so long
by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus.

[Love's Labour's Lost, V, 1.]

            

            Professor Spevack lists that final blend word under
Communication (subgroup Pseudo foreign), along
with 36 other tongue-twisters, among them, oscorbidulchos
and kerelybonto.
            

            At the time of Shakespeare's birth in 1564, the
English language was besieged by foreign importations--French,
Italian, Dutch, Spanish, and Latin-by-the-yard.
Thought, as Virginia Woolf said,
plunged into a sea of words and came up dripping.

            An inspired originator of compounds ( cloud-capp'd
towers; home-keeping wits), Shakespeare created
no fewer than 273 for anatomy alone, cited
with almost palpable enthusiasm by Professor
Spevack.  Three of these fusions could very well be
contemporary: rug-headed, urchin-snouted, and
Agueface (an in-your-face gibe delivered to the asinine
Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth-Night ).

            Those who have always thought (or been
taught) that Hamlet's Get thee to a nunnery
rudely suggests that poor Ophelia hie herself to a
brothel, Professor Spevack, ignoring Eric Partridge
and other Shakespeare scholars, will have none of
that interpretation.  A nunnery may be a monastery,
an abbey, a convent, a cloister, or a priory.  Period.

            Not that the world's oldest profession is in any
way slighted in the book and volume of Professor
Spevack's brain: under strumpet (main heading Humans,
Family, Friendship) there are fifty-eight references,
among them, blowze, giglet, stewed prune,
and quail.  In contemporary England, quail has
shifted to bird; since 1860, quail in America has continued
to mean a sexually attractive girl.

            Since bastard (the only equivalent male counterpart
to whore ) is listed rather benignly under the
heading, Family, we find under rogue (the sole alternative
to bastard ) sixty-eight equivalents, including
drumble, scroyle, and varletto.
            

            Among the thirty-seven main groups and 897
subgroups, all models of clarity and superbly indexed,
subjects range from the Physical World to
Sense Perception to Law to Religion to Time and
Space.  There are 509 references to animals; fifty-nine
to flowers; fifty-three to fruits and nuts; sixteen
to vegetables, and eighteen to herbs.  One wonders
if a nobleman or a man-about-court could be such
a keen observer of the creatures of the field and forest,
sea and air, as Shakespeare, the naturalist of
Warwickshire, who knew his flora and fauna as well
as their many distinctive attributes.

            
               Hamlet is possibly the best known of Shakespeare's
works (and surely the most quoted).  Professor
Spevack makes short shrift of the lengthy debate
over Hamlet's I know a hawk from a handsaw (II,
2).  The line, admittedly confusing, is often played
(sometimes mimed! ) as though Hamlet could not tell
a bird of prey from a cutting tool.  A hawk is, in fact,
simply another kind of tool, used to this day by plasterers
and masons.

            In the ninety-two entries under the subgroups
Decay and Sickness we find further echoes of Hamlet:
blast, carrion, foul, mildew, peak, rank, gross,
rotten, unweeded, thought-sick.
            

            One of the many benefits of this finely tuned
work is not only that meanings, but shades of meaning
are made clear, especially helpful for actors, directors,
and students.  In many instances, one may
come fairly close to Shakespeare's meaning.  To miss
the crucial element of emotive charge that even a
simple, one-syllable word may convey, to lose or
pass over the nuance of meaning is to lose Shakespeare's
feeling as well.  In Othello's account of his
courtship of Desdemona, he says:


...she thank'd me,
And bade me, if I had a friend that lov'd her,
I should but teach him how to tell my story,
And that would woo her.  Upon this hint,
I spake:...
[I,3]

            

            According to Professor Spevack, the word hint has
no connotation of invitation or covert suggestion:
it simply means cue or suggestion; but should not
be construed in the modern sense of innuendo, or
sly, or teasing, which it came to mean by the end
of the 18th century.  This is, to be sure, a super-subtle
distinction; but these bits and pieces of
Shakespearean usage can make a luminous difference
both in reading and in performance.

            In the merest quibble, the word limbeck ( Macbeth ,
I, 7) is missing from Professor Spevack's compendium,
although it appears to be standard usage
in most editions of Macbeth.  But, alembic, of which
it is a common aphetic form, is there, and it means
the same thing.

            Professor Spevack and his colleagues have
charted the countries of Shakespeare's mind, casting
a new and penetrating light on the infinite variety
of his imagination.  We are the richer for their
perseverance.

