VOL22_4.txt

   
      
         
            Jam Pass Die



            
               Jam pass die, monkey chop peppeh

               
                  Cameroon Pidgin Saying
               
               [Literally, In dire straits, a monkey will even eat chillies or Anything will do in an emergency.]
            

            Pidgin English is spoken by millions of people all
over the Third World.  There are many varieties,
but they are all most expressive and entertaining.
The most publicized is probably Tok Pisin, the pidgin
of Papua New Guinea.  This has developed into
a language in its own right.  One of the country's
weekly newspapers, Wantok , is published entirely in
Tok Pisin, and there are daily radio programs in it,.
Attempts have even been made to introduce the
works of Shakespeare to the masses by translating
them into Tok Pisin.

            No one who has ever seen the Bard's immortal
words, I come to bury Caesar..., reduced to Mi
kam tasol long plantim Kaesar ... can be expected
to take Shakespeare too seriously again.  And a Tok
Pisin version of Little Red Riding Hood, told me
some years ago by an old China Sea sailor, remains
to this day one of the most hilarious monologues I
have ever heard.

            Tok Pisin does not stand on ceremony, either.
Even the formidable Duke of Edinburgh was heard
to remark ruefully on an official visit to Papua New
Guinea that it was very difficult to maintain a stiff
upper lip when one was constantly being introduced
as Whitefella Blongum Kween.

            But it is Coast Pidgin with which I am most
familiar.  This is the lingua franca of West Africa.  I
worked as a forester on The Coast for thirty years,
so I suppose I had more time than most to become
fluent in the language.  Here, too, there are subtle
differences from one country to another both in the
spoken word and in the written word, from the phonetic
Krio of Sierra Leone and Liberia to the more
straightforward pidgins of Nigeria and Cameroon.

            But, whatever its background, pidgin remains
colorful and, often, onomatopoetic.  In Coast Pidgin
mud becomes putta-putta and noise becomes
wahallah .  A phrase like I have been involved in an
accident becomes, graphically, I dun fukkup .  One's
outrage over some disastrous contretemps is alleviated
somewhat by the culprit's risible attempts to explain
away the circumstances of his crime in pidgin.

            I had in my employ, for a mercifully brief period,
an ancient caretaker called Sixpence.  Sixpence's main
claim to fame was that, as a very young lad living in
Cameroon, he had been employed by the celebrated
Mary Kingsley as a houseboy.  His relationship with
the renowned traveler had ended in some acrimony
after just eight hours, during which time Sixpence
had managed to consign the whole of her insect collection
(painstakingly accumulated for the British
Museum) to the bonfire which he had lit in the compound
outside her chalet for the express purpose of
burning the rubbish from within it.  This was the day
on which Sixpence's innocence had come to an end,
and Miss Kingsley's sulfurous expertise with the English
language had remained indelibly etched in his
memory all his life.

            Sixpence's eyesight was failing badly when we
first met, and he was disaster-prone.  Gas cooking had
just been introduced to the European houses in the
area at the time I hired him, and Sixpence, I was
soon to find out, had much to learn about the dangers
of gas cylinders.  I was walking up the path one
day when a colossal explosion rent Africa asunder and
a large part of my house fell down before my eyes.
I stumbled through the dust and the ruins to find
Sixpence, dazed but miraculously unscathed, sitting
amidst the debris.  Na some kine ting meka na
WHISSSSH lika na shanake foh one dahk konna, he
explained aggrieved, I go put fiah mek I look am
gooh.  Den de whole forking place go jakarah.  [A
slightly bowdlerized translation might read: I heard
a sound which I took to be the hiss of a snake emanating
from a dark corner.  I lit a match in an endeavor
to locate the reptile.  Then the whole deuced building
disintegrated.]

            Pidgin loses much of its character when written,
and it is a sad fact that both the writing and the speaking
of it is discouraged today in many of West Africa's
more modern schools for much the same reason, I suppose,
that I remember many years ago being made to
feel an outcast for having Gaelic as my mother tongue
in an English-speaking school in my native Scotland.
One would hope that the evocative pidgin will be kept
alive.  If it is, it will be due in no small part to the efforts
of a few of the older missionaries in the hinterland.  I
am not, alas, of their faith, but I had to admire the command
these old-timers had of tribal languages in general
and of pidgin in particular.

            It was from one of those missionaries that I
obtained a copy of Genesis in pidgin English.  It was
a version still being used in churches in parts of Nigeria
and Cameroon when I was there:


For de furs time nutting been dey.  Only de Lawd
na He dey.  An de Lawd He dun go wakka hard for
meka dis ting dem de call Eart.  For six day de
Lawd He wakka an He dun mek all ting--everything
He go put for Eart.  Plenty beef, plenty cassava,
plenty banana, plenty yam, plenty guinea-corn,
plenty mango, plenty groundnut--everything.  An for
de wata He put plenty fish, an for de air He put
plenty kind bird.

After six day de Lawd He dun go saleep.  An
when He saleep, plenty palava start for dis place
wey dem call Hebben.  Dis Hebben na de place wey
we go lib after we dun die if we no do so-so bad
ting for dis Eart.  De angeli lib for Hebben an play
banjo an get plenty fine chop an plenty palm wine.

De headman for dem angeli, dem de callam
Gabriel, he dey dere when dis palava begin for
Hebben.  Dere be plenty humbug by one bad angeli,
dem de callam Lucifer.  An Gabriel he catch Lucifer
an he beat am ploppa an palava finish one time...

            

            One is almost tempted to remark, Eat your heart
out, Billy Graham!

            There is no doubt in my mind that, without pidgin,
West Africa would be the poorer.  It is a language
of humor and it can lighten the darkest of moments.  I
have rarely known a situation so bad that a few words
of pidgin could not make it seem a little brighter.

            It was the height of the African rainy season and I
had hitched a ride with an old Dutch missionary to a
ceremony several hundred miles away to which we had
both been invited.  The roads were a sea of mud and
now, with night approaching, we were stuck, finally and
irrevocably, in the middle of the rainforest.  The river in
front of us thundered over the road where just the day
before a wooden bridge had spanned it.  Behind us, a
colossal tree had fallen across the road, effectively blocking
our retreat.  We had not eaten since morning, and
the chances of our doing so in the next twelve hours
looked slim indeed.

            A troupe of chimpanzees emerged from the forest
beyond the river.  They were the wettest looking
monkeys I had ever seen.  They stopped and stared
at us, then began a chorus of hooting noises that
echoed out through the treetops.  I swear that they
were laughing at us.

            No food for us this night, Father, I said sorrowfully.
In fact, at this rate we'll be lucky to eat
before Christmas!

            He did not reply immediately.  He was ferreting
around behind the car seat.  He hauled out a disreputable-looking
traveling bag and rummaged inside.  I
caught glimpses of a white soutane, some underpants,
a string of rosary beads, a big black Bible.  Finally, he
unearthed what he was looking for.  He removed the
cork and handed the bottle to me.  The twinkle was
back in his wise old eyes.  Jam pass die, he said.
Monkey chop peppeh.

            I took a long, long pull at Scotland's finest.  I felt
it kindle heavenly fires within me right down to the
soles of my boots.  Suddenly, Africa did not seem so
wet and muddy and dreary after all.  I handed the
amber nectar back to the Reverend Father.  The old
man raised the bottle to his lips and we watched as
the chimps scurried silently, one behind the other,
back into the sodden forest.

            Yes, Father, I replied with quiet satisfaction.
Monkey chop peppeh, indeed!
         
         
            The Day They Took the Peck out of Pecksniffian




            Erskine Caldwell must have felt that one lexical epoch
was enough for him.  He stayed with the same old
Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary he began with; when
it threatened to come apart he would have it rebound.  As
a contributor to the language and one whose writings
were confined to a snapshot of time and people, Caldwell
could well afford to stand pat.  As a mere word user, I must
keep up with the times.  Every twenty years or so I upgrade
my dictionary.

            It was in that spirit of personal progress that I replaced
my Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary with the
Ninth.  Upgrading is a pain; decades of accumulated notes,
highlights, and cross-reference jottings must be transferred
to the sterile new edition.  Things were going fine
until I got to the word Pecksniffian .  It was still there, but
the definition had been cleansed of its contemptible meaning
and made tolerably benign.  After entering the proper
definition in the margin, Selfish and corrupt behind a
display of seeming benevolence, I sat down to decipher
the new version: unctuously hypocritical.  That is about
as easy to embrace as a wet eel, about as useful as a punctured
balloon.  Describing a Pecksniffian scoundrel as
merely hypocritically hypocritical implies that something
can indeed be less than nothing, as that theory was catechized
by Wilbur the pig in Charlotte's Web .

            Charles Dickens' character, Seth Pecksniff, made his
debut about the time the YMCA was founded, only a few
years before P.T. Barnum introduced us to the Swedish
Nightingale, Jenny Lind.  As words go, Pecksniffian is a
youngster.  The word Calvinism was coined in Vasco da
Gama's day, and during the four centuries since has been
left pretty much alone.  Seth Pecksniff could no more
undergo a post-mortem metamorphosis than John Calvin.
Dickens certainly was not wishy-washy when it came to
developing characters, and Seth Pecksniff was definitely
not just a quick study among the cast in Martin Chuzzlewit .

            Something sinister is up, thought I.  Why would a
lexicographer snatch up a unique, Dickensian creation, gag
him and bind his real persona hand and foot, then slyly
stand an impersonator in his place?  This is clearly a sign
of unctuous hypocrites at work.  Did the decriminalization
of Pecksniff have more expansive implications?  Persons
in high places would any day rather be called hypocritical
than corrupt.  With queasy, frantic haste as one might
inventory his burgled residence, I looked up corrupt .
Whew!  Still intact: morally degenerate and perverted.
I had been prepared for anything: hypocritical, demonstrating
poor judgment,...

            For years and years, Merriam-Webster has held out
an explicit definition of Pecksniffian , one precisely consistent
with the Pecksniff we know, and usage has squared
with that definition.  It was a special word, unambiguously
descriptive of a character's character.  Users have been
respectfully fussy about employing that distinctive word;
it has not been slung around indiscriminately, as quintessential
is today.  A literal translation of unctuously
hypocritical--the phrase does demand some translation--
would describe ordinary slick operators mainly putting on
airs.  Hypocrites, even hypocritical hypocrites, are a dime
a dozen.  One can see a parade of the species on TV any
Sunday.  Sometimes they even pop up in our bathroom
mirrors.

            But Pecksniffians are a different breed.  They are not
simply characters who display contrived earnestness and
advertise virtues they don't have, like the big smile and
self-bestowed nickname Honest John , your friendly usedcar
dealer.  The Pecksnifflan is not so benign.  Fortunately
for society, Pecksniffians are spread pretty thin among the
general population.  It would scarcely concern a Pecksniff
that we suspected that he is not what we had first thought--
or hoped for.  What he desperately hopes to conceal is what
he truly is: corrupt!

            Yes, I realize the living nature of language.  I expect
gradual evolutionary changes in word usage.  But the sanitizing
of Pecksniffian was no more evolutionary than the
stallion's transmutation to a gelding.  The old and new
definitions are so opposed as to be in mortal combat.  One
might want to keep one's guard up when dealing with an
unctuously hypocritical old boy, but that comes somewhat
naturally because unctuosity in people is pretty easy
to spot.  But unctuous hypocrites are not the sort who
would make a $500 billion raid on the US Treasury in broad
daylight.  That kind of a job demands the talents of genuine
Pecksniffian politicians and their Pecksniffian pals.
Was Charles Keating, as he passed out worthless bonds
in exchange for thousands of citizens' retirement nest
eggs, merely unctuously hypocritical, or was he corrupt
behind a display of seeming benevolence?

