Periodic Table Manners
(The Carnival of the Elements)
Like the weather, atoms nowadays are freely
talked about but the ordinary person rarely
does anything about them. We know that water is
H2O and (if we are sufficiently dyspeptic) that baking
soda is NaHCO3; and it is generally agreed that uranium
is quite heavy and that certain isotopes of it can
be manipulated in such a way as to make a very big
bang. Some of us may even take a slightly perverse
delight in the ability to rattle off the first 90-odd
names of the elements to the tune of Gilbert and
Sullivan's Modern Major General, thanks to the jeu
d'esprit of a brash young Harvard junior-faculty statistician
in the early 1950s.
Very few of us, however, can say why the symbol
for sodium is Na, why quicklime should remind us of
a Brooklyn journalist preacher, or what the secret
ingredient in a popular variety of ersatz diamond has
to do with a little town in the southern end of Sweden
and near the end of the alphabet.
The following article makes no attempt to be a 20-minute
Chem 101 crash course for the perplexed, but,
it is hoped, should at least provide you with counter-ammunition
the next time someone corners you at a
party and starts dropping terms such as stoichiometry
as the temperature of your beer rises slowly but inexorably
from cellar to attic.
It is in Attica that we begin, for the notion that the
many complex substances with which we are surrounded
in daily life might in reality be compounded
from a much smaller number of basic elements is documented
as far back as the golden age of Greece.
Today we are accustomed to thinking of elements and
atoms as one and the same; to the Greeks, atoms and
elements represented efforts by different philosophic
schools to explain the discrepancy between appearances
and the true nature of things.
According to Aristotle, it was the qualitative pluralist
Empedocles (484-424 B.C.E.) who first argued
that everything was fundamentally reducible to the
elements earth, water, air and fire (or sunlight) in different
proportions, but, as one classical scholar
observes, a popular belief in the four as somehow
basic ingredients in nature was much older, possibly
a borrowing from Egypt.
Greek atomism was fashioned in a different workshop.
Democritus (born sometime between 470 and
457 B.C.E.) maintained that despite our sense perceptions,
in reality there are only atoms and the
void. Aristotle says that Democritus conceived
atoms—the word means unsplittables (Greek a- ,
not-, plus tomos , a cut, section)—as being particles
at variance with one another which tend to get
ensnarled and interlocked... fit snugly and so catch
firm hold of one another, for some bodies are scalene
while others are sharply hooked, some are concave,
others convex... (As it turns out, atoms don't quite
work this way; but complex molecules, particularly
organic compounds, often do, which is why surface
proteins of a cell that function as receptor sites for
harmful invaders such as viruses can be blocked with
other molecules of the appropriate shape, and why,
when placed in a solution of mixed sugars, some bacteria
flunk the membership test for the Clean Plate
Club because they can digest dextrose but leave its
mirror image, levulose, untouched.)
Although the four-elements paradigm remained
robust throughout antiquity and through the Middle
Ages (during which a mystical tradition emerged
proposing a fifth element, ruling the others, the socalled
quintessence ), atomism fell out of favor for
nearly two millennia until the quantitative philosophy
of the early Enlightenment created a conceptual environment
friendly to the metamorphosis of alchemy,
through the chemical experiments of Robert Hooke,
Isaac Newton, Joseph Priestley, Henry Cavendish,
Antoine Lavoisier and others, into something like the
chemistry we were all taught in high school.
The scientist's prejudice, to be sure, sometimes
impeded saving the phenomenon (as the Greeks
aptly called experimental observation). The year
before the outbreak of the American Revolution,
Priestley succeeded in removing from air, so he
thought, the substance called phlogiston which was
thought to be what put fires out, and dubbed his
dephlogisticated air oxygen because he supposed it
to be an essential ingredient of acids (Greek oxy -,
sharp—as in oxymoron —plus - gen , related to the
verb gignomai , I become, happen, am born)
. Cavendish was much closer to his own mark: in 1766
he isolated hydrogen, which he correctly perceived
as a building block of water ( hydro- being the
oblique stem of Greek hyder , water).
In many instances, finding an element was simply
a matter of recognizing that it was an element
and not a compound, and had been lying around
people's mines and workshops since antiquity. In
place of the alchemical signs still common through
Newton's day in the notation of chemical reactions,
elements got assigned symbols of one or two letters,
often drawn from the Latin names for the same substances
because Latin remained the common tongue
for scholarly communication across national and linguistic
borders until well into the 19th century. Thus
the sign for iron became Fe (from Latin ferrum ), for
gold, Au ( aurum ), for silver, Ag ( argentum ), for copper
Cu (cuprum) , for lead, Pb ( plumbum —until
steel replaced lead pipe for waterworks, plumbers
were, and had been since Roman times, workers in
lead).
Other symbols are less straightforward.
Sodium—the name is derived from soda , originally
an Italian term for ash used in glassmaking and later
applied to a number of sodium salts—is Na, short
for natron or natrium , a neo-latinate term also
applied to a variety of sodium compounds. Because
it has the same number of free electrons as hydrogen,
sodium is useful in a great many compounds as
a substitute for one of the two atoms of hydrogen
(also valence 1) in a variety of acids. Thus jewelers'
pickling solution, used to dissolve surface sulfides
from precious metals and marketed under such
trade names as Dixcel or Sparex, is sodium hyposulfate
(NaHSO4;), far less corrosive than the sulfuric
acid
it replaced in everyday use. Other common
sodium compounds are NaHCO3 (sodium bicarbonate,
or baking soda, mentioned above), NaCl (sodium
chloride, or common table salt; chlorine is so
called because in its gaseous form it is green—
Greek chlor- , as in chlorophyl , which, a vulgar
euphemism for manure notwithstanding, is what
really makes the grass grow green), NaOH (sodium
hydroxide, commonly known as caustic soda or lye)
and NaNO3 (sodium nitrate, sometimes called Chile
saltpeter).
A common substitute for sodium when the latter
is contraindicated (e.g. for heart conditions) is potassium
(from potash), whose valence is also 1 and
whose symbol is K, from late Latin kalium , a word of
dubious etymology. (For what it's worth, Greek kalia
means birdhouse, little shed, wooden shrine—
such as would cover an outdoor divinty's statue.)
Unlike sodium, free potassium reacts violently with
water, liberating gaseous hydrogen ; but like sodium, potassium is rarely
free and much more apt to be encountered in compounds. Potassium iodide
can be used at dinner as a salt substitute; Morton salt
includes significant amounts of it as an additive
because iodine (like chlorine, a valence-1 halogen
and a gas in its natural state) is necessary to the
proper functioning of our thyroid glands.
Potassium chloride (KCl), on the other hand,
can be made to react with Chile saltpeter (see
above) to produce true saltpeter: potassium nitrate
(KNO3), an essential ingredient of gunpowder,
whose other two components are sulfur and carbon;
the three can be combined to explosive effect in as
simple proportions by weight as 1, 2, and 3 respectively.
(Do not try this at home.)
There is also a compound called wall saltpeter
because it can leach out of the mortar between the
bricks of damp walls: calcium nitrate (CaNO3).
Calcium has a valence of 2, so it can substitute in
many a molecule for two atoms of potassium, sodium,
or hydrogen, or some combination of them; its
name derives from Latin calx , which means both
lime—the substance, not the fruit—and heelbone.
The association of lime and bones is not accidental:
Limestone (calcium carbonate, CaCO3) is nothing
but the fossilized skeletons of tiny sea animals, and
calcium is the principal ingredient of bone; when
Shakespeare wrote, in The Tempest , that Of his
bones are coral made, he stated a truer fact of
nature than he may have known. Other ubiquitous
calcium compounds include gypsum—calcium sulfate
(CaSO4;), which is what sheetrock is made of—
and the active binding agent in cement, quicklime—
Calcium oxide (CaO), produced by cooking limestone
in a lime kiln (the primitive version, a lime rick
—compare hay-rick , a variant of haystack —was a
heap of earth with the stone and a fire kept going
inside it—whence the name of the town in Ireland
by which the doggerel verse-form is called as well ).
Quicklime is quick (that is, alive, as in the quick
and the dead) because it is anhydrous (Greek for
unwatered) and soaks up water with a vengeance to
make slaked lime (calcium hydroxide, Ca(OH)2,
from CaO + H2O), which is what makes quicklime so
useful as the binding agent in mortar, cement, and
concrete.
Some elements bear macaronic labels: one
which has a name from Greek but a symbol from
Latin is antimony (refined as early as 900 C.E. and
used, during the Middle Ages, as a powerful precursor
to Ex-Lax. The patient swallowed it as a pill
which was collected at the other end and weighed,
the patient being charged for the difference.)
Antimony is so called from Greek antimonos , against
single(ness) owing to its readiness to react with
other substances, but its chemical symbol is Sb, from
Latin stibium , the name of a cosmetic and medicinal
powder (antimony sulfide) used by Roman women as
a hair blackener for their eyebrows, and in ophthalmology
(of which there were many Etruscan specialists,
thanks in part to the unhealthy swamps of
Rome's Tuscan hinterlands) as an eye ointment.
Another metal, tin—for which the Phoenicians used
to sail as far from Tyre and Sidon to the mines on the
coast of Cornwall nearly three millennia ago—bears
a Latin symbol short for another metallic substance:
Sn, for stannum , a Roman-era amalgam of silver and
lead. (The Romans called tin plumbum album —
white lead.)
Most of the elements discovered in the first exuberant
wave of Enlightenment chemistry bear
abbreviations close to their actual names: Ni for
nickel, first identified in 1751 (an abbreviation of
German Kupfernickel , copper-demon, so called
because miners first noticed it as a stubborn adulterant
of copper ore), Al for aluminum—spelled alumin i um
in the British Commonwealth nations
(named in 1825 from Latin alumen , astringent substance),
Co for cobalt (isolated in 1735; the name is
a variant of German Kobold , a kind of imp). But
there are a few curve balls here as well, such as tungsten
(from tung sten , Swedish for heavy stone), first
discovered in 1783, whose symbol is W, short for
Wolfram (wolf-soot)—the German name for tungsten
oxide.
Tungsten was first discovered in the United
States in 1819, along with tellurium (with the symbol
Te, it comes from Latin tellus , another word for
terra , both meaning earth; compare the consonant
shift between Latin puer , boy, and puella, girl) in
Huntington, Connecticut, in a bismuth mine. (It was
once thought that bismuth —symbol Bi—was a
Germanic corruption of weisse Masse , white mass.
However, it now appears to have a far more complicated
history: German Bismut came from New Latin
bismutum , itself altered from medieval Latin vismutum ,
from obsolete German Wismut , itself a compound
of Wise- , meadow, plus Mut , mine claim. If
this seems far-fetched, consider that a major
American silver polish company began when a Mr.
Wright of New Hampshire extricated one of his cows
from a slough in a wet part of a field and was tipped
off by the whitish mud clinging to the animal's feet to
the presence of what proved to be a surprisingly
large deposit of calcium-rich diatomaceous earth.
Mines do grow in meadows.)
Apart from identifying the elements, the
chemists of the 18th and early 19th century were
most interested in quantifying them. Jö;ns Jakob
Berzelius, who discovered selenium (from Greek
selene , moon) in 1818 and named silicon (from
Latin silex , flint) in 1824, compiled the first systematic
table of the elements in 1828, arranged according
to units of atomic weight one twelfth of the heft
of the commonest isotope of carbon. (The heavier
carbon-14—C14 for short—is radioactive, with a
half-life—the amount of time it takes half the
radioactive atoms to throw off particles and decay to
their non-radioactive isotope—reckoned in thousands
of years, once the carbon is captured in a living
organism such as a tree. This permits a means of reasonably
accurate dating which has been a boon to
archeologists.)