            Mary Douglas Dirks

            
               Old Lyme, Connecticut
            
         
         
            Death Dictionary
            Owing to my being unable to find the full bibliographical
information for it in my infallible library
cataloguing system, I cannot provide more than the
fact that a book published several years ago by
Scarecrow Press, Slang and Jargon of Drugs and
Drinks, by R. A. Spears, was recalled when I saw the
Death Dictionary: they are similar only in that they
are both thesauruses (in Roget's sense of the
word--that is, they contain all sorts of direct and
oblique references to the subjects they cover).  Anyone
who has any doubts about the flush nature of the
English lexicon and the propensity of its speakers to
coin metaphors should attend to these two works (at
least), for they deal with only a small segment of
culture.  I do not mean, of course, to disparage the
capacity of other languages in their ability to exhibit
such a fine array of words and phrases pertaining to
a particular subject, but, if it is common, I am unaware
of it.

            The subtitle of the DD is, Over 5,500 Clinical,
Legal, Litterary and Vernacular Terms.  A few years
ago, when I made reference to the expression join
the majority, a reader who likes to deal with such
things wrote to advise that the expression was no
longer literally true, for the number of people living
now exceeds the total of all who had ever lived.  (I
apologize for being unable to give the exact reference,
but the VERBATIM index goes only through Volume
XVIII.)  One cannot argue against such wisdom,
but its validity does not mitigate our capacity to say
anything we like, including, The earth is flat and
Adolf Hitler was really a sweetie.  Factual or not,
join the majority is in the DD , along with 5,499
other terms.  The range is quite wide, running from
Texas cakewalk Death by hanging, through buy
the farm to Thyestean banquet A feast at which human
flesh is eaten, and Tlaloc Aztec myth .  A rain
god to whom children were sacrificed annually by
drowning.  As can be seen, this book is a veritable
treasure trove of arcane information.  The entries include
the facetious ( throat trouble Death by hanging;
get or have a permanent To be executed by
electrocution), the legal and legalistic ( executory
devise A situation in which no estate vests under
the will until the occurrence of a future event), the
jargon-based ( psycho-weaponry Fear of death implanted
in the minds of victims by terrorists; performance
suicide Suicide in response to a sense of
failure in meeting society's standards), the poetic
( pull a Frankie and Johnny To kill one's husband in
revenge), the religious and mythological ( Petbe
Egyptian myth .  God of retaliation and death;
third-class relic Rom. Cath .  An object or cloth
which has come in contact with a first-class or second-class
relic).  Shiva or shibah is in, from Orthodox
Judaism, but not the phrase sit shiva.
            

            The book has an interesting Introduction,
which, for some reason, has a bibliography different
from the one beginning on page 193.  Although the
entire book constitutes, as mentioned above, a sort
of thesaurus, there is actually a Thesaurus section
where, under main headings like Abortion, Afterlife,
Assassination, Autopsy, Burial, etc., are listed synonyms
arranged under categories like Examination,
Investigation, Medical Examiner, and Morgue (for
Autopsy) and Associations, chamber, exhumation,
Mound, Premature, Preparation for, Receptacle,
Shroud, and Types (for Burial).

            Aside from its linguistic, lexicographic, and social
uses, the Death Dictionary is highly recommended
not only for its approach and treatment but
as a course of study for any who have contemplated
death in the abstract or in its ineluctable reality--
their own or somebody else's.

            Laurence Urdang
         
         
            Centennial Usage Studies
            [The Centennial in the title refers to that of
the American Dialect Society, not of American Usage.]

            This collection of twenty-seven papers represents
a broad spectrum of opinion, chiefly by linguists
and teachers, some of whose names will be
familiar to VERBATIM readers.  The smooth perusal of
the articles is aided by a minimum of footnotes (at
the ends of the essays), with a detailed bibliography
(pp. 205-21) at the back of the book, followed by a
useful Index of the words discussed.  The essays
treat usage from historical and contemporary perspectives,
including material on the usage of classes
of words (like pronouns of reference), specialized
vocabulary, comparative treatment in dictionaries
and usage reference books, visual style, and other
topics that are likely to interest readers of VERBATIM.

