(Dia)critic's Corner
A letter writer once accused The [Toronto] Globe and
Mail , Canada's newspaper of record, of setting a
new record for splitting an infinitive. A front-page article
ended in the phrase, Premier Peterson said that in order
to after which the notice SEE P. A16 was inserted, and
on page A16 the sentence was indeed completed as
promised: balance the budget, expectations would have
to be lowered. That is some split!
However, writing letters to editors to complain about
split infinitives is child's play for the truly obsessed. As a
self-confessed obsessive when it comes to newspapers'
errors, my own pet peeve—one which all the North American
news services and most of its major news magazines
seem to be guilty of—is leaving diacritical marks off foreign
words. To their credit, British news services (e.g., Reuters)
and publications like the Observer, Guardian , and
Economist , are usually quite careful to get it right. Sometimes
these omissions are genuinely trivial. Montreal is
quite acceptable; Montréal would be pretentious except
perhaps in Canada. But sometimes they are not trivial at
all, because a diacritical mark can change the pronunciation,
the spelling and therefore even the meaning of a word.
In general, diacritical marks are all those little jots
and tittles that appear over, under, and even through various
letters. We don't have many in English; the only common
one I can think of offhand is the diaeresis (as in the
two dots over naïve ). where it indicates that two vowels
side by side are not a diphthong but separate, distinct
vowels. Israël is an example which is not seen much any
more; Zaïre is seen occasionally; Haïti is common in
French, where it is pronounced as three syllables, but
the English standard seems to be Haiti (two syllables). The
New Yorker still insists on coöperate .
Related to diacritical marks are two constructs, the
ligature , which is a character resulting from tying together
two or more standard letters, and the digraph , which is
a special case of the ligature . The term ligature is usually
reserved for printer's conventions (that is, where combinations
like fi, ffi, fl , and ffl are linked together to form a
single character), whereas the digraph . while graphically
tying together two characters, actually represents two
diphthongs which were common in Latin: after the invention
of printing, the Latin/Romance ae became æ,
and oe became œ. These are almost never seen in the
US today, but they are still occasionally encountered in
British and other varieties of English influenced by British
practice, although it is usually the unligated form that
one encounters, not the digraphs.
The most common example used to be US encyclopedia
vs. traditional non-US encyclopaedia (encyclopædia ).
However, as even the British spell this word the US way
now, the best examples of current US/non-US dichotomies
in the use of the digraphs can be gleaned from the world
of medicine and science, as in gynœcology/gynecology,
hœmatology/hematology, œsophagus/esophagus, œstrogen/
estrogen, cœsium/cesium, œdema/edema, œstrus/estrus,
pœdiatrics/pediatrics . In Canada, one rarely encounters
in common usage the British spellings listed, but, while
they continue to be widely used by medical professionals,
even that practice has come under US influence.
Diacritical marks can be broken down into two types:
accents, which affect, roughly speaking, pronunciation
only; and umlauts, which affect spelling as well as pronunciation.
As already mentioned, English is relatively
sterile when it comes to diacritical marks; true gold can
best be struck in foreign fields, where the accent grave,
accent aigu , and the circonflexe . The two accents are used
in French to change the value of e , which is the most common
vowel in French (as in English) and which comes in
as many varieties as Campbell's soup—hence the need for
some kind of regulation by diacritical marks. The circonflexe ,
on the other hand, is really a sign of orthography ,
not pronunciation, being a reminder of a dropped s—it
is usually there for historical reasons but connoting a reason
which has long since ceased to make sense and which
modern French speakers have probably been blithely
unaware of. Thus the French île reminds us that the word
was once spelled isle , from Latin insula; the name of the
eight month, Août , reminds us that it came from the Latin
augustus; and être betrays its origins as Latin esse with
the same orthographical scar.
French, being a Latin-derived language, is also very
rich in digraphs, which are often still retained today in
France, but are dying out in Quebec: cœur and œuvre are
common examples.
German has no pure accents that I can think of (other
than the occasional diaeresis in foreign proper nouns,
such as Israël ), but it has one very common ligature and,
of course, the umlaut which is much like a digraph—in
fact, these characters are essential to proper spelling, and
it is for that reason that a dropped umlaut may be seen
as an offense. The common ligature in German orthography
is the esszet (β, β) and there are three vowels which
can take the umlaut (ä, ö, and ü ). The esszet (pronounced
ess-tset) was formed when mediæval (for US read
medieval) humanists got carried away and tried to force
German into the Græco-Latin mould of grammar and
spelling (a disease that spread to the British Isles, too).
In Greek, the sigma that is written in the middle of a word
(σ, called medial sigma) is different from the sigma at the
end of a word (ς, called final, or terminal sigma). In
mediæval Latin the two s's were also differentiated: ∫ was
the medial s, and s the terminal s. This convention persisted
until recently. In microfilms of the 1881 Canadian
census, I have come across names like Agne∫s, who was
sometimes noted as being a dre∫smaker. In German, this
double-s, ∫s, eventually evolved into β. The diphthongs
ae, oe, and ue appear so often in German that mediæval
scribes started writing the e above the first vowel, something
like this: \?\. As they were writing with flat-pointed
pens, which tended to emphasize the vertical strokes
(especially in Fraktur, the so-called gothie script of old
German) the little superior e came to be represented by
two short, vertical strokes, which then became two square
dots. Then, when Germany adopted Latin letters during
the pre-World War II era, they became two round dots.
I have always thought that the ü was a perky little character—draw
a circle around it and you get that ubiquitous
Californianism, \?\.
The convention in English is to transcribe the
umlaut—to restore, as it were, the lost e. Hence, the
Hanseatic port of Lübeck is properly Luebeck in English
Similarly, the esszet should be transcribed as ss, never
as B, which I see often.
The Scandinavian languages also have characters similar
to the German umlauts: besides the ä and ö (Swedish),
Norwegian and Danish have œ (a + e as in English),
Norwegian and Danish also have θ (o + e) and all three
use a (a + a). The rules for transcription are similar to
those for German words: Alborg=Aalborg; Kθbenhavn=
Koebenhavn (of course, in this case there's a perfectly
acceptable English equivalent, Copenhagen). As an interesting
aside, German alphabetizes words as if the umlauts
were transcribed (so Köln would come before Kohl, for
instance), but the Scandinavian languages treat their
umlauts as trans-z characters (so in Swedish phone books,
Ödlund would come after Zetterström).
News services that drop umlauts might deserve some
sympathy; given the isolation of North Americans, the
assumption is easily made here that the umlaut is an extraneous
character that can be dropped—as accents in French
often are when French words are transcribed into English—without
doing bodily harm to the word in question.
However, dropping umlauts is less forgivable than dropping
accents, because accents describe pronunciation,
and anyone who is familiar with the word will know how
it is supposed to be pronounced, regardless of the accent.
If you have heard the name of Canada's prime minister
(Jean Chrétien) pronounced correctly, or if you are sufficiently
acquainted with French to know this fairly common
name (which means Christian), you do not need to
know that an acute accent is usually put over an e to indicate
that it is a long e in an unstressed syllable. Hence,
its omission will probably not stop you from pronouncing
Chrétien correctly (that is, with the emphasis on the second
syllable).
Umlauts are not simply accents, however: they are
fundamental to the spelling of a word and should always
be transcribed as ae/oe/ue (or aa in the case of the Scandinavian
a) in character sets that do not provide umlauts.
In any case, many German and Scandinavian place names
have English equivalents: Munich for München,
Cologne for Köln, the aforementioned Copenhagen
for Kθbenhavn, Gothenburg for Göteborg, and so on.
However, I recently read an Associated Press account of
a neo-Nazi demonstration in a place called Nurnberg.
The problem here is that this is neither fish nor fowl. It
is not the correct English name for this city, which is
Nuremberg, and it is not the correct German name, which
is Nürnberg, or Nuernberg. One strongly suspects that
the writer simply did not know the English name for
Nürnberg. Yet more confirming evidence to the pessimists
amongst us who lament the deterioriation of standards
by the users and abusers of the Mother Tongue, especially
cis-Atlantic journalists.
If there are any questions, comments, that arise from any
edition of this newsletter, please feel free to contact me (Ron
Shaw) at—. I'm also open to suggestive topics for next trimester's
edition. [From a newsletter, Total Quality Management, published
by OAO Corporation, . Submitted by
.]
Galling Gallicisms of Quebec English
The Oxford Companion to the English Language
(OCEL ) is missing an s at the end of its title, for it
has headings for more than four hundred varieties of our
multivaried mother tongue—Australian English, Singapore
English, Indian English, Black Vernacular English, etc.
Some of the varieties are unfamiliar, like Babu English,
a mode of address and reference in several Indo-Aryan
languages, including Hindi, for officials working forrajahs,
landlords, etc.
My mother tongue is one of the mutants listed in
OCEL , and I am constantly being reminded of the peculiarities
of my usage. After giving an American telephone
receptionist my phone number, I added, My local is 222.
Your what? she retorted. I quickly corrected myself:
My extension is 222. I left a Newfoundland customer
perplexed when I told him that I would try to find an item
at one of our filials , instead of subsidiaries . I am guilty of
speaking Quebec English.
In Quebec, it is taken for granted that English affects
French. One hears expressions like le snack bar, chequer
(instead of verifier ), and un towing a tow truck. In the
business world one encounters a myriad of Anglicisms
like meeting, cash flow, down-size , and business itself.
The presence of these borrowings make some Quebecois
feel that their language is under threat. More and more,
however, the flow is not unidirectional: most English-speaking
monolingual Quebecer will use metro for subway,
dépanneur for convenience store , and caisse populaire
instead of cooperative bank . The following demonstrates
the French influence on Quebecois English:
The professor (teacher) at the polyvalent (high
school) believed that scholarity (education) was being
affected by students consecrating (devoting) more
time to manifestations (demonstrations) about the
dress code than to their notes (grades). During his
conferences (lectures), their inattention was hurting
their apprenticeship (learning of the subject matter).
He also felt he was getting collaboration (cooperation)
from his confreres, Anglophone (English speakers),
Francophone (French speakers), and Allophone
(speakers of neither English nor French) in better
serving the collectivity (community). He thus had
a rendezvous (meeting) with the Director-General
(principal), Monsieur Gendron, and stated that it
was a primordial (essential) consideration that some
teachers be let go before they reached permanence
(tenure) under the syndicate (union) agreement.
Monsieur Gendron wrote back saying that he had
requested a subvention (grant) in the annex (appendix)
to his planification (policy) budget to the confessional
(denominational) school board in order that formation
modalities (training methods) could be created to
make teachers more dynamic animators (group leaders).
Although terms like collaboration, rendezvous , and
annex might be used in non-Quebec English contexts,
they read like inappropriate choices from a synonym dictionary,
and cooperation, meeting , and appendix seem
more natural.
The trend towards the Gallicization of English in
Quebec coincides with the introduction of pro-French
legislation around twenty years ago, and the use of French
has gained in prestige as a result, making it more likely for
Gallic loanwords to appear in English. Anglophones are
speaking French to a greater extent at home and at work,
creating a situation in which the French term becomes more
familiar than the English. Thus, an Anglophone might use
the word demand when he means ask, reparations when
he means repairs, and remark when he means notice,
because he is constantly employing demander, réparations ,
and remarquer when speaking French.
These faux amis (false friends), as they are called,
are confused both by Anglophones speaking French and
Francophones speaking English. They are also among
many of the words likely to have their meanings changed
in Quebec English. For example, résumer does not mean
to resume but, as Americans know from their adoption
of résumé for curriculum vitae, to summarize; and decevoir
means to disappoint, not to deceive. Not many Anglophones
in Quebec today use resume and deceive in the
French sense, but over time I suspect that such usages
will increase.
It is often hard to know where English and French
begin and end. Franglais includes such classics as hot-dog
steamé all dressed , and a rock music review which declared
that a group's appeal was to male white trash de vieille
souche. Vieille souche is a term that refers to old stock
Quebecers.
To those who bemoan the loss of the chastity of the
French language, all I can say is that the lady never was
a virgin: French is essentially mutated Latin corrupted by
Arabic, Gaulish, and Germanic, to name a few of the
seducers. Even the name of the country, France , owes its
name (as does England ) to a Germanic tribe. Language
purity is a myth. The reality is that English and French
have been borrowing from one another since at least 1066.
Ironically, some of the dreaded Anglicisms, like rosbif
and club , were originally Gallicisms that had penetrated
English in the 18th century.
The King of Wordsmiths
John Updike remarked that language has bloomed
from the infinite fumblings of anonymous men. We
meddle constantly with our linguistic roots, grafing suffixes
and slang with equal abandon, and toss the resulting
hybrids about us with the carelessness of toddlers flinging
pablum. Thus are new words born, whether as engineer's
lingo or the wino's mutterings. But new language blooms
also from the not-so-careless utterances of certain
individual writers, particularly in the field of speculative
fiction. At least since Lewis Carroll intrigued his readers
with Jabberwocky, there have been writers—Robert
Heinlein and Dr. Seuss, to name two—who deliberately
minted new words. In A Clockwork Orange Anthony
Burgess invented an entire dialect (Nadsat, a Russified
version of English): I could sort of slooshy myself making
special sort of shoms and govoreeting slovos like Dear dead
idlewilds, rot not in variform guises and all that cal.
Frank Herbert was also no slouch at wordvention:
chaumurky, sietch , and heighliner are examples from
Dune . Much of it is fresh, serviceable language, not merely
humdrum technical derivatives or the names of gadgets
and aliens, and has certifiable potential to enter the English
language. Grok , for example.
But for sheer variety, quantity, and above all charm
of his neologisms, I submit that none compare with Jack
Vance, a.k.a. John Holbrook Vance. As Jack Rawlins said,
...to make up words that carry just the right scent, that
strike the reader as new and familiar simultaneously, is
extremely challenging, and Vance is a master at it.
It is not unusual for a single novel to have fifty or more newly
created words; in The Face there are almost a hundred.
In Showboat World , Apollon Zamp advertises for musicians
who ...play instruments of the following categories:
belp-horn, screedle, cadenciver, variboom, elf-pipe, tympany,
guitar, dulciole, heptagong, zinfonella . In Galactic
Effectuator , Vance tosses off gangee, sprugge, cardenil
bush, raptap , and shatterbone in two orgiastic paragraphs.
Most of Vance's neologisms are nouns, the majority
of them plants, animals and/or foods. Others designate
musical instruments or weapons, denote magical spells,
crystallize cultural concepts or rituals, or express metaphors.