            A Pecksniffian TV evangelist might conceivably--
heaven forbid--revile sin and sinners while wallowing in
the conduct that he rails against.  A particularly talented
Reverend Pecksniff actually averted the destruction of
his empire with a tele-tearful explanation that his debauchery
was sacrificial and in the line of duty: It was on-the-job
training for hand-to-hand combat with the devil!, he
explained.

            There is a movement to decriminalize the meanings
of words that once described criminal conduct in
unmistakable terms.  I first noticed it in the early 1980s,
coincident with the apex of the looting of the savings and
loans, about when Merriam-Webster discovered the tolerable
side of Seth Pecksniff.

            Then, after that, the Texas Penal Code redefined car
theft to unauthorized use of a motor vehicle and
decreased the penalty for the crime.  We should reflect that
all Jesse James did was ride about making unauthorized
withdrawals from banks.  Who can say what the federal government
had up its sleeve when it softened the term narcotics
and began calling heroin and cocaine controlled
substances .  Dope addicts in that nature of things became
mere substance abusers --new terminology that seemed
to come about when some high government officials
were accused of shooting up on heroin and sniffing coke.
The old illegal numbers racket was vigorously battled by
vice squads across the land until the states got into the
business.  Presto! The wicked numbers game is a racket
no more, but a respectable, highly promoted Lotto, the
hottest gambling enterprise ever conceived.

            Who would have ever dreamed that pursuit, apprehension,
and prosecution of criminals was the wrong tactic
in the war on crime?  Now that we have discovered that
we can slash the crime rate by simply excising the peck
from Pecksniffian , so to speak, we should enter the 21st
century with everybody living happily ever after.
         
         
            A Proper Look at Verbs




            She was Christian Diored from head to foot.  Do you
know how to Charleston?  The plot was Holly-woodized .
Would you xerox this page for me?  They
Sundayed at the lake.  The milk is pasteurized .  He
Christied down the slope.  All these italicized words
belong to a sizable group of verbs based on names--
names of people, brands, places, time periods, and so on.
But although we can talk about proper nouns and proper
adjectives, we do not have a proper term to classify such
verbs.  Surely they deserve to be classified, but as what?
The answer is not an easy one, so before trying to put forward
some ideas, let us start by looking at how similar nouns
and adjectives are classed.

            The words Jane, Italy , and February are three examples
of what we usually refer to as proper nouns--those
individual nouns that refer primarily to people, places,
and time periods and that are generally written with an
initial capital letter, Such words can also be termed
proper names or proper nouns, though these more
general terms may also include titles ( The Times, Gone
With The Wind ), nationalities ( the Japanese, Russians ),
ethnic or religious groups ( Arabs, Jews ), languages ( English,
Swahili ), buildings ( the Central Station, Durham
Cathedral ), and organizations ( OPEC, the United Nations ).

            Some grammar books go a step further, pointing out
that along with proper nouns there is also a category of
proper adjectives.  Proper adjectives, we are told, generally
derive from proper names and are also usually written
with an initial capital letter.  In the main they refer to
nationalities ( Swiss, British, Egyptian ), places ( Venetian,
Himalayan, Balkan ), ethnic, linguistic, or religious groups
( Sanskrit, Gaelic, Muslim ), and people ( Napoleonic, Smithsonian,
Dantesque ).  Sometimes a proper noun is used
attributively, as an adjective ( a London buy ).

            Some proper nouns and proper adjectives that have
given rise to widely used expressions are normally written
with a lower-case letter; examples include cardigan,
boycott, sandwich, platonic love, quixotic .  Many experts,
however, prefer to categorize these as common nouns or
adjectives, labelling them eponyms --words derived from
names.  In fact, the name that originally inspired the word
is now often merely incidental to the meaning and presumably
in consequence the capital letter is omitted.
These factors appear to strip such words of proper status.
The OED states quite dogmatically that a proper noun
is written with an initial capital letter.  Other sources are
not quite so outspoken; Merriam-Webster dictionaries
maintain that proper nouns are usually capitalized in
English.  Definitions tend to be gerrymandered to comply
with editorial policies.

            A small number of problems of capitalization--and
therefore of categorization--arise, as, for instance, with
words and expressions like F/french fries, Hoover,
B/bohemian, C/casanova, S/scotch whisky, C/casarean .
In such cases there seem to be few hard and fast rules:
some dictionaries indicate a capital letter, others a small
letter, still others give both forms.  Here the dividing lines
between proper nouns and adjectives and eponymous
common nouns and adjectives become even hazier.

            But rather than pursue that obscure tack any further
(place names such as Washington are surely both
proper nouns and eponyms), let us see if the proper
categories of words really end there as grammar books
tend to suggest.  If we have proper nouns and proper
adjectives, can we not have proper verbs, too?  What
about verbs such as boycott, hoover, gerrymander, pasteurize
(all based on personal names, though all usually
written with a small letter).  Can they not be termed
proper verbs?  Once again, as far as these verbs are concerned,
the answer would seem to lie in the lack of an
initial capital letter and the fact that they refer to something
very much removed from the naine itself.  For these
reasons, most grammarians would simply classify these
verbs as eponyms.

            If, however, we look at a few more verbs based on
names, the situation is perhaps not quite so clear cut.
Brand names, for example, are also regularly seen in verbal
form; some typical examples are shown in the following
sentences.  (All name-based verbs given as examples in
this article are included in the OED2 , the Oxford Dictionary
of Modern Slang or the Longman Register of New
Words unless otherwise stated.)


I'm going to Ajax the sink next.  (Ajax is a cleanser.)

You can do it when you B&Q it' (British advertising
slogan; B&Q is a DIY chain.)

She barbified herself to go out that evening. (from the
Barbie doll.)

We were given a bovrilized version of the report.  (Bovril
is a concentrated beef extract.)

The pack was cellophaned for convenience.

Most Eastern European countries are now well and
truly coca-colonized.

The area is to be Disneyed into yet another
theme park.

They Gallup-polled a large sample.

Kodak as you go.  (American advertising slogan.)

Please, Sellotape/Scotch-tape the envelope.  (from
British and US trade names.)

Don't just book it, Thomas Cook it! (British advertising
slogan.)

You should Vaseline your hair down.

The pocket flap was Velcroed shut.

Could you please xerox this letter.

            

            Quite deliberately, some of these have been written
with capital letters and some with lower-case letters.  To
coca-colonize, cellophane , and xerox appear to work quite
well with small letters, but capital letters are surely preferable
for many of the others.  It probably depends on how
widely used each individual verb is.  Whether or not a
capital letter is used may often be a question of personal
choice, and dictionaries frequently give both forms.

            Place names can also crop up in a verbal form,
C/charleston being a classic example.  Countries, areas, and
cities used as verbs can often indicate a visit: you might
hear: They Cyprused in spring or We Florida'd last fall
in the course of normal conversation.  But other more
specific meanings can become attached to places: to
Benidorm means to develop (a seaside resort without
much respect to the natural landscape or the urban environment);
to Rubicon implies going beyond a point of no
return.  Hardly anyone is aware that the verb to meander
comes from the name of the winding Menderes river in
Turkey.  Place names and the like often become verbs
when used with an- ize or an - ify suffix: The story was Hollywoodized;
The area risks being balkanized; The region
was Vaticanized; The decor was Frenchified; The country
is becoming Swissified; The immigrant quickly became
Americanized; Standard British English is being Cockneyfied .
Capital letters are generally used here, except for
verbs which have become fairly common.

            Capital letters usually seem compulsory for names of
time periods used as verbs.  We Christmased at home and
New Yeared in the mountains.  She April Fooled him would
look very strange with lower-case letters.  Likewise, capital
letters are essential in the song Dishonest Modesty , by Carly
Simon and Zach Weisner, where we find the magazines
House and Garden, Vogue, Glamour, Mademoiselle, Bitch
and Screw , and Penthouse all being used as verbs.

            Personal names probably constitute the largest category
of name-based verbs.  Frequently used verbs found
in dictionaries are usually written with lower-case letters
( boycott, bowdlerize, hoover ), the name behind the verb
being almost insignificant.  Other examples include to
braille , to biro , to grangerize , to malaprop , to spoonerize ,
and to morse .  But a more original, significant use of a personal
name in a verbal form is more likely to be written
with a capital letter.  Advertising copy, topical conversation,
and song lyrics seem to be three very fertile sources
of this latter use.  For example, in the song Rainbow High ,
from Evita , by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, we
find, So Christian Dior me, So Machiavell-me, So
Lauren Bacall me.

            There are numerous expressions based on famous
names that celebrate the well-known traits of the people
in question; here is a fairly short list:


She threatened to Bobbit him.

She Ciceroned us around the site.

The old couple often Darby-and-Joan-ed a bit.

They tended to Darwinize their theories.

You need to Grundify your comments.

He is Hitlerizing his style of leadership.

You Judased on us.

He tried to Napoleonize his image.

Her drink had been Mickey-Finned.

It was not the first time he was caught Ponting military
secrets.  (After Clive Ponting who leaked to the press
details of the sinking of the Argentinian cruiser,
General Belgrano.)

Stop Pecksniffing at me!

He's Prince Charming her.

They unsuccessfully tried to Stonewall the move.

He Tarzaned out of the tree.

Don't Uncle Tom me so!

            

            The examples Ponting and Prince Charming from
the above list are generally found as verbs only in
their - ing form, as that is their original form.  But few other
name-based verbs seem to have such constraints, probably
because English is such a relatively uninflected language,
whereas many other languages have dozens or
even hundreds of verb forms.  The flexible nature of
English means that verbs can easily be based on names,
whereas in Latinate languages, with their many inflections,
such a process is clearly hampered.  Perhaps it is precisely
because our approach to the grammar of English is still
in many ways based on Latin grammar that we do not have
a specific grammatical term for name-based verbs, and it
is time to give proper recognition to this feature.

            The dividing line between proper nouns (and proper
names) and common nouns-cum-eponyms is difficult to
define.  Nevertheless, two key factors for classification
seem to be whether the name behind the verb is still relevant
to the meaning and whether a capital letter is used.
Such considerations are also pertinent to name-based
adjectives.  There would appear to be no reason why the
first of these defining factors cannot be applied equally
well to verbs, a boycott and to boycott could be labelled
hand-in-hand as eponymous noun and verb (poor Capt.
Boycott having been forgotten by everyone except the
etymologists and encyclopedists).  In the majority of cases,
however, the name is not irrelevant, and the capital is
usually kept.  Clearly, we need a second category for those
verbs that still allude directly to the name and that are
consequently often written with a capital letter.  The only
proper term for such a category must be proper verb .
         
         
            
My cup was an old blue one I had bought long ago at
a Dallas Police Association fund-raiser....  You could replace
a cup like that, but I had had it a long time.  Page 35.
I did not have a personal coffee cup of my own...
Page 176.  [From Turnaround Jack , by Richard Abshire,
William Morrow.  Submitted by .]
         
         
            Elementary, My Dear Mendeleev




            The categorization of all the known elements of the
day by the Russian scientist Dmitri Ivanovich
Mendeleev (1834-1907) represents an instance of genius
in nomenclature and classification.  Not only did Mendeleev
notice that the elements could be grouped together in a
chart that related their atomic numbers (the number of
neutrons in the nucleus of their base isotope), but he also
saw that this relationship grouped together elements with
similar chemical characteristics.  For instance, all the
noble gases (neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and radon)
are arranged in a vertical row at the right-hand edge of
the table.

            However, just because elements in the same area of
the Table are related atomically and chemically, this neatness
is not necessarily reflected in the names, let alone
the two-character symbols we have given to elements,
which reflect all the chaos, variety, whims, and even vanity
of history and human nature.

            Let us start with some of the more common elements,
however, as their etymology best illustrates the
complete arbitrariness in naming elements.  Hydrogen ,
with atomic number 1, is actually rather straightforward:
its name comes from easily recognized Latin roots for
water and create.  It is the most common element in the
universe, and it is the most common element in ordinary,
everyday water.  In German it is called, very prosaically,
Wasserstoffe water stuff in recognition of its role as the
basic building block of water.