            It is not often that this commentator has the opportunity
to commend a book as a bargain, but it
would be difficult to find a book of this value among
commercial publishers' books at such a price.  Those
who wish to join The American Dialect Society are
welcome on the payment of $30 (regular membership
annual dues); for this they receive all publications,
including American Speech, probably the best,
most readable scholarly periodical on language in
the world, Publication of the ADS, among which is
the present volume, and the Newsletter.  Correspondence
concerning membership should be sent to the
Executive Secretary/Allan Metcalf/Department of
English / MacMurray College/Jacksonville, IL
62650/USA.

            Laurence Urdang
         
         
            The Logophile's Orgy
            If one is to acknowledge that it is unfair to express
personal prejudice in reviewing books, then
the entire reviewing process might as well be rejected
as pointless: a critic's opinions are valid only
when he has gained a following among readers who
agree with--or, at least, respect--his point of view.
The issue arose (again) when I grappled with the
purpose of this book.  One must accept the premise
of the author's introductory words:


The Logophile's Orgy began as wondering about
other writers' favorite words...The thrust of
the book is that we all have favorite words...
I, for example, use the words eggplant and
kumquat more often in my writing than other
words...

            

            The problem is that the words selected— summer afternoon
(Henry James), powwow, pulchritude, punctuate
(Shirley Lord), Preposterous (Charles
Krauthammer), delegate (Maxwell M. Raab)--often
appeal because of personal association and not for
euphony (unlike classics like murmur and smooth ).
On the grounds of euphony, many would reject
words beginning with p or containing a k -sound; on
other grounds, there may be someone out there
whose favorite word is kreplach.  It is not hard to see
why publicity- and work-hungry actresses might like
ubiquitous, but it would be wise to give up attempts
at analysis before coping with eggplant and kumquat,
though Frumkes does suggest that they reflect a proclivity
for ovoid objects.

            Not all those invited to contribute are writers,
and one is moved to wonder why people like Ricardo
Montalban, (the ubiquitous, to borrow Cybill Shepherd's
favorite) Phyllis Diller, and other major and
minor celebrities were solicited.  Many are so uncelebrated
or of such transitory glory that they have
been provided with identifying squibs: (cookbook
writer) Maida Heatter's favorite is chocolate; (CEO,
Bear Stearns) Alan Ace Greenberg's, omphaloskepsis
(probably after eating kreplach and a good reason
for finding another broker); (singer) Gloria Estefan's,
houndation, weirdness, plethora, the first of which is
not in dictionaries; and, finally, (entertainer, magician)
Penn Gillette's dysphonic ruckus.
            

            Those to whom all that is acceptable as a basis for
a book may find enjoyment, intellectual fulfillment,
and other reward in acquiring it.  At a stretch, one
might regard it as a book of (rather longish) quotations
dealing with a particular theme.  The contributors
are listed alphabetically at the front, then their
contributions appear in the same order; there is no
index of words, so one cannot compare and/or contrast
selections.  As for this reviewer, he would have
preferred looking at the trees rather than the paper.

            Laurence Urdang
         
         
            Quotations with an Attitude
            One has to be in the right mood for this sort of
thing, and I was particularly so at the time I picked it
up for review.  In the context of the book, Wickedly
Funny must be interpreted as meaning cynical, bitter,
sarcastic, though when it comes to people like
Phyllis Diller, who is more vulgarly tragic (or tragically
vulgar) than funny, it must include self-deprecating
comments (Old age is when the liver spots
show through your gloves; My plastic surgeon told
me my face looked like a bouquet of elbows).  It is
misleading to call this a book of quotations: most extracts
are comedians' one-liners, and the better comedians--Fred
Allen, Goodman Ace, Groucho Marx,
and a few others--produce the better one-liners.

            Samuel Goldwyn could scarcely be characterized
as a humorist, so his Goldwynisms, rumored to
be the product of a publicity agent, at least qualify
as quotations.  Similarly for Voltaire (not funny),
Thomas Fuller (The patient is not likely to recover
who makes the doctor his heir--clever but not
funny), and Bertrand Russell  (There is much pleasure
to be gained from useless knowledge--wise but
not funny), and Sigmund Freud (Sometimes a cigar
is just a cigar--a straight line funny only to us).  I
should say that the book is entertaining, even amusing;
but it is rarely funny: if you enjoy her performances,
Rita Rudner is funny on stage saying The
closest I've gotten to a ménage-à-trois was dating a
schizophrenic, but it is not funny to see its concocted
cleverness in print.