Four decades later, Dmitri Mendeleev systematized
the table to show stacks of elements with similar
properties (e.g. the interchangeability of the
numbers of hydrogen, lithium, sodium and potassium
atoms in molecules such as sulfates and hydroxides:
The sodium atom in lye—NaOH—could just
as well be replaced by a second hydrogen, making
hydrogen hydroxide—HOH, better known as
H2O, or water). Mendeleev's insight was so valuable
that when radioactive elements began being synthesized
in laboratories during this century, he got one
named after him: Mendelevium—note the dropping
of the final e!—the 101st element (symbol
Md), first synthesized in 1955.
Other scientists with eponymous atoms include
the discoverers of radium, Pierre and Marie Curie
(element 96, Curium, symbol Cm, discovered in
1944), Ernest O. Lawrence, founder of the
Lawrence Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore laboratories
(element 103, Lawrencium, symbol Lr, synthesized
in 1961), and, of course, Albert Einstein
(element 99, Einsteinium, symbol Es, created in
1952)—the only instance of an atom named after
someone still living at the time of its discovery. (He
died in 1955.)
Place names and celestial bodies have been a
fruitful source of names for both natural and synthetic
elements. For the outer planets, there are
uranium, neptunium, and plutonium. Cerium is
named for the asteroid Ceres, both having been discovered
the same year (1801). National commemoratives
include Americium, Germanium, Polonium
and Francium; ancient France likewise gets a nod in
Gallium (Ga), the only metal that melts in your
hand, not in your chamber (unless you have a very
warm room)—named both for Gaul (Latin Gallia,
that place which, thanks to Julius Caesar's memoir
of its subjugation by the Romans, every schoolchild
used to know was divided into three parts) and, in a
gesture of unusual levity, as a pun on the name of its
discoverer, Paul-Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran.
(French coq and Latin gallus both mean the same
thing: rooster.)
One place has the distinction of having no fewer
than four atoms named after it, an embarrassment
of nomenclature arising from what was originally
thought to be one element turning out on closer
inspection to be several. Carl Gustav Mosander
found a new element in a geological sample from
Ytterby, Sweden, a town just a few miles north of
Göteborg (the Swedish terminus for the ferry from
Frederikshavn, Denmark. Do not confuse this with
Ytterby n , Sweden, which is 1000 kilometers to the
north, on the gulf of Bothnia). Naturally enough,
Mosander named the new element Ytterbium, after
the town.
One can well imagine his surprise when the
new atom turned out to be plural. To make the best
of a bad situation, the second and third elements
got names from pieces of the first: Erbium (Er) and
Terbium (Tb). Complicating matters even more, in
1907 another chemist, George Urbain, discovered
that the remaining element was actually two. The
new one got called Ytterbium (Yb) and Mosander's
original find got the name Yttrium (Y). Synthetic
yttrium aluminum garnets (YAGs) are favored by
jewelers and their public because the high refractive
index of the gem approaches that of diamond,
at a fraction of the cost.
Revelation is not seal'd: New elements are
being discovered to this day. As of last year, the
Society for Heavy Ion Research in Darmstadt,
Germany, had gotten up to element 112. These new
radioactive atoms are remarkably ephemeral, often
decaying in millionths of a second into lighter elements
by casting off subatomic particles, their fleeting
lives documented only by vapor trails.
Still, they enjoy a brief existence of a sort, and
names for them, honoring physicists and the locations
of their laboratories, are already queued up
awaiting approval by the scientific community at
large: Rutherfordium for #104 (Ernest Rutherford),
Dubnium for #105 (after the Russian lab at Dubna),
Seaborgium for #106 (Glenn Seaborg), Bohrium for
#107 (Niels Bohr), Hassium for #108 (Hesse
province in Germany, where the Darmstadt lab is
located) and—the first element to be named solely
for a woman—Meitnerium for #109 (Lise Meitner).
It is a sobering thought, then, to consider that
virtually all of the elements above #2 (helium, the
fusion product of the hydrogen that makes up the
stars, our sun included) are the result of the catastrophic
blowing apart of prior suns, and that our
earth and everything else in our own solar system
are mere cosmic hand-me-downs from someone
else's supernova. In this light the history of the universe
according to Taoist thought can be either
depressing or exhilarating, depending on one's point
of view; at any rate it seems true enough as far as
the Big Picture goes: First there was nothing. Then
there was something. Then there was hydrogen.
Then there was dirty hydrogen.
Notes
Nick Humez is the coauthor, with his brother
Alex, of a half-dozen books on language and word origins
including Latin for People/Latina pro Populo
(Little, Brown, Boston: 1976). He divides his time
between a silversmithing studio in Maine and a scriptorium
in New Jersey.
The idea for this title came from Jane
Gallagher Cates, to whom, with her husband, David
Cates, I am indebted for thoughtful comments and
suggestions on an early draft of this article.
Tom Lehrer, who went on in the 1960s to a
tenure-track position at Stanford and to write songs
for the television hits That was the Week That Was
(New Math, The Vatican Rag) and Sesame Street
(Silent Letter E). In his easily accessible modified-stride
piano style and sardonic lyrics, Lehrer profoundly
influenced a whole generation of budding
cabaret-song composers, including the author of this
article. It could be argued that only Socrates, perhaps,
had so widespread an effect on a rising generation in
his cultural milieu—and we all know what they did to
him .
Philip Wheelwright, in The Presocratics , BobbsMerrill/Odyssey:
1966, page 481, note 8. That the Egyptians recognized an elemental chemistry—the
word khem is a very old name for the black alluvium
of the Nile delta, and thus, by synecdoche, for Egypt
itself—is argued at some length by R. A. Schwaller de
Lubizc in his titanic book on the temple of Apet of the
South at Luxor, The Temple of Man (Inner Traditions
International, Rochester, VT: in press).
Priestley's flawed insight is discussed in Thomas
Kuhn's brilliant The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (Harvard University Press: 1969.)
Originally issued by Chicago University Press as one
offering in a set of works, edited by the mathematician
Rudolf Carnap, called Foundations of the Unity
of Science, Kuhn's blockbuster deconstruction of
normal scientific practice had the effect among
some readers of torpedoing the very idea that that
there was any unity of science. That it was the final
volume in the series may, however, have been entirely
coincidental. Carnap died in 1970 and Kuhn this
past year.
The formula for sulfuric acid will never be forgotten
by anyone who learned in junior high school
some variant of the following epitaph:
Johnny drank the beaker dry;
Johnny is no more:
For what he thought was H2O
Was H2SO4;.
As the Italian chemist Primo Levi dramatically
was reminded when a flask blew up in which he was
trying to refine benzene under wartime-scarcity conditions,
one of several remarkable escapes from death
recounted in his collection of autobiographical essays
published as The Periodic Table (Schocken, New
York: 1984).
Here is the limerick about Henry Ward Beecher,
promised in the opening paragraph:
A great Congregational Preacher
Once said to a hen, You sweet creature!
The hen, just for that,
Laid an egg in his hat,
And thus did the hen reward Beecher.
It has been argued, but not definitively proven,
that this is a veiled reference to the scandalous affair
between Beecher and Elizabeth Tilton, a member of
his parish and the wife of his successor as editor of the
Independent , for more on which see Richard
Brookhiser's article The Happy Medium in the New
York Times Book Review of March 29, 1998.
An alternate derivation, spurious but appealing,
was proposed to us while this article was in preparation,
in a letter (8/20/1998) from Col. Frank Holan,
USAF (retd.): The symbol for tungsten is W because
it is Weird.
I am indebted to Edward Goldfrank, my coauthor
on the Boston Basin Bicycle Book , for bringing
to my attention this tidy cosmological synopsis (personal
communication, late 1970s).
Loose ends: (a) While we're on the subject, or at
least next door to it—or at any rate, before we leave
its vicinity—let this be said for the record: Nowhere
in the works of Arthur Conan Doyle does arch-sleuth
Sherlock Holmes ever actually say, Elementary, my
dear Watson.
(b) The term element itself, while unquestionably
from Latin—Cicero gives it as a gloss for Greek stoicheion,
series ( stoichiometry is the calculation of
relative quantities of reagents and their end-products
in a chemical reaction)—is of obscure derivation.
Ernout and Meillet, in their delightful Dictionnaire
étymologique de la langue latine , urbanely review several
rather far-fetched possibilities including
LMN—well, it is a series—and elephas (elephant),
but conclude with a shrug of their shoulders and a
suggestion that the word might have come from
Etruscan. Another word whose origin is shrouded in
the mists of antiquity—like the swamps of Etruria, a
notoriously foggy place.
EX CATHEDRA
Ave!
Or, rather, hello again! VERBATIM is back,
with as few changes as possible, and we hope that it
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You'll find some familiar voices as well as some
new ones in this issue. In choosing the articles you
see in this issue I had help from a name you may
have noticed on the masthead: Paul Heacock, of the
Cambridge Dictionary of American English. I would
also like to thank Bob Olsen, John Mella, Mike
Slattery, Debbie Posner, and (especially) Hazel Hall
for their help. (Hazel has agreed to continue as our
UK representative.)
One thing you may have already noticed is that
we are a little more wired than before, and it's not
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One of the questions we asked on our survey was
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Please include the title,
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Fowler's English Usage, (ed. R.W. Burchfield,
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VERBATIM'S) all depends on whether you feel
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DARE—More Than Halfway There
Because logophiles regularly ask about the
progress of the Dictionary of American
Regional English (familiarly known as DARE), I'd
like to take the opportunity of VERBATIM's rebirth
to bring you all up to date. First, let me answer the
most frequently asked question, How is Fred
Cassidy doing? I'm delighted to say that Frederic G.
Cassidy, DARE's Chief Editor as well as the founder
of and inspiration behind the project, shows few signs
of slowing down as he approaches his ninety-first
birthday. His recent return from a trip to Jamaica
(where he was born and later did the research for his
books on Jamaican English) and his imminent departure
for a conference on Caribbean Linguistics in St.
Lucia should convince you of his good health!
The second most frequently asked question,
When will Volume IV be available? is more difficult
to answer. Before I try, let me give a quick synopsis of
the project for those who aren't already familiar with it.
The Dictionary of American Regional English is a
reference tool unlike any other. Its aim is not to prescribe
how Americans should speak, or even to
describe the language we use as cultivated speakers
and writers. Instead, it tries to document the varieties
of English that are not found throughout the country—those
words, pronunciations, and phrases that
vary from one region to another, that are learned at
home rather than at school, or that are part of our oral
rather than our written culture. Although American
English is remarkably homogeneous given the
tremendous size of the country, there are still many
thousands of differences that characterize the various
dialect regions of the United States. It is these differences
that DARE records.
The Dictionary is based both on face-to-face
interviews carried out in all fifty states between 1965
and 1970, and on an extensive collection of written
materials (diaries, letters, novels, histories, biographies,
newspapers, and government documents) that
cover our history from the colonial period up to the
present. These materials are cited in individual
entries to illustrate how words have been used from
the seventeenth century through the end of the twentieth.
The entries also include pronunciations (if they
vary regionally or differ from what would be expected),
variant forms, etymologies (if DARE can add to
what is already known about a word's history), and
statements about regional and social distributions of
words and forms.