            German has a number of other element names which
end in -stoffe: Kohlstoffe, Sauerstoffe , and Stickstoffe being
the best known.  Kohlstoffe is, of course, the stuff of coal,
or charcoal.  Both coal and c(h)ar come from IE * ker ,
meaning charcoal.  Sauerstoffe is not a reference to Säuerkraut ,
but in a way that is not as crazy as it sounds: Säure
is the German word for acid, and oxygen is likewise the
stuff that makes acids.  Oxy comes from Greek oxus
sharp < IE * ak , sharp and sour both being descriptive
of acid.

            
               Nitrogen is a little more complicated.  The word comes
from Greek natron ash or soda.  What might have been
referred to was nitrogen's key role in creating nitrates and
other alkaline (soda-like) compounds.

            Alongside these four most common elements--probably
99 per cent of all atoms in organic molecules are
either carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, or nitrogen--we should
consider some of the elements without which our standard
of living would be impossible: the base and precious
metals.  A group of five metallic elements which were well
known to the ancients and which also have in common
symbols that do not resemble the English words for
them are lead (Pb), copper (Cu), mercury (Hg), silver
(Ag), and gold (Au).  The reason the symbols vary so
much from their names is that they are abbreviations of
names given them in ancient times.  Mercury , also called
quicksilver , is liquid at room temperature and thus
brought to mind the fleet-footed Roman messenger god.
However, the Greeks also called the metal quicksilver;
in Greek, liquid silver is hydrárgyros , from which the
symbol Hg derived.

            
               Copper is from ME coper , OE coper/copor , Proto-Germanic
* kupar , and is called cuprum in Late Latin;
both Proto-Germanic and Late Latin forms are from
Latin Cyprium , the adjective for Cyprus , whence the best
copper came in antiquity, which goes back to the Greeks,
who called it kupros .  Whereas both the name of the element
in English and its universal symbol come from
Cyprus , the name came via Germanic and the symbol
via Latin.

            
               Lead is from ME/OE lead , West Germanic lauda , but
its ultimate origin is obscure.  The Latin plumbum weight
gives us the symbol, Pb (along with words like plumb,
plumb bob , and plumber one who works with lead and
lead pipes.

            
               Silver is from OE siolfor/seolfor , Proto-Germanic
* silubhra , and may not be an Indo-European word at all,
but one borrowed from the Semitic language Akkadian
(the language of Babylon): sarpu refined metal.  The
symbol, Ag, comes from Latin argentum , from IE *arg,
meaning to shine, or white.

            
               Gold comes from OE gold , IE * ghel to shine but in
a yellow sense (in contrast to * arg , which is to shine in
a white sense).  This root, or closely related ones, such
as * ghol , yield a whole slough of modern English words
via various Proto-Germanic and related IE roots: yellow,
gild, gall (a yellowish substance), choler, cholera, melancholy
black bile, and chlorine , all via Greek kholé yellow
bile and Greek chlidé luxury and Proto-Germanic
* ghhleid and * glazem: gleam, glint, glimmer, glisten,
glass, glaze, gloss, glance, glade, glee, glow, gloaming,
glide , and glissade --quite a haul from what is basically
a single root!  The symbol, Au , comes from Latin aurum
gold, which, in turn, comes from Indo-European
* auso- gold, but possibly meaning to draw water, leading
one to speculate that ancient gold was found by panning,
as in placer mining.

            Finally, a group of odds `n' sods: nickel (the devil's
metal), from modern German Kupfernickel copper
demon: Nickel is a diminutive of Nicklaus , similar to the
English Old Nick, a term for the Devil, so called
because nickel was considered a contaminant when found
in copper ore but in the early days of mining--as if the
metal were spooked.  Once a use had been found for
nickel (it is what makes stainless steel stainless, among
other uses), it became a desirable metal; but its ore was
found to have a gremlin in it, which turned out to be
cobalt ( Kobalt in German).  The German word for gremlin
is Kobold , an underground sprite believed to put
curses on ore.

            Although several elements are spelled differently on
either side of the anglophone world ( caesium vs. cesium ,
for instance), only aluminium is both spelled and pronounced
differently.  Aluminium is so spelled outside North
America (except by the Canadian aluminum giant, Alcan
Aluminium ).  The metal was identified in 1808 by Sir
Humphry Davy, who originally named it alumium , based
on Latin alumen , and alum , oxides and sulphates of
aluminum, respectively, which were known to the ancients.
Four years later, however, Davy changed his mind and
called the element aluminum , which he felt more closely
resembled the Latin roots.  The word was transformed in
aluminium in Britain because it seemed more classically
consistent.  There is another element--tungsten--which
used to be known as wolfram in Britain, although this has
been supplanted by tungsten .

            It is not considered proper to name elements after
oneself, but others can name an element after you if you
are dead and sufficiently famous.  Or you could arrange
to have an element named after your hometown or your
country: Scandium, Polonium, Europium, Francium,
Americium, Germanium, Berkelium, Californium, Yttrium ,
and Ytterbium , the last two being elements named after
the Swedish town where they were discovered.  Elements
named after scientists include Curium, Mendelevium,
Einsteinium, Nobelium (actually this was named after
Sweden's Nobel Institute, not directly after Alfred Nobel),
and Lawrencium .  However, there is another element
whose nomenclature breaks the rules thanks to a trick its
discoverer played on the world.  The 19th-century French
chemist Paul Emile Lecoq de Boisbaudran managed to
name Gallium after himself (because, of course, Coq in
Latin is Gallus !).  As gallium is the only other metal, besides
mercury, which is liquid at room temperature and since
liquid metals have a slightly shady reputation, perhaps
Lecoq's trick was poetically apt.
         
         
            Logos (Speech) and Logos (Symbols)
            Ägyptisches Museum, Berlin

            In the Beginning was the Logos  ... and only much
later were there letters.  When and where humankind
made its first intelligible utterance will never be
known.  However, it was only a mere 5,000 years
ago that Homo loquens hit upon writing down some of
the Babelian babble around him--and there has been
no stopping him since!  Presumably, Sumerian or Egyptian
accountants--no boob-bookkeepers they!--first substituted
signs for pictographs, giving them phonetic
instead of semantic values.  Literati of the day decided
they too could use these new-fangled marks for something
besides counting cows, setting in motion another
logorrhoeic avalanche that has continued to snowball
ever since.  Speech and writing, as inextricably joined as
a paper's two surfaces, are different forms of the same,
singular phenomenon distinguishing humans from all
other creatures on earth.  Yet, while the garrulous gabble
continues everywhere, constant and unabated, writing
still eludes half the world's population for whom marks
on any medium remain inscrutable, impenetrable,
indecipherable cryptography.

            Writing is a symbol of the sounds (Aristotle, Categories ).
But the discrepancies between language in its
spoken and written forms are often blatant.  The symbols
of any writing system have whatever phonetic value its users
agree to assign to them, convention and consensus playing
a major role.  For example, Europeans in America
confronted with the street sign PED XING Efor the first time
have seriously believed in the imminent Sinicization of contemporary
American English.  The configuration 2 is
pronounced kaks(i), ketto, tin, rua, dua, lua, iki, xojor, mbili,
zole, shnayim , and roughly, four to six thousand other
ways around the globe.  English orthography's quixotic,
chimerical vagaries, allowing such Cheshire-cat creations
as ghoti (= fish, courtesy of G.B. Shaw) and Ghoughphthleightteeaux
(= potatoes; see Firmage), are notorious.

            From Aristotle and Quintilian to De Saussure, Chomsky,
Harris, De Francis, and Pinker--to name a few--man
has been studying language for more than two millennia.
Two books of recent vintage reflecting this ongoing fascination
are:
         
         
            The Alphabet Abecedarium
         
         
            The Story of Writing
            
               The Alphabet Abecedarium is the bibliophile's answer
to the botanist's stroll through the garden, being an eminently
enjoyable omnium gatherum of recondite, recherché,
and obscure arcana and lore about the letters of our
Latin alphabet written in a light, conversational, self-deprecatory,
tongue-in-cheek style.  After a brief history of the
alphabet, each of the twenty-six succeeding chapters is
devoted to a single letter, with a final one discussing signs
and symbols.  Firmage recounts the development of each
letter from its first protoplastic attestation on through its
often protean metamorphoses over the millennia.

            In an engaging, wide-ranging display of erudition, Firmage
discusses the letters' symbological values in such
diverse parlances as chemistry, music, ancient and modern
mysticism (including far too much New Age material
for my tastes), while quotes from such diverse figures
as Joyce, Rabelais, Dostoyevsky, Bob Dylan--and Elmer
Fudd--interlard the text.  Firmage's main interest in this
pleasant potpourri is in aesthetics: the letters' shapes and
designs.  Extrapolating on the theories of the Renaissance
designer, Geofroy Tory, as expounded in his Champ Fleury
(1529), Firmage takes Tory's sketches as the springboard
for his analysis of the letter-shapes and the sometimes
highly stylized forms they assume throughout history,
from their inchoate inception in the Near East down to
present-day, computer-generated typefaces.  Line drawings
alternate with explicative text.

            Quibbling additions and corrections: the mirrorreverse
epitaph (p. 2) is anything but an illiterate endeavor,
the letter forms being quite standard, the contents entirely
normal.  Why the letters are reversed is a puzzling enigma.
Precedents to the horn book (pp. 59,76) are the approximately
300 sometimes waxed or white-washed wooden
tablets preserving children's school exercises (3rd c.
BCE-9th c. CE), many of the later ones likewise adorned
by a cross.  Acrostics (p. 75) are already attested in the Near
East (3rd millennium BCE), Egypt (14th c. BCE) and 6th-c.
BCE Greece.  The so-called alectorocephalic anguipede
deity portrayed on the gem (p. 174) is not the Christian
three-form god but a teratomorphic concoction of Gnostic
syncretistic fantasy.  The (mis)information (pp. 11, 183)
that papyrus was costly is an undying canard.  After a hundred
years of research and the publication of 50,000 papyri
in a dozen languages the price of papyrus is simply
unknown, too many imponderabilia--quantity?  quality?
size?  amount?--plaguing the few references to a price.
Incredible profligacy--a few lines on otherwise pristine
sheets--and thousands of ancient tax receipts prove that
even the poorest peasant could pay for the papyrus on
which his payments were recorded.  Scraping writing off
papyrus irreparably damages the surface; washing produces
only a smudge.  Errors were simply crossed out and written
over.

            Predating Kircher's mystical alphabets (p. 164) by
1400 years are so-called ring letters and characters of
Greek, Coptic, Syriac, Hebrew, Ethiopian, Aramaic, and
Arabic amulets.  Chinese history (p. 183) says Cai Lun, a
court official, invented paper in 105 CE.  Recent archaeological
finds antedate Cai Lun's putative invention by centuries:
the oldest paper artifact being a 3rd-c.  BCE map
recovered from a tomb in Fangmatan in 1986.

            Only Egyptians of the Hellenistic period washed off
and imbibed (p. 11) curative spells.  Their pharaonic forebears
knew nothing of the sort.  Missing is a discussion of
the word element which some derive from l + m + n; and
(pp. 111-12) a reference to Luis d'Antin von Roote, Mots
d'Heures: Gousses, Rames (New York 1967) and to Catullus'
hilarious poem (no. 84), The Egregious Cockney,
persiflaging pre-Augustan Romans' tendency to overaspirate.
Rare misprints, and mistakes: p. 96 for flourine read:
fluorine; pp. 164, 255: millenia; p. 179: for porcarum
read porcorum ; p. 254: accomodate.  Although The Alphabet
Abecedarium is not necessarily a book to read from
cover to cover, I did it, thoroughly captivated.

            In the end were the Logos?  Taking a different
approach, Robinson's The Story of Writing is almost coffee-table-sized;
it is elegantly designed and richly illustrated.
After presenting various systems of communication
(signs, pictographs, rebuses, shorthand, tallies, Babylonian
clay tokens, Peruvian quipus), Robinson discusses
such ancient and now defunct but decipherable writing
systems as Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs,
Minoan Greek Linear B, and Mayan glyphs; ditto some
of the more outstanding conundra awaiting decipherment--Cretan
Linear A, Proto-Elamite, Etruscan, and
the Easter Island and Indus scripts.  The rest of the book
treats living languages and their scripts.

            From Hieroglyphs to Alphabets--and Back?,  the
title of Robinson's concluding chapter, is not an entirely
rhetorical question.  Only twenty years ago did those now
ubiquitous and--depending on how one perceives them--
exuberantly eloquent or infuriatingly laconic logos begin
to appear on highway and street signs; in terminals (do
kilted Scots or slacks-clad women ever end up in the
wrong lavatories?); computer screen displays; and instruction
manuals for electr(on)ic gadgetry.  Similarly, architectural,
musical, mathematical, astronomical, chemical
notation, dance and circuit diagrams are replete with symbols
some scholars place on a par with proto-scripts, implying
that after 5,000 years of literary lucubrations and
scriveners' scribblings we are leaving the Age of Writing
and entering a post-modern Age of Logography.

            Succinctly stated, the basic, underlying question is,
How do we (who use alphabets) read?  Conversely, how did
the ancient Sumerians, Egyptians, and how do present-day
Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans read?  Athanasius Kircher's
(1602-1680) and Joseph de Guignes' (1721-1800) fanciful
descriptions of Chinese signs and Egyptian hieroglyphs
gave birth to the notion that these writing systems could
somehow circumvent pedestrian alphabets, going as it
were straight to the heart of things.  Since then the myth
has persisted that here encoded in these quasi-representational
forms was the quintessence of thought, the eternal
Platonic ideal, the Jungian Ur- symbol underlying all
human cogitation--and by extrapolation, speech--the
(al)lure of the fabulous (Far) East playing an obvious role.

            Linguistic research has proven, however, that such
notions are entirely false.  Hieroglyphs and logographs are
just as much phonetic-based scripts as letters (which millennia
ago were likewise pictorial representations of concrete
objects).  That hieroglyphs and logographs sometimes
contain significant visual elements--mnemonic aids to
jog the memory and set the synapses swinging--is icing
on the cake.  First and foremost, hieroglyphs and logographs
are read as sounds, not symbols, as my seven-year foray
into Chinese has taught me.  How the brain actually perceives
writing of any shape is a question spanning a wide
variety of disparate disciplines, cognitive sciences, (neuropsycho-)
linguistics and -biology, the debate ongoing and
controversy-laden.  Visible speech, regardless whether
alphabetic or logographic, with all its faults and foibles,
its inherent inconsistencies, inadequacies, and inaccuracies,
it seems, is here to stay.
         
         
            All Gone Pear-Shaped:
Opportunities for Misunderstanding the Police




            One of my first and most vivid impressions after
becoming a London police officer was the exceptional
richness of police jargon.  It also struck me as odd,
in view of how inventive and amusing this jargon is, how
little is used for background colour in TV police dramas
and, when the programme-makers use it at all, how often
they get it wrong.

            For instance, fictional police are always talking about
their being in the Force , whereas real police never talk
about the force : it is always simply the job .  So an off-duty
officer stopped in a speed trap will try to escape by murmuring
to the traffic officer, I'm in the job, mate, or perhaps
just I'm job.  When his pals ask him about it they
will say, Were you in a job car?  Officers perennially
gripe about the abrasive and unsympathetic qualities of
job toilet paper .  Even the house journal of Britain's largest
force, the London Metropolitan Police, is called simply
The Job .

            Similarly, no real police officer has, in my hearing,
ever referred to his territory as either his manor or his
patch , both terms being the norm in British cop shows.
In fact, policemen always speak of their ground : an officer
might ask his pal, Do you know a pub called the Rhinoceros?
and his friend will reply, Of course I do: it's
on my ground.  Returning from a foray outside his own
station's area, one officer will say to another, Ah, we're
back on the ground again.

            Another term much beloved of TV dramatists is Super ,
for Superintendent, and its logical next step, Chief Super :
the Super's on his way.  In reality, police never abbreviate
this rank.  I've no idea why; they just don't.  It is always
the Superintendent or He's a Chief Superintendent now.
In conversation, however, the Superintendent or Chief
Superintendent in charge of a station is almost invariably
referred to as simply the guv'nor , and he and his entourage
of supervising officers down to and including Inspectors
are collectively the governors .  The Inspector running a
shift of operational officers is also the guv'nor .

            By contrast, no one, of any rank, ever addresses someone
of the rank of Constable as Constable: in direct
address he will simply be addressed by name or, in more
formal contexts, by his number: 601, report to the Chief
Superintendent for annual qualification review at 3.00
pm.  In indirect reference, the body of Constables is
always referred to as the PCs , mentioned individually in
such terms as He's a PC on M Division, My son's in
the job: he's a PC at Wembley.  Sergeants are addressed
from time to time as Sarge , but much more usually as Skipper
or Skip ; and they are always referred to indirectly as
such: He's a skipper on M division.  Inspectors and Chief
Inspectors are never abbreviated or otherwise jargonized.
As for the most stratospheric ranks of all, ending with the
Commissioner himself, they are known collectively as the
brass .

            The PCs are divided into reliefs , each working a rotation
of early, late, and night shifts.  Shift , however, is a word
that is not used by the police: early and late duties are
known as early and late turn , but nights are always night
duty or plain nights .  Early turn is generally known colloquially
as early worm , but the other two have no sobriquets.
Any single period of work is a tour (of duty) .  Before
your tour you get into your uniform, including your bonnet
(helmet--but never the flat cap used on motorized
patrol), your stick (truncheon, including the new American-style
nightsticks), and your uniform jacket (not strictly
a jargon term, but another case of police-public divide,
in that the public nearly always call it a tunic , which is
never used by the police themselves).  You also put on
your PR personal radio.  At one time this was called the
Batphone , but that term has dropped out of use.

            The building where all this takes place is never
referred to as anything other than the nick .  That is also
the commonest of many names for prison, and the one
almost invariably used by police.  Anyone held in police
custody is banged up.  Nick is the universal verb for the
act of arrest: the polite courtroom phrase I arrested and
cautioned him is almost invariably a euphemism for the
words actually spoken by PC to the prisoner on the street
are, You're nicked--suitably adverbially embellished if
the prisoner has caused the PC to run, fight, or lose his
breath.

            A prisoner is a body , as in Any mobile unit available
to so to Trafalgar Square to pick up 601 with a body?  But
you never arrest a body, or even nick him: you always get
a body .  You may also feel his collar or, more commonly,
have him off , and if it is for anything other than drunkenness,
you get a crime knock .  Crime knocks often flow
from observations.  Here is another example of the TV
people (and the newspapers) getting it wrong: they always
refer to the police as keeping an observation .  Police, on
the other hand, never say that, always doing an obbo .  One
thing, however, is certain: however he came to be arrested,
the body is always thenceforward referred to as Chummy .

            Many crimes are invariably referred to by initials,
some of which belong to offences that have been super-seded--a
good example of jargon's proving more tenacious
of life than the things from which it arises.  For example,
someone arrested for the offence of going equipped for
theft is still known by the initials of the old offence of carrying
House Breaking Implements by night, from the
Larceny Acts, though they were repealed decades ago.  Thus
I had him off for HBI.  You might also have him off for
TDA (Taking and Driving Away, now replaced by Taking
a conveyance ), or for OPD (Outraging Public
Decency), IPO (Impersonating a Police Officer), or for
the better-known ABH or GBH (assaults occasioning
Actual or Grievous Bodily Harm).  And there are many
others.

            If you have had someone off for some of the more
serious of these crimes it is likely that you will be in plain
clothes.  In that case you need to identify yourself as job
to Chummy.  You do this by flashing your brief , which
means in practice waving under his nose a bit of plastic
that is actually your warrant card, but as far as Chummy
knows might be anything, and announcing that he's nicked.
When he gets to the nick he will then holler for a brief
of an entirely different kind, namely his lawyer--a solicitor;
and if the case goes as far as court, the brief will very
likely have engaged a mouthpiece --in Britain a barrister,
in the USA a trial lawyer--to speak for him.

            Some crime knocks are wrongful, and sometimes
officers have been known to arrest on sight someone they
feel sure is at it and decide later on what they have arrested
him for, sometimes even planting evidence.  This is known
in copspeak as being swift , or as swifting someone off for
whatever it is that is later decided upon.  Or you may tell
your pals in the canteen later that you had him off under
the C [or whichever] Division Breathing Act or under the
Refusal of Particulars Act .  More frequent is the custom
of claiming that Chummy said something self-incriminating
on arrest.  This is known as verballing him up .  Any
such behaviour is often described as bent , as in bent copper ,
but among police themselves the common term for
such an arrest is, I see old so-and-so got well and truly
stitched up for theft from vehicles.  This is yet another
case where police and public part company: the media
always talk of bent police fitting up innocent arrestees.
The police never use that term, always stitch up .  The
term fit up was, as far as I can ascertain, coined by the
novelist G.F. Newman in his story of a bent detective,
Sir, You Bastard , but it is the one that has caught on, at
the expense of the real police term.

            A police officer caught going bent will get into trouble.
Whether or not he ends up in court, he will certainly
be the subject of internal disciplinary proceedings.  He will
describe himself, however, as having been stuck on , this
being short for stuck on the dab .  Or he may use the other
half for his abbreviation and say, I'm going on the dab
for this.  The term comes from the word dabs fingerprints,
which are taken from a prisoner by police only after arrest
for fairly serious crime.  And an officer who has been stuck
on may well be heard lamenting that It's all gone pearshaped --which
is what happens when anything that
should have a fine, firm shape sags, with all the stuffing
leaking down into the bottom and flopping outwards.

            Having initially been stuck on, the errant PC will
soon receive the official form warning him that he may
be subject to disciplinary proceedings.  Like all large
bureaucracies, the police flounder in an ocean of paper,
with a form for every action.  The one for this warning of
possible discipline is a Form No. 163, so the PC can now
say of himself, I've been one-six-three'd; and a bit later,
when the senior officer assigned to investigate the complaint
decides that there is enough evidence to justify a
hearing (which he always does), comes the even more
dreaded next stage, I've been one-six-foured --i.e.,
given notice of the date of the disciplinary hearing.

            You can be stuck on for anything from serious misconduct
to minor infringements of the police's absurdly
draconian and catch-all disciplinary codes, which make it
possible for a senior officer with a grudge against a junior
to stick him on for almost anything.  For example, the PC
may have been caught slipping unobtrusively into a restaurant
or pub on his ground to scrounge--otherwise ponce
or mump --a drink or a meal.  Every PC cultivates his own
special places for this purpose: they are his own preserve
and forbidden to other PCs; he will refer to them as his
ponce-holes , and they add greatly to the sum of constabular
happiness.  (Mine included the Savoy Hotel.)

            Other things for which one might go on the dab
include scrounging provender from markets, the produce
being known as codgel ; associating with the wrong kind
of company, which is to say actions like boozing with
known criminals, or CRO men.  (CRO stands for Criminal
Records Office.  The office itself has been given an
impressive new name, but the old initials survive it.)  So
I might talk of your friends with criminal convictions as
your CRO mates.  Police/public again: the cop shows
and newspapers always describe these friends of yours as
having form .  The police always talk of previous .  Having
either, Chummy will of course have a docket number at
CRO or its computerized replacement; any police officer,
however, will still say Well, well, well!  He's got a club number
!
            

            Having nicked Chummy, the police may wish to
search his property for the proceeds of his crimes.  If he
refuses his permission for them to do so, they will get a
W (warrant) from a magistrate or, in some parts, a Panel
of experts bench of lay justices.  Then they will go and
give his drum a spin , or just spin him search his home.
Whether or not they find anything, they will eventually
get into half-blues civilian jacket over job shirt and trousers
and go off to the pub for a well-earned pint; and if you
eavesdrop on their conversation, since policemen always
talk shop, you will undoubtedly overhear some of the
expressions you have been introduced to here.
         
         
            
 No one expected it to be that high, but it's lower
than what we expected, said Mark Obrinsky,....  [From
The Wall Street Journal , , page A8.  Submitted
by .]
         
         
            
But the N.C.A.A. is concerned only with breaches
of its recruiting and academic rules, not with honest-to-goodness
crime.  [From A National Disgrace, in
Reader's Digest , .  Submitted by ]<None>
         
         

            Turns of Phrase




            How long is it since you turned round and gave someone
a good earful?  And did he or she turn round and give
as good as they got?

            You might turn round to me and say you don't know
what I'am on about.  In which case I am liable to turn round
to you and say, Of course you do.  Open your ears.

            But beware.  You may find this particular speech habit
to be like the creaking tree outside the window: it was
always there but you never heard it.  Once you hear it you
scarcely hear anything else.

            Why do we twist and spin before we speak?  Is it a
ritual?  a spell to ward off contradiction?  a dance of self-justification?
Certainly, it usually carries some hint of
aggression, and, as always, vindication is in the mouth of
the utterer.

            If you turn round and do it to me, it probably means
you are being duplicitous in some way--switching allegiance;
reversing an opinion.  A turncoat, perhaps.  She
turned round and told me she always knew I had the
dress sense of a bag-lady.

            We might term this Turning Round and Offering
Bare-faced Cheek.  The orbiting full moon, perhaps.

            Consumer grievances are particularly rich in these
audacious revolutions.  Retailers seem to turn round wholesale
on their hapless customers with outrageous demands.
The Gas Board turned round and said I had to pay for
their cock-up.  This is called Turning Round and Moving
the Goalposts.

            If, on the other hand, I turn round and do it to you,
it probably means that I am turning in heroic defiance,
wheeling in righteous indignation, turning on my tormentors.
I turned round and told them I wasn't going to
take it lying down.  This is known as Turning Round and
Standing One's Ground.

            The average day's listening to talk radio will provide
a vertiginous selection of all these categories--plus, of
course, the Political Revolution.  That is not, as previously
thought, the overthrow of one faction by another but
describes those occasions when the minister reverses his
position while claiming consistency of stance.

            That is called Turning Round and Steering a Steady
Course and appears on Page 1 of the Spin Doctor's
Manual.

            The pièce-de-résistance of the rotating phrase, however,
came when my own step-daughter told me of an
aggravated duet (or should that be roundelay?)  between
herself and her habitual sparring partner.  After an epic
exchange of personal pirouettes she delivered the knockout
punch with the following:

            I told her to her face, [an aberrant piece of straight-talking,
this] Don't you turn round to me and tell me I
turned round and accused you of being two-faced.  Thus
creating, in the true sense of the term, a circular argument.
Dizzying stuff, eh?

         
         
            The Intrusive s




            The letter s sometimes appears at the end of a word
to which it does not properly belong.  Examples are a little
ways, anyways , and somewheres .  This usage is commonly
heard in the United States, chiefly from country folk, or
folks.  The earliest use I have found is dated 20 April 1806,
when William Clark, in the Lewis and Clark Journal,
wrote, a long ways off.  Today in newspapers, and especially
in advertising, one often reads (and hears) a savings
of and, increasingly, Daylight Savings Time .

            Sometimes it appears that one s is suggested by another.
Thus we hear for heaven's sakes , and for goodness' sakes .
Harold Ross, the founder and editor of The New Yorker ,
was a stickler for details of grammar, punctuation, and
usage.  But he is quoted as saying, For God's sakes.

            The intrusive s frequently makes its way into place
names.  The road on which I live, properly Lyons Plain
Road , is often called Lyons Plains Road.  A nearby town
is commonly called Greens Farms; it is my guess that Mr.
Green had only one farm.  For some years I spent the
winters in a house in England called Gun Green Farm .
Something like one in twenty letters from the USA were
addressed to Gun Green Farms.  An example I particularly
like is Smiths College .

            The addition of an s to a place name seems to be
largely an American habit.  But the British have also played
their part.  In England, rather more than in the United
States, one finds an s tacked on to the French names Marseille
and Lyon.  Marsales is in fact the commonly heard
pronunciation.  Even the good edition of the Encyclopaedia
Britannica (1911) gives the entry LYONS (Fr. Lyon ) and uses
Lyons throughout the text except when giving a name, such
as the Paris-Lyon main line .  The heading MARSEILLES is given
with no reference to the spelling Marseille , except when
reproducing similar names or as a place of publication.

            
               The Times Atlas of the World (1967) does better; in
the gazetteer it gives Lyons, France, see Lyon, and
Marseilles, see Marseille.  In the map of France it gives
the proper spelling, with the English in parentheses below.
In a full-page article in The New York Times , August 26,
1990, What's doing in Lyons, Steven Greenhouse uses
Lyons and Lyons's throughout, though using Lyon in a
name, such as Bistrot de Lyon .  At one point he writes,
Lyons, which the French spell Lyon.

            Newspaper accounts of sporting events commonly
refer to the finals.  There are, of course, quarter-finals and
semi-finals, but only one final.  Let me report that more
than once last week, I was wished a Happy New Year's ,
though I am sure that my friends were wishing me to be
happy for more than one day.

            Recently I read Treason in the Blood , a book about
the Philbys, father and son, Houghton Mifflin, 1994, by
Anthony Cave Brown.  The subject greatly interested me;
but my faith in the author was shaken on the very first
page, by his misquotation from Blake, And did those feet
in ancient times ... I was less surprised by an advertisement
of an outfit that offered visiting Americans summer
courses at Cambridge and Oxford, misquoting Matthew
Arnold, Oxford ... whispering from her towers the last
enchantments of the Middle Ages.  This horror, ruining
Arnold's lovely rhythm, actually appears in that otherwise
admirable book, the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations .

            Finally, I hope I may be forgiven, as a Cambridge man,
for citing my favorite example, a book called Manuscript
and Proof , published in 1937 by Oxford University Press.
My copy, carefully preserved, has the jacket, twice proclaiming
the title as Manuscript and Proofs .
         
         
            The Game of the Name




            Being born of parents from the East Midlands and
spending the early years of my life there, having a name
like John Thorpe never really gave me any problems.
The countryside of Lincolnshire and Leicestershire
abounds with village names that end with thorpe and,
apart from being called Thorpy by my school pals, the
name never caused any difficulty.  That was before I
started travelling.  It was then that I found out just how
tough it is for most nationalities to get their tongues
round the dreaded th.  Even when I started working in
London I had to accept a fair number of Mista Forps
in the course of an average day.

            It is not surprising that my first exposure to non-Brits
was in France, where I soon reconciled myself to
a Gallic attack on my personal hygiene when they
insisted on addressing me as Miss Your Soap, subtly
intoned, I always thought, with an interrogatory inflexion.
Later, on many visits to Germany, I reluctantly submitted
to the title of Hair Torpor, an uncanny
prediction of what was to befall my then luxuriant
growth.  Italians mostly managed with a cheerful Seen
Your Top, which surprised me because I was taller
than most of those I had to deal with.  My Russian contact
used to call me simply Zorrp, which I found
pretty much to the point, and a Hungarian colleague
settled for Trope.  Only in Switzerland did I find
someone who truly tried to get it right, but the effort
involved putting his tongue out at me and concluded
with an overly explosive final consonant; but he got all
the bits in there.

            My travels in Asia demonstrate a much more sensible
approach by the wily natives, and in India, China, and
Japan most of my contacts have, without invitation, settled
for the easy to deal with Mister John.

            Strange to say, it is in the US that one of the really
weird aural hiccups occurs.  It usually happens in restaurants
or hotels or any of the other places where professional
name takers are found.  The conversation usually
goes something like this:


Good morning, sir.  Could I have your name please?

Yes, I'm John Thorpe.

OK, Mr. Philips, I've put your name on the list.

No, no.  My name is Thorpe, not Philips, John
Thorpe.

Oh! Sari! Yewer Jarn Thorwup.  Gee, I'm sari.

            

            Now that conversation may sound unbelievable, but in the
US I have been renamed Philips dozens of times, on the
West coast, particularly.  So often, in fact, that I have been
forced to assume the new identity of the more acceptable
Jarn Thorwup when dealing with any of the name takers
so deeply entrenched in the American way of doing
things.  How can they hear it that way?  It is not as though
Thorpe is that unusual a name in the States: after all, one
of the great athletes of all time was Jim Thorpe, and they
even named a town after him.  To be honest though, I think
I would rather be a Zorrp than a Philips.
         
         
            F U Cn Rd Ths ...




            What is the ruling logic behind abbreviations?  Of
course, they should be shorter than what they stand for,
or why use them?  But they should also be quickly decodable
for the original words, and that is not always the
case.  For example, does ct. mean count or court?  It can
mean either.  Or take the state in which I live, Mississippi:
should that be abbreviated MS , or is that for Missouri?
Or if Missouri is MO, what is Montana, and if Montana
is MN (try again), what is Minnesota?  A few bouts of this
will make your head spin.

            And then, some abbreviations have unsuspected
depths, or at least possibilities I had never entertained.  I
have a friend named Mary who stands words on their
heads.  She is bright, articulate, and ten years old.  Why
are some streets called Beloved?  She asked me the other
day.

            What do you mean?  I asked--my usual response
to one of Mary's queries.

            Right there, she said, pointing to the lettering on
a map that read Grand Blvd .

            Mary, that's Boulevard , not Beloved , I objected,
but feebly.  Mary's readings are often more interesting
than the conventional interpretation.

            She turned her serious gray-eyed gaze full on me.
How can you tell?

            Context, I replied with all the adult stiffness I could
muster, and that seemed to convince her.  But since then,
she has me wondering.  Why do so many roads end in
Saint --Elm St., Main St.?  What about the Bulldog in the
Manger (Bldg. Mgr. in rear) I see listed in apartment
blocks?  How does a woman fit in an envelope (Ms.
enclosed)?

            From there, it is a short route to Phony Doctors
(Ph.D.s) and municipal twerps (Now entering Monroe
Twp.).  But maybe I had better stop here before I lose
all central ( ctrl .).
         
         
            
               ANTIPODEAN ENGLISH
            
         
         
            The ABC of Broadcasting Australian




            Australia's national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting
Corporation [ABC], has had advice on its use of English
for more than half a century.  The advising body, the
Standing Committee on Spoken English [SCOSE], has in
recent years been made up of four categories of member:
broadcasters [practitioners]; bureaucrats [facilitators];
academics [linguistic experts]; and representatives of the
wider community.  The committee is generally held in
high regard but ran aground when four out of five of the
outside members resigned earlier this year.

            Their action raises two questions.  The first is a general
one: what sort of standardisation or regulation does
a community expect or tolerate in the language its broadcasters
use?  The second is more local and specific to the
set of circumstances pertaining in the ABC: why does a committee
which has had a useful and influential life for more
than fifty years suddenly reach a crisis point at which a
significant proportion of its members are prepared to
gamble on an incoming General Manager's reassessment
of its role and put at risk its very existence?

