A Yankee Dime and Other Reginal Expressions
Some years ago, when sportscaster Red Barber
used Southern expressions like sitting in the catbird
seat and tearing up the pea patch , there was a degree
of national amusement. Unfortunately, much of
this colorful speech has been lost as the language has
become homogenized through raido and television.
Sigmund Freud is not blameless. Thanks to him, we
are all nowadays more or less selfconscious.
The generation that came of age in the first two
decades of the century was probably the last of the
unselfconscious breed. And because there was much
less travel in those days, the regions retained their
speechways much more completely than they do now.
Later, however, especially during World War II, there
was considerable mobility from region to region.
Southerners who went up North were quickly made
aware of curiosities of speech like I'm fixing to do
something or go somewhere. And there was hilarity
among Northerners, for instance, when a Southerner
asked, Who's carrying you to the dance? Carry in
Southernese meant escort. Hush puppies and hoe
cakes were also terms sure to attact attention fifty
years ago, but are now in common use. Hoe cakes ,
originally baked on hoe, and hush puppies , allegedly
so named because pieces of them were fed to dogs to
keep them quite, are variations of what Southerners
call corn bread and New Englanders call (spider)
johnnycake: spider because it was baked in a spider , a
black, cast-iron skillet. And when Northern visitors to
the South first saw black-eyed peas, they were puzzled.
We call these beans , they would say. When
we say peas, we mean what Southerners call English
peas or green peas. Northerners were also amused
at a Southern matriarch's saying to a tardy arrival at
the dinner table, We've waited for you the way one
pig waits for another.
Those were the days of the enormous midday
meal. Most men worked close to home, and the paterfamilias
as well as all school children came home
for dinner. It was the custom to cook large quantities
of many vegetables and at least two breads for this
meal. Yeast bread was called light bread and corn
bread was corn pone, corn dodgers, hoecake, or hush
puppies . Even in small families, large meals were
prepared at midday. One could never tell how many
people might drop in. In big families, the cook customarily
went to her own garden or to the curb market ,
now called the farmers' marker , to lay in a big
supply of vegetables and fruit. Usually, enough was
cooked for supper, too. However, if everything came
out even with nothing left over, the meal came out like
Willie Ross's fish . If some foold was particularly tasty,
beyond delicious, it was larruping . If someone ate too
much, he had a hog's bait . The word bait used as a
noun meaning sufficiency is given in few language
references. In Southern parlance, a bait ment more
than enough. A hog's bait was a gluttonous plenty.
She has more than she can say grace over, was another
expression which seems to have disappeared.
Even though it refers to grace before meat and thus
means that the materfamilias has more people to feed
than she can manage, the term was used in many situations
of someone whose load was too heavy.
If a child, in early attempts at cookery, made a
mess, it was a mommick or a begarm , both of which
were used as noun and verb. However, the word bollix ,
meaning to bungle, was used only as a verb. Bollix
is the only one of the three terms listed in most language
references. It is a safe bet that many who use
the term bollix (informal) do not know that it is a variant
spelling of ballocks (vulgar) testes.
Before store-bought clothing was available, homemade
was the rule. During a fitting, if something was
too tight, it was as tight as Dick's hat band and would
have to be altered. Girls learned to sew at an early
age. For some it was a slow and tedious business, but
others picked it up fast and sewed with a red hot needle
and a burning thread . Although it is standard to
use the adverb directly for right away, it is not used as
much now in American English as formerly. I'll be
there directly, sometimes contracted to treckly, was
frequently heard as was in three shakes of a dead
sheep's tail , a colorful hunorous variant on the usual in
two shakes of a lamb's tail .
A bossy woman was the old ballyo (bell ewe?),
and of a person who put on airs, it was said, She's got
a b-i-g place . If plans went haywire, they went skywest
and crooked . Children were warned not to go at
some task with main strength and awkwardness or
not to go whalestaving at some job. When youngsters
overdid some subject, they were told not to make
a blowing horn of it .
In the early days of TV, dancing groups blanketed
the air waves. This early dancing was fairly frenzied
gyrating which S.J. Perelman labeled fire-in-awhorehouse
choreography. Oldsters called it didapping :
Why are they didapping all over the place like
that, some would ask.
Few things are as crude as antiquated slang; consider
the terms dandy-funk and hambeaters , circa
1910. Some men, it was said, wore dandy-funk on
their hambeaters. Dandy-funk is perfume and hambeaters
are the long tails of a swallow-tailed coat,
widely worn during that period. Another relic of that
period, not heard any more, is the call to children for
household help: Come quick and see old Ringdie!
The source is unknown; perhaps it originated when a
dog named Ring was in his death throes and the family
were being called. Ringdie was said as one word,
and the call was made if one wanted quick response.
Some of the common comparisons were: slow as
the seven-year itch, mad as a biting sow, though as
withleather, fierce as a boar hog, flat as a flitter , and
hot as flugens . Neither fitter (in this sense) nor flugens
appears in any readily available American dialect
reference, nor do they appear to be related to
German words of similar sound. Nor does the prized
gold monkey . If a person, an employee, for example,
was highly valued, it was said, His boss wouldn't trade
him of a gold monkey.
Every child learned the right way to spell Mississippi:
M, i, crooked letter, crooked letter, i, crooked letter,
crooked letter, i, humpback, humpback, i .
The earlier generation of males wanted hot biscuits
for breakfast and spoke disparagingly of baker's
bread as wasps' nests . Skim milk was blue John , a
widely used term. Also common was the term Yankee
dime , as in not worth a Yankee dime. This regionalism
was used mainly at Christmas: if a person
wanted to make it clear he had not given a friend (?)
a gift, he would say, I gave him a Yankee dime. The
term means a kiss but was used disparagingly, as in to
kiss off . Not in any reference work I checked, it is
probably a relic of Southern attitudes after the Civil
War, as is the term gone to Lincoln . The latter refers
to property which had been appropriated because the
home ovwner had not paid taxes on it.
The South was indeed the Bible Belt, as H.L.
Mencken labeled it. However not only the South, but
the whole country was caught up in religious revivalism
during the early decades of the century. The best-known
national revivalists were William Jennings Bryan
and William A. Billie Sunday. But there were hundreds
of lesser-known revivalists whose teams blanketed
the South. These revivals usually lasted two
weeks and were also called rotracted meetings .
During the summers, every city and small town had
its revival tent where repentant sinners walked down
the aisle, the sawdust trail , to the mourners' bench for
prayer and sometimes emotional repentance. Ordinary
people, especially children, genuinely tried to be
good in word and deed. The children were probably
damaged beyond repair because they were not allowed
to take the Lord's name in vain, or to swear, i.e., use
words like devil and hell . Instead of devil , they were to
say the bad man , and instead of hell, the bad place .
Churchgoers were told not to call anyone a fool no
matter how justified the label because there was an injuction
against it in the Bible. (Matthew 5:22)
Keeping the Sabbath was also important. Respectable
people never did a washing on Sunday. And as
for sewing on Sunday, the old superstition stated that if
a person sewed on Sunday, the devil would make the
sinner rip every stitch with his/her nose. Of course,
no one took this seriously. However, two New England
superstitions were taken seriously. One, known also in
Europe, warned against giving knives as gifts: they
would cut the friendship. The other warned against
watching a parting guest out of sight: bad luick would
ensue. Another superstition warned a woman contemplating
marriage, Change the name and not the letter,
change for worse and not for better.
In the old days, a standard farewell was, You
keep out of meanness, hear? Though it was often
used jokingly, it was the equivalent of the current
Have a good day.
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Anti-Language
If the chief use of language is to communicate, it
might come as a surprise to note a few of the
times when language is used specially to confuse
and alienate.
Anti-languages do just this: their reason for existence
is to ensure secrecy by being understood by
only a small band of people. Once too many people
have cracked the code — most important, when those
who have done so are in some way opposed to the
anti-language's users — the language becomes obsolete
and dies.
Linguistically speaking, an anti-language is
formed by a process of relexicalization, which is substituting
new words for old. The grammar of the original
language is kept, but a distinctive vocabulary
develops, quite often when referring to activities or
areas important to the subculture that the creating the
language. Established society usually has its nose put
slightly out of joint in the process.
John S. Farmer, co-editor of Slang and Its Analogues ,
wrote in 1890, The borderland between slang
and the Queen's English is an ill-defined territory, the
limits of which have never been clearly mapped out.
Other linguists who have taken on the chalenge of
doing so include Jonathan Green, Hotten, Grose,
William and Mary Morris, Wentworth and Flexner,
and Eric Partridge, who published the first edition of
his enormous Dictionary of Slag and Unconvential
English in 1937. Further back, as long ago as 1792,
Friedrich Ch. Laukhard wrote, It is common knowledge
that students have a language that is quite peculiar
to them and that is not understood very well
outside student society.... But if the code of behaviour
somewhere is particularly lievly, then the language
of the students is all the richer for it—and vice
versa.
Convicts shipped to Australia spoke a criminal
argot described by James Hardy Vaux as flash language
in his New and Comprehensive Vocabulary of
the Flash Language of 1812. Vaux, in fact, was criminal
himself, but also a linguist; transported to the
colonies three times, he used the journeys as opportunities
for research. Most of the words he lists (swag
being a notable exception) did not pass into mainstream
Australian English. Possibly some exist in the
criminal underword to this day.
Let us look at the modern underworld. In a
friendly manner two men are talking in the presence
of third man, an impostor — a detective or an investigative
reporter — who believes he has infiltrated their
ranks. His problem is that the first two are aware of
his deception. The first man says to the second, Shall
we clear up this mess? No, the second replies,
we'll leave it for the cleaner. Little does the impostor
know that he has just been sentenced to death,
for what was really said was, Shall we kill him? No,
we'll leave it to a professional. A cleaner is a hired
gun, an assassin — or at least it was until recently.
Now the definition is too well known, and it will
shortly be dropping away. Cleaner is a word which
adheres to the second principle of an anti-language:
the word employed in the process of relexicalzation
should not itself be conspicuous.
A great deal of argot appears to be ordinary language
— not only in the English-speaking sunderworld.
In india a sentence that translates into English as Go
clean the bowl is used by a murderer to an associate in
front of a victim. It means Prepare a grave. (Note
the similar links between murder and hygiene.) Few
studies, however, have been made into the language
of underground groups, not least because of the dangers
to researchers. We know that the language of the
Calcuttan underworld contains more than forty words
for police and more than twenty for bomb . Often,
the meanings of such code words are detected and
then they promptly go out of use; sometimes, they
are not detected at all.
The same is true of the anti-language of prisoners.
Considerably more is known about grypserka —
the anti-language of Polish prisoners — than about any
English-speaking system, but even that knowledge is
incomplete and out-of-date.
The alternative, second life inside Polish prisons
involves a complex caste system of people and suckers ,
categories determined by the type of offence involved
and the length of incarceration. Movement within
the hierarchy depends on sticking to the rules of a
game in which grypserka figures prominently. An inmate
is downgraded to sucker by breaking the rules,
one of which is never, ever, to reveal the secrets of the
anti-language, no matter what pardon or privilege is
offered. It is a concept well known in all prison systems.
In England a prisoner would be grassing .
English prison slang is readily enough available in any
prison drama or comedy: screw is a guard, snout is
tobacco, nonce is a child molester or other sex offender,
and nick or porridge is prison itself. This is
not anti-language, for we all understand it. This outdated
prison slang is used almost nostalgically, in the
same way that some people still employ Cockney
rhyming slag (which was once itself an anti-language).
Anti-language is not easy to define as it does not
have rigid rules to which a subculture's inventions
must conform. Nor is it easy to determine its origins,
although historically an argot known as pelting speech
was employed by bands of ne'er-do-wells in Elizabethan
England. There were over twenty terms for
varying types of vagabond: rogue, prigger of prancers
horse thief, counterfeit crank , and bawdy basket are
but a few.
Both then and now, new vocabulary in key areas
lead to finer distinctions in meaning than are found
in the parent language. There are many synonyms,
and for the speakers there is the comfort that comes
with the freedom to discuss illegal acts in public
places.