A feature unique to DARE is its inclusion in the
text of the dictionary of numerous maps that show
where words were found in the 1,002 communities
investigated during the fieldwork. The maps are distorted
to reflect population density rather than geographic
area (giving a speaker in small, but densely
populated Connecticut as much space as a speaker in
large, but sparsely populated Nevada). Though the
maps are disconcerting at first glance, one easily
learns to translate the state boundaries and make
sense of the regional patterns.
Volume I, including extensive introductory matter
and the letters A-C, was published in 1985 (to the
acclaim of scholarly and lay reviewers alike, I'm
pleased to say). It had gone into a fifth printing within
a year of publication. Volume II (D-H) came out in
1991, and Volume III (I-O) appeared in 1996. Volume
IV will include P through the middle of S (we hate to
divide a letter in the middle, but you all know how big
S is). And Volume V will take us through Z.
To give you a sample of what's to come, let me
mention a few representative headwords from
Volume IV—chosen simply because I like them. (If
they are strange to you, see below for their meanings.)
The P's take us from pandowdy to pompey to pudjicky;
the Q's offer qualmish, quick start, and quiddle;
in R we find ramstugious, redd up, robin snow, and
rumpelkammer; and S yields saluggi, say-so, and
smearcase. Not to be outdone in creativity, the natural
science entries offer pollynose, prickly pig, puppy
toes, Quaker bonnet, railroad Annie, and sac-a-lait,
among many, many others.
As you can see from this sample, we are moving
steadily along through the alphabet. Our original
hope had been to publish Volume IV in 2001, with
Volume V coming out in 2006. That schedule, however,
was contingent on our maintaining our earlier level
of funding, which has become increasingly difficult,
and, in the last few years, impossible. In fact, our
financial woes necessitated a staff reduction last summer,
and it looks as if Volume IV will not be ready
before 2002.
Although the project is located on the campus of
the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University
can provide very limited financial support. Our funding
has come primarily from grants from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, matched by gifts
from numerous foundations and individuals. While
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation was for many
years our largest source of private funds, we have
also received assistance from the Brittingham Fund,
the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Evjue
Foundation, the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation,
the Hillsdale Fund, Inc., and the Grace Jones
Richardson Trust, among others.
After helping DARE for nearly twenty years
(despite its usual limit of ten years), the Mellon
Foundation has had to move on to other worthy projects.
So, we must find other friends who can help us
see that this project reaches the only reasonable conclusion
for a dictionary—the letter Z. The single
bright spot in our funding picture is that the Dean of
the College of Letters and Science here at the UWMadison
has provided DARE with a Development
Specialist for three years. David Simon has just
joined our staff, and will be devoting his considerable
energies to finding new sources of funding for
DARE. Although we hope that the National
Endowment for the Humanities will continue to provide
us with some support, it is clear that the future
of the project depends largely on private philanthropy.
We all know people who know people who
might be able to help. If you can be part of our support
network, or know someone else who can, won't
you give David a call? He can be reached at (608)
265-9836. Or drop him a note at 6125 Helen White
Hall, 600 N. Park St., Madison, WI 53706; or send
him an e-mail at [email protected]. (While
you're on line, take a look at our website, at
http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/dare/dare.html. ) We
invite you to join in our rallying cry—On to Z!
In case you didn't recognize those Volume IV
headwords, here they are again:
pandowdy a deep-dish pie or cobbler
pompey bulging or sagging (used in reference to
a floor or a surface of ice)
pudjicky sullen, grouchy
qualmish queasy
quick start a sneaker
quiddle to fuss over unimportant matters
ramstugious violent and reckless in behavior
redd up to clean, tidy up
robin snow a light snowfall
rumpelkammer a junk room or storage place
saluggi (spelled in various other ways as well) a
game intended to torment its victim
say-so an ice-cream cone
smearcase cottage cheese
pollynose a maple seed that one splits apart and
sticks to the bridge of the nose
prickly pig a porcupine
puppy toes a plant of the genus Euonymous, also
called cat's paw and burning bush
Quaker bonnet a bluet; also lupine
railroad Annie an orange milkweed
sac-a-lait a white crappie (a fish of the sunfish
family)
Exploring the Lexicon with Natives of North America
In August, 1967, at the Dictionary of American
Regional English (DARE) offices on the University
of Wisconsin campus, Frederic G. Cassidy assembled
the third group of dialect fieldworkers he would
send out in Word Wagons (Dodge vans converted to
campers) to collect regional words from far-flung
reaches of the United States. I was one; the others
were Tom Clark, Stanley J. Cook, and Patt Van Dyke.
We went through a week of orientation and instruction,
getting to know the office staff and operations,
having our driving and phonetic transcription skills
checked, and learning to use our camping and
recording equipment. Bibliographer Goldye Mohr
had identified the communities we were to visit. It
was up to us to choose an efficient itinerary and
locate informants—as many as needed, but ideally
just one in each place—to answer the 253-page
DARE questionnaire (QR). We were advised to
begin each project by notifying the county sheriff,
town clerk, or other officials, and to ask them for
leads to good informants.
The ideal informant (INF) was a native and lifelong
resident from an old local family, someone without
much exposure to the outside world, who spoke
regularly and familiarly with community members of
all social ranks and occupations, who could remember
precisely how all of them talked about their
social, domestic, economic, and natural environments,
and who would donate ten to twenty hours of
free time to transmit all this information.
The ideal fieldworker (FW) was a good listener
with at least a little linguistic training and a lot of
Sprachgefühl who knew as much about the world in
general as the INF knew about the local part of it.
First, though, the FW had to possess a talent for fitting
in, so as to make such an impression of integrity
and worth on local officials that they arranged an
introduction at once to the ideal INF. Once the
interview began, this ideal FW would seem as familiar
as an old friend, so that the INF always spoke in
everyday terms instead of bookish formal ones.
Like all ideals, these remained abstract, and
DARE had to make do with actual human beings and
their limitations. Judging by the quality of the 1,002
QRs archived in Madison, we—INFs and FWs
alike—must have compensated for our limitations
pretty well.
Of my own limitations, the one I had to compensate
for most was my ignorance of city life. I asked Jim
Hartman, the fieldwork coordinator, not to send me
on any more urban expeditions than necessary.
However, since I was the sole FW assigned to
Louisiana, New Orleans was necessary. In fact, it was
necessary twice, because two QRs were allocated in
the metropolitan area. To increase coverage, I divided
one between a white suburban housewife and a
black gardener from downtown. For the other I went
to the Irish Channel, a working-class neighborhood.
This was the environment I was most ill-suited for.
I knew how to act in some places. Growing up in
the rural Ozarks, I learned early that good country
people expect visitors to sit and visit a spell before
bringing up their business. From dealing with academic
administrators, I knew to come straight to the point
with personages who sit behind large desks and have
their time allocated by secretaries. One of my teachers,
a South Carolina native, had taught me that white men
like me always had to state their business clearly when
looking for a resident of a black neighborhood; otherwise
the neighbors would assume they were up to no
good and pretend not to know the person. Because my
city experience was largely limited to student enclaves,
however, nothing prepared me for establishing turf in
a working-class urban neighborhood.
My difficulty was exacerbated by the setting
where I was introduced by a city councilman: a bar,
Parasol's, which played a central role in the social and
cultural life of the Irish Channel. I could find no one
INF who would withdraw to a private spot for a quiet
interview; I just had to show up every afternoon and
interview whichever authentic old-time Irish Channel
male residents came in and agreed to talk there in the
bar. Women stayed on the restaurant side, and I was
given to understand it would be presumptuous of me
to try to interview them. On the bar side, I was
expected to buy rounds of drinks when my turn came
up and to drink the beer served to me when others
bought rounds. The regulars came almost every day
to play out roles (jokester, misanthrope, goosey guy,
smiley guy, gourmand, and others) in an ongoing plotless
improvisational drama.
It was a fun-loving group, and I would have had as
much fun as anybody if I had not had work to do, but
keeping the QR going required continual exercise of
the will. Normally, with one INF, once we established
a working relationship, my only strain came from
making the questions understood and making sure I
understood the answers. In Parasol's, though, I had to
struggle every night to shape and defend my identity
because it never did settle down to a single role that
every actor could play to. To some I was the guy writing
a book. One fellow always greeted me with,
Arkansas! Arkansas! Another fixated on Wisconsin
and repeatedly tried to start friendly arguments about
the Green Bay Packers.
A quintessential incident: one night a patron new
to me came in, noticed me asking questions, and
began asking some himself. I explained cordially what
I was doing and who I worked for.
He said, Oh, a Yankee, hunh?
Still cordially, I said, No, I'm not a Yankee. I just
work for the University of Wisconsin. I was born and
raised in Arkansas. He sparred with me about what
the Dictionary would be good for and called me a
Yankee again. This time, half for show and half in real
anger, I stood up, slammed my fist to the table, and
shouted, God damn it, I'm not a Yankee!
There were several of us at the table, and every-body's
beer turned over. I thought, Uh-oh, now I've
got a fight on my hands. Sensing I had to show some
spunk, but unable to guage it right, I had almost
shown too much. He said, Take it easy. I'm not trying
to start nothing. He didn't back off for long; after I
had bought more beer, he came after me again about
the Dictionary. I think, he said, it's a lot of bullshit.
I answered much the way I had answered more
delicately phrased objections in Arkansas and north
Louisiana: I told how, for example, a fisherman would
be able to check the Dictionary if he caught a mudfish
in Florida and wanted to find out what the real
name of it was. He could find that the mudfish is
called bowfin in textbooks, that in south Arkansas and
north Louisiana it is written grindle or grinnel but
always pronounced [` grinl ]; that in south Louisiana it
is called green cypress trout, grinnel , and choupique ,
which in English is pronounced [š]; that in
northwest Florida the word grindle is sometimes pronounced
[`grindl]. A person could find similar interesting
bits of information about every aspect of daily
life.
Such explanations had always worked before but
here I had gauged wrong again. The people farther
north had all been earnest Protestants with a utilitarian
outlook. This man resided in a Catholic neighborhood
whose cultural values were epitomized by
parades: Mardi Gras, St. Patrick's Day, and St.
Joseph's Day. Celebrants began planning next year's
parade the day after this year's was over. I should
have known that these interests did not point to a
utilitarian turn of mind.
Yeah, he said, but I still think it's a lot of bullshit.
A few years later I would present a symposium
paper titled Scholarship as Play, saying academic
pursuits manifest the human tendency to extend the
learning activity of play all the way through adulthood
instead of abandoning it after adolescence, as
most other mammals do. Even in 1968, though, I
had long realized—without thinking the matter
through so thoroughly as I did for the paper—that
academic study is not serious in the same sense that
farming, mining, weaving, and child-rearing are. I
had seldom said so openly, but this began to seem
like a good time. I grinned and looked the man in the
eye and said, To tell you the truth, I think it's a lot
of bullshit myself. But I really enjoy doing it.
He looked blank for a moment and then grinned
back and said, You know something? I kinda like
you!
Fitting in can have its drawbacks. Another time,
I was able to keep an informant only because I was
an outsider; she realized she should make allowances
for my ignorance. That story is worth telling, if only
for the word she made allowances for.