            To take the general question first, let us begin with
a little history.  SCOSE began its life in 1943 as the Pronunciation
Advisory Committee.  It was concerned with
the maintenance of standard English pronunciations as
those then believed to be most suitable for broadcasting.
Standard English meant the King's English, and in this
outpost of Empire, announcers (though unseen) wore
dinner suits to read the news and abided by the rulings
of the English phonetician Daniel Jones, whose tremendously
influential English Pronouncing Dictionary was
first published in 1917.  Enter a young Australian phonetician,
Alex Mitchell, later to become the founding
Vice-Chancellor of Macquarie University, and in that
capacity to appoint Arthur Delbridge, later to become
Chief Editor of the Macquarie Dictionary , as Macquarie's
first Professor of English and Linguistics.  In 1952, on the
recommendation of an internal committee set up to consider
the desirability of the ABC's making some departure
from BBC practice, the Standing Committee on Pronunciation
was established to (and the wording is historic)
advise the Corporation on the most acceptable
pronunciation of those words for which [the] current Australian
pronunciation differs from the pronunciation
recorded by Daniel Jones.  The committee was named the
Standing Committee on Spoken English in 1954, Mitchell
and Delbridge being successive chairmen of SCOSE during
its formative years.

            Over the years this committee has vigilantly assessed
its utility, several times reviewing its aims and procedures
(in 1971, 1983, 1987, and 1989).  Its revised terms of reference
are: to advise the Corporation on its use of Spoken
English in broadcasting, with special reference to
pronunciation, grammatical usage, and style; and to prepare
for publication, in electronic or print form, such specialised
guides to the use of English, or other languages
as necessary.  Its primary goal has been the provision of
expert advice to broadcasters--on the pronunciation of
names, place names, foreign words, words from specialist
vocabularies as various as music and sport, the Church
and medicine, etc.  Daily lists of words that are likely to
give a broadcaster the conniptions are constantly being
added to a huge database which is electronically available
to all broadcasters.

            Nor has the committee shirked the responsibility
thrust on it by the public or avoided public controversy.
It has taken on (over the pronunciation of kilometre) Australia's
most loquacious Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam,
and fearlessly determined an Australian pronunciation
of words as divers as Jervis Bay, Chernobyl, and Quixote.
It has developed and sustained a public role for itself, as
its numerous correspondents will testify.  It has watched
over and, in a very low-key way, guided the development
of a recognisable and accepted Australian standard.  It has
not been without influence on the ABC's commercial rivals.
It seems reasonable to assume that it is valued by the
community.

            Where a committee can lose its way, no matter how
intrinsically valuable its deliberations, is in its communication
with its users (or should-be users).  One problem
is the receptivity of a new generation of broadcaster that
thinks SCOSE ivory-towerish and its recommendations
arcane and irrelevant in a world where information matters
more than its expression.  A second has been the maintenance
of a communicating mechanism within the
Organisation, which has been dependent on support from
within the ABC's management structure.  In its heyday
SCOSE was chaired by one of the academic members,
which gave it a certain impartiality and independent force,
and the circulation of its findings was the responsibility
of a senior ABC officer and a trained secretary-cum-research
assistant who was the servant of the committee and who
reported to that officer.  Most recently it has been chaired
by a senior officer, alternately the Head of Radio (who
has rarely been able to attend meetings), and the Head
of TV (who attended one meeting out of eleven).  Both
professed their whole-hearted support for SCOSE (as did
the then General Manager, who attended one Christmas
party), but neither has been able to deliver.  This has left
the research assistant on her own, and SCOSE effectively
if unintentionally emasculated.  But perhaps the revolution
is over and the new generation is in the right.
         
         
            
WORD PROCESSORS - TEMPORARY - several positions open
proficiency with at least 1 language necessary.  Call The Agentry.
[Classified ad in the (Springfield, Massachusetts) Union-News ,
.  Submitted by anon.]
         
         
            
HOLYOKE - An ordinance that will help the city recoup
thousands of dollars in fines from abandoned car owners has
won the support of the police chief.  [From a story by Martin
J. Laue in the (Springfield, Massachusetts) Union-News , .  Submitted by anon.]
         
         

            Many thanks for the very kind gift of the number
of VERBATIM containing the long and very amusing article
on my grandfather, Professor Walter W. Skeat [The
(invariably) Right Reverence Walter W. Skeat, XVIII,
1,16].  From what I was told many years ago, he was constantly
deluged with letters from complete strangers
demanding to be told the etymology of various words,
and I am not at all surprised that he should have shown
irritation with those who had not even taken the elementary
steps of consulting either his own dictionary or
the N.E.D .  These, however, were the easy ones and could
be answered very briefly.  When asked for the derivation
of a word of which the etymology had not been worked
out, he adopted a rationing system: he did the best he
could with the resources available in his study in the space
of half an hour.  The result was then communicated to
his correspondent, whose letter would then be dropped
into the wastepaper basket!

            This was necessary because otherwise his work would
have brought to a standstill.

            Of course personal acquaintances were not treated
in such a cavalier fashion, and he must have accumulated
an enormous correspondence, virtually none of which has
survived, except for his letters from Sir James Murray, who
with great presence of mind, on hearing of my grandfather's
death, recovered the letters which he had sent him.
Both sides of this lifetime correspondence are now in the
possession of his granddaughter, Miss K. M. E. Murray,
who has made arrangements in her will to bequeath them
to the Bodleian.

            Apart from these, all his vast correspondence seems
to have been destroyed, apart from a few stray items
which have descended to me.  I say destroyed because I
recall having been told many years ago that after his death
his two sons (my father and my uncle) spent weeks tearing
up old letters.





         
         


            Robert Adams writes [XXII,2] of the much-celebrated
Stoat as if Heironymous were still anonymous.  I am astonished
that Adams has been unaware of Stoat's new career.
Mr. Stoat has been profiled several times in Tqydrtk
Magazine , among other places.  In those articles, he spoke
of his frustration with words inevitably creating meaning
in the minds of literate readers and his search for an audience
neither literate nor readers.  Possibly Cardiff has been
spared MTV, but we haven't.  The idea that words strung
together will inevitably make some sort of sense and conjure
connections in a reader's mind has been vanquished
by MTV.  Stoat's insight was to mate words without apparent
meaning to video images that move so rapidly and have
so little intrinsic activity (as opposed to action, of which there
is plenty) that no one can imagine what they're about.
There is no time for reflection and savoring, no desire to
be bombarded again.  Nouns are often paired, but in ways
that guarantee incomprehension.  For instance, in one of
his famous videos, a haddock (or some other large fish) was
on the screen for a moment while a vocalist [ sic ] sang about
a light bulb.  Now, of course, we have been given the key
to this complicated metaphor.  Thanks for enlightening us.

            I hope Mr. Adams will explore this oeuvre and see
how people can take random words sung to apparently random
music and accompany them by random images.  Mr.
Stoat has successfully broached the barricades of words.





         
         

            Mr. Champlin [On Good Terms, XXII, 1, 11] might
be interested to know that in this part of the world, South
of Manchester, in the market town of Altrincham, a custom
called Beating the Bounds takes place every year.
Boundary stones have taken the place of merestones .  They
may be set in a wall or be part of a bridge or some such
construction.  I have attended the ceremony, which takes
about two hours and involves crossing the local canal by
boat since that is where the boundary crosses.

            I have a letter from the Steward and Notary to the
Barony of Dunham Massey (constituted by the Baron
Hamon de Massey after the Norman Conquest), giving
me the script which is read at the start of the Beating the
Bounds.  Once young boys had their heads bumped on the
merestones to make them remember exactly where the
boundaries of their parish lay!  Now one of the members
of the Altrincham Court Leet takes a branch of willow and
swishes it against the stones occurring along the route.

            Beating the Bounds was intended to establish boundaries
at a time when accurate maps were not available.
The bumping of boys' heads had to be suffered even when
the merestones were thrown into dividing streams or
ponds.

            There is a great deal of history attached to this practice.
I took some photos at various stages along the route
when I walked with the Court Leet of about half a dozen
gentlemen dressed in mediaeval robes.





         
         

            I enjoyed Alan Major's A Catalogue of Cats [XXII,2]
very much.  In it he refers to the 1785 edition of Captain
Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue .  I wonder
if Mr Major is aware of the 1811 dictionary,  A Dictionary
of Buckish Slang, University Wit, and Pickpocket
Eloquence , which appeared twenty years after Grose's
death and which is presumably an expansion of the original
work.  It was reprinted in 1984 by Bibliophile Books,
33 Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London WC2E 7JS.  It's
a great read and has the following cat-derived words and
definitions:


cat a common prostitute.

old cat: a cross old woman.

cat-heads Sailor's slang, a woman's breasts.,

to cat or shoot the cat to vomit from drunkenness.

cat and bagpipean society a society which met
at their office in the Great Western Road: in their
summons, published in the daily papers, it was
added that the kittens might come with the old cats
without being scratched.

cat call a kind of whistle, chiefly used at theatres, to
interrupt the actors and damn a new piece.  It
derives its name from one of its sounds, which
greatly resembles the modulation of an intriguing
boar cat.

cat harping fashion Sailor's slang, drinking
crossways and not, as usual, over the left thumb.

cat in pan from turn cat in pan change sides or
parties; supposed originally to have been turn cate
or cake in pan.

cat's foot Also, live under the cat's foot be under
the dominion of a wife; be hen-pecked.  to live like
cat and dog, said of married persons who live
unhappily together.

as many lives as a cat Cats, according to vulgar
naturalists, have nine lives--that is, one less than
a woman.

no more chance than a cat in hell without claws
said of one who enters into a dispute or quarrel with
one greatly above his match.

cat lap tea.  Also called scandal broth.

cat match when a rook or cully is engaged amongst
bad bowlers.  (Elsewhere rook is defined as a cheat
and cully as a fop or fool.)

cat of nine tails a scourge composed of nine strings
of whipcord, each having nine knots.

cat's paw to be made a tool or instrument to
accomplish the purpose of another: an allusion to
the story of a monkey that made use of a cat's paw
to scratch a roasted chestnut out of the fire.

cat's sleep counterfeit sleep.  Cats often pretend to
sleep to decoy their prey, then suddenly spring on it.

cat sticks thin legs.  The allusion is to the sticks with
which boys played at cat.

cat whipping or whipping the cat a trick often
practised on ignorant country fellows, vain of their
strength: a wager is laid with them that they may be
pulled through a pond by a cat.  The bet being made,
a rope is fixed round the waist of the party to be
catted and the end thrown across the pond, to which
the cat is fastened by a packthread.  Three or four
sturdy fellows are appointed to lead and whip the
cat: these, on a signal given, seize the nd of the
cord, and, pretending to whip the cat, haul the
astonished booby through the water.

whip the cat Tailoring, to work at private houses, as
practised in the country.

            

            In his final paragraph, Mr Major says that cat's hair
down on the face of youths before the beard grows is a
term that all male readers will be familiar with.  I never
encountered that: we used to refer to it as bum fluff !

            Incidentally, the Thai name for cat is meow .





         
         


            In XXII, 2 you printed a letter from me regarding
Charles Stough's article, Insulting Nicknames Give Journalists
Something to Be Proud of [XXI,4].  In that letter
I gave my own recollection of a popular satirical summary
of the nicknames of England's newspapers and asked if
other readers might be able to come up with more complete
and accurate versions.  Two readers have, in fact,
responded, Ms. Diana May (Ickenhan, Middlesex) and Dr.
John Kahn (Eton College).  I think that other readers
might be interested in a new and improved list.  This list
is an amalgamation of Ms. May's and Dr. Kahn's, which
vary in some details but agree on the most important
points:


The Times         Read by the people who run the
                               country.
Daily Mail        Read by the wives of the people who
                               run the country.
Daily Mirror      Read by the people who think they
                               run the country.
Guardian          Read by the people who think they
                               ought to run the country.
Independent       Read by the people who think the
                               people running the country are
                               wrong.
Financial Times   Read by the people who own the
                               country.
Today             Read by the people who think they
                               own the country--and want to sell it.
Morning Star      Read by the people who think the
                               country should be run by another
                               country.
Daily Express     Read by the people who think the
                               country ought to be run the way it
                               used to be run.
Daily Telegraph   Read by the people who think it
                               still is.
Sun               Read by the people who don't care
                               who runs the bloody country
                               providing she's got bit tits.