While slang is not itself anti-language, it exhibits
some of its tendencies. Slag has as many divisions as
the English language has dialects. Youth slag, soldier
slang, actor slang, gay slang, CB slang — the list is
endless. And every gang wants its own argot, a test by
which a potential recruit can be measured: if you don't
know the language, very often you cannot get in; or, if
you are already in, not knowing the latest key words
can be disastrous for your credibility.
Slang is a means of unification; for those who use
it, it is fun, unconventional, and sassy. What is more,
it can be witty, picturesque, metaphoric. How it differs
from anti-language is that while it often intends to
subvert, it does so by being understood (at least in
part) by the world at large. Where the purpose of
anti-language is to be secretive, slang is often offensive.
It is used by those4 who want it to be known that
they are a clique — not dangerous people or criminals,
row.
It is important to remember, however, that what
survives of this generation's slang may bacome the
next generation's standard English. Bus was the slang
term for omnibus, zoo for zoological gardens , and
piano for pianoforte .
The board slang once used on Citizens' Band
radio has similarities with anti-language, although
even the police more often regarded CB users as eccentric
nuisances than criminals. The users, however,
revelled in their outlawed status; the police were well
represented in the CB lexis. They were bears or
smokeys ; police station, a bear cage or cave ; a police
helicopter, a bear in the air . Police using radar were
kojaks with kadaks . More confusingly, a police car
was a jam sandwich or a bubble-gum machine . The
way CB expressions run along metaphorical pathways
is reminiscent of pelting speech. Blood wagon or
meat wagon ambulance and dragging wagon tow
truck are like the much earlier crashing cheats teeth,
smelling-cheat nose, and belly cheat apron, where
cheat means thing to do with.
Teenage slang in England in this decade has been
strongly influenced by African and American cultures,
by immigration, and by cinema. Wrongly accused of
being a lazy language, youth slag is, in fact, as complex
and rhythmic as any dialect. The words man,
well hard, wicked , and swear-words are not simply
idle padding for a sentence, they are an
intrinsic part of the language. That so many adults
disapprove of the way the youth communicate is precisely
what keeps this variety of slang going.
This leads to the issue of talking Black. Linguistically,
Black English has origins in Caribbean
(mainly Jamaican) Creole. Black English, a patois,
does not vary much from region to region and belongs
to an ethnically defined social group. In Black
sittings its use ensures soldarity between speakers; in
White or mixed sittings the use of the patois symbolizes
social distance from mainstream society and an
assertion of ethnic identity. The more linguistically
distinct the sounds of a patois, the more it can come
to symbolize social distance. Here is approaches the
status of anti-language. For some Black speakers,
talking Black provides a system of resistance on a linguistic
level to a powerful social order.
It has long since been noted that when two people
who come from different social backgrounds
meet, there is often a tendency for their speech to
alter, so that they become more alike, a process known
as accommodation or convergence. Its opposite — divergence
— occurs when people wish to stress their
personal, social, religious, or sexual identity; divergence
takes on a position of confrontation, though is
often said to be a result of the speaker's pride. Anti-language
is divergence on a grand scale, and most varieties
of slang are at least sympathetic to the
philosophy and purposes of anti-language.
Are we faced with the paradox in which groups of
English speakers effectively use different languages?
Very unlikely. But perhaps there will be a rethinking
of the word communication and an instinctive scintilla
of caution when communicating outside one's social
group.
The Grockles of Goodrington
On the 25th of May 1995 a character in The
Archers , BBC Radio's long-running country
soap, mentioned spending the weekend preparing
Lower Loxley for an influx of grockles on Monday.
The Archers is set in the Midlands, but it seems the
word grockle has trqanscended its southwestern connections
and become a widely distributed informal
term for tourist, summer visitor, or holidaymaker.
By extension, it can mean nonresident, nonlocal, or
outsider. Tony Thorne's Bloomsbury Dictionary of
Contemporary Slang (1990) claims that it has been
adopted by non-native hippies and travellers living in
the West Country to refer to anyone who is not approved
of.
The OED2e labels grockle as dialect and slang, of
uncertain origin , and mildly disparaging , as well as associating
it especially with southwest England. It provides
eight citations from 1964 to 1986, including
John Fowels' novel Daniel Martin , and another referring
to the Isle of Weight. In Cornwall the word
emmet is used with exactly the same meaning and is
likewise labelled mildly disparaging by the OED ,
which gives two citations, both of which include
grockle , from 1975 and 1984. Its meaning is presumably
transferred from the basic sense ant. Indeed, the
writer quoted in the 1984 citation [ Listener 20 Sept.
23/1] regarded it, in comparison with grockle , as less
difficult and more vivid because its true meaning is
ant. The Bloomsbury Dictionary claims it has been
used in Cornwall since the 1950s.
There have been various attempts to illuminate
the uncertain origin of grockle , from the fanciful to
the plausible. An Exeter University academic once
speculated, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, that it might come
from the Latin graeculus , translated as Greekling with
a derogatory flavour. It has often been derives from the
name of the clown Grock, an allusion to the red sunburnt
noses of seaside holidaymakers. That is the version
given in The Dictionary of Contemporary Slang , by
Jonathon Green (Pan Books 1984, rev. ed. 1992):
The term originated in the West Country, specifically
Torbay, where a local remarked that the stream of
visitors to the town resembled little Grocks, or
clowns...
A most detailed and circumstantial account of its
genesis, which more than a little impresses me, also
traces its origin to the Torbay area and a comic, but
not of the Grock variety. This version claims that
grockle was the spontaneous coinage of a worker in
the southwest holiday trade, prompted by an early
memory of a picture story in a children's comic.
Between 1952 and 1960 Arthur Rivers, then in his
twenties and Londoner by birth, was in charge of
the boating-lake at Goodrington, a district of Paignton
in Devon, now part of Torbay. In the summer of 1955
or 1956, Mr Rivers saw among the customers a tiny
old lady with beady eyes, a pointed nose and a ruddy,
weatherbeaten, pinched-up face. He was so struck by
her appearance that he observed to his assistant that
the old lady was like a little grockle. His assistant,
not surprisingly, replied, What the hell's a grockle?
Mr Rivers explained that he had been reminded of a
figure from a picture serial he had once read, called
Jimmy and his Grockle . The grockle was a small dragonlike
creature with magic powers. Mr rivers tells
me that he could not recall the name of the comic,
when he had seen it, and even whether it was British
or an American import.
The old lady and the three equally diminutive
adults and two small children in her North Country
group regularly visited the boating-lake during their
holiday, and the staff took a fancy to the expression Mr
Rivers had used and would say things like Your
grockle family's here and so on. The term survived
the departure of the originals and was soon consciously
adopted for all the holidaying patrons, mainly
from the Midlands and North, by the large number of
seasonal employees at the lake. Mr Rivers' assistant,
Freddie Fly, wrote an Ode to the Grockle and the
coaches bringing the tourists were christened grockle
wagons . Mr Rivers has emphasized to me that the
word was not then used in a disparaging way, but
more as a kind of professional in-joke, with about the
same force as the now universal punter client, customer,
part of the verbal comaraderie of a lively band
of young workers.
The word became current among the families of
the boating-lake's local staff and outlasted the season
to be acquired later by other holiday trade people in
the area, such as the Paignton-born novelist and local
columnist Brian Carter. In an article in Torbay's
Herald Express (May 1993), he remembered hearing
grockle for the first time in the late 1950s when working
on the Goodrington promenade. From there it
would inevitably spread to Paignton and Torquay, the
towns which, with Brixham, now make up Torbay.
By the early 1960s Freddie Fly had become a
barman at a Brixham pub and there met a writer,
Peter Draper, who was working on a screenplay for a
flim based on the adventures of seasonal workers in
the holiday industry. He picked up Freddie Fly's use
of grockle to add authenticity to his script. The flim,
starring Oliver Reed, was released in Britain in 1964
as The System — the system being one to pull
birds — and in the US as The Girl-Getters , a more
explicit rendering of the same idea. This was the first
national publicity for the hitherto local expression,
and the OED's first citation of grockle is, in fact, from
Flims & Fliming , 31 October 1964, extracted from a
review of what is presumably The System .
In the same year Pan Books published a halfcrown
paperback novelization by John Burke of Peter
Draper's screenplay. The text contained the film's extended
dialogue explanation of grockle (including
grockle-comforter for transistor raido and grocklebox
for cheap camera) as well as its other passing
references, but added about fifteen more in the narrative,
with an example between quotation marks in
the back-cover blurb. It may be that in pre-video
days these appearances in print, after the film had
ended its run in the cinema, played a part in the
spread of the expression during the res of the 1960s.
The word was certainly hard to escape in the
Torbay area in the early 1970s, and by then often had
a derisive flavour, as friction increased between young
locals and young summer visitors. Hence Look at
those bloody grockles! from some trawlerman was
my own first encounter with it as I took a party of
Swiss students round Brixham. Stickers reading Nongrockle
could sometimes be seen in the rear windows
of cars as an assertion of local identity. The word had
also spawned more extensions, like grock-trap shop
selling tourist sovenirs. The Daily Telegraph of 12
August 1986 (the last of the OED's citations) also gives
grockle fodder fish and chips, grockle bait tourist
souvenirs, and grockle nests camp sites.
In 1993 Arthur Rivers, who had become the landlord
of a Paignton pub, took part in a Radio Four programme
with Peter Draper, Brian Carter, and an
OED representative. At the end, the presenter
handed Mr Rivers a photocopy from a 1937 issue of
The Dandy , a British weekly children's comic. The
page heading was Jimmy and His Grockle , so Mr
Rivers was able to validate and localize the memory
that had floated to the surface of his mind in the mid
1950s. Grockle turned out to be onomatopoeic, being
all the little dragon ever said.
The first number of The Dandy , published by D.
C. Thomson of Dundee, was dated 4 December 1937,
when Arthur Rivers would have been six or seven
years old. However, Jimmy and his Grockle had
started in 1932 as a conventional serial story in another
Thomson children's publication, The Rover , before
being tracslated into picture strip form in 1937.
It ran again in the D.C. Thomson comic Sparky from
1966 to 1976.
Perhaps it was The System that helped grockle
to beome so far-flung and win out over the allegedly
more vivid but today still Cornwall-confined emmet .
But I personally would speculate that the unknown
creator of Jimmy and his Grockle in the early 1930s
keew the sort of word that resonates in children's
memories. Could a further reason for the word's success
be that it rhymes with the name of a kind of edible
molluse that is a traditional feature of British
seaside holidays? It clearly seems to have appealed to
the writer of some verses in Shooting Times &
Country Magazine for 14 August 1975 — not spotted
by the OED — which ran in part:
There are the like in other lands,
But here they call them grockles
And feed them on the summer sands
Ice-cream and rock and cockles.
Latter-day English
When Joseph Smith announced to the world in the
early 19th century that he had seen God, and gave
to the world his Golden Bible (The Book of Mormon) , he
certainly introduced some radical new theologh. However,
as his followers, presecuted and harried out of the estern
US to the godforsaken wastes of what is now Utah, then
proceeded in build Zion as they made the desert bloom,
they and their descendants have also contributed some
unique words to the English language (or, in some cases,
some unique twists on existing words).
A full exposition of strictly doctrinal terms is beyond
the scope of this article because such a listing would entail
a detailed examination of Mormon doctrine. Speaking of
Mormon doctrine, the term, used as a general-purpose
noun, adjective, and adverb, as an unofficial designation for
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its adherents,
and comes from The Book of Mormon , a book
that Joseph Smith claims to have translated from gold
plates goven to him by an angle. The book claims to be a
parallel to the Bible, but pertaining to the New World, and
relates the religious history of several groups of people.
Talking about the book in a scholarly way in somewhat
like discussing Tolkien's works, which also contain a richly
developed cultural world. In Tolkien's case it is self-evident
that his Lord of the Rings trilogy is a work of fiction, and
non-Moromons would probably assign the Book of
Mormon to the same category; but faithful Mormons take
its truth seriously (whether strictly historical on one end of
a spectrum to mythologically symbolic on the other end),
albeit of faith. This is by way of pointing out that Mormon
was the name of the major editor of the book, and it was
named after him, although he did not write the whole
book.
