Power Users Dump Baudy Language: The Ambivalent Nature of Computer Slang
What happens when power users dump baudy
language ? Should they abort, retry, ignore ,
or admit failure? They might boot up again, but they
could experience a head crash . Would Kermit prevent
them from being munged ? What should a poor
technoweenie do when threatened by thrashing between
disk and memory? Nerdettes better hope their
motherboards are user-friendly . If all else fails, they
could hit the DWIM key.
Hackers , or just plain droupies , probably have
no trouble translating what I just wrote out of computer
jargon and slang into more conventional English.
But even if you do not understand the preceding,
you probably feel the tension between words
conveying force, strength, and menace, such as
power users, abort, dump, head crash , and munged ,
with words suggesting vulnerability, frailty, and humor
as a defense against such powerlessness, in
words like technoweenie, nerdettes, user-friendly ,
and DWIM (for do what I mean, a mythological key
that would make the computer do what you cannot
figure out yourself).
Most people who use computers feel ambivalent
about them. It should not, therefore, be surprising
that computer slang conveys divided, and sometimes
radically conflicting feelings. As a librarian I see evidence
every day of this ambivalence in the slang
used by patrons and colleagues. Slang is a reliable
gauge of attitudes because it is usually used in an
unguarded way to express unedited feelings.
I am using the word slang as it is defined on
page xi in the latest scholarly dictionary of American
slang, J.E. Lighter's Random House Dictionary of
American Slang , Volume I, A-G (1994): an informal,
nonsubstandard, nontechnical vocabulary composed
chiefly of novel-sounding synonyms for standard
words and phrases. I am assuming, as the editor of
this dictionary argues, that slang is not just colloquial
language, but that it is often aggressively informal,
that it doesn't tolerate pretense, that it is often
crude, blunt, ribald, egalitarian--in short, very unpretentious
and honest language. [ ibid , xii] Computer
slang is similar to, but rather different from
computer jargon, which is the specialized language
used by tekkies. Jargon is the in language used
by any profession, group, or class. The word default
is jargon for something automatically carried out
unless you change it. This term does not qualify as
slang because it is a legitimate, formal term, rather
easy to define denotatively, quite fit for use in polite
company, and equally at home in written and spoken
language. By contrast, the neologism droupie a person
who likes to spend time in the company of programmers
and data processing professionals, is slang
because it is very informal language. In fact, it is so
casual as to suggest an anti-grown-up rebelliousness
because of its probable derivation from the word
groupie , and it is definitely more frequent in speech
than in writing.
Because slang is up front and sometimes deliberately
in your face language, we can learn
more about how people really feel about computers
by examining slang rather than jargon. A good way
to remember the difference between slang and jargon
is that jargon serves to indicate a referent, usually
with great precision, while slang characterizes
and often makes light of what is referred to, and
nonslang synonyms are almost always readily available.
Technical language develops among specialists
for the purpose of cooperation; slang develops
among associates for purposes of expressiveness,
companionability and to some extent exclusivity.
[ ibid . xvi-xvii]
We can learn a lot about what is on people's
minds when we analyze jargon, but we can learn
how they feel when we analyze slang. Thus, it is not
surprising that a great deal of computer jargon is a
quick way to say otherwise complicated things. For
example, MIPS is a convenient acronym for millions
of instructions per second, point and click is a quick
and direct way of describing basic mouse techniques,
and run-around , borrowed from typesetting,
is an apt metaphor for the way text flows around the
outside edges of a graphic image. Jargon like this is
very good at precisely describing actions and things,
but these words do not convey any obvious attitudes
about their referents.
My analysis of computer slang has revealed a
great deal of ambivalence about these often mysterious
and seemingly omnipotent machines. Some
computer slang suggests a love-fear conflict. One
does not have to be a Freudian to wonder about the
double message implied in some of these terms.
On the one hand, there are quite a number of
words and phrases suggesting that computers are
powerful and frightening. We definitely want to do
all we can to avoid causing a computer to bomb or
crash. It is true that many computer applications began
in the military but many people who are not conscious
of the military associations use expressions like
command language or launch a program. Because
computers simulate many human activities, it is not
surprising that we should attribute all kinds of human
characteristics to them. They do seem to possess artificial
intelligence; some of them create virtual reality;
and they are so efficient that they make us
wonder about why we would want to do anything in
real time any more. When I am feeling especially
organized at work I like to tell coworkers that I'm in
the batch mode. Computers are so seemingly lifelike
that we worry when they catch viruses; we seek
to debug programs; and we do not have to be right-to-lifers
to worry if a computer application is suddenly
aborted. Our fears are often suggested when
we say that some repetitious human activity looks
as if it is programmed. We sometimes want to
deprogram people who belong to dogmatic cults.
As if to counteract or reduce the frightening
power suggested by many of these words, other
slang expressions suggest that computers are really
quite harmless. Some of these terms go to the opposite
extreme, suggesting a warm and fuzzy, childlike
relationship that seems all too naively trusting, as if
Little Red Riding Hood really could trust the wolf
dressed as her grandmother. Surely we must expect
that the normal state of affairs is for computers to be
hostile, or at least unfriendly. Why else would we so
frequently use the term user-friendly to describe operations
that are not easy to do? And how did such a
cold and unhuman thing like a telecommunications
protocol for transferring files between a mainframe
and a microcomputer get dubbed Kermit? It seems
incongruous that a character on a children's television
show should be identified with such an impersonal
thing. At Western Michigan University two
names for areas within our mainframe are Piglet and
Winnie, suggesting that all the hard, serious data and
big-time university research is really not daunting at
all. On the contrary, that world is as blithe and carefree
as the Winnie the Pooh stories. Similar words
for computer services at my university are grog,
gumby, roo, tigger, kanga, ninny, thumper, mickey
and minnie (for Mickey and Minnie Mouse), and
Laurel and Hardy. Surely the people who coined
these names are of the same mindset as those who
call miniature programs applets or refer to diagonal
or circular lines in a text as jaggies. Reference librarians
who regularly contribute to the Stumpers
list on the Internet refer to themselves as wombats.
This apparently originated because one of the
reference questions involved these Australian marsupials,
noted for their burrowing qualities. Surely
the nickname has stuck not only because of the metaphorical
associations with librarians burrowing for
answers, but also because the name sounds cute,
personalizing what otherwise might seem to be the
overly mechanical activity of finding answers to reference
questions. So many people use their pets'
names for passwords that these are among the first
names a decoder would try to learn.
I want to suggest that there is a very understandable
reason for the apparent conflict between words
like power user and Kermit. The soft, warm, children's
words allow us to allay our fears about computers
that crash and bomb and abort. It is as if the
cute words undemonized the scary ones. I do not
have to be a hacker or a tekkie in order to manage
efficiently my user-friendly computer, In one version
of reality, those ubiquitous computers are going to
take over all aspects of life, doing away with my job
or changing it into something a robot should do,
rather than a human being. Another version of reality
offends bureaucrats and is just as exaggerated, but
it is very useful as a defense mechanism. In this view
of the world, I can feel very safe indeed--in fact, I
am more than simply safe--I am nurtured in the
warm and cuddly child's world of fun things like
floppy disks, where I can cozy up to my motherboard,
and pretend that I am a Dogcow (a trademark symbol
of Apple Computer) for a character that can say
words like Moof when it is asked to list Laser-Writer
options. Fortunately, the real world of computers,
notwithstanding slang words to the contrary,
exists somewhere between the opposing fantasies of
the cold impersonality of Brave New World and the
carefree innocence of Winnie the Pooh.
[NOTE: In this article, I have consulted The Computer
Glossary: the Complete Illustrated Desk Reference,
by Alan Freedman, (American Management
Association, 6th ed., 1993), and computer dictionaries:
Jargon: An Informal Dictionary of Computer
Terms, by Robin Williams (Peachpit Press, 1993);
Prentice Hall's Illustrated Dictionary of Computing,
by Jonar C. Nader (Prentice Hall, 1992); and Webster's
New World Dictionary of Computer Terms, by
Donald Spencer (Prentice Hall, 1992).]
During this, the Year of Arts in Education in Connecticut,
budget cutbacks have reeked havoc with many
school arts programs. [From From the Station Manager,
by John F. Berky, in Applause , Connecticut Public
Radio Newsletter, . Submitted by
.]
A middle-aged muslim man looking for a muslim
woman--object, matrimoney. [From The [Toronto] Globe
and Mail , . Submitted by
.]
From China to Peru: An
Oriental Odyssey
Where have you been on your travels lately?
They say Bali is her best in the spring, but
you may prefer somewhere warmer, such as Yadian.
Myself, I can't wait to visit Eluosi again, although all
roads traditionally lead to Luoma, even if you are
travelling from as far as Meizhou. They are the Chinese
names for, respectively, Paris, Athens, Russia,
Rome , and America .
Where in the world are these places, you may
wonder. Maybe in China? Well, yes and no. They
are Chinese transliterations of those names, rather
than translations, and strictly speaking in the Romanization
system known as Pinyin should be written
with tone signs and without capitals, since Chinese
has pictographs, not letters as we understand
them. They would then appear as bālī, y˘di˘n,
éluósī, luóm˘ , and měizhōu .
Chinese names of places in China itself are of
course actually meaningful, although many have become
distorted by Westerners. The capital, Peking ,
now familiar to most in the West in its more accurate
form, Beijing , has a name meaning northern capital,
by contrast with Nanking , southern capital. Canton ,
or as it now appears on modern maps, Guangzhou ,
means broad region, while Shanghai means over
the sea.
The Chinese names of neighbouring places in
the Far East are also often similarly meaningful and
may be translated from their language of origin.
Thus gu\symbol\ngd\symbol\o means broad island and translates
the Japanese name of Hiroshima , while d¯ngjīng ,
meaning eastern capital, translates the Japanese
original of Tokyo. Japan itself is riběn , literally sun
root. (Hence its Western byname, Land of the Rising
Sun.) The Pacific Ocean is tàipíngyáng peaceful
ocean. The Chinese name of China itself is
zhōngguó middle country, while the Western name
is traditionally associated with that of the Ts'in dynasty
(221-206 BC), although actually recorded
much earlier. (The character for middle , a rectangular
figure bisected by a vertical line, represents a
square target pierced by an arrow.)
Places further from China may also sometimes
have their names translated, assuming they are already
meaningful. Thus Port-au-Prince , capital of
Haiti, is tàiz\isymbol\găng , literally great son port, but Haiti
itself is hăidi , clearly a transliteration. However, it so
happens that this name is actually (though coincidentally)
both meaningful and appropriate, since it translates
as sea land.
Such serendipity sends one on a voyage of discovery,
to see what meanings can be aptly found in
other Chinese transliterated names. The transliterations
themselves, as instanced above, may at first
seem strange. However, once one appreciates certain
conventions, the forms of the names fall into
shape. The Chinese do not distinguish l from r in
Western words or names, for example, so that these
letters when transliterated may appear as either.
Hence luómă for Rome and bālí for Paris, but
l\isymbol\sīběn for Lisbon, and lúndùn for London. Similarly,
initial b or p can give Chinese m , so that Peru
(with Western r as well) is milŭ and Bangkok màngŭ .
The Chinese r itself is closer to Western sh [\?\] or zh
[3]. Hence ruìdiăn for Sweden and rìnèiwă for Geneva.
Generally, too, Chinese does not have consonant
groups or words ending in a vowel (except the
nasal -ng [η] as in běijīng ). This means that vowels
appear in transliterations where one does not expect
them. Baghdad is therefore bāgédá . The transliteration
itself is often from the native form of the name.
Spain is thus xībānyá , from España , Germany is
déyìzhì , from Deutschland .