            





         
         


            I read Mary Douglas Dirks's review of Professor
Spevack's Shakespeare Thesaurus [XXII, 1], in the comfort
of the little village pub at Stalham Green here in
Norfolk.  (If the camera had worked properly, you would
be able to recognise VERBATIM on the table beside my pint.)
The pub is named after a bird common in the Broads, the
grey heron Ardea cinerea , known locally as the harnser .
We do not mistake it for a hawk, a plasterer's board with
a handle underneath (called, interestingly enough, oiseau
in French).  On the other hand, we do not use it to cut
wood.  Our forebears used to hunt it with hawks, and they
could easily distinguish hunter from quarry.

            I was taught at school that Hamlet was referring to
falconry when he explained to Horatio that he was but
mad north-northwest.  This seems more likely than a punning
comparison of tools which His Royal Highness is
unlikely to have used.  Besides, what other kind of saw
would he (or Shakespeare) have known, power tools then
being in their infancy?  Could the foot-lathe have been
adapted as a footsaw?

            H. Kirke Swann, in his Dictionary of English and Folk-Names
of British Birds (Witherby and Co., 1913, republished
by Gale Research Company, Detroit, 1968), gives
Hern, Hernshaw, Hernseugh, Hernsew, Harn, Harnser , and
Harnsey as names for the Common (Grey) Heron.  The
last three are East Anglian.  All are derived from the
French heronceaux young heron, which itself descends
from heroncel , an Old French diminutive.

            There are a number of French words in common use
here in the Far East (of England).  The cloth with which
mine host Wally mops the bar as we discuss that American
mag of yours is called a dwile , from toile .  We use towels
in the course of our toilet (and in the toilet, too), but
dwiles are found in bars and kitchens all over Norfolk.

            Goo ye well together, as Wally says to the company
at closing time.





         
         


            Rosemary Bowmer [XXII, 2, 9] says that a rod was
four and a half yards when she started school.  I was taught
that five and a half yards made up one rod, pole, or perch;
thus, four rods equalled twenty-two yards, the length of
a cricket pitch, ten times that made a furlong, and there
were eight furlongs to a mile.  Of course, these measurements
were used by unlettered and ignorant peasants,
who had no schooling; nowadays, when education continues
till well into adult life, even to pensionable age, counting
is done, as it were, on the fingers--metric, I believe, that
it is called.

            R. Millar [ibid., 22] says there cannot have been so
many smiths in olden times.  Smith does not necessarily
refer to a blacksmith but to a worker, possibly in metal
( smite , as in beating with a hammer or such?).  Gold,
White, Silver, Copper, and., as in the case of my grandfather,
Tyresmith, by trade, not by name.





         
         
            [Undoubtedly changes in the values of measurements can
be attributed to inflation.]
         
         


            Donald Macintosh's anecdote about the Scottish
workman whose conversation baffles the visiting Frenchwoman
[XXII,2] makes the unwarranted assumption that
the common speech of the people of the Scottish Lowlands
is an English dialect.  The subject has been debated
for at least four centuries but, as the editors of VERBATIM
must be aware, a body of evidence suggests that the
Scots tongue has many of the characteristics of a distinct
language.

            As Mairie Robinson, editor-in-chief of The Concise
Scots Dictionary (Aberdeen University Press, 1985), points
out in her Introduction, Scots is more strongly differentiated
from Standard English than any of the English
regional dialects in the number of words, meanings of
words and expressions not current in Standard English,
in its strikingly different pronunciation, and in the loyal
affection with which the Scottish people continue to
embrace it.  Scots is not a corruption of modern English;
Scots and modern English evolved in parallel from Old
English, with importations from many other languages.

            The Scot in Mr. MacIntosh's story is looking for his
gaffer, a word used throughout the British Isles--not
just in Scotland--to mean a boss.  All the other words
nyatter, nyaff, skelly, cack e'e, manky, broony , and gansey --
are uniquely Scots and are listed and defined in Ms.
Robinson's dictionary.

            To call the Scots tongue Doric (meaning broad or
rustic) is to perpetuate the notion that it is the speech
of uneducated country folk, an idea still endorsed by snobbish
anglophiles in Scotland.  Lallans, of course means
lowlands in Scots and has been used in recent years to
designate a variety of literary Scots used by writers of the
Scottish Renaissance movement, which is determined to
preserve the ancient language as an artistic medium.

            Mr. MacIntosh has lived too long among the
Sassenachs.





         
         


            I cannot resist the temptation to add two fine examples
of names matching professions after reading Jerome
Betts's article All in the Family [XXII,1].  First there is
of course the conductor Simon Rattle and perhaps less well
known is the old established firm of Cape Town undertakers
by the name of Human & Pitt Ltd.  By the way, is
Mr. Betts perhaps a bookmaker?





         
         


            In EPISTOLAE [XXII, 2] Mr. Bernard Adelman writes,
Bill Bryce, I have read... I have a hunch that he means
Bill Bryson, and the reference is probably to his book,
The Mother Tongue .  A niggling point, but other readers
may have been momentarily confused, as I was.  How
Bryson may feel about being conflated with Lord Bryce
is anybody's guess.





         
         


            I shouldn't wonder that British telly interviewers
were intrigued and probably a tad confused, too, for
Ms. Hilary Howard got her reds mixed in No Boys Named
Sue, But...: Carmine Cavallero was a nimble-fingered
pop-Latin pianist who performed often on television.
Carmen Dragon is the conductor.  He made several albums
with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra in the late '50's and
early '60's and is the father of Daryl Dragon of The Captain
and Tennille fame.

            I enjoy VERBATIM so much and thank you; but I really
miss the Paring Pairs game.  Please consider reinstating
it... at least now and then.





         
         
            [It is not simply a matter of reinstating Paring
Pairs --I have to make them up, and after several years
of doing so, my mind ran dry.  Several readers offered
contributions, but I felt that they were a bit off the mark.
If I am again touched by the muse, Paring Pairs may
appear again.  --Editor.]
         
         


            Several items from XXII, 2:

            1.  Anent the impact of Scottish dialects on the French;
the reverse can occur.  A World War I Punch cartoon showed
a Scottish soldier outside a cafe in France explaining to a
new arrival: Och, mon, it's an easy language.  For example,
if ye want twa eggs, ye ask for twa oofs, they bring
ye three, and ye gie one back.  It's an easy language.

            2.  To add to Insulting Nicknames, staffers at the late
Houston Post referred to The Houston Chronicle as Brand
X.

            3.  Also from the late Houston Post , as a practical guide to
usage in stories: An African-American is any black with
a college degree who isn't in jail or under indictment.
Cynical?  Racist?  Nevertheless, an almost infallible guide
to current media usage.

            4.  [EPISTOLA from Bernard Witlieb] The man's man was
Shirley Povich, not Povish.

            5.  Add to A Catalogue of Cats cat-hairpins --much
favored by Captain Jack Aubrey in the Patrick O'Brian novels.
These are lashings to cinch the shrouds in closer to
the mast, to allow the yards a few extra degrees of swing.





         
         


            My reference is to All in the Family. by Jerome
Betts [XXII, 1].  The most aptly named individual I have
ever encountered was a dentist who, early in this century,
had his office in Netwark, New Jersey.  His name was
Robert Treat Paine.  In the same city, during the same
period, there was a dining establishment called The
Celibate Restaurant.  The management were not at all
interested in the sexual practices of their clients and,
indeed, hoped only to cater to the many yet single people
of the city.





         
         
            A Sea of Words
            This dictionary was published too late for me.  I
became a Patrick O'Brian fan about 20 years and fifteen
(of seventeen) volumes ago.  O'Brian's is a roman fleuve
recounting the 1790-1815 continuing adventures of his
ship captain hero, Jack Aubrey, Royal Navy, and of Aubrey's
best friend, Dr. Stephen Maturin, ship's surgeon, a naturalist
and spy for the British.  The enthusiasm of the public
for these volumes has increased exponentially with
encomiums like, The best sea stories, and then, The
best historical novels ever written.  There are fan clubs
now all over the world for these enthusiasts.  (Charlton Heston
is head of the Southern California chapter.)  For non-epopts:
reading these is like reading Jane Austen--with
every so often a hellish sea battle or shipwreck.

            In order to enjoy O'Brian's novels, I have read them
with a Hammond Atlas at one side and the Oxford English
Dictionary at the other.  That is tedious.  Had a Sea of
Words been published years ago, I would have been most
grateful.  Anyone would have needed lexicographic succor.
Such words as limicole, catharping, xebec, siriasis --
as well as boxing the compass, the sails of a full rigged
ship, chains, deadeyes, shrouds, halyards, and stays, are
all well explained in this book, including pictures of how
a square--rigged warship had its sails raised, lowered, and
tacked, an incredibly complicated and difficult procedure.
Maps and diagrams of engagements are included.
At the back is a bibliography of dozens of other Napoleonic
era sea stories by other authors.

            As a physician, I can usually find errors in a lay
author's medical orientation, but not with O'Brian!  The
only thing that I have not been able to find in medical
dictionaries, the OED , or even in A Sea of Words , is his
use of the word marthambles , which remains unknown to
me.

            If every enthusiastic reader of Patrick O'Brian buys
a copy of this book, it will be a best-seller.  As one enthusiast,
I would recommend the purchase.

            Murray C. Zimmerman

            
               Whittier, California
            
         
         
            Feminist Stylistics
            Three decades after the reawakening of feminism, no
field of scholarship remains unexamined by feminist analysis,
a process rhetorician Gay D. Claiborne has defined
as an effort to deconstruct the patterns of thinking that
lead to a world-view of reality as consisting of oppositional,
hierarchically-ordered pairs of things.  As they
seek to undo the masculine/feminine, self/other, writer/
reader splits, according to Claiborne, feminist scholars...
work at an elevated political level of grave potential
outcomes, for feminist involvement focuses on the
foundation of cultural paradigms constructed by socially
sanctioned ways of thinking.  (Gay D. Claiborne, pp.
143--44, Japanese and American Rhetoric: A Contrastive
Study , International Scholars Publications, 1993.)

            In Feminist Stylistics , Sara Mills challenges socially
sanctioned ways of thinking as she confronts the politics
of language-use head on.  Noting that language is not simply
a vehicle for ideas, but rather a material entity which
may in fact shape those ideas, Mills states that a further
aim of feminist analysis is to draw attention to and change
the way that gender is represented, since it is clear that
a great many of these representational practices are not
in the interests of either women or men.  Her book establishes
a framework for such analysis designed both to
describe sexism in a text and, through a process she names
feminist stylistics, to deconstruct the way in which point
of view, agency, metaphor, and other features of the text
are unexpectedly closely related to matters of gender.

            For lay readers and students who are not familiar with
the prevailing concepts of mainstream linguistics, stylistics,
and literary analysis, Mills's Introduction provides a
helpful explication of current theories and positions in these
disciplines.

            The opening chapters address such questions as
whether meaning can exist in a text itself or is more the
result of a negotiation between reader and text; whether
male writing can be distinguished from female writing in
terms of formal linguistic constituents; and how gender
interacts with reader positioning, that is, the ways a text
addresses and identifies its reader.

            Mills, a research professor in English at Sheffield
Hallam University, looks at these issues in relation to conventional
models of text in which a piece of written material
is treated as if it existed in its own right with little
reference to factors or constraints outside it--the socioeconomic
factors of gender and race, for example.  She then
develops a feminist model which extends the parameters
of a text into its surrounding context.  This model, she
asserts, makes space for the possibility, and in fact the
necessity, of integrating notions of gender, race and class,
and also sociohistorical and economic factors, into the
analysis, and indeed into the definition of the text itself.