Whether Mormon was historical figure or a fictional
Character is a matter of faith, but many of the
names in the book do have roots in Near Estern languages,
for whatever reason. Several of the personal
names in the book are popular boys' names amongst
Mormon families today; especially popular are Jared
(which is also the name of an obscure Biblical personage,
but the Book of Mormon character has a far
greater profile), Helaman and Nephi . Current place
names in Utah that come from the Book of Mormon include:
Bountiful, Lehi, Nephi, Manti, Moroni , and
Deseret (town, not the territory). There are numerous
Biblical names as well: Paradise, Jordan River, West
Jordan, Goshen, Ephraim, Zion National Park, Joseph,
Mount Carmel , and Moab , as well as places named after
early leaders and settlers Brigham City, Grantsville,
Heber City and others. The Jordan River is so called
because the geography of Utah resembles that of Palestine:
Lake Utah drains via the Jordan River into the
Great Salt Lake, just as the Sea of Galilee drains via the
Jordan River into the salty Dead Sea. Old World Zion
and New World Zion are thus mirror images of each
other. The names of two towns, American Fork and
Spanish Fork bear special mention because of a peculiarity
of Utah pronunciation especially rural pronunciation:
locally these towns are known as American Fark
and Spanish Fark, respectively.
An intriguing example of a Book of Mormon place
name is Desert , which was a very popular name in Mormondom
in the 19th century. Utah was not allowed to
enter the Union until long after it had achieved the minimum
requirements for statehood (1896) because
Americans at the time abhorred the Mormon practice of
polygamy (called plural marriage in Latter-day English).
Having more than one wife was all right: Gentiles (nonMormons)
just disapproved of having them all at the same
time! Speaking of Gentiles , there is a story (perhaps apocryphal)
that the famous Israeli general and archaeologist,
Yigael Yadin, once prefaced a speech at the University of
Utah with the observation, You know, this is probably the
only place I can come and be a Gentile!
The territory that preceded the state of Utah
(named after the Ute Indians) was called the Territory
of Desert . It is a term for the promised land in the
Book of Mormon and is supposed to mean land of the
honeybee. It has been speculated that the word is related
to the Egyptian d”rt , a term for the Red Crown of
Upper Egypt, whose emblem was the bee. In the 19th
century these was a Deseret Industries . The hive is
the symbol of Utah and appears on its coat-of-arms.
The territory of Desert covered an area much larger
than the modern-day state of Utah: parts of Nevada,
California, Arizona, Idoho, Wyoming, and Colorado
were all part of Desert at one time. A non-contiguous
part of the Mormon empire is Mormon Country , an
area of southern Alberta, Canada, which was settled by
Mormons in the late 19th century refugees from US
marshals looking for polygamists).
Several doctrinal terms bear mentioning. Mormons
(or Latter-day Saints , as well call ourselves-not out of a
sense of spiritual superiority, it is to be hoped, but because
of a reference of St. Paul's to the members of the ancient
church being called saints) have two basic types of
religious buildings: chapels and temples and they are as different
as synogogues and temples are in Judaism. A chapel
is a meeting house, but the area of assembly for worship
withinthe chapel building is alson called a chapel .
Traditionally there is also a cultural hall , which serves as
everything from an overflow for the chapel, a basketball
court, an area for dramatic and musical productions, and
a hall for wedding receptions. The main Sunday meeting
— the counterpart to Catholic mass — is called sacrament
meeting , sacrament in the Mormon sense being
one specific sacrament only: what other christians called
the Eucharist. A temple is a building where, as a rule, no
meetings are held but where Mormons go for certain ceremonies,
including vicarious ordinances (ordinances on be
half of one's ancestors), for celestial marriages (technically,
celestial marriage is the institution of marriage that extends
past death, as generally understood, and the wedding
ceremony itself is called a temple marriage ), and a
place where one receives one's endowment . An endowment
in this case is a ceremony at which one ritualizes
one's place in the universe, both with respect to God and
with respect to one's extended family. There are also tabernacles ,
which are large meeting places for special-purpose
meetings-the best-known one is; of course, the tabernacle
where the Mormon Tabernacle Choir is based, on Temple
Square , in Salt Lake City.
When Joseph Smith's successor, Brigham Young,
founded Desert/Utah, he sent colonists out to places as far
away as Colonia Juarez, Mexico; Cardston, Alberta,
Canada; San Bernardino, California, and all over Wyoming,
Idoho, Nevada, and Arizona. All of these colonies were set
up in the same way, with streets wide enough to ensure a
full team of oxen could turn around. The towns were organized
politically in a way presious Mormon colonies in
the estern states (Kirtland, Ohio, and Nauvoo, Illinois)
were, into stakes and words . The image of the stake comes
from the stakes used to hold up the tabernacle in Old
Testament days; today it corresponds roughly to a diocese,
and is a collection of words. The word started out as a political
subdivision, just like wards in most North American
cities, but became the equivalent of a parish. Stakes are
headed by a stake president , a volunteer official (there is no
professional clergy), and wards are headed by a bishop .
All males from twelve years of age are eligible to
hold the priesthood ant it is this semi-universal priesthood
that governs the church (with participation by women in
some administrative roles, but outside the context of the
priesthood itself) and conducts its rituals. The priesthood
is divided into the Aaronic Priesthood , for young men
from twelve to eighteen, and the Melchizedek Priesthood
for adult males. Each branch is divided into three offices:
Decons are 12-13; Teachers are 14-15; Priest are 16-17;
and the Melchizedek Priesthood is divided horizontally
into three offices: Elders (you might have met some awfully
yound Elders on your doorstep... ), Seventies , and
high Priests . The imagery comes from the time when
Moses went up Mt. Sinai, leaving a group of seventy at
one point and the edlers of Israel behind them. Moses
himself was, of course, the high priest.
Slang terms, unofficial terms and humour abounds
within Mormondom. The humour column of an unofficial
scholarly publication, Sunstone , in called Oxymormons.
Women are referred to institutionally as the Relief Society ,
after the name of their auxiliary organization (founded by
Joseph Smith's wife, Emma, it claims to be America's oldest
women's organization). To hold the priesthood is a euphemism
for any sort of physical affection displayed by
women towards men (since all men, at least in principle,
are members of the priesthood); the Word of Wisdom is a
reference to Mormons' dietary laws (which prohibit smoking,
alcohol, drugs, and caffeine-containing hot drinks);
Primary is a reference to children up to the age of eleven
(as with the Relief Society, this is an example of the name
of the organization being extended generally to its members).
Mormonism has a relatively well-defined theology,
but even in such a centralized body of thought there is
bound to be a specturm of beliefs and social attitudes.
What Gentiles would call liberals and called liahonas by
Mormons, and conservatives are called iron-rodders ,
both terms coming from Book of Mormon images.
And finally, what about splinter groups, without which
no self-respecting religious group would be complete?
Mormons who do not practice their religion are called
Jack Mormons , the largest schismatic group, The
Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints ,
(note the difference in spelling of latter-day) who did not
follow what they call the Utah Mormons out west, but
stayed in Missouri, are called Reorganites , and although
Mormons have their share of fundamentalists, to call
someone a fundamentalist in Mormondom is to accuse
him of being a closet polygamist. The practice of polygamy
was outlawed just before the turn of the century, but
polygamous families persist down to the present day. One
has to admit, these terms represent an improvement over
one term that used to be applied to Missourians during the
days of persecution in the mid-19th century (the Missouri
state legislature still had an official Mormon extermination
order on its books until someone discovered it in the
archives in the 1970s): they were affectionat4ely known as
Pukes .
The Meaning of Murder
In the 1991 Gulf War, supporters of Saddam Hussien
cheered when SCUD missile fell on Tel Aviv, calling
George Bush a murderer for having bombed Baghdad.
At the same time, supporters of George Bush, who had
cheered when US planes bombed Baghdad, called
Saddam Hussein a murderer for bombing Tel Aviv.
Both sides agreed on what they meant by the word
murderer , mut they made opposite judgments as to
whom it applied and why. How is that possible and
what does it tell us about how language works?
Murder differs from kill in involving the notion of
justification. To say that one person kills another is to
say that the first deprives the second of life; but to say
that a person murders another is to say the depriving is
unjustified. This raises the questions, What does justified
mean and How does one justify judgments about it?
Justified falls among a class of words that also includes
what linguists call modals ; the most notable of
these are must, should , and can . Despite their apparent
definiteness, the meanings of such words involve
an element of indeterminacy that someewhat
resembles ambiguity.
Must assets that there are laws and facts that
jointly necessitate some occurrence, either already
completed or yet to be brought about, without specifying
exactly what those laws and facts are. For example,
the context in which sentence (1) originally
appears makes it clear that the author intends it to express
a historical necessity already in place, based on
the law that time moves forward and on the fact that
a lot of time has passed.
(1) Although precise figures must remain elusive,
according to the best current estimates a total of
10 to 11 million living slaves crossed the Atlantic
Ocean from the sixteenth through the nineteenth
century.
[Kolchin, Peter, American Slavery: 1619-1877,
Hill and Wang, 1993.]
However, the sentence could just as well have
appeared in a government report expressing an admonition
to keep the numbers secret, based on the
fact that numbers of such magnitude would anger the
slaves' descendents and on an assumed law to the effect
that sufficient provocation caused people to rebel.
Neither must itself nor the sentence as a whole provides
the slightest clue as to which of these inter pretation
is intended. Only the context makes that clear.
Should means the same as must , except that it
leaves room for loopholes that avoid the asserted necessity
in new or unusual circumstances. For example,
(2) and (3) progvide ways around the necessities
(1) asserts, on its reprective historical and admonitory
interpretations.
(2) Although precise figures should remain elusive
(under normal circumstances), major new discoveries
of slave-holders' journals and artifacts
will enable us to compute exact totals.
(3) Although precise figures should remain elusive
(under normal circumstances), publishing the
figures in the current climate of suspicion will
clear the air, defuse anger, and enable people to
move on.
Can is related to must in being what logicians
call its dual . Whereas must says there are laws and
facts that necessitate some occurrence, can asserts
that whatever laws and facts there are, some occurrence
is permitted (or possible). One consequence of
this relation is the fact that though can and must have
very different meanings, cannot and must not are synonymous.
For example, (4) has can where (5) has
must , but the meanings of their respective sentences
are the same.
(4) Dr. Larssen, you cannot let it get you down to
the point where it affects your work. You can
not.
[Turtledove, Harry, World War: Tilting the
Balance, Ballantine, 1995.]
(5) Dr. Larssen, you must not let it get you down
to the point where it affects your work. You
must not.
Negating a sentence containing must keep the
necessity claim intact, negating only the verb, whereas
negating a sentence containing can keep the verb intact,
negating only the permission (or possibility). To
say x cannot v is to say x must not-v. To say x can
v is to deny x must not-v.
Justified is, in effect, a hybrid of must and can .
Like must , it asserts the existence of laws and facts,
but like can it expresses permission, rather than necessity.
To say that some action is justified is to say
there are laws and facts that permit it, whereas can expresses
permission for whatever laws and facts there
are. To say that some action is not justified is to say
that the action is prohibited whatever the laws and
facts are.
So to murder is to kill in a way that is prohibited
whatever the laws and facts are. To deny that a killing
is murder is to claim there are laws and factsa that permit
it. Those who cheered for George Bush, instead
of calling him murderer, based their judgment on
what they took to be a law regarding the sanctity of
national borders and on the fact that Iraqi troops had
violated such a border by invading a neighboring
country. Thoses who cheered for Saddam Hussein,
instead of calling him a murderer, based their judgment
on a law regarding the sovereignty of national
government and on what they took to be the fact
that the borders his forces had crossed were imposed
by Western colonialists without the consent of the inhabitants.
Obviously, none of this sheds any light at all on
which of the sides, if either, was correct. It does help
to explain how people can talk past each other, using
the same words in the same language expressing the
same meanings, but interpreting those meanings in
relation to very different frameworks of concepts, beliefs,
expectations, and values.
Kudirat Abiola, 44, was in her car when she was shot
at close range by six gunmen Tuesday morning. She died of
her head wounds two hours later, as did her chauffeur.
[From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel , , p. 10a.
Submitted by .]
The caretakers must be physically strong, and have
enough stamina to tote groceries and supplies up hill, and
garbage down hill. Weedeating is mandatory. [From the
United States Lighthouse Society Bulletin , , p. 1.
Submitted by ]
The truth is that the SAS consists of...men who have
fought and died in the western desert, in Borneo, Malaya...
[From an article by Andy McNab in The Sunday Times , . Submitted by .]
Last week, in the High Court, The Sunday Times
apologised to Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, the former
Malaysian minister of finance and now leader of one of the
main opposition parties, over an article published in
February 1994 in which it was alledged that as a representative
of the then Malaysian government, he had sought to
procure special payments from a major British company to
secure the continued progress of a construction project in
Malaysia. In a further feature on The Malaysian Affair
(March 13, 1994), the allegation was repeated and the article
further suggested that he might have had a corrupt connection
with a $600m banking fraud in Hong Kong, the
death of a bank auditor and the false imprisonment of a
Malaysian businessman as part of a cover-up.
...We now accept without reservation that the serious
allegations mentioned above should never have been
made and as stated in open court last week, apologise unreservedly
to Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah for any distress
and embarrassment caused by the articles. We have furthere
agreed to pay him a substaintial sum by way of compensation
and his costs and have undertaken not to repeat
the allegations. [From The Sunday Times , , p.
1/21.]
The Staff of Life
Travellers in Spain over teh centuries have always,
consciously or not, emphasized the deep division
existing between townsman and peasant, especially
reflected in the food eaten by one and the other.
The peasant's fare always consisted basically of
bread — V.S. Pritchett in Marching Spain , a journey
made in 1928, seems to have eaten nothing between
towns but hard bread and the occasional doubtful
egg; although paying for it, little else could be offered
him. The peasants themselves often had nothing but
bread or bread and coarse wine. As the faced each
new day, the peasant's first thought was survival for
himself and his family for another twenty-four hours.
For them bread was life. Through the years popular
sayings grew up reflecting this obsession with that
one food, applied to the daily philosophy of life.
Passed from village to village, from hearthside to field
and tavern, losing a word here, gaining one there,
sometimes so badly pronounced as to change sound,
though not sense, the refráin or saying having the almost
sacred pan bread as its foundation came to
form an integral part of country life.
Sanish Popular Saying or refrán
Literal Meaning
Approximate English Proverb
equivalent
Más bueno que el pan Better than bread As good as gold (children)
To be kindness itself (adults)
Guardar pan para mayo y le para To put aside bread for May and wood To look at both side of a panny
abril for April
Coger a uno con las manos en la masa To catch someone with his hands in the To be caught in the act
dough
Al pan, y al vino, vino To bread, bread and to wine, wine To call a spade a spade
Amasando se hace el pan Kneading makes bread All things come to those who wait
Tan buen pan hacen aqui como en As good bread is made here as in There are as good fish in the sea as
Francia France ever came out of it
Con pan y queso nadie se pone obeso Nobody gets fat on bread and cheese Too much of one thing is good for
nothing
Quien con hambre se acuesta con pan Whoever goes to bed hungry dreams of To have a bee in one's bonnet
sueña bread
Quien con hambre se acuesta con pan sueña Whoever is hungry dreams of bread Same as above
Quien do pan a perro ajeno, pierde el Whoever gives bread to an unknown Land and lose — so play fools
pan y el perro dog loses bread and dog
Pan, pan, muchos lo toman y pocos lo Bread, bread, many take it, few give it Charity begins at home
dan
Por dinero baila el can, y por pan, si se The dog dances for money and for Needs must when the devid drives and
lo dan bread if given it Money talks
Media vida es la candela; pan y vino la Half of life is fire; bread and wine the Count your blessing
otra media other half
Mucho te quiero, perrito, pero pan I love you well, little dog, but with little A long tongue is a sign of a short hand
poquito bread
No hay vida como la del pobre, There is no life like the poor man's who The greatest wealth is contentment
teniendo pan que le sobre has too much bread with a little
Pan con pan, comida de tontos Bread with bread, food for fools Variety is the spice of life
Nunca buen pan de mala harina Never good bread from bad flour Ill beef ne'er made good broth
Bien sé lo que dogo cuando pan pido I well know what I say when I ask for Every man is best known to himself
bread
El pobre que pide pan, carne toma si se The poor man asking for bread will They that have no other meat, bread
lo dan take meat if it is given and butt are glad to eat
Desde los tiempos de Adán, unos recogen Since Adam's days, some gather the Some reap what others have sown
el trigo y otros se comen el pan wheat and others eat the bread
Pan ajeno ilunca es tierno Another's bread is never fresh Envy never enriched any man
Pan ajeno caro cuesta Another's bread costs dear Another's bread costs dear
Agua fria y pan caliente, nunca Cold water and hot bread never made a Oil and water never mix
hicieron buen vientre good belly
A pan dure, diente agudo To hard bread a sharp tooth Necessity is the mother of invention
Abuen hambre no hay pan duro ni To a good hunger no bread is hard nor Beggars can't be choosers or Hunger is
falta salsa ninguna sauce is needed the best sauce
A buen hambre no hay pan duro To a sharp hunger no bread is hard Hunger is the teacher of many
Para viuda hambriento no hay pan For the widow and the hungry no Hunger finds no fault with the cooking
duro bread is hard
Pan no mío me quitta el hastío Bread that isn't mine takes away He that serves everybody is paid by
bordeom nobody
Eso es pan para hoy y hambre para This is bread for today and hunder for A short-sighted policy
mañana tomorrow
Pan tierno y leña verde, las casa pierde Fresh bread and green firewood lose Two wrongs don't make a right
the house
Contigo pan y cabolla With you, bread and onion Love will find a way
Can pan y vino se anda el camino With bread and wine the way is walked A full stomach makes short work
A falta de pan, buenas son tortas When bread is lacking, pancakes are Half a loaf is better than none
good
Los muchos hijos y el poca pan enseñan Many children and little bread teach Cut your coat accoring to your cloth
a remendar mending
Es un pedazo de pan He/she/you is/are a piece of bread A good person
Ganarse el pan To earn the bread To be the breadwinner
Con su pan se lo coma ! May he eat it with it with bread! Good luck to him/her/you!
El pan nuestro de cade dia Our everyday bread Our daily bread
Es pan comido It is eaten bread It's as easy as pie
Por un mendrugo de pan For a scrap of bread For a bite of eat
Repartirse como el pan bendito To distribute like holy bread To sell like hotcakes
No es lo mismo predicar que dar pan It is not the same to preach as to give Actions speak louder than words
bread
Estar a pan y agua To be on bread and water To be on bread and water
No solo del pan vive el hombre Not only of bread does man live Man does not live by bread alone
Fo Er Si Guo Er and The Cross-Eyed Bear (or: OfOronyms and Other Literary Trompes l'Oeil/Oreille)
Singlish. Sort of (but not really) single? Contemplating
marriage or divorce? Actually Singlish
has nothing to do with one's marital status. It is the
system of writing that the victorious Japanese wanted
to impose on the defeated Australians, New Zealanders,
and Americans at the end of World War II,
forcing them to abandon Latin letters and use Chinese
logographs as phonetic equivalents of English words
instead. As a foretaste of things to come to committee
responsible for implementing this innovation proffered
a Singlish rendition of Lincoln's Gettysburg
Address: (of er si guo er) Four score...
Obviously, this plan never got off the ground. How
could it? Historical facts aside, the Singlish Affair
is the brain-child of John DeFrancis ( The Chinese
Language, Fact and Fantasy , Univ. of Hawaii, 1984), a
parodying bulesque pointing up certain features of languages
in general and of Chinese in particular.
Languages, though glibly spoken and written, often present
formidable problems of perception, both visual
and aural. Thus fo er si guo er , to all appearances
Chinese, is actually pseudo-Chinese nonsense. Only
when one realize its Singlish — that is, English masquerading
as Chinese — does it become intelligible.
Although Singlish is a figment of imagination,
there are many examples of genuine switched writing
systems masquerading as something they are not. In
fact, trans-alphabetism, to coin an appropriate neolo-
gism, goes hand in hand with the history of writing.
The first known graphic system, cuneiform, served as
the common vehicle of expression for not only
Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and Ugaritic,
but also Elamite, Hurrian, Old Persian, and Hittite.
Much later, the Greeks borrowed a foreign alphabet,
Phoenician and adapted it to their needs. The Greek alphabet
was, in turn, used with modifications by the
Lykians, Lydians, Etruscans, Copts, and Slavs.
Transformed by the Romans into the Latin alphabet, it
has since become the most widely used writing system
ever in the history of mankind.
Alongside these examples of mainstream transalphabetism
are other lesser-known curiosities. From
antiquity many such chameleonic switchovers are preserved
on papyrus, parchment, stone, and bone and in
clay, Greek letters serving to write Demotic Egyptian,
Babylonian, Hebrew, Aramaic, Indian, and Latin.
Conversely, Demotic Egyptian signs and Hebrew,
Armenian, and Latin letters were sometimes used to
write Greek. Such trans-alphabetic texts are approximate
phonetic productions written by or for someone
interested in but not capable of reading a particular
language in its proper alphabet. Thus, numerous
trans-alphabetic glossaries—Greek-Latin, LatinGreek,
Hebrew-Latin, Arabic-Coptic, and ArabicGreek—once
thought to be schoolboys' exercises, are
probably elementary aids for tourists, pilgrims, and
businessmen. Even in 10th-century Europe it was
fashionable to write Latin texts employing Greek letters,
Greek being a far more holy language than mundane
Latin. Yet in Greek documents, notaries
appended their names and formulaic closing statements
using Latin letters.
Furthermore, magicians deliberately wrote such
trans-alphabetic words and texts on amulets in order to
project an aura of mystery and impress a credulous
clientele. Thus one finds Egyptian, Hebrew, Aramaic,
Greek/Latin, and other languages disguised in Greek
and Latin letters. Likewise, Hebrew was written in
phonetic Coptic.
Alongside these more pragmatic productions,
trans-alphabetic texts are even found lurking in literature,
both ancient and modern. In one of his comedies,
the Roman playwright Plautus lets a character
declaim in Phoenician on stage. Plautus wrote the
text in phonetic Latin. Mark 15.34 records Christ's
reproach from the cross— eloi, eloi, lamma sabachthani ?—
using Greek letters to transcribe the original
Aramaic. In 1903 a Greek papyrus drama fragment
from Oxyrhyncus (Egypt) was published in which an
Indian appears conversing in his mother tongue. In
1995 a 3rd-century BCE papyrus preserving an unknown
language was found. Both of these languages,
written in phonetic Greek, still await elucidation.
Another ancient oddity is a 4th-century BCE Aramaic
religious text in Demotic script.
Modern translingual jeux d'esprit are Mots
d'Heures Gousses Rames , by Luis d'Antin von Roote
(New York, 1967) in which English masquerades as
French; Brigid Brophy, In Transit (London, 1969);
and the ultimate: Joyce's Ulysses and Finnegans Wake
with their ostensibly English yet polyvalent, transliteral
letter and word groups which punningly play over
no fewer than fifty to sixty languages in Cheshire-catlike,
now-you-see-it-now-you-don't trompes l'oeil .
Apart from these curiosities are the many quite
standard instances of scripts serving to reproduce languages
with which they have no organic relationship
whatsoever. Middle Persian (an Indo-European language)
was written in a form of Aramaic (a Semitic
language). Modern Persian is expressed in Arabic
(Semitic) letters. Yet Maltese, a bonafide Semitic language
is written not in Arabic but in Latin letters.
Turkish, which is neither Semitic nor Indo-European,
was written using Arabic letters until 1928, when
Kemal Ataturk decreed that it thenceforth be written
in Latin letters. Other ancient Turkic languages,
as Arabic and Malayalam in India, were sometimes
written using Syriac (Semitic) characters. Middle
High German, more commonly known as Yiddish, is
written in Hebrew letters, and, when similarly expressed
by means of Hebrew letters, Spanish is called
Ladino. Central Asiatic languages were sometimes
written using Syriac letters. The Copts in Egypt originally
wrote their language (a derivative of pharaonic
Egyptian) in Greek letters; today they read their
prayers in Arabic transcription. Chinese logographs
have been employed for Korean, Japanese, and
Annamese. However, present-day Vietnamese uses
Latin letters, as do many African, Asian, Polynesian,
and Micronesian languages around the world. If the
ancient Romans were to meet up with Latin letters in
modern central Africa, Micro- or Indonesia would be
flummoxed for certain!
That is not to mention the occasional Modern
Greek, Hebrew, Russian, and Chinese transcription of
an English, French, Italian, German, or African word,
name, or place—and vice versa. Run-of-the-mill
trompes l'oeil in every language are foreign words in
disguise: Norwegian byra (French bureau ); Dutch
kadotje (French cadeau + Dutch - tje ); Chinese qiao ke
li (Aztec xocolatl chocolate). Hong Kong and Macau
present what are probably the most egregious examples
of all-pervasive linguistic symbiosis on a daily
basis, Singlish ubiquitous in the former, (e.g. ba shi
bus; de shi taxi), Portusinese in the latter.
Aural equivalents of these trompes l'oeil are socalled
oronyms— trompes l'oreille —which Pinker describes
in Language Instinct (New York, 1994, p. 188),
citing such examples as, The stuffy nose can lead to
problems The stuff he knows...; It's a doggy-dog
world It's a dog-eat-dog world; A girl with colitis
goes by A girl with kaleidoscope eyes (Beatles' song);
Gladly the cross-eyed bear Gladly the cross I'd bear
(traditional Christian hymn). Readers undoubtedly
have their own favorites.
I was saddened by the news of Sidney Greenbaum's
death [XXIII,1], and yet made less so somehow
by the thought that he died in the middle of what
he spent his life doing. May we all be as fortunate.
With regard to your review of his Oxford English
Grammar , for me too, the traditional grammarians
Jesperson, Curme, et al., do it right. They present us,
for our pleasure and edification, with the structures of
the language as found in the best of the corpus.
Greenbaum's latest effort, on the other hand, wraps
an immense corpus of colloquial and formal speech
up in the respectable garb of grammatical explication,
leaving the reader to have learned elsewhere which of
the examples should serve as a model when he invites
his boss to dinner. I take this to be not only silly
but potentially politically pernicious.
In her delightful study, Theories of Discourse ,
Diane Macdonell describes how after the French revolution
the bourgeois came to realize that, if the lower
orders took seriously the slogan Liberté, Egalité,
Fraternité , their wealth might fall into the hands of
the wrong people. The solution to the problem was
straightforward. Teach everyone French as if it were
Latin. The results were a working class who could
read directions but not compose a well-formed composition
in their complicated native tongue, and an
educated class who got to the university, used French
as they had learned it at their mother's knee (naturally,
not as they had been taught it in school), and made
good use of the grammatical rules they had been
taught by applying them to their study of Latin, a
nicely dead and therefore reasonably systematizable
language.
The British, who didn't go through the dislocation
(and revivification) of a revolution, simple allowed the
gentry to establish the colloquial norm for those who
counted themselves among the educated, and mined
the literature for texts to constitute a canon that would
be taught as a stylistic and, as a by-product, grammatical
model. The result was a respect for proper
English, that is to say the English spoken by proper
gentlemen. All a bit authoritarian, but reasonable.
The effectiveness of the policy can be seen by making
a quick analysis of the language spoken by Oliver
Twist: Dickens, qua social reformer, knew perfectly
well that if Oliver hadn't somehow come to speak the
Queen's English, he wouldn't have made it. (One
might add in passing that the twentieth-century, establishmentarian
feathers ruffled by D. H. Lawrence
with Lady Chatterley's Lover were less the result of
Mellors' seducing a member of the aristocracy than
his not addressing her properly.)
This latest trend, to make use of a vast corpus of
linguistic data as a way to democratize the understanding
of language is—and I think here you and I
quite agree—a gross mistake. Not only does it throw
out the concept of good English, but it establishes
the norms of language on what's said. (This is an expression
frequently used by my British colleagues and
one that in my opinion is as silly as basing a legal system
on what's done.) Not long ago, when I suggested—for
a passage chosen for our entrance
exam—that an it that referred back to an unstipulated
topic of a previous paragraph, be changed to
this , I was told that there's no need to be so picky because
it's said. The consequences of this (not it )
have not been such salutary effects as a broadening of
acceptable usage, or a loosening of the traditional
schoolmaster's authority over what constitutes proper
English, or a diminution of class consciousness. The
results—perhaps totally unforeseen—have rather
been a shift in linguistic authority away from the gentry
and Oxbridgians to the media.
The consequences of all this are fascinating.
We who are in control of the media and therefore
aware of the context in which unclear English is used,
know what's going on (and therefore the meanings of
the utterances used to describe it), while the vulgar
(to use Berkeley's delightful expression for those with
a shaky grasp of vocabulary and syntax who are therefore
ill equipped to understand some particular bit
of newspeak) are led to believe, when they fail to
fathom what's going on, that the failure in comprehension
is entirely their fault.
Greenbaum in his Grammar , with its democratic,
what's said, corpus-based approach to language, unwittingly,
I am quite sure, keeps the really proper use
of English in the hands of those who are to the manner
born, while allowing the media moguls to interpret
or misinterpret the topics of public concern as
they will and at the same time disallowing the vulgar
from gaining a firm grasp on the means by which they
might enter the debate. We have here a delightfully
constructed catch-22: if you don't study your grammar
you're uneducated; if you do, you've been exposed to
a proper education by your kindly school system; but
when you use one of your grammar book's dreadfully
improper constructions as a model, you place
yourself in the class of the obviously simple-minded,
whose opinions are irrelevant. And please notice:
when we use the word class here, we do so not at all
in a social sense—oh dear me, no—but strictly in an
intellectual one. If you don't know the difference between
the appropriate contexts in which to use two examples
placed one after the other in your grammar
book, it's a consequence of your mind's incapacity to
grasp how things ought to be correctly expressed, not
that you've had the misfortune of being born into the
working class. (To what extent this is a conscious
agenda on the part of the establishment and how
much it is simply an ill-conceived educational policy is
a matter for further inquiry.)
Rather than focusing our attention on the establishment
of universally applicable rules of grammar as
a way to make a more democratic society, we might
better develop a more holistic, semiotically based curriculum
that points our young in the direction of clear
thinking. I take Peirce to be right when he tells us
that meaning (and therefore correct usage in the
broadest sense) is always inseparable from context.
And given that fact, I would argue that as long as the
educational system teaches dictionary definitions as
giving lexical meaning and grammatically proper
structures as carrying grammatically meaning, we will
have (as we do now) the vast bulk of our population
functionally illiterate.
The subset of semiosis called—perhaps misleadingly— language
comes into being when there is a will
to share. (Searle would call it an intention.) It works
when those involved share a common experience, a
common set of general rules for their communication
game, and a common aim for their dialogue. It happens
best when the experience has the broadest possible
horizon, the rules are supplemented by good
style, and the aims are the achievement of the best
possible degree of understanding. To give short shrift
to any of these three facets of communication is to
tear apart the fabric of dialogue.
Too much buck-passing (usually in the name of
scientific rigor) between the experts on language, literature,
and history has resulted in the sad fact that
clear thought, the mortar that serves to create integrated
human interaction, has been quite consistently
assigned to the other guy's bailiwick.
School systems teach systems. But that can't be
the end of the matter. The process that Bakhtin calls
Dialogue is ultimately context based and not system
based. This is why, for example, the expression, The
teacher has it in for me, falls through the cracks of
lexicon and grammar. The sentence doesn't mean
what the words mean, and if they did, why is the verb
have it in for defective? I've never heard it used in
the first person, nor, one might add, with the Pope as
subject. Students would learn ten times more about
words and how they are used if, instead of being asked
to remember what is grammatically or lexically correct,
they were asked in class to play roles such as
shoe salesmen or lords of the manor and by doing so
got a feel for what is said by such people in such dialogues—not
just what is said , but what is said in such
by such people dialogues . This kind of contextual
sensitivity (a sensitivity that is as yet not sufficiently
well understood) is far more important than that sort
of abstract knowledge of the proper use of language
that prompts certain of us to shiver at someone else's
stumbling over a shibboleth. Needless to say, the idea
of abstract knowledge isn't all that simple. How
much of what passes from Knowing grammar is in
fact remembering what was said at home or by an author
one has read? Are grammatical rules explanations
of what is said by people like us? If they are,
how does the learning of them help someone who
doesn't speak like us? Does a child learn to walk by
having the musculature of the legs explained to her?
(I add in passing a news bite heard between the writing
of this paragraph and its mailing: a teacher was recently
given an award for innovative teaching. He
received it because he has his students write letters
taking the part, for example, of Martin Luther King,
Jr., and explaining his reasons for encouraging civilrights
marches, a context in which repetition might
well be more frequent than in an essay by Bertrand
Russell. A correlate to this observation can be found
in the otherwise wise stylistic advice of E. B. White.
What grade would he have given the eloquent civilrights
leader? And why?)
I would argue that for survival in the twenty-first
century students will need an integrated course in
Peircean sem(e)iotics. A course in which an appreciation
of one's cultural context is combined with an
understanding of the suitable styles of dialogue
needed to express one's intentions. A good friend,
the editor of an award-winning medical journal, received
his education in English in Kansas without
benefit of grammar book, but rather through the reading
and discussion, orally and in writing, of such works
as Catch-22 . My students at Tokyo Joshi Dai have
studied English grammar and memorized its vocabulary
for well over a half-dozen years, and when they
are asked if they can explain how to get to the train
station answer Yes, and stand by with a smile waiting
for the next question. (And this should not be
construed as a lack of grammatical comprehension,
since, if they don't know the way, they invariably answer
I'm sorry.) Somehow, the proper understanding
of how we function semiotically (I'm trying to
avoid the word language for now) needs to be built
into any educational system by which succeeding generations
are taught the most effective way of sharing
human experience—both domestic and foreign.
To get started on this major project I've been
looking at Michael Shapiro's The Sense of Grammar:
Language as Semeiotic (Indiana, 1983), and a rather
more interesting effort, one with which you may be
familiar, Robert Lord's Words: A Hermeneutical
Approach to the Study of Language (University Press
of America, 1996), and would be most appreciative of
any suggestions on the work being done by those who
are having second thoughts about the use of that apparently
promising source of linguistic data known as
The Corpus.
I have immensense pleasure in renewing my subscription
to your wonderful periodical.
Marc Schindler's excellent article [XXIII,1] probably
had no space to mention Polish—a language
whose alphabet ends in three zs: z, ź , and z Polish appears
to be a difficult language to learn, but it has the
supreme advantage that every combination of letters
is always pronounced the same. It is therefore possible
when meeting with a group of, say, pharmaceutical
chemists, to pick up a copy of their technical
journal lying on a table and impress them with your
grasp of their profession by reading an article out
loud—without understanding a word of it. Some
words you can guess at, of course. The Polish for
purgative is czyszczacy —and just by looking at it you
can understand why.
Laura A. Macaluso [EPISTOLA XXIII,1] is not
strictly correct. Beatles originated from Silver Beetles
[ sic ]. Whatever the subsequent connection with beat ,
the insect came first. And talking about the naming of
things, their most famous song, Yesterday , was originally
released on an LP in the US as an instrumental
with the title Scrambled Eggs . A Ph. D. thesis there
for some earnest young academic!
Some years ago, travelling in luxury to Venice by
train, we noticed considerable excitement being generated
by an attractive couple at the table opposite.
Two female passengers of riper years asked especially
to be photographed with the young man for a family
album. I asked the Italian waiter who he was. Oh,
he fumbled, he eez Ronnie Modern . I didn't recognise
the name but it told me everything. A sensitive,
old-fashioned youth, failing to survive in the hurlyburly
of English popular music, eking out a living
crooning sentimental nostalgia to elderly matrons on
the European night club circuit. I wondered how he
had scraped together the fare for the Orient Express.
Perhaps he was doing the cabaret from the grand
piano after dinner and his agent had scrounged him a
free meal in the contract. Mix with the punters,
Ronnie, you'll get bigger tips that way .
[Can anyone tell me the US equivalent of punter?
It's not in the 1996 Webster. Used disparagingly by
bookmakers of their customers, especially those placing
small bets. By transference a prostitute's client or
the unknowing victim of a minor confidence trick.]
Later, we shared a quiet bottle of Laphroaig with this
well-mannered and impeccably spoken paragon and
his beautiful young wife. We learned that he was trying
to make a career as a novelist and that in the discipline
of fencing he had nearly made the Olympics.
I asked where his name had come from. His wife
looked puzzled, then light dawned. Iron Maiden ,
she corrected me. Bruce is the lead singer. I had an
immediate memory of a bare-chested super-lout
backed by a wall of electronic Armageddon screaming
at me from a television and earning more dollars in an
evening than there are greenfly on my roses. If it
ever gets out what he's really like, I remarked, he'll
never sell another record.
Does anyone remember Manfred Mann? It is
the only instance I am aware of where—initially at
least—a band was referred to collectively by the name
of its founder. Compare: the members of John
Lennon are...
And in the early '60s, in a small village hall in
East Sussex, England, we danced to a group of amateurs
called The High Numbers . The who? Yes, The
who .
[ Punter is used to mean guy, fellow, chap, geezer,
etc., but the most common US equivalent is probably
customer, a deliberately ambiguous choice for the
senses client and guy, as in cool customer, queer
customer , etc. As punt is a Briticism for gamble,
punter in the sense of gambler is a Briticism; there
are many US equivalents, the most common being
sucker .—Editor]
I read (Dia)critic's Corner [XXIII, 1] with great
interest but was perplexed by the examples at the top
of the second column on page 1, as I counted four
misprints at a first reading (œ for æ) and my feeling
was confirmed by checking Chambers Twentieth
Century Dictionary . In my memory and dictionary
we would spell the examples quoted as gynæcology,
hæmatology, cæsium , and pædiatrics. However,
in fiddling with my keyboard I discovered that the
italic form of æ (in Times New Roman at least) is almost
indistinguishable from œ except with a magnifying
glass—thus; œ, æ —so I can only assume you
have been thwarted by a quirk of the computer!
In the paragraph at the foot of this column, one
might have expected to see diæresis in place of diaeresis,
but at least the unligated form does not lead
in italics to a misleading spelling, in appearance
at least.
[In the italic forms of many typefaces, especially those
designed since photographic and computer typesetting
equipment became prevalent, the distinction between
the digraphs æ and œ is all but lost (and in
some is lost entirely). That is owing in part to the
lack of sophistication among type designers and, undoubtedly,
in part to the changes in spelling practices,
even in Britain, where the digraphs are gradually
being replaced by a single character, usually e. (We
had to abandon our customary style of referring to
characters by setting them in italics because the characters
are indistinguishable.)—Editor]
David Galef's article, F U Cn Rd Ths
[XXII,4,15], brought to mind a puzzling abbreviation
I noticed on highway signs when I moved to Los
Angeles some years ago. It's FWY . To reach my
house one might, for example, take the HARBOR FWY.
I realized eventually that the W is the Welsh vowel
and that FWY should be pronounced PHOOey.
Anyone who has travelled on a Los Angeles FWY
would probably agree that this is a very appropriate
designation.
To Ms. Flanders' brief list of Foreign Treasures
[XXIII,1] I would like to add one of my late father's
French favorites, La moutarde m'est montée en nez , I
lost my temper (lit. the mustard ascended into my
nose).
I am having difficulty remembering the alphabet,
and I would appreciate help from a reader. The
alphabet in question was recited to me by a London
cabbie many years ago. He liked to talk with his fares,
and when he learned that I made a living as a writer
he turned off the meter and proceeded to teach me
his alphabet. The notes I made were incomplete and
have been mislaid. Here is how it began...
'Ay for 'orses
Beef or chicken
Seaforth 'ighlanders
...and so on, through to Z—for what? That's one of
the missing letters. I can also remember:
Effervescence
Ifor Evans
'Ell for leather [my personal favorite]
O for the wings of a dove
Queue for 'taters [a memory of the recent war]
Arthur Askey
Tea for two
Why for art thou Romeo...
Can anyone fill in the gaps?
It has long been a source of puzzlement to me
that borogoves is a source of puzzlement to others.
After reading in The joy of jabberwocking, by J. A.
Davidson [XXII,1,23], that but somehow a few editors
gave it a second r , as in borogoves , and Probably
many years ago a careless printer put in that extra γ,
I have, somewhat tossicatedly, to ask: Am I the only
one for whom (many years ago) Professor Bagos
Hitman opened wide a copy of Sweet's Anglo-Saxon
Primer and, pointing to a bevy of bilingual yokemates,
one of which was (to the best of my recollection)
something like bearu grove , burbled (accusingly)
Tulgey? Brillig! whiffled I.
The phenomenon of names matching professions
[EPISTOLAE, XXII,4] has been the subject of much discussion
this year in the British magazine New
Scientist , where it is termed nominative determinism .
However, my two favourite examples have not appeared
in the pages of that magazine: an officer of
the British Trust for Ornithology called Sue Starling ,
and two researchers in the field of asthma called
Ichinose and Sneeze .
As a once occasional translator of Russian, I am
overpowered by an itch to comment on Emanuel
Strauss”s review of Peter Mertvago's Comparative
Russian-English Dictionary of Russian Proverbs &
Sayings [XXIII,3]. A couple of observations in the
review, whether Strauss's or Mertvago's, strike me as
dubious at best and the translation of an example as
misleading.
I do not agree that the relative brevity of many
Russian proverbs stems from the fact that the Russian
language has no articles and also resorts idiomatically
to participial condensation by not using oblique
forms of the verb to be. What about byvshii having
been and budushchii , the future participle of the
Russian verb for to be? No, the form of the Russian
verb for to be that is usually (but not always) omitted
is the present tense, as sometimes in English: Terrific
guy, that Tom! This omission and the absence of articles
does lend a certain pithiness to Russian
proverbs. But I think that the apparent brevity, which
depends in part on whether you count words or syllables,
is due much more to the heavy inflection of
Russian that compresses meaning in single words.
The best example of this kind of semantic compression
that occurs to me is from Latin, a language that
in many respects is grammatically similar to Russian:
Romae romane , which comes to us in English as
When in Rome, do as the Romans do. In Russian I
can squeeze this down to V Ryme-po-rymski . But
then in English one can come pretty close to both
the Latin meaning and brevity with, say, In Rome,
act (or be) Roman. Running English proverbs and
sayings through my mind, I seem to find that although
our language has the resources to be fairly pithy, we
are not as attracted to pithiness as Russians and
Romans.
What bothers me more, however, is the translation
of the Russian proverb Chemu Vanya nye nauchilsya,
tovo Ivan nye vyuchit . Literally, leaving out
the tovo as redundant in English, this proverb means
What Johnnie hasn't learnt, John won't learn. Just as
in English the nickname Johnnie implies youth, so
the Russian nickname Vanya implies boyhood—but
only implies: Uncle Vanya was not young—while the
formal names John/Ivan imply maturity. By overloading
the proverb with little and old in What
little Johnnie hasn't learnt, old John will not learn,
the translator (here a traditore, indeed) has killed the
clever implication inherent in the play on names, perhaps
in a fumbled attempt to bear out his claim that
Russian proverbs are relatively brief.
Maybe I am nitpicking, though. The statement
that Generally speaking, the Russians make greater
use of proverbs than the Americans or the British is
doubtless true, with the consequence that the careful
attention given Mertvago's compilation is quite justified.
As for me, I hope that my nitpicking through the
articles you publish in VERBATIM demonstrates the
consideration I think due these articles rather than
envy and pedantry.
I found the following article by my grandfather,
Professor Walter W. Skeat, among some of his papers.
The justification for reprinting it would be that
although I find his explanation totally convincing, it is
not to be found either in the original edition of the
OED under the word dear , to which he refers, or in
the revised edition published in 1989.
OH! DEAR!
It must have struck many that the very common phrase
Oh! dear is, after all, a very senseless expression. When we
come to try to read sense into it, some might think that it
may be contracted from some longer expression, such as
Oh! dear me. But this is not in accordance with the evidence.
The earliest known example of Dear me is no
older than 1773, whilst Oh dear occurs as early as 1694,
and is the earliest known phrase in which dear occurs at all.
Dr. Murray remarks [in Volume IV of the New English
Dictionary , 1897, s.v. dear] that several phrases occur,
such as dear save us in 1719, dear knows in 1876, dear
help you in 1880, and the like, which suggest that dear
represents or implies a fuller dear Lord ; thus dear knows
is equivalent to the Lord knows, and so on. But he adds,
very justly, that a derivation from Ital. Dio , God, resting
upon the modern English pronunciation of dear , finds no
support in the history of the word.
I wish to draw attention to two ascertained facts. The
first is that the particular phrase Oh dear! is the earliest of
the set, as has been already remarked; and secondly, that
there is no trace whatever, even in dialects, of a fuller form
like dear Lord. If we are to go by the evidence, we must
recognise that the interpretation of dear by dear Lord or
even by Lord at all, is due to the influence of popular etymology,
which could make nothing of dear when it stood
alone.
I think it is equally clear that we must dismiss all
thoughts of connecting its origin with the Italian Dio .
I will now go a step further, and assert that there is no
evidence whatever for connecting it with the adjective dear
at all! It makes no sense, as we may see by a little thought.
For dear means beloved, affectionate, precious, and the
like; but the exclamation Oh! dear! is one that denotes
something very different, something that is lamentable or
calamitous, and very far from being pleasant. Thus, in
1694, Congreve makes one of his characters say—Oh! dear!
you make me blush! In 1769 we find—Oh dear! oh dear!
how melancholy, has been to me this last week! And again—
Oh! dear! I shall die! And in Goldsmith's She Stoops to
Conquer , Miss Hardcastle says—Dear me! Dear me! I'm
sure there's nothing in my behaviour to put me on a level
with one of that stamp.
If we will only, for a moment, consider this probability,
viz. that there is no good reason for associating this interjectional
phrase with a well-known adjective, this will leave
us free to look around us, and see whether any other source
is possible.
And if we do this, we have not to look far. The phrase,
for instance, makes no good sense in English; and this affords
a presumption that it was borrowed from abroad.
And whenever we consider the possibility of borrowing at
the end of the seventeenth century, our first thoughts turn,
as a matter of course, to France. Let us see what French
will do for us.
I now venture to quote some remarkable words from
Cotgrave's well-known Dictionary, and from the Old French
Dictionary by Godefroy.
Cotgrave has:— Deâ , an interjection, as Dâ, ouy de^
[the circumflex over the a is not mine, but Cotgrave's], yes,
truly, verily, without doubt also, a tearme of expostulation
[note this]; as deâ, qui vous mouvoit ? why, or good God,
what reason had you? or what, a God's name, moved you?
It should particularly be remarked that the sense coincides
exactly with that of the English phrase. We can translate
this literally by saying—Dear, dear! who put you up to
it? It is a note of expostulation, as Cotgrave truly says; and
it indicates despair rather than hope.
Godefroy has:— Dea, dia, dya, da , a sort of exclamation
of astonishment. His examples show that it was sometimes
preceded by the interjection he [illegible character] as Hé,
dia! or Hé! dea , which is suggestive of the English phrase.
It was usually employed, as in English, to imply lamentation
or disaster, as, e.g. Hé, dea! quand je fus né quelle mauditte
estoille presida dessus moy; i.e. Oh! dear! what an evil star
presided over my birth. Dea! quel desastre est ce qui
regne en France! i.e. Dear! what a disaster prevails in
France! It served also, as Cotgrave notes, to enforce an affirmation,
as in Ouy dea , dis je; Yes, forsooth, say I.
It is worth while trying to guess whence this expression
came. We notice that Cotgrave writes it with a circumflex
over the a , as if it were a contracted form. It is remarkable
that the chief word which in Old French began with dea- or
dia - is the too common word deable or diable , the use of
which in expressions of lamentation is so prevalent both in
French and English. It really seems as if the true sense of
Oh dear! were Oh! the devil! The clipping of swearwords
is a common phenomenon. If this be so, the exclamation
Dear knows may have originated in a phrase which
meant the devil knows. But as this interpretation was not
at all obvious, or was forgotten, the familiarity of many
Englishmen with the Span. Dios and the Ital. Dio may really
have suggested a new interpretation in the eighteenth
century; indeed, even Cotgrave seems to have had such a
notion. For the earliest example of Dear save us is no
earlier than 1719; whilst, on the other hand, the use of dea
occurs in Rabelais, and Godefroy, in his supplement, quotes
the phrase Dya, dya , houoih, hau dia, i.e . Dear, dear!
houoih, Oh dear! from a book dated 1561.
This O.F. dea , later dia , seems to be modern F. da .
The O.F. disva, diva, i.e. come along, is clearly quite a
different word.
Finally, we may notice that the double form dea, dia ,
will suit either the old or the modern pronunciation of the
English dear , so that phonetic requirements are fulfilled
either way.
[ The Modern Language Quarterly , date unknown, 1903 or
1904.]
In OBITER DICTA [XXIII,3,16] Tony Hall writes...
the square of 5.5 is not a simple piece of mental
arithmetic. But it is! The square of any number
that ends in 5 (typically n5) = [n(n + 1)]25. Thus the
square of 5.5 = (5.6)25, or 30.25.
Contradiction in Terms
Given that the English language is the world's
principal form of communication, we can perhaps be
forgiven for tripping ourselves up with it occasionally.
We are particularly good at contradicting ourselves—
so good, in fact, we do it daily, assuming that other
people don't beat us to it.
I can recall the time I bought some terracotta
ducks containing scented candles, which I was instructed
to place on a dining table during a meal, or in
any room I wished. The scent would repel all biting
insects in the area. When the ducks arrived, a footnote
on the instructions informed me they were for outdoor
use only.
Newspapers are extremely good at bringing people's
contradictions to a wide audience. Consider the
memorable statement made by the head of a ¥1.5
million winning pools syndicate. They had filled in
their coupon while drinking to celebrate a ¥20 win.
When they won the pools, the leader said, It's great.
We've never won anything before. Granted, the effects
of alcohol might have been responsible for that
confusing statement. I have yet to find an excuse for
these next examples.
I have seen plastic-lidded containers which are
completely safe to use in the microwave—so long as
you don't use the lid; all manner of tablets instructing
you to take two every four hours—but no more than
six in any twenty-four hour period; and a notice by
school bosses who were determined to improve the
poor standard of spelling on the Isle of White .
So, contradictions are rife. And I am unanimous
in that.
The Internet is quickly becoming a fixture—however
mobile it might seem—of modern life. We have
not (yet) connected with it, but the link is imminent,
and we expect to be surfing along with the rest of the
world in due course. In the meantime, we rely on
readers to pass on tidbits as they come across items
suited to what we perceive to be our readers' interests;
what follows came via e-mail from the Internet
via our correspondent, Mr. Eduardo Rodriguez, of
WORDS NOT YET IN THE DICTIONARY
AQUADEXTROUS (ak wa dekśtrus) adj. Possessing
the ability to turn the bathtub faucet on and off with
your toes.
ACCORDIONATED (ah koŕde on ay tid) adj. Being
able to drive and refold a road map at the same time.
AQUALEBRIUM (ak wa lib re um) n. The point where
the stream of drinking fountain water is at its perfect
height, thus relieving the drinker from (a) having to
suck the nozzle, or (b) squirting himself in the eye.
BURGACIDE (burǵuh side) n. When a hamburger
can't take any more torture and hurls itself through
the grill into the coals.
BUZZACKS (buźaks) n. People in phone marts who
walk around picking up display phones and listening
for dial tones even when they know the phones are
not connected.
CARPERPETUATION (kaŕpur pet u a shun) n. The
act, when vacuuming, of running over a string or a
piece of lint at least a dozen times, reaching over and
picking it up, examining it, then putting it back down
to give the vacuum one more chance.
DIMP (dimp) n. A person who insults you in a cheap
department store by asking, Do you work here?
DISCONFECT (dis kon fekt) v. To sterilize the piece
of candy you dropped on the floor by blowing on it,
somehow assuming this will remove all the germs.
ECNALUBMA (ek na lubma) n. A rescue vehicle
which can only be seen in the rearview mirror.
EIFFELITES (eyé ful eyetz) n. Gangly people sitting
in front of you at the movies who, no matter what
direction you lean in, follow suit.
ELBONICS (el boń iks) n. The actions of two people
maneuvering for one armrest in a movie theater.
ELECELLERATION (el a cel er aý shun) n. The mistaken
notion that the more you press an elevator button
the faster it will arrive.
FRUST (frust) n. The small line of debris that refuses to
be swept onto the dust pan and keeps backing a person
across the room until he finally decides to give up
and sweep it under the rug.
LACTOMANGULATION (lakto man gyu laýshun) n.
Manhandling the open here spout on a milk container
so badly that one has to resort to the illegal side.
NEONPHANCY (ne oń fan see) n. A fluorescent light
bulb struggling to come to life.
PEPPEER (pehp ee aý) n. The waiter at a fancy restaurant
whose sole purpose seems to be walking around
asking diners if they want ground pepper.
PETONIC (peh tońik) adj. One who is embarrassed to
undress in front of a household pet.
PHONESIA (fo neézhuh) n. The affliction of dialing a
phone number and forgetting whom you were calling
just as they answer.
PUPKUS (pup kus) n. The moist residue left on a window
after a dog presses its nose to it.
TELECRASTINATION (tel e kras tin aý shun) n. The
act of always letting the phone ring at least twice before
you pick it up, even when you're only six inches away.
Future to the Back
Whatever happened to the word back ? I feel as
if I have been transferred back to the future, or
should I say future to the back? I look back to yesterday
and ahead to tomorrow, but recently the
meaning of back seems to have reversed behind my
back. Back is often now used to mean forward.
Dictionaries show no such change. The adverb back
still means in, to, or toward a past time, and the adjective
back is still defined as of a past date; not current;
but I continually find examples of backward
writing.
In an Associated Press story:
The Library of Congress put off a major exhibit on
Sigmund Freud and promptly found itself on the
couch.... The show was pushed back to late 1997
and possibly later.
In a Providence Journal story about a person considering
a new job:
The 32-year-old father said he would do it only if he
could push back the starting time until 11am instead
of 9.
In one of thousands of articles about O. J. Simpson, in
The New York Times Judge Ito was quoted as saying,
in response to a request that the trial date be moved
ahead, that
[I]t was too late to move the date back.
Reverse news from The New Yorker :
National Weather Service renewed its prediction for
a 32.5 foot crest, but put it back another day, to
Thursday. It just kept coming at us like a bouncing
ball.
A backward bouncing ball?
From Larry McMurtrey's Lonesome Dove :
He hurried to Santa Rosa, risking further damage to
the wagon, only to discover that the hanging had
been put back a week.
More Providence Journal back talk:
The hearing had been scheduled for Tuesday, then
pushed back to Friday.
Lawmakers pushed back from Feb. 1 to Nov. 1 the
effective date of a law requiring all motorists to carry
liability insurance.
A possible theory for reversing the meaning of
back is that the sense is further [back] in the schedule,
not further back in time; but a usage such as the
following in a published television schedule for 8pm
may negate this argument:
Looking for Roseanne? You'll have to wait until
9:30. ABC pushed the program back 90 minutes.
I sent pages of examples to the editors of New Edition
of the Oxford English Dictionary . They replied that
my evidence
...is filed for the attention of our new words editors.
If they find that we have accumulated a number
of examples of back in this sense in our files and
on our databases then it will be considered for drafting
as an established usage.
A Calendrical Sentence
Many years ago I came across a meaningful sentence
attributed to Rabindranath Tagore, the only
Indian writer to win the Nobel Prize:
Worship God and attain a soul devoid of anger, passion,
and guilt.
Memorize this sentence, because it is not only meaningful
but also useful in that it will enable one to find
out the day of any date except in leap years.
The sentence has twelve words. Each word is
connected with each month, respectively, that is, worship
for January, God for February, and for March,
and so on. Here is the method to apply in finding the
day of any date of any year except leap years. (Leap
years are easy to identify: they are any year divisible by
4 and centuries divisible by 400: thus, 2000 will be a
leap year, but 1900 was not.)
India became independent on 15 August 1947.
To find the day of the week on which that date
fell, first divide 1947 by 4: the answer is 486 (with a
remainder of 3, which should be ignored); add this
number: 1947 + 486 = 2433 . Then find the word
that stands for August, the eighth month— of —and
add the number of its letters: 2 + 2433 = 2435.
Now add the date sought: 2435 + 15 = 2450.
Divide this number by 7: 2450 ÷ 7 = 350 with 0 remainder.
Now, the days of the week are numbered 0 through 6,
beginning with Friday: 0 = Friday; 1 = Saturday; 2
= Sunday; 3 = Monday; 4 = Tuesday; 5 = Wednesday;
6 = Thursday.
Ergo, India's Independence Day, 15 August 1947, fell
on a Friday.
Take another example: V-E Day, 8 May 1945:
1945 ÷ 4 = 486 (+ 1).
1945 + 486 = 2431.
May = A = 1 + 2431 = 2432.
2432 + 8 = 2440.
2440 ÷ 7 = 348 + 4.
4 = Tuesday.
And a final one: the day Lincoln was shot, 14
April 1865:
1865 ÷ 4 = 466 (+ 1).
1865 + 466 = 2331.
April = attain = 6 + 2331 = 2337.
2337 + 14 = 2351.
2351 / 7 = 335 + 6.
6 = Thursday.
Iffy Sentences
I won't be home till later tonight, says the wife to
the husband in the sit-com. If you get hungry, there's
ham in the fridge.
I have always wanted to be the husband in that
scenario so I could snap back, Oh, really? And
where's the ham if I don't get hungry?
Similarly: the secretary is going to leave for vacation,
and the morning of her last day at work, a coworker
remarks, If I don't see you again before I
leave, have a great trip!
Oh, yeah? I make her reply. And what kind of
trip should I have if I do see you before I leave?
I call these situations iffy sentences , whose if-then
logic doesn't quite work. Syntactically speaking, the
apodosis, or consequence, is not linked to the protasis,
or condition, and this causes semantic confusion.
That is, the ham is in the fridge no matter what the
state of the husband's stomach, and a last possible
meeting has nothing to do with the well-wisher's kind
hope. In each case, the conclusion should stand
whether or not the premise is fulfilled. Of course,
someone may note, If you think about them, they
do make sense. And what if you don't think about
them? Do they recede into nonsense?
The truth is that these sentences are really just elliptical
constructions. Fully expanded versions of the
first two might read, albeit clunkily, You should know,
if you get hungry, that there's ham in the fridge.
Since I may not see you before I leave, let me wish
you a great trip right now!
Anyone who keeps an open ear can add to the list
of iffy sentences. If you don't mind, I have to go is
another example in my growing collection, along with
If you speak to the boss, I'm sick today. Quibbling
over such syntax may seem trivial, but language is so
often a dormant phenomenon that it is worth tweaking
its tail on occasion. And those who are alive to
such nuances often get better results from their
queries. As I once heard a man asking a woman out
on a date, If you're interested, just let me know. But
let me know if you're not interested, too.
She suddenly looked interested.
The Game of the Name
Being born of parents from the East Midlands
and spending the early years of my life there, having
a name like John Thorpe never really gave me any
problems. The countryside of Lincolnshire and Leicestershire
abounds with village names that end with
thorpe and, apart from being called Thorpy by my
school pals, the name never caused any difficulty.
That was before I started travelling. It was then that
I found out just how tough it is for most nationalities
to get their tongues round the dreaded th . Even
when I started working in London I had to accept a
fair number of Mista Forps in the course of an average
day.
It is not surprising that my first exposure to non-Brits
was in France, where I soon reconciled myself to
a Gallic attack on my personal hygiene when they insisted
on addressing me as Miss Your Soap, subtly
intoned, I always thought, with an interrogatory inflexion.
Later, on many visits to Germany, I reluctantly
submitted to the title of Hair Torpor, an
uncanny prediction of what was to befall my then luxuriant
growth. Italians mostly managed with a cheerful
Seen Your Top, which surprised me because I
was taller than most of those I had to deal with. My
Russian contact used to call me simply Zorrp, which
I found pretty much to the point, and a Hungarian
colleague settled for Trope. Only in Switzerland
did I find someone who truly tried to get it right, but
the effort involved putting his tongue out at me and
concluded with an overly explosive final consonant;
but he got all the bits in there.
My travels in Asia demonstrate a much more sensible
approach by the wily natives, and in India,
China, and Japan most of my contacts have, without
invitation, settled for the easy to deal with Mister
John.