In introducing myself and DARE to a prospective
INF in Cameron, LA, I gave examples of what I
had learned. Among others, I mentioned the names
caouane [\?\ka\?\wεn] or [\?\ka\?\wæn], turtle; gros-bec
[\?\gro(u),bεk], night heron; and bec-scie [\?\bεk\?\si],
merganser. She agreed to work with me, but the
next day she warned me not to say one of the words
I had used the day before because it was a dirty word
and I would get in trouble for it. At the time I could
not recall any words I had said. I asked, Which
one?
She cast down her eyes and said, I can't tell
you.
For a day or two I was almost afraid to speak at
all, until I narrowed down to the words mentioned
above. Just before leaving Cameron, I made an educated
guess and asked my INF if it was the word for
turtle that was so bad. She said it was.
Hartman had told me to be on the lookout for
the southeastern turtle name cooter , with the slang
meaning pudendum. If that was what caouane
meant, we had something. I pursued the investigation
in a bar, where verbal taboos are often relaxed.
There was one male customer inside, talking with
the proprietress. After I had circumlocuted a while
to avoid offense to her, she and the customer agreed
slyly they knew what word I meant. I learned over to
the man, cupped my ear, and intoned dramatically,
Tell me.
It's caouane [\?\ka\?\wæn], he said, and in French
it means pussy. I remained outwardly calm, but I
could have jumped up and down and shouted.
I wrote to Cassidy expressing puzzlement. I
remembered Thomas Pyles pointing out in class
once that animal metaphors for this body part name
cute, furry animals: pussy, beaver, squirrel, monkey,
cony, and (in France) lapin . Nothing about a turtle is
cuddlesome; it does not fit the pattern. Cassidy
offered an intriguing explanation: the metaphor
probably originated in Caribbean folklore, which has
it that sea turtles (the referent for caouane in standard
French dictionaries) copulate for a hundred
days at a time. In Louisiana the name was transferred
to a freshwater turtle with far more modest
size and amatory tenacity, but the metaphor persisted.
It pays tribute not to cuteness but to sexual
power. It venerates venery.
I would never have learned all this if my INF
had not proffered the courtesy owed to an ignorant
outsider.
[Textual note] The anecdotes recounted here are
retellings of my fieldwork journal entries dated Feb. 5
and Mar. 7, [1968]. The original volumes are in my
possession; photocopies are archived at the DARE
office.
Ups and Downs
Explaining English idioms is tough enough, but
how do you account for the seemingly contradictory
ones? I was in a taxi with a Japanese friend of mine,
and the driver was cutting through traffic like a
speedboat through a docking area. Hey, buddy! I
rapped on the divider-glass. Slow up a little, will
you?
This tactic actually worked. But when we arrived
at our destination and were safely on the sidewalk, my
friend murmured, Excuse me, but isn't the proper
expression slow down?
Well, yes, I began. I mean, no. It's both, really.
My friend cocked his head as if to say, You
Occidentals! I could have said something about
Japanese—how hai sometimes means yes and sometimes
means no —but decided not to pursue it further.
Still, it got me thinking.
Take a restaurant doing a brisk business: when
closing time comes around, does it shut up for the
night, or shut down ? When your grandmother picked
all those cherries, did she put up preserves or put
down canned cherries for the winter? For proper
directions, do you go down the road for a mile before
turning right, or up the road?
These may seem like imponderables, but we can
tease out a few differences. First of all, when an
establishment shuts up, it simply closes, but when it
shuts down, it ceases activity. If this sounds like too
nice a distinction, consider common usage: factories
shut down rather than shutting up; conversely, your
rude brother may ask you to shut up, not shut down.
Similarly, putting up food often involves sealing it in
jars later stored on shelves, as opposed to putting
down a good supply of hay for your livestock. As for
which way to go on a road, up is either literally up a
rise, due north, or just the way the speaker is pointing.
English has other such ups and downs: ripping up
a house versus ripping down the same structure, for
instance, or the hearty Drink it down! instead of
Drink it up! If usage is a sundial, the shade of
meaning alters its angle slightly here. Ripping up anything
means destroying it, often by severing the connective
tissues, from ripping up floorboards to ripping
up a draft card. To rip down a building, on the other
hand, is to raze it. Break up and break down , like tear
up and tear down , and cut up and cut down , work
comparably. Idiomatic drinking, like drinking itself, is
a little fuzzier, but two senses coexist: having your
comrades clap you on the back as you tilt up your beer
stein, or else downing a draught of nasty medicine
because the doctor tells you to.
Of course, most ups and downs function as simple
opposites, as in uptown versus downtown . To look up
a road should be in the opposite direction of to look
down it, just as to look up to a person you admire is
the course of to look down on an inferior. But what
about expressions that split unevenly? To sit up is at
most a slant-opposite of to sit down , since sitting
down means to sit, whereas sitting up means that you
were already sitting but are now improving your posture.
(A sit-up , with a hyphen, exercises your abdominal
muscles, but a sit-down strike tends to exercise
the tempers of management.) And if you happen to
be sitting already, then you can stand up , but if you're
asked to stand down , then you're still standing after
that, just not on the stage or dais. Of course, if you're
in the military, to stand down is to be at ease, no
longer at attention.
Other uneven splits include hurry up , or to hasten,
versus hurry down , to hie yourself in a particular
direction. You dig up buried treasure but dig down on
your energy reserves to finish that race. You can be
called up for army duty, but in Britain to be called
down from university is a bit of a disgrace, similar to
expulsion in the United States. Why are these ups and
downs not polar opposites? If it comes to that, even
uptown and downtown aren't quite equivalent
because downtown in many towns is only a few
blocks.
After a while, you can see a difference emerging.
Get up and get down , for instance, could be exact
antonyms, except that each has one or more secondary
meaning that leads away from the original
paired meanings. Get up may mean to pull yourself
up from the ground or to arise from bed. In the nominal
sense, getup can mean a costume. Get down ,
however, besides meaning to alight, also refers to
loosening up or having sex (from get down to it ), as in
the refrains of so many funk songs from the 1970's. To
throw up a parcel onto the boat may be the opposite
of to throw down that parcel onto the loading dock,
but clearly throw up has a regurgitative meaning that
throw down lacks. This second meaning forms a slant-opposite.
Put up and put down , for instance, need not
refer just to food: you can put up a guest (and put up
with him, as well) or put down a dying dog (a milder
form of which applies to making babies sleep). To
return to look up and look down , which seemed so
complementary in terms of location or regard: look up
has a tertiary meaning, as in looking up a word in the
dictionary, that look down lacks.
Thus, pipe up and pipe down are also slantopposites:
to speak out or to tune a band versus to
lower your voice. Keep up means to stay with the
pace, whereas keep down is to oppress, or not to disgorge.
When you turn down , are you refusing an
offer or folding a bedsheet? You can just as well turn
up that bedsheet, but when good luck turns up , that
introduces a new wrinkle. Maybe one good turn
deserves its opposite. As D. H. Lawrence once
wrote, in an autobiographical poem called Red-Herring:
My father was a working man
and a collier was he,
at six in the morning they turned him down
and they turned him up for tea.
The various senses of both turns show a lot about
the mining business and what an efficient hell it was.
In a similar vein: you run up a flag on the pole,
or run up a gross of a new product, or just run up a
whopping bill, but you run down a colleague, or a
truck may run down a man on the street. And the
rundown is inside information. You can touch up a
paint job, but you touch down on an airfield. And
this is not to be confused with the touchdown that
all American football fans know. You can stay up as
in keeping awake, or stay down as in hugging the
boxing ring mat for fear of your opponent, yet to
stay up can be the opposite of to stay down—it just
depends on the context. (As a linguist friend of
mine once wearily conceded, Everything depends
on the context.)
You can even apply some ingenious logic to the
ups and downs: if you want to pack up more in an
already stuffed suitcase, better first pack down what
you have in there. If you live it up too freely, you
may never live it down . And crackdowns , done
while there is still time, may prevent future crackups .
Or a comeuppance may lead to a bringdown .
Then there are the single halves. You can cook
up a storm, but if you attempt to cook down one,
leave me out of your dinner invitations. You can
catch up to your rival, but who ever heard of catch
down ? You can pick up a quart of milk at the supermarket,
or some information by keeping your ears
open, but you generally don't pick down anything.
When you get too rowdy, you may be asked to quiet
down, never quite up —or, in reverse, clam up but
never clam down . Oppositely, you may be asked to
'fess up or own up, but not in any other direction.
Facing a rough day ahead, you may want to rest up ,
but never rest down. You can't butter down your
boss. Your feelings may be pent up inside, not pent
down. Scuffing your shoes on the pavement wears
down the leather, not up . And how would you ever
hunker up?
On the other hand, the lopsided quality of single
halves has caused a few reparations. Nowadays,
the warm up for an athletic meet is paired after the
event with a warm down. And the old query
What's up? has a streetwise counterpart, What's
going down? Just as nature is reputed to abhor a
vacuum, some people can't abide asymmetry.
Of course, there are other ins and outs to pursue
here, but in and out just introduce more
instances of slant usage, from read in and read out
to——( fill in or fill out the blank).
Should I go off from here? Or should I go on?
Word Words
We need some new words to describe words.
English already has several well known -onym words
(from the Greek onyma meaning name), such as
synonym (same meaning), antonym (opposite meaning),
and homonym (same sound).
Less well known is heteronym (same spelling, but
different sound, e.g., sow meaning pig and sow
meaning planting seeds). Heteronyms are also
called homographs.
Then there's pseudonym , (false name), eponym
(named for a person, e.g., sandwich after Lord
Sandwich), and acronym (formed from the initial letters
or syllables of a group of words, e.g., snafu meaning
Situation Normal; All Fouled Up or laser meaning
Light Amplification Stimulated Emissions
Radiation).
It was that word acronym that started me thinking
about the need for more word words. The word
acronym is sometimes used for words formed from
the first two letters of a group of words. Soho is the
area of Manhattan SOuth of HOuston Street. But is
Soho an acronym? Yes, if we accept a definition that
includes the initial letters. But can't we be more precise?
Let's leave acronym for a word formed from the
first letter of several words. Then, we'll need a word
for a word formed from the first two letters of words.
How about bicronym ? That captures the initial-letter
sense of acronym but uses the combining form bi- signifying
two (from the Latin bi- meaning twice or
having two).
What then should we do with Tribeca , the area of
Manhattan that is the TRIangle BElow CAnal Street?
Bicronym won't do, because we are using the first
three letters of triangle. Tricronym won't do either,
because we are using only the first two letters from
below and Canal . Perhaps the answer is polycronym ,
still capturing the initial-letter sense of acronym , but
using the combining form poly- signifying many
(from the Greek polus meaning much).
These words, bicronym and polycronym , suggest
the need for still another word. The words bicronym
and polycronym are formed by breaking up the combining
form acro- (from the Greek acros meaning
highest) into a- and cro- and combining bi- or poly-
with cro- . A word thus formed by breaking up an
existing combining form, prefix, root, or suffix should
also have a name. It could be fractonym, using the
coined combining form fracto- (from the Latin fractus,
the past participle of frangire meaning to break).
Fractonyms existed in English before we had a
word for them. A fairly well known example is prequel
the word that means an episode or a movie that portrays
events occurring before the events in the original
episode or movie. Prequel takes the word sequel
(Latin sequela meaning what follows), breaks it into
se- and -quel , and then combines -quel with the prefix
pre-. Another current example of a fractonym is
threepeat , used to describe the feat of a team or individual
who wins an annual championship three years
in a row. The Chicago Bulls were widely reported to
have achieved a threepeat in professional basketball.
Repeat was broken into re- and -peat and -peat was
combined with three. Voilà, another fractonym!
Then we could have retronym, meaning a word
formed by reversing the spelling of another word.
Lord Kelvin is credited with coining mho by reversing
the spelling of ohm . An ohm is a unit of electrical
resistance (named for the German physicist, Georg
Simon Ohm), and a mho is a unit of conductivity of a
body whose resistance is one ohm. We could also call
mho a backword , but we are better off staying with
the family of -onyms. Retronym derives from the
combining form retro- (from the Latin retro meaning
backward).
A related word is needed for a word with two,
opposite meanings. Sanction means to forbid and
also to permit. Moot means a debate, and a moot
point originally meant a debatable point and then
also came to mean a point that was not debatable or
not worth debating. Such a perplexing word might
be called a contronym, using the prefix contra- (from
the Latin contra meaning against), or possibly a contradictonym.
We also need a word for a word that illustrates its
own meaning. Oxymoron means a phrase that contrasts
opposites for a literary effect, e.g., a deafening
silence. Oxymoron derives from the Greek oxymoros
meaning pointedly foolish, which itself derives from
oxy- , a combining form meaning sharp (from the
Greek oxus meaning sharp) and moron (from the
Greek moros meaning dull). Oxymoron is an oxymoron.
But what should we call such an unusual
word? One possibility is etymonym (pronounced ehTYM-o-nym),
using the coined combining form
etymo- (from the Greek etymon meaning the true
meaning of a word, which derives from etymos meaning
true or real). This is not as rare a category as you
might think. Another etymonym is noun (noun is a
noun). Prefix almost qualifies; at least it illustrates a
prefix.
Then, there should be a word for a word that has
an etymology that is no longer true. Atom literally
means a hypothetical body that is so small that it is
incapable of being further divided. Atom derives
from the combining form a- (from the Greek a
meaning not and the Greek tomos , meaning cut).
Of course, in the age of neutrons, protons, electrons,
and even quarks, we now know that an atom is not a
particle that cannot be divided into smaller particles.
So we need a word for outdated etymologies.
Possibly pseudoetymonym, using the combining
forms pseudo- and etymo- . Another possibility is
gerontoetymonym, (pronounced ger-ON-to-ehTYM-o-nym)
using the combining forms geronto-
meaning old (from the Greek gerontos meaning old
man) and etymo-. Perhaps better to stay with pseudoetymonym
and save the prefix geronto- to form
gerontonym , meaning an old word, especially one
whose original meaning has been altered, but is not
necessarily now false.
The category of eponyms might be subdivided to
add literatonym (pronounced lit-er-AH-to-nym),
meaning a word derived from the name of a person
or place in literature and mythonym , meaning a literatonym
derived from mythology ( Herculean from
Hercules, and, less obviously, martial from Mars). A
well known literatonym is serendipity, often used
imprecisely to mean anything found by good luck,
but precisely meaning something good that is unexpectedly
found while looking for something else.
Serendipity was coined by Horace Walpole from the
fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip (the
ancient name for Ceylon), who often set sail for one
destination and found something even better, by fortunate
accident.
What should be call these new words?
Neologism is sometimes used, but it means not only
a new word but also the use of new words. Besides,
better to stay with the -onym ending and call such
words neonyms , using the combining form neo-
(from the Greek neos meaning new).
Finally, we need a word for all these words that
identify a category of words — the existing words
such as synonym, antonym, and homonym, and the
suggested neonyms—bicronym, fractonym, etymonym,
and the others. The obvious answer is
nymonyms, or, a bit catchier, nymnyms —word
words.
Mad for Words: A Tale of Murder, Insanity,
and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary
At the author's party held to launch this book
in Oxford last spring, the current editors of the OED
were green with envy. How could Simon Winchester,
a journalist best known for travel books, have earned
a huge publishers advance for this book? And why
would the film rights be worth even more—a cash
payment in the six figures sterling? It is, after all, a
description of what they do every day as lexicographers.
The heart of the story concerns two elderly gents
who copy words out of old books and write about
them in a dictionary. It does not seem the sort of
action-adventure story that would lend itself to film
treatment. Much as those of us who love words
would wish for it, a film biography of Sir James
Murray isn't the stuff to draw people to the multiplex
theatres out by the highway. A fine scholar, a self-educated
and proud man, but one whose favorite
recreation was riding a huge tandem tricycle around
Oxford and the surrounding countryside.
Hint: it's the other guy.
The other elderly gentleman with a library of old
books and the recreation of copying curious words
out of them was William Chester Minor, M.D., an
American living in England and one of the most
faithful and useful of Dr. Murray's volunteer readers.
Speaking to the Philological Society in 1899, Murray
declared: So enormous have been Dr. Minor's contributions
during the past 17 or 18 years, that we could
easily illustrate the last four centuries from his quotations
alone. Minor did little else than make word
indexes to old books; it was an obsession with him.
If the filmic possibilities aren't yet clear, we
should begin with Minor's birth in Ceylon in June
1834, the child of New England missionaries.
Winchester invents some luscious women: young,
chocolate-skinned, giggling naked girls with sleek wet
bodies and rosebud nipples and long hair and coltish
legs with scarlet and purple petals folded behind their
ears, who play in the white Indian Ocean surf and who
run, quite without shame, along the cool wet sands on
their way back home (40). Here, perhaps, the cinematic
possibilities become a little more obvious.
These girls are not, perhaps, altogether fictional;
Minor would later tell people that he began to entertain
lascivious thoughts about the time he was thirteen.
And his parents thought it was a good time to
send him back to New Haven to board with an uncle
while he got more education than the mission schools
could provide. (In a characteristic flight of the travel-writer's
imagination, Winchester hints that the parents
were sending him back to Connecticut where frolicsome
female nudity was, they thought, less common.)
Minor earned his medical degree from Yale in
1863 and immediately enlisted in the U.S. Army. The
life of an army surgeon in that dismal year was horrifying,
and Minor could not have felt optimistic since
neither Vicksburg nor Gettysburg had yet produced
hope that the union would be preserved. In May
1864, he was treating the wounded from the Battle of
the Wilderness, part of the brutal and grueling campaign
that would take so many lives in the peninsula
of Virginia. But it was not that carnage that so influenced
Minor's life, in Winchester's view, but the order
that the doctor brand an Irish deserter on the face
with a D. Fear of retribution from the unforgiving
Irish, combined with those Sri Lankan girls, is
adduced by Winchester as a factor leading to Minor's
life as a dictionary maker.
The army eventually recognized that there was
something badly wrong with Minor, and when he continued
to serve as a medical examiner after the war, it
became apparent that he was unfit for his responsibilities
as a captain in the medical corps. He was, in
1868, diagnosed as delusional and taken for treatment
to a hospital in Washington. Released at the
behest of friends, he left for England in October
1871, with a box of paints, some books, and his gun.
On February 17, 1872, Dr. Minor shot George
Merritt, a brewery worker, in the back of the neck as
Merritt tried to flee. He killed him, thinking him to
be an Irishman stalking him and bent on revenge.
And then, when a constable approached, he admitted
the shooting. Minor was tried, found insane, and committed
to the asylum at Cawthorne—hence the title
of Winchester's book in Britain: The Surgeon of
Cawthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness, and the Love
of Words.
Minor eventually learned of Dr. Murray's great
project and began to copy words from old books. And
then, in December 1902, he cut off his penis.
Winchester would like us to believe that this surprising
piece of surgery is connected to those lissome
beauties of Sir Lanka or to intimacies with Eliza
Merritt, George's widow. (Though Eliza had visited
Minor a few times and was grateful for his contributions
for the upkeep of her children, the idea that they
had been intimate some fifteen years earlier is utterly
speculative. This is one of many flights of fancy during
which Winchester negotiates among the possible,
the probable, and the no evidence exists.)
Consider the movie: what script writer would show us
Minor copying out words from a 1693 volume called
the Compleat Woman rather than a remorseful and
forgiving grapple with a tipsy Mrs. Merritt?
In April 1910, the British government yielded to
the importunings of Minor's relatives and let him go
home. Cawthorne had cared for him since 1872 and
now it was time to shift the costs of his upkeep to the
Americans. So, in the company of his brother, he went
to St. Elizabeth's in Washington—Winchester
reminds us that an anti-Semite American poet and a
failed assassin of an American president have been
housed there too. Minor wasn't quite through,
though; in 1915, he smacked one of his fellow
inmates, though he had but little strength to hurt
anyone. In 1919 his nephew urged that he be moved
to an asylum in Connecticut. On March 26, 1920, he
died—at 85 years and nine months.
Interspersed in Minor's story is the tale of the
editing of the OED. Winchester's story has an abundance
of mistakes. Herbert Coleridge, the first editor
of the Philological Society's dictionary, was not the
poet's grandson; Elisabeth Murray's biography was
only taken on by Oxford after Yale University Press
had turned it into a bestseller and shamed OUP into
publishing it (OUP having earlier rejected it as
unworthy). There are lexical curiosities as well.
Bugger grips is his intriguing term for what others
might call muttonchops or burnsides; he believes
that fulsome means exuberant.
But these carpings are sour grapes. Winchester
is getting very rich from a story pretty well known to
many people interested in dictionaries—particularly
Elizabeth Knowles of OUP who unearthed basic
information and is rightly given, by Winchester, what
he would call a fulsome accolade. He discovered a
Minor descendant and found a trove of correspondence
that makes the story much richer (and more
factual) than what was otherwise known. He seems
to have overlooked a story in the Springfield Sunday
Republican headlined A Mad Dictionary Maker
(July 25, 1915, p. 16).
Winchester wants the story simple, and cinematic.
Murray should arrive at the gate of the Asylum
imagining it is some private residence—alas,
Winchester tells us, a popular myth. Murray knew
that Minor was in the asylum; it was as obvious from
the return address on his letters as Sing Sing would
have been to an American counterpart. Minor was so
guilt-ridden over his prodigious sexual appetites
that he committed an autopenectomy, reducing his
organ to a stub that extended about one inch from
its base. These are alluring possibilities for film.
And remarkable accents to a story that is essentially
about two elderly gentlemen making a dictionary.
Richard W. Bailey, University of Michigan
On the So-called Debate over Black English
Perhaps no issue better illustrates the poverty of
our political and intellectual culture than the so-called
debate over Black English, or as it has now
been christened, Ebonics.
The confusions are many; the emotions are high,
and the political ramifications obvious. It may be of
interest to try to sort some of the issues out.
Language or Dialect?
The Oakland School Board proclaimed that
Ebonics was a language, and that teaching English to
speakers of Ebonics was an exercise in bilingualism,
comparable, in principle, to teaching English to
speakers of Spanish or Vietnamese. The outcry was
impassioned and predictably hostile.
The debate is virtually meaningless. Most students
of language understand that whether two varieties
of speech are considered dialects of one language
or separate languages is as much a political
question as it is a linguistic one. So, for example, the
varieties of Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.) are
about as different as the Romance Languages
(Portuguese, Spanish, etc.). That one group is
referred to as dialects, and the other group as languages
has more to do with national boundaries than
any internal feature of the speech varieties themselves.
One linguist characterized a language as a
dialect with an army and navy.
Bad English
Much of the debate has been couched in terms
of lowering standards, the dumbing-down of the
education system, etc. For example, in a syndicated
column, Ellen Goodman (Seattle Times, December
27, 1996) snidely compared Black English I be
with French Je suis, and characterized the former
as merely bad English, as opposed to a valid language.