Some, like skak and merrihew , are footnoted with lengthy
explanations about the sociology of magical creatures.
Terms like Monomantic Syntoraxis and Tempofluxion
Dogma reflect his droll skepticism toward religion. Some
are wonderfully playful, such as pinky-panky-poo, or simply
wonderful, such as scurch and dreuwhy (the latter
alleged to have been drawn from the ancient Welsh). The
adjectives are always vivid: the colors rawn and pallow
and smaudre (which also function as nouns), and squalmaceous
or halcositic. He also gives us verbs (disturgle,
skirkling), a few articles and cardinal numbers, and even
a sprinkling of interjections and appellatives.
The words may also be categorized according to
whether they are intended to be English. Clearly most
of them are; we are expected to read them without recoiling,
though we may grope for a dictionary. Others are
implicitly or expressly taken from an imaginary tongue such
as Paonese or the idiom of the Dirdir, or that of the
Water-folk (e.g., the shibbolethic brga skth gz).
But the most interesting method of analyzing Vance's
neologisms is by etymological speculation, which falls into
roughly five categories that shade into one another like
colors in the spectrum. I list these divisions in order of
decreasing distance from English:
1. Those that appear to have come into the world de
novo, from stem to suffix. We can think of no corollary,
and feel little or no resonance with known words—dyssac
(an herb liquor), thawn (a bearded cave-dweller),
bgrassik (translation uncertain).
2. Those that tantalize us with faint echoes of known
words. The morphemes are rather familiar, but overall
we cannot place them: harquisade (a variety of tree with
glass foliage), marathaxus (a scale from the body of the
demon Sadlark). Some of these are ... hauntingly familiar
growths, like catafalque trees and hangman trees,
as Terry Dowling put it.
Submulgery, ensqualm, bifaulgulate—the reader runs to the dictionary and is surprised
to find them absent. Some sound so real that they
flit past like butterflies or called strikes, only to awaken
us in the middle of the night with the realization that
they cannot be: halcoid, subuculate, Chief Manciple.
Close cousins of such words float unbidden into our consciousness.
We think of subterfuge and skulduggery
to explain submulgery; coaxed by ensqualm, we recall
ensnare, qualm, and squall; for bifaulgulate,
ungulate and a host of words beginning with the prefix
bi- come to mind. We are crowded with conjecture.
3. Portmanteau words, the most fascinating and treacherous.
Here the stems are reasonably certain, but they
ignite an extended metaphor. Thasdrubal's Laganetic
Transfer was the spell used by the magician Iucounu to
banish Cugel on his search for the euphoriant cusps in
The Eyes of the Overworld. One might easily overlook the
hidden word lagan goods thrown into the sea with a buoy
attached. This is certainly a reference to Firx, the painful
parasite installed in Cugel's liver to keep his mind on his
task. Moreover, the phrase is a reminder of Vance's love
of sailing. Another example is gleft, a kind of phantom,
one of which stole part of Guyal's brain while his mother
was in labor. Surely this word arose from glia, a class of
brain cells, and theft.
An especially intriguing case is pleurmalion, the tubeshaped
device used by the sorcerer Rhialto to discern the
location of a precious textual prism, even from great distances
in space and time. We cannot avoid recognition of
the Latin pleura side or rib. And mustn't the -malion
fragment refer to Pygmalion, the legendary king who fell
in love with his sculpture of a woman and persuaded
Aphrodite to bring it to life? We are struck by the insight
that the pleurmalion relates to the lost prism as the biblical
rib to a woman, bringing it (her) into view and thus to hand.
They must be reunited.
Any doubts that Vance actually thinks along these
lines are dispelled by a revealing footnote to the word murst
in Chapter 16 of the last book in his Demon Prince
series: The meaning of this word, like others in The Book
of Dreams [the villain's childhood notebook can only be
conjectured. (Must: urgency? With verst: in Old Russia,
a league? Farfetched, but who knows?)
4. In this group are words that draw clearly from identifiable
roots and appendages and combine them according
to traditional rules: calligynics, malepsy, Gynodyne,
photochrometz. These are mix-'n'-match suits of clothes.
The Latin, Greek, or Old English roots are readily discernible
(though I cannot explain the -etz in the last case),
and generate few if any metaphorical overtones.
5. Compounds, straightforward alloys of real words,
sturdily welded or hyphenated: sagmaw, trapperfish, sadapple,
bumbuster, and the delightfully macabre ghostclutch.
He has even been known to do this in French:
garde-nez nose-protector is a logical amalgam of garder
to guard and pince-nez: An extravagant garde-nez of
gold filigree clung to the ridge of his nose.
Such compounds can seduce us into spurious assumptions.
The term elving-platform—a birthing station for
the species hyrcan major—implies the existence of the
verb to elve, give birth to an elf! Vance can indeed be
master of the ridiculous. (Meanwhile we should not overlook
that hyrcan major is also a fine portmanteau word,
with its references to Hyrcania, a province of the ancient
Persian and Parthian empires, and Ursa Major, the Great
Bear constellation.)
Even some of Vance's proper nouns hint strongly at
the existence of daily words: Universal Pancomium, the
name of a large boat, suggests a more generalized category
of encomium; reading Dylas Extranuator (a spaceship)
compels us to ask what extranuate might
mean—perhaps strain in wonder? A building called the
Catademnon (pungent gust of ancient Greek syllables!)
is certainly not merely a confection, reminding us as it does
of condemn, Agamenmon, and Parthenon, all of which
relate directly to Vance's hero Emphyrio and his tragic fate.
Vance has achieved something extraordinary: the
invention of nearly 1700 interesting new words, a number
sufficient to justify his own dictionary.
In contrast, the Burroughs Dictionary
and The Dune Encyclopedia include many characters and places and are thus actually
concordances or encyclopedias rather than true dictionaries.
And Vance is still busily, incorrigibly at work.
Most neologisms remain in their literary greenhouses,
to be enjoyed only by visitors. But some have
escaped and spread like weeds to become part of the language:
Heinlein's grok, for example. How many of Vance's
coinings will infiltrate our daily gab? Will we send our
enemies skirkling, or drink skull-busters at the corner
bar? Will our windows be made of translux? In The Languages
of Pao, Vance explored the notion of using created
languages as instruments of social engineering. Let
us hope that his whimsical words—Whimsicant—are
already doing just that.
Rawlins,
Jack, Demon Prince: The Dissonant Worlds of Jack
Vance, Borgo Press, San Bernardino, California, 1986.
2 Dowling, Terry,
The Art of Xenography: Jack Vance's General
Culture Novels, in Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative
Literature, Vol. 1, no. 3, December, 1978.
Temianka, D.,
The Jack Vance Lexicon: From Ahulph to
Zipangote, Underwood-Miller, 1992.
McWhorter, George T., Burroughs Dictionary: An alphabetical
list of proper names, words, phrases and concepts contained in the
published works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, University Press, Lanham, Maryland, 1987.
McNelly, W. E.,
The Dune Encyclopedia, G. P. Putnam's Sons,
New York, 1984.
Child Safety Prevention Program Offers Little Sisters
Sound Strategies. [From Reaching Out , newsletter of the Big
Sister Association of Greater Boston. Submitted by
.]
Built of sandstone bricks and 25ft tall, Fuller's remains
were placed beneath the floor of this mausoleum on his death
in 1834. [From The Independent, , Section
Two. Submitted by .]
Has the past year brought the lowering of voices and
search for common ground called for in the wake of the shootings
by Cardinal Bernard Law, Gov. William Weld and others?
[From the Boston Globe, , front-page article
by Don Aucoin (who ought to be made to stand in the corner).
Submitted by .]
The Problem of Names
Recently a brisk, chummy young woman whom I had
just met asked me what my first name is. John,
I told her. Well, now, John...,she began.
Nobody calls me John, I said gently. I then explained
to her that it is not so much the first-naming itself that
some of us older citizens do not like but the doing it in
a casual way by people we do not know.
I told her that people who know me call me Jock .
I have carried that label from the first week of my
life. I was born in Winnipeg General Hospital. My mother
was Canadian by birth; my father an immigrant from
Scotland. Nurses in the hospital teased him about his
accent and began referring to me as wee Jock . My mother's
relatives picked it up and I have lived with it ever since.
When I was in high school some of my friends took delight
in referring to me as an athletic supporter. (I like the
woman in Peter De Vries' novel, Forever Panting , who
spoke about John Jock Rousseau.)
Dr. Wayne W. Dyer, one of the better-selling gurus
in pop psychology a few years ago, gave this advice in
his book, Pulling Your Own Strings: Always deal with
people on a first name basis unless they make it clear
that they need to be addressed in some other way. Why
did he use the word need with respect to those of us who
prefer not be called by our first names by people who do
not know us at all well?
I read somewhere that a girl was given the name
Camery because her uncle had served in the Queen's
Own Cameron Highlanders, a regiment in the British
army. The writer pointed out how unfortunate that was,
as camery , he said, is a disease of horses in which
pimples appear on the palate. I was skeptical of that. So
to three or four dictionaries. No mention. That writer,
I knew, liked to do a little leg-pulling in his writings.
Then I went to the big Oxford: camery is an obsolete
word and the writer had simply quoted that dictionary's
definition. Now I worry a little about my car, a splendid
secondhand Toyota Camry .
H. L. Mencken, in one of his more crotchety moods,
said this: The first Rotarian was the first man to call
John the Baptist Jack. On the other hand, an English
university teacher said this about John Milton: I would
venture to assert that no human being ever called
him Johnnie.
In the USA an actor who appears in two roles in a
play is given as his name for the second one, George
Spelvin . An actress is Georgina . I understand that in England
he is Walter Plinge . I do not know what name they
give to a woman.
P. G. Wodehouse has delighted many readers with
the names he gave to characters in his wonderful humorous
novels: Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, Pongo Thistleton ,
and many others. About the naming of characters he said
this: Odd how important story names are. It always takes
me about as long toget them to my satisfaction as it does
to write the novel.
Many years ago I found in an abandoned farmhouse
a copy of a 1912 issue of The Presbyterian , a periodical
published in Toronto and devoted to spiritual uplift and
the sale of patent medicines and trusses. In it the editor
commented briefly on a recently published pamphlet
written by Bernard Shaw, On Going to Church . He gently
castigated Shaw for indulging in one of the modish
foibles of the day by calling himself G. Bernard Shaw
rather than use, in the good old Irish manner, George B.
Shaw . Then he suggested to his fellow ministers that
J. Melchizedec Smith looks more impressive than either
John M. Smith or J. M. Smith .
A few years ago I read a brief report on some research
that had been done at a California university by a team
of psychologists in which they discovered that the way
people sign their names and use it for public purposes
tells something significant aboutthem. They said that if
you use John J. Doe you probably are a very conventional
person. A simple John Doe suggests that you are rather
outspoken, an assertive loner. ( Bernard Shaw was the
playwright's usual byline.) John James Doe tends to be
rather proud, and he likes to stand in the limelight. J. Doe ,
on the other hand, is likely to be excessively modest.
J. J. Doe is generally a person who likes to remain in the
background, a shy one—like J. A. Davidson. J. James Doe
is a go-getter, and likes to think himself a man of considerable
importance. (H. Allen Smith, an American
humorist, called this, and exemplified in his own usage,
parting one's name on the side.)
Some years ago I noticed a tendency among American
preachers—a tendency I noticed also in Canada—to adopt
the three-name pattern. This particular foible may have
been initiated by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), who
had been a preacher before concentrating on being an
important literary man. Harry Emerson Fosdick
(1878-1969)—notice that middle name, although it may
not be significant—was the leading American preacher
of his time. And, of course, we must not overlook Norman
Vincent Peale . Would not N. Vincent Peale have given
the eminent positive-thinker a bit more class? (I read
somewhere that a striptease artiste in California a
few years ago adopted as her stage name Norma Vincent
Peel .)
Turning To Nod Goodbye
Cyberspeak is ubiquitous. Many cyberwords, for
example, download, laptop , and modern are
euphonious, enriching the language. They are not
loanwords, but here in their own right. Other terminologies,
especially that of metrication, are cuckoos in the nest. In
turfing out the venerable words, they deprive the language
of colour and warmth
Arnold Bennett said that any change, albeit for the
better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.
One regrets the inevitable parting with words that
have served us since Anglo-Saxon times and were here
before King Alfred. Many arrived with William the Conqueror.
Others were absorbed in Shakespeare's time, often
from the great literatures of Greece and Rome. Soldiers,
sailors, and traders brought home idioms from distant lands.
Some words die and are forgotten, but many of those
which wrapped themselves about us like comfy old coats
are stolen off our backs. So we don hectares, litres, and
milligrams—but not, I hope, without turning to nod goodbye
respectfully to the earliest form of English bequeathed
by our ancestors.
I like that ancient Saxon phrase, which calls
The burial-ground God's-Acre!
[Longfellow: God's-Acre]
Only in phrases like God's-Acre and broadacre does
acre still mean a field of sorts. Correctly, an acre is a measure
of 4840 square yards of land, whereas Old English
aecer was the field—a piece of land cleared for ploughing
or grazing. An acre's precise definition varied according
to time and place. A farmer was an acreman who paid
a firma , or fixed rent.
Later an acre was a strip of open field, large enough
to be ploughed by a yoke of oxen in one day. To help the
ploughman measure his 4840 square yards, a chain 22
yards long was laid along the field's headland, showing
the width to be ploughed. From here he would plough
furlongs (i.e., a furrow long), of 10 chains or 220 yards.
Come Sunday, the ploughman might mark out the village
cricket pitch, having borrowed the farmer's chain:
22 yards exactly.
Persons of a certain age learned by rote that eight
furlongs make a mile, and since the 9th century, a furlong
has described an eighth part of an English mile, regardless
of its agricultural definition.
From time immemorial we have used our bodies for
measuring—by foot , for example. An ell , Anglo-Saxon eln ,
was a rough reckoning, being the distance from the crook
of the arm to the end of the longest finger, the elbow being
where the bow or bend occurred. Bow is from an old
verb, bugan to bend, and is at the root of rainbow, bow
(tie), and bow (and arrow).
Using our fingers, we counted in tens. Numbers 11
and 12 emphasize this finger-reckoning. After ten sheep
had passed him, the shepherd had used up all his fingers.
Many etymologists believe that endleofon is the
Old English form for left after ten, one left over.
Twelve in Old English was twa-lif or twelf , when two
(more than ten) were left. Twa-lif represents the elements
in two and leave.