            The book is organized under six major headings
(The Human Animal, Human Endeavor, etc.), with a
varying number of subcategories under each (Birth &
Childhood, Youth,...Memory,... Sanity &
Madness).  The quotations are listed in rather haphazard
order under these subcategories; authors (including
rare attributions to the most popular, Anon.) are
ascribed and, if they are dead, their dates are sometimes
given (but none for Lenny Bruce, Sigmund
Freud, Samuel Goldwyn, Groucho Marx, etc.); it is
hard to understand the style.  If one is interested only
in what Ronnie Shakes or Marty Indik--Who
they?--had to say, there is an Index, but it does not
list Anonymous.  There is even a quotation evidently
prepared by committee: Why is life so tough?  Perhaps
it was cooked too long. -- University of North
Carolina-Charlotte Philosophy Department .  Things
must be really bad for the tarheels.

            Laurence Urdang
         
         

            I find Mary Imber's comments on rhyming
slang, O.  Abootty's short essay on Kerala Billingsgate,
and Charles Lewis' neat exposition of English
permutations [XXI, 4] particularly entertaining and
informative.

            For me the most interesting thing about Charles
Lewis' table is that although I assume it works for his
London English, it does not quite work for my standard
American English.  In my English, as in that of
most Americans, bawd/bored/board, sword/sawed/
soared , and or/oar/awe/ore are not homophones; I
pronounce bawd/sawed differently from board and
or/oar/ore differently from awe . (Incidentally, presumably
the second or third sight in the triplet cite/
sight/sight ought to be site .)

            Such observations about the differences between
British and American English put one in mind
of Prince Charles' (a/k/a the Prince of Wales) deprecation
of the American idiom and denunciation of its
incursions into English English.  Henry Porter, in a
disapproving article in The Guardian Weekly for May
21, 1995, quotes the Prince as declaring, We must
act now to ensure that English--and that to my way
of thinking means English English--maintains its position
as the world language.  As Henry Porter comments,
He might as well demand a rematch of the
battle of Saratoga for all the success he is going to
have.  But we may concede that British English, vocabulary,
pronunciation, and all, is still in competition
with American English and even clings to a limited
superiority of prestige.  On American wedding
invitations honor is often still spelled honour , some
pretentious theatrical enterprises in the USA spell
theater theatre , and in mustard ads on American
television you won't hear filthy-rich senior citizens
say, Hey, bud, you got any Grey Poupon?

            I find cultivated English speech often hard to
understand, nor do I think this is entirely owing to
unfamiliarity with U phonology.  The fact that there
is no distinction in the British pronunciation of some
words, such as sword/sawed , that I pronounce differently
supports my idea that my English is phonemically
fuller than even cultivated British speech.

            And then there is the case of my friend who
feared for her hearing.  A few years ago she consulted
a physician specializing in auditory problems.
The doctor examined her inner ears and tested her
hearing, which he found normal, and then asked,
Why did you think you were going deaf?  My
friend replied, Well, lately I have had trouble understanding
what people are saying--especially on
TV. What do you watch on TV?  the doctor
wanted to know.  Not much lately.  I'm down
pretty much just to Masterpiece Theatre .  Well,
there's your answer, the doctor said; I can't understand
that British English, either.




         
         
            
From its rich nappa leather and pigskin lining to its
supple comfort, the Prestige tennis shoe spoils your feet.
[From an advertisement by Prince in The New Yorker , :47.]
         
         
            
They were wheeling away the stretcher to where a
cab was coming to take her away from the stadium.  The
TV lights were still in Joyner-Kersee's face, the face that
had been buried in the track less than an hour before.  She
kept smiling at the cameras and sat there, standing tall.
[From an article by Phil Hersh, datelined Tokyo, in the
Chicago Tribune , n.d. Submitted by 
.]

         
         


            I have just read Poetic Licenses, by Paula van
Gelder, in VERBATIM [XIV, 4], which illustrates Environmental
License Plates (ELPs) in California.  Ms.
van Gelder's article deals with transpositions of letters
which strikes me as a sort of stonemasonry.
There is another group of ELPs which requires a
different level of imagination and which I think of as
sculpture.  Here are three of the latter:


FUNEDK is the plate on my dentist's car.  The letters
are to be read separately one after the other.
Try it a bit faster.  The answer to the question should
be, No, I have no decay.

One day I drove up behind, a French Peugeot with
the license plate ALLONS.