Not all names produce a fortuitous literal meaning
as apt as that for Haiti . But America, as měizhōu ,
has a name that happens to mean beautiful
continent--America the Beautiful, after all--while
England is yīngguó , brave country. (This England
never did, nor never shall, Lie at the proud foot
of a conqueror, as the Bard penned.) Even Paris
seems to have a historic reference, since bālí literally
means clayball multitude: the Roman name of
Paris, Lutetia , comes from Gaulish luto mud, clay.
In the names of America and England the second
element is not part of the transliteration but the
Chinese word for, respectively, continent and
country. Other continents also have names that are
part transliteration, part zhōu : Europe is oūzhōu ,
Asia, yāzhōu , and Africa fēizhōu . The second and
third of these have names that could literally be interpreted,
hardly flatteringly, as inferior continent
and wrong continent, but the first element of Europe's
name has no corresponding sense.
There are some curiosities. The Chinese name
of Iceland is bīngdăo . This is clearly not a transliteration
but a translation: it literally means ice island,
with the second element apparently mistranslating
the Icelandic name for the country, Īsland ice
land as island. Nearer home, the Chinese name for
Korea is cháoxiän . This literally means seatide
fresh, not inappropriately, but is actually a transliteration
of Korean chosön , which means land of the
morning. The Chinese name for the Atlantic
Ocean, on the other hand, is quite different: dàxīyáng
great western ocean.
It has to be said that if one attempts a literal
translation of many Chinese placenames one simply
ends up with a sense that is surreal rather than suitable.
Many cannot be meaningfully translated at all.
Of those that yield some sense, the following handful
may be considered poetic coincidences:
Athens yădiăn proper law
Chile zhìlì wisdom benefit
Delhi dél\isynbol\ virtue hometown
France făguó method country
Ganges hénghé everlasting river
The Hague hăiyá sea tooth
London lúndùn matching honest
New York niŭyuē bond agreement
Thailand tàiguó peaceful country
Japanese Pop Group
Nomenclature
The names that Japanese pop groups adopt
would, at first glance, appear to be as vacuous
and bland as the worst of the western pop their managers/producers/arrangers
plagiarize and instruct/
command them to play. Not for them the teen British
and American angst, rebellion and outrage expressed
by such band names as The Sex Pistols, The
Nipple Erectors, The Slits (all-girl, ho ho Hemingway),
The Dead Kennedys, The Butthole Surfers, Kid
Kommode and the Bidet Boys, Pogue Mahone (now
knows as The Pogues since being dropped from the
BBC's playlist because some scholar told the BBC
that pogue mahone meant kiss my arse in Irish), and
so on. What is interesting about some of these purveyors
of Japanese pap--I mean pop--is how their
names appear on CD, cassette, and other labels and
in the Japanese pop press.
For this to be appreciated I must first briefly
describe the complex Japanese system of writing. It
consists of borrowed Chinese ideograms (characters
known as kanji , the hiragana syllabary used for Japanese
words not covered by kanji , the katakana syllabary
used for foreign words, and the Roman alphabet
known as romanji usually used for abbreviations
like UN and acronyms like GATT . You can see the
whole consort effortlessly dancing together on the
front page of any Japanese newspaper. In the case
of the names of their pop groups, this concatenation,
however, assumes truly awesome and bizarre proportions,
surely unknown, indeed not even possible,
in any other language.
• Meaningless names written in romanji: B'z (pronounced
bees), Lindberg, Qlair (pronounced
kler), SAYE·S, SMAP, T-Bolan (probably from the
late British pop star Marc Bolan and his '70's group
T.Rex), trf (pronounced truf), Zard.
• English names written in romanji: a (always glossed
in parentheses as alpha), Access, CoCo, Damn
Rockers, Dreams Come True, Escalators Vanilla
(possibly inspired by the `60's American bands Vanilla
Fudge, The Mood Elevators, and Strawberry
Alarm Clock, though made ludicrous in conforming
to Japanese grammar which requires the adjective
to follow the noun), Hound Dog, Jigger's Son (four
guys), Judy and Mary (three guys backing a girl
singer), Princess, Tube, Wink, Zoo.
• Japanese name written in romanji: Mi-ke (a winsome,
snaggle-toothed teen warbler. Mi-ke is a
popular name for pets, particularly cats).
• English names written in katakana: The Dark
Ducks, J-League Downtown (J-League is a soccer
league), Physical, Cruising, Omnibus, Original Love,
The Peanuts (twin sisters), Southern All-Stars, The
Tempters, Tokyo Performance Doll (seven girls), Tulip,
Tunnels (pronounced toenails), Zutorobi
(The Beatles pronounced backwards, syllabically
rather than alphabetically! The Seltaeb? Nah!).
• Partly Japanese and partly Western name written in
romanji: Bakufu Slump (literally, blast, as in explosion,
slump. Slump is a loanword used in baseball
and economics).
• Partly Japanese and partly Western name written in
kanji and romanji: Comé Comé Club (literally, rice
rice club).
• Pure Japanese name written in khanji and romanji:
Hikaru GENJI (The kanji component, hikaru,
means light (as illumination); GENJI, always capitalized,
seems to be a literary allusion to Lady
Shikumi Murasaki's c. A.D. 1000 novel The Tale of
Genji, Genji being the male protagonist.)
• Pure Japanese name written in kanji: Otokogumi
(Warriors' Group)
• Pure Japanese name written in kanji and hiragana:
Kaguya-hime (literally, Princess Sparkle, from a
classic Japanese nursery tale.)
From all this we can clearly deduce that in no
way can the Japanese be accused of xenophobia--
linguistic, anyway! Indeed, L'Académie française
might do well to note the above and the albeit absurd
names of these two Japanese discos rendered in
romanji: Maharaja Saloon Sahara King & Queen
Disco Maebashi , and Maharaja Tokushima Space
Disco Liberazione .
Casanova's English
Some years ago I worked as an English teacher in
a school not far from Italy's Adriatic Riviera,
which is flooded with tourists in the summer. Not
surprisingly, some of my students came along primarily
to acquire a smattering of spoken English to
help them chat up holidaying women. For such
men, the somewhat tedious rules of English spelling
were of scant interest, I lav you, Pleas com and
leave whit me in my aus was typical of the kind of
useful phrase that they might jot down in their
notebooks. This devil-may-care attitude to the
quaint rules of English spelling follows firmly in the
illustrious footsteps (or perhaps penstrokes) of the
greatest Latin lover of them all, Giacomo Casanova.
Born a Venetian, Casanova led a peripatetic life
which took him through almost every country in Europe
in search of fame, fortune, and female attractions.
In his day French was the international language,
spoken by anyone who aspired to a place in
high society in any country, but during his brief visit
to London in 1763-64 he made an attempt to pick
up a smattering of English. In his autobiography,
written thirty years later, he proudly demonstrates
his knowledge, casually throwing English words into
the middle of his French text with an easy confidence
and some bizarre spelling.
He arrived in Dover in June 1763 in a paq-bot
which he shared with the Duke of Bedfort. His
eighteen-hour coach journey took him through
Cantorberi before reaching London, where he
called on a former lover of his who now lived in
Soho Squarre. She did not give him a particularly
warm reception, however, and he was soon on the
lookout for a house to rent for himself. With the help
of an English-speaking friend, he examined the columns
of the Advertisser and quickly found the ideal
bachelor pad--a house in Pale-Male--which he
moved into at once, making sure that the Auskeper
would take on a French-speaking maidservant.
He was keen to get to know the city and his
friends in London society soon showed him the
sights. Being the son of an actor and actress, he was
naturally interested in the theaters, such as those at
Covengarde, Drurilaine, and Hai-marcket.
Casanova was also a fervent card player and was
soon invited to play a few robers of visk (or
wisk). Not being accustomed to that particularly
English form of cards, he lost fifteen pounds in his
first game to Lady Covendri. He was also not entirely
familiar with English money and mistakenly
paid her fifteen guineas, thus leaving Lady Coventry
smiling at her unexpected gain of a further fifteen
scheling (or was it shelin, seling, or even
chelin?).
Casanova enjoyed London. He lived near such
attractions as Grim-pare and the new royal residence
of Bukingan Aus. A brief stroll up WiteAle
took him towards Chirincras. He could enjoy
lunch at the Staren-taverne in Pique-Dille
with his good friend Milord Pimbrock [Pembroke],
where the water might offer him a plate of
traditional English Rochebif and a mug of
Strombir. Afterwards they might venture out to
the Boulingrin or, if he needed ready money
quickly, to pawn some possessions at the Pingbros.
He could also admire Wren's splendid new
church of St. Pol and the wonderfully efficient
Penni-post which delivered letters around the
capital.
Casanova was a highly intelligent man and a
competent linguist. Much of his prodigious literary
output, including his 3,000-page autobiography, was
written in French, which was a foreign language to
him. So why was his written English so haphazard?
Part of the answer lies in the spell-as-you-like
nature of our language at a time when Johnson's dictionary
was still a novelty, though while some of his
variant spellings of shilling , for example, are typical
of the English of the day, much of Casanova's spelling
would look more at home in a Chaucerian text than
one from the Age of Englishtenment. Besides, he did
not write his life story till thirty years after his visit to
England, with no more than his memory to rely on
when writing a language he had spoken but, very
likely, not written before. But most important of all is
that the situation did not worry him. He loved to
communicate and was happy to charge headlong at
the language and have a go regardless of the risk of
mistakes--an attitude which many people today
might do well to learn from.
Maybe it would bring a smile to Casanova's lips
to know that even now, although the world and the
relative importance of the English language have
changed so much, those of his countrymen who style
themselves as his heirs retain his enthusiastic disregard
for English spelling. As he would doubtless
have observed in his perfectly idiomatic English,
Plus ca change, plus c'est la même chose.
Our Hopes For The New Year Are Soaring! [From
an advertisement for The Swan Funeral Homes, in the
Pictorial Gazette East, . Submitted by
.]
There isn't room to list them all, except it must be
noted that they included the Right to Die Society apologizing
for accidentally calling itself the Right to Life Society
in a previous letter, and the Right to Life Society objecting
to the theft of its name. [From The Toronto Star, . Submitted by .]
Safire's Syndrome
William Safire, the political and language columnist
for the New York Times , has been
concerned about the correct use of the apostrophe
and s with proper nouns ending in s , particularly
with eponyms, so concerned that he has named a
syndrome for himself: Safire's syndrome --the urge
to correct. His compulsion emerged when both
President and Mrs. Bush were diagnosed as having
Graves's disease, one of several eponyms for hyperthyroidism,
a common condition caused by excessive
secretion of thyroid hormone.
Which leads to the use of medical eponyms,
proper names, usually of persons or places, to designate
diseases; their signs and symptoms, alone or in
combination; reflexes, and a host of other medical
phenomena. Dorland's Medical Dictionary , 26th
edition (1974), devotes more than nineteen columns
to short definitions of diseases, the vast majority eponymous,
seven named for physicians who early described
hyperthyroidism. Fortunately, only Graves's
name ends in s but his is the overwhelmingly favored
eponym of English-speaking physicians. Dorland
also listed 488 signs, again mostly eponymous,
of different diseases, thirty-three in thyrotoxicosis.
Twenty-five of the physicians commemorated were
western Europeans or Americans active between
1860 and 1920, years of intensive correlation of
bedside and pathological findings, whose names now
linger as historical markers.
But historical background offers little help in
the management of Safire's syndrome, because criteria
for correct use of apostrophes and s 's for
proper nouns ending in s are lacking. Fowler noted
the problem favoring s 's but made no specific reference
to the conversion of proper possessive nouns to
adjectives; Strunk and White affirmed the propriety
of s's , and Gowers, in The Complete Plain Words ,
prefers s's , a choice of some importance because his
father, the British neurologist Sir William Richard
Gowers (1845-1915), is remembered for his column,
disease, fasciculus, sign, solution, syndrome,
and tract by Dorland.