To tell meant to count (as in telling the beads of a
rosary ); a tale was a reckoning. In L'Allegro , Milton
writes:
And every shepherd tells his tale
Under the hawthorn in the dale.
In telling his tale, every shepherd counted his sheep
as they went past him. We still tell the time.
A hand-span is the stretch from thumb to little finger.
According to Dr. Johnson, span new was the term applied
to cloth immediately after taking it off the spannans , or
stretchers.
A rod, pole, or perch was measured by a stick, the
Old English rodd being 5½ yards. The area of an acre was
standardized by Edward I as being land 40 rods long by
4 rods wide.
Yard (OE gyrd, geard ) is of superior stock: the earth
itself was middangeard middleyard, being the place
between the abode of the gods and the abode of giants.
As a suffix it survives in churchyard, dockyard , and
shipyard .
Until about 1150, Old English time was reckoned
by nights, not by days, for the Anglo-Saxon language
flourished in lands where nights were long and the days
fleeting periods of light. The light of learning, notes
Simeon Potter in Our Language , shone more brightly
in Northumbria than anywhere else in Europe. Northumbria
was then on the periphery of the civilised world.
North American friends rightly regard as archaic my
use of fortnight , this word being a survival of the old way
of reckoning two weeks, by using fourteen-night. Shakespeare
uses sevennights for week when the three weird
sisters chant:
Weary se'ennights, nine times nine
Shall he dwindle, peak and pine.
[Macbeth i, 3, 20]
Reckoning by nights is a relic of the Celtic custom
of starting the day at sunset. In the Book of Genesis too,
evening always precedes morning: The evening and the
morning were the first day.... The time between light
and dark, twilight , is of the same root as two, twain, twixt ,
and tween , from Old English twa .
A certain drama is attached to words prefixed by
night -. From Old English galen to sing comes nightingale ,
simply the singer by night. Deadly nightshade and
woody nightshade , the narcotic plants commonly known
as belladonna and bittersweet, have their origins in Old
English nihtscada, niht night and scada shade. Old
English mare in nightmare means demon or devil. Tennyson
writes of the black bat, night, Shakespeare of the
foul womb of night. Better sleep might have resulted from
taking a nightcap or grog (whiskey preferred) before bedtime,
helped too by wearing a night cap .
Small units of time— second, minute , and hour —are
borrowed from Latin secundus, minuta , and hora. Year,
month, week , and day are Old English gear, monao, wice ,
and daeg . Day has poetical overtones. The daisy flower
closes its pink-tipped petals (lashes), and goes to sleep when
the sun sets. In the morning the petals open to the light.
Anglo-Saxon for daisy was daeges eage day's eye.
The Bible uses dayspring for the beginning of the
day; also for the commencement of the Messiah's reign:
The dayspring from on high hath visited us.
[Luke i, 78]
Old English springan (German springen ) became
spring , but an older word for that season marks a period
of the Church Year: Lent. The Saxon's March was lencten .
Lenten food being frugal and stinted, Shakespeare has
lenten entertainment in Hamlet , a lenten answer in
Twelfth Night , and a lenten pye in Romeo and Juliet.
Lent lily is the older name for the daffodil.
When daffodils begin to peer,
With heigh! the doxy, over the dale,
Why, then comes in the sweet o' the year,
For the red blood reigns in the winter's pale.
[A Winter's Tale, IV, ii, 1]
Of unknown origin, doxy is variously the low term
for sweetheart or mistress, female tramp or beggar, plaything
or paramour [toy boy?], even a baby. In the West
of England, babies were called doxies.
The oldest words, for example, wife, live, fight, love,
sleep , and house , relate to home and family. They also
include the counting of time and measuring of space, the
meeting of communities, the working of the soil and caring
for beasts. The language was not called Anglo-Saxon
by those who spoke it, but Englisc from Engle Angles,
Anglo-Saxon being simply the earliest form of the language.
William Burroughs said that words are an around-the-world,
ox-cart way of doing things, awkward instruments,
eventually to be laid aside. He was thinking of
the space age and no doubt would have included the
cyberworld. But Richard Morrison, writing in The Times
in 1995, says he knows a journalist who has taken to writing
his stories in longhand, revising them laboriously in
ink, and only then tapping them into the computer. When
Morrison asked why he did that, his friend answered, So
that posterity can compare the various drafts. Shakespeare
would surely have understood the need.
ANTIPODEAN ENGLISH
Dharuk Words In English
When the first European settlers arrived in Australia
in 1788, there were approximately 250 separate languages
spoken by the indigenous peoples. During the 200 years
of European occupation these have declined in use, to the
point where not more than about twenty are active, in the
sense that they are being learnt by Aboriginal children and
cover aspects of the everyday life experienced by those
children.
These active languages tend to be those spoken in
the north and the west of Australia, in those parts of the
country where the Aborigines have been most able to
retain their traditional way of life. The first languages that
the Europeans encountered, those once spoken on the east
coast of Australia, survive only as they were recorded by
the settlers and have been reconstructed in the light of
later acquired knowledge of the family of Aboriginal languages
as a whole. Paradoxically, it is these languages that
have contributed most to the lexicon of Australian English.
Not more than about 400 words have been borrowed
altogether, and yet of these some 60 come from Dharuk,
the language which was spoken on the site now occupied
by the city of Sydney and not much beyond it, which
existed in an inland and a coastal dialect.
Although there are still a few Dharuk descendants
in the vicinity of Sydney, and these may still use a handful
of Dharuk words, Dharuk effectively ceased to function
as a language by the mid-19th century.
What then survives? Names of flora and fauna, names
of implements, especially weapons, a few miscellaneous
names of dwellings, ceremonies, people identified by sex
or activity, striking features of the environment, and a
handful of pidgin terms suggestive of an only rudimentary
communicative exchange.
The flora and fauna are characterised by their distinctiveness.
The Great South Land was to prove extraordinarily
rich in new species, some of which, like the
kangaroo, had an irresistible novelty about them; at the
same time they were as numerous as sheep in England
and as useful to man. The wallaby and the wallaroo were,
like the kangaroo, large marsupials which the Aborigines
hunted; the koala was also a marsupial but arboreal in habit
and sufficiently unique in appearance to have had the
settlers liken it to a bear, a sloth, or a monkey in their naming
of it; the wombat was a heavy, thickset marsupial
sometimes known as a badger because of its burrowing
habit. The only animal immediately recognisable to European
eyes was the native dog or dingo , and the distinction
was early made between the domesticated dog, or
dingo , and the wild dog, or warrigal . Two of the small number
of birds identified were the boobook , an omnipresent
owl, and the currawong , a large, crowlike bird whose
curiosity would have brought it to notice. The name of a
good eating fish, the wollami or snapper, on which the early
settlers were frequently dependent, was again an understandable
borrowing.
When it came to plants, the same sort of criteria
were observed: the waratah, a strikingly beautiful red
flower which has become the floral emblem of New South
Wales, was soon identified, as were the burrawang , a
palmlike plant very common in the coastal forests, and the
kurrajong , a plant that yields a useful fibre.
The name of the dance ceremony corroboree , probably
the most immediately observable characteristic of
peoples regarded as savages, which had both a religious
and an informal social form, was readily adopted, as was
koradji a wise elder or, as he was often described, a
witch doctor.
Weapons like the boomerang, the hielamon (a wooden
shield), the nulla nulla (a club), the waddy (ditto), and
the woomera (a spear-thrower), were identifiable to the
earliest settlers as were also gin woman, myall , which distinguished
a wild Aborigine from his civilised or tame
brother, gibber a stone, and gunyah a dwelling. But the
largest group of words that characterise the early period
are those that clearly formed part of a language used for
the limited communication that took place between the
two peoples: cobra head, mundowie foot, bogie to bathe
or a bathing place, crammer to steal, nangry to sleep,
patter to eat, budgeree good, cabon big, cooler angry,
jerron afraid, narangy little, muny very, baal a negative,
and cooee a call or to call.
Of the several word lists compiled by officers of the
First Fleet, as the first group of convict-laden ships was
known, that of Lieut. William Dawes is the most ambitious,
attempting a grammar of Dharuk as well as a vocabulary.
But such a resource is more an indication of what
was available to the settlers than a record of what they
actually used. For that we must turn to their accounts of
life in the colony and to the words which they adopted,
which they use more or less unselfconsciously as part of
their language as colonists.
And here there are three observations to be made.
First, the words used by the Aborigines were seldom as
attractive to the colonists as descriptive English names
that emphasised the perceived resemblance between the
new and the known and familiar, and so made for more
certain communication. Thus, distinguishing epithets like
colonial, native, wild, black, brown, green , and gray qualify
names of common Old World species like apple, ash,
oak , and pine to build a considerable and understandable
vocabulary. Second, a positive effort needed to be made
to ascertain the Aboriginal name, and experience showed
that the geographical range of Dharuk was extremely
limited: the fact that a new set of names came into use
as one crossed the boundary of another Aboriginal language
must have mitigated against borrowing. Third, the
Aborigines were widely thought of as backward and
uncivilised and, while this attitude persisted, their nomenclature
carried no great recommendation.
Royal Thoughts on Collective Nouns
Could the thoughts of the estranged Royal Couple
occasionally turn to an interesting series of collective
nouns that apply to their circumstances? Princess Diana's
musings, in her sea of troubles , could go back to her association
with a nayful of knaves , particularly one, one of
an execution of officers who have betrayed her confidences.
She has encountered a threatening of courtiers
and an abandonment of confidantes . The publication of a
beribboned bundle of love letters would entertain a company
of gossips and a knot of adversaries for ever, much
to the embarrassment of her eloquence of lawyers .
Outdoors she is harassed by cassettes of photographers
and a worship of writers , all of whom are employed by a
cluster of publishers .
At school her children are surrounded by a rascal
of boys and, on occasions, a flock of girls . The young
boys have to endure a kissing of aunts and suffer a slew
of uncles .
Charles's reflections are of a non-patience of wives
(both his own and others') and an incredibility of cuck-olds .
He is one of a state of princes who are shod by a
drunkship of cobblers and clothed by a disguising of tailors .
During his sporting activities he is accompanied by
a stalk of foresters while shooting at a column of wildfowl
or riding with a blast of huntsmen who are escorted by a
kennel of hounds . His estates are managed by a provision
of stewards .
At home he is surrounded by a farrago of toadies,
a draught of butlers , and a temperance of cooks .
Charles's affairs are the concern of a caucus of politicians,
a noble crew of lords , and a bench of bishops , all of
whom are kept informed by a diligence of messengers .
Finally, he is devoted to his maternal grandmother, a
descendant of a dishworship of Scots .
Cyberspace and Khyber Pass
The language of the information superhighway is
English—more accurately, a sub-species thereof with its
own grammar and semantics. Since it has come into being
with a sudden and persistent rush, reflecting the burgeoning
and undisciplined information system it conveys,,
it has not been amply recorded, much less described, in
standard reference works or lexicons. The New Shorter
Oxford English Dictionary (1993) and reprinted with
corrections in the same year, does not even include internet .
To fill the gap, specialized glossaries have emerged,
the best naturally in computerized form (like The Jargon
File, Version 2.9.6, 16 August 1991), where entries
can be quickly and efficiently updated, a process which
in itself reflects the hasty transience of much of the vocabulary.
Although a complete linguistic description will have
to wait until the dust settles—if it does at all, given the
volatility of the technology and the ever-increasing number
of the participants-certain features, destined to
remain, are already apparent. As far as grammar is concerned,
the simplistic syntax and the exceptional preponderance
of nouns and verbs (with an accompanying
heavy reliance on conversion) are obvious and enduring.
The vocabulary, like the grammar, is determined to a large
extent by the medium of computers and the operation of
networking. But their insistence on speed is not entirely
the message. Nor would it be correct simply to draw comparisons
with newspeak or some other centrally decreed
and regulated system. For although the vocabulary does
make important use of computer terminology, and although
it does share with newspeak a penchant for blends and
acronyms and an avoidance of adjectives and adverbs, it
reflects a manner and an environment greater than both
computerese and newspeak.
Within a strictly controlled computer system, in which
accuracy is absolute, the vocabulary as a whole is programmatically
casual. Its salient characteristic is its playful
primitivism. It is laid back: one talks, chats, browses.
Stress (evident in terms like prowler, skulker, lurker , as
well as Trojan horse, worm, vulture, leech ) is soothed with
(or disguised by) a variety of linguistic palliatives: generous
helpings from pop culture ( cookie monster, Kermit )
and science fiction ( cyberpunk, core wars, cosmic rays,
emoticon ); chummy diminutives ( archie, newbie, smiley );
and jingly rhymes ( snail mail ). The iconic word is surfing:
a sociolinguistic cornucopia of connotations of sport,
vigor, youth, individuality, speed, independence, leisure,
health, and middle-to-upper-class education and affluence.
The vocabulary is jocular in its easy mixture of the
casual (in slang or coinages or abbreviations), the learned
(in avatar, baroque, catatonic, synchronous ), the visual (in
hieroglyphics or emoticons), and even the aural (in the
fondness for explosives, like bang , common spoken name
for !) or onomatopoeia ( bletch, glitch, gonk ). The vocabulary
is suffisant in its wordplay ( AIDS , A* Infected Disk
Syndrome, sex , Software EXchange) as in the nonchalance
of its central and mixed metaphor: surfing the web ,
borrowed from scanning television channels for a watchable
program.
The vocabulary is mischievous in the mixture—and
not just in the ways just mentioned. One prominent phenomenon
is the flaunting use of homographs: words that
appear in conventional dictionaries are given a meaning
which is not to be derived logically or figuratively from
the customary one. Leaving aside blends and acronyms,
a few representative examples (with definitions from various
sources) should be sufficient:
advent the prototypical compute adventure game.
arc to create a compressed (archive) from a group of
files using SEA ARC, PKWare, PICARC, or a
compatible program.
biff to notify someone of incoming mail [named after
the implementor's dog barked whenever the
mailman came].
bum to make highly efficient, either in time or space,
often at the expense of clarity.
chemist someone who wastes computer time on
number crunching when you'd far rather the
machine were doing something more productive.
flag a piece of information that is either TRUE or
FALSE.
flame an ill-considered, insulting e-mail or Usenet
retort.
jughead an index of high-level gopher menus.
lynx an excellent, text-based, UNIX browser for the
Web.
pretzel command key.
strudel common (spoken) name for the circumflex
character.
tin a threaded newsreader for UNIX.
troll to deliberately post egregiously false information
to a newsgroup in hopes of tricking dense know-it-alls
into correcting you.