A very small car passed me with the license plate
XX YY.  I had to exceed the speed limit to pass him
and to see that the driver was a small man with a
pointed beard, exactly what I should expect a geneticist
to look like.
            





         
         

            Foreign Treasures



            I have long been fascinated by the way idioms
and phrases are often used to express the same concept
in a completely different way in different languages.
Here are some examples of French idioms:


tirer le diable par le queue, lit. to pull the devil by
the tail: to live from hand to mouth

mettre des queues aux zéros, Lit. to add tails to
noughts: to overcharge

Comme un diable dans un bénitier, Lit. like a devil in
a font: like a cat on hot bricks

ramener sa fraise, Lit. to declare one's strawberry:
to put one's oar in

appuyer sur les champignons, Lit. to stamp on the
mushrooms: to put one's foot down

casser sa pipe, Lit. to break one's pipe: to die

avaler son bulletin de naissance, Lit.  to swallow one's
birth certificate: to die

mal aux cheveux, Lit.  hair sickness: a hangover

noyer le poisson, Lit.  to drown the fish: to side-step
the question or to introduce a red herring

un æil poché, Lit. a poached eye: a black eye

reméde de cheval, Lit.  horse remedy: kill or cure

            

            And some phrases:


vivre comme un coq en pâté, Lit.  to live like a cockerel
in pastry: to be in clover

c'est un autre paire de manches, Lit. that is another
pair of sleeves: that is another story

c'est le jour où les poules ont les dents, Lit. this is the
day when chickens have teeth: when pigs fly

soul comme une grive,...un polonais,...une
bourrique, Lit. as drunk as a thrush,... a Pole,
... a donkey: as drunk as a lord

            

            German offers an even greater variety of exquisite
examples:


böhmische Dörfer or Wortsalat, Lit.  Bohemian villages
or salad of words: double Dutch or it's
Greek to me

das alte Lied, Lit.  the old song: the same old story

Senf dazugeben, Lit. to add mustard: to put one's
oar in

Papierdeutsch, Lit.  paper German: officialese or
gobbledegook

weiβe Mäuschen, Lit. white mice: pick elephants or
traffic police

Plunderstück, Lit. item of plunder: a Danish pastry

eine Leiche im Keller, Lit. a corpse in the cellar: a
skeleton in the cupboard (or closet)

Hals und Beinbruch!, Lit.  Break your neck and your
leg!: Good luck!

ein Landei, Lit. a rural egg: country cousin

ins Fettnäpfchen treten, Lit.  to step into a bowl of fat:
to drop a brick (or to make a tactless remark)

Nägel mit Köpfen machen, Lit.  to manufacture nails
with heads: to go the whole hog

saure Gurkenzeit, Lit.  the time for sour gherkins:
the silly season

ins Gras beiΒen, Lit.  to bite into grass: to kick the
bucket (or to bite the dust)

Blau und Grün, Lit. blue and green: black and blue

ein blaues Auge, Lit. a blue eye: a black eye

ein Rotstift, Lit.  a red pencil: a blue pencil (as used
by the censor)

            

            And some phrases:


das Schäfchen im Trockenen haben, Lit. to have
brought the sheep into the dry: to have made
one's pile

Schnee von gestern, Lit. yesterday's snow: water under
the bridge

so sicher wie das Amen in der Kirche, Lit. as certain
as the amen in church: as sure as eggs are (is?)
eggs

sich freuen wie ein Schneekönig, Lit.  as pleased as a
snow king: as happy as a dog with two tails

auf beiden Schultern Wasser tragen, Lit. to carry water
on both shoulders: to have a foot in both
camps

wie Gott in Frankreich leben, Lit.  to live like God in
France: to be in clover

ein Gesicht wie 37 Tage Regenwetter haben, Lit. to
have a face like 37 days of rain: to have a long
face

A browse through dictionaries will provide many more
gems.  Good hunting!

            

         
         
            Et tu, Brutus, old chap!



            I recently watched a program on television
which featured somebody called Levan --a first name
pronounced LEEVan.  I cannot get it out of my head
that this chap is named after Lee van Cleef.  I know it
is silly, but there it is.  I also find myself making up
similar names which might turn out to be popular,
like Susanbee, Henrythee, Popejohn, Franklindee, and
so on.

