VOL22_2.txt

   
      
         
            French Lessons in Lallans



            Once upon a time, as they say in all the best
fairy tales, one of the most unlikely treaties
ever envisaged was forged between two countries
who were poles apart in almost everything except
their mutual dislike of the nation that separated
them geographically.  The Auld Alliance, a treaty
of accord between France and Scotland, was born.
Today, nearly seven hundred years later, it remains
intact despite the vicissitudes of time and a language
barrier that only the French have ever made much
effort to surmount.

            In The Luck of the Bodkins , P.G. Wodehouse
remarked on the ...look of furtive shame, the
shifty, hangdog look which announces that an Englishman
is about to talk French....  The inimitable
Mr. Wodehouse was, as usual, spot-on with his
characterization.  We insatiable travelers have seen
similar scenes enacted many times around the watering
holes of the world, from Calais to the fleshpots of
Douala, from Quebec to the silver strands of the
Côte d'Ivoire.  The average Brit is seldom at his most
confident when forced by circumstance to attempt
the language of another.

            Not all citizens of the United Kingdom suffer
from this malaise when finding themselves on foreign
shores.  Mr. Average Scot does not, for one.  The intricacies
of the Gallic subjunctive do not worry him at
all, and for the best reason in the world: he does not
even bother to try.

            There are those who will sneer that a race
which owes its very existence to the ingurgitation of
massive quantities of porridge during its formative
years is capable of speaking in no other way.  But
Scots have long been inured to such slurs.  As a
proud Scot myself, I feel that a much more probable
reason for this apparent lack of linguistic ambition is
to be found in the regional dialect.  There are parts
of Britain in which regional dialects can be as incomprehensible
as Tocharian to the innocent abroad,
and the farther north one ventures through England
the more incomprehensible they seem to become.  It
gets worse in Scotland.  Strangers listening to any of
the Scottish dialects will soon realize that they are as
replete with gutturals as any Teutonic dialect.
Tongues created by God for the pronunciation of
names like Auchtermuchty are quite unsuited to the
more delicate nasal nuances of the French language.

            Each dialect is distinct and distinctive.  Aberdonians
have the Doric, with its quines girls and
loons boys, Glaswegians bombard you with The
Patter, famous for its infamous glottal stop and raw,
street humor.  In the moors of Carrick and Galloway,
the natives converse in Lallans.

            Lallans is the language of Burns, and it is a language
in which he wrote most beautifully.  It is, in
fact, not a separate language at all.  It is just one
more dialect of English, but one would have to be
listening pretty carefully to figure that out on first
exposure to it.

            For reasons that need not detain us here, some
years ago I happened to be visiting the translation
section of a large publishing company in darkest
Hertfordshire, England, and I became involved in
conversation with one of the employees, a charming
young French translator.  The subject of regional dialects
in our respective countries came up.  Being very
new to this country and having, so far, only encountered
school English, she found it difficult to believe
that dialectal variation could be so great in such
a tight little island as ours, and that so much of it
could be unintelligible to the uninitiated.  We were
interrupted by the arrival of a worker clad in a boiler
suit of some antiquity.  I could not recall having seen
him before, but I would have recognized his type
anywhere.  He was a raw-boned, sallow little chap
with sunken eyes and lived-in features, the sort to be
found aplenty in bygone days walking out mean-look-ing
whippets in the thin gray mists of gloaming
around any Ayrshire mining community.  At that moment
I would have bet my very soul that he hailed
from The Land Of Rabbie Burns, and the first words
he uttered showed the intuition inherited from my
mystic forebears to be firing on all cylinders.

            Huv ye seen ma gaffer, Jim? he queried.

            I sneaked a sidelong look at my companion and
a glow of the purest contentment spread slowly
through me.  She was about to get her first lesson,
and I could feel in my bones that it was going to be a
good one.

            I don't think I know your boss, I hedged
craftily.  What does he look like?

            The little man took off his cap.  He removed a
squashed cigarette from somewhere inside it and lit
it carefully with the minute, barely smouldering
stump of the old one.  He drew with deep satisfation
on his reefer and exhaled an acrid cloud of blue
smoke around us.  He glanced at her, the world-weary
eyes of Old Scotia and the prelapsarian ingenuousness
of Young Picardie's meeting in a fleeting
look that spanned the ages.  He coughed harshly and
spat copiously on the ground.  Then he let her have
it with both barrels.

            Och, he intoned with Bren-gun rapidity,
He's jeest a nyatterin' wee nyaff wi' a skelly cacke'e
an' a manky, broony-kinna gansey.

            When he had gone, my young French friend
asked me in understandable bewilderment, What
sort of language was that?

            English, I replied innocently.

             English??!! 

            Well, yes, sort of...

            Oh my God! she exclaimed, appalled.  And I
am supposed to be a translator! What on earth was
he saying?

            I thought carefully for a moment or two before
committing myself:

            He intimated that, in his humble opinion, his
overseer is a loquacious and diminutive fellow of a
somewhat devious and unpleasant bent, that he is
afflicted with a strabismus of the sinistral optical
member, and that he is currently attired in a rather
noisome woolen torsal garment of an indeterminate
off-chocolate hue.

            She stood before me like a stricken stirk, her
eyes glazed and her mouth agape.  Then her teeth
clicked shut and she lanced me with a look of frosted
French steel.  I theenk you are taking the meeckey
out of me, she ground out savagely.  And off she
flounced.

            The Auld Alliance must have been strong indeed
to put up with seven centuries of this sort of
stuff.
         
         
            
Balloonist lands in hot water with ex-minister's
wife. [Headline in The Times , n.d. Submitted by .]

         
         
            
It would also ban public consumption of alcohol and
wild dogs in these areas.  [From an article by Andrew
Jack about La Rochelle, France, in the Financial Times , .  Submitted by 
.]

         
         
            An Aye for an Aye




            I cannot really lay claim to being a native of England's
North Country as most of my ancestors
left the Borders during the Industrial Revolution,
and I was born farther south, in Yorkshire.  However,
I did live a large part of my life in Seahouses, a
small fishing village on the north Northumbrian
Coast.  Even though I consider Northumberland and
the Scottish Borders to be home, technically I am
still a Yorkshireman, and, having been raised in that
county of virtually unshakable local accents, it was
natural that my tongue would give me away and that
I would be called a Yorkie when living in Northumberland.
But on return trips to my birth place,
the Northumbrian influence would show and I
would be baited as a Geordie.  (I have since gone
international: I'm a Pommie in Australia and an
Aussie when back in England!)

            While in Northumberland I did serve my time
on a coble, a traditional fishing boat working out of
that tiny harbor not far from the Scottish border,
and it was during those years at sea that I learned
some of the more subtle intricacies of Northumbrian,
in particular that most flexible of all words--
Aye .  To most people in the English-speaking world,
Aye means yes, as in that well-worn phrase, Aye,
aye, skipper.  But the initiated know that there is a
great deal more to this little gem than meets the ear,
so to speak.

            I remember walking down to the harbor, early
one very misty morning, with a friend from Yorkshire
who was coming out on the boat to watch us
haul the creaves (lobster pots).  As we neared the
village we met an older fisherman heading in the
opposite direction.  He glanced up as we passed,
shook his head and uttered a terse greeting.

            Thick, eh?

            Aye, I replied.

            That was the sum total of the conversation.  After a
few minutes of deep reflection, my Yorkshire friend
could contain himself no longer.

            What was that all about?  he asked.

            He said that it was very foggy today and he
thought that the boats would probably not be going
out--he asked me if I was of the same opinion.  I
said that I agreed with him.

            My friend lapsed back into thought, stunned by
the hidden complexity of such a brief exchange.  Unknown
to him, the conversation down at the harbor
would be even more perplexing.

            The smaller boats had no radio or radar, so it
was customary, during adverse weather conditions,
for the fishermen to congregate around whatever
spot at the harbor offered the maximum shelter from
the weather of the day.  After an appropriate period
of time, some sort of taciturn group decision would
be made on whether or not the boats would go out
that morning.  Sometimes the men would stand for
several hours, all attention turned to the prevailing
conditions--and anything else that might happen
by.  As we joined the inevitable group gathered at
the end of the old lime kilns, one man looked up.
The conversation went something like this:

            Aye?  (In a short rising tone as if to say,
Who's this stranger with you?)

            Another fisherman turned his head.

            Aye, aye.  (These were two level-sounding
words meaning So your mate's going out with you,
is he?  It was more of a statement than a question.)

            Another voice added:

            H'aye.  (With an expulsion of breath, and going
down at the end: He'll be lucky to go anywhere
today, with all this fog... it's far too thick.)

            And another...

            Aye' he.  (This had a long dip in the middle,
with a short ending: That's right, very lucky to get
out.  He'll be lucky to climb down onto the boat.)
Silence for a while.  Then a more resigned sound
came from within the group.  It was almost a sigh:

            Aye.  (I think everything that you all just said
is correct, I don't think that the mist will clear, not
this morning.)

            Aye.  (A short, sharp, high note, with a hint of
contradiction: You never know, it could; we'll see
who's right.)

            Silence again.  An old bomb of a car bounced past
with several rough-looking youths inside.

            Aye!  (Quite strong, starting low, rising to the
end, as if to say, Going far too fast!)

            Aye!  (More of a growl: Yes, a ridiculous
speed to be traveling; and what are they doing, driving
about at this time of day anyway?  Up to no good
if you ask me.)

            Several Ayes--all different, but all in agreement.
(A rare thing!)

            Silence.  A big lift (sea, wave) came in the harbor
and all the boats made a run on their rope ends.
It was studied thoughtfully, the implications for the
prospects of the day mulled over.

            Aye!  (Long and strong, quite a dip in the
middle: Not only is it misty, but the sea is making
too!)

            Aye!  (Short, resigned, exhaled as a sigh: I
can't see that we'll be out today, just you mark my
words.)

            Aye.  (Fairly level, slight dip, then rise toward
the end: That's right, we'd have been far better off
staying in bed.)

            More silence.  One of the fishermen lazily drew his
knife out of his trouser pocket; he laboriously
opened it and began to sharpen the blade on the
corner of the sandstone wall.  There are providence-tempting
implications to be considered in an act like
this.

            Aye!  (Throaty, short, rise at the end, hint of
disgust: I don't know what you're sharpening that
thing for...)

            H'aye!  (Strong, definite but falling: Put your
knife away, man, you'll only make things worse.)

            One man looked up at the mist.  His face scanned
the bland emptiness of the full sky.

            Aye.  (Descending, exhaled, slightly wavy, almost
a touch of ridicule: Well, you lot can do what
you like, I've been here long enough, I'm off back
home.)