It may be argued that such personal semantics are
more than mischievous. But it would be going too far to
assert that they are critical of existing structures. Jargon
or slang and standard have always coexisted and over the
years have grown more mutually tolerant. What is clear,
in any case, is that a private and exclusive language is
evolving and engaging ever larger numbers of participants
in a linguistic process which is destined to become
more and more public as computer technology itself
becomes the dominant force in communication and other
social activities. From the point of view of language, what
is interesting is the coincidence, be it mischievous or critical
or accidental, of the ideal and the real. For the examples
of semantic noncompliance—along with features as
widely disparate as computerese or the variety of registers—begin
to reflect a world-view, the crystallization of
a special sphere. Real , as in realtime 6 the time it takes real
people to communicate, as on a telephone' is set against
virtual: 1. common alternative to logical. 2. simulated;
performing the function of something that isn't really
there. For netizens , cyberspace is the shared imaginary
reality of the computer networks. For citizens, shared
reality is the existence in space and time of Khyber Pass.
Atmosphere English
As a guest in a Thai household I was drying my hands
on a towel when, glancing down, I noticed some
writing on it. I think my hosts were a little disconcerted
to see me emerging from their bathroom laughing roundly
a couple of minutes later. I hastily told them what it said
on the towel: THE SUN WAS SHINING AND THE DUDE'S
FAMILY WENT ON A PICNIC.
This is an example of what Western advertising agencies
in Asia call atmosphere English. In Japan, particularly,
manufacturers feel that English-sounding names
and writing on products add prestige to goods marketed
there, and it is certainly true that atmosphere English has
reached its apogee. This has resulted in such products as
a brand of jeans called Trim Pecker , lawn fertilizer called
Green Piles, Cow Brand shampoo, Shot Vision TV sets,
Carap candy, Pocky candy, Pocket Wetty pre-moistened
towelettes, and a nail-polish remover called Fingernail
Remover . Two top beverages are named Calpis and Pocari
Sweat , and a coffee creamer is called Creap . Slogans, too,
are sometimes in English, like this one on a deodorant
container: Sweet Medica—it frees you completely from the
smell of your underarm sweat . Or this, on a bottle of nose
drops: Nazal—for stuffed nose and snot .
But let us return to for a moment The Sun Was Shining
and the Dude's Family Went on a Picnic . It turned out
this towel had been made in Thailand. As is already well
established, the Japanese are the undisputed masters of
putting largely meaningless English on their products.
Here, however, was an example of Thai efforts in the
same direction and, as a long-term resident here, I am
pleased to note that it is grammatically irreproachable
and makes some sort of sense! My hosts had one other
towel in the same series which they eagerly dug out; it
read: In the Evening the Sheep Was Praying to the Twinkling
Stars in the Dark Sky . I plucked disconsolately at
this towel. Not at all contemporary, maybe it wasn't the
simple-minded nonsense it seemed, maybe a parody of
Wordsworth perpetrated by a disillusioned towel copy
writer à la J.K. Stephens' celebrated parody of that poet:
Two Voices are there: One is of the deep/And one is of
an old half-witted sheep.... But in the end I decided it
was the simple-minded nonsense it seemed.
I work with many Japanese in Thailand, often outside
office hours in their apartments. So, intrigued by the
Dude towel, I furtively began to case their kids' T-shirts
(all of which, it turned out, had been bought in Japan).
In four weeks I came across the following, starting with
the simplest:
SNOB HOUSE
YOUR OWN FEELING
PAPP BABY
THE EMPLOYMENT OF GOOD SENSE IN CLOTHING
THE HAPPINESS OF BEING FASIONALBE—A POLICY
OF SELF-DETERMINATION
Here, meaning and grammar cannot be faulted (except
for PAPP BABY: PAP BABY would be intelligible if odd—
lactation, paps, pap pabulum), though, with regard to
clothing, few countries can be said to conform to the
extent Japan does. The salariman's uniform is well known,
and all Japanese schoolgirls must wear blouses modelled
on those of Portuguese mariners from the days of sail. Some
have said that the Japanese even conform in rebellion: the
Yakuza (Japanese Mafia) all dress alike though a little
sharper, e.g. two-colour ties, mean pairs of wraparounds,
tattoos, brutal crew cuts, and an attitude!
Next up on the catwalk is a young fellow modelling
a truly classic T-shirt:
ALL KINDS OF INSECT WARMING
I AM MUCH PLEASED AT YOUR HONESTY
NAUGHTY KIDS BEBE CO.
BEBE KIDS FAVOURITE BEBE NAUGHTY CLUB
PLEASE
Notice the spelling of favourite —the writer is incomprehensible
in British English.
Rivalling haute insect-warming couture is the last
gem my research turned up, a T-shirt bearing the words:
KIDS COMPANY. KIDS DREAM. BLITHE MATE.
YOU OFFERED ME A GOOD PLAN, I MADE UP
MY MIND THAT IT SHOULD BE DONE. IT IS VERY/
THOUGHFUL OF YOU TO DO SO. I GAIN A LOT OF
KNOWLEDGE BY THIS.
All these slogans are wrought in attractive designs and lettering
and are not intended to be read, so I would like to
express my thanks to those puzzled Japanese parents who
allowed me to do so. Even so, native English-speakers confronted
with this manner of stuff will have trouble not sniggering
in their saké and—horror of horrors—be asked to
explain wherein lies the humour.
How do the Japanese manage to come up with such
copy? Some have suggested the injudicious use of Japanese/English
dictionaries combined with deplorable highschool
English teaching. Nicholas Bornoff, in his book Pink
Samurai , cites some perhaps edifying advertising copy
from a catalogue for bar and club furniture:
I QUENCH MY THIRST BY A HOT LIQUID OF
AMBER-COLOURED
THE ICE IN THE ROCK-GLASS TICKED AWAY WITH
A CRASH
I GET DRUNK ON MY FAVOURITE LIQOUR WITH MY
CONGENIAL FRIENDS
THE HOME WORLD ONLY FOR MEN
More Foreign Treasures
Idioms in other languages can be misleading, for
there are many different and often colourful metaphoric
ways of expressing the same concept. Here are a few
examples from French and German.
avoir du monde au balcon [Lit. to have the world
on a balcony] (of a woman) to be well-endowed
avoir une peur bleue [Lit. to have a blue fear.] to
get the fright of one's life
avoir des antennes [Lit. to have antennae] to have a
sixth sense
bruit de couleur [Lit. a colourful noise] a rumour
casse-tête [Lit. head-breaker] brain-teaser
essayer de noyer le poisson [Lit. attempt to drown
a fish] to fudge the issue
avaler les couleuvres [Lit. to swallow grass-snakes]
to endure humiliation
prendre un carton [Lit. to take a carton] to get a
licking
brasser de l'air [Lit. to shuffle the air] to give the
impression of being busy
se noyer dans un verre [Lit. to drown oneself in a
glass] to make a mountain out of a molehill
être haut comme trois pommes [Lit. to be three
apples high] to be knee-high to a grass-hopper
river son clou à quelqu'un [Lit. to fasten one's nail
to somebody] to leave somebody speechless
pour un oui ou un non [Lit. for a yes or a no] at
the drop of a hat
Impossible n'est pas français. [Lit. Impossible is
not a French word.] There is no such word as can't.
Ce n'est pas un aigle. [Lit. This is no eagle.] He is
not the brightest.
être aimable comme une porte de prison [Lit. to
be as pleasant as a prison gate] to be a miserable so-and-so
un jour à marquer d'une croix blanche [Lit. a day
for marking with a white cross] a red-letter day
jeter son bonnet par-dessus les moulins [Lit. to
throw one's hat over the windmills] to throw caution
to the winds
Plaie d'argent n'est pas mortelle. [Lit. A wound
of money is not fatal.] It is only money.
ne pas savoir sur quel pied danser [Lit. not to
know on which foot to dance] not to know what
to do
...and some German idioms:
öffentliche Hände [Lit. public hands] local
authorities
das horizontale Gewerbe [Lit. the horizontal
trade] the oldest profession
Fersengeld geben [Lit. to give heel money] to run
away
ein blinder Passagier [Lit. a blind passenger] a
stowaway
Farbe bekennen [Lit. to admit to colour] to come
clean
Mein Rad hat eine Acht [Lit. My bike has an
eight.] My bike has a buckled wheel.
seinem Affen Zucker geben [Lit. to give sugar to
one's monkey] to let oneself go
Stein and Bein schwören [Lit. to swear stone and
leg] to swear blind
Der Teufel steckt im Detail. [Lit. The devil hides
in the minute.] It is the little things that cause
problems
Grillen im Kopf haben [Lit. to have crickets in the
head] to have strange ideas
jenseits von Gut und Böse sein [Lit. to be beyond
good and evil] to be past it
das Ei des Kolumbus [Lit. the egg of Columbus] an
inspired discovery
Das paβ wie die Faust ins Auge. [Lit. That goes
like a first into the eye] That clashes dreadfully.
Da lachen die Hühner. [Lit. This makes the
chickens laugh.] You must be joking.
And here are some metaphoric masterpieces:
Storchschnabel [Lit. stork's beak] geranium
Glühbirne [Lit. glowing pear] electric light bulb
Fingerhut [Lit. hat for a finger] a thimble
Eigenbrötler [Lit. one who eats his own bread] a
loner
Jägerlatein [Lit. huntsman's Latin] fish story
ein Achtgroschenjunge [Lit. an eight-cents boy] an
informer
Löwenmäulchen [Lit. small lions' mouths]
snapdragon
Hühnerauge [Lit. chicken's eye] corn (on the foot)
Indo' and Outdo' European
The most important contribution to comparative linguistics
was made by Sir William Jones (1746-94), a
British linguist trained in the law who was appointed
judge of the supreme court of judicature at Calcutta, in
1783. Convinced of the importance of consulting Hindu
legal authorities in the original [ Encyc. Brit . 1963, 13,
140a], Jones, well versed in Sanskrit, became aware of
the correspondences among Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Slavic,
and Germanic forms, which led him to the conclusion that
Sanskrit was another, older form of a parent language
from which all had sprung. It was his work that formed
the basis of the linguistic studies later carried on by the
brothers Grimm (Jakob Ludwig Karl, 1785-1863; Wilhelm
Karl, 1786-1859), which, in turn, gave foundation
to the development of the comparative method. The term
Indo-European cropped up first at the beginning of the
19th century; as much of the work was being done in
Germany, it is not surprising that the term preferred
there was Indo-Germanic , actually a translation of indogermanisch
(with a small i because it is an adjective), which
arose in the late 1820s; the latter survives in the literature,
largely replaced by the former, especially since the
discovery that Celtic is a member of the family.
The reason for bringing up this bit of history is to introduce
four terms with which some readers may be unfamiliar
and which reflect to some small degree the poetry
that once lurked in the hearts of linguists educated in literature
as well as linguistics.
The first is karmadharāya , a Sanskrit compound of
karma fate, destiny + dharāya holding, bearing, which
is used to describe a compound word in which the first
member describes the second, as in highway, blackbird ,
(adj. + n.), steamboat, bonehead, fingerstall, fingernail,
toenail (attrib. n. + n.).
The second is dvandva , a Sanskrit redundant compound
of dva + dva pair, couple, which is used to describe
compounds in which the elements are linked as if joined
by a copula, as in prince-consort, attorney-general, postmaster-general
(n. + n.), bittersweet (adj. + adj.).
The third is bahuvrihi , a Sanskrit compound meaning
having much rice,<bahú much + vrīhiacute; rice. It is
used to describe compounds composed of an adjective and
a substantive so as to form, principally, a possessive adjective,
like bahuvrihi itself; it also forms a compound that
is different grammatically from its head member and,
particularly, plurals that function as singular nouns, as in
lazy-bones, sly-boots . Other examples are rosy-fingered,
redcoat, high-potency (vitamin) , and, indeed, all such
compounds that might be spelled as two words in predicative
position but are usually written with a hyphen
when in attributive position.
The fourth is tatpurusha literally his servant, which
is used to describe compounds in which the first element
qualifies or determines the second, while the second
retains its grammatical independence as a noun, adjective,
or participle. For example, bookcase, yearbook, summerhouse,
windowbox, eyedoctor; hair-raising,
finger-licking, God-fearing, man-eating; nose-picker,
bottom-feeder, dive bomber, fighter escort .
Whether the compound is written conventionally as
two words, as a hypheme, or solid has no bearing on its
analysis. These are not the only possibilities for compounding
in English (or Hindi, or Sanskrit), but they are
the most common.
Unbelievably, Part V,... has not even been accorded pagination,
something for which Random House ought to be carpeted
for before the International Bibliographical Court. [From
a review by Laurence Urdang in VERBATIM, XXII, 2,18. Submitted
by , and some other
base villains.]
The Cassell Dictionary of Appropriate Adjectives
It must be emphasized that this is not a synonym
dictionary; rather, it is just what its title denotes: a dictionary
of adjectives that are appropriately connected with
the nouns that are listed. In a more technical sense, it is
a collection of collocative adjectives, that is, adjectives
that are often associated with the nouns that are listed.
For example, here is the listing under one of the nouns:
appetite, appetites mighty, enormous, gargantuan,
endless, limitless, unlimited, unfailing,
uncontrollable, lusty, voracious, ravenous,
(in) satiable, sharp, ferocious, rapacious, devouring,
brutish, wolfish, healthy, hearty, greedy, keen,
robust, inordinate, substantial, unbridled, avaricious,
poor, grotesque, morbid, morose, raucous, finicky,
discriminating,, (im) moderate, shrunk, new-found,
catholic, postprandial
Not all these adjectives seem appropriate to me: it is hard
for me to envision a context in which satiable appetite,
raucous appetite, shrunk appetite, or postprandial
appetite might be appropriate; on the other hand, I, like
many readers, could probably come up with several other
adjectives that are not listed. Without going into detail on
each one of these, the difficulty I see is, for instance, with
raucous appetite , for raucous means harsh, strident, grating
and is commonly associated with voice , where, indeed,
it is listed. As shrunk is a past and past participle of shrink
and not, properly, an adjective, I am not sure why it is there
in place of shrunken , especially since Mikhail specifically
writes in his Preface, Only words listed in standard language
dictionaries as adjectives are included in this Dictionary.
Thus all other etymological forms, as participles
ending in - ed (rejected offer) or - ing (playing child), are
excluded. As for postprandial , that is usually applied to
something edible or drinkable, as referring to something
that comes after a meal; in my language (and culture), postprandial
appetite would be a rare collocution.