Even the most superficial analysis of any speech
community would reveal that certain varieties of
speech are prestigious and others are stigmatized,
and that what determines a particular variety's status
has virtually nothing to do with the internal features
of that variety and everything to do with the class,
and in this case the race, of the speakers involved. In
short, the issue is the color of their skin, not the color
of their vowels.
But the confusions are deeper, and more insidious.
I was on a recent talk show, where the host
referred to speakers of Black English as illiterate
thugs. The juxtaposition of the two terms is revealing.
An academic feature, namely literacy, is
assumed to correlate with a moral one. In other
words, bad English is what is spoken by bad people.
This assumption is pervasive in our society. Someone
who speaks a prestigious dialect is thereby thought
to be honest, clean, trustworthy and admirable.
A friend of mine used to teach remedial reading
in the New York public school system. The class was
for students who had repeatedly failed, and was
referred to as the last class before jail. On the first
day, my friend would tell the class, I'm supposed to
teach you how to read. But, let's get one thing
straight; Hitler knew how to read, and my grandmother
didn't, and I'll take my grandmother any
time. The difference between my New York friend
and the radio talk show host is crucial. Schooling and
morality are not synonymous, and probably show virtually
no significant correlation. In the current discussion,
familiarity with the prestige dialect does not
correlate with moral virtue.
Some Basic Linguistics
On this issue, it is sometimes difficult to know
who are worse, the intellectuals or the bigots.
Columnists quote scholars who insist that speakers
of Black English are careless and lazy and that the
particular variety of speech involved has no rules.
That positions such as these are articulated and published
reflects a level of information analogous to
arguing that the earth is flat.
In fact, an example of how rules in Black English
differ from those of other dialects may be revealing.
Consider the following data. (I hesitate to refer to
dialects as standard or nonstandard, since it seems
to me to give the game away.)
In one dialect of English, the plural of nouns is
formed by adding [s] or [z] or [\?\], resulting in forms
like [posts] [boyz] and [bus\?\s] for posts, boys and
buses .
In my dialect of English, however, the plural of
post is pronounced something like [poss]. The simplest
mechanism for accounting for such a pronunciation
is by adding a phonological rule for the deletion
of [t] under certain circumstances. So, for example,
prints and prince are both pronounced [prins]. The
rule, in fact, is more general, applying to [d] as well.
Wines and winds are both pronounced [waynz].
Notice, however, that the rule for the deletion of [t]
must follow the rule for forming the plural.
Otherwise, if [t] deletion preceded plural formation,
then [post] would become [pos] and the plural would
be [pos\?\s]. Well, it turns out, that for many speakers
of Black English, the plural of post is, in fact, pronounced
[pos\?\s]. Why? Because they have essentially
the same rules as I have, but in the opposite order. In
other words, there are three dialects:
Dialect A: Plural formation.
Dialect B. Plural formation followed by [t] deletion
Dialect C. [t] deletion followed by plural formation.
Pedagogy
Now, imagine the average teacher of reading with
students representing each of the three speech varieties.
A student of Dialect A, sees the written word
posts , and pronounces it [posts]. The teacher beams;
that child can get to be president. A student of
Dialect B sees the written word posts , and pronounces
it [poss]. The teacher might encourage the
student to enunciate more clearly. Such a student
might not get to be president, but could perhaps
aspire to be Mayor of New York.
But now the student of Dialect C sees the word
written posts and pronounces it [pos\?\s]. The teacher
is confused Get that student an eye-exam; get that
student a hot lunch; get that student something. The
fact is that such a student has demonstrated the ability
to read. What the student needs is a better teacher.
And, ultimately, that's one thing that the Oakland
School Board was suggesting: the simple, commonsense
proposal that teachers might be more effective
if they knew something about the speech patterns of
the people they were trying to teach. Unfortunately,
that proposal became obscured by the pointless
debate over whether Black English is or is not a language.
History
Another emotional, and largely irrelevant debate
resulted from the use by the Oakland School Board of
the word genetic to refer to Black English. That some
actually took this to mean that people are born with a
predisposition to acquire a particular language would
be laughable if it were not so pernicious. (Some years
ago, there was a brief article in the newspaper about
a woman from Texas who had adopted a Mexican
infant, and was studying Spanish, so that she would be
able to speak to the child when it grew up. She was
equally misinformed but not as malicious as the current
critics of the Oakland School Board.)
In fact, the origin of some of the features of Black
English is of some theoretical, scholarly interest.
Slaves in this country were systematically separated
from their families, and put in situations where they
could not use their native language. In such a situation,
what typically develops is what is referred to as a
pidgin, based on the language of the environment, in
this case, English. The next generation acquires this
language as a product of their linguistic maturation,
and this variety is sometimes called a creole. Over the
succeeding centuries, this language has undergone a
process of decreolization for obvious reasons.
Now, what is of some interest is that because
slaves in other countries were not systematically isolated,
there is, as far as I can tell, no such thing as
Black Portuguese in Brazil, for example. In other
words, there is a historical explanation for the emergence
of Black English, but it surely has little relevance
to the current educational and pedagogical
debate.
It still remains to be seen whether a rational,
coherent language policy for speakers of Black
English can evolve in our educational institutions.
Given the emotional and uninformed reaction so far,
it is hard to be optimistic.
Revising The F-Word
Writing a book entirely about the word fuck,
aside from being a good way to guarantee cocktail-party
chatter, exposes one to numerous criticisms.
Apart from the tiresome degradation of society
arguments from the puritanical, everyone is familiar
with this word in its many forms. Newspapers coyly
refer to it with euphemisms and circumlocutions, Tshirt
vendors stock shirts emblazoned with its many
parts of speech. And everyone has a favorite passage,
unusual compound, or offbeat etymological
theory to promote.
The original edition of The F-Word was a successful
project. It included almost all of the important
uses of the word, and the introduction gave a
good picture of the word's history, both etymological
and social. But there is always room for
improvement, and so when Random House determined
it was time to reprint, we decided that a
major revision could be supported. The revision is
in progress at the time of this writing, and this is a
preliminary report on where things stand.
Historical
Interest in the historical aspect of the word fuck
has always been high; most reviewers cited various
anecdotes from the Introduction. We have accordingly
been trying to research and add any relevant
or interesting story. The earliest example of fuck,
appearing in a ciphered version in the fifteenth-century
poem Flen Flyys, has always been a
crowd-pleaser, since it is not only in code—suggesting
that the word was taboo even at that time—but
describes monks fucking. (Seemingly a popular subject
for that era—an early sixteenth century apostil
refers to the poor scribe's fucking abbot.) The
original edition gave sparse details on the background
of this poem and translated the cipher without
explaining it; even the mainstream American
Heritage Dictionary, Third Edition, gave more
complete treatment. In the new edition, we will
give a thorough version of this attestation.
The date of 1926 for the first openly printed use
of fuck in America—still the earliest we have discovered—provoked
the question of the first use of
fuck in the movies. We are still researching this, but
it seems that fuck first appeared in mainstream
movies around 1970 ( MASH and Myra
Breckenridge ); it had been used earlier in several
avant-garde films. Unlike the literary world, where
provocative books such as Ulysses or Lady
Chatterley's Lover led to legal battles over obscenity
issues, in the movies, no one tried to place fuck onto
film until the country was ready for it.
While fuck appeared in popular periodicals such
as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine,
Playboy , and others by the 1960s, it took a bit more
time for the word to, um, penetrate the august
pages of The New Yorker . The editorship of Tina
Brown is usually credited—more usually, faulted—
with that journal's frequent use of the word, and
though writers did use it frequently under Ms.
Brown, in fact fuck appeared there, spelled in full,
in 1985, during the editorship of the puritan William
Shawn, in a short story by Bobbie Ann Mason:
Maybe you have to find out for yourself. Fuck. You
can't learn from the past. (June 3, 1985, p. 81).
The etymology of fuck has never ceased inspiring
comment. The various purported acronymic origins
are still the first thing most people think of; we
will be expanding our treatment of this, and including
the first known appearance of an acronymic etymology
(in New York's underground paper The East
Village Other), in 1967. The most striking recent
development has been the popularity of the pluck
yew story, which conflates the origin of fuck with
an earlier piece of folklore about the origin of the
offensive backhand two-finger gesture. According
to the original form of the tale, before the battle of
Agincourt, immortalized in Shakespeare's Henry V,
the French taunted the English longbowmen by
waving two fingers at them, saying that those fingers
(used to pull back the bowstring) could never
defeat the mighty French. After the English annihilated
the hapless French (10,000 dead French to a
mere 29 Brits, by Bill S.'s count), the English
responded by waving their two fingers back at the
French in the now-familiar gesture (the American
version limits it to the single middle finger). The
recent twist has been to note the fact that longbows
are traditionally made of yew wood, and claim that
the act of drawing the bowstring was called plucking
yew; the victorious English not only waved
their fingers at the French, but shouted We can
still pluck yew! Pluck yew! at them. A few convenient
sound-changes brought us to our familiar
phrase fuck you.
This story, totally ludicrous in any version, was
popularized on the National Public Radio segment
Car Talk, where it was meant as a joke; many
unfortunates, particularly on the Internet, have
taken it seriously. It will be debunked.
On the serious side, considerably more etymological
information will be presented. The editor is
grateful to Anatoly Liberman for sharing the entry
(and bibliography) for fuck from his magnificent
forthcoming etymological dictionary. Liberman
argues convincingly that the word is part of a large
family of Germanic words having the form f + [short
vowel] + [stop], having the base meaning to move
back and forth (not to thrust, as most dictionaries,
and the original edition of The F-Word, had it). It is
probably a borrowing from Dutch, Low German, or
Flemish, but not a continuation of an Old English
word. He finds no Indo-European cognates (of Latin
futuo he notes It is a strange coincidence that Latin
futuo is also an f word).
On the less serious, but still scholarly, side, we
will refer to the hilarious Studies Out in Left Field:
Defamatory Essays Presented to James D. McCawley
On His 33rd or 34th Birthday . This remarkable collection
applies the principles of transformational
grammar to the analysis of sexual and scatalogical
vocabulary. Quang Phuc Dong's English Sentences
Without Overt Grammatical Subject looks at the
oft-questioned basis of fuck you!, whilst Munç
Wang's Copulative Sentences in English: A
Germanic Language Spoken in Northern Delaware
studies the grammaticality (in the author's idiolect)
of such sentences as Micky fucked Michelle's cadaver
in the ass (grammatical), Bret fucked the mannikin
through the hole he drilled in its throat (of
questionable grammaticality), and Fred fucked the
log through a hole that squirrels had made
(ungrammatical). The omission of this classic, first
published in 1971, is unforgivable.
Least forgivable of all was the omission of Allen
Walker Read's 1934 classic An Obscenity Symbol,
the most important article ever written on fuck ,
despite the absence of that word from the article
itself (a not uncommon situation in the field, I might
add). The decision of the editor (who even now is
hiding behind this circumlocution, but yes, it was
me) to forgo a bibliography should not have prevented
him from acknowledging this indispensable work.