Critics may sensibly ask, Who owns the eponym?
Some processes are named for early reporters,
as is Graves, and some for victims as Lou Gehrig
(amyotrophic lateral sclerosis), usually without their
permission or even awareness. Should the earliest
reporter, the most accurate one or the one most
widely known today be memorialized? One might
look to modern medical journals for guidance but
little is to be had. The Annals of Internal Medicine ,
organ of the American College of Physicians, abandoned
the possessive form totally in 1988, protesting
that eponyms are inappropriate when a directly
descriptive synonym is available. Many medical
journals, however, have declined to follow its lead
and medical dictionaries are neither particularly
helpful nor consistent. By 1988 the editors of Dorland's
28th edition had deleted three eponymous
entries for hyperthyroidism, retaining Graves but
now as Graves disease , the second s and its possessive
apostrophe banished. Stedman's Medical Dictionary ,
26th edition (1995), argues that Graves ' is
correct, while the Churchill lexicon (1989) omits
both apostrophe and s with Graves but keeps both
with Parry's disease , another eponym for hyperthyroidism.
Those who prescribe written usage offer no
guide at all as to how to handle the problem posed
by the spoken word. How can Dan Rather or Peter
Jennings let his audience know when a celebrity suffers
eponymously? The speaker, the scriptwriter,
and their audience might have thought that President
and Mrs. Bush were ill with Grave disease.
And there is Bright's disease , used by the public to
identify chronic kidney disease of any cause which
might be called Bright disease by some. And what of
Best's disease--congenital macular degeneration
of the eye
Gross's disease--saccular dilatation of the anal
wall with retained inspissated feces (What
is a directly descriptive synonym for this
process?)
His's disease--trench fever
Little's disease--spastic palsy (Little disease
would pose a nice problem for the TV or radio
announcer)
Tooth's disease--progressive personeal muscular
atrophy (usually compounded as Charcot-Marie-Tooth's
disease)?
Consider these without 's
What if Prichard were asked to present his 1993
VERBATIM article, Whatever Happened to Frank
Beriberi?, before an audience? He reported that
the late, lamented Sidney J. Perelman confessed that
he had Parkinson's disease and Parkinson had
mine, but Eisenberg, in Scientific American, asserted
that Perelman said he had Bright's disease
and he has mine (James Parkinson, 1755-1824,
described paralysis agitans and Richard Bright,
1789-1858, chronic glomerulonephritis). Poor Perelman
! Other sources, however, assert that Bright
had Groucho Marx disease and that Groucho had his.
Which then is correct, Marx, Marx, or Marx's disease?
Safire's problem, and mine, too, are avoided in
the Linnaean nomenclature for biological classification
in that the names of persons and places are latinized
or otherwise altered, as
Salmonella typhi, the microbial cause of typhoid
fever, recalls the American bacteriologist David
Elmer Salmon (1850-1914)
Rickettsia rickettsia, or Rocky Mountain spotted
fever, the American, Howard T. Ricketts
(1871-1910)
Neisseria gonorrhoeae, the German A.L.S. Neisser
(1855-1916).
Safire's syndrome would have been of little concern
in the 18th century, before eponyms became
fashionable, and, according to Johnson's Dictionary
of the English Language, before the adjective possessive
would modify case. There, possessive is defined
as having possession and apostrophe as In rhetoric,
a diversion of speech to another person or In
grammar, the contraction of a word; as, tho', for
though. Use of the apostrophe to indicate possession
or in combining short words, as, isn't for is not,
is not considered.
However, The Chicago Manual of Style, 14th
edition (1993), does offer comfort and guidance to
the perplexed, proclaiming that Most proper nouns
including most names ending in sibilants take 's as in
Kansas's, Burns's poems, Marx's theories, Berlioz's
opera, and Ross's lane. Among the exceptions are
Jesus', Moses', and names of more than one syllable
whose unaccented endings are pronounced eez,
as in Euripides' or Xerxes'.
Safire's syndrome is not limited to medicine. A
recent Wine Talk in the New York Times tried to
answer the question Stags Leap, Stag's Leap, Stags'
Leap--Which of these spellings is correct in referring
to the wines of a particular section of the Napa
Valley in California? The answer: All of the
above. The advice to the consumer, Just keep the
apostrophes straight. Just so.
There is not a finite number, I am sure, but it must
be a large number. [From a review by Laurence Urdang
in Verbatim , , page 36. Submitted by .]
Lingerie manufacturer works with University Extension
to improve bottom line. [Subheadline in Exclaimer
(published by University of Missouri System, Lincoln University),
. Submitted by .]
The Way That They Tell 'em
Total absence of humor, remarked Colette,
Renders life impossible.
The lady was correct. Humor and the ability to
express it have been a fundamental part of human
life from the beginning. But, as sure as there are
wines that do not travel well, so, too, is there a type
of humor and a form of language that is best appreciated
in the land of its origin. Or, to be more specific,
in its region of origin.
My own country, Scotland, is a classic example.
Scottish humor can be an acquired taste. It is so distinctly
regional, and it is peculiar to its particular
region as is the language through which it is expressed.
Visitors to the region laugh, not so much at
what is said, but at the way in which it is said. The
listener laughs at the reconteur as much as at the
story itself.
Listen to the lugubrious drollery of the western
Highlander. His stories are long and involved, and
they are best heard when you have lots of time on
your hands. The Highlander is a consummate storyteller.
Whether he is relating one in his native
Gaelic or in the lilting English that he learned at
school, you can almost hear the sough of the sea on
far-off, never-to-be-seen-again Hebridean machairs
as he speaks. There is an innocent humor to be
found in his stories, to be sure, but they are stories
that are invariably tinged with a brooding sort of
sadness. You are glad that you listened, but you are
left with a louring aura of melancholy around you
long after you have taken your leave of him.
Over on the east coast the humor is sharp and
incisive. It is a sardonic wit, a wit that can be as
savage and biting as the dry northern winds that sear
this land for a goodly part of the year. It has much of
the pawky vulgarity of the Glasgow wit, but it is different
somehow, much more personal. It is wit between
friend and friend. On the other hand, listening
to the banter between gaggles of Glaswegians at,
say, their Barras market on any morning of the year
is like listening to the discordant yakking of jackdaws
around derelict tenement chimneys in the
nesting season.
Far away from all those, down at the southernmost
tip of Scotland, both humour and dialect have a
decidedly Irish flavor. With the green glens of Antrim
just a short hop across the water, this might not,
on the face of it, seem so surprising. But there is
more to it than that. Wigtownshire (as the county
was called until the Whitehall bureaucrats dropped
the ancient name in 1975 and decreed that it be
merged with Dumfries and Galloway) has been relucant
host to many incomers. The earlier inhabitants,
the shy Mesolithic tribes and the mysterious
Picts, vanished for ever into the moorland mists before
the invaders. With them, they took their language.
The Roman came and went, leaving not so much
as a place name behind him. Indeed, had not his
Latin been adopted by the scholastic monks of the
day, little would have remained to show that he had
ever been there in the first place. VENI, VIDI, VICI,
he crowed smugly. And then, as a historian friend
of mine so succinctly put it, He just buggered off.
The Celt brought religion and the Gaelic. In
fact, the eccelesiastic Ninian brought Christianity
here long before Columba reached Iona in AD 563.
Unlike the Roman, the Celt left his mark in the many
place names of Gaelic origin scattered around southern
Scotland to this day. Stranraer, the largest town
in Wigtownshire, is one such. Its name means, literally,
fat peninsula, from the Gaelic sròn reamhar .
Gaelic was the mother tongue in Wigtownshire
for twelve centuries, but little trace of it remains
in the spoken language today. It was the pervasive
Anglo-Saxon who really set the foundation for the
dialect spoken by the modern descendants of Wigtown
Man.
But it was with nearby Ulster that the inhabitants
had the greatest affinity. Indeed, to this day
they call themselves, and their dialect, Galloway-Irish.
It is as good a name as any. Although it is
English that they speak, you would hardly think so
when you first hear them in full flow. It is a lingo
that has little in common with either the slow, precise
enunciation of the Highlander or the clipped
phraseology of Sir Noël Coward. It is a thick macedoine
of Broad Scots and Ulster English, and it has a
harsh and uncompromising rasp to it, especially if
you don't understand a word that is being said to
you--which, it might be added, is quite often the
case if you are a newcomer to that part of the world.
Simple phrases like I wish to dismantle it become
Ah'm gaan tae tak' it sinnery , and even simpler words
like foolish become glaikit , so that by the end of
your first day you are desperately searching for
strong drink and the services of a good interpreter.
The Galloway-Irish are a people of humor.
There can, admittedly, be a bitterly Schadenfreude
quality to some of it, for theirs is a hard life. But,
more often than not, it is the Irish that surfaces.
Occasionally--and particularly for those not accustomed
to the dialect--their pronunciation of certain
words can lead to embarrassing misunderstandings,
as the following tale from my youth may illustrate:
Aul' Wullie was a smallholder. His only interest
in life was his farm, and he labored long and hard
among the stones and the whins to wrest a living of
sorts from the reluctant soil. It was a way of life that
would have crippled many a lesser man, but Wullie
was a tough old bird: when the day of his hundredth
birthday dawned he was still maintaining a keen interest
in the daily affairs of his little place.
The old man would have been content to allow
the occasion of his centenary to pass unremarked,
but his family had other ideas. They arranged a
mighty soiree for the great day, and they invited a
reporter from the county newspaper to be there to
interview him. The reporter--a demurely austere
product of colonial missionary parents--was on her
first assignment and she was, in fact, completely new
to this area.
Wullie seemed preoccupied and the interview
was not going well. In desperation, she asked him if
there was anything she could do to make his day
complete. A spark of life glimmered at last in the
old man's rheumy eyes.
Aye, he replied with sudden interest, There
is that, lassie. Ye cud gie me some sex.
She recoiled in shock. When she had recovered
somewhat, her messianic zeal got the better of her
and she reminded him that, at his age, he should be
more concerned with thoughts of the afterlife than
with the prurient temptations of this one. She would
probably have pursued this subject at some length
had not the old man interrupted her.
Mebbee ye're richt, lassie, he said, But ah
still need the sex. Ye see, ah've got foarty-fower
hunnerwecht o' tatties oot there ahint the byre, an'
ah've nae sex tae pit them in.
It's the way that they tell'em, as Mr. Frank Carson,
the Irish comedian, would no doubt remark.
It is a peaceful place. There have been no battles
on its soil since Roman times. Although many of
its sons have died on foreign shores under the British
banner, the land itself has slumbered undisturbed.
A single bomb jettisoned by a fleeing German
bomber during the 1939-45 war plopped into a
remote bog, scaring the living daylights out of a
nesting moorhen, but that was about all. The horrors
of the London blitz belonged to another planet:
things that were read about in newspapers but
which were barely comprehended by the majority in
this tranquil little backwater.
The Russians had entered Berlin and the European
conflict was drawing to a close. I was standing
in a Wigtownshire forest, eavesdropping on a conversation
between two workers. They were cynics,
as most old countrymen are, and neither could be
convinced that the war just ending would be the war
to end all wars. One of them, an old campaigner
with the local Home Guard, was particularly eloquent.
Jeest tak' heed o' whut ah tell ye, Erchie,
warned the sage, They'll be anither waar yit. An'
whun it dis stert, ah wud wadjir ma wumman an'
weans agin yours that it 'ull be a faar waar waar th'n
th' last waar wur.
Indeed it will. But the invader had better come
prepared if he ventures beyond Hadrian's Wall. He
is in for a long, long haul in the wind and the rain
and the sleet if he wishes to master the Galloway-Irish.