Everyone has his own private view of how language
works, an observation seldom offered by linguists, even
those who touch on the subject of idiolect. That this book
is highly personal becomes evident in the entry immediately
following that for appetite:
appetizer, appetizers See also food intriguing, exquisite,
irresistible, tasty, cheesy, spicy, tangy
Here, one might yearn for some punctuation: surely
the last four words cannot be considered alongside the
first three. Moreover, I can think of dozens of other words
in the tasty, tangy class that could be added, but those
appear in the very long entry under food .
In principle, I like the idea of such a book and have
thought about doing one myself. But the almost insurmountable
practical considerations reared up before me,
and I quickly abandoned the idea. For one thing, entries
become less useful the longer they are. In the present work,
for example, the entry for appetite runs to eleven lines,
which is reasonably assimilable; the entry for approach,
approaches, however, runs to thirty-nine lines, life, lives
to fifty-eight, eye, eyes to sixty-eight. Are users really so
desperate for descriptive adjectives that will go with nouns
as to be willing to wade through almost two hundred
terms? I rather doubt it. Then there is the question, Why
are both singular and plural forms shown for the headwords?
Although mention is made of the fact in the Preface,
no reason is given, and one might assume that users
of such a book would have no difficulty in assuming that
the plural of breadwinner is breadwinners , even that the
singular of teeth is tooth .
A chief criticism of this book, in particular, is that the
adjectives are jumbled together in no discernible order
or, as mentioned, with punctuation between (except for a
serial comma). Thus under architecture, we find strings like
...(un)original, eccentric, plain, austere, mediocre,
nondescript...
...civic, religious, pastel, mosaic, landscape,
prehistoric...
and it is not till we get to the end, where a dozen styles
are listed that there is any sense of semantic or associative
grouping. This shortcoming can be seen in most
entries:
area, areas...affluent, rich, unique, crucial, key,
prime, vital, sensitive, volatile, enjoyable, quiet...
artefact, artefacts [sic]...impressive, authentic...
priceless, deathless...aboriginal, religious, cultural
eye, eyes...bluish, (china-) blue, sea-blue, brunet,
almond, (liquid-) brown, ginger-brown...
From the spelling ( artefact, honour ) and from the name
of the publisher, this is clearly a work produced in Britain.
Although there might be some differences between British
and American English, one is sore put to accept their
extending to the notion that speakers of British English
regard almond as a color for eyes rather than a shape.
This collection could have been made more useful
and more usable had the author attempted to group adjectives
within an entry according to semantic character
rather than just dump them into one helter-skelter list without
separators of any kind.
Laurence Urdang
Manual of Specialised Lexicography: The Preparation
of Specialised Dictionaries
In the decades during which I have been involved in
the compilation, editing, revision, updating, adaptation,
etc. of dictionaries, I have always considered lexicography
an art. That is not to say that technique is not involved,
merely to observe that some dictionaries are better than
others because their editors are more literate, imaginative,
poetic, and generally possess those attributes with
which we associate art rather than technique or mundane
craftsmanship. Such dictionaries, too, succeed because
they establish a rapport with generations of users. It goes
without saying that most of those drawn to lexicography,
like those attracted to art schools, exhibit skills more likely
to be associated with craft than with art; these days, far
too few of those who work on dictionaries have a thorough
grounding in literature, let alone the various specialties
within linguistics—general and comparative studies,
classical and modern foreign language study, phonetics,
philology, etymology, to say nothing of lexicology and lexicography.
The results are seen on the bookshelves of
bookshops throughout the world: adequate but largely
pedestrian bilingual dictionaries and a scattering of monolingual
works that have been resurrected by greedy publishers
who have engaged dryasdust editors to update
out-dated, out-of-copyright dictionaries in order to make
a fast buck.
Lexicographic technocrats enjoy using terms like terminology,
terminography, LSP language for special purposes,
LGP language for general purposes, lemma,
lexeme , and other words, reflecting the notion, long prevalent
in psychology, sociology, and other social sciences, that
if you can give a problem a name, you have somehow
gone a long way toward solving it. This book, which consists
of a series of chapters and subchapters, was written
by a committee, which immediately tells the reader something
about its likely consistency and continuity.
It is true that the principles that apply to specialized
dictionaries are not the same as those that apply to general
dictionaries, either monolingual or bilingual. For one
thing, the user of a specialized dictionary can be assumed
to have a level of sophistication that includes knowledge
of and some understanding of what goes on in general dictionaries.
It takes the editors of the subject book several
pages to make this point, which, it seems to me, is rather
simple. Their explanation includes Venn diagrams (which,
notwithstanding their utility, I thought had gone out of
fashion a few decades ago) and other devices. It is hard
to imagine that this book would be picked up by anyone
but a lexicographer or someone interested enough in
becoming one to subject himself to such a turgid presentation;
in the event, one might assume a certain level
of familiarity with the subject. Yet the treatment is reminiscent
of Washington Irving's Knickerbocker History of
New York , which—facetiously, at least—starts out with the
creation of the world. If one doubts the turgidity of the
style of this work, witness the following, which merely says
that entries in a dictionary can be ordered in different ways:
The macrostructure of the word list should be
understood as the arrangement of the lemmata
occurring in the word list.
Is that the writing of a person to whom you would want
to give the responsibility for explaining complex or
unknown terms in simple language? A few sentences farther
on, the writer offers:
Knowledge of the alphabet implies that lemmata
may easily be arranged and looked up.
I think I have dwelt on such shortcomings enough.
Laurence Urdang
The World's Writing Systems
This is truly an impressive-looking tome, persuading
one that it is complete and authoritative. As for completeness,
writing systems are a bit off my beaten track,
and I dare not offer an opinion; as for authority, while Peter
T. Daniels' name is not familiar to me, the work of William
Bright, Professor Emeritus of linguistics at UCLA and erstwhile
editor (for twenty-two years) of Language , the journal
of the Linguistics Society of America, is well known
to me, chiefly in his latter capacity. In a preceding number
of VERBATIM [XXII, 3], appeared a review article by
Dr. William Brashear, of the Egyptian Museum in Berlin,
of two new books dealing with the alphabet; now we have
this comprehensive work on writing systems.
Interest in writing systems was dormant for many
years: some thirty years ago, the only—and best-known—
scholar working with alphabets was Dr. David Diringer.
The spark that has ignited so many to look at the subject
is difficult to identify: perhaps it can be put down to television
and its many programs dealing with archaeology. A
recent program on the Minoan civilization mentioned
that Michael Ventris was a teenager when he listened to
a lecture by Sir Arthur Evans in which he described his
struggles trying to translate what had become known as
Linear A and Linear B, the ancient scripts found at Knossos
and elsewhere in Crete. Ventris, the program held,
vowed to be the one who would one day translate the
script(s), a reflex of ambition rarely associated with
teenagers today. In any event, Ventris did, finally, decode
Linear B, but died (at thirty-four) before arriving at a
translation of Linear A. If susceptible teenagers watched
that program, perhaps they will be inspired to work on
Linear A, still an enigma, owing largely to the paucity of
corpus.
The subject of writing systems was considered beyond
the pale by structural linguists, as it was not a reflex of
natural utterance but a secondary representation. (Structural
linguists do not like to deal with meaning, either, satisfied
that the meaning of a word is the sum of its
contexts—a perfectly valid argument if one allows context
to include one's mother telling an infant, Here, darling,
eat another spoon of applesauce. Unless ostensive
objects are thus pointed to and identified, how could anyone
ever learn their names?) As a consequence, the subject
was infra dig for serious linguists for many years,
and it is refreshing to see it brought to the surface again.
The impact of writing on language cannot be denied: in
English, the conservatism of the spelling system has had
an effect on the preservation of linguistic features that
might have otherwise faded; in all languages, the traditions
of literature (to say nothing of scripture [sic] ) have
a profound influence, as the fundamentalist effect bears
witness. To ignore or scorn writing and its influences is
struthious and unscholarly, and this emerging crop of
books, besides their attractive graphics—excuse the pun—
are welcome.
The relationships between linguistics and writing are
emphasized here and there in The World's Writing Systems
by the short essays, prepared by the editors and contributors,
that punctuate the text. It would be most useful
to provide a list of the thirteen parts of the book:
Part I Grammatology
Part II Ancient and Near Eastern Writing
Systems
Part III Decipherment
Part IV East Asian Writing Systems
Part V European Writing Systems
Part VI South Asian Writing Systems
Part VII Southeast Asian Writing Systems
Part VIII Middle Eastern Writing Systems
Part IX Scripts Invented in Modern Times
Part X Use and Adaptation of Scripts
Part XI Sociolinguistics and Scripts
Part XII Secondary Notation Systems
Part XIII imprinting and Printing
Each of these parts, introduced by a contributor or
one of the editors, has several sections; there are seventyfour
sections in all, and each of those, in turn, has its own
commentary. The result is not only a comprehensive treatment
of a subject by an authority but a detailed description
of the place the section has in the general scheme of
representing ideas by squiggles on a page, rock, or tablet.
Not only are (so-called) standard writing systems described,
but (under Part XII) there are sections on Numerical
Notation, Shorthand, Phonetic Notation, Music Notation
(by James D. McCawley, University of Chicago), and
Movement Notation Systems (dealing with dance). The
section Adaptations of Arabic Script was prepared by Alan
S. Kaye (California State University, Fullerton), erstwhile
contributor to VERBATIM; Bernard Comrie (Cambridge
University) and our friend Eric P. Hamp (University of
Chicago) contributed the subsection on Welsh, in Part X.
The word colophon has undergone several metamorphoses
since its earliest appearance in the 17th century:
it originally referred to the inscription at the end of
a book identifying its basic bibliographic information, that
is, title, author, subject, publisher, date and place of publication,
in other words, the information today found on
the title page. Presumably, because it sounded like a fancy
bibliographic term, it was adapted in the 20th century as
a fancy word for logotype , or trade mark . For its third incarnation
we can cite page 920 of the present book in which
colophon is drawn into service as the title of a section that
lists all the typographic fonts employed in typesetting the
book. That is a useful and interesting adjunct, and we
must assume that it has been called colophon because
typography has been subsumed under the original rubric
of bibliographic information. Although it is not documented
in any dictionary that I checked, this usage is
familiar to me as referring to the modest comments that
publishers like Alfred A. Knopf once included on the last
page of their books, for example (actually from a Random
House title):
This book has been set in Weiss by Typographic
Images, New York; printed by Rae Publishing, Cedar
Grove, New Jersey; and bound by A. Horowitz & Sons,
Fairfield, New Jersey. The paper was donated by the
Lindenmyer Paper Corporation, New York./Book
design by Carole Lowenstein
—from Donald S. Klopfer, An Appreciation,
Random House, 1987.
The World's Writing Systems is an essential addition
to the library of anyone interested in or involved in any
of the myriad aspects of language, both as a fascinating
browsing book and as an important reference work. I have
no immediate need for information about Sinhalese, for
instance, but who knows what sorts of questions may arise
in my mind (or others') that might send me rushing to the
shelf? My only disappointment was that Daniels' concluding
essays on Analog and Digital Writing (Section 74)
were not sufficiently detailed and technical for my taste,
but then my appetite for matters technical probably
exceeds that of most people likely to be concerned with
writing systems.
Laurence Urdang
The Sounds of the World's Languages
Phoneticians, pronunciation editors of dictionaries,
linguists, language teachers, and others who are—and
ought to be—interested in and knowledgeable about the
sounds of many languages and who have—and ought to
have—sufficient background and training to understand
the technical materials on which understanding of the
text relies will be amply rewarded by this valuable book.
The writing is concise and specific, allowing little room
for idle chatter; the information is sometimes revelatory:
Nearly 90 percent of the Californian speakers
produced 0 as in think...with the tip of the tongue
protruded between the teeth so that the turbulence is
produced between the blade of the tongue and the
upper incisors. Only 10 percent of the British speakers
made this sound in this way; 90 percent of them used
an articulation with the tip of the tongue behind the
upper front teeth. [p. 143]
One is moved to enquire how the sound is articulated by
speakers of other English dialects or in other regions
(New England, for example), but the book does not go
into that much detail.
The organization is by sound types: Stops, Nasals
and Nasalized Consonants, Fricatives, Laterals, Rhotics,
Clicks, Vowels, and Multiple Articulatory Gestures, the
last being combined sounds. Ladefoged, Professor of Phonetics
Emeritus at the University of California, and Maddieson,
Adjunct Professor of Linguistics, ibid ., are well
known for their work in phonetics.
Laurence Urdang
The Joy of Words
[Available in the US from Seven Hills Book Distributors,
49 Central Avenue, Cincinnati, OH 45202.]
Ronald Rose writes a weekly column about language
in The Canberra Times , and this book is a collection of
those essays, fleshed out in full in those instances where
they might have been cut by the newspaper for economy
of space. The essays are brief and interesting and range
throughout the entire spectrum of the subject, including
literature. There is, for example, a piece on spoofs in
which Rose cites several that are well known, omits others
(like Poe's The Great Balloon Hoax), and includes
at least one that is a satire, which is a different sort of animal:
Gulliver's Travels is not, to my mind, a spoof. I am
all in favor of weekly columns on language, but one must
be careful.
Rose is now seventy-six and, evidently, going strong.
The book is informative and entertaining, but the reader
should check the validity of some of Rose's comments
before incorporating it into a doctoral dissertation or other
important work. That admonition applies also to the blurb
on the back cover, which, presumably, was composed by
somebody at Kangaroo Press but not submitted to Rose
for approval. It refers to His vulgar vocabulary and facility
in slang, but—more important—it offers oddities like
a reference to learning by rote on page 105 and to Pidgin
on page 41: upon looking both up, I found nothing
about rote learning on page 105 and nothing about Pidgin
on page 41; nor was either listed in the sparse index.
The cover copy also refers to his endlessly entertaining
analyses of literary terms such hypocorism [ sic ] palindrome,
clerihew, idiom, [and] acronym: of these, acronym
and hypocorism are as absent from the index as the as
between such and hypocorism. Perhaps such curiosities
will make the book a collector's item, but whoever
wrote the text for it at Kangaroo ought to be relegated
to the outback.
I am prejudiced, I know, but while I find the use of
impact as a verb an interesting linguistic development, I
consider it execrable style for literate speakers and (especially)
writers; yet it appears in Rose's Preface, where one
can also find a transitive use for coruscate ( OED2e please
note). It is not de rigueur for linguists or lexicographers
to utter judgments about language, just as doctors are not
supposed to react with revulsion should a patient reveal
a particularly revolting affliction. But it seems to me (occasionally—like
now) that it is just such prejudices that I
am being paid to express. Otherwise, why bother reading
a review?
Laurence Urdang
BREVITER...
Thinking Out Loud
Subtitle: An Essay on the Relation between Thought
and Language. Sparse index.
Donald Davidson's Philosophy of Language
From the cover: The guiding intuition is that
Davidson's work is best understood as an ongoing attempt
to purge semantics of theoretical reifications. Seen in this
light the recent attack on the notion of language itself
emerges as a natural development of his Quinian scepticism
towards meanings and his rejection of referencebased
semantic theories.
Statistics in Dialectology
From the cover: [P]rovides a clear, easily understood
course in statistics for the linguist who works with real
linguistic data from real subjects and converts those finding
into numbers.
Bilingualism
From the cover: This book is a general introduction
to the study of bilingualism from a combined
sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic perspective....
Professor Romaine explores bilingualism as both a societal
and cognitive phenomenon.... The author also
assesses the positive and negative claims made for the
effects of bilingualism on children's cognitive, social and
academic development, and examines the assumptions
behind various language policies and programs for bilingual
children.
Autosegmental & Metrical Phonology
From the cover: This is the first complete introduction
to the current generative theoretical phonology,
presenting a general introduction to the two theories of
phonological representation that lie at the center of current
research. In addition, the central issues and tenets
of lexical phonology are set out and critically evaluated.
Gender Voices
From the cover: Does the language we speak create
and sustain a sexist culture?... The authors...explore
...the idea that language shapes individual lives—that
through our speech we all help recreate gender divisions
in society.
Sociolinguistics and Second Language Acquisition
From the cover: In this book, Professor Preston
assesses the relationship between second language acquisition
and sociolinguistics, focusing in particular on the
findings of quantitative sociolinguists.
The Ethnography of Communication, An Introduction
From the cover: [This book] is concerned with how
and why language is used and how its use varies in different
cultures.... Saville-Troike presents the essential
terms and concepts introduced and developed by Dell
Hymes and others and surveys the most important findings
and applications of their work. Drawing on insights
from social anthropology and psycholinguistics and using
examples from a great many languages and cultures, she
builds up a model which includes communications within
the overall framework of cultural competence.
An Introduction to Phonetics & Phonology
From the cover: Assuming no prior knowledge of
the subject, this book offers a thorough account of topics
covered in courses in phonetics and phonology.
The Oxford English Grammar
Undertaking a description of a language may be
regarded as a curious occupation. Writing reviews of them
is no less odd an experience. For various reasons, I have
chosen to comment on only certain aspects of this book,
chiefly because a thorough review would occupy far more
space in VERBATIM than many readers might willingly tolerate.
Suffice it to say that the grammar is Chomskyan and,
though a bit thin on the ground, is quite adequate. I have
found other things to criticize, however, that may be more
germane to books in general, especially reference books
and, particularly, to reference books on language.
First, I want to vent my spleen on publishers' book
designers who haven't the slightest idea of what they are
doing. As one case in point, I cite The Random House Dictionary
of the English Language, Second Edition , in which,
possibly in order to mimic other dictionaries but probably
because there are few things that designers can get their
grubby little fingers into, the main entry words were reset
in sans-serif type, presumably just to make them harder to
read. Those who are not designers but typographers
steeped in statistics of readability and other scientific applications
to typography are fully aware that because of the
redundancy built into its characters, almost any serif font
is more (readily) legible than any sans-serif face, and trying
to make a book look modern by using sans-serif makes
no sense at all. Besides, there is nothing modern about
sans-serif type: if anything, it is moderne —that is, in the
tradition of Art Deco. Turning to the illustrations (including
the black-and-white maps) in the RHD2e , it must be
said that the originals were a model of clarity and detail:
I know, for as Managing Editor, it was among my responsibilities
to commission them and to accept or reject completed
artwork or to have it modified. That was a laborious
and time-consuming task, amply rewarded by the high
quality of the drawings as published in the original edition.
In the Second Edition , however, the designers took it upon
themselves—merely for the sake of change, I believe—to
lay a fine screen over every illustration (except the maps),
thus losing much of the finical detail originally produced.
The result is a dull, grayish blob on the page.
As if to confirm that the various afflictions of designers
have infected the UK operations of Oxford University
Press, we are now faced with Greenbaum's Grammar ,
which can only be said to have suffered. Worse, their
incredibly unimaginative work has resulted in a book that
ought to have been about 400 pages shorter than the present
work, which I shall explain.
In his Preface, Professor Greenbaum suggests that
the Grammar can be used as a work of reference. The
structure of the book—through no fault of the author's,
I am sure—militates against such use, for the Index refers
the user to numbered sections: each chapter is numbered
from 1 (The English Language) through 12 (Spelling), with
subsections numbered sequentially (e.g., 1.1 English Internationally
through 1.10 Good English). A typical question
a user faces is a choice between may and might , so I
looked up might in the Index and found
might 3.25; 4.29; 5.17, 24
The first problem, inherent in the poor design of the
book, is that there is no clue in the running heads as to
which chapter and section one has turned to (unless he
has chanced on the beginning of a chapter or section:
only the page number appears). The section titles and numbers
frequently appear at the gutter column, making it
almost impossible to thumb through the book to find a
reference quickly. As it happens, both the title of subsections
3.25 and 4.29 happen to be in the gutters of
the pages where they begin, making it inconvenient to find
them. Had these numerals been set at the foredge of the
pages (instead of the page numbers, which serve no discernible
useful purpose), finding the proper chapter and
subsection numbers would have been greatly facilitated.
The second problem is the (unexplained) style 24,
which should properly be designated 5.24: there are
only 12 chapters, so it is confusing to see a reference,
apparently to a chapter, that is really a reference to a subsection.
(Under the Index entry for dictionaries are
listed 8.28, 30 , but chapter 8 contains no subsections
beyond 8.21, clearly a mistake.)
Third, excluding the Appendix and a Glossary, the
book contains only 600 pages, and, presumably to bulk
up its page count (probably at the instigation of the publisher,
so that more money could be charged for it), the
designer has employed a hanging indention of about ten
picas, and wide interlinear spaces. The result, had the
book been set to full measure, is that it would have been
less than 400 pages long.
Fourth, relating specifically to the entries looked up,
while may and might are both mentioned, except for the
following passing remark [p. 154] no comment appears:
3. Their past forms are often used to refer to present
or future time:
He might be there now.
She could drive my car tomorrow.
That is not inaccurate, but it scarcely tells the full story,
nor is it particularly helpful in explaining the use of may ,
which is the present of which might is the past, in constructions
like She may have said that vs. She might have
said that . There is no internal cross reference to 5.24 B,
where the notions of Permission and Possibility are given
peremptory coverage (though there are six citations), and
no helpful comment is offered about their interchangeability
in contemporary usage or what was, formerly, their
distinction in formal contexts.
Fifth, the Glossary (pp. 615-35) concerns itself largely
with the terminology of Chomskyan grammar, but the
treatment is unsatisfactory. For instance,
rhotic accent Non-rhotic accents drop the /r/ when it
is followed by a consonant sound, as in part.
They also drop the /r/ at the end of a word when it
comes before a pause. Rhotic accents retain the /r/.
It is poor style to find the headword term defined virtually
as an afterthought. The entry at mass noun is a cross
reference, See count noun.; but the definition at count
noun makes no mention of mass noun . Although the definition
for common noun consists of a cross reference to
proper noun , there is no proper definition for it at proper
noun , only a contrastive comment from which one is supposed
to derive a definition by default. As only Chomskyan
grammar is covered in the book, entries are lacking for
such common grammatical concepts—albeit from other
disciplines, like traditional grammar— substantive,
dependent clause, independent clause, conjunctive adverb,
adverbial conjunction, misplaced (or dangling) modifier ,
etc.—all terms well established in discussions of nonChomskyan
grammar. Many of the definitions use terms
that are not themselves defined and are not always transparently
clear, e.g., postmodify, linguistic unit , etc.
Some of these shortcomings can be laid at the door
of the author, some at the door of the book designer, most
in the lap of the editor (if there was one).
It is undeniable that the word-stock of a language can
be derived from a vast corpus of its writing and speech
to produce a dictionary; a grammar can be likewise derived,
but such exercises are rare and are usually confined to work
on dead languages. Thus, Champollion had little enough
to go on to decipher the Rosetta Stone, and Ventris would
have been hard put to find a native speaker of Minoan
Linear B (or A). But for modern languages, the situation
is different. Preparing a monolingual English dictionary,
lexicographers who are native speakers of English may often
turn to citations of usage in context to derive or verify senses
of some words; but for words whose meanings they already
know, they can rely on their own knowledge and use citations
for confirmation. Relying solely on one's own knowledge
can be dangerous—witness Johnson's definition of
pastern —so one must always check and double-check;
but that is not a difficult matter if citation material is
available, and there are usually other books or specialists
one can consult.
(Let me say parenthetically that not only is there
nothing wrong with looking at others' work but that those
who studiously avoid doing so for any reason are extremely
foolish: how can one know how the competition has handled
something without checking? Aside from the
unavoidable fact that competition is a driving force in
the publication of such works, one can scarcely expect
to improve on the competitive works without knowing
what they are up to.)
Writing a grammar entails many judgements, but the
most relevant for my purposes here is to wonder about
the amount of information brought to the task by the
grammarian. It is highly unlikely that the subject will be
approached with a feigned tabula rasa , relying solely on
citation materials. But the question arises whether the
grammar is constructed from what is known (or found)
and then verified through the application of suitable
citations, whether the grammar is citation-driven, or
a combination of the two is employed. In any event,
the requirement for an experienced grammarian is
undiminished.
In principle, one must question the function of a
grammar. In essence, such a work cannot be more or less
than a description of how a language works. But the question
must arise in the mind of the publisher (if not the
grammarian), Who is going to use the book? That is not
readily answered these days. There was a time when students
were required to study the grammar of the language,
but that day appears to be gone. Today, then, we
might more logically be looking at a market consisting of
people who want a reference grammar, that is, one in
which they can find answers to their questions about how
the language works.
This raises a question germane to the Oxford English
Grammar . Professor Greenbaum has drawn on the
huge resources of a number of different corpora of English
that have been gathered at the Survey of English
Usage and several other research centers, all of which
are listed in an Appendix [pp. 601-14]. The sources of the
citations range widely and include telephone conversations,
classroom lessons, broadcast interviews, parliamentary
debates, spontaneous commentaries, business transactions,
news broadcasts, etc. One could scarcely disagree
with the fact that all of these make up a reasonable crosssection
of what must be categorized as the popular use
of language. Throughout the Grammar are interspersed
quotations from these sources, each carefully documented.
That might well provide a reasonably accurate picture
of contemporary language. But is that what a user of the
Grammar as a reference grammar might want? One of the
beauties of the Oxford English Dictionary (and of, say, A
Grammar of the English Language , by George O. Curme)
is that users are comforted by quotations from sources
that are acknowledged paragons of English usage, writers
like Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, Scott, etc., even Hemingway.
Are they likely to be attracted by evidence from
students' conversations with their flatmates? from recordings
of Christmas-dinner family conversations? I could
find only twenty books that had been mined for citations
and all were published in 1990. (I hasten to say that
although the Curme Grammar is a VERBATIM Book, my
purpose in bringing it up is not to sell books but to contrast
its content with that of the subject Grammar .)
There is still another aspect to the whole business of
citations. Some thirty years ago, I proposed that the most
relevantly useful attribute of citations was their exposure ,
that is, the number of people who, on the basis of readership
statistics, could be assumed to be reading and
listening to the manifestations of language presented in
books, newspapers, magazines, and radio and television
broadcasts [ Word , XXVI, 3: An Unabridged Word Count
of English]. The exposure of a word would be expressed
as an index number resulting from the normalization of
(unwieldily large) numbers of readers and listeners and
would be likely to provide some meaningful measure of
the frequency for a significantly large percentage of the
lexicon. Prior to that, frequencies had been calculated on
the basis of raw occurrences in a text selected by a
researcher at whim, though it must be acknowledged that
the books (at least) selected for examination were classics
of literature assumed to be widely read, taught, and
used as models of effective expression (if one insists on
avoiding the concept of good English).
In resorting to sources that might be justifiably viewed
as natural language, those who concur with Professor
Greenbaum's approach ignore this important aspect of
citational matter. I am not sure that anyone has attempted
their documentation, but it is well known that an enormous
number of clichés, idioms, metaphors, and other
expressions used in everyday contemporary speech and
writing derive from the writings of Shakespeare and other
contributors to the imagery and poetry of the language.
While their manifestations undoubtedly appear in the
snatches of telephone and flatmate conversations recorded
in the numerous corpora cited in the Appendix to the
Grammar , their exposure is virtually asymptotic to zero.
In other words, there are some who believe that we might
be well advised to attend to what Milton, Donne, Dryden,
Jefferson, Franklin, Lincoln, Byron, Shelley, Keats,
Austen, Alcott, Dickens, and thousands of others have
contributed to the molding of the language in all its reflexes
and who find it difficult to understand the usefulness to
be derived from an analysis of idle telephone and flatmate
conversations, student essays read by no one other than
the instructor charged with their marking, business letters
read by no one other than their (individual) recipients,
non-printed examination scripts exposed to nobody,
social letters, classroom lessons, business transactions
(between, for example, architect and 2 clients and solicitor
and client), and so on. While it is undeniable that
some of the sources—news broadcasts, broadcast talks,
press news reports, for instance—can be said to reach a
relatively wide (though unquantified) readership or audience,
they are in the minority compared with the large
number of sources that seem to reflect language that
occurs, as they say these days, on a one-on-one basis.
Is that lack of representative material what people
want or expect from a grammar? Not I, to be sure. Given
a choice, I should prefer to model my language on the
writings of acknowledged masters and on the speech of
Roosevelts and Churchills rather than on what appears in
a student essay. I can make a clinical observation regarding
the diminution of politeness in the language, attributable,
perhaps, to the lowering of the standards of civility
and yielding, typically, constructions like Me and her went
to the park (as contrasted with Her and me went to the
park, I suppose).
I was unable to find any comment by the author justifying
the use and application of the (million-word British)
International Corpus of English (ICE-GB).
Also, comments regarding standard and nonstandard
usage are absent. For example, nothing is offered regarding
the poor style of the reflexive pronouns for I or me as
in Hong Kong had obviously been very carefully planned
with Peter and myself in mind [p. 183], though why and
is italicized in the original is hard to understand. It may
be argued that in a descriptive grammar—how can a grammar
be anything but descriptive? —comment about good
and bad English are anathema, but weasily little comments
can be inserted (as they are in dictionary usage notes)
referring to careful speakers, educated users, their
peers, and others whom users of a grammar might, conceivable,
wish to emulate. Thus, rare is the dictionary that
offers infer as a synonym for imply without some sort of
label. Even the permissive Merriam-Webster III , while
remaining tight-lipped about usage, condescends to offer
see IMPLY at definition 4 of infer . As those who use infer
for imply might be somehow stigmatized in (some) educated
circles, failure to report such a usage leaves the
suspicious user of a dictionary (or grammar) who has the
wit to look it up facing a serious lacuna in the information
given about the language. Such information is not prescriptive
or proscriptive, it is descriptive of certain
attitudes—right or wrong—about the language and has
its proper place in a dictionary. Comparable grammatical
usages merit mention and appropriate comment.
In a subsection called Good English Greenbaum
makes a passing reference to the aesthetic use of language
[1.10]; but remarks concerning artistic use of language
are notably absent, presumably lest they constitute
some sort of value judgment. As we all know, the grammar
has been distorted by political correctness (e.g., in
avoiding the masculine pronoun as a pronoun of reference),
and, in a rare opinion, the author concedes that constructions
like A Candidate who wishes to enter the School
before his or her eighteenth birthday may be asked to
write to state his or her reasons can be clumsy.
The basic question is, To what use can such a book
be put? There can be no confuting the fact that the grammar
of modern English—that is, the English in use for
the past two centuries—differs little from that of earlier
stages of the language: after all, languages are sorted and
distinguished by linguists on the basis of their grammars,
not their lexicons. (Thus, English is a Germanic language
because of the history of its structure, or grammar; were
its lexicon alone to be considered, it might well be classified
as a Romance language, owing to the large percentage
of words of French and Latin origin.) There is
no gainsaying the advantages in having an up-to-date
grammar of English. Though, personally, I am not enamored
of Chomskyan grammar, despite its occasional departures
from traditional terminology, nouns and adjectives
are still nouns and adjectives. The chief aim remains a thorough,
consistent, coherent, preferably understandable
description of the structure of a language. Indeed, some
of Greenbaum's presentation amounts to a tacit commentary
on and reflects valid criticism of the inconsistencies
found in traditional grammar. Unfortunately, the commentary,
being tacit, is a bit too subtle for many of the
people who are likely to refer to the Grammar .
[It is with the deepest regret that we announce the
sudden death, on 28 May 1996, of our friend Professor
Greenbaum, while on a speaking engagement in Moscow.]
Laurence Urdang
The F Word
At first, the idea that there can be a single word in
English or in any language that merits the creation of a
232-page volume—directory, rather than dictionary—
devoted to it exclusively must seem preposterous. But
with the initial riffle through the pages of The F Word,
noting the different typefaces that designate parts of
speech, definition, date of origin, source, examples, it
becomes evident that this word is the great workhorse,
an old familiar in The Life, and indeed deserving.
The F Word , the work of the scholar etymologist who
is a resident editor in the dictionary department at Random
House, proves to be a rare item indeed: a comprehensive,
vastly eclectic, tongue-in-cheek serious treatment
that has to be the first and last word on this world-class
Word. For the curious layperson, it will be a source of
amazement and information, a good deal of it funny,
including many of the anecdote-examples, but some of it
revealing and far from funny. Funny are the ingenious hybrids,
elaborate euphemisms and novel insult-categories. Not
funny, I think, are numbers of sex-related terms referring
to actions or practices more traditionally the subjects of
reports by physicians, psychiatrists, the courts, and, increasingly,
stories in the media. That some of the terms, like
the practices, are nearly as old as printing cuts or ought
to cut the ground out from under those authorities who
attribute it all to the '60s' and post-'60s' generations.
It takes no more than a preliminary skim to suspect
what is soon substantiated in the ample sources and usages
that accompany most entries—that it is within the military
services of the United States and Great Britain, from
the times of the World Wars, that the F-words have their
truest homes. Why this is so might provoke some thought.
Is it a kind of barracks clannishness? Certainly it is a
macho, masculine kind of thing, with more than a touch
of adolescent snobbery in one's familiarity with a special
treasure, such as snafu or B.F.D. (q.v. for yourself).
An instance comes to mind from the 1941-1946 years
lived in an infantry division. Crossing the North Atlantic
in late 1943, one of the nine of us packed in a cabin made
for two read aloud a joke in a letter from home: A Scotsman
(jokes were openly ethnic then) on discovering his
near-drowned son being resuscitated yells at the exhausted
rescuer, Well and good, mon, but where in 'ell is his
hat? Overnight it became a staple for expressing ingratitude,
greed or pushiness, properly adapted of course:
Say yr chow's not hot enough? Where's 'is fxxxin' hat, hey?
And there were a number of outfits —companies, battalions,
and at least one regiment—that claimed snafu
was coined solely in-house, to the point that the division
newspaper once actually tried to authenticate the origin,
precipitating a near riot.
Curious among the many curiosities in this entertaining
work: the World War II coinage snafu gets only
two and a half pages. The word or term commanding the
second greatest coverage is an unspeakable that is evidently
spoken a great deal. Including all its usages, initials, purposeful
distortions, etc., it fills pages 191 to 214. I, at
least, would never have suspected!
This book will probably find no reader fully conversant
beforehand with even half its contents. Who knows
the distinction between a fxxxface and a fxxxhead?
A big bonus is the funny and learned Foreword by
Roy Blount, Jr. Needed is a different term for humorist
Blount. This one suggests the business of being funny, and
conveys nothing of the surprise and delight at observations
that cause explosions of laughter. The Foreword is
itself worth the price, which easily makes The F Word a
double bargain.
Benedict B. Kimmelman
Philadelphia
Musical Punstruments
Salvationist, ex-army bugler, retired marine biologist,
inventor, paronomasiamaniac, you name it, Zach
Arnold has been or is it. He cites Byron's lines from Don
Juan : There's music in all things, if man had ears, and
then sets out with passionate vim to prove the point. The
genial wheeze was to construct playable instrument
sculptures, and to christen them with music-related puns
(e.g., Tuba Toothpaste). Each of the sixty-two Heath
Robinsons—Rube Goldbergs to you Americans—here
illustrated conceals a miniature harmonica (diatonic and
with the range of a full octave).
Zach Arnold is fully versed in the theory and practice
of punning, and clearly has it in his bones. He knows
about Lévi-Strauss's notion of intellectual do-it-yourself
( bricolage ). Each of his punstruments creatively cannibalizes
and recycles preexisting materials, all that comes
to hand. He is fully aware, too, of the very ancient tradition
of the rebus, the pictorial pun. Not letting his own
exuberance run away with him, he prudently issues a
safety warning about the manipulation of tools and substances.
Throughout, rhetoric, figures of speech, music,
and handymanship feed productively and voraciously off
each other.
After all, the pun is, in (typically) more senses than
one, first a mock-up and then, if it works, a working model.
As Freud underlined, playing on the multiple meanings
of words is an exercise in thrift: two or more meanings
for one word or phrase. Wit is psychic economy. In more
technological terms, like the computer, as Arnold says, the
pun enables a continuous flip-flop (though flip gags often
flop). The computer's version of this is a switching between
two stable states (unstable mates), but of course any shuttling
begets an element of instability, wobble, neitherone-thing-nor-the-other.
Some Arnoldian examples: Shoe Horn and Soul
Music, Jello Dali, Orange-juice Harp, Knocked Urn in
Sea (did you wince? That is a clichéic, kneejerk reaction,
and you should be ashamed of yourself), Valse Teeth.
Infected, I cooked up: Baby Sitar, Bad Vibes, King Gong,
Anglo-saxophone (scooped there, I think, by Christine
Brooke-Rose). Punning is often, as with the suck-blow
mouth-organ, vamping, i.e., harping, extracting blood out
of a victim, or camping around. The punner like Arnold
prolifically spawns neologisms, inkhorn terms, even nonce-words.
As well as being purely verbal, the pun can be
visual, kinetic, gestural. Arnold in fact offers useful tips
(patter, stage-business) for performing his pieces, rather
like the word-balloons in cartoons.
As it is the humble, brazen harmonica, he suggests
for the repertoire pop songs of all epochs or popular classics.
As always in any collection of wordplays, many—
most—are terrible or toothless (e.g., Tuning Fork , which
lacks the desirable distance between the two items suddenly
conjoined). He is fully conscious of his own, for which
he coins cacohomonym.
Swift said that like fleas, puns get everywhere. The
impulse in this book is macaronic hybrid, adhocist, ecumenical,
miscegenating. Example: A sabot boat, although
one could use it on any day of the week and not just on
the sabat or shabath , which immediately tempts one to
throw the baby out with the shabath , probably the best
solution —if somewhat murky and not potable—after all.
This has the pseudo-shamefaced but essentially brass-necked
mark of the inveterate punner. There is, of course,
method in his madness (it has been claimed that puns introduce
lunacy into language, but it was there all along), and
capering wordcaprice in his pedantry. Brigid Brophy
pointed out to me the musical puns in Mozart, where the
horns sound forth on occasion to intimate cuckoldry.
Unlike Onan, I am not myself a handyman, nor can
I play anything except cricket or hooky. Arnold, like Georges
Perec, provides his own mode d'emploi , instructions for
use. All you need, apparently, is a lathe, a sharp knife, a
band saw (not to be confused with a hawk), manual dexterity,
dedication, and the requisite amount of the higher
lunacy (though, like Hamlet, Arnold is but mad northnorth-west),
and you too could say: I can do that. Gizza
job.
This book is highly sophisticated and deeply naive,
just as punning is adult/childish, iuvenis senex ; ingenuity
and ingenuousness rub matey shoulders. All proceeds go
to the Salvation Army. So salve your conscience, and save
your soul, by buying it.
Walter Redfern
University of Reading
Child Safety Prevention Program Offers Little Sisters
Sound Strategies. [From Reaching Out , newsletter of the Big
Sister Association of Greater Boston. Submitted by
.]
Nel van Dijk,...the European Parliament's leading campaigner
for safe sex, recently distributed 625 condoms to her
fellow MEPs, part of an EU programme to help combat AIDS.
The campaign had hit the Internet, she informed fellow MEPs.
There they could find all the do's and don'ts about safe sex
including a video of a man fitting a condom. For those unfortunate
enough not to have access to the Internet, she added: I
also have one on a floppy. [From the Financial Times , . Submitted by .]
A letter from L. Alan Swanson [XXI,3,21] claims that
the original name for the Beatles was The Golden Beatles.
This caught my eye right away as it is a well-known
fact among Beatles fans that one of the original names
for the band was The Silver Beatles. This name appeared
after a few changes in line-up of the members and in
their name, such as The Quarrymen and Johnny and
the Moondogs.
After reading through some Beatles literature, it
becomes obvious there are some inconsistencies as to
how the Beatles chose The Silver Beatles after calling
themselves Johnny and the Moondogs, though the fact
remains that they never called themselves The Golden
Beatles. The best explanation for the name Beatles can
be traced directly to the music that influenced Lennon,
McCartney, Harrison, and Sutcliffe at the time and to
their music idol, Buddy Holly. The music of the early
1960s in the Liverpool area was often referred to as beat
music, and so, modeling themselves after Holly's band, the
Crickets, John, who couldn't resist a pun, suggested
Beatles as a play on beat music.
Where the Beatles got Silver from is harder to
trace. One source claims that silver was an obscure
reference to Long John Silver, highlighting Lennon's role as band leader. This proves true when recalling other
band names from the early 1960s, such as Gerry and the
Pacemakers, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, and
Derry and the Seniors, all names that point out that one
member was the leader. Other people have dismissed the
adjective Silver as merely an addition to give the name
some flash.
The language of the Beatles, what they said, what they
wrote about, and first of all what they called themselves,
is an important part of Western culture.
Most authorities in these matters [cf. Darwin Ortiz's
Gambling Scams , p. 189] agree that the broads tossed or
faked in three-card monte [XXII,3,15, item 5] are not
specifically the queens; rather, the reference is to pasteboards
that are wider than the standard deck (viz. pokersized
cards vs. bridge-sized), which makes cheating by
sleight-of-hand easier in that game.
I have just read Mr. William H. Dougherty's EPISTOLA
[XXII,2] on the subject of balagan in which he refers
to a previous contribution by Milton Horowitz. Surely,
the vehicle for carrying the Russian word into Modern
Israeli Hebrew was Yiddish! And in Yiddish, balagan
means mess, bedlam. (Uriel Weinreich's Yiddish-English
Dictionary , YIVO, New York, 1968)
It is not unknown, I think, that meanings change
when words cross language frontiers, and what was a temporary
booth at a Russian fair (quite probably a chaotic,
noisy affair) becomes a mess and a bedlam in Yiddish. As
a lover of Yiddish, I hate to see its influence ignored in
such a lengthy etymological review.
[Undoubtedly, Uriel Weinreich would have offered the
same remark himself, as his Languages in Contact (1953)
made the point many times over. —Editor.]
In his piece, The Day They Took the Peck out of
Pecksniffian [XXIII, 4], Doug Briggs observed, There
is a movement to decriminalize the meanings of words
that once described criminal conduct in unmistakable
terms. Amen. And I have an additional example of what
he means.
I am a child of the '20s, a time when those who were
involved in what was then (I believe) a minuscule drug
problem in the US were called dope fiends. The implication
for a child or youth, quite intentional I am sure,
was that anybody who took drugs (dope) was not only to
be avoided, but also feared. To this day I carry that reaction
to drug users. Today the use of narcotics is commonly
referred to as doing drugs , a phrase that seems to
imply a harmless activity such as doing the samba . Alternatively,
one perhaps might be into drugs , as if he were
dabbling in one more little pastime whose attraction would
ultimately fade as he got into something else.
These locutions would be of little importance, I think,
if it were not for the fact that they have been adopted by
most of the news media and the entertainment industry.
Nobody uses dope fiend any more, even referring to addicts
who regularly overdose. And in that word overdose we have
yet another euphemism, don't we, as if there were such
a thing as a beneficent normal dose of heroin or crack.
As Mr. Briggs seems to be saying, ideas have consequences,
and so do the words that express them.
On another subject in the same issue, Ronald Mansbridge's
The Intrusive S reminded me of another intrusion,
or rather a transposition, that I seem to be hearing
more and more these days. It happens when a speaker
wants to modify the adjective another , and comes up
(turns around?) with That's a whole another subject.
Words are fun if we keep our tempers—and as long
as we have VERBATIM.
An EPISTOLA from Jim M. Pols [XXII,4] refers to the
article in XXII,1 by Jerome Betts concerning names that
match their possessors' professions. It has triggered an old
memory from my high-school days (almost 70 years ago)
when a teacher cited, as presumably authentic, the story
of a visitor to a little western town who noticed a shingle
reading A. Swindler, Attorney-at-Law. The visitor pointed
out the unfortunate conjunction, but the lawyer simply
protested that it was actually his name. Suggested the
visitor, Why don't you at least substitute your whole first
name for that awful A? The lawyer sadly replied, It's
Adam.
In A Proper Look at Verbs [XXII,4,4], Nigel Ross
writes—accurately so—of the pervasion and intrusion of
proper verbs into our language alongside proper nouns
and proper adjectives. Being from the European side of
VERBATIM readership, he may not be aware of the California
invasion of the Pacific Northwest. Thousands of
Californians have relocated to Washington and Oregon for
personal or job-related reasons, and many, many Washingtonians
and Oregonians do not like it at all.
The bumper sticker in the accompanying photo uses
a proper verb to reflect that prevalent Pacific Northwest
opinion concerning their new, ex-California neighbors.
In response to Dr. Murray Zimmerman's review of
A Sea of Words [XXII,4], I enclose a copy of The Patrick
O'Brian Newsletter from March 1994 containing an explanation
of the word marthambles:
Marthambles is a very fine word that I found in a
quack's pamphlet of the late 17th or early 18th century
advising a nostrum that would cure not only the strong
fires and a whole variety of more obvious diseases but
the marthambles too. I have never see it anywhere else
and it has escaped the OED.
A small correction is in order to Daniel Temianka's
Badges Redux [XXII,3,13]: for Joseph Wood Crutch
read Krutch.
Bumpersticker seen the other day: Illiterate? Write
for help.
If my Ontario townsman Mr. Kurt Loeb was
impressed with the licence plate 2THMD [XXII, 3], may
I suggest that he stroll over to Bathurst Street any weekday
rush hour and wait for 2TH LES to drive by. Primary,
secondary, and (someday, St. Apollonia forfend, mine own
teeth should fall out) tertiary appropriateness is his for
the viewing.
Hilary Howard's article [XXII,1] brings up the song
A Boy Named Sue. I knew a man named Sue, a distinguished
attorney in my home town, but he spelled it
Sioux, in the city of Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He
named his daughter Suzanne, but his son was named Bill.
I also knew a girl named Bill. She was called Billie,
but her given name was Bill Lee. Her father's name was
Lee, and she was the third daughter and last child in the
family, so they must have given up on having a boy who
could carry on the father's name.
In a high-school class with five girl Shirleys we also
had a boy named Shirley, a refugee from the blitz in England.
With that name and a British accent he could well
have become the butt of ridicule, but he quickly became
one of the boys when someone gave him a more appropriate
nickname, Shirts.
Marc A. Schindler's potentially important piece, Elementary,
My Dear Medeleev [XXII,4] is unfortunately
marred by some bloopers.
Hydrogen is a name of Greek origin, not Latin. It
is called Wasserstoff in German (not Wasserstoffe).
Kohlenstoff (not Kohlstoffe) means carbon, not charcoal
(which is Holzkohle ). The German for oxygen is
Sauerstoff (not Sauerstoffe) and for nitrogen Stickstoff
(not Stickstoffe). English nitrogen comes from Greek
nitron (not natron). The name of gallium is not only a
pun on the name of its discoverer, Lecoq de Boisbaudran,
but a patriotic tribute to his native country—Latin Gallia ,
Gaul, France.
The history of the discovery and naming of the lanthanides
(the fourteen rare-earth elements with atomic
numbers 58 to 71 in Mendeleev's table) is fascinating. In
1788 the mineral ytterbite (now gadolinite ) was discovered
near the Swedish village (not town) of Ytterby. The
Finnish chemist Gadolin isolated a new earth (metallic
oxide) there in 1794 and called it yttria . In 1803 the
Swedish chemist Berzelius discovered another earth and
named it cerium , for the asteroid (minor planet) Ceres.
Take just yttria . In 1843 the Swedish chemist
Mosander analysed this earth into yttrium proper, erbium ,
and terbium , all named for Ytterby. In 1878 the Swiss
chemist Marignac further isolated ytterbium , and in 1879
the Swedish chemist Cleve distinguished holmium (named
for Stockholm) and thulium (from Thule, the farthest
land known to the Greeks). In 1886 the aforesaid Lecoq
de Boisbaudran (who had already discovered gallium in
1875) isolated dysprosium (Greek for difficult to reach).
In 1907 the French chemist Urbain separated lutetium
from ytterbium, naming it for his native Paris (Roman
name Lutetia ).
Cerium has its own, similar development, so that by
the early 20th century all 14 lanthanides had been isolated.
(The element with atomic number 61 is not found
naturally, and this number was allocated to promethium ,
when proof of its existence was confirmed by American
chemists, who named it for Prometheus, in Greek mythology
the earliest teacher and benefactor of mankind.)
Ex tempore speakers, whether private citizens unused
to explaining themselves before large groups or public figures
long used to it, may flounder about when unexpectedly
faced with camera or microphone. They may
struggle to find the right word and, if they succeed, may
mispronounce it. Such lapses, surely, may be forgiven.
Charity, however, does have its limits and cannot be
stretched to cover the following:
crooshible (crucible) Coretta Scott King, The Jim
Lehrer News Hour 19 February 1996
debbicle (débcle) Economist Paul Solomon,
MacNeil/Lehrer 12 November 1994
esculation (escalation) Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton,
MacNeil/Lehrer 5/31/95
exasterbated (exacerbated) Military Historian Edward
F. Murphy, All Things Considered, National Public
Radio 14 April 1996
heenious (heinous) Portland (Maine) Police Chief
Mike Chitwood, NBC News 28 June 1996
imbrigglio (imbroglio) Christian Coalition leader
Ralph Reed, MacNeil/Lehrer 12 June 1995
inniment (imminent)—Military Historian Edward F.
Murphy, All Things Considered, National Public
Radio 4/14/96
leggislation (legislation) Eleanor Holmes Norton,
MacNeil/Lehrer 16 January 1995
mischievious Massachusetts Senator John Kerry,
Mac Neil/Lehrer 27 April 95
peripatretic (peripatetic) Alexander Haig, MacNeil/
Lehrer 19 December 1994
preemptory (either peremptory or preemptive, the
context did not reveal which) Alexander Haig,
MacNeil/Lehrer 19 December 1994
un-be-noun-st (unbeknownst) Biologist John
McChesney, All Things Considered, National Public
Radio 23 April 1995
When the man in the street or his female counterpart
says all-mond ( almond ), beero ( bureau ), callm
( calm ), carmel ( caramel ), cooten ( couldn't ),
deffly ( definitely ), ditten ( didn't ), ek cetera ( et cetera ),
gore-may ( gourmet ), prolly ( probably ), putt-ing ( putting ),
tair-iss ( terrorist ), tore-iss ( tourist ), or commits
other and worse sins against good English and grammar,
the listener realizes that the vernacular—a dialect, Low
English—is being spoken and prolly thinks no more
about it. After all, the speakers may never have been
taught the basics of their one and only language, their
mother tongue. Perhaps, too, they have never heard of
dictionaries. The foregoing examples, however, were not
drawn from the street but from the air and were
uttered by professional broadcasters.
Is there any excuse for broadcasters who read their
scripts still managing to mangle not merely the foreign
names which recur daily but even everyday words like
nuclear? Consider the following:
assessible (accessible) Portland (Maine) NBC reporter
Chris Rose 29 May 1996
baffoonish (buffoonish) Portland (Maine) NBC News
anchor Cindy Williams 28 June 1996
cause celeb (cause célèbre) former judge and, during
the O.J. Simpson trial, a legal consultant for NBC
Ira Reiner February or March 1996
coodigrah (coup de grâce) Ira Reiner NBC 19 June
1995
epitats (epithets) NBC News reporter David Bloom 29
July 1995 and on many occasions since; CBS 60
Minutes reporter Steve Croft 25 September 1994
in-dicked-ment (indictment) Lewiston (Maine) NBC
News reporter Ann Murray 6 June 1996
noodging (nudging) All Things Considered reporter
Terry Gross National Public Radio 25 May 1996
On June 7, 1996, the Maine Public Radio announcer,
reading the midday news report, spoke of a local philanthropist
who was doughnutting something-or-other—I
did not learn what because I was straining to understand
that mysterious verb and, too late, realized donating had
been meant. In April 1996, a political advertisement on
television used the word legislator when the context made
clear that legislature was intended. That ad disappeared
after a few days; I wish I could feel confident that its
removal was caused by concern for the language. Again
and again one hears local and national broadcasters according
an extra syllable to past participles as if the words
were back-formed from adverbs, e.g., allegèd, assurèd,
composèd, markèd, suffusèd, supposèd. NBC News
anchor, Tom Brokaw, who regularly says bo`l and
Clin`on, recently introduced a report on brust cancer.
A slip of the tongue, perhaps; but, during one memorable
two-week period in 1994 beginning in Thanksgiving week
and ending December 2, while reporting on Bihac, he came
up with Bihar, Bihak, and Bihash before getting it
right. Is that acceptable?
BBC has its Pronunciation Unit which advises on
usage and pronunciation. Australia has had its watchdog
Standing Committee on Spoken English. Now we learn
[ANTIPODEAN ENGLISH, XXII, 4] that SCOSE is being disbanded.
I urge and advise its members to listen to US
broadcasters for a week or two. Listen and reconsider
your decision.
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'm 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 selfjustification?
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 straighttalking,
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?
To Coin a Name and Name a Coin
Around six years ago, not long after Canada replaced
its green Queen's one-dollar note with an eleven-sided
gold-coloured coin, a schoolyard ditty made the rounds:
We're tiny, we're tuney
We haven't got a loonie
Because of Brian Mulroney
and the stupid G.S.T.
Mulroney rhymes with loonie . Brian Mulroney was
Canada's prime minister at the time. The most unpopular
PM in Canada's modem history, he introduced the
Goods and Services Tax, a VAT-like national sales tax.
Loonie is the well-nigh universal Canadian slang term for
the dollar coin. (Only the Royal Canadian Mint refers to
the loonie as a dollar coin.)
Canada almost didn't have a loonie. The original
design for the reverse side of the coin featured a voyageur—
the same as on the older nickel dollar—but the dies were
stolen on the way to the Royal Canadian Mint in Winnipeg,
where the first coins were due to be minted. The backup
design was that of a loon—our unofficial national bird. Ah,
but that unfortunate name: loon as in loony bin! Although
the terms loonie , a diminutive noun from loon , and loony ,
an adjective (ultimately) from lunar are etymologically
distinct, their similarity has encouraged obvious satirical
connections: our economy, which is loony, has as its
fundamental unit of currency the loonie; many felt that
the policies of Brian Mulroney were loony. In short,
the slang term sprang up immediately and collectively, and
no one person could ever claim to be the inventor of it.
However, a two-dollar coin is due to be introduced
soon in Canada, and the etymological situation here is a
totally different story. The Mint, as usual, is no help—they
refer to the new coin unimaginatively as the two-dollar
coin, so the letters columns of every newspaper in the
country have been filled with speculation and suggestions
for a slang term for this new coin, which is slightly larger
than the loonie, gold-coloured and polygonal (like the
loonie), but with a silver centre with a polar bear pictured
on it. Once the design was released, the name bruin was
suggested by many people, but the name that appears to
be winning is doubloonie, combining the double loonie
with a reference to a traditional coin said to be favoured
by pirates—again, a not-too-subtle satirical reference to
the appetite for taxation of most governments.
I may have the dubious distinction of being the first
to propose this name in a letter-to-the-editor published
in Canada's newspaper of record, The [Toronto] Globe and
Mail , on 20 February 1993, long before the Mint announced
the coin. At that time the idea had occurred to me because
I knew that both New Zealand and Australia had one-dollar
and two-dollar coins: I had been to Australia several
times on business and had seen them. To me, it
appeared to be just a matter of time before Canada also
introduced a two-dollar coin but it took an article in the
Globe and Mail on the need for two-dollar coin to concentrate
a kind of critical mass of public attention onto
the issue. What actually appears to happen in cases like
this is that neologisms do not appear like a single light bulb
going off in one person's head but rather like wheat after
spring rains: if the ground is fertile the seed germinates
throughout the field.
It Figures
When it comes to counting, I have always been in awe
of French schoolchildren. How do they manage to do
mental arithmetic with numbers such as quatre-vingtdix-sept
four twenties plus seventeen and soixante-quinze
sixty plus fifteen, which require mental agility just to
translate them into the figures 97 and 75? The comparable
English three score years and ten is certainly more
poetic than the simpler seventy , but I doubt whether it
was ever used in calculations.
It is hardly surprising that the French-speaking Swiss
and Belgians prefer their own system which, like English,
has separate words for seventy and ninety. They, along
with English- and German-speaking children, would appear
to have a head start over the French. The German system
of saying numbers in reverse order (like the old English
four and twenty ) may even make calculations easier,
as children are usually taught to start with the units column
before moving on to the tens and hundreds.
My admiration for the French has, however, paled
into insignificance since I started learning to count money
in Mina, a language spoken in Togo and parts of Benin
and Ghana. I was astounded to realize that illiterate market
women (Benin has an illiteracy rate of over 75%) happily
multiply five by thirteen and add one hundred while
my brain is still struggling to work out whether this comes
to more or less than 150.
Counting money in Mina involves using multiples of
five as far as twenty-five and then using a combination of
multiples of twenty-five and five as far as one hundred.
Even numbers greater than 100 are sometimes expressed
as multiples of twenty-five. This means that 180 CFA
francs can be expressed as one hundred plus sixteen fives,
or as one hundred plus three twenty-fives plus five, or yet
again as seven twenty-fives plus five.
After this humbling experience I am inclined to
review my earlier belief that French children must be at
a disadvantage when it comes to mental arithmetic. In fact,
children who grow up speaking a language such as French
or Mina, which obliges them to make connections between
numbers and introduces them to multiples at a very early
age, probably take to arithmetic faster than those who plod
along adding one to the previous number ad infinitum .