New Words and Senses
A moderate number of new words or phrases,
and a smaller number of new senses, have been
added. Several readers suggested the addition of that
'70s hit, zipless fuck an act of intercourse without an
emotional connection, coined by Erica Jong in Fear
of Flying . We had originally decided to omit it since
zipless was often used on its own to mean passionate
but emotionally uninvolved, but it does appear often
enough as a set phrase to deserve entry. Arnold
Zwicky, chief editor of the Studies Out in Left Field
collection celebrated above, suggested genderfuck
instance of reversal of normal sex roles; (specifically)
transvestism, a common term whose absence can
only be explained using the Johnsonian formula, in
answer to a woman who has asked him why he
defined pastern as the knee of a horse, ignorance,
Madam, pure ignorance. Thanks to the diligent
research of friends and colleagues, we have pushed
this back to 1973 with frequent cites thereafter.
Another unfortunate omission was fuck buddy a sexual
partner, esp. a friend with whom one engages in
casual sex, which we currently have found to 1983
but have hopes of bettering. To mercy fuck and sport
fuck we now add the even less pleasant hate fuck,
immortalized as the title of the first album of post-punk
band Pussy Galore in 1987 but found in the
'70s, and force-fuck, apparently coined because the
word rape wasn't shocking enough. The bizarre lesbian
expression fuckerware party gathering for the
group use of sex toys seems, contrary to expectations,
to be real; the definition of fist-fuck, originally
limited to anal fisting, has been widened (with citations)
to allow for vaginal fisting as well. More recent
additions are a new sense of ratfuck a busy party
marked by flagrant social climbing; insults such as
fuckball and fuckrag (popularized in the movie
Scream ); and a number of marginal uses whose
admission is being debated, including fuck-trash
loathsome person and fuck monster promiscuous
person, esp. a woman.
British and Australian terms, omitted on policy
grounds from the first edition, are now being included—and
why not, with a word this widespread?
Fuckpig a disgusting person (according to
Partridge, it dates to the nineteenth century, a claim
I'd love to be able to verify) is a winner, as is fuckwit
a fool, fuckwitted stupid, and the absolutely
delightful contestant from Bridget Jones' Diary:
fuckwittage stupidity. Fucktruck a van or car in
which people engage in sexual activity had been
mentioned in the introduction as being Australian
(where it has been used since the 1960s), a statement
rejected by numerous correspondents who testified
to their activities in thusly named vehicles in
the U.S. of A.; two people noted that the word was
also used for a bus on which one can meet prospective
sexual partners (both, curiously, referring to a
shuttle between Wellesley College and the Harvard
and M.I.T. campuses).
Many of these new items came from suggestions,
but most suggestions were ultimately useless.
Everyone and his or her brother or sister, it seems,
has a favorite fuck -related usage. And in most cases,
these appear to be expressions doomed to the
nonce world. The introduction to the first edition
listed several such words, suggested by colleagues,
such as clothesfuck difficulty in deciding what
clothes to wear and fuckbreak leave of absence
from work in order to get pregnant (two other
terms from this section, fuckload a large amount
and fuck-muscle the penis, were omitted for insufficient
evidence but will now be added). Publication
brought a blizzard of ever more outrageous suggestions,
including (but not limited to) fuckadocio,
fuck-a-doodle-doo, and fuck-aroni, whose meanings
can only be guessed at. Many suggestions also failed
to respect the nature of the definitions; several
readers commented on the absence of un-fucking-believable,
which appears under -fucking-, infix, or
of fuck book, which is covered by fuck , adj., pornographic;
erotic.
Antedatings
As most users of historical dictionaries know,
the search for antedatings—citations earlier than
those previously known for a word or sense—is a
crucial effort. Early examples force us to rethink
what we thought we knew about the historical
development of language. The original work for The
F-Word proved that fuck was used in a variety of
figurative senses far earlier than had previously
been believed, and that certain expressions were
years or decades older than anyone had realized.
The number of antedatings we have found in
the last several years has been small, which is both
good (in validating the quality of our original
research) and bad (no breakthroughs). The insulting
epithets fuckface and fuckhead were originally
first cited in 1961 and 1962, respectively. Several of
the citations referred to World War Two, and a
euphemistic 1940 example of fuckfaced suggested
that these terms were in use in the 1940s. Happily,
we found solid 1945 citations in an article published
in this magazine in 1989—an article we had read,
without catching these cites. This article also provided
a significant antedating for N.F.G. no fucking
good, an abbreviation accidentally omitted from
The F-Word but included in the book's parent work
with a first cite from 1977.
The compound fuck-me intended to invite sexual
advances, chiefly exemplified by fuck-me
[shoes] (with various specific types of shoes), was
only attested to 1989. Several reliable sources
claimed familiarity to the 1960s and 1970s, and we
were able to confirm this with a 1974 citation from
the musician David Bowie. The expression fuck-you
money, unknown to the editor before a reader letter
called it to attention, was first cited to 1986,
thanks to a search of the Nexis database. A colleague
subsequently discovered a 1976 example.
M.F. , a euphemistic form of motherfucker , had been
attested to 1964; we found a 1959 example buried
in Robert Gold's excellent Jazz Lexicon. Finally, the
best we had been able to do on titfuck was 1986; a
Nexis search came up with a Playboy example from
1984, which inspired a check of Robert Wilson's
1972 Playboy's Book of Forbidden Words, which
indeed had it. The second definition of fuckable,
sexually available, with a single 1977 example, was
pushed back to 1972 in Bruce Rodgers's Queens'
Vernacular, which also supplied a first cite for
mouthfuck, verb.
An important goal of the revision has been to
include any famous use of relevant forms of fuck .
In the original version, we were content to have a
good smattering of examples from the earliest to
the most recent, but as long as the examples were
genuine attestations, we were satisfied. (Preference
is given to actual examples in running text, then to
printed glossarial evidence, and finally to orally collected
examples.)
Now we have made an effort to extend our evidence
from important or interesting sources. Thus,
we have added the famous scene in Catcher in the
Rye, where Holden sees a fuck you graffito and
muses on his desire to protect his little sister
Phoebe from seeing such vulgarity. Another important
citation is from Allen Ginsberg's Howl, where
he has seen The best minds in my generation
destroyed by madness,...who let themselves be
fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and
screamed with joy. Bufu a homosexual man, a
portmanteau from butt fucker, was already in with a
first citation from a 1982 Valley Girl dictionary, but
we have added the use in the defining text of that
subculture, Frank Zappa's Valley Girl: Like my
English teacher—He's like Mr. Bufu...He like
flirts with all the guys in the class. Under fuck up
we have added the well-known opening lines to
Philip Larkin's poem This be the Verse, the only
use of fuck to be regularly found in dictionaries of
quotations: They fuck you up, your mum and
dad. They may not mean to, but they do. And for
the literal sense, we learn from Liz Phair that I
want to fuck you like a dog...I'll fuck you till your
dick turns blue.
The regular program of gathering new evidence,
combined with database searches for underattested
forms, has delivered an impressive return of citations.
We have four instead of two examples of fubar
in the secondary sense drunk; up-to-date examples
for give a fuck, fuck act of sexual intercourse, fuckable,
fuck-all, fuckboy, fuckfest, and others; a valuable
third cite for fuck an evil turn of events; more
florid entries in the stronger, more vivid, or more
elaborate curses section, and newly fleshed-out
entries for fuckee in both literal and figurative senses.
This evidence proves that these terms are all real
words, still in current use in the English-speaking
world.
We have tried to keep deletions to a minimum,
chiefly by not including marginal terms in the first
place. Any item with two or more examples may be
considered secure; an item from a single non-glossarial
source that parallels an existing expression may
also be considered secure; an item with only a single
glossarial citation would have been kept out unless a
confirming example could be solicited. An included
marginal term, then, would be one from a single oral
or written source that does not parallel another term
and appears, in this editor's opinion, to be unlikely.
Those that are on the ropes for this revision, include
fuck-plug a contraceptive diaphragm, with a single
example from a college student in 1984, a term not
subsequently found despite wide questioning and
extensive database searching; fuck 5.b. to trifle or
interfere with (that is, the usual sense of fuck with ,
but without the with), found in a single example
from a movie; and friggin in the rigging , a nautical
expression for loafing on duty, which is too uninteresting
a figurative sense even if it does have some
currency beyond the single oral example we have
found.
And last of all, but first in the book, we are
adding something that no book should be without:
an epigraph. The easily offended, who nonetheless
choose to pick up this book, will be faced with this
before they get to anything juicy:
Tis needful that the most immodest word
Be looked upon and learned.
—Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part II
P.S. As you read through this Directory please
understand that the committee has worked very hard
to make it as accurate as possible considering the
circumstances. Let's remember To error is human
and to forgive divine. [From the
Southern California Rotary Directory. Submitted by
.]
Names New and Old: Papers of the Names
Institute
This (second)¹ selection of the papers read at the
Names Institute covers the last seven years at
Fairleigh Dickinson University (FDU, 1980-1986)
but includes some papers read at meetings of the
Institute since 1986 at John Jay and Baruch Colleges
(New York). Dedicated to Margaret M. Bryant
(1900-1993), the volume has four subdivisions: I.
Geographic Names; II. Names in Literature; III.
Personal Names; and IV. Various Other Names.
I. Geographic Names is further divided into 1)
International Names, and 2) Names in the United
States. The contributions of three members of the
US Board on Geographic Names (BGN), namely,
Richard R. Randall, Meredith F. Burrill and Donald
J. Orth, give a very good and welcome insight into
practical aspects of placename-giving. In Political
Changes and New Names, Dr. Randall pays particular
attention to both the new names of politically
changed countries and also to the problems arising
when we try to record native names (as in transcription).
In Motive in Placenaming Donald Orth discusses
motivation in naming a location and illustrates
his point with a very appropriate quote from
Mysterious Island by Jules Verne. He mentions, for
example, names that honor persons, names that have
a religious background, names that express ego
gratification and toponymic habituation (in which
familiar names from the homeland are adopted to
make a place seem a little less strange), names which
show evidence of discovery, etc. He stresses, however,
that The motives themselves may be explicit or
subconscious, but their conjunction at a given
moment is normally unpremeditated. Even though
they may be considered separate events, there is a
direct linkage between the motive to name and the
name given. In fact, it is difficult to consider one
without the other. They are capable of reinforcing
one another in a number of ways. (p. 23.)
Part 2 of the first section opens with a reprint of
Allen Walker Read's onomastic history of the Rocky
Mountains, which is followed by a very lengthy
paper on No Names in the United States. In the
latter work Robert M. Rennick professes that it is
only an introduction to the subject and asks for more
information so that more extensive research can be
done. However, in this work the author is unable to
convince this reader of the need for more such
research, and I think the paper would have benefitted
very much from an abridged presentation. On
the other hand, Dr. Burrill's article on Toponomy
and Cultural History is a very good example of
how toponomy (and lexicography in general) and
history can benefit from each other. Each culture
group has its own ways of looking at nature, its own
set of distinctions between things in a general class,
and its own rigid boundaries to thought that are
posed by its language. Including terms for artifacts
of all kinds that are useful cultural clues, these elements
are reflected in toponyms. (p. 114-115.) The
author describes the use of specific terms and the
problems associated with them, beginning with the
word swamp, which is followed by creek, folly,
tump , and gurnet . Especially, he says, the comparison
of the use of these words in the colonies and in
the respective homelands has promising results.
Benjamin Nunez's historical study, Proto-Portuguez
Toponymics on the West African Coast
in the Fifteenth Century speaks for itself, and the
same may be said for the optimistic and thoughtful
remarks of Alan Rayburn's Promoting the Study of
Names As a Scholarly Discipline in North
America.