            Aye!  (Short, sharp, level: Me too!  This was
followed by other Ayes of agreement, but all different.)

            Aye, aye.  (First one level, second one descending:
We'll not do any good down here.  I think
we've made our decision.)

            The men started to move off, each going his own
way.  My skipper turned to me.

            Aye.  (Short, to the point: That's it my bonnie
lad.)

            My Yorkshire friend looked inquiringly into my face.

            Does this mean we're not going out to sea?

            What could I say?

            Aye.
         
         
            Falls the Shadow




            There's many a glitch 'twixt script and speech.
For a start, the script might be mis-typed or
semi-legible, and the speaker ignorant.  On a state
occasion during the Queen's recent visit to Namibia,
the master of ceremonies introduced Her Majesty as
Queen Elizabeth the eleventh.  And on an Irish
radio requests program a few years ago, the presenter
launched into a dedication to this effect:
And now, a special message for John Donachy of
Ballycloran, who is a hundred-and-eleven!  ...no
he's not, he's ill .

            And of course, even the clearest of scripts and
brightest of speakers will produce occasional misfires,
such as:


faulty accessing: a funfair of trumpets; a prawn in
the game; I know you like the back of my head.

mispronunciations: deteriate; cow-orkers; Grenada
as if written Granada.

botched tongue-twisters: shallow and slipshod
shatire; that disquieting condition called Kwok's
Quease; the fire at the Tirestone fire tactory.

spoonerisms and similar transpositions: submersive
elephants within the party; a cross-fannel
cherry; Tonight's orchestral concert comes to you
from the Bath Room at Pump.

            

            As long ago as the mid 1960s, the phenomenon
was conspicuous enough to inspire the title of a comedy
series on BBC radio, I'm Sorry I'll Read That
Again (whence the title of the current I'm Sorry I
Haven't a Clue )--the catchphrase adopted by radio
presenters as part of their retrieval strategy.

            For all their humor and popularity, such types
of deviation are in reality neither very common nor
particularly revealing.  The interesting types of deviation
are the more common, yet less recognized
types (widely unrecognized, it seems, perhaps because
seldom funny).  They are mistakes at sentence
level rather than word level; prosodic rather than
lexical mistakes; mistakes of stress, intonation, and
syntactic segmenting: in effect, accentuating the
wrong word or syllable, modulating the pitch incorrectly
(a rising rather than falling tone, say, or a
questioning rather than affirming tone), and pausing
in the wrong place.  A well-known literary example
is Quince's mis-structuring of his prologue within A
Midsummer Night's Dream:

               
Consider then we come but in despite.

We do not come as minding to content you [etc].

            

            And ponder these old parlor-game jokes:


What is THIS thing called, Love?  (inquisitively)

Pick your OWN strawberries! (indignantly)

There are 23 full-time professors and ten ¦ odd
teaching assistants.  (tiny pause after ten rather
than after odd)

It's now ten o'clock Greenwich.  Meantime, here
is the news.

Greenpeace divers yesterday blew ¦ up an effluent
pipeline in the Irish Sea.  (tiny pause after
blew rather than after up)

            

            Underlying such jokes is a crucial linguistic law:
a written sentence carries a higher risk of ambiguity
than a spoken sentence.  The stage directions
within a written/printed sentence are rudimentary--being
almost always of just the following four
kinds (in descending order of explicitness):


typeface (italics or boldface, say, to encourage
the reader to accentuate the word);

punctuation (a sentence ending with an exclamation
point, say, prompts a quite different reading
from one ending with ellipsis dots);

word order (position an element later in a sentence--in
English, at any rate--and its chances
of taking the main stress are usually increased);

word choice (a word like disgusting, for example,
specifically invites being enunciated in a withering
tone, whereas the more ambiguous revolting
might not).

            

            Since these cues are so rudimentary, ambiguity
pervades written sentences--sentences in isolation,
that is--and the transition to a spoken version can
therefore be a hazardous procedure.  Can you read
out loud the following sentences, for instance, without
feeling torn between rival renderings?


Do you understand?  (inquiringly, or menacingly)

I spoke to his secretary yesterday.  (accentuating
secretary, or yesterday)

She hasn't scooped me, has she?  (confidently, or
anxiously)

When can I meet your French mistress?

She tried shooting herself.

Build thee more stately mansions.

Do you think we should postpone or cancel the
meeting?

            

            Where the genuinely informative stage directions
reside is not within the written sentence itself,
but in the sweep of the preceding sentences--in the
context.  It is context that makes smoothly intelligible
reading possible.  Context, the Great Disambiguator.
Written sentences that in isolation appear ambiguous
will snap into focus when enmeshed in a larger discourse;
moreover, written language has the advantage
over spoken language in that it allows rereading
(and reading ahead) in order to ensure an accurate
interpretation of a given sentence.

            Consider how indeterminate the following sentence
is, out of context: on which word should the
main emphasis fall?


The UN team has also criticized the Bosnian
Serbs for various violations of the ceasefire.

            

            But put the sentence in context, and it suddenly becomes
quite clear where the emphasis lies:


UN observers have criticized Bosnian Muslims for
moving men and heavy guns into a demilitarized
zone south of Sarajevo.  The UN team has also
criticized the Bosnian Serbs for various violations
of the ceasefire.

[approximate transcript of a news report on the
BBC World Service, 11 May 1994]

            

            Obviously it is on the word Serbs that the main stress
should fall (to point up the contrast, established in
the preceding sentence, with the word Muslims ).
Unfortunately, the newsreader failed to render it
that way.  He placed the main stress on also , overlooking
the parallelism of the sentences and the contrast
that it was intended to foster.  In doing so, he
made nonsense of the report.

            What accounts for this tendency of theirs to
misread?  Sometimes it is a clear-cut matter of fatigue
or inattention, speaking trippingly, without attending
to meaning.  (In fairness, it does sometimes
happen that they have little or no time to acquaint
themselves with the script before reading it on air:
stop-press reports flash up on the Autocue; urgent
traffic bulletins or revised continuity announcements
have to be read unpreviewed from a last-minute
printout.)  And they neglect, through ignorance or
overconfidence, to take the elementary precautions
that would guard against such lapses: above all, to
mark up their scripts, the way actors do--inserting
a vertical pause here, or a curving tonemarker
there, or an underlining to cue emphasis, or
three dots to indicate a dying fall...

            Even pre-recorded broadcasts yield a good crop
of clangers.  (Of the six examples quoted below, four
fall into that category.)  Perhaps cost-cutting (which
the BBC, for example, seems to regard as one of
its main functions these days) has led to cornercutting--before,
during, and after the recording
session: less run-through time, less editorial monitoring,
less post-production checking and polishing.

            Here is a brief selection of examples (limited to
BBC programs) from the dozens I collected during
the summer of 1994.  They are broadly of two kinds:
those in which the wrong word is accentuated and
those in which the pause is wrongly positioned (or
perhaps, in technical parlance, examples of faulty tonicity
and faulty tonality, respectively).

            Continuity announcer, on BBC2 TV:


Cataclysmic events in the cosmos are taking place
tonight.  At this moment, Jupiter should be on the
receiving end of the first gigantic comet MASS.

(The main stress should be on first or gigantic or
comet rather than on mass.)

            

            Barry Norman, on BBC1 TV:


“Ladybird Ladybird” is not, however, a polemic
...Nor is it an attack on the social WORKERS,
although they do sometimes appear overzealous
...

(Shift the stress from workers to social.)

            

            Prof. Robert Wistrich, in a lecture given on BBC Radio
3:


Dreyfus was pardoned in time ¦ for the Universal
Exhibition in Paris in 1900... and his innocence
solemnly proclaimed six years later.

(The unwanted pause after time reveals a misreading
of his own sentence.)

            

            Chris Serle, on BBC Radio 4:


As he talked about his life ¦ and played his catholic
selection of Desert Island discs, ¦¦ it became
clear that he's a DOER ¦ and not a PONDERER ¦ on
life's inequities.  (Get rid of that last pause, and
place the second of the emphases more on inequities
than on ponderer; the current rhythmic and intonational
pattern thoroughly misconstrues the
construction.)

            

            Continuity announcer on BBC1 TV:


It's downhill all the way, ¦ in the SECOND of
tonight's films ¦ starring ROBERT REDFORD.

(Considering that the previous film had been The
Sting, the announcer is missing the point when he
allows a pause after films and then accentuates
Robert Redford: surely the last three words really
constitute a restrictive rather than a nonrestrictive
phrase.)

            

            Dr. Roy Porter, on BBC Radio 4:


How then did it happen ¦ that a successful and
wealthy country ¦ declined to become one of the
poorest in the world?

(Shift the second pause so that it follows rather
than precedes declined, and the sentence is
changed--utterly--from its intended sense.)

            

            Won't someone tell the big broadcasting companies
that accurate script-reading involves more
than accurate pronunciation?  Isn't it time, for instance,
that the News and Current Affairs producers
at the BBC, and the Talks producers as well, began
taking advice not just from the BBC's excellent Pronunciation
Unit but from its wonderful Drama Department?
         
         
            
Insectarium buzzes in heart of city of buggerly
love.  [Headline in The (Durham, North Carolina) Herald-Sun ,
.  Submitted by 
.]

         
         
            
He could not shake the dread feeling that he and all
the others who had been involved in those projects were
sitting on a bomb that, sooner or later, would explode in
their faces.  [From The Acting President , by Bob Schieffer
and Gary Paul Gates, E.P. Dutton, p. 273.  Submitted by
.]

         
         
            
[I]n our attempt to provide direction on how to control
and mitigate damages, it appears we neglected to empathize
with the fact that orchestrating such efforts may
have been difficult for you.  [Letter from William C. Turnbull,
Jr., of Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, .  Submitted by .]

         
         
            Towards a New Literature




            This brief article describes and illustrates the
struggle of Hieronymus Stoat (1947-) to
produce a completely new literature.  In his own
words:


The concept of things happening is inherently
bourgeois and ultimately capitalist-imperialist.
We must, I believe, strive to rout out these corrupting
influences on literary art; to debourgeoisify
writing.

[letter to the author, 1981]

            

            This achievement could only be brought about by a
completely new style of writing in which nothing
happened.

            Stoat's first attempt, a novella (untitled, like all
his work) opened thus:


The haddock looked at the wall for sixty-two
years.  The light was on.

            

            He was dissatisfied with this even before the ink was
dry.  Although little appeared to happen, a number
of events were implicit.  For instance, the moment
sixty-two years were up, the haddock presumably
stopped looking at the wall--a momentous event in
the context.  And, more subtly, the light's being on
contains the event of its having been turned on.  But,
most tellingly, it was argued by critics that the haddock
looking at the wall constituted a happening,
even if it were rather drawn out and somewhat uninteresting.

            Absorbing these criticisms, Stoat came to the realization
that the problem lay in verbs.  Wherever
you have a verb, things happen.  By definition.  He
thus tried to write in a completely verbless way.  His
revision of his untitled novella now began:


Pale haddock.  Endlessly white wall.  Ambient
lucency.

            

            This was better.  To make up for the missing verbs
he attempted to add interest by scattering adjectives
and adverbs everywhere.  But after a time, he had to
recognize that even though the text did not actually
describe anything happening, the mind had an extraordinary
facility to make things happen, unbidden,
to the haddock and wall in the light.  And the
adjectives actually helped.  Quite interesting things
could happen, with a vivid imagination.

            Now this was as bad as describing happenings.
After all, the text had no meaning outside the
reader's mind; so if that mind became full of imagined
events as a result of reading the text, then it
had failed in its quest for happeninglessness.  Slowly,
Stoat came to the realization that substantives, too,
were the problem.  Write a noun and the reader will
conjure up an image.  Moreover, the image will be
doing something--an event will be happening.
What if they too were expunged, then?  He tried it
and came up with:


Pale.  Endlessly white.  Ambient.

            

            With horror, Stoat realized that this was worse!  The
text provided a backcloth for all sorts of imaginings.
Amazing events were enacted in the minds of readers,
conjured by these suggestive qualifiers: virgins
dreamt of knights-at-arms on white chargers; dirty
old men elaborated prurient extravagances.

            Reluctantly he was forced to discard nearly all
of these signifiers.  Even prepositions could convey
the impression of happenings.  The single word up ,
for instance, was so loaded with connotation that it
too had to be avoided.  Stoat flirted briefly with a
form of writing that used only the definite and indefinite
articles, but soon became disenchanted with
such lifeless passages as:


A the the a the a a the.

            

            He ruefully concluded that even this could stimulate
an over-heated imagination.

            Meaning: that was the problem.  Where words
had meaning, they would engender images in the
readers' imaginations.  These images would start to
move and things would start to happen.  What was
needed was a meaningless language.  How about
Latin?  Granted some people still understood it, but
not the great generality of his readers.  He tried it.

            Video meliora proboque; deteriora sequor.

            A whole new set of problems emerged.  With a little
more imagination, readers could see all sorts of English
words hidden in the text.  With mounting despondency,
Stoat was forced to conclude that the
problem was words.  Any words, any words would
defeat his purpose.  To substitute pictures would be
to enter the world of graphic art and to desert literature.

            In a dream, the answer came to him: punctuation
!  How about a literature that was simply punctuation
marks?  He tried it, tentatively at first:


,.;;..,,!,:

            


            Then with more authority:


?;,,,.;;:!;;,..?;:...\?\\?\.,,

            

            Too many semicolons, said the purists, while the
more pragmatic marveled at the piquancy of the single
(unopened or unclosed?) quotation marks.

            We shall reserve judgment until we see his first
work of major length.
         
         
            
But each dish is more elaborate than the next...
[From a restaurant review by S. Irene Virbila in the Los
Angeles Times Magazine , , p. 26.  Submitted by
.]

         
         
            
There'll be plenty to eat: hot dogs, hamburgers,
children under twelve, only a dollar.  [From Hillbilly,
WHRB (Harvard University's radio station), Cambridge,
Massachusetts, .  Submitted by .]

         
         

            Notes on Quebec English



            English in Quebec shows much evidence of creolization.
Its speakers live in a linguistically complex
society, a mosaic of languages from around the
world in Montreal, dominated everywhere by speakers
of standard French and of Joual (from cheval ),
the 17th-century Norman and Poitou dialect that is
the folk speech of the province.

            My student Brigitte Harris, who is from Ontario,
immediately observed many peculiarities of usage
when she arrived in Montreal to earn an M.A. degree
in applied linguistics at Concordia University.
Our plan for her thesis was to count the Gallicisms in
the annual reports of the Protestant Schoolboard of
Greater Montreal for 1970 and 1980 and to compare
them.  We carefully considered spelling, punctuation,
and vocabulary, reasoning that such texts must
have been prepared by several people and vetted
many times, so the texts must have seemed unexceptional
to their writers and editors.  We found twice
as many Gallicisms in the 1980 text as in that for
1970.

            Textual rules of French seem normal to native
speakers of Quebec English.  For example, the spelling
of the name of the Benedictine monastery St-Benoît
du Lac contains a hyphen instead of a period,
as well as a circumflex accent.

            French names for foods are common: poulet frit
fried chicken Kentucky; moules mussels; frites
French fries; poutine French fries with curd
cheese and gravy (named after a Colonel Poutine
who was in charge of provisions at the Siege of Quebec
in 1749; at the end, the only stores remaining
were potatoes, cheese, and chicken stock; local folk
etymology has it from putain, putanesca ); aubergine
eggplant (the usual word in Britain); jarret de boeuf
shin of beef; caribou a fortified sweet wine, etc.

            Some examples of peculiar usage: we pay at the
cash cashier's station in the wicket grated window;
we lose waste time ; we open turn on and close
turn off the light ; and we say il y a rien là there's
nothing to it, literally, there's nothing there.  We
watch out for the S.Q. Sureté du Québec (police)
on the autoroute interstate; if you are going to the
dépanneur handy store (a mom-and-pop store),
stop at the S.A.Q. Société des Alcools du Québec
(liquor store).

            We receive subventions subsidies; we give conferences
lectures and lectures readings; we have
several years of scholarity schooling; belong to syndicates
unions; have fond souvenirs memories; attend
colloques colloquia; serve as animators leaders;
ride on the metro subway; and we eat hot dogs
steamé all dress steamed hot dogs with the works.

            Typical Canadian pronunciation is found in Quebec
English, such as raising--actually incomplete
shifting--of the /au/ phoneme, and the Briticisms
been /bin/, tourniquet / `t\?\rnike/, and again /\?\gen.
There is increasingly a syntactic change in the use of
the present perfect for the simple past, as in I have
noticed that last year .  The present perfect in English
has the same structure as the French passé composé ,
but traditionally it has had a different meaning; this
usage may not be peculiar to Quebec: perhaps it is
spreading in North America.

            Recently, a Francophone taking calls on CBC
(English) Radio in Montreal said, May I make a precision
[clarify something] for your auditors [listeners]?
Those who speak neither the dialect nor
French would be unable to understand that question.

         
         
            
The fates of two massive proposals to ease conjection
in the city centre... are still undecided.  [From New
Statesman & Society, , p. 16.  Submitted by .]

         
         
            
Zoning Enforcement Officer Ron Discher reported
that the farm has stopped work on the paddock, an enclosed
area where horses can graze and be mounted.
[From the Redding Pilot, .  Submitted by
.]

         
         


            Robertson Cochrane's enjoyable article, Me
and Empathy [XXI, 4], says, Why is it... that
people will not hesitate to proffer publicly their
guess-work on word origins and other language matters,
when they would not similarly dare to explain
the ordinary facts of botany and chemistry?  But
that is not so; for Bernard Shaw, for one, was interested
in language and in evolution (the life force
in Back to Methuselah ).  But the vitalists, like Shaw
and Bergson, weren't alone in trying to explain evolution;
there were also the Lamarckians (and later in
the then-Soviet Union, Lysenkoism); the orthogenesis
true-believers; and, finally, the neoDarwinists,
whose view of random mutations is the currently accepted
explanation.  But even today, with the Ebola
virus, are there explanations that are not guesses?
And in cosmology, what is the Big Bang theory if
not a guess?

            Guess-work on word origins is not and probably
cannot be science, since the matter is not involved
with well-established general theories.  But hunches
and logic and experience surely play a crucial role
(at least).  Take, for instance, the slang word kiester
buttocks.  Bill Bryce, I have read, writes that it
comes from the Yiddish.  But in my more than 70
years of speaking, reading and listening to Yiddish, I
have never heard that word (or read it); also I've
never heard any German-speaking person use it and
say that it derives from Kies meaning small round
stones (gravel).  But in the largely Italian neighborhood
where I was born and raised, I heard it often.
So, I guess that it's an adaptation of chiostra , referring
to a round thing, like a circle or a globe.  And I
must, or rather, want to say, that one of the prime
reasons for my enjoying Mr. Cochrane's article is
that he demolished the anti-empathy argument by
using logic and facts.





         
         


            In your review of Death Dictionary [XXII, 1, 18],
you appear to believe a correspondent who asserted
that most of all the people who ever lived are alive
today.  [In an earlier discussion of join the majority .]
That has not been true even for the past two centuries.
Today, there are about 5.6 billion living people.
If you add the estimated populations from the
almanacs for 1800, 1850, 1900, and 1950, you get
6.0 billion--and the real figure for the period was
certainly much higher.  A similar result is arrived at
by calculating in a different way: the almanac estimates
a world population of 200 million in AD 1; if
they had quietly reproduced themselves every
twenty-five years, with no increase in the rate of
population growth, almost 16 billion people would
have lived and died since then.

            I suspect that your correspondent was misled by
the word exponential in most statements of Malthusian
theory.  The statement would be true for a pure
exponential series (for example, in the series 1, 2, 4,
8, 16, it is clear the 16 > 1 + 2 + 4 + 8), but humankind
does not increase by such a series.





         
         


            I agree with Ashok Mohapatra's basic thesis in
Politicking with Words  [XXII, 1, 1], but I think his
search for elegant formulations obscured his judgment
in the selection of examples he cites to make his
point regarding the new German dictionary.  (p.2)
Stating that ...many words and usages exiled from
East Germany now found a place as free citizens
in the world of linguistic glasnost..., he cites only
one, Republikflucht , which is a true East German
neologism, i.e., a new crime--leaving the country--
which didn't exist before and has since been eliminated
from the penal code.  He is downright silly to
claim that Meinungsfreiheit (it should be one word
and capitalized, as all German nouns are), Weltreise
(obviously not Wettreise, which would mean a trip
to make a bet--only Phileas Fogg combined the
two), and Freizeit have now found a place in the
world of linguistic glasnost.

            Pomposity of expression is no substitute for clarity
of meaning.  Meinungsfreiheit, Weltreise , and
Freizeit were descriptive nouns used in the German-speaking
world well before the East German regime
came into being, although it, and the Nazis before,
connected the latter two with state-run programs
capitalizing on the human desire to travel and have
time for oneself.  Meinungsfreiheit is a term both regimes
clearly shunned; I suppose in a sense it was
liberated.  Stasi is simply an acronym for the infamous
communist secret police, successor to the Gestapo,
a term well known on both sides of the Wall.
It found its place into the new Duden ; OK, so what?
Where is the linguistic glasnost?

            Mr. Mohapatra is on solid ground in buttressing
his argument with the two widely diverging definitions
of capitalism.  But I am astonished that in his
diligent search he did not come up with the most
glaringly telling example of all juxtaposing definitions:
those for Democracy .  It would have been interesting
and enlightening to learn how the communist
state, which called itself a Democratic Republic,
defined the form of government which its every action
perverted and defiled.





         
         


            Intrigued by Milton Horowitz's A Discouraging
Word [OBITER DICTA, XXII, 1, 13], I set about tracking
the word balagan along its etymological course back
from the modern Hebrew into which, according to
Milton Horowitz quoting Herman Wouk, the word
was borrowed from Russian.

            The entry for the Russian word in the Tolkovyi
Slovar' Russkogo Yazyka (Moscow, 1935), reads as
follows, as transliterated and translated:


Balagan [Pers. balahana balcony].  1. A light
wooden structure for shows at fairs.  2. An amateur
theatrical production with primitive scenery; a theatrical
style based on imitation of this primitive stage-craft
(theatrical term).  Balagan art.  Balagan concepts
in Meyerhold's productions.  II By extension: A balagan-like
show, i.e. a crude, artistically tasteless, disordered,
frivolous one (derogatory).  The actors'
clowning turned the comedy into a balagan.  This is
no session, but a kind of balagan.  3. A temporary
wooden vendors' booth at a fair.

            

            The Russko-Angliiskii Slovar', compiled under the
general direction of Professor A.I. Smirnitsky (Sixth
Edition; E.P. Dutton & Co, New York, 1959), defines
the Russian word in English as follows:


Balagan, 1.  (wooden structure) booth; (for presentations)
show-booth; 2. show; (extended meaning)
farce, tomfoolery, preposterous piece of buffoonery.

            

            Does not one come away from these definitions of the
Russian word with the impression that whoever infected
Milton Horowitz's software may have taken
the discouraging word directly from Russian rather
than from Hebrew?  According to Wouk's footnote, as
quoted by Mr. Horowitz, in modern Hebrew balagan
has come to mean mess, foul-up, snafu, fiasco.  But
the Russian meaning of a booth for crude, vulgar buffoonery
seems to fit better the trick title that appeared
on Mr. Horowitz's computer screen.  My
guess is that the joker who named the program Balagan
was a Russian-speaking immigrant, either to Israel
or America, who may well have been aware of
the word's currency in modern Hebrew but for
whom the meaning remained the Russian one.

            Also interesting is the indication in the Tolkovyi
Slovar' that the word is of Persian origin and that in
Persian it means balcony.  Balahana looks a lot like
our English word balcony ; so I looked up balcony in
The Random House Dictionary of the English Language
(1966), where I found the etymology given as:


balconye < It balcone < balc(o) scaffold (< OHG
balcho beam)

            

            
               Webster's Third New International Dictionary gives a
similar etymology, stating that balcony is ultimately
of Gmc origin.  The Tolkovyi Slovar' states that the
Russian word for balcony (balkon) is borrowed from
Italian, which took it from Persian, not the Germanic
languages.

            So which authorities are right, the American
dictionaries or the Tolkovyi Slovar'?  Did the Italians
take their word balcone from some Germanic tongue
and pass it on into English, Russian, and other languages;
or did Italian take the word from the Persian
balahana , as Russian did balagan , at least according
to the Tolkovyi Slovar'?  Etymologies in the OED,
The Random House Unabridged , and Kluge's Etymologisches
Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache have
cognates of balagan/balcony popping up in Slovene
( blazina ), Greek, and most significantly in Lithuanian
( balǽienas ), purportedly the most conservative
of the Indo-European languages.  I suggest that
these scattered avatars of balagan/balcony evidence
descent from a single Proto-Indo-European root,
most prolifically in Italian and Persian.





         
         


            In response to the letter from Mrs. Maughan S.
Mason [XXI, 4, 17] regarding the odor emanating from
Pozzuoli (Naples), I did not know there was a refinery
there, but I do know that it's a sulfur area (probably
a bath in ancient times), and it does smell to
high heaven.  I know: during WWII I was stationed in
Naples and we would go to Pozzuoli.





         
         


            In Charles Stough's delightful article, Insulting
Nicknames Give Journalists Something to Be Proud
of [XXI,4], he gives The Grope and Flail for Canada's
national newspaper of record, The (Toronto)
Globe and Mail .  Another common nickname, bestowed
by a satirical paper called Frank , is The Glock
und Spiel , probably a sly dig at the Globe's conservative
leanings.

            I have heard Sydney's counterpart to the Globe
referred to as the Australian , and, earlier this year,
on International Women's Day , Edinburgh's The
Scotsman changed its masthead to The Scotswoman
for the day.

            In England, there is a well-known summary of
the country's best-known papers.  Here is as much as
I can remember (possibly inaccurately as well as incompletely);
perhaps another reader can supply the
full version:


The Telegraph is read by those who think they run
the country;

The Times is read by those who actually run the
country;

The Independent is read by those who think they
should run the country;

The Mail is read by those who think whoever runs
the country's a bunch of bastards;

The Express is read by those who think aliens run
the country;

And the Sun is read by those who don't care who
runs the country as long as she's got great tits.

            





         
         


            In A Billingsgate in Kerala, by O. Abooty
[XXII, 4], we read, ...Magnesia (a metal-bearing
region in Greece)...  There were two cities in
Asia Minor called Magnesia : one was in the Kingdom
of Lydia on the river Hermos below Mt. Sipylon; the
other, usually called Magnesia on the Maiander [Meander
river], was in the region called Ionia.  It is
probably the Lydian city whose name provided the
word magnesium as well as related words, like magnet .
Lydian Magnesia survives as the city of Manisa,
in what is now Turkey.

            To expand on Robert J. Powers's EPISTOLA [ibid.]
shrimp is not the only shr - word pronounced sr- in
the South: shrink and shrapnel may be added to the
list.  Other southern pronunciations that strike the
northern ear as different are:


[oil]                  all        [fΙθ]            fifth
kst]                   asked      [har]                    hair
[`bΙdnιs]      business   [`pou\?\l]               Paul
[`biy\?\n]             billion    [`w\?\d\?\nt]            wasn't

            





         
         


            Re: No Boys Named Sue, But..., by Hilary M.
Howard [XXII, 1, 7].

            1.  John Wayne's real name was Marion Morrison .

            2.  The author's name was Joyce Cary , not Carey.

            3.  The author notes that Shirley had mainly masculine
associations for centuries.  A major American
sportswriter for the Washington Post was (the male)
Shirley Povish, most noted for his article on Don
Larson's 1956 perfect game in the World Series.  It
began, Hell froze over.





         
         


            There has recently been some opinion in VERBATIM
[XXI, 3, 21] concerning the acronym AWOL .  I
suppose it doesn't matter all that much whether
someone is absent without leave or absent without
official leave--in either case, he or she is probably
in for a heapa trouble.  But, for my two cents' worth,
when I was in the U.S. Army, early 1950s (Korea,
Land of the Morning Calm, sometimes referred to as
Frozen Chosen), I was in a battalion personnel unit
and handled daily Morning Reports from each battery.
This included manpower accounting.  We always
saw the term and heard it and used it as absent
without leave.  While we had few or no real
instances of AWOL, it was reported daily.  The use of
WO for without meant--to us, anyway--that a
person who was gone, missing, couldn't be found,
etc., was absent and had been granted no leave--
official, unofficial, or what have you.  This was
AWOL .  There could be leaves of unofficial nature
(often called hip-pocket leave), but those were
not reported as any kind of leave: they compensated
a person some time off for a job well done or for a
long period in action and were not charged against
ordinary leave allowances.  But being AWOL was a
no-no, whether official or unofficial.





         
         


            The Editor's comments on ...prejudice
against Negroes in many Western societies...
[XXI, 3, 9] were apt but somewhat incomplete.  I saw
equally severe prejudice against people of darker
skin, often including Negroes, by non-Whites in two
major Asian countries in which I worked (1968-70,
1978-83) and in fourteen sub-Saharan African countries
in which I worked (1972-74).  Bigotry against
Blacks, sadly, is not confined to Western societies.





         
         


            E.A. Livingston's communication [XXI, 3] certainly
struck a responsive chord in me.  I have been
troubled by the use of African-American and AfroAmerican
to describe the people in question, especially
since a dear friend of mine, who is solid Caucasian,
emigrated from South Africa and is now a
citizen and thus is aptly described as an African-American!

            Since I recently had the privilege of seeing the
revival of Showboat on Broadway, I was particularly
interested in the lyrics of Old Man River.
When I was a child in the early 1930's, the song was
sung with the words: Darkies all work, etc..
When Frank Sinatra recorded it, he said Here we
all work, etc., fitting the meter but supposedly
more correct politically.  I never had any reason to
suspect that the original was other then Darkies
until I recently acquired a CD of songs from American
musical shows which were recorded in England
as performed there.

            Please look at the lyrics of the song in the enclosed
copy of the notes which accompanied the
CD.  I suspect strongly that this is the way it was
performed in London.  What I now wonder is
whether anyone can authenticate these words as being
the actual words when the show was first performed
in this country in 1927.  (Incidentally, I was
happy to see the corrigendum of the misattribution
of authorship of Poplollies and bellibones , since I was
the one who called it to Susan's attention!)

            Let me just add how much I have enjoyed and
continue to enjoy your magazine.  I am probably one
of your longest-standing subscribers (a very awkward
locution but I am probably not one of your
oldest).





         
         
            The relevant verses are:


Niggers all work on de Mississippi,
Niggers all work while de white folk play,
Pullin' dem boats from de dawn till sunset,
Gittin' no rest till de Judgement Day.

            

            (© 1927 T.B. Harms Company.  Copyright renewed.)
         
         
            
               VERBUM SAP
            
         
         
            Ha...ha...have one on me!




            In Act III, Scene 3, of Much Ado About Nothing ,
Constable Dogberry exclaims, Hah, ah ha! Well,
masters, goodnight... In Act II, Scene 1, of The
Tempest , Sebastian blurts out, Ha, ha, ha!  And Act
IV, Scene 2, of Troilus and Cressida contains one
Ah ah! and two Ha ha!s.  Which goes to show,
perhaps among other things, that the Bard was no
surer on his feet when it comes to the peripatetic
letter h than the rest of us.

            Its now-you-see-it-now-you-don't habits have
haunted English speakers of virtually every generation
since The Venerable Bede was an altar boy.  Although
dropping or adding an un-Standard h became
a social stigma only in the 19th century, the
habit itself is ancient.

            In his preface to the Lay of Havelok the Dane
(c. 1300), Walter Skeat cited several h -bombs, including
holde for old, hevere for ever , and Henglishe
for English .  In addition he found a handful of instances
where the title character was rendered as
Avelok .  Indeed, the earlier Anglo-Saxons had little
more luck with the voodoo h ; in a brief article in an
1888 issue of Notes and Queries , Prof. Skeat wrote:
Only last week, I found ors for hors horse in an
unedited A-S manuscript.

            Of course, Old English provided more opportunities
for error.  The time of Bede and Beowulf were
the hey-days--or ha!  -days--for the letter h .  Besides
providing early aspiration for many words, h did
yeoman service in front of the consonants l, n, r , and
w .  A predecessor of our verb load for take on water
was haladan , which logically led to the words
hlædel ladle and hlæden pail.  It is possible to see
today's louse egg, or nit in OE hnitu , but better by
far to illustrate the hn start with the felicitous verb
hnappian doze or nap.  Hrog , it seems to this perhaps
perverted mind, is a better word than ours for
mucus of the nose, or snot.  But then, half a loaf to
the Anglo-Saxons was only half , while a whole one
was a half .

            The hw beginning accounted for a slew of
words, many of which (such as which ) have survived,
but with the two initial letters transposed.  Here too,
the migrant, mystic h has served as a social shibboleth.
But those who make a big thing of correctly
pronouncing their wh words should know that it is
impossible.  What the modern purists are doing is
fully sounding the old hw in that order.  And my
guess is that even the most fastidious speaker drops
the h from the third-person pronoun in the question,
What did he say?
            

            Mind you, the letter h was playing hide and seek
even before Anglo-Saxon times.  Its use in Classical
Latin was more or less the same as it is today--as a
weak aspiration, the Romans being no more desirous
of exerting themselves than we are.  Spelling and use
were already erratic.  Arena was used as often as the
more correct harena sand, and we seem to have
preferred it as well, because that is the word we
adopted for the sandy site of gladiatorial combat,
sand being unbeatable at absorbing blood and gore.
As another example, the word umidus has no historical
right to its initial h but sports it anyway.  In the
Romance languages spawned by Latin, h has all but
disappeared as a symbol of sound value.  It frequently
persists, however, as an etymological relic
(French homme from Latin homo ) or with an imagined
etymological value (French haut , actually from
Latin altus , but influenced by Old High German hoh
high).

            Following the Latin lead, the Italians were the
earliest to scrap h entirely.  The result is such Cockney-looking
constructions as orribile and istorico .
They were digging the grave in Old French, but the
burial service was rudely interrupted by the Renaissance.
The English, who were importing French
words prodigiously, now have many examples from
both sides of the letter-shed-- ability and the suffix
- able , as well as such words as arbo(u)r , from the cut
stage.  We have others where the h has been reinstated
but is not pronounced ( hour, honest, heir , for
example), and still others where the h has been replaced,
but on whose pronunciation we have not yet
made up our minds ( humo(u)r, humble, herb ).  When
I was young, we took family vacations near Lake Huron,
where pronunciation was subject to the same
lack of certainty, providing the potential for some
proverbial southwestern Ontario jocularity.

            Perhaps the most notorious example of English
dithering in this matter is the word for which a Himalayan
snow monster is named.  Though no one has
met the snow monster, and therefore no one is in a
position to pass judgment on the creature's disposition,
we seem to feel that abominable is an apt descriptor.
But from the time of John Wycliffe until
the mid 1600s, we spelled it abhominable in the belief
that it sprang from the Latin elements ab away
from and homo man.  We changed back again
when the abominable truth was discovered that the
word had its own legitimate Latin ancestor, abominosus
meaning away from the omens, or hateful and
odious.  Something similar happened for a while to
preheminent , the suspicion being that the h was inserted
to avoid what the linguists call hiatus.
Some people solve this problem by illogically placing
a dieresis over the second e .

            But h in the initial position has long been the
more nagging nuisance.  Abundance existed as an excrescent
habundance for most of the 14th century
and for a good while after that, in the belief that the
word derived from Latin habere to have.  And neither
hermit nor hostage began life with an initial h .

            The letter's name, aitch, goes back to Old
French ache , from a late Latin accha, ahha , or aha --
all or any of them descendants of an earlier Latin ha .
I am sure we will all be happy to know that we are in
roughly the same league as the Romans and William
Shakespeare when it comes to knowing our ahs from
a 'ole the ground.
         
         
            
               ANTIPODEAN ENGLISH
            
         
         
            Famous Australian Etymologies



            The prize for the first--in the sense of earliest
recorded and significant--Australianism is generally
awarded to kangaroo , despite the fact that another,
much less striking animal, the quoll , is noticed in the
same glossary of an Australian language, that compiled
by James Cook, navigator and explorer, in
1770.  Some years elapsed before the British decided
to establish a penal settlement in the land which
Cook, when he took possession of it in 1770, primarily
to forestall the French, named New South Wales.
But, in 1788, Captain Arthur Phillip landed at Botany
Bay (near the present Sydney) with a mixed
party of convicts and their military custodians and
sought to use what little knowledge had been passed
on to him of the indigenous inhabitants, their language,
and the new land's flora and fauna.

            Somewhat to his surprise and that of others in
the party, the Aborigines of Port Jackson (as Sydney
Harbour was named) did not recognize the word.
Instead, they appeared to think it was an English
word and borrowed it (as they did other words, like
gammon and fellow ) with glee, using it of the cattle
which the invaders had brought with them and apparently
thinking it meant edible animal.

            This was to give Phillip and others their first
intimation that there was more than one Aboriginal
language; but, so distinctive and so immediately
made a symbol of the country was the animal itself,
and the word rapidly took on in English and, indeed,
in French.  And when, in 1820, Phillip King landed
at the Endeavour River, in the north of what is now
Queensland, where Cook's glossary was obtained,
he found that the local Aborigines did not recognize
the word, using a name something like menuah instead.
It was to be more than a century before the
explanation became clear, and, in the meantime,
several other possibilities were floated.  It was at first
thought that Cook and the naturalist Joseph Banks,
who was at his side, had erred, either in their understanding
or in their documentation, and it was later
suggested that an Aboriginal informant had misunderstood
the question and replied I don't know or
something a little less polite.  It was 1972 before the
linguist John Haviland identified the word in the
Queensland language Guugu Yimidhirr, where it denoted
a particular species of kangaroo and evidenced
the fineness of distinction that characterizes
Aboriginal languages.  By this time, of course, the
number and complexity of Aboriginal languages was
well known, and the Port Jackson language, or
Dharuk as it is now known, was long extinct.

            As a footnote, and in illustration of the sense of
Aboriginal humor which might have misled Cook,
consider the Victorian Aboriginal word moomba ,
used since 1955 as the name of a Melbourne carnival
and freely translated let's get together and have
fun.  Later scholarship suggests that the city fathers
were taken for a ride, the word apparently being
widespread in Victorian languages and meaning
buttocks.

            Aboriginal etymologies are now mostly settled,
the historical and geographical evidence of a word's
early use being brought collectively to bear as in the
case of kangaroo .  But where there is no evidence of
borrowing and no feasible source language, some
other explanation has to be sought.  This is the case
with a favorite Australian term for an Englishman,
pom or pommy .  At first sight this might appear to be
a British regional dialect word, but there is no possible
etymon even remotely like it recorded in Wright
or the OED .  So, whereas for dinkum , for instance, a
sense history can be established that fits chronologically
with a verifiable regional antecedent, for
pommy there is no such answer.  The first task then is
to track the word back to its earliest recorded occurrence
in Australian English to see if the context yields
any clues as to origin.  And it does.  Both forms are
first found in popular newspapers, notably the Bulletin ,
an aggressively Australian weekly, and in the Sydney
Truth , also a weekly and no less Australian, but
more scurrilous because more urban in outlook.  In
both papers the chase goes back to 1912, when there
was a sudden increase in assisted immigration and in
the consequent expression of attitudes to this immigration.
Both papers displayed an editorial indulgence
in word play.  Both evidence a third form,
pomegranate , with its tell-tale variant spelling pommy
grant .  The rhyme might not have been a very good
one, but the chant went up nonetheless--Immigrant,
Jimmy-grant, Pommy-grant--originally expressing
a prejudice against assisted immigration of
any sort, but later, simply because of the numbers
involved, becoming focused on the British, and later
still on the English.  For some reason unknown to lexicographers
the word became popular, and it was but
a matter of time before it was shortened to pommy
and then pom , both of which were used adjectivally
as well.

            But this explanation, first advanced and documented
by the Australian National Dictionary , has
yet to win full acceptance, there still being those
who prefer the unsubstantiated acronym POME
Prisoner Of Mother England or the French pomme
de terre as a source.  There are even those who find
the comparison of the brightly colored fruit with the
ruddy cheeks of the newly arrived English immigrant
sufficient explanation in itself.  Folk etymologies
often have a life of their own.
         
         

            My jugular vein is caught in the bedding




            That statement, we were once asked to believe
by John Cleese, was an example of the irrelevancy of
Victorian English phrase books, along with the well-known,
My postillion has been struck by lightning.
But each age and each culture has its own phraseology.
Already after 30 years LPs, gramophones , and
wirelesses belong to history and a never-ending tide
of new transatlantic terminology swamps these shores
with the everyday expressions of Chicago and Silicon
Valley.  Perhaps we need an English Academy to keep
our language pure.  But, whether through technological
or social change, language moves on.

            Two recent phrase books of African languages
illustrate how one man's bread is another man's
mealie-meal.  One language is Swahili--as approved
by the East African Swahili Committee in
1957; the other Fanagalo-- The Lingua Franca of
Southern Africa, printed only twenty years ago but
using language very alien to the urban Brit.  The
phrases chosen aptly describe the sort of society and
people these languages serve.

            Fanagalo, though hardly heard of in Europe, is
used daily by thousands of people in southern Africa.
It is a made-up language like Pidgin and, unlike
Esperanto or Volapük, is based on a real tongue,
Nguni, related to Zulu and Xhosa.  It was created to
meet an urgent need for a common language between
those using the European-derived Afrikaans,
English, German, or Portuguese on the one hand
and, on the other, the speakers of the numerous African
tongues from the Angoni in Malawi to the Zulus
in Natal, all of whom worked together in the diamond
diggings, gold mines, and farms of the whole
of southern Africa, including Mozambique and what
are now Namibia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe.

            Its vocabulary may look strange but sounds familiar.
Counting, for example, begins: wan, tu, tri,
fo, fayif, sikis ...; while around the home you find
stui stew, grevi gravy, pitsh peach, and flauwa
flour.  All these are based on English words as are
the expressions used in mines and factories: aseyi
hofisi assay office, mayin kapten mine captain,
blas-fonis blast furnace, and kaplin huk coupling
hook.  The grammar and construction, though, are
Nguni and distinctly unfamiliar.  The phrases employed
to teach us Fanagalo are indicative of its origin:
Who has stolen the venison?, The medicine will
kill your intestinal worms, I told this boy he must not
go underground, as he is drunk, Open the compressed
air immediately , and so on.

            Swahili is the lingua franca of East Africa, but it
has a lot in common with Fanagalo, and the two include
many similar words.  However, the 1957 New
English-Swahili Phrase Book demonstrates a rather
different world.  In the section headed The House
we find Iron the lace with great care, Mangle all these
clothes, We need charcoal for the iron today, I want
you to buy four sheep's tongues , and--how colonial-- I
want also two cucumbers, for afternoon tea!
Under Farm and Plantation there are the following
useful lines: The cowshed roof is leaking badly,
The wild pigs are very troublesome , and A lizard got
into the fowl-pen .  But Safari and Hunting includes
the choicest phrases: Let all the utensils be safely
packed, Is it lung blood or heart blood?, Hang up the
kill so that the hyenas do not get at it, Put water in
the skull and get the brains out with a stick , and Split
the skull and give the brains to the cook .  All very
useful given the right time and place, although
Which way is the wind? and Can they hear us from
here? might be better left unsaid.

            But it is probably the attitudes revealed that
already place these books in a bygone age: Arrival
at the coast gives us I want to go ashore; carry my
loads ; on safari there is Pitch all the white men's tents
in line ; and Fanagalo phrases for golf include Move
your shadow, Don't rattle the bag , and Have you caddied
before?  I don't want a useless boy .  I wonder if
Ernie Els knows those?

         
         
            
PLEASE DO NOT ANNOY, TORMENT, PESTER, PLAGUE,
MOLEST, WORRY, BADGER, HARRY, HARASS, HECKLE, PERSECUTE,
IRK, BULLYRAG, VEX, DISQUIET, GRATE, BESET, BOTHER,
TEASE, NETTLE, TANTALIZE, OR RUFFLE THE ANIMALS [Sign
in the San Diego Zoo Wild Animal Park.  Submitted by
.]

         
         
            
Attendance has been very erotic... [From a report
of a Master Gardener Meeting in Master Gardener
Almanac , .  Submitted by .]

         
         
            Grow Your Vocabulary By Learning the Roots of English
Words
            This book is really a comprehensive study of
word formation in English, dealing with roots, prefixes,
and suffixes.  To make it palatable for a popular
audience, it has been published in the guise of a vocabulary
builder, which, I suppose, it is, though anyone
without both the vocabulary to begin with and
an inordinately strong will is very unlikely to find
the book easy to understand.  One might regard it as
a popular combination of Carl Darling Buck's A Dictionary
of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European
Languages (1949 and 1988) and A Comparative
Grammar of Greek and Latin (1933), both
University of Chicago Press, with something of Edward
Pinkerton's Word for Word , Verbatim Books
(1982), and my Suffixes and Word-Final Elements of
English (1982) and Prefixes and Word-Initial Elements
of English (1984), both Gale Research, thrown
in.  None of these appears in the Bibliography, however,
which seems to be given over to books and
articles dealing with the teaching and learning of
vocabulary.

            As it seems likely that readers of VERBATIM are
not among the prospective customers for this book
as a vocabulary builder, it is worth reviewing as a
source book for the meaty information about word
formation and to ignore the sizzle about vocabulary
building.  Indeed, the market as perceived by
Schleifer consists largely of educated adults and
browsers of difficult words and word lovers of all
sorts: relatively short shrift is given to high school
and college students, and, mercifully, no mention at
all is made of those who might have been sold on the
promise of a better life--or a better after-life, or
perhaps a better half-life--through the acquisition
of an expanded vocabulary.

            The best description of the content is Schleifer's
own, which, to save time and effort, is reproduced
here, slightly edited:


Part I: COMMON ROOTS...provide [s] in-depth
coverage of 36 common roots and described, in
detail, the dissection, analysis, reconstruction,
definition, and commentary processes, followed
by 24 exercise entries for each root or related
roots.

Part II: HELPFUL HINTS is a partial answer key
for the exercises in the COMMON ROOTS and provides
the meaning and etymology of one root per
exercise word.

Part III: SUBJECTS consists of three categories of
specialized words and phrases, which are further
divided into 36 subjects, each of which, through
an illustrative example and a wide selection of
exercises entries, provides additional practice in
dissecting, analyzing, reconstructing, defining,
and providing commentaries for English words.

Part IV: HOW ENGLISH WORDS ARE CREATED: A
SHORT COURSE is a simplified, step-by-step presentation,
which includes a large assortment of easy-to-understand
charts and tables and illustrates
how English words are constructed from native
Latin-, and Greek-derived roots to which prefixes,
suffixes, and other roots are affixed in accordance
with precise linguistic rules.  This part
serves both as a self-contained course in English
etymology and as an explanation of the more
technical Latin and Greek data presented in A
CROSS REFERENCE DICTIONARY and in the Technical
Information and Detailed Example sections of the
COMMON ROOTS.

Part V: A CROSS-REFERENCE DICTIONARY is a
combination dictionary-index, which provides
follow-up coverage and page references for thousands
of words and roots discussed in this book.
...[W]hen used in conjunction with Part I...,
[it] becomes a self-teaching primer for the study
and application of English etymology.

            

            Unbelievably, Part V, which contains 58 pages
of small print and is one of the most useful and informative
sections of the book, has not even been accorded
pagination, something for which Random
House ought to be carpeted for before the International
Bibliographical Court.

            For some people, a comprehensive description
of the history of words in English is more information
than they wish to assimilate, and they will be
relieved to learn that Schleifer covers the territory
in about ten pages.  For those who wish to know
more, there is a neatly put together section on Latin
(pp. 175-228) and one on Greek (pp. 228-64).
Grow Your Vocabulary offers an excellent overview
of how words are created and compounded in English
and belongs in the library of every word-lover.

            Laurence Urdang
         
         
            Witty Words: A Hilarious Collection of Outrageous
Quotations for Every Day of the Year
         
         
            Conversational Joking: Humor in Everyday Talk
            There must exist some standard, somewhere, for
what passes as witty, funny, hilarious, but it
probably changes hourly and depends on the age,
religion, race, financial condition, location, and
other characteristics of the observer.  We often
laugh appreciatively at what is clever, though it may
not be funny, humorous, or even mildly amusing.
Take, for example, the three quotations from Clarence
Darrow given for April 18 in Witty Words (in
which, it is easy to see from the subtitle, quotations
are arranged for each day of the year):


The first half of our lives is ruined by our parents
and the second half by our children.

When I was a boy I was told that anybody could
become President; I'm beginning to believe it.

I have never killed a man, but I have read many
obituaries with a lot of pleasure.

            

            These are, as the book title suggest, witty; one could
certainly agree that they are facetious; but they are
not funny, and certainly not hilarious.  Sometimes,
the shock of recognition when one encounters
a well-phrased truism is enough to trigger a welcoming
response, which might manifest itself in a smile
to indicate the pleasure of the experience.  But a
smile is not a response to something hilarious.  I
rather suspect that Eileen Mason was satisfied with
the title of her book; then the publisher came along
and stuck in hilarious for advertising purposes.
One could not disagree with outrageous.  Not all
the quotations are witty; an inept one is credited to
Adolph Deutsch:


A film musician is like a mortician--he can't
bring the body back to life, but he is expected to
make it look better.  [October 20]

            

            Another for the same day:


The greatest thrill known to man isn't flying--it's
landing.

            

            One might comment that safely would not have
disturbed the meter of that poetic thought.

            If one likes this sort of thing, this is a good collection.
It is arranged in calendar order and has
three indexes, one of people, one of holidays, and
one of subjects.

            Professor Norrick might be offended to find a
review of his book so closely associated with what he
might consider to be trivial, but he does expend a
great deal of text describing the various forms of
humor--sorry, I cannot resist the punctuation--
that come from one-liners and clichés (many of
which, after all, are quotations).  There is little humor
in this book, either in the joking or the situations
described, largely because of the analytical approach:
nothing makes a joke fall flatter than having
to explain what is funny about it, especially when it
was not particularly funny to begin with.  It is hard
to tell why Norrick persists in interspersing the recorded
conversations with irritating Heh heh heh
heh hehhehheh or Ehhehheh ha ha ha.  But
these are natural conversations, and it evidently
takes so little to make people laugh--an apt metaphor
seems to send them into paroxysms of laughter--that
one need no longer wonder at the success
of stand-up comedians who rarely say anything
funny but focus on reminding their audiences of
truisms.

            Humor, as we are told endlessly by those in the
entertainment profession, is a serious business; Norrick
demonstrates that it is serious for linguists, too,
which we might have suspected once Freud got his
hands on it.

            Laurence Urdang
         
         
            Caught in the Web of Words: James Murray and the
Oxford English Dictionary
            Although this book was not reviewed in VERBATIM,
encomiastic reviews of it have appeared internationally,
and this is merely a notice to let readers
know that it is available in paperback (albeit at a
formidable price).

            Laurence Urdang
         
         
            Puzlpack Version 3, for IBM PS's or compatibles
            Puzzle solvers seem to fall into two categories,
those who use reference books to help them find the
right answers and those who eschew any aids whatsoever.
I have always fallen into the latter category.
If I could not identify a missing word in a quotation,
I marked that down to my own failing, one that was
not likely to be remedied by looking it up in Bartlett ,
after which it would be promptly forgotten; mercifully,
not all clues in puzzles are quotations, so some
of them worked out; besides, the word that had to
be supplied was usually a very common one and its
only connection with the quotation was that it happended
to appear in it, like be in To be or not to be.
For many years, the crossword puzzles published in
Britain, like those published in VERBATIM) have been
of the cryptic kind, differing from the typical
American variety by a diagram that does not cross-key
every letter of every word and by clues that are
not simply straightforward matter, like the solution
ers for bitter vetch and other otherwise useless
bits of information; for one thing, many of the clues
are anagrams, which is where Puzlpack comes in.  To
save space, here is what Puzlpack can do (from the
blurb):


• Find all single-word anagrams: EIPRST yields
ESPRIT, PRIEST, RIPEST, SPRITE, STRIPE, TRIPES.

• Unscramble jumbled words.

• Find all blank tile substitutions.

• Find the unknown letters in crosswords:
W?R??S yields WIRERS, WORLDS, WORSES,
WORSTS, WORTHS, WURSTS.

• Display all words with any range of lengths in
a set of letters.

• Verify the validity of a word play.

            

            I am not entirely sure that I understand what each of
those means (especially worses and worths),
but experienced puzzlers might.  The program is
simple to load and, once in place, easy to use; it is
also extremely fast.  The OED on Compact Disc has a
facility for finding blank tile substitutions, but it
does not include all possible inflected forms.

            If everyone had this software, there would be
no point in using anagrams in clues, I suppose; on
the other hand, not everyone does, and the use of
such aids is probably ruled out in competitions
where the entrants are controlled--that is, not
working at home.  It is also useful for puzzlemakers.

            Laurence Urdang
         
         
            A Catalogue of Cats




            In view of the abundance of the worldwide population
of the domestic cat it comes as something
of a surprise to learn that no authority can categorically
state where the name for this group of small,
soft-furred carnivorous animals started or when.  We
know the cat was domesticated both in the East and
West in the early historical period, the ancient
Egyptians being credited with having been the first
people to have done so and at one period in their
history to have worshiped it as sacred.  The name is
found in Latin and Greek in the first to fourth centuries
and in the modern languages as far back as their
records go.

            Almost certainly a loanword, in Old English it is
catt ; Welsh and Cornish cath ; Gaelic cat ; Old Irish
cat ; Dutch and Danish kat ; Middle Dutch katte ;
Swedish katt, katta ; Old Norse kött-r ; Old High German
chazza, chataro ; Middle High German katero,
kater ; Modern German Katze , but Modern German
and Dutch also have kater tomcat ( tom denoting
the male of certain species of animal, notably the
cat); French chat ; Spanish and Portuguese gato ; Italian
gatto ; Old North French cat ; West German katta ;
Breton kaz ; Old Slavonic kotŭka, kotka ; Slavonic kot ;
Bulgarian kotka ; Russian, male kot , female kotchka,
koshka ; Bohemian, male kot , female kotka ; Lithuaniane
kate ; Finnish katti ; Polish kot , male cat or tomcat
koczur, kocur .  As the above indicates everyone
had or has some sort of word for the cat.

            What is also a mystery is why the use of the
word cat was so often attached as a prefix to other
words.  In some examples I feel the word also suffered
catachresis , a misapplication of cat due to
etymology.  Catgut , for example, has nothing to do
with that animal as it is a tough, elastic cord made
from the twisted intestines of sheep, used for the
strings of musical instruments.  The first element
might have come from kit small fiddle.  When it is
played badly, however, some listeners agree that
there is a feline similarity to caterwauling , from the
Middle English caterwawen , an uttering of a discordant
shrieking, as from a cat.

            A person who is catlike is lithe and active,
moves stealthily and noiselessly, perhaps like a cat
burglar seeking to commit a crime by using a cat-walk ,
a narrow ledge, footway, or platform.  Possibly
mannequins (fashion models) can be considered cat-like
when they promenade, cat-footed , confident in
moving down the catwalk at a fashion show evoking
no catcalls from the audience (unless the designs fail
to be to the viewers' liking), eliciting catty remarks,
turning the show into a catastrophe .  It is unlikely
they would have wanted to see examples of cat suits ,
the all-in-one, neck-to-foot legged garment, worn by
women and men during WWII.  Winston Churchill,
often depicted as a bulldog, frequently wore one to
work, though he preferred to call it a boiler suit.
Winnie possibly thought his cat suit was the cat's
whiskers , i.e., good, satisfactory, perfect, ideal for
the task.  The cat's whiskers is a term possibly first
used in 1927, by Dorothy L. Sayers in her novel
Unnatural Death .  Maybe the early uses of the cat
whisker or cat's whisker , a thin wire for establishing
contact on a crystal (wireless) set was thought to be
the same when the listener was successful.

            Similar to the cat's whiskers is the cat's pyjamas
meaning anything that is very good, attractive;
American in origin from around 1920, it had become
Briticized by 1923.  However, according to Eric Partridge,
in his Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional
English , the word was obsolete in the UK by 1934;
but it was far from dead in Australia as late as 1965.

            In the same war those night fighter pilots who,
because they could see well in near-darkness, shot
down numerous enemy aircraft were said to be cat-eyed .
A famous ace pilot was known as Cat's-eyes
Cunningham.  Cat-eyed women though are those
with greenish, slinky, Oriental-type eyes.  Cat's-eye
is a semi-precious, yellowish-brown stone, a variety
of chalcedonic quartz or chrysoberyl, which, cut in a
certain way, reflects light and has a luster like the
contracted pupil of a cat's eye.  Catoptrics is the
study of the reflection of light.  Cat silver , German
Katzensilber , similarly, is silver that still shines in declining
light.

            A cathouse is a brothel, cat being a former word
for prostitute.  Perhaps some of the latter drank cat's
water , a 19th-century term for gin.  Catting was a
word for chasing after the female sex, i.e., a man
out on the tiles--like a tomcat?  Cattery is the
name for the place where numbers of animal cats are
housed.  A cat-hole or cat-flap is the entry and exit
site in a door for a household's cat, the difference
being that a cat-hole is merely a hole in the door,
whereas a cat-flap is hinged to swing to and fro and
close the opening automatically.

            A cat-lap is not the owner's lap on which the cat
can sit or lie and sleep, but a cup of tea.  It was so
referred to as far back as 1785 when Grose, in his
Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue , stated,  cat-lap :
tea, called the scandal broth.  Gossip over the tea
cups perhaps?  Other authorities hold that cat lap
was slops; the stuff a cat will lap.  A catnap is a short
sleep, sometimes after a meal, as a cat is wont to
have.  Catnip is the American name for a plant
known elsewhere as catmint .

            
               Cat ice is a thin layer of ice on a puddle from
under which water has receded, so named because it
will bear only the weight of a cat, or a catling , a
kitten walking over it cat-footed to avoid breaking it.
Cat dirt is not what might be thought, but a type of
clay.  Catbrain is a soil containing clay mixed with
stones.  Cat and clay is straw and clay mixed together
to make rolls of material which are laid between
the wood posts in constructing mud walls of
dwellings.

            Ironically, although cats are reputed to dislike
water and getting wet, there are numerous words
using cat for nautical and maritime items.

            
               Cat is abbreviated from catamaran , used in
trade names like Hobie Cat .  A catamaran is a raft of
logs lashed together or a boat formed of two hulls
held together by a bridgelike framework.  The word
catamaran comes from the Tamil kattu binding,
katta to tie, and maram wood, meaning logs.  Another
use of catamaran , quite different, is a cross-grained,
cantankerous woman.

            The cathead is a heavy piece of timber projecting
from the bows of a vessel for hauling anchors
fitted with a stock into position clear of the ship's
side.  It was so called because in the days when there
was much carving on wooden-hulled ships, a cat's
head or sometimes a lion's head was almost always
carved on it.  This procedure, before the days of the
stockless anchor, was known as catting the anchor .  A
cat purchase is a rope tackle used for hauling an anchor,
especially on a cat davit , a light crane used on
small vessels to hoist an anchor so it can then be
swung round to lower the anchor on to the deck or
overboard.  A cat pennant is the small pennant used
either as a marker for an anchor buoy or as a signal
that a vessel is at anchor.  A catenary is the curve of
the anchor cable between the anchor on the sea bed
and the vessel.

            
               Cat's-paw has several meanings.  One is the
slight ripple on the surface of an otherwise flat sea,
interpreted by sailors as portending a breeze.  A
variation is a light breeze, just strong enough to ruffle
the water surface.  Second, it is a twisting hitch,
made in the bight of a rope to form two eyes through
which the hook of a tackle is passed for hoisting.  A
catshank is a knot similar to a sheepshank but with
an extra turn through the loops to prevent their slipping
through.  Third, cat's-paw dates from the late
18th century as a dupe, a person used by another as
an unsuspecting agent, or tool, especially in nefarious
transactions.  This version came from the fable
of the monkey which used a cat's paw to draw hot
chestnuts from a fire.  A century later the term cat's-foot
was used for a dupe.  As for cat holes , they
were two small holes cut into the stern above the
gun ports on a sailing man o' war, on the same level
as the capstan, and used for leading a stern hawser
to the capstan when required to secure the ship
astern.

            There are many uses of cat in the naming of wild
species, some having tenuous associations.  A cater-pillar
is the larva of a butterfly or moth, coming
from the Old French chate pelouse , hairy cat.  This
dates back to 1440 and the word catyrpel , worm
among the fruit.  Cat's-head is a very large apple
variety, possibly a cider apple, the name, dating
back to 1617, supposedly given owing to the similarity
of the fruit to a cat's head.  In the 19th century
totally different was cat's-head , it being a non-nautical
term for the end of shoulder of mutton.  A cat-bird
is an American thrush, with a call like that of a
cat.  A catfish has barbels on its head, around the
mouth, that slightly resemble a cat's whiskers.  Cat's-foot
is another name for the British wild plant
ground ivy, so called from the resemblance of the
shape of the leaves to the print of a cat's paws.
Cat's-tail , also timothy grass, was a name formerly
given because the shape of the grass flowerhead resembles
that caudal appendage.

            Male readers will know what cat's hair is (or
was--older men remembering it from long ago)
down on the face of youths before the beard grows.
         
         
            
               CORRIGENDA
            

            We apologize for having confused the order
of the paragraphs in Politicking with Words: On
Ideology and Dictionary Meaning, by Ashok K.
Mohapatra [XXII1,1]: their proper order is easily determined
in the reading, so we shall not bother to
clarify it here.

            We thought we could ignore the error and it
would go away, but readers keep reminding us of
what might be called, because of its prominence, a
typogiraffical error: in Murdering the Language
[OBITER DICTA, XX,4,5], the grammatically proper
form would have been Omar m'a tuée, (reflecting
the feminine gender of the preceding m ') and not, as
printed, tué .
         
         


            
               
To those that live in Florida it is almost invaluable,
as we cannot get eggs that are fresh and good
in any other way.  Mrs. Wm. Henry Montague,
St. Augustine, Florida.

            

            [From an advertisement for Condensed Eggs]

            The above advertisement appeared in the Chicago
Tribune Pronouncing Dictionary , Clark and
Longley, 1886.  Another advertisement, for the McIntosh
Family Faradic Battery (Price $10.00), claims
that it treats the following diseases:


Abscesses.       Debility.      Kidney.        Rheumatism.
Acne.            Diarrhea.        Disease.     Ringworm.
Ague.            Dropsy.        King's Evil.   Salt Rheum.
Asthma.          Dyspepsia.     Lameness.      Scalds.
Baldness.        Epilepsy.      Leucorrhea.    Scrofula.
Biliousness.     Felons.        Lumbago.       Spasms.
Boils.           Fits.          Milk, to       Spinal
Bunions.         Goitre.          increase     Irritation.
Catarrh.         Headache.        flow.        Sprains.
Chilblains.      Hiccough.      Nervous        St. Vitus
Colic.           Hysteria.        Exhaustion.  Dance.
Constipation.    Impotence.     Nervousness.   Toothache.
Convalescence.   Incontinence   Neuralgia.     Tumors.
Convulsions.       of Urine.    Numb Palsy.    Varicose
Cramps.          Jaundice.      Paralysis.       Veins.
Deafness.        Joint          Piles.         Vomiting.
                   Affections.

            

            It is worthwhile pointing out that this editor has suffered
from some of these affictions (especially Convalescence)
at one time or another (and the attacks
seem to return with increasing frequency as the
years dwindle down).  Still, most have happily been
kept at bay: we still have not suffered from, among
others, the King's Evil, insufficient flow of milk, St.
Vitus [ sic ] dance, deafness, or salt rheum; the others,
including felons, come and go and must be regarded
as natural reflections of everyday life.  Etymologically,
males cannot suffer from hysteria, and most
older people are unlikely to get colic.

            Such amusements aside, one might think that a
careful review of an older dictionary might reveal
something about the state of the language at the
time of publication; but that is not necessarily true
for old dictionaries any more than it is for new ones.
To be sure, there are oddments and peculiarities that
can be spotted: in the case of the subject work, one
cannot help finding the definition of electricity a
source of entertainment:


the operations of a very subtile fluid.

            

            Readers may be surprised to learn that there is, effectively,
no definition in the Random House Unabridged
for electricity : where one would expect to
find the main definition appear cross references to
electric charge and electric current , neither of which
offers a definition akin to the one we all know to
the one sought.  The problem is, of course, that
while our understanding of the behavior of electricity
has improved in the last century or so, we know
little more about its basic nature than we did before.

            Like modern dictionaries, dictionaries prepared
in the past contain entries considered important by
their editors, either for personal reasons--and there
is nothing much criticizable in following a personal
opinion if it is that of a qualified observer--or because
a given word had become traditional in the
contemporary cultural context.  Thus, for instance,
we can readily understand retaining a definition for
awful striking awe, but few would agree that that
was either the dominant sense (or even a common
sense) in the 1880s in America; yet no other definition
is provided.  It must be remembered that the
dictionary in hand contains only 32,000 words and
phrases, which means that it is half the size of the
average mass-market paperback dictionaries sold today.
It therefore carries a surprising number of obsolete
and archaic words, and it is difficult to tell
whether they are in because they were common in
American English, in American English spoken in the
Midwest, or simply carelessly retained from an earlier
dictionary which was not properly edited.  For
one thing, certain British spellings are retained, but
those might have been left over from pre-Webster
spelling reform: endeavour, moulding, humour; enamelling;
fulfil .  But esophagus not oesophagus , etc.

            A large number of words that do not occur in
common speech and writing today are listed; some
have been selected here (omitting pronunciation and
part of speech) with comments based on checking in
the Oxford English Dictionary , which, it must be
noted, classed the words at about the time of publication
of the Chicago Tribune Pronouncing Dictionary :


acritude, an acrid taste.             embassy, message to a foreign
  [obsolete]                                          nation.  [Secondary sense in
acronical, rising of a star at           OED (which has main entry
  sunset, or setting at sunrise.                      under ambassy).]
  [The second part is wrong.]                      embolus, a pistion, or driver.
aduncity, bending in the form            [obsolete]
  of a hook.  [obsolete]                           emolumental, producing profit.
adustion, the act of burning             [obsolete, rare]
  up.  [obsolete]                                  epistolize, to write letters.
after-wit, wisdom that comes             [...engaged in by
  too late.  [We should have                          correspondents to
  revived this word instead of                        VERBATIM.]
  borrowing esprit d'escalier         estuary, an arm of the sea; a
  only to translate it into the                       vapour bath.  [Second sense
  awkward staircase wit.]                is obsolete.]
aggrievance, injury; wrong.           estuation, a boiling; agitation
  [Sense not in OED.]                    of water.  [obsolete]
agonism, contention for a             exustion, act of burning up.
  prize.  [Sense not in OED.]            [obsolete]
allision, act of striking against.    eye-servant, a servant that
  [obsolete]                                           requires watching.  [archaic]
anteact, a preceding act.             eye-service, service done
  [obsolete]                                           under the employer's eye.
aphthong, a letter having no              [archaic]
  sound.  [useful, but rare]                       flammeous, consisting of or
architective, belonging to                like flame.  [rare]
  architecture.  [Sense not in                     forestall, to buy goods before
  OED.]                                   they reach the market.
elusion, escape; evasion.  [rare]         [obsolete]

            

            There are other curiosities in this book.  For example,
the entry


affusion, act of pouring upon.

            

            By contrast, here is the pertinent definition from the
OED :


2.  Med.  A remedy in fevers, consisting in pouring on
the patient a quantity of water, varying in temperature
according to his state, but usually from 50° to
60° or 70° Fahr.  Also fig.  1803 W. TAYLOR in Ann.
Rev.  1. 273 From the eruptive fever of democratic
effervescence, countries recover by slight and temperate
affusions of concession.

1844 T. GRAHAM Dom. Med. 752 In very acute attacks
of yellow fever...we resort to the use of purgatives,
and the cold affusion.

            

            At alcahest , the definition reads, the universal solvent;
at alkahest , which is merely a spelling variant,
the definition is, a pretended universal solvent,
from which one might conclude that the first is the
real thing.

            On pronunciation, [ak-ses'] is given as the preferred
form, while it is the secondary form in other
dictionaries of the period.  Huge is shown as [hūj] but
humour is pronounced [ū'mur]; adagio is shown as [adā'jē-ō],
and accompany and similarly spelled words
are shown with geminate consonants, e.g., [akkum'pa-ne].

            The conclusion is that such books seldom have
anything to teach us except in the most general way
about the way the language was used in another
time, partly owing to the lack of sophistication of
their compilers, partly to their conservatism, which
tempts them to include terms and definitions that
are no longer current.  Such entries must be retained
for they are encountered in reading.  Some conservative
dictionaries published earlier in the 20th century
listed a huge number of Scotticisms on the (justifiable)
grounds that they would be useful in
reading Burns; but most school editions containing
Burns's poetry later on supplied glosses, so an ancillary
reference proved unnecessary.  With all the dialects
and long-lived speakers of English today, the
lexicographer risks inaccuracy in labeling a word,
phrase, or sense obsolete or archaic : there is sure to
be someone who speaks a form of English in which
the expression is extant.  For another thing, we must
pay close attention to historical information--not
about the language, but about the culture.  For instance,
just because we now know that the alkahest
(or alcahest ), phlogiston , and the philosopher's stone
do not exist, they must still be listed in dictionaries,
just as the words for abstract notions like honesty,
integrity, beauty, truth , and so forth have a place.

         
         
            
               Logophobia
            

            Under the headline, Plaintiff faints at mention of
sex, Ben Maclntyre, The Times correspondent in
New York, reported [11 March 1994] about a Cincinnati
woman who suffers from conversion hysteria ,
a fortunately rare affliction in which the individual
collapses unconscious at the mention of a word or
group of words.  Shades of The Manchurian Candidate
!  She was sitting in a chair and immediately
fell out when sex was mentioned, according to the
woman's defense attorney.

            It is not a subject for flippancy, one must concede,
especially in the circumstances surrounding
the case.  Evidently, a neighbor learned of the
woman's condition, whispered the word sex to her as
she was passing through the lobby of the apartment
house where they live, whereupon she dropped,
unconscious, to the floor, and he sexually molested
her--presumably after moving her to a more private
venue.  The trial of the molester is becoming difficult
to prosecute, for every time the molestee is
called to testify, she faints, even if the prosecutor so
much as spells the word s-e-x .  How the event was
reported in the first instance is not revealed.  It
might be suggested that Ameslan be employed or
that the woman be asked to demonstrate what took
place using dolls, as they do when asking children to
testify.  Readers may draw their own conclusions
and opinions on the subject; it wouldn't do for us to
comment.
         
         
            
               Have a nice day
            

            Even the less sensitive of us become irritated
with clichés after a while, and one often wishes that
Have a nice day had gone the way of Hi!  My name is
Bruce and I'll be your waiter today and the Bunny
Dip.  But it seems here to stay, and, on reflection,
merits comment.  It ill behooves us to criticize its
emptiness, for we all utter Good morning, Good afternoon,
Goodby, How are you?, Hello , and numerous
other salutational and valedictory remarks in the
course of the day.  It is likely that Good day had its
origins in Have a good day , which is not very different
from Have a nice day , either in meaning or in
spirit.  Perhaps we may soon be hearing Nice day
(meaning Have a nice day, not, as it already does,
It is a nice day, to the latter of which our curmudgeonly
response is usually, Yes, if you like warm,
sunny, breezy spring days).

            
               Good day has taken on other connotations, depending
on its prosodic features (stress pattern).  A
straightforward Good day', with little stress on good ,
is the neutral greeting; Good' day', with equal stress
and even a slight pause between the words, uttered
emphatically, is tantamount to dismissal; the Australian
G'dye is again the neutral expression on meeting
or parting.  Till something else comes along or we all
agree to go back to better established clichés, we
might as well get used to Have a nice day and its
variant, (You) have a good one, now : the alternative
is to stay at home.

            Laurence Urdange
         
         


            Paul Blackford's article [Some English Loanwords
in Thai, XXI, 1,5] brought to my mind my
favourite chunk of Thai vocabulary and, incidentally,
another loanword from English (from Thai for
Travellers , DK Arts, Bangkok):


Krapaow thue puying bags, ladies'
Krapaow thasanachorn bags, travelling
Krapaow ekka-sarn bags, brief
Krapaow James Bond attaché case
Krapaow rot-mai bus conductor

            

            I never did figure out that last one.