            Along these lines, another baby name fashion
has come along.  This time it is for names ending with
the masculine suffix - us, the most recent example to
receive publicity in England being Columbus.  We all
know that young parents can't resist these fashions
any more than they can resist the new clothing styles
that come along, but where will it all end?  Many
parents would recoil in horror at being considered
fashion victims with regard to names, but when your
children ( Marcus and Titus ) are in school with Tacitus
and Rufus and Dædalus you can be consoled by
the fact that in the school down the road, the children
of Danii and Du'aine ( Gluteus and Mucus ) are
being mercilessly ragged by Tahini and Pooh, themselves
the children of Elvis and Moonbeam.
            

            Yes, it is true!  Fresh from a demi-generation of
people calling their offspring Moonflower and Droplet,
they are jumping, or being pulled, on to the latest
bandwagon as a result of that curious human trait
which makes people want to be twee and different.
It is clever to have a slightly unusual name for the
brats because it makes them stand out from the
crowd--at least for five minutes--until that virus,
or whatever it is that goes round the maternity
wards when suddenly every other poppet is called
Jason or Tracii or Wayne.
            

            In Norway there is a law which prevents registering
silly or unusual names for children.  Apparently
at one time people were choosing names like
Thunderstorm or Fisherman, these being inspired by
current events.  A similar rule exists in France, where
names must be chosen from a prescribed, though extensive
list.  However, it is not the same where I live:
I am regularly confronted with children whose names
I last saw on the menu of the Maharajah restaurant.

            We all know that names, or most of them, mean
something.  More often than not, we in Britain do not
know what they mean, whilst foreigners from Boulogne-sur-Mer
to Beijing seem to know exactly their
meaning and history.  In a Chinese restaurant in Tehran
(in 1977) a waitress told me that her name meant
the sound of small bells heard tinkling across the
valley.  Yes, I thought then, I bet it does.  Only
now, I realize, she was telling me the absolute truth.
Understanding that names really do mean something,
perhaps we could ask people to think more carefully
when choosing them.  For instance, if you want your
latest to be a lawyer, then choose a solid trustworthy
name like James, but change your surname to something
like Budge, Bilbo & Tweep.  If you want a master
builder, use Brick, Timber, or Lintel.  You might even
consider the persistent American habit of giving only
initials as names and call your architect-to-be RSJ or
your just-announced announcer BBC .  Gardeners
could be Buddy, Lorne, Jeyes, or Bethany .  Astronauts
could be Rocket or Luna or even Columbus .  A driver
could be Dodge.  A chef could be Kenwood or even
Chefette.
            

            Place names were a favorite for surnames at one
time--why should they not do double duty as first
names?  I favor Bath, Bolton, and Barton-le-Beans for
a plumber, carpenter, and farmer, respectively.
This has a satisfying economy of word usage which
pleases me no end.

            It isn't even necessary to be given these names
at birth, because there cannot have been so many
Smiths in olden times and I have a suspicion that
some people give themselves new names when they
take a new job where nobody knows them.  How
else would we explain the suddenly large number of
Krystles, Daleys, and all the Fionas who have suddenly
become ffyona?
            

            And speaking of giving yourself something you
weren't born with, what about Peter for a safecracker,
Tealeaf for a shoplifter, and perhaps Bogus
for a conman, which brings us back to square one!

            
               In the spring of 1994, British toothpaste commercials
referred to plaque as plock; six months
later, they referred to it as plack.  What the British
put on (both our) houses remains plock.
            

            
               
                  No problem
               

               Talking about (or in) clichés, a columnist in The
Independent recently commented on No problem:
Why, she quoted a friend, when I ask for a pint,
should the barman feel it necessary to reassure me
that I am not making an unreasonable request?  Our
sentiments exactly.  In similar situations, especially
when one has bought something in a shop, bar, or
wherever and says Thank you (when it is really the
salesperson who should have said that), the reply
should have been either Thank you  or You're welcome.
The response No problem is probably intended
as a sincere expression of willingness to serve,
but it comes across as a polite way of saying, I don't
really mind your having taken up my valuable time
coping with the mentally and physically taxing demands
imposed by your overbearing, though trivial
request, because I am an accommodating, thoughtful
person paid to occupy myself with major decisions
concerning issues of earthshaking consequence, with
but don't let it happen again implied.  There is no
doubt that this one is here to stay--at least for a
while--if its reflexes elsewhere ( Kein Problem, Pas de
probléme, etc.) are any indication.  We devoutly wish
that it will either disappear or quickly acquire the
meaninglessness of other well-established clichés.
            