            In the second half of the book, Mills employs the
strategies of feminist stylistics to expose the workings of
gender at three levels of language--the word, the phrase
or sentence, and larger-scale discourse.  Her examples
throughout are taken from widely diverse written materials,
both canonical and nonliterary, including novels,
newspaper articles, advertisements, and popular songs.

            Although the book is described lightly as a tool-kit--
and indeed Mills's Summary lists questions through which
a text can be analyzed for its representations of gender--
Feminist Stylistics is a complex, many-layered approach
to reading that enables a reader to look beneath overt content
in order to see hidden messages which, while often
unrecognized by both writer and reader, nevertheless reinforce
and help to legitimatize stereotypical notions about
gender differences embedded in our culture.

            Examining ready-made phrases referring to women,
or in some cases men, Mills cites, for example, some
familiar proverbs.  A woman's work is never done seems
to describe a natural state of affairs.  The message is hard
to counter because the speaker/writer using it does not
take responsibility for inventing it but merely calls on preexisting
commonsense knowledge.  Thus, if a specific
woman complains of having too much work to do, Mills
writes, this phrase can be used to suggest that the...
difficulty of the conditions of her [specific] working life
is not as important as the general fact that women always
have too much work to do.  It might further suggest that
someone who has, at any given time, completed all the
tasks before her is not, by definition, a woman.

            Also examined are effects of the grammatical convention
in English that the masculine is the standard or
unmarked form, the feminine being deviant from the
norm.  One result is the use of generic words to refer to
males only, of which Mills gives ludicrous examples like
the headline on a news story about AIDS prevention among
the elite, TOP PEOPLE TOLD: TAKE A MISTRESS.

            For all its lively examples and provocative insights,
this is not a smooth text; it tends toward the prolix, partly
because of the author's determination to cover all bases.
By the same token it succeeds in floodlighting the protean
ways gender is characterized in texts.  In giving readers
the means to recognize--and, if they choose, to
resist--such characterizations, Feminist Stylistics is an
important, ground-breaking book.

            Casey Miller and Kate Swift

            
               East Haddam, Connecticut
            
         
         
            Spirit Pond Runestones, A Study in Linguistics
            The Spirit Pond Runestones were discovered in 1972
by Walter Elliott, a carpenter beachcombing on the banks
of the Spirit Pond near Popham Beach in coastal Maine.
These are four small stones, ranging in size from that of
an egg, to the largest, the size of two fists.  One stone
has a map inscribed on one side and is now referred to
as the Mapstone.  Another is an amulet.  A third, the Christian
Marker, has two words plus a K-rune, taken to mean
Christian ( Kristinn ).  The largest one is called in this
book the Memorial Stone.

            Most of the discussion in the book is based on this
Memorial Stone, which measures 7½” × 11” and is inscribed
on two flat surfaces.  Author Chapman provides a transcription
and his translation.  The Maine State Museum
acquired three (which three?) of the stones from the
finder.  Archaeologist Bruce Bourque sought help from a
linguist to have them translated.  He retained Dr. Einar
Haugen, Professor of Linguistics and Scandanavian Languages
at Harvard, certainly a leading scholar in his fields.

            Dr. Haugen declared in an article, The Rune Stones
of Spirit Pond, Maine, in Man in the Northeast , No. 4,
1972, p. 77 that the stones were modern artifacts, which
Chapman ruefully glosses as fakes.  He seems to regard
Haugen's statement of their modern origin as based, in
part, on similarities to the Kensington Stone of Minnesota,
long considered as fraudulent, although not by everybody.
Robert A. Hall, Jr., had submitted an article to a learned
journal in 1950 supporting the authenticity of the Kensington
Stone.  We are told (p.2) that the article was neither
published nor returned.  Prof. Hall published it as a
book almost a third of a century later, The Kensington RuneStone
is Genuine , Hornbeam Press, Columbia, SC, 1982.

            Chapman, convinced by nautical and navigational
evidence that the Mapstone was genuine, felt that the
other runestones of the group must be authentic too.  He
managed to make an appointment with Professor Haugen,
who had called them modern.  Haugen invited
Chapman to visit him at his home, and in a lengthy meeting
they discussed Chapman's findings.  They agreed on
most matters regarding the runic characters and on many
features of language.  But if Chapman had hoped to convert
Einar Haugen to his own views of the authenticity of
the stones, he did not succeed, for the Professor never
deviated from his conviction that they were modern.  He
agreed, however, to keep in touch with Chapman and to
answer whatever questions he had.  Chapman states (p. ii)
that Haugen had a scholar's open mind (a characteristic
not ordinarily perceived by him in most scholars), and he
seemed grateful for Haugen's comments.  This lasted for a
number of years (until Haugen's death, in fact).  The professor
had not been willing to provide a complete translation, for
his time and energy were both consumed in a number of projects
and obligations.  Paul Chapman apparently had his own
views of how long it took to provide answers to runic questions
and seems to have, in some cases, expected replies by
return mail.

            He compared the text of the Memorial Stone with the
contents of two sagas (sometimes called Vinland Sagas).
James E. Knirk, head of the Runic Archive of the University
of Oslo, who read an early draft of one of Chapman's articles
(pp. 31-32), questioned the validity of using the evidence
of the sagas, which contain so much fictional and fantastic
material.  Chapman's defense of his procedure is that the two
sagas on which he based his conclusions were mostly factual
and dealt to a great extent with navigation, an area in which
he claims competence and practical experience.

            He seems not too much at home in matters of language.
His subtitle, A Study in Linguistics , bears this out.  He seems
relieved to be able to report that linguists had spent considerable
time in studying the runestones without significant
results or that they were quick to call something
fraudulent.

            The book is, despite these strictures, worth reading,
and judicious readers will probably separate the genuine
from the dubious.  The illustrations are pleasing and informative
and the runes are neatly transcribed.  The author
makes an interesting attempt to account for several features
of the runestones: the reason for their being left in Maine,
the presence of Danish and other words in the inscriptions,
the implications of runic inscriptions in which oghams occur
together with runes, etc.  One wonders whether Spirit Pond
has spectral or religious connotation.

            Robert A. Fowkes

            
               Bronxville, New York
            
         
         
            Making the Alphabet Dance
            In Language on vacation (1965), Dmitri Borgmann
redefined the obsolete term logology to mean `wordplay,'
and he also redefined the field itself.  Now another author
takes a revolutionary approach to wordplay in a handsomely
produced, brilliantly written book.  Ross Eckler's
Making the Alphabet Dance delves into the fertile substrata
of logology that he calls letterplay, which considers
words as collections of letters to be manipulated.  His
book shows the abundant possibilities in the field.

            Having edited Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational
Linguistics since 1970, Eckler knows letterplay better
than anyone else.  He has witnessed it evolve through
the work of many people, he has written many articles about
it himself, and now he has traced its development with
the precise logic of a chessmaster of language.  Although
letterplay can be confusing, Eckler deconfuses the forms
and demonstrates the relationships between them.  The
text flows easily from one topic to another, peppered with
examples both serious and humorous.  Forbidden Letters,
Obligatory Letters, the first chapter, presents several
take-offs on Mary Had a Little Lamb, including this sless
version:


Mary had a little lamb with fleece a pale white hue,

And everywhere that Mary went the lamb kept her in
view.

To academe he went with her (illegal and quite rare);

It made the children laugh and play to view a lamb in
there.

            

            In Chapter 2, Letter Patterns and Distributions,
Eckler notes that written wordplay may go back as far as
the origins of written language.  He discusses palindromes
and pangrams and many lesser-known forms based on
patterns.  For instance, word graphs represent words as
letters connected by lines.  This word graph links the letters
in the word before :


O - R
|   |
F _ E _ B

            

            Word Fragments, the chapter that follows, presents similar
ideas, but it involves parts of a word instead of the
whole.

            Central to Eckler's word view is Chapter Four,
Transforming One Word into Another.  As he sees it, all
of letterplay revolves around three simple operations by
which one word can be transformed into another--insertion,
deletion, and rearrangement of letters.  One type of
transformation, the word network, grew out of Lewis Carroll's
word ladders (originally called doublets).  In a word
ladder, two words are connected by changing one letter
at a time:


LESS
LOSS
LOSE
LOVE
MOVE
MORE

            

            In one type of word network, all words of the same length
would be connected at all possible places.

            The next chapter, Alphabetical Order and Scoring,
begins with a discussion of the last word in English and
examines forms that rely on positions of the letters in the
alphabet.  This paragraph by Allan Simmons is an alphabetic
pun:


Eh! Be seedy, ye effigy, at shy Jake.

A lemon, opaque.  You are a stew--

Feed a bull, you ex!  Why said?

            

            In Word Groups, the letterplay shifts to words that
look ordinary alone but become unusual in combination.
The chapter opens with word squares and variations, like
the compound word square invented by Hairy Partridge:


      toe   own   bib
ATE   At    To    bE
SET   So    wE    iT
MAY   Me    An    bY

            

            The chapter on Number Words explores the fascinating
things that happen when words and numbers
collide.  Many of the resulting forms are ideal for
computer letter-crunching.  Lee Sallows had to build
a special-purpose computer to write this self-enumerating
sentence:


This sentence contains three a's, three c's, two d's,
twenty-six e's, five f's, three g's. eight h's, thirteen i's,
two l's, sixteen n's, nine o's, six r's, twenty-seven s's,
twenty-two t's, two u's, five v's, eight w's, four x's,
five y's, and only one z.

            

            The Afterword concludes with a look at words as
single entities.  It is divided into two sections--geometric
views of words and a discussion of long words.

            
               Making the Alphabet Dance is the manifesto of a
man whose love for words goes far beyond twenty-six letters.
One of the most important wordplay books of the
20th century, it gives a name to letterplay and traces its
evolution.  Although the field is complex, both expert and
novice can make new discoveries.  And that, Eckler would
be the first to say, is exciting:


One of the great joys of recreational linguistics is the
chance to do original work, to discover new
techniques or better examples illustrating old ones.
Such contributions can even be made by the diligent
newcomer to the field; it is not always necessary to
serve a long apprenticeship mastering past results.

            

            As Lewis Carroll wrote, Won't you join the dance?

            Dave Morice

            
               Iowa City
            
         
         
            
               BREVITER ...
            
         
         
            The Coiners of Language
            A penetrating study of metaphor as illustrated chiefly
by André Gide's Counterfeiters .  No index.
         
         
            The Words We Use
            
               The Words We Use is a very readable book about
English words, though, from the notes at the ends of
chapters, one infers that it was intended as an informal
text.  The reader gets the impression, though the author,
educated at Oxford and London universities, was Professor
of Applied Linguistics at the University of Hong
Kong, that the book is either for beginning linguists or
for interested parties from other disciplines.  It suffers
from one severe, reprehensible shortcoming: it lacks an
index, something no book should be without.

            The book is short and simple, but not simplistic (a
word used by some these days to avoid over-simplified );
it is divided into fourteen brief chapters, the titles of
which will give a good indication of what they are about
(for a change).  Each chapter concludes with Notes and
Suggested Further Reading, and from the fairly sophisticated
materials listed, one is not deluded into thinking
that this is a lightweight work.  The chapters are headed:


What is a word?
The trouble with dictionaries
The use of words: what happens when we talk
How did words originate?
How do words change their meaning?
Word borrowing
How are new words created?
Words as structures
How do we learn to use words?
Choosing between words--words in context
On the tip of one's tongue
The written word
Words and the poet
Sticks and stones: words as reality

            

            There is an Afterword that is even friendlier than
the text.  Space does not permit a more thorough investigation
of the content, save to offer the advice that time
spent with this book will prove informative and rewarding.

            Laurence Urdang