Strange to say, it is in the US that one of the really
weird aural hiccups occurs. It usually happens in
restaurants or hotels or any of the other places where
professional name takers are found. The conversation
usually goes something like this:
Good morning, sir. Could I have your name
please?
Yes, I'm John Thorpe.
OK, Mr. Philips, I've put your name on the list.
No, no. My name is Thorpe, not Philips, John
Thorpe.
Oh! Sari! Yewer Jarn Thorwup. Gee, I'm sari.
Now that conversation may sound unbelievable,
but in the US I have been renamed Philips dozens
of times, on the West coast, particularly. So often, in
fact, that I have been forced to assume the new identity
of the more acceptable Jarn Thorwup when
dealing with any of the name takers so deeply entrenched
in the American way of doing things. How
can they hear it that way? It is not as though Thorpe
is that unusual a name in the States: after all, one of
the great athletes of all time was Jim Thorpe, and
they even named a town after him. To be honest
though, I think I would rather be a Zorrp than a
Philips.
Cyberethnicity
The language of the Internet is visual, produced
on a screen and printoutable. Still, for all their delight
in browsing and surfing, netizens seem to prefer
chatting, personal and intimate communication.
Chatting has restraints, of course, in a network of burgeoning
traffic and explosive costs. If chatting is
friendly and informal, it must also be brief and pungent.
Derived to a large extent from pop culture
comic strips, science fiction, TV—the jargon of the superhighway
is larger than life, bold if not simplistic,
and not without a certain intellectual mischievousness.
Highlighting is a natural and favored component,
as in the fondness for abbreviations, acronyms,
capital letters, telescoping, emoticons, interjections,
and other striking visual devices, not to mention their
frequently slangy ( plunk I just put you in my killfile)
or vulgar ( RTFM Read the fucking manual) content,
as well as onomatopoeic renditions ( bang common
spoken name for !).
Although the Internet is international, its jargon
is a subspecies of American English. It is a melange,
to be sure, but given the technological nature of the
medium, its roots and contours are clearly definable.
It is a product of the east and west coasts of the
United States, its poles being MIT in Massachusetts
and Berkeley in California. A detailed profile is not
necessary here, but one element is of interest as a
further device of highlighting: ethnicity. In the U.S.,
The Jargon File (Version 2.9.6 of 16 August 1991) asserts
(not without a certain telling naively, hacker-dom
is predominantly Caucasian with strong
minorities of Jews (East Coast) and Orientals (West
Coast). The Jewish contingent has exerted a particularly
pervasive cultural influence (see Food, above
[where available, high-quality Jewish delicatessen
food is much esteemed], and note that several common
jargon terms are obviously mutated Yiddish.
Leaving aside such fully assimilated German words
as pretzel and strudel (and the fact that new meanings
have been attached to them), the mutated Yiddish
terms represent, for one thing, the only discernible
ethnic orientation in the vocabulary and are thus by
their very appearance a form of highlighting. They
stand out. For another thing, they are generally emotive—onomatopoeic
expressions communicating dissatisfaction
or disgust.
Among those listed and defined (albeit not always
accurate in explanations) in The Jargon File are
bletch [from Yiddish/German brechen to vomit,
poss. via comic-strip exclamation blech] interj.
Term of disgust. Often used in Ugh, bletch. (Also
bletcherous Disgusting in design or function; esthetically
unappealing.)
DRECNET [from Yiddish/German Dreck dirt] n.
Deliberate distortion of DECNET, a networking
protocol used in the {VMS} community. So called
because DEC helped write the Ethernet specification
and then (either stupidly or as a malignant customer-control
tactic) violated that spec in the design
of DRECNET in a way that made it incompatible.
foo interj. Term of disgust... Very probably, hackish
foo had no single origin and derives from Yiddish
feh and/or English fooey.
glitch [from German glitschen to slip, via Yiddish
glitshen to slide or skid] n. A sudden interruption in
electric service, sanity, continuity, or program function.
gonk v.t., n. To prevaricate or to embellish the
truth beyond any reasonable recognition. It is alleged
that in German the term is (mythically)
gonken... You're gonking me. That story you just
told me is a bunch of gonk. (In German, for example,
Du gonkst mir You're pulling my leg.) And
from another source,
greps Yiddish for belch. Some say that [Kibo] is
the first deity of the Internet. Also known as he who
greps.
It would be going too far to suggest an anti-Semitic
stance (despite the implications of not including Jews
among Caucasians). Undeniable is the grossly comic
intention and effect, doubtless a reflection of pop culture's
infatuation with the sputtering, guttural, goofy
German (rather than Yiddish) sounds of TV's Stalag
17 . What better accompaniment to the cacophonous
examples listed than blinkenlights: n. Front-panel diagnostic
lights on a computer, esp. a (dinosaur).
Derives from the last word of the famous blackletter-Gothic
sign in mangled pseudo-German that once
graced about half the computer rooms in the English-speaking
world. One version ran in its entirety as follows:
ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS!
Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und
mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk,
blowenfusen and poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist
nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das
rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cottonpickenen
hens in das pockets muss;
relaxer und watcher das blinkenlichten.
Cannibal Victims Speak Out!
Those VERBATIM readers who delight in Sic! Sic!
Sic! squibs will find fulfillment in the pages of this
book, which chronicles examples of unfortunate syntax
and typographical errors—usually called literals
in British English—gleaned from the pages of various
(British) periodicals. Inevitably, those that seem
funny to one person may be deadly to another. A few
samples:
ACCOUNTING ASSISTANTS
Keen to broaden your experience?
c¥12,000
Chevron welcomes sex with all suitably
disabled people regardless of size of bank
balance.
—Evening Standard
Q. I'm fourteen and one of my boobs is smaller than
the other. Does it matter?
A. Be positive. Say that one is bigger than the other.
—People
In the August 8 edition, a photo of famed Nazi hunter
Simon Wiesenthal was incorrectly identified as Dr Josef
Mengele. We regret the error.
—Weekly World News
Such things can often raise a chuckle from those who
appreciate the incongruity of the item and those who
smirk with smug superiority.
Laurence Urdang
Yankee Talk: A Dictionary of New England Expressions
Dialects are subject of popular interest, especially
quaint ones like Pennsylvania Dutch or many dialects
of the South and New England. Treatments of
such dialects appropriate for the popular market cannot
be technical, but neither should they be inaccurate.
It is after all possible to be both informative and
interesting. Yankee Talk works hard at being both, but
succeeds better at the second aim than the first, giving
out a passel (indefinite number) of entertainment
and a gorm (gooey mess) of misinformation.
The misinformation begins in the introduction
[v], where the author acknowledges among his sources
Mitford M. Mathews' The American Dialect Dictionary
and A Dictionary of Americanisms . Only
the second of those works is by Mathews; the first is
by Harold Wentworth.
The work is also generous in what it considers to
be New England expressions. Anything quaint found in
New England is fair game, regardless of where else it
may occur. For example, each tub must stand on its
own bottom is said to be an old proverb stressing New
England self-reliance, but A Dictionary of American
Proverbs documents its distribution throughout the
United States and Canada.
Chat gets an entry as a New England expression,
with a citation from Herman Melville boasting, By
our immortal Bill of Rights, that guarantees to us liberty
of speech, chat we Yankees will. Never mind
that the Oxford English Dictionary documents the
word's use since the fifteenth century or that it is familiar
all over the English-speaking world.
Chock full and church supper also have entries.
The first is attested in the OED from as early as 1400.
The second is the sort of free combination that can
and does occur anywhere. Both are standard English,
neither being a specifically New England expression.
Other standard English words mislisted as New England
words are package store a store selling alcohol by
the bottle for consumption elsewhere, pshaw! an exclamation
archaic everywhere, sheers sheer curtains,
and verandah .
Verandah is Anglo-Indian from Hindi or Bengali,
which got it from Portuguese. It is apparently included
here because Edith Wharton used it (at least
the entry includes a quotation from her) or because
some New England houses have verandahs. But on
either of the same grounds, window and arch could
be listed as New England expressions.
Folk etymology is favored in this dictionary. The
entry for anadama bread , a New Englandism whose
origin is unknown, is devoted to variants on the following
tale:
Tradition has it that a Yankee farmer or fisherman,
whose wife Anna was too lazy to cook for him, concocted
the recipe. On tasting the result of his [sic]
efforts, a neighbor asked him what he called the
bread. The crusty Yankee replied, Anna, damn her!
There are other genuine New England expressions
in this volume—and plenty of them—including
dingclicker humdinger, forth-putting bold, forward,
grouty surly, sullen, Hampton boat a dory-type of
sailboat used for fishing, and harness cask a tub used
on ships for storing salted meat. All of these can also
be found in the best dictionary of American dialects:
Frederic G. Cassidy and Joan Houston Hall's Dictionary
of American Regional English , including, as it happens,
the same illustrative quotations used in Yankee
Talk plus some additional ones.
There are also occasional, perhaps disingenuous,
puzzles. The entry for chism , for instance, which
reads in full, Heard in Maine for gravy or cream
sauce. It would be useful to give a bit more information
for the guidance of the innocent and unwary:
chism is a variant of the vulgar slang term jism or gism
for semen, so in the reported use is an indelicate
metaphor. Readers of the dictionary should be
warned that in a Bangor restaurant they ought not
ask for chism with their roast beef.
The problem with this book is knowing which entries
are genuine and which spurious. To make that
discrimination, another more reliable work like the
Dictionary of American Regional English needs to be
consulted. So the user might as well go to the better
source in the first place, thus confirming Dorothy
Parker's critical recommendation (slightly paraphrased):
This is not a book to be tossed aside lightly. It should be
thrown with great force.
John Algeo
Wheaton, Illinois
Wordplay, Origins, Meanings, and Usage of the English
Language
Among life's sadder experiences must be meeting
someone late in one's career only to have him suddenly
snatched away. That is how I felt about
Robertson Cochrane, whose articles on language in
the (Toronto) Globe and Mail were first called to my
attention several years ago. We corresponded, and I
persuaded Bob to write for VERBATIM. His lively,
friendly, perceptive, well-written column appeared
several times under the heading he chose, VERBUM
SAP. We finally met in 1995, when we had lunch together
at Niagara Falls. Alas, he succumbed shortly
thereafter.
Five of the articles reprinted here are from
VERBATIM, and that speaks for the high esteem I have
of Bob's writing. Moreover, I provided the Foreword
to Wordplay . Perhaps I may be allowed to quote
from that:
It is... an unalloyed delight to see
Robertson Cochrane's cogent commentaries cap
tured in book form, a less transitory medium than
the periodicals in which they originally appeared....
...[W]riting well is only half the task; one
must also have something to say. Owing to the vastness
of the English language, it is impossible to believe
that one would run out of things to say about its
myriad aspects. Indeed, the scholarly journals have
been overflowing with turgid prose for decades, and
it is particularly refreshing to know that comment on
virtually any aspect of language can still be offered in
language that, glowing with respectability, cleaving to
the well-turned phrase, punctuated by the provocative
pun, can be so engagingly presented.
Laurence Urdang
After 170 years of uselessness and ¥100,000 of refurbishment,
the Government is at last proposing to do something
with Marble Arch. [From The Times , ,
p. 17?. Also caught (in a Letter to the Editor) by .]
PUCCINI: Tosca (Filmed in the locale & time periods
specified in the libretto)... [From Atlantic Classics-Complete
Catalog 1995 , p. 197. Submitted by
.]
A scene just before the intermission, when the family
is sitting down for the Jewish satyr, does drag on a bit, but
otherwise, the pace of the humor is right on. [From a review
of Beau Jest in The Daily World , .
Submitted by .]
Sixteen searchers, a search dog and a helicopter were
being used to search today, but rain and six to 10 inches of
new snot, with a total accumulation of two to three feet at
those elevations, are hampering operations. [From The
Daily World , . Submitted by
.]
Boas was puzzled by a Japanese paper that kept referring
to stricken mass distributions. Unable to figure out
what this meant, he wrote to the journalist's editor. It turned
out that a referee's report had told the author, The term
generalized mass distribution is no longer used. The word
generalized should be stricken. [From American
Scientist , , p. 192. Submitted by .]