II. The editor introduces this section—
Names in Literature—by stating the purpose of
it, namely, which is to ask if the study of imaginary
personages and places does not properly belong to
onomastics. (p. 127.) This section contains papers
about Bret Easton Ellis' Less than Zero (Leonard
R.N. Ashley); Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (Lynn
Hamilton); Anna Seghers' Revolt of the Fishers
(Russell E. Brown), Molière's Le Malade imaginaire
(Betty J. Davis), Baltasar Gracián's El Criticón
(Catherine G. Rovira); Trollope's The Warden
(Vivian Zinkin); and Names Prime Evil: Fictional
Heroes of Horror and Fear in the work of Sir
Walter Scott and Barbey d'Aurevilly (Maxine M.
Bernard).
One of the most readable of these articles is
Russell E. Brown's paper on Anna Seghers' Revolt
of the Fishers, in which he shows how the author
establishes a certain universality for the uprising:
accordingly, the names can be attributed to no specific
place or time. It seems that the Bretonic language
is not only the major source of character
names here, but Low German and Dutch also play
a part. Brown emphasizes that the last two languages
have a lot of names and spellings in common.
However, the source Brown uses for Dutch
names is hardly adequate: Van der Aa's biographical
dictionary only describes well-known Dutch persons
and isn't meant to be an overview of all the
surnames in use. For that information one should
turn to the Nederlands Repertorium van
Familienamen edited by P.J. Meertens and others,
in fourteen volumes (Assen, Van Gorcum 1963-1988).
Nevertheless, Brown's description of the
author's choice of a pen name and her symbolical
use of the name Marie in her novel are excellent
examples of the relevance of literary name studies.
The paper of Maxine M. Bernard covers the
work of two authors, Sir Walter Scott and Barbey
d'Aurevilly, but because of this broad span her conclusions
are not always very convincing. For example,
this is her interpretation of one of Barbey's religious
monsters (the seductor and rapist of an innocent
country girl in A Nameless Story ): The name
Riculf seems to be a clever composite of two
French words: rire, meaning to laugh, comes
directly from the Latin rictus meaning a mocking
sneering laughter; and culer meaning to back
away or go astray. His persona was just such a type:
mocking God, leading others astray, scornfully getting
away. (p. 219.) She doesn't mention that this
name is a perfectly normal Germanic name which
consists of rik- mighty and -ulf, wolf which is
itself a rather colourful name for a scoundrel. The
French connection that Bernard suggests seems to
me rather farfetched and certainly needs more
proof, e.g., from significant quotations of the novel
itself. I would go no farther than point out a possible
double meaning, and certainly would not proclaim
the French interpretation the only one, but
would mention it only as a possible secondary
meaning.
III. The contributors to Personal Names are
Kelsie B. Harder, Herbert Barry & Aylene S.
Harper, A. Ross Eckler, Penelope Scambly Schott,
and Dorothy E. Litt. Harder's Literary Names
Mainstreamed As Given Names is very insightful:
How many parents realize that the currently popular
Jennifer is derived from Guinevere (King
Arthur's adulterous queen) or that the name Pamela
became popular through Samuel Richardson's
Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740)? As the author
states, Naming now seldom reflects reading. (p.
231) Barry and Harper's article about Sex
Differences in Linguistic Origins of Personal
Names is to the point and thorough. An important
point they make is that although names nowadays
are often chosen without knowledge of their linguistic
roots and meanings, the linguistic background
nevertheless persists as an important basis for selection:
books of names generally provide information
about roots and meanings and as long as these books
are read and used, the knowledge of these works will
form part of the choice. (p. 251.)
In Eckler's paper on Single-Letter Surnames
we learn that all letters exist as a surname (and are
overwhelmingly likely to be held by people of
Oriental ancestry, p. 264), and only Q is missing.
The paper by Penelope Scambly Schott, Rosamond:
Poison and Contamination gives a neat example of
historical confusion based on the fate of another
individual with the same name. Thus, the fair
Rosamond of English literature—Henry II's mistress
who died in 1176—was (also said to be) poisoned
to death in 1592, not in the flesh but on the
page.
It isn't clear to this reviewer just what place the
Litt article, Self-Naming and Self-Defining in
Subscriptions to Familiar Letters in the English
Renaissance, is supposed to have in onomastics.
The author explicitly refrains from examples of
nomination, in code names, code-numbered names,
anonyms, pet names, name-changing, and other onomastic
oddities in this material (p. 285). Yet these
elements seem to be more related to onomastics
than those she has described in this paper and therefore
make the reader anxious to know more.
IV. Various Other Names. The paper section of
the book ends with this general category, which
includes articles by Douglas P. Hinkle, Roger W.
Wescott, Walter P. Bowman, Thomas L. Bernard,
and E. Wallace McMullen. While Dr. Hinkle admits
he has barely scratched the surface in his article, yet
in Street-Language Naming Practices in the
Hispanic Drug and Underworld Subcultures, he
goes into great detail and tells us quite a bit (e.g.,
that a snort of cocaine is called a narizón , from the
Spanish nariz, nose, which compares to English
slang snootful). Anyone curious about technical linguistics
will take delight in Wescott's comments on
The Phonology of Proper Names in English. He is
of the opinion that slang has formal as well as
semantic peculiarities and that names resemble slang
in this respect. (p. 301) Thus, he tells us, names can
exhibit phonetic alternation. An example is the
sequence Jean, Jen(n)y, Jane, Jan(et), John, and Joan
(ultimately derived from a single Biblical Hebrew
name meaning Jehovah's mercy). He also mentions
the four types of palindromization (two will suffice
here): progressive additive: pap<pa or paw; and
regressive additive: Nan<Ann or Anna . Thus, a
good number of common changes are explained for
us. For example, one extreme lexical transformation
is the nickname Poll which is derived from Mary, in
which the m has been both occluded and unvoiced,
the a has been retracted, the r has been lingualized,
and the y has been dropped. (p. 306.)
According to Bowman, Musical Names: The
Titles of Symphonies is a beginning on an abundant
onomastic field. Among those already well-known,
Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique appears at first to
be an instrument of revenge against one heartless
lady and (using the same title) also a means of admiration
directed toward his future fiancée. Bowman
describes how composers have used placenames to
express feelings evoked by visits (e.g., Dvorak's
From the New World), or to express a nationalistic
or patriotic regard for a homeland (e.g., Hindemith's
Pittsburgh Symphony). Personal names as well as
political events or dates function in symphony titles.
Also literature has left its mark (e.g., Liszt's Faust).
Bowman concludes his paper with some fascinating
oddities. In Thomas Bernard's Names,
Nationality, and the Incongruity Factor, our attention
is called to the fact that a good number of people
have names that don't seem to correspond with
their nationality. One example will suffice: until
recently one wouldn't assume that someone with the
name Fujimori would be a Peruvian.
The last article in the volume is McMullen's
History of the Names Institute, 1980-86. A companion
article, again by the editor, concludes the
articles in Pubs, Place-Names and Patronymics and
covers the years 1962-1979.
But this isn't all: the book has extensive indices,
e.g., the admirable Index (e) which contains the
Abstracts (all written by the authors) and Topics of
the Annual Programs of the Names Institute, 1980-1986.
In combination, Index (a)—Vitas of the
Contributors to this volume—in which the editor
lists information about the careers and research of
the authors and their mailing addresses, and Index
(e) form a helpful guide for onomasticians on the
move who are looking for partners in discussions
about items of mutual interest. In brief, then, it is
my opinion that this neat, hardbound, onomastic
anthology is indeed very readable.
¹The first anthology was entitled Pubs, Place-Names
and Patronymics: Selected Papers of the
Names Institute, edited by E. Wallace McMullen
(FDU, 1980. Covers 1962-1979.) and is still in
print. To order, send a check for $6.00 (made out to
E. Wallace McMullen) to Prof. Finke.
Together these two publications include complete
programs, papers and abstracts, etc., for a
total of 25 consecutive years, plus the subsequent
John Jay and Baruch College programs (1987-1998).
Including the forthcoming 1999 event, these
annual programs continue to be held at Baruch
College.
Karina van Dalen-Oskam, Leiden, Netherlands
(To order send a check (made out to E.
Wallace McMullen) to Prof. Wayne H. Finke,
American Name Society, Dept. of Mod. Langs., Box
340, Baruch College, 17 Lexington Ave., New York,
NY 10010; or by fax ++212-387-1591.)
Lost and Foundering (Eheu, Jane Ace! May She RIP)
Last week, as I was arranging my notes on solecisms
called from television, radio, and newspapers,
I suddenly realized that updating the long list, even
without citing dates and perpetrators, had begun to
take up too much time. Of course, as I had been
telling myself all along, police work is tedious; but
someone has to do it. Or so I had always thought.
Now, however, I paused in my labors after a short
stint of alphabetizing and partially annotating a few
recent additions, to wit:
[Budget] cuts were made all across the border.
[The candidate] must definitive his position.
...a fashion that was dig rigueur...
A storm system is now domineering the weather.
...by one of the foundling fathers of our country...
After reading the glum statistics
Their coffee is grounded daily.
this was hollowed ground. (Paul Gigot on the
MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, 1994.)
Now we are being indulged[deluged] with snow.
[A respected local philanthropist's] name will live in
infamy.
The dead were interned.
Maybe, as we are about to invoke on a course...
(U.S. Army chaplain in Vicenza, Italy, addressing troops
soon to embark for Bosnia.)
A cherished momentum of...
The issue [of the two murders] is a mute point.
He was oustered from the Party.
it piquéd his interest.
Big-Business-bashing ...is nothing but tub-thumping
popularism.
The attack was provocated by...
This raked havoc with investors.
...rendering the social fabric. (Paul Gigot)
Supplies were replentished...
Women are reticent to buy such clothes...
Pat Buchanan has transpired [transcended?] his early
reputation.
A prison trustee... (newspaper article)
He waived goodbye. (newspaper article)
The fee was wavered.
Somehow, he wrangled an invitation.
The [victorious] army yielded power harshly...
It was the last example which gave me pause.
Perhaps, I thought, the army yielded power harshly
while wielding a no-iron velvet fist?
Already, while working my head to the bone
on the above examples and others too humorous to
mention, I had been visited by fond memories of
Jane and Goodman Ace, those masters of malapropism—though,
according to an article in The New
Yorker which I read years ago, Goodman was the
master; Jane was a real-life Mrs. Malaprop. I had
made a list of the Jane Aceisms in that article. I still
had that list and now, rather than just sitting there
like a bum on a log, I compared Jane's words with my
own burgeoning record of unstrung and unlamented
lapses, many, still to be entered in my trustee notebook.
When I had at last poured over the two lists—
the one, so much too brief; the other, so much too
wrong— you could have knocked me over with a
fender! What a disillumining experience! Entre nous
and me , until then, I had believed that, in any baffle
of wits, Jane Ace would have won, thumbs down. In
all my bored days, I would never have believed that
she had not reached the highest pinochle of success.
Now, I was saddened to see that her words, compared
with those of today's ragged individualists,
were thin and emancipated. No longer was she the
human domino she had always seemed to me. Hey,
you, and a lass, Jane Ace! Your turkeys have come
home to roast, with avengings!
I saw that it was high tide for me to stop wrecking
my brain looking for more more flies in the oatmeal .
It was time, too, to remember that words, like
men, are cremated equal. In short, if hers was to
remain the clowning achievement, it was time for me
to shred my list—and not a moment to swoon.
Italicized phrases are Jane Aceisms. All other anomalies are the author's.