ANTIPODEAN ENGLISH
More Famous Australian Etymologies
A little learning has always been a dangerous
tool in the mind of the amateur etymologizer, and
early acquaintance with one or more of the languages
of the Australian Aborigines not infrequently
proved seductive. Take that universally popular
caged bird, the budgerigar , first encountered in the
inland of New South Wales and known to the colonists
from the 1840s. Its name was first written
down as betcherrygah , that being a transliteration of
the Yuwaalaraay word gijirrigaa (Yuwaalaraay being
a language similar to the better-known Kamilaroi),
but the temptation to explain the word had triumphed
over the etymologizing process as early as
1848, when the spelling budgery garr was preferred,
and the first element explained as meaning in the
black's language--good or handsome. It is true
enough that budgerry (or bujari as it is more correctly
transcribed) in the Sydney language Dharuk
meant good. But in the Sydney language only, its
familiarity to English ears being the result of its taking
on in Australian pidgin as a term of approbation
from as early as 1790. What more natural than that
the White perception of a bird destined to become a
plaything of the western world--as evidenced by
another of its names, the lovebird --should become
paramount. In Australia now the shortened form
budgie is in more common use--but that is another
story.
Another world that exercised the etymological
imagination is billabong , which owes its currency
outside Australia to the familiarity of the national
song, Waltzing Matilda , of which it is a crucial part.
Here again a word was broken down into two elements,
billa creek and bang or bung dead, and
little thought given to the fact of their independent
origin. Billabong is first recorded in the 1830s in
southeastern New South Wales as a name in the
Wiradhuri language for a watercourse which flows
after rain, and hence any backwater, blind creek, or
anabranch left in the arm of a river, a pool which is
left when the connecting stream dries up. It is not
the source of billy , a Scottish dialect word for a milk
pail, nor does it have anything to do with the
Queensland Aboriginal word bung dead, which
passed into Australian pidgin in the 1840s and which
developed by the 1880s the application bankrupt,
as in the bank's gone bung . Tempting as this suggestion
may be, it is geographically and chronologically
impossible.
Yet another Aboriginal word, borak , was held by
some to be the etymon of barrack , although the probability
has to be that this is a British regional dialect
word given a new lease of life in fresh circumstances.
Borak was a negative in the Victorian language
Wathawurung and was one of a comparatively small
number of words which the Aboriginal languages collectively
contributed to an on-the-whole short-lived
Australian pidgin. Borak was borrowed in the late
1830s and, perhaps because the Dharuk negative
baal was already in use, did not last long in its primary
sense. But it almost simultaneously developed a
secondary sense as a noun meaning nonsense, rubbish,
a synonym for the more frequently used gammon ,
a British cant word for guile or deceit that the
convicts brought with them and which also moved in
the direction of nonsense or humbug. Oddly,
borak was coupled with the verb poke in the phrase to
poke borak at , meaning to deride, and this was close
enough to the transitive use of the verb barrack ridicule,
jeer at, verbally abuse to suggest that the two
might be connected. And, in the absence of a memory
of its British use, the Aboriginal, being to hand,
seemed to some a possible source.
Again, what needs to be taken into account is
the balance of probabilities. It is unlikely that a borrowed
word would undergo a significant change in
form so quickly and, with hindsight, it is more likely
that an impreciseness of meaning caused by unfamiliarity
should attend the bringing into vogue of a
word amongst those who did not have a dialect
memory of it. So barrack , attested as a Northern
Irish term for bragging, shifts slightly but not contextually
in meaning to the vociferous denigration of
a sporting team or a participant in a fight, and admits
the converse of this in the intransitive verb barrack
for support. And the less said the better about another
conjectural etymology which would have it
that this partisan practice began in Melbourne and
characterized the behavior of the crowd at the police
barracks end of the ground.
Such behavior was often associated with larrikins .
And the etymology of this word has also been
hotly disputed, even if mostly by the lunatic fringe.
The golden rule has to be that, if there is a historically
valid source, it is to be preferred unless the circumstantial
evidence makes a mockery of it. In this
case the presence of a high proportion of British regional
dialect speakers amongst the convicts and settlers
who emigrated or were transported to Australia
argues incontrovertibly in favor of a dialect origin if a
potential etymon can be shown to exist. One can,
even if there is a perceptible difference between the
benign OED definition a mischievous or frolicsome
youth and the Australian a young urban rough.
The circumstantial evidence provided by the historical
dictionary's quotations documents the shift, and
there is no case for resorting to the fable that the
word derives from the description of such youths
larking about.
Some Secrets of English Nicknames
Names are a tricky subject in English as in any
language, but happily a very few facts go a
long way towards explaining the origins of hundreds
of English nicknames and family names. Many family
names are patronymics, so called because they
are based on the first name of some long-ago father.
English patronymics fall into three common types:
1) the father's name alone, John Will; 2) the father's
name plus possessive -s , John Williams or Wills ,
meaning, in effect, William's John; and 3) the father's
name plus -son , John Williamson or Wilson .
(Sometimes spelling disguises the clarity of these
forms: for instance, Davis or Davies is really Davy's
and Dixon is Dick-son .) Not all patronymic-like
names are based on a father's name; they might also
recall an employer, like John Lord , or a female relative,
like John Jillian (from Juliana ).
A patronymic can be based on a full name ( William-s )
or a nickname ( Will-s ). That is important because
many familiar patronymics are based on otherwise
obsolete nicknames, as we shall see. A lot of
these ancient nicknames had cute diminutive suffixes.
Only one of these remains productive today,
the - y or - ie in Willy or Willie , but Middle English
had several others at hand. Anglo-Saxon provided
- kin , as in Will-kin and Tom-kin , whence Wilkins and
Tompkins ; and - cock , as in Will-cock , whence Wilcox .
French provided - ot , as in Mary-ot and Philip-ot ,
whence the surnames Marriott and Philpott ; and -in
or -on , which could turn Mary to Marion, Alice to
Alison, Dick to Dickon (whence Dickens ), and Rob to
Robin (whence Robbins and Robinson ). All of these
suffixes show up again and again in surnames, so
they can be quickly recognized.
Harder to recognize are certain distortions imposed
on the bodies of first names when they are
clipped down to nicknames. Usually, to make a first
name into a nickname we just pluck out the most
prominent syllable, like Sue from Susan , and either
leave it plain or make a diminutive out of it by adding
- ie or - y: Susie or Suzy . Some names refuse one or
both of these tricks ( Laura makes only Laurie , not
* Laur ); but they are about the only ones left to us in
Modern English. Middle English, however, had
many other ways to play around with a first name to
make new nicknames, including the seven patterns
of consonant substitution discussed below. Many of
the resulting forms remain current as nicknames (or
indeed as names in their own right), others are preserved
only in patronymics, and still others have
vanished entirely. Listed below by consonant category
are all the forms I have been able to find, regardless
of their modern currency. Some of the
stranger ones are from a list in Thomas Nugent's
New Pocket Dictionary of the French and English
Languages (New York, 1834). Note that a few names
fall into more than one category.
1) r becomes d or h. This affects just three
names: Robert makes Dob or Hob , Roger makes
Dodge or Hodge , and Richard makes Dick, Hick , or
Hitch --though not * Ditch , apparently! This is the
origin of the surnames Hobbes and Hopkins (i.e.,
Hobs and Hobkins ), Dodge cars, and Alfred Hitchcock ,
among other things, including some famous sobriquets.
Yokels, for example, are called hicks in
America and hodges in England; and because workhorses
once often sported the name Robert , we call a
prototype horse Old Dobbin and our ancestors
called rocking horses hobby horses . Pursuing a favorite
pastime was known as riding one's hobby horse ,
the origin of hobbies . There are also some similarlooking
names that merit attention. Bob for Robert
seems to have been created by phonological assimilation,
the final b attracting an initial b , but Richard
and Roger have no corresponding nicknames * Bick
and * Bodgee . The surname Dodd is rooted in an obsolete
first name, Dodda (though Dodson seems to
be a variant of Dodgson ). The Hud of Hudson was a
nickname for both Richard and Hugh ; another name
rooted in Hugh is Hutchins , via the French diminutive
Huchon .
2) r becomes l. Thus Dorothy to Dolly, Harold
to Hal (and also Henry to Hal , via Harry ), Mary to
Mal or Molly, Peregrine to Pel , and Sarah to Sally . It
is comforting to find that Dolley Madison was christened
Dorothea , and perhaps not so comforting that
Molly shows up also in gun molls gangsters girlfriends.'
3) r vanishes. This was happening long before r-
dropping became common in English accents: Barbara
to Babs, Bartholomew to Bat, Bridget to Biddy,
Christopher to Kit, Dorothy to Dot, Frances to Fanny,
Harriet to Hat, Herbert to Hab or Hub, Jordan to
Judd, Margaret to Maggie or Meg, Margery to Madge,
Martha to Mattie , and Theresa to Tess .
4) I vanishes. Thus, Alice to Assy, Gilbert to Gib,
Melissa to Misa, Philip to Phip or Pip, Walter to
Wat --and perhaps Charles to Chaz , though I think
that is just a joke pronunciation for the abbreviation
Chas . As nicknames, most forms in this set are obsolete,
and perhaps for good reason: I knew a Melissa
who absolutely hated being called Missy. But Gib,
Phip , and Wat survive in patronymics: Gibson, Gibbons,
Gibbs; Phipps; Watson, Watkins, Watts . Electrical
watts were named for the Scottish engineer
James Watt, and readers will recall Wat Tyler's Rebellion
of 1381.
5) zero or h becomes n. Thus Abigail to Nab,
Ambrose to Nam, Anne to Nan or Nancy, Edward to
Ned, Eleanor or Helen to Nell, Humphrey to Nump ,
Isaac to Nykin, Isabel to Nib, Obadiah to Nobs , and
Oliver to Noll . These nicknames originated as possessives,
since Middle English words beginning with
a vowel or silent h took the possessive mine instead
of my ; so instead of my Anne, people said mine
Anne, which was reinterpreted as my Nan, just
as the animal once called an eft or an ewt is
now known as a newt. Two of these nicknames
developed notorious associations: Oliver Cromwell
was known as Iron Noll , and the children's verses of
Ambrose Philips ensured the everlasting fame of his
nickname, Namby Pamby .
6) m becomes p. This applies to only four names:
Margaret via Meg makes Peg, Margery via Madge
makes Paige, Martha via Mattie makes Patty, and
Mary via Mal or Molly makes Pal or Polly . All Pattys
nowadays are probably Patricias, but Nugent did list
Patty for Martha .
7) th becomes t. Thus Anthony to Tony, Arthur
to Art, Bartholomew to Bart or Bat , Catherine to
Kate or Cat or Kitty, Dorothy to Dot (and Dickens's
Little Dorrit ), Elizabeth to Betty or Bet (whence
Betsy and Bessie ), Martha to Martie or Mattie , Matthew
to Matt, Nathaniel to Nat or Nate, Theodore to
Ted, Theresa to Tess or Tracy, and Thomas to Tom . In
England before the 1600s, th in Hebrew and Classical
words and names such as these was pronounced
as plain t after the French fashion, as is still the case
with Thomas: Tom and the other nicknames in this
set are partly just phonetic spellings of the old
sounds of the full names. Note that the old t-for-th
sound survives also in Esther, Theresa, the river
Thames, the British pronunciation of Anthony as
Antony, and the name of the spice thyme , usually
called time.
In the nicknames Babs and Nobs, the suffix -s is
an old diminutive suffix like - y; in fact, a few nicknames
apparently combine the two: Betsy, Patsy, and
Nancy. The suffix still surfaces occasionally, as for
England's Prince William, known as Wills. (This is
distinct from the patronymic - s of John Wills .) One
last diminutive suffix is - o , a macho one for boys
only-- Tommo for Tommy . This has a modern ring,
but it is older than it looks: in Samuel Butler's Hudibras,
from the late 1600s, I find Ralpho .
Badges Redux
Everyone remembers the classic scence from Treasure
of the Sierra Madre in which the banditos
encounter that dark-minded prospector, Humphrey
Bogart, in the rugged mountains of Mexico.
I found a little dove in her nest, ha ha ha ha
ha!, reports a subordinate bandito (in Spanish) to
his boss. She was hidden.
Bandito Number One, in the person of Alfonso
Bedoya, calls out to Bogart, Oiga Señor: We are the
Federales. You know, the mounted police. (He
pronounces it mohnted.)
Bogart: If you're the police, where're your
badges?
Bedoya's smooth Mayan face contorts into a
sneer, Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't
need no badges. And, shouting angrily, I don't
have to show you any stinking badges!
This brief soliloquy is notable in several respects.
First and most obvious is its use of repetition,
perhaps the simplest poetic device. And it
might also be considered an example of pleonasm,
the use of more words than those necessary to denote
mere sense; redundancy, or tautology.
But most remarkable is that only the third sentence
is grammatically correct. The first two are
merely slang, but by the third Mr. Bedoya has become
so enraged that he resorts to speaking correct
English.
I submit that he does so because he knows he will
thereby communicate more effectively. As Joseph
Wood Crutch remarked, Children were taught standard
English instead of that acceptable to their peer
group in order to facilitate communication between
class and class, region and region, century and century .
... [his emphasis] In this instance, standard English
serves to bridge the gap between bandito and gringo .
(But lest we succumb to the modern fantasy that open
and honest communication will solve all disputes, we
must also recall that soon after Mr. Bedoya's last assertion
the shooting starts. Perhaps if he had displayed
some badges, authentic or otherwise, he might
have more easily achieved his objective.)
Furthermore, in speaking correct English, Mr.
Bedoya also reveals his identity as a relatively learned
man, undoubtedly a major reason that he is the jefe of
his gang. Emotion will betray character every time,
and education is power.
All but a few employees--including one who confessed,
and later hung himself in jail--were soon set
free. [From The New York Times , .
Submitted by .]
Inflation rears its head in the strangest places.
Ruth Flanders's Foreign Treasures [XXII, 1,21] includes
a face like 37 days of rain. When I first
undertook the study of German (Bronx High School
of Science, 1939) the expression was ein Gesicht wie
drei Tage Regenwetter haben .
Please be patient with Wellerisms and their collectors
[XXI,3], as I was patient with my grandpa
when he said that years ago his teacher told him to sit
in the front of the class for the present; he waited and
waited and she never gave it to him. Collecting lists
of silliness is a legitimate pastime. I collect matchbooks
and names that end in - ford . My collections are
completely without academic merit but they amuse
me. To compare the collectors of Wellerisms to
brick-wall comedians is to overlook a generational, if
not historical and unfortunate shift in humor. Men of
my grandpa's era and earlier were amused by the
subtle, the slapstick, and the silly. Men of my generation
and younger are amused by the sewer. Can you
imagine the hard-edged rappers of today being tickled
by the lyrics of Mairzy Doats? My dad's earnest
question, do you walk to school or carry your
lunch? was so utterly lame, so naive, but such romps
in the playgrounds of language are never tripe.
Mr. Alan Major [XXI,3] can take comfort: arzey-garzeys
is alive and well here, eight miles or so from
Canterbury. I learned this when a neighbour stumbled
on them and broke her leg.
In Pendleton Tompkins's letter about vanity licence
plates [XXII,1], he answers the dental question
FUNEDK? with the words, No, I have no decay.
I believe that William Steig of CDC? fame
would have answered, SIFDK. Perhaps dentists are
word lovers. At home I spotted this identifying
plate: 2THMD.
What's eating you?
What's eating you? If you are a member of the
Mina ethnic group of West Africa it could be almost
anything, even your own head, as the phrase for I
have a headache in its literal translation means My
head is eating me. In Mina, a language spoken in
Togo and parts of Benin and Ghana, the verb to eat
is used in many phrases that have nothing to do with
food.
If a speaker of Mina is suffering he will say that
he is eating the wind, if he is comfortable he will
say that he is eating life, if someone lends him
money he will say he has eaten their credit. Birthdays,
religious festivals, and anniversaries are also
eaten.
Whereas it is easy to explain this by referring to
the cultural importance of food in African societies,
the same reasoning can hardly be applied to the case
of English, which has its own fair share of food
images. While our cars eat up the miles, we chew
over ideas, digest information, devour with our eyes,
make mincemeat of our enemies, and take what they
say with a pinch of salt . We are forced to eat our
words and our hats and we occasionally bite off more
than we can chew . All of which should give us food
for thought.
English As She Is Minced
English is the compulsory second language in
Israeli schools. For readers of the language whose
mother tongue is Hebrew, English brings an additional
challenge, learning a new alef bet Alphabet
with its accompanying new rules.
Hebrew has a script generally written without
vowels--except for prayer books and books for little
children. After the first few years in school, children
do without them. The vowels are marks above and
mainly below the consonants:
S CN B SN N THS XMPL
A A E EE I I EA E
By the time children start to learn English they
are fluent readers and writers of vowelless Hebrew.
Consequently, learners of English or of any Latin
script language tend to skip a few vowels here and
there in a cavalier manner, or, if you prefer, with
Israeli chutzpa, as if they were saying, BG DL,
they're only stpd vwls, we'll pt a few in fr th stpd
tchr who cn't rd English without them.
In addition, several consonants do double duty
by adding a dot within the letter. Thus, V.=B,
f.=p, k.h=k, .s=s, and S.=SH. These marks are also
discarded with the vowels, so that often one has to
understand by context. That is difficult for foreign
students of Hebrew, but we are not dealing with
these poor souls here. What we are dealing with is
our schoolchildren, who are writing, Why get ufset
ober a pew consonants?
Hebrew shuns initial v, f, kh, and final b, p, k . So
Philip would be PILIF and verb would be BERV.
Are you still with me, dear readers of BRVTM ?
Learners of English are also troubled by words
like film, corn, and charm . Not only is the lack of a
vowel sound between the consonants unacceptable,
but the l and r are pronounced in all their glory:
FILLIM, CORREN, CHARREM. The fact that the vowels
are not written does not prove that they are not
there, does it? The word fillim -- pillim for the
more literate--is very popular. - im being the usual
masculine plural ending, our offspring say, I have
two fillim, one fil in my camera and the other in
reserve. I wonder what the singular of Verbatim is.
... Corren Pleckess is a popular breakfast food,
replacing Kvakair Oats.
Of course, learners who realize that most
plurals are formed in English by adding - s or - es have
been known to speak of two ambulance, one ambulan.
However, the singular of rail any metal bar is
pronounced RELLS, plural RELLSIM.
Exhaust, a word much loved in auto repair
shops, has become EGGZOZZ and is so transliterated
into Hebrew.
Still, there is yet hope: now that Israel has
signed a peace treaty with Jordan, the sign at the
frontier near my home warning approaching persons
of DANGER, FRONT BEHIND! has been taken down.
Villon's Straight Tip to All Cross Coves
Tout aux tavernes et aux fiells
William Ernest Henley
Suppose you screeve? or go cheap-jack?
Or fake the broads? or fig a nag?
Or thimble-rig? or knap a yack?
Or pitch a snide? or smash a rag?
Suppose you duff? or nose and lag?
Or get the straight, and land your pot?
How do you melt the multy swag?
Booze and the blowens cop the lot.
Fiddle, or fence, or mace, or mack;
Or moskeneer, or flash the drag;
Dead-lurk a crib, or do a crack;
Pad with a slang, or chuck a fag;
Bonnet, or tout, or mump and gag;
Rattle the tats, or mark the spot;
You cannot bag a single stag;
Booze and the blowens cop the lot.
Suppose you try a different tack,
And on the square you flash your flag?
At penny-a-lining make your whack,
Or with the mummers mug and gag?
For nix, for nix the dibbs you bag!
At any graft, no matter what,
Your merry goblins soon stravag:
Booze and the blowens cop the lot.
The Moral
It's up the spout and Charley Wag
With wipes and tickers and what not
Until the squeezer nips your scrag,
Booze and the blowens cop the lot.
I encountered William Ernest Henley's translation
of a Villon poem and have had a time translating
it. Finally, after exhausting the Oxford English Dictionary ,
I found Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and
Unusual Words , which has almost all the expressions
in it. I offer a simple glossary of terms that might be
unfamiliar, should anyone else wish to enjoy the
poem.
1. cross coves--crooked fellows
2. tout aux tavernes et aux fiells--to the taverns
and to the bitter gall and bile, which I believe
to be synecdoche for evil women.
3. screeve--from the French escriver (écriver)
to write, means to write begging letters.
4. cheap jack--to go out into the country with a
pack on your back, selling ribbons, needles,
etc., to the country folk.
5. fake the broads--broads are the three queens
in a three-card monte game, and faking broads
would be setting up the usual fraudulent game.
6. fig a nag--to fix a horse up so that it looks better
than it really is for fraudulent sale.
7. thimble-rig--the equivalent of three-card
monte, only with three thimbles and a pea,
where the sucker guesses which thimble has
the pea under it; shell game; another cheating
game.
8. knap a yack--knap is a cheating throw at
dice, and yack is the sound of finger beating
on the forehead; it means cheating dice.
9. pitch a snide--push counterfeit money.
10. smash a rag--steal a handkerchief.
11. duff--fix something to look better than it is for
fraudulent sale.
12. nose and lag--nose a police informer; lag a
police informer inside a prison.
13. get the straight--have a little luck and win.
14. land your pot--make some money.
15. melt--get rid of or spend.
16. multy--an augmentative word, empty of meaning:
like saying goddamn or bloody or some
other expletive.
17. swag--loot.
18. blowens--trulls or whores.
19. cop the lot--get everything.
20. fiddle--cheat.
21. fence--buy and sell stolen goods.
22. mace--swindling or robbery by fraud.
23. mack--pimp.
24. moskeneer--a mosker sells or pawns things at
pawn shops for more than their true value, frequently
with a story of need or some other
fraudulent con.
25. flash the drag--(of a man) to wear women's
clothes with immoral purposes.
26. dead-lurk--steal from something during
church service.
27. crib--a brothel.
28. do a crack--do a robbery or burglary.
29. pad with a slang--walk about with a sales permit
to sell.
30. chuck a fag--boost a very small boy up to a
barred window so that he can get through the
bars and into the house to open the door for
his accomplices.
31. bonnet--a shill or capper for a thimble-rigger
or a broad-faker: an accomplice.
32. tout--to sell information at horse races for a
percentage of the net made on the information.
33. mump and gag--grimace.
34. rattle the tats--shake dice.
35. mark the spot--mark cards.
36. stag--shilling.
37. on the square--honestly, from the masonic
symbol of the try square.
38. flash your flag--try.
39. penny-a-lining make your whack--make an attempt
to write.
40. mummers--a disparaging word for actors.
41. mug and gag--make faces and clown.
42. goblins--gold sovereigns.
43. stravag--extravagate: wander about.
44. up the spout--at pawn.
44. Charley Wag--a thimble-rigger or other criminal;
pawnbroker.
45. wipes--handkerchiefs.
46. tickers--watches.
47. squeezer--the hangman's noose.
48. nips your scrag--squeezes your neck.
William Ernest Henley had tuberculosis of the
bone, was hospitalized for years and treated by Lord
Lister himself with, I believe, scraping of the bone,
and whatever primitive antisepsis was used in those
days, probably carbolic acid. Henley endured years
of agony, and his poem, Invictus, was truly written
from experience.
Murray C. Zimmerman, M.D.
Whittier, California
May I offer a few reflections on various matters
that struck me while browsing through XXII, 1?
The article Politicking With Words , with its references
to rival definitions of Whig and Tory , put me
in mind of a cartoon that appeared in Punch in 1896
(since republished in a collection--I don't go back
quite that far). Beneath a drawing of a small girl out
walking with her grandfather appeared the following
exchange:
What are Tories and Radicals, Grandpapa?
Tories, my dear, are people who like to have a
queen, and lords, and bishops, and more or less remain
as they are--whilst Radicals object to having a
queen and a House of Lords, and are dissatisfied
with everything and everybody, jealous of all who
are better off than themselves, and are always trying
to rob them of their property, and, in fact, they're a
pack of infernal rogues and scoundrels!
And which are you, Grandpapa--a Tory or a
Radical?
It would be pleasant to think that we could all
ignore prejudiced definition so blithely!
A few nits to be picked, or addenda to be appended:
• A rod (also a pole or perch) was indeed a premetric
measure, but it was five and a half yards,
not four and a half (Proper Words in Proper
Places). When we moved into our present house
in the '60s we were told that the garden measured
five and a half rods square --the square of 5.5 is
not a simple piece of mental arithmetic, I found.
• From the same article, the use of without to mean
outside persists very commonly in cryptic crossword
clues. But then a great deal or archaic or
arcane usage crops up in that context.
• The use of car for a tram was certainly common in
Norfolk (U.K.) before WWII--I can still picture
surviving pre-war signs reading Cars stop here
upon request, upon what by then were bus stops,
in my home town of Gt Yarmouth in the 1940s.
• As an aside to that, it intrigues me (mildly) that
whereas the French shortened automobile to auto,
the Scandinavians retained the other end, producing
bil for car.
• A felicitous trader's name that used to be displayed
prominently in the Suffolk town of Oulton
Broad in the '50s was that of one L.S.D. Rich--
with reference to predecimal currency.
• I would love to see anyone attempt to drink a Suffolk
Punch: this is a particularly huge and beautiful
breed of plough-horse. Norfolk Punch, on the
other hand, is a commercial non-alcoholic drink of
herbal origin and reputedly health-giving.
• It is not only trousers that are implicitly excluded
by the printed word (New York Sansculottery): the
current obsession with knowing the ingredients of
foodstuffs has resulted in several notices on items
in bakers' shops, saying Our cakes are made with
pure butter only, a culinary feat.
• Could the necessity for dough to be gaumy or
gormy (On Good Terms) be a precursor of the term
gormless meaning stupid, dull? (Alas, despite the
18th-century spelling, gaumless, I believe the
term comes from Old Norse gaumr heed).
Tony Hall
Chearsley, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire
Feminine Goldfish and Other
Hybrids
Grammatical gender lingers in popular English.
We still say, Fill 'er up of a car or She's
been a good old ship. But in more formal standard
English inanimate objects are now referred to by the
neuter pronoun it , though in other Indo-European
languages that I know grammatical gender lingers as
a sort of ghost of animistic gender haunting all nouns.
A Frenchman speaking his native tongue might tell
you, Notre langue francaise, elle est trés belle. Or
a Spaniard or Mexican might say, Aquella mesa,
puedes meterla en la cocina. Only in parody of a
foreign language will a speaker of English say anything
like: The French, she is a beautiful language
or English as she is spoke.
In this respect English pronouns referring to animals
appear to be marginal. Although according to
current prescriptive grammar, animals, especially of
unknown sex, should be referred to as it , they practically
never are in standard spoken English. A baby
is often it , but a cat not obviously a tomcat is more
likely to be called she and a dog or horse he , while
generally in English the masculine singular pronoun
comes naturally when one is referring to an animal.
Nor is this a new thing in English. Over a century
ago the poet Longfellow wrote:
The day is done, and the darkness
Falls from the wings of Night.
As a feather is wafted downward
From an eagle in his flight.
A noticeable feature of English as spoken by bilingual
Hispanics in New Mexico is a tendency to
carry over into English the Spanish gender of whatever
living creature they are talking about. For example,
whereas Anglos refer to squirrels as he , some
Hispanics will consistently call a squirrel she , presumbly
because in Spanish the noun for squirrel
( ardilla ) is feminine.
So I was progressively puzzled to hear a Hispanic
friend always refer to my grandson's goldfish
as she/her . To me the little creature, which (whom?)
I call Algernon, is a he, though in fact I have not a
clue as to its natural gender. The Spanish word for
fish is pez , a masculine noun, or loosely, pescado ,
which is also masculine and properly designates fish
as game or fare. True, in sophisticated Spanish a
goldfish can be called specifically a carpa dorada ,
which is feminine, but such a term seemed unlikely
to occur in the rustic Spanish of New Mexico. I got
to wondering what the local Hispanics would call a
goldfish. It would hardly do to ask because when
pressed for a word, a native speaker will often come
up with one that he thinks is proper rather than the
one in common usage. Then I remembered that a
plumber whose first language was Spanish once admired
our truchitas (in standard Spanish little
trout), which he saw in a goldfish bowl we had.
Since for centuries about the only fish known to the
Hispanic hillbillies in the mountain valleys of northern
New Mexico were trout, the word for trout,
trucha, has become generic, supplanting pez and
pescado for fish in everyday language. So, I concluded,
when Nellie Griego subliminally translated
her Spanish word for fish into English, in the process
carrying over the Spanish gender, it was the feminine
gender of trucha or its diminutive truchita
rather than the masculine gender of pez that she attached
to the English word.
Spanish gender is not the only element of the
language of bilingual Hispanics that may affect their
language, whether English or Spanish. Context may
influence their choice of words. A few days after I
had solved the gender mystery, I climbed onto the
roof of our house to inspect the work of two Mexican
roofers who were daubing pitch onto cracks in the
parapets. Hay muchos liques? One of the workmen
asked me. Sí, I replied, en este techo hay
goteras. I am too much a purist, not to say pedant,
to utter unnecessarily the loan word liques (from the
English leak ). Indeed, I was slightly bothered by
having had the bastard word thrust upon me. So
later I asked the same lady who feminized the goldfish
why the roofer used liques when Spanish has the
common word gotera meaning the same thing. She
was not sure; gotera sounded better to her. But later
she consulted her husband about the matter and
passed along his analysis to me. Her husband had
said that one should speak of goteras in a roof, as the
roofers had not, but of liques in machinery, for example
in a car engine. From this pronouncement I
extrapolated that when things are introduced into
one culture from another, the words for and about
those things tend to come attached to the things.
Automobiles (locally called trocas ) have been introduced
comparatively recently into the Hispanic culture
of New Mexico from an industrialized Anglo
culture. Anglo words such as troca (from truck ) and
lique (from leak in a troca) have entered with the
Anglo things, whereas houses with their goteras in
flat roofs have been a part of Hispanic culture for
millennia. So a car motor springs a leak, but properly
speaking, a roof or an old human body develops
goteras .
Languages influence one another most conspicuously
in phonology. A case in point occurred for
me when I was exchanging some gossip about a local
family squabble over property with the same Hispanic
lady who figures in my first two anecdotes.
She shitted her out of that house, the lady declared.
I was startled, indeed slightly shocked to
hear this from my rather prim and proper friend. So
out of character was the scatalogical word that I
could not believe that I had heard it right. I kept
wondering off and on about the matter till I realized
that what I had heard was a case of double hypercorrection.
Spanish lacks the phoneme i as in sit for
which the Hispanic ear and tongue tend to substitute
the i of Francine . And although in some Mexican
dialects the English sh sound has replaced ch , in
standard Spanish the phoneme closest to English sh
is the affricate ch, which therefore tends to replace
sh in the perception of Hispanophones. Subliminally
aware of these tendencies in her speech, my unwitting
informant had compensated for the tendencies
by reverse substitution. Meaning to say cheated,
she had articulated sh in place of ch and the i of sit in
place of the ea .
I believe this sort of phonetic hypercorrection is
fairly common in language. In Cockney English, for
example, where initial h is regularly dropped there
is a tendency to compensate by supplying initial h
where it does not belong. There is even a trace of
this tendency in American English: Hit hain't like
'im. In Spain Andalusian Gypsies sometimes lisp
their s's and pronounce their soft c's and z's as s .
Though in the short run influences of languages
and dialects on each other may result in distortion
and ridiculous or embarrassing absurdities, the longterm
fruit of linguistic cross-pollination appears to
be enrichment, of which the English language provides
a shining example.
The Comparative Russian-English Dictionary of
Russian Proverbs & Sayings, with 5543 Entries /
1900 Most Important Proverbs Highlighted / English
Proverb Index
The title is justified by the comparison of Russian
proverbs and sayings with English counterparts
and, where applicable, references to Greek and
Latin sources as well as the Bible. This is also a
timely book in light of the wide interest in post-Soviet
Russia. As tourism and economic relations
develop, so does interest in the Russian language.
However, students of a foreign language soon realize
that to master it fully, it is not enough to know
the grammatical structure and basic vocabulary: one
must also memorize a fair number of phrases and
idiomatic expressions and, as a further step, proverbs
and sayings.
Generally speaking, the Russians make greater
use of proverbs than the Americans or the British.
In 1971 the late Russian paremiologist, G. Permiakov,
tried to establish a proverb minimum, and he
found that every Russian adult knew more than 800
proverbs and sayings.
Pre-revolutionary Russia produced a number of
dictionaries of proverbs; a well known one was Dal's
Proverbs and Sayings of the Russian People (1862),
which contains over 30,000 entries. The popularity
of proverbs in Soviet Russia has been reflected in
scores of dictionaries, printed in practically all Soviet
republics. The communist leaders, including
Lenin, recognized early the propaganda value of
conveniently selected entries in the hands of what
the communists called agitators, apparatchiks and
politruks political leaders. Most of their publications
excluded religious and capitalist proverbs
and sayings. They encouraged instead the proliferation
of proletarian publications which were sold at
very low prices.
Against the large number of Soviet dictionaries of
only Russian proverbs, comparative and bilingual dictionaries,
Russian-English ones were rarely published
and they contained between 500 and a couple of
thousand entries only. That is why Peter Mertvago's
dictionary of 5,500 entries is a useful addition to comparative
paremiographical literature.
The compiler starts with a short introduction
dealing with the definition of proverb. This is a
thankless and practically insoluble task. He quotes
Permiakov's formulation, Proverbs and proverbial
phrases are signs of situations or of a certain type of
relationship between objects --not particularly lucid.
A more down-to-earth definition is given by
John Simpson in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of
Proverbs: A proverb is a traditional saying which
offers advice or presents a moral in a short and pithy
manner; but even this does not entirely satisfy
scholars. The Introduction touches on the origin of
proverbs and their similarity in other languages.
The publication in 1500 of Erasmus' Adagia brought
about a trend to translate Latin and Greek proverbs
and quotations into national languages. It also
started an inter-borrowing from common historical
and cultural antecedents.
Mertvago also deals with the difference between
a proverb and a saying. He quotes the Russian
proverb, Pogovorka-tsvetok, poslovitsa--
yagodka a saying is a flower, a proverb is a berry.
The relative brevity of many Russian proverbs stems
from the fact that the Russian language has no articles
and also resorts idiomatically to participial
condensation by not using oblique forms of the
verb to be . Alliteration and rhyme help to memorize
them.
The main part of the dictionary is covered in
about 380 pages. Each entry is numbered, which is
useful for cross-references to semantically similar entries.
The Russian text (in Cyrillic) is followed by a
literal translation in English, unless there is a clear
English equivalent, by which Mertvago means both
lexical and conceptual correspondence. Equivalents
are printed in bold face. Where there is no equivalent
the dictionary gives a corresponding English version,
sometimes a few variants.
The entries are arranged in alphabetical order by
the first Russian letter. There are several other methods
for arranging proverbs and sayings. Mertvago
could have followed the modern trend and used the
key word or thematic arrangements. However, compilers
of proverb dictionaries know that there is no
perfect system for arranging proverbs: each has its
advantages and flaws. Ultimately it comes down to
personal choice and for whom the dictionary is intended.
In a dictionary of this size, the complier is faced
with the task of including or excluding a certain quotation--not
a very easy decision when one is dealing
with a stock of scores of thousands of Russian proverbs.
The fact is that the dictionary contains popular
versions, used in modern spoken Russian. The most
important and commonly known proverbs are
marked with an asterisk. This will be appreciated by
the non-native reader who is not familiar with the
popularity of a certain proverb or saying. There are
1900 entries with asterisks.
There are two appendices. One deals with more
than 100 proverbs and sayings containing personal
and geographic names. For example, Chemu Vanya
nye nauchilsya, tovo Ivan nye vyuchit What little
Johnnie hasn't learnt, old John will not learn; V
Rimye byl i Papu nye vidal Went to Rome, but didn't
see the Pope. The other appendix deals with the
structure of the Russian proverb and gives separate
sections of analytical proverbs, metaphorical ones,
similes--proverbial comparisons (about 100), as
well as contrasting couplets and negational proverbs,
etc. There is a four-page bibliography of main
sources. At the end of the dictionary, there is a large
(eighty-three-page) index of English proverbs arranged
by key words and cross referenced to the
main part of the dictionary.
To sum up, this is a comparative dictionary with
a number of useful features, as if Mertvago wanted
to fill in gaps existing in other dictionaries. There
are hardly any printing errors and plenty of white
spacing making reading easy. It is a commendable
publication.
Emanuel Strauss
Merstham, Surrey
The Electronic Publishing Forum
The 3.5" diskette containing the Forum arrived
with a friendly note from John Galuszka (telephone:
(805) 927-5259; e-mail: [email protected],com)
saying, This will be of interest to your computer-literate
readers. Nothing loath, we loaded it into the
computer for a run.
Before commenting on the contents of the Forum ,
I must disburden myself of some prejudices long
held against computer programmers and other specialists.
First, though, I must say that I have enormous
admiration for their fertile imaginations, ingenuity,
and extraordinarily facile minds: some of the
programs they have developed in recent years are
truly astonishing in their complexity. That acknowledgment
having been made, I find myself continually
irritated by their cavalier dismissal of everything that
human beings developed in the course of history: it
reflects an adolescent mentality that is scornful of
anything that might have taken place before these
parvenu geniuses put finger to keyboard. Rather
than go into great detail, I shall focus on one important
feature offered by many word-processing programs,
namely, alphabetization. If one goes back to
the order in which ASCII characters are arranged
(which was a matter of system and convenience, with
little or no attempt at alphabetization, except that the
lower case and capital letters are in alphabetical order
and the numbers are in sequence), one can see
where later alphabetization programs derive their order.
As most lexicographers, librarians, indexers, editors,
and other literate and intelligent people know
(and as those who compile telephone directories in
some parts of the world have learned), there are preferred
alphabetization systems. These are generally
letter by letter (with some standardized hierarchy established
for capitals, diacritics, punctuation, numerals,
and other anomalies) and word by word (which,
though it is not usually suitable for dictionaries,
works reasonably well for certain kinds of material.
One has to look hard--I have, and still, without success--to
find a system that places 'tis and 'til within
reach of the letter T, that does not sort U-238 at the
end of the U listings, and that does not put several
pages between éclat and eclectic . I recently wrote to
Novell to complain about the sorting order in
WordPerfect and received a reply, totally unresponsive,
that explained in kindly detail how I could
(mis)sort words in different columns of a database.
Perhaps a reader will rush to my aid in my hour of
need.
The point is not entirely irrelevant in relation to
the Forum . First of all, neither the wrapper nor the
accompanying descriptive matter tells a novice how
to access the information on the disc. (The usual
way, in Windows, is to click on Main, then twice on
File Manager; then on the drive, usually A or B,
where the disc has been placed; then, move the cursor
to the listed program that has the suffix .exe,
move it to File, then down the list to Run, and click
twice.) No instruction is included for accessing the
information via MS/DOS, either. Once in the file, it is
not child's play to navigate amongst the various categories
of data. If one goes through sequentially, he
finds this at the end of a given selection:
To read the next article, select ... <20-2.#>*
INDEX ........................<INDEX0.#>*
I could find no useful index: though there is a list of
file names, they are numerical and offer no clue as to
their contents.
The Introduction offers a succinct description of
the Forum:
The Electronic Publishing Forum is a quarterly,
on-disk publication devoted to the subject of
electronic publishing using computer disks. It includes
information on publications, publishers,
and programs related to this subject. Information
for writers, with writer's guidelines from publishers,
is also included. Articles on related subjects
are included. A database of electronic books “in
print” is updated quarterly. Information on the
topics discussed in the back issues of the Forum
will be found in the Catalog section of this disk.
Writers, publishers, and others interested in
this subject are invited to contribute to the discussion
of issues related to electronic publishing.
Submit material to: John Galuszka, Editor, The
Electronic Publishing Forum, P.O. Box 140, San
Simeon, CA 93452. Subscriptions to this publication
cost $12.00 for four issues (postpaid to
North American addresses; overseas add $8.00
for shipping; California residents add 7.25% sales
tax.)
Subscribe to The Electronic Publishing Forum
and keep informed about these developments
for only $12.00 a year. See the REGISTER.NOW
file. Please note that the contents of
this magazine are the same in the shareware edition
and the subscriber edition, but subscribers
also get bundled copies of the sample programs
with their copy. If you found this publication on
the Internet, on a BBS, or one of the commercial
on-line services as file EPF20.ZIP, you have the
whole magazine, but not the sample programs
that go with it.
The foregoing reflects enthusiasm, intelligence,
and resourcefulness but it is badly written, is riddled
with the kind of jargon that frightens away anybody
not privy to the secret language of software, and,
consequently, makes the rest of its content suspect.
Notwithstanding, the content that was read is
not without interest and merit. There is, for example,
a longish list of zines, described as follows:
For those of you not acquainted with the zine
world, zine is short for either fanzine or
magazine, depending on your point of view.
Zines are generally produced by one person or a
small group of people, done often for fun or personal
reasons, and tend to be irreverent, bizarre,
and/or esoteric. Zines are not mainstream publications--they
generally do not contain advertisements
(except, sometimes, advertisements for
other zines), do not have a large subscriber base,
and are generally not produced to make a profit.
There follows information about formats and,
under How Do I Get the E-zines?, a lot of instructions
given mostly in computer jargon. It is difficult
to describe the content of this catalogue, so here is a
sample:
Albert Hofmann's Strange Mistake
A hypertext 'zine commemorating the 50th
anniversary of the accidental discovery of LSD,
16 April, 1943. The document contains archives
by authorities from Albert Hofmann to Abbie
Hoffman, hypertext fac/tion on CIA-sponsored
acid tests, and testimonial solicited from users all
over the world.
There follow details identifying the editor, format,
and how to access the zine. Many of the descriptions
are longer, some are shorter. They include Armadillo
Culture (Being the excremeditation of a hyperactive
armadillo's activities, opinions, and other
stuff ... ), Athene (The online magazine of amateur
creative writing, accompanied by
NOTE: Athene became defunct in 1989. Intertext
is its immediate successor, which I assume
is facetious), and BLINK (which would like
to be a forum for the issues surrounding the intersection
of consciousness and technology. This
is our best defense against postmodern angst: To
critically look at and anticipate the cultural and
social changes spurred by the rapid development
of technology).
One quickly gets the impression that much of this
material comes from the fringes of California, but
Breakaway comes from Norway, The Bucknellian
from Bucknell University, in Pennsylvania, Chaos
Control from Rhode Island, and so forth.
Another file that was examined is called Unclassified
Ads, etc. It contains a listing of a surprising
number of novels and other works (like The
Hypertext Hamlet ), none of which is accompanied by
the customary bibliographic information: in most instances,
even the authors are not listed. The prices
range from $6.00 (for Electronic Books in Print ) to
$20.00 (for three novels by Marian Allen. The variety
is enormous, ranging from books of poetry--or,
at least, of poems--to a Better Volleyball, Bicycle
Tune-up, 21st Century Almanac, Clowning for Fun &
Profit (a How-to book), and scores of other works on
fiction, nonfiction, and reference. An order form
(which one prints out from a computer) is provided.
The price is not omitted, but most are available for
very little--about $5.00 per disc.
In sum, the Forum offers a very mixed bag, indeed,
some of it, as can be seen from the quality of
the text, bordering on the semiliterate, yet much of
it rife with ideas, some of which, depending on one's
interests and inclinations, must be said to be stimulating.
For myself, I find it tedious to read lengthy
sections of text from a screen, though that is less
likely to bother computer-philes and -phanatics.
Not being a prospect for Internet, World Wide
Web, or any of the other network servers (as they
are called), I was relieved to see that a subscriber to
Forum could receive physical diskettes in the mail
and not have to access the information via modem.
Still, a computer of middling sophistication is required,
so those who have not (yet) joined the future
need not apply.
Laurence Urdang
Brewer's Quotations: A Phrase and Fable Dictionary
Books of quotations are curious things. I have
never compiled one, but I understand that publishers
like them because they sell well. As I use such
books mainly as reference books, I am probably the
wrong reviewer for this work by the estimable Nigel
Rees, a Londoner well known as the host of a BBC
radio program, Quote ... Unquote , who publishes
an amusing, entertaining, informative newsletter
with the same title. To be brutally frank, I care little
about what Jimi Hendrix and Marlon Brando might
have said (or, in the latter case, mumbled): of far
greater moment are the words of people like Julius
Caesar, Shakespeare, and Mae West. Whether Greta
Garbo actually ever said, I want to be alone (she
did), is of little consequence in the larger scheme of
things; but the world consists of many parts, including
many smaller--even infinitesimal--things, and
we must not turn our noses up at the exact wording
of Neil Armstrong's moon quotation: at least it was
in English, and one need not try to explain that in Et
tu, Brute , the last word is not the English word brute
but the vocative case of Latin Brutus and then go off
into the paroxysmal grammar of Latin to explain
what a vocative is.
In any event, Rees sets forth the purpose of his
book with admirable clarity in his Introduction. (If
one wants to know why someone wrote or compiled
a book, one should always read the author's Preface,
Foreword, Introduction, or What-have-you). After a
brief mention of some of the things the book is not,
he continues:
What Brewer's Quotations does contain is the
most commonly misquoted, misattributed, misascribed,
misremembered and most disputed sayings
that there are. It also contains sayings that
are frequently unattributed, unascribed, misunderstood
and misapprehended, or words whose
authors might wish to reconsider them.
[p. ix]
The reason for putting Brewer into the title (according
to Rees) is that his book follows naturally in the
tradition of ... Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
[which] singled out words and phrases with tales to
tell and did not attempt an unachievable comprehensiveness.
[N]ot attempt an unachievable comprehensiveness
is a marvelous quotation that I must
borrow for my next book, review, article, or comment
on the parlous state of the world, and I shall
now be able to preface it with, In the words of
Nigel Rees ... I found Rees's Introduction more
entertaining than the body of the book.
I had to put the book to some sort of test, so I
looked up I'm all right, Jack , which is not in the
fairly comprehensive Index; instead, I found it under
Jack: I'm all right J., and it would be unfair to
complain about that; to learn that it was said to come
from a novel by Sir David Bone is not much of a
revelation, nor is it particularly exciting to learn that
Eric Partridge thinks it arose earlier as a minced
form of some taboo Victorianism (if such things actually
existed).
Much more entertaining is a slow browse
through the pages, which reveals items like this:
Book of Common Prayer, The
1662 version
The quick and the dead.
In the Apostles' Creed: From thence he [Christ]
shall come to judge the quick and the dead,
quick meaning alive.
To Lord Dewar (1864-1930), a British industrialist,
is credited the joke that there are only two
classes of pedestrians in these days of reckless
motor traffic--the quick, and the dead. George
Robey ascribed it to Dewar in Looking Back on
Life (1933). A Times leader in April that same
year merely ventured: The saying that there are
two sorts of pedestrians, the quick and the dead,
is well matured.
I begin to cleave to the well-matured story, I'm
afraid; but it does have the advantage today, when
the younger generations demonstrate a total lack of
respect for tradition, of not being overworked by
the comedians who rarely say anything funny or
even clever but make up their routines to remind us
of our foibles. My foibles are very serious, indeed,
and are not anything to joke about.
Readers should be aware that Rees is British and
that the book has a British leaning, less in the choice
of sources, perhaps, than in the inclusion of quotations
that are opaque to those who are not of the
British persuasion and in attributions to obscure Englishmen--John
Braham, English singer and songwriter
(1774-1856), for example.
The structure of Brewer's Quotations is simple:
the main text lists authors in alphabetical order with
quotations following in alphabetical order by first
word; in a few cases, where several works are cited
from a single author, like Dickens, the titles are in
alphabetical order with the quotations following.
On every page, the quotations are numbered sequentially,
providing a quick reference point for the
Index, which lists quotations by their key words, in
some cases listing them more than once: for example,
By their fruits ye shall know them is listed in the
Index both under fruits and under know . One criticism
focuses on the designer of the book, over whom
the publisher's editor (if not Nigel Rees) should have
exercised some influence: in a book in which the
page numbers are an essential piece of the reference
apparatus, they should not be set in the center of the
bottom of the page, where they are hard to see
when thumbing through, but at the top, as close to
the foredge as possible.
Brewer's Quotations was originally published by
Cassell, in 1994. Other titles in the Brewer series, a
name perpetuated more for commercial association
with Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable than
for relevance of content, are, in addition to Brewer's
Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, 14th Edition,
Brewer's Concise Dictionary of Phrase and Fable,
Brewer's Politics, Brewer's Theatre , and the anachronistic
Brewer's Dictionary of Twentieth-Century
Phrase and Fable [BIBLIOGRAPHIA, XVIII, 4, 19],
Brewer's Cinema, and Brewer's Twentieth-Century
Music .
Laurence Urdang
Aviatrixes, Clinchers, & Differentials:
Bulgarian Slang in the '90s
Hearing the vernacular spoken on the modern
streets of Sofia is like hearing a cross-section of this
Slavic nation's tumultuous history. Words of Church
Slavonic origin mingle freely with a large body of
Turkish words--a legacy of five hundred years of
occupation--along with words from Romany, Romanian,
Modern Greek, German, French, Italian, Tatar,
and Macedonian. After World War II, Bulgaria's
close cultural ties with the former Soviet Union ushered
in a large batch of Russian neologisms.
Today Bulgaria's newest generation is opting for
radical new English or English-sounding words--
cool words that are kreizi crazy, fain fine,
bomba bomb, tiptop tiptop, shik chic, vuvelirno
jewellike, dzhust just, absolyutno absolutely, or
sadistichno sadistic.
In late-night bars, euphemistically known in student
slang as biblioteki libraries, Bulgaria's youth
mixes and mingles, rapping in trendy new words.
The heavy-metal crowd is the most radical creator of
new terms. Sofia's heavy-metal culture calls itself
metalurgiya metallurgy, and the heavy-metal aficionado
is known as a metalurg metallurgist, or
metal for short.
As the tough youths sit on bar stools eyeing the
passing crowd, sexist labels proliferate. An attractive
woman is a beibi baby, bambina (from the Italian),
or bonbon (from the French). Large breasts are
referred to as balkon balcony, or bombi bombs,
and a large bottom, curiously, as a diferenzial differential
(in a car). (In some of Sofia's slang groups, the
even stranger expression shvester --from Schwester ,
German for sister--is preferred.) A thin woman is
called an antena . A rich woman who buys rounds of
drinks is known as a mangizlika , from the Romany
word mangis hard cash.
On a rougher level, kushetka couch from
French couchette , is used pejoratively for a woman
who has many sexual partners, and avantazhiya
(from the Italian word for advantage) implies that
the woman is looking to profit from the men she
attracts. A woman always short of cash is known as
an aviatorka aviatrix: instead of being sensible with
her money, she is flying high.
Men, too, are slotted into neat categories. The
gardrob (as in wardrobe) is the tough muscle-man.
A smooth operator is called klincher --a clincher.
Men without any finesse are called buldozer . The
droger is the male drug addict, drogerka the female.
(The drugs they take are called vitamini ).
Aborigén aborigine is the provincial who has
come to Sofia for a night on the town. He is also
known as a kaskét cap, as in the French casquette , a
modern pun on kalpák fur cap, an offensive taunt to
out-of-towners that is of Turkish origin. (These hat
expressions stem from the fact that Bulgarian provincials
traditionally wear large home-made fur
caps.)
Modern words for homosexual are pedi,
pederuga, and pedal (as in bicycle pedal). All three
developed from the Russian pede , a slangy contraction
of pederast , which was borrowed from the
Greek by way of French. (Coincidentally, modern
French argot uses both pede and pedal in the same
way.) If, however, a homosexual is particularly aggressive
and masculine-looking, he is called manáf
Turk or its stronger derivative, manafchiya .
A particularly interesting trait of Bulgarian
slang is the astonishing array of rough words of Turkish
origin for idiot, loser, asshole, etc.: abdál,
ahmak, bálama, balamúr, balamúrnik, balúk, budalá,
bunák, chirák, chukundur, dangalák, dangul, edepsizlík,
esnáf, haidamák, hairsús, haivan, haivanin, inatchiya,
kakavanín, katraník, kepazé, kusurlíya, leke,
mandá, maskará, pachá, palamud, perdesis, rendé,
sersém, and sersemin .
Mixed in with this hefty portion of harsh Turkish
words is an ever-growing batch of newer Western
additions. What are Bulgaria's most in words in
the '90s for idiot and loser?: striptiz uotur striptease
water, a curious reference to maladroit, foolish
individuals; kretenozavur cretinosaurus; boiler
one whose head is full of bubbling hot water; sifon
siphon, one whose head is like an empty tube;
bushón fuse, from French bouchon cork; diaria
diarrhea; loko from Spanish loco; galosh as in galoshes;
kashón crate, from Italian cassone; lainer
ocean liner, a pun on the Bulgarian word lainó
scum.
Up or Down to You
Robb Wilton, that acclaimed and dearly-loved
British comedian of the thirties and forties, introduced
one of his best wartime monologues with the
classic first lines,
The day war broke out, my wife said to me,
It's up to you!
I said, What is?
If he had been writing the sketch today, he would
probably have quoted his wife as saying, It's down
to you. Over the last forty years or so, the expression
up to ... has been widely replaced by down to
... in British usage. It has been a quite unnecessary
transformation, and an unfortunate one because it
brings with it an inferior nuance. Starting in less literate
circles as part of slipshod mod jargon, this
replacement has gradually been adopted more and
more widely. It can now be noted in use by school
teachers (and some teachers of English at that), by
university dons, and even by BBC newsreaders and
commentators.
How has this departure come about? It probably
has some association with social and moral
changes which, over the last few decades, have
brought increasingly churlish and irresponsible attitudes.
Up to ... conveys a sense of duty, of looking
up to the person or body concerned, with confidence
in their integrity. Down to ... brings a sense
of looking downwards to them, somewhat disparagingly,
and blaming them. No longer does a difficult
situation arise and the question immediately follow
Who's this up to?--meaning, Who will unquestionably
regard it as his/her responsibility to sort the
matter out? Rather is it now an immediate question
of Who's this down to?--meaning, Who can be
found to blame, so that the job of correction can be
quickly thrust down to them, leaving others untouched
and unassailable.
Does it really matter? Or is it just part of the
continuous evolution of our rich and living language?
Surely, careful consideration leads to the
conclusion that it does matter and that the change
should be deplored. Why? Because a perfectly good
phrase suggesting honourable obligation or moral
duty has been replaced by an inferior one implying a
bureaucratic, regulatory responsibility, and even
perhaps litigation and punishment.
Let us try to retain up to ..., using it whenever
it may be appropriate; then down to ... may once
again be confined to its proper contexts.
A Fourth Use of the Verb
Rodomontade in the Eighteenth
Century
Under the rubric for the verb rodomantade in
the second edition of the OED , one finds a trio of
examples from the eighteenth century. The first is
from Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755) which informs
us of its meaning to brag thrasonically; to
boast like Rodomonte. The second and third citations
are found in the works of Fanny Burney, a
member of Johnson's circle. In both her Cecilia
(1782) and Diary (1787), we see the verb functioning
as a gerund. In the former work, we read
there's nothing to be got by rhodomontading,
and in the latter, I think his rhodomontading as innocent
as that of our cousin.
Evidence for the presence of the word on the
other side of the Atlantic has been limited heretofore
to a single 19th-century example. In this particular
instance the verb is employed as a present participle
by Washington Irving in Life & Letters (1831)
to describe his hero a rodomontading Congressman
from the Western States. There is, however, another
ocourrence of rodomontade about fifty years
earlier, in the writing of John Adams. In a letter to
Elbridge Gerry, written from Braintree, Massachusetts,
17 October 1779, Adams described the tactics
he had tried to use in Paris to avoid political queries
made by an insistent Ralph Izard: At Sometimes
[ sic ] I endeavoured to perswade [ sic ] him to excuse
me, at others I rhodomontaded it, with him, and endeavoured
to divert him from it ... Exactly how
the word entered Adams's vocabulary is not known.
The verb probably came to his attention through
Johnson's Dictionary , with which both Adams and
his wife, Abigail, were familiar. Nevertheless,
while Adams's source remains obscure, his application
of it does no longer.
In America, during the 19th century, the noun rodomontade ,
spelled rhodomontade, appears in the autobiography of Catharine
Maria Sedgwick, whose work dates from 1853. See The
Power of Her Sympathy , ed. Mary Kelley (Boston, 1993), 70. I am
grateful to Conrad E. Wright, the editor of publications of the
Massachusetts Historical Society, for this information.
The Papers of John Adams , ed. Robert J. Taylor (Harvard University
Press, 1989), vol. 8, 206.
See The Adams Family Correspondence , eds. L. H. Butterfield
and Marc Friedlaender (Harvard University Press, 1973) vol. 4,
177, as well as The Spur of Fame , ed. John A Schutz and Douglass
Adair (The Huntington Library, 1966) vol 1, 92; vol. 2, 2436.
Political Incorrectness
It is reported in The Independent [9 December
1994] that on the South Side in Chicago, local gangs
prefer to be called niggers to distinguish themselves
from the despised suburban upwardly mobile
blacks. Meanwhile, among the American white liberals
the correct term is now people of colour.
Can this be confirmed?
But after a one hour delay, the game was canceled,
bringing a shower of booze and debris from the estimated
10,000 people attending. [From an AP story in Cape Cod
Times , , page B1. Submitted by .]
If you are seated in an exit row and you cannot read
this card, or cannot see well enough to follow these instructions,
please tell a crew member. [From an emergency
instruction card on United Airlines planes. Submitted
by .]
You and I know George Bush is the only man who
can and should keep the reigns of Presidency in 1992.
[From an undated letter from Floyd Brown, National
Chairman, Presidential Victory Committee, received . Submitted by .]
“A Serbian soldier monitors the trajectory of a tank
shell just fired through binoculars on a hill southeast of
Sarajevo Sunday.” [A photo caption from the Pocono Record
(Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania), . Submitted
by .]
Pop megastar Michael Jackson ... insisted he had
very little plastic surgery during a live television interview
with Oprah Winfrey on Wednesday. [From an AP story in
the Pocono Record (Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania), . Submitted by .]