         
         
            The joy of jabberwocking




            If you do not worry about the borogoves (or
borogroves) being mimsy while the slithy toves were
gyring and gimbling in the wabe, you should not
bother to read this piece.  Others of you, of course,
know about these splendid beasts, and their activities,
in the poem Jabberwocky, which is found in
Lewis Carroll's Alice through the Looking-Glass.
Some of the nonsense words from this poem have
been taken into standard dictionaries of the English
language.  Jabberwocky itself is given in The Concise
Oxford Dictionary as designating nonsensical writing
or speech, esp. for comic effect.  Webster's New
World gives this: meaningless syllables that seem to
make sense; gibberish.

            You may remember that the jabberwock, burbled
as it came whiffling through the tulgey wood.
The verb burble, according to The Concise Oxford,
means speak ramblingly, make murmuring noise.
As a noun it now means a murmuring noise; a rambling
speech.  It also says that it is an aeronautical
term meaning, (of an air-flow) break up into turbulence.
Carroll may have taken it from the Scots
language, in which it means to bubble or boil up,
like water from a spring; for Scots burble-headed
means stupid, confused.  Whiffle is defined as be
variable or evasive.  In Scots it means either to
drive before the wind or to play the fife or flute. I
like to think that the jabberwock played the flute in
the tulgey wood.  According to the big Oxford, Carroll
coined tulgey to designate a wood that is thick,
dense, and dark.

            Others of Carroll's verbal concoctions are now
found in our dictionaries, such as slithy (probably
from slither ), gyre (from gyrate, perhaps), and chortle
utter a low, deep laugh.  There is the splendid galumphing,
which, according to Chambers English Dictionary
now means to stride along exultantly; to
bound about in an uncoordinated, noisy way.  Then
we are given frabjous, as in O frabjous day!, which
The Concise Oxford allows straightforwardly as meaning
delightful, joyous and has provided the adverb,
frabjously.
            

            Incidentally, the time at which the slithy toves
were doing things in the wabe and the borogoves
were going all mimsy was brillig, which Humpty
Dumpty said is four o'clock in the afternoon--the
time when you start broiling things for dinner.

            When Carroll coined the word borogoves he
gave it only one r, but somehow a few editors gave it
a second r, as in borogroves.  This led to great confusion.
For example, the second edition of The Oxford
Dictionary of Quotations (1953) gave two- r
borogroves in its index, but in the text has the one- r
borogoves.
            

            Probably many years ago a careless printer put
in that extra r, which an equally careless proofreader
let pass.

            James Joyce said that this poem had some influence
on him when he was writting Finnegans Wake.
            
         
         
            
Better than a hotel.  Luxury suites, elegantly furnished
with daily maid & linen service. [From an advertisement
for Bristol Plaza in New York Magazine (repeatedly).
Submitted by .]

         
         
            
School Threatened: A new alternative school for
young car thieves, runaways and gang members is already
in danger of closing for lack of funds B3 [From Inside
Today's Valley Edition of The Los Angeles Times , .  Submitted by .]

         
         
            
With all the promises and claims being bantered
about in the long distance marketplace,... [From the
opening salvo of a letter from Pacific Bell, .  Submitted by .]

         
         
            
Sexual Aides: How to order them without embarrassment.
How to use them without disappointment.
[From an advertisement by The Xandria Collection in
Mother Jones , , p. 84.  Submitted by
.]

         
         
            
...photographs of the very, very, young girls with
which Peter Altenberg, poet in prose, lined the walls of
his room at the Graben Hotel.  [From Art View, by John
Russell, in The New York Times , .  Submitted
by .]

         
         
            
Every minute was more exciting than the next.
[From an on-camera interview with Linda Evans, commenting
on Night of 100 Stars partly in New York to
promote Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous.]

         
         
            
A woman gave birth to two of her triplets a month
after delivering, the third, a rare occurrence, physicians
said Thursday.  [From The Philadelphia Inquirer , .  Submitted by .]

         
         
            
In keeping with Hershey's commitment to excellent
products, please call us if this product does not meet your
expectations....  [From the text on a pint container of
Hershey's Chocolate Milk.]

         
         
            
Whatever one thinks of smoking in public places
...isn't a smoking ban in saloons almost a contradiction in
terms?  [From the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph ,
.  Submitted by .]