By Their Notes Ye Shall Know Them: A Look at Onomatopoeic Ornithonymy
According to the great Danish linguist, Otto
Jespersen, there are five theories to account for
the origin of language: the bow-wow theory, in
which speech imitated animal calls; the pooh-pooh
theory, in which people made instinctive sounds
through physical or emotional reactions; the dingdong
theory, in which people reacted to the environment;
the yo-he-ho theory, in which people
spoke when working together; and the la-la theory,
in which speech arose from the romantic side of life.
If bird names are anything to go by, the bowwow
theory (perhaps we should call it the tweet-tweet
theory) rules the roost, since many birds are
named for their songs or calls. This even holds for the
generic cock, hen, and chick . The farmyard cock is so
called for its clucks, as illustrated by Chaucer in The
Nun's Priest's Tale, in which Chanticleer cryde anon,
cok, cok. The cockerel's cock-a-doodle-doo is an
extension of this, as a cock's crow. The hen is so called
for her singing, with a name related to Latin canere
to sing, and so to English chant . (Chanticleer, though
male, has a name meaning one who sings clearly.)
The chicken has a name related to that of the cock ,
with its changed vowel representing its less powerful
cry. The chick , as a young bird, is named from it.
Outside the farmyard, but still (usually) within
farmland territory, the crow and rook are both named
for their harsh call or caw , and though less common,
the chough and the raven are similarly named. The
chough's cry has been described
as kyaw , and the raven's as prruk (suggesting the name of the physically
related rook ). The corncrake's cry has been verbalized
as crex , which adequately represents the crake that is
the basic form of the name.
Elsewhere afield, the curlew , with its cry of courli ,
is obviously named, as is the cuckoo , whose name is
similar in many languages (French coucou , German
Kuckuck , Greek kokkux , Latin cuculus ). The first
part of its name is in fact directly related to that of the
cock , as the initial cuck - of its call corresponds to the
farmyard bird's cluck.
The jackdaw also belongs to the crow family
(Corvidae ), and daw represents its chak . (It does it
better in Italian than English, where the bird is a taccola ,
from earlier tacca .) The first part of its name is
the personal name Jack . The sparrow does not itself
have an imitative name, although it was formerly nicknamed
Philip , for its rapid twittering and chirping
notes. Hence John Skelton's early 16th-century poem
Phyllyp Sparowe , a lament by a young lady for her pet
sparrow killed by a cat, with the affecting lines:
Nothynge it auayled/To call Phylyp agayne,/Whom
Gyb our cat hath slayne.
Another bird with an imitative name prefixed by
a personal name is the magpie . Here pie is related to
Latin pipere to chirp. There are other birds with
pi - or its equivalent in their names similarly, such as
the peewit, pipit , and even the pigeon . True, pigeons
coo , but the bird derives its name from the onomatopoeic
base pip - that imitates the chirp of a young
bird (and that also gave English pipe ). Hence also the
more obvious name of the sandpiper , a bird that pipes
(or peeps ) on the sands.
We are now by the seaside, where the gull has a
name representing its repeated kyow, kyow . The
seagull is also known as the mew , likewise an imitative
name. Another aquatic bird is the goose , whose name
represents its distinctive honk. The male of the
species, the gander , has a directly related name, as
does the gannet . Its cry is described as a barking
arrah . Still with the water birds, the heron is named
for its harsh cry rrank; the name itself is related to
that of the hen . The bittern is a further wading bird;
its cry is usually described as a boom, and the first
part of its name, from Latin butio , represents this.
Yet another water dweller is the garganey , a kind of
duck. Its name represents its distinctive quacking.
On dry land, the finch is named for its prolonged
nasal tswe-e-e , mostly clearly heard in the greenfinch.
The siskin is in the same family and has a similar
name—and indeed a similar call. A harsher note is
sounded by the shrike , whose name is related to
screech and shriek . The quail is so called not because
it is timid but because the call of the female is a double
note queep, queep . The quail is a gamebird, as is
the partridge . Its own name is equally imitative, not
of its voice but of the sharp whirring sound made by
its wings when it suddenly flies up. This sounds like
a fart , a related word. (Compare Greek perdix partridge.
and perdesthai to break wind.) Quite a different
sound is made by the owl, whose name represents
its familiar hoot, otherwise the final, longer
note of its conventional call tu-whit tu-whoo . English
howl is a related word. French hibou also imitates the
bird's call, as does its German name Eule , a diminutive
form of Uhu , eagle owl.
Even the little wren has an echoic name, as much
more obviously does the chiffchaff , although its chiffs
and chaffs are usually repeated in irregular order, such
as chiff, chiff, chiff, chaff, chiff, chaff . A rarer bird, but
also with an obviously onomatopoeic name, is the
hoopoe . Its far-carrying poo-poo-poo is also represened
in its Latin name, Upupa epops . Its name
evokes the equally exotic bobolink, bulbul and whippoorwill ,
with their clearly echoic names. The last
bird is an American nightjar , where jar is also an imitative
word, referring to its loud churring cry. ( Churr
and jar are related words.) The nightingale does not
have a directly imitative name, although the final- gale
is related to yell , which is undoubtedly echoic.
It is tempting to relate the yellowhammer's name
to yammer (German jammern ), referring to its fussy
call, a rapid chi-chi-chi-chi-chi... chweee , traditionally
rendered little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese. But the
origin of the name is disputed. (The first part of the
name indicates the colour of the bird's head and underparts.)
Finally in this bouquet of bird names, let us
savour the rail , whose repeated gep, gep, gep and
groaning and grunting notes suggest a death rattle , a
related word. They order things more neatly in
France here, for râle is both the name of the bird
and the word for this agonized and agonizing sound.
Verbal renderings of birds' calls and notes are those given
in A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe , Roger
Tory Peterson, Guy Mountfort, and P.A.D. Hollom, 3rd ed., Collins, 1974.
Ex-woman student to get a $125,000 settlement.
[From the Seattle Post Intelligencer , . Submitted
by .]
EX CATHEDRA
Vale!
The time has come, as it does to all entities, animate
and inanimate, to say goodby. This issue,
Volume XXIII, Number 3 [Winter 1997], will be the
last published and edited under our aegis.
It has, as they say, been a good run. There have
been ups (like the time when we had a mailing service
that kept adding new and renewing subscribers' names
and addresses without removing the old ones, leading
us not only into a state of euphoria contemplating our
20,000 paid subscribers but, at the same time, into
near bankruptcy paying the attendent increased printing
and postage costs without the expected revenues);
and, of course, there have been downs (like falling
behind so far in the publishing schedule that we
changed the dates of the issues from May, September,
December, March to Summer, Autumn, Winter,
Spring (as in Of Thee I Sing! ), and the dismay and disappointment
at the down-marketing of The New
Yorker , once a stalwart—if expensive—source of new
subscribers, now—still expensive—catering to the
pretentious philistine market).
Present subscribers might be surprised to learn
that the initial rate for a year's subscription was $2.50
and that copies were sent out via first-class mail. It
must be said, though, that those first issues ran to six
and eight pages compared with the current twenty-four
(or, sometimes, more). Being rather indolent in
money matters, we have never been aggressive in pursuing
advertisers; but the frequent return and regular
orders from some advertisers reflected some satisfaction
with the results sought.
One of our proudest moments came when, upon
first loading into our computer the CD-ROM of the
Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary , we
discovered that it contains 121 quotations from
VERBATIM. We were pleased, too, when, several years
ago, we were able to pay contributors, a rare occurrence
in the loftier realms of noncommercial publishing.
Also, many periodicals, from Reader's Digest
to journals of lesser circulation, have reprinted articles
from VERBATIM.
With the rarest exceptions, those who wrote to us
seeking information, offering comment or criticism—
and there have been many, from everywhere in the
world—treated us with kindness and respect, even
when they caught us in the most embarrassing errors.
We have enjoyed chatting with those who have telephoned,
and we have—without fail, we think—sent
written replies to all who have written (with the exception
of those who sent publishable EPISTOLAE).
Lately, we have been remiss only in writing discouraging
letters to job applicants, because virtually all
have written merely to a name and address found in
a list of book or periodical publishers.
Our book publishing activities have not shaken
the earth beneath our or anyone else's feet: our bestseller
by far has been the two-volume Grammar of the
English Language , by George O. Curme (seven printings),
with Richard Lederer's Colonial American
English a close second (two printings). Other books,
which I still believe to be good ( Word for Word , by
Edward C. Pinkerton), amusing ( Wordsmanship , by
Claurène duGran, a thinly disguised anagram of
Laurence Urdang), and useful ( Verbatim Volumes I-VI
and the Index thereto, altogether four books), have
not fared so well: indeed, a substantial portion of the
stock at our warehouse in Pennsylvania consists of
Word for Word and the Verbatim volumes. Another
Great Disaster (though it will probably go unnoticed
on any television series of that name) has been our offering
of VERBATIM binders: one must assume that the
back issues have ended up, along with the Sears
Roebuck catalogue, hanging from a nail in the privy.
We found the number of people who knew—or
know—about VERBATIM to be astonishing: in Europe,
among ordinary people interested in language,
among linguists, among scholars in general, most
knew of it; alas, they didn't subscribe.
We, personally, shall miss the correspondence
with contributors, commentators, critics, and friends;
and we shall miss the silent majority, those of you
who quietly continued to renew your subscriptions,
year after year, occasionally dropping a line with a
complimentary remark.
If we owned a green eyeshade, quill pen, and
cuff-protectors, we could tell you, with some sentiment,
that we are hanging them up. We do not, and
you may be assured that if there is any reason to write
to us, we shall be about (either in Aylesbury or Old
Lyme), hence reasonably accessible to answer
your questions.
—The Editor
Muddled Meaning
Confusion results not only from using the wrong
word, but also from Sinful Syntax. In the sentence,
She loves music better than me , the syntax gives
the meaning She loves music better than she loves
me; but a majority of listeners and readers, infected
by Sinful Syntax, will today understand the sentence
as She loves music better than I love it or ...better
than I do. If that is really what was meant, then the
sentence should have been, She loves music better
than I . Elementary! one would have said only a
few decades ago; but Sinful Syntax is now pandemic
and contaminates even some of the most careful
speakers. For example, former US Senate Majority
Leader George Mitchell and Maine Governor Angus
King, both of whom have said on more than one occasion
between you and I, for you and I, like you and
I . Other examples are:
The two members of Congress argue in the media
over whom is more obsessed with sex
[Subheading of a Portland Press Herald article.]
Who's more to blame? Them? Or us?
[Maine NBC News anchor
Cindy Williams, 21 May 1996.)
He is that rarest of travel writers, one whom his readers
feel is completely trustworthy.
[From a review by John David Morley of
The World, The World, by Norman Lewis, Cape,
1996, in The Times Literary Supplement,
26 July 1996, p.7.]
Not even The New York Times , our journal of record,
is immune. The caption beneath a photograph in the
Metro Section, 1 February 1995, was
Ivy Pearson, 12, left, reflecting on the everyday
hardships that pupils like she and Lakesha Perry face
in Brownsville, Brooklyn.
Sometimes it is not the case that is wrong but the
pronoun itself: the organization who; the people
which . Even possessive pronouns present difficulty
for some. My wife and I's constant fear was ... said
a man interviewed by Maine NBC News Health
Beat reporter Diane Atwood, 22 December 1994;
and, in David Plante's novel, The Family, hers and
her husbands bedroom appeared several times. So
many educated people misuse pronouns that others,
uncertain of what is correct, try to avoid one error by
committing another. This, at any rate, would explain
the increasingly common for John and myself and
John and myself are.
One of the most basic rules of grammar, that decreeing
agreement in number of indefinite article or
demonstrative pronoun with the noun modified, is,
apparently, no longer seen as binding. Maine CBS
News reporter Thom Halleck said, 21 May 1996, ...a
potentially-fatal tumors; and Los Angles NBC News
reporter David Bloom, 3 June 1996, and on later occasions,
has spoken of a balanced-budget amendments.
Far more common are errors like the following:
These sort of habitat...
[Zoologist Dr. Merlin Tuttle, founder of
Bat Conservation International,
speaking on NPR All Things
Considered, 8 April 1995.]
...those kind of redeeming aspects...
[Roger Courts, a direct-mail fund-raiser
for the Sacred Heart League, quoted
in an article about a film, The Spitfire
Grill, in the Portland Press Herald,
24 August 1996, p.2.]
Breaches of that other basic rule decreeing agreement
in number between subject and verb are at least
as common as the foregoing errors:
Everyone have assured that...
[Boston NBC News reporter
Tewa Che, 30 December 1994.]
If there are such a thing...
[Peter Walsh, Commissioner of Maine's
Department of Human Services, speaking on
Maine NBC News, 19 December 1994.]
The best device [for detecting bombs] are dogs.
[FBI Officer Fox, speaking on the MacNeil/Lehrer
News Hour, 13 December 1994.]
More generally, there are a variety of pleasures...
[From a review by George Stade of Christopher
Lehmann-Haupt's A Crooked Man, in The
New York Times, 21 February 1995.]
If meaning is to emerge without ambiguity from
a language like English, largely uninflected and having
many homonyms and homophones, writers must
be able to recognize not just the Parts of Speech but
also those peripatetic words that wander from one
category to another. All your work is undone . Does
that mean no work was done or the work done was
destroyed? In the Maine Sunday Telegram , 30
December 1992, an article about hibernating bears
contained this sentence: I have seen some bears double
their size. Is double verb or adjective? Treating
adjectives as if they were nouns is a form of abuse
which has become common. In Painting for Posterity,
an article by Amy Sutherland in the Maine
Sunday Telegram , Section E, 1 September 1996,
there was this: [in a portrait] Too broad of a smile
could look maniacal, or like a smirk.
Even when syntax is not sinful, meaning may be
muddled. James Gleick in his 1992 biography, Genius,
the Life and Science of Richard Feynman , quoted the
Harvard philosopher, W.V. Quine: I think that for scientific
purposes the best we can do is give up the notion
of knowledge as a bad job... Did he mean
give up as a bad [useless, vain] job the notion of knowledge
[of the ability to know anything with precision] or
did he mean give up thinking that knowledge is a bad
[impossible] job? In light of the context, the first interpretation
seemed more suitable to this reader.
On page 60 of Harper's , December 1995,
Kathryn Harrison, in What Remains, wrote:
Because most of us fear suffering so intensely...
Did she mean fear so intensely [all] suffering or
fear such intense suffering? In the comic strip
Prince Valiant , whose captions are consistently well
written (and no wonder: their author is John Cullen
Murphy), there was in the 5 May 1996 sequence:
Cormac's arrival was watched... by the island's most
populous inhabitants. Perhaps the original was most
of the populous island's inhabitants and was deformed
through some editorial glitch—but even
Homer, it is said, sometimes nodded.
Stress may alter meaning in ways unforeseen by
a writer. On page 72 of The New Yorker , 2 August
1993, there was this: I think it's what they used to call
the dog. Was it something for calling the dog or the
dog's name? On page 42 of the same issue is the ambiguous
He disliked boring people. Advertisers
often exploit the possibility of a double meaning or of
a pun which shifting stress can provide: A growing
problem; Drink in the sun!; The company you
keep.
Other ambiguities occur when vernacular expressions
begin to invade High English. A Maine
NBC News reporter, Jennifer Rooks, 31 January 1995,
said, [School] officials say they have no problem with
drugs in Freeport [Maine] schools. Because of the
faddish (and odious) No problem!, such a sentence
will soon mean—even now will be understood by
many to mean—that school officials do not disapprove
of drug use among students.
And what of that little word, too? I cannot
speak too highly of him. It cannot be too long.
He's not too fond of his students, is he? Abbott
and Costello could have wrung a good many laughs
from such sentences, as well as from one in an accident
report: There was no one to help. At first, the
meaning seemed to be no one to give help; but,
as the report continued and we learned that the victim
had walked away, the meaning changed to no
one to be helped.
Meaning can be muddled in many ways. Sense
is slippery. It easily escapes the nets flung out by
words, even when they are straitened by rules of syntax
and by logic. When the possibilities for misunderstanding
seem nearly as infinite as words
themselves, what a wondrous thing it is when words
and their users' intentions coincide.
Salty Sayings from Cornwall
The Cornish way with words tends to be as salty as
their native pilchards. Many old sayings are
concerned with cutting people down to size and
shrewd thrusts are meant to find their mark!
The slow-witted are often described as, Like
Tregony band—three scats [beats] behind, or as
too slow to carry a cold dennar [dinner]. Stronger
still is the old gibe, Put in weth the bread and took
out weth the cakes, often muttered behind the deficient
one's back. Any sign of putting on airs or assertiveness
is frowned upon, and one still hears crude
jokes like, Quietness is the best noise as Uncle
Johnny said when he knocked down his wife, or
Dressed to death like Sally Hatch. Mournful looks
were crisply dismissed in Old Cornwall as looking
like a dying duck in a thunderstorm. Greed, too,
was discouraged with a terse reminder, You don't
need that any more than a toad needs side pockets.
The famous Cornish pasties provide the saying,
As long as Jan Bedella's fiddle if a new young cook
makes a misshapen pasty. For the Cornish tend to be
rather a critical race owing to their struggle to make
ends meet in a county which has long known economic
hardship. A hard-pressed life naturally tends to
blunt speech.
Of a bandy-legged individual you will hear, He
couldn't stop a pig in a passage! and of lank hair,
like a yard of pump water. Even a contented person
is often heard to say, Ah'm happy on me own dung
heap, with typical Cornish self-mockery. Ask an
older inhabitant for his or her age and you may well
get the familiar reply, As old as my little finger and a
bit older than my teeth. In a strong-minded county
like Cornwall an individual may be admired as being
as tough as Hancock's mother—an archetypal
dragon lady rooted in local history.
Being a Celtic nation, the Cornish cleave naturally
to vivid descriptions. Any sign of restlessness, for
instance, is summed up as, All of a motion like a
Mulfra toad on a red hot shovel, and when shivering,
it is a case of cold as a quilkin [frog] or chilled to
the marra [marrow]. Although pushiness is not a
quality naturally approved of in Cornwall, neither is
undue modesty: standing in his own light like the
Mayor of Market Jew (another apocryphal figure).
Pride is rebuked as, Fancies she was brought up in
Court, pigs one end and she t'other! Laziness is
tartly described as, like Ludlow's dog, leaning agen
the wall to bark. As for the maker of weak tea, more
strong words are forthcoming: Water bewitched and
tea begrudged.
More encouraging are the old Cornish sayings,
Turn the best side to London Show off the best
side of anything and Cheer up you'll live till you
die! More rough good humour comes out in the oft
heard, You'll do it bit by bit as the cat said when she
swallowed the hatchet ...I'll manage but it's a tight
fit.
Dark explanations may be given for misfortune in
Cornwall such as, He bin awverlooked [ill wished].
Still, bracing remarks in plenty urge folk to get on
with things. After all, concentrate on the basics,
carry a knife, a piece of string and some money; then
you can cut, tie and buy. Count your blessings, however
meagre, as, a toad is a diamond in a duck's eye.
The idea that someone has been in a situation
very like your own, long before you, is very prevalent
in these old Cornish sayings. Often this has a warning
note, like Lady Fan Todd dressed to death and killed
with fashion is one, so is the curious Children's
tongues will cut your throat with a bar of soap or hang
you with a yard of cotton. Just as strange is the gluttony
warning, like Tommy Dumplens after guldize
supper, carry me home and don't bend me, for I'm
feeling rather possed up. Vanity in young girls is
checked by, Nobody will stop their horse galloping to
look at you.
Throughout all these sayings, a downright judgmental
tone can be heard, summed up in the old
Cornish last word, Theer tes [it is] an' caan't be no
tesser! No arguing with that.
ANTIPODEAN ENGLISH
Settlement by Sea
Astride Port Jackson, the city of Sydney marks
the site of the first European settlement in Australia.
From Sydney a second convict settlement was established
at Hobart, in Tasmania. To the north, on
Moreton Bay in Queensland, Brisbane was founded;
to the south, on Port Phillip Bay in Victoria, Melbourne.
Westward round the southern coast,
Adelaide was first approached from the sea as was, at
the western extreme, Perth. In time, overland routes
between these cities (Hobart, of course, excluded)
were found but, for much of the 19th century, what
are now the capital cities of the six Australian States
were most easily reached by sea.
In each of these the linguistic situation obtaining
in Sydney was replicated. The settlers quickly discovered
that knowledge of Dharuk (the Aboriginal
language spoken in Sydney) was of no help to them in
communicating with the local Aborigines—unless the
Aborigines had learned words from the settlers in the
belief that they were English, as indeed happened
with some pidgin terms and, in the west, with
boomerang . In each new settlement, therefore, borrowing
began anew. So, in Brisbane, dialects of
Yagara were the first encountered, and the source of
some sixteen loan words. In Melbourne, the Victorian
languages, Wuywurung (spoken in three dialects on
the site of Melbourne and to the north and west) and
Wathawurung (spoken on the western side of Port
Phillip Bay) were the first source of borrowings,
though the surviving words number no more than sixteen.
The language spoken on the site of Adelaide,
Gaurna, though unusually well recorded—by
Lutheran missionaries who were amongst the early
settlers—again yielded only about ten loans. The extremes
are provided by the nameless Tasmanian languages,
which gave no more than three words to
English, and Nyungar, the language spoken over quite
a large area in the southwest of Western Australia but
essentially the language of the site of Perth, which
has enriched English with more than fifty loanwords.
The ignorance surrounding the Tasmanian languages
betrays the fact that the relationships between convicts
and later settlers and the Tasmanian Aborigines
were of a hostility unreached elsewhere; the continuing
fertility of Nyungar by contrast results from a
much happier and more accommodating relationship.
One has to assume that the words which had a
Sydney-based currency in English were known to
most colonists because they had been encountered
either in Sydney or in accounts of Sydney. Nonetheless,
there is a sense in which each new settlement
meant a new start, and consequently a duplication in
the nomenclature of key items. Gunyah , the Dharuk
word for dwelling, is matched by the Melburnian
quamby , a verb meaning lie down, camp, and also a
noun meaning shelter, by the Brisbane humpy , the
Adelaide wurley , and the Perth mia mia . Of these,
hump is now the most commonly used, in the general
sense of a hut or temporary dwelling, whether of
Aboriginal or European provenance. And mia mia
has been widely used in Victoria in this sense and, in
New Zealand, of a duck-shooter's hide. But the fact
remains that, despite this diversity, the English word
hut enjoyed a greater currency than any of the borrowings,
being the usual word for the accommodation
of the convict, the rural labourer, and the
itinerant bushman.
Australian pidgin acquired a second negative,
borak , used as an alternative to baal or in a figurative
sense for humbug, nonsense, or rubbish, from
Wathawurung, whence came also an exclamation merrygig
well done and coolie , a derogatory term for a
person who partnered an Aboriginal woman. It is
ironic that lubra , a word for a black woman—usually
a younger woman than is connoted by the Dharuk
gin —was one of the few survivals of the Tasmanian
languages, in which it has been suggested that it
meant penis. From Yagara come bung broken,
dead, yacka , both as a noun and a verb meaning
work, and yohi , an affirmative, all originally in pidgin.
Other loanwords repeat the Sydney pattern, striking
or otherwise significant flora, fauna, and weapons
being named: so there is the Tasmanian boobialla , a
fruit-bearing Acacia, the Melburnian bullan bullan , a
beautiful bird with a lyre-shaped tail, the Brisbane
yungan gong, the Adelaide pinkie , a bilby or bandicoot,
and the Perth quokka , a species of wallaby. And
there are local names for weapons, like weet-weet , a
Victorian missile used both as a weapon and as a toy,
-wirra , a South Australian club, and kylie , a West
Australian boomerang.
Each new settlement meant a new beginning but
so limited was the relationship between settlers and
Aborigines that there was little progress beyond the
Port Jackson model. Not until travel by land supplemented
and eventually replaced that by sea did incremental
borrowing became at least a possibility, just
as the passage of time meant that there was a likelihood
that a language would be more fully and more
competently recorded.
The Case of Nyungar
Exploration and settlement overland followed
travel by sea. In particular, once the mountain barrier
had been overcome, the settlers from the Sydney area
moved inland and to the north. Thus the languages
of the New South Wales inland—Wiradhuri and
Kamilaroi and its dialect Yuwaalaraay—formed part
of a borrowing continuum which began with Dharuk
and which incorporated the Australian pidgin which
David Collins, an officer of the First Fleet, had described
as a barbarous mixture of English with the
Port Jackson dialect. Words like gammon and piccaninny ,
from English slang and African pidgin respectively,
joined a range of Port Jackson words to form a
pidgin in which limited communication was possible.
This was added to as it travelled north and west by
words like yabber talk, based on the root ya -, found
in Wiradhuri and other languages), the Yagara
(Brisbane) words bung dead, humpy dwelling, and
yacka work (as noun and verb), and, particularly, by
names for flora and fauna the travellers now recognized
as being commonly found in the inland. So
Wiradhuri words like corella and gang-gang , names
for cockatoos, kookaburra , a kingfisher, boggi , a lizard,
belah , a Casuarina, billabong anabranch, gilgai waterhole,
and bondi , a club, became parts of everyday
Australian English, as did the Kamilaroi words brolga ,
a crane, budgerigar , a small parrot, coolamon wooden
vessel or basin, gundy , yet another word for hut, and
towri country, the traditional territory of an Aboriginal
people, the Yuwaalaraay words galah , a parrot, and
gidgee , an acacia, and words common to Kamilaroi
and Yuwaalaraay like the names of other species of
acacia such as boree and mulga . When a would-be
poet writes the lines,
Where the tangled boree blossoms,
Where the gidya thickets wave,
And the tall yapunyah's shadow
Rests upon the stockman's grave
he has, in a sense, guaranteed the currency of the
words he uses.
Much the same sort of continuum exists in the
west, where Nyungar, which had a number of advantages
over Dharuk, has provided for more than 150
years a source of loan words. First, the settlement in
the west took place some forty years after that in the
east, and the settlers had a better idea of what they
were handling. Second, though the language is no
longer spoken, it was more fully and more intelligently
recorded than those first encountered. And,
third, as a matter of governmental policy, Aboriginal
names for flora and fauna have been preferred. So,
for instance, the names of the farmed freshwater crayfish,
koonac , and marron , have only short histories of
usage in English, coincident with their utility, though
they were first recorded in the 19th century. And
there are substantial lists of the names of trees— jarrah,
karri, mallett, marri, tuart , and wandoo —and of
animals— chuditch, dalgite, dunnart, kumarl, nool-benger ,
and numbat —that are familiar at least in the
west.
There are also words representative of other
areas of Aboriginal life, such as boylya cleverman or
wise elder, gnamma waterhole, kylie boomerang,
miamia dwelling, monaych , originally the name of a
cockatoo and by transference a police officer, nyoongar
Aboriginal person, wagyl , the mythical rainbow
serpent, wilgie , a red ochre used to paint the
body on ceremonial occasions, and wongi , a word for
an Aboriginal person, originally used around Kalgoorlie.
But, though the Nyungar words supply a more
comprehensive picture of Aboriginal life than do the
Dharuk or those from any single inland language, the
greater number of words used to denote key notions
of Aboriginal belief and life are special uses of English
words like cleverman, which has replaced words like
the Dharuk koradji and the Nyoongar boylya , which
are effectively obsolete. So the Aboriginal equivalent
of the Creation is Dreamtime , itself a translation of
alcheringa (an Aranda word), bark hut is preferred
to gunyah or humpy, country to the Kamilaroi towri ,
and walkabout to the Nyungar pink-eye . And bark
paintings are known in the terms in which they are
characterized by the European eye, as dot or X-ray
paintings. The language of the invaders is the language
of choice, except in the artificially maintained
case of the nomenclature of flora and fauna.
In other words, although the opportunity was
there for borrowing on a larger scale and with a degree
of comprehensiveness that had not been
achieved hitherto, it has not been taken. In the west,
as elsewhere in Australia, the lexicographical evidence
of a developing understanding of the indigenous peoples
of Australia is slight indeed.
Proliferating Plurals (and Some Singular Substitutions)
It seems that reporters and other writers and
speakers have invented a new rule: Whenever possible,
use plurals. Thus television, radio, and newspaper
reporters tell us:
Aids and assistances were given by the Red Cross.
The conditions of the bombing victims are unknown.
An oil spill has impacted [i.e., affected] many fishing
crafts.
Damages to the bridge from the collision were slight.
It was a meeting of Republican Party faithfuls.
The futures of American children are in doubt.
Toxic substances in their drinking water have caused
harms.
A passing motorist gave much-needed helps after the
accident.
The intelligences of the two groups are the same.
I am writing in regards to...
A $20 savings over the regular price...
[A retiring football coach] always worried about the
academic standings of his athletes.
Fog will lower visibilities today.
At the same time, perhaps from an unconscious discomfort
caused by so many perplexing plurals, there
has been a mini-trend in the opposite direction. One
form has been the de facto singularization of some
commonly used words of foreign origin: L bacterium,
datum, medium, stratum ; It graffito ; LL (fr Gk) phenomenon ;
Gk criterion . Though all are currently
being used almost exclusively in plural form, they are
treated as if they were singular, e.g., a bacteria, etc.
The more usual form of singularizing appears when
we are told that someone is no longer in the good
grace of someone else; the ground for divorce was...;
the supervisor or custodian (i.e., janitor] of a school
building was also responsible for the upkeep of its
ground ; and one reporter, evidently mightily disturbed
by the prevalent pluralism, even tried to
make a singular noun still more so by lopping off its
final s : a specie of mammal (which one might think is
right on the money). Though the singular insanity is
far outstripped by the multiple mania, one can expect,
in this age of downsizing, to encounter more of
the less and less of the more.
What's In a Name?
This slightly enlarged version of Paul Dickson's
Names , published by Delacorte Press in 1986, is a
light-hearted collection of names that the author considers
to be interesting for one reason or another. We
are invited to share his delight in Embraceable Zoo
(for a store selling toys), Onan (Dorothy Parker's pet
canary who spilled his seed), Robot Redford (a robot
which once gave a commencement address), and
many similar examples. For most of us, these are typical
tit-bits that raise a passing smile when we come
across them as column-fillers in our newspapers. To
irrespressible name-collectors like Paul Dickson they
bring the thrill of a new find that anyone who has
ever collected anything will understand. I have
known a few name-collectors in my time, and they
are an enthusiastic bunch. I remember George
Hubbard showing me the filing cabinets in his New
York apartment, crammed with lists of personal names
like Mollie Panter-Downes and Romeo Yench . I also
recall with affection the late John Leaver, who cycled
around the English countryside as a boy collecting
pub-names. He was still collecting them in his seventies.
John Leaver is not mentioned in this book, which
is very thin on British material. Mr. Dickson says, for
instance, that he has long had a special passion for
apple names, and quotes several hundred of them,
but he ignores the National Apple Register of the
United Kingdom , by uriel W.G. Smith, which catalogues
the names of 22,000 cultivars. (Miss Smith
once amused herself by working 365 apple names into
a story, which began:
Mrs Toogood, whose daughter Alice was a Little
Beauty, but rather a Coquette, despaired of ever seeing
a Golden/Ring on the Lady's Finger...)
We need not cavil, of course, at the absence of such
obvious reference sources; in a work like this the author
has the right to favour serendipity over methodical
research.
Whether he has the right to be needlessly careless
in his statements is perhaps another matter. As a
typical example, we read that the word derrick , derived
from the surname of a famous hangman, was
in use for centuries as a name for the gallows. A
glance at the citations in the OED or at Partridge's article
in Name Into Word , which Dickson cites in his
bibliography, would have made it clear that this usage
did not extend beyond the 17th century. It is also
news to me that I once wrote a book called First
Names , mentioned on page 138. Mr. Dickson's definition
of name is itself rather unsatisfactory. Why are
we suddenly treated on page 16 to an incomplete list
of -ine words ( bovine, feline, lupine , etc.)? What are
the German nouns Wettfahrt and Fahrtwind (printed
without their capital letters) doing here? The latter
may interest those who make a special study of flatulence
(perdologists?), if such people exist, but these
are not names.
There is no need to include non-names in a book
of this kind when we are surrounded by thousands of
minor nomenclatures. The paper on which these
words are printed, for instance, as well as the typeface
and even the ink, have names. Almost any generic
noun can be broken down into named subdivisions.
To a knowledgeable pogonologist, a beard is a Bodkin,
Cathedral, Ducktail, Goatee, Lavatory Brush, Imperial,
Pique-devant, Spade, Stiletto or Vandyke , to name but
a few. At least two hundred types of hat have more
specific names. If Mr. Dickson wished to remain thoroughly
American, he could still find interesting names
on his doorstep. Let me recommend the names of
ten-pin bowling teams, which often pun on strike, split ,
or pin . (The over-fifties team for which I play is the Hot
Irons: we strike while the iron's hot and also play
golf.)
Merriam-Webster say that this book forms part of
their lighter side of language series. I hope that
they will at some stage do justice to the more scholarly
work that has been done, especially on place names
and personal names. Names and naming rightly attract
the attention of philologists, sociologists, psychologists,
literary critics, and others. Huge sums of
money are spent on finding suitable brand names.
Paul Dickson has every right to approach names in a
light-hearted way, but Juliet's question, What's in a
name? can be answered in many more intellectually
satisfying ways than this.
Thames Ditton, Surrey
Chasing the Sun
Jonathon Green has deservedly acquired the
mantle of Eric Partridge as the foremost authority on
British slang. His books are many; listed on the back
flap of the dustjacket of this book are the Macmillan
Dictionary of Contemporary Slang, The Slang
Thesaurus, Neologisms: New Words Since 1960, Slang
Down the Ages: The Historical Development of Slang ,
and The Dictionary of Jargon .
The present work is a departure for him, for most
of his earlier works have been reference books. I
have heard some of Green's broadcasts and interviews,
and he comes off quite well, for he is smooth and
glib, just what is needed for radio. That style translated
into book form, however, makes this book seem
greatly overwritten. Its main fault lies in the reliance
on extensive quotations from the works described,
the sort of thing one expects to be paraphrased by a
historian, with the original matter buried in footnotes.
Mercifully, there are few such notes, and they come at
the end of the book where they can be ignored. The
problem with the quotations is that they are often
quite long and neither interesting nor revealing, often
serving to support a point made by the author, whom
I would be happy to believe on his own recognizance.
Still, there are a number of errors which ought to be
corrected for any subsequent edition or printing.
Green's account of the early history of dictionary-making
is very useful and interesting, for it gathers
together information about the personal lives (and
qualifications—or lack thereof) of the famous lexicographers.
One might quarrel with an occasional
comment (like, [The Techne ] might be said to have
become the basis of every Greek textbook that schoolboys,
in England and elsewhere, would face until the
year 1000, which must have encompassed a relatively
small number), but such are few and far between in
the earlier chapters of the book. It is not till we arrive
at the final chapter, The Modern World, that serious
inadequacies rear their ugly heads.
Green writes:
[Lexicographers] have retained their priestly role, especially
in America, and especially in the world of
what America terms college and Britain concise
dictionaries,...
[p. 359]
The simple facts are that American college (or
desk) dictionaries today contain about 170,000 entries
(about half that number of headwords), up from
the ±130,000 they had till the 1960s); British concise
dictionaries contain far fewer than that: the Concise
Oxford , the best-selling dictionary in the UK, contains
about 120,000 entries (probably not more than about
60,000 headwords), which is equivalent to what are
classed as concise dictionaries in America. As far as
I am aware, what are called college or desk dictionaries
in America have no special label in Britain,
though several, notably the Collins Dictionary , are of
comparable extent.
Green is correct in writing that the (unabridged
Funk & Wagnalls) Standard Dictionary of the English
Language (1893) gives two pronunciations for each
entry, but he is mistaken in reporting that one represents
the popular pronunciation, the other showing
the precise one [p.364]: there are two pronunciations
because one employs a more popular, presumably
understandable pronunciation key (called, in the
phonetics trade, a broad transcription) while the
other cleaves to a scholarly transcription (called a narrow
transcription); if such a pattern were followed
today, the first would be the simplified system used
generally in most dictionaries and the second would
employ the symbols of the International Phonetic
Alphabet (which, for their more recondite transcriptions,
require a trained phonetician for their understanding).
In discussing the third edition of Merriam-Webster's
New International Dictionary (MW-III),
Green describes one of its main advances as a general
move away from America's traditional prescriptive
lexicography, towards a more descriptive, British
style. Such a move had, indeed, taken place many
years before Philip Gove's editorship of the MW-III
and is evidenced in such works as the Merriam-Webster
Collegiate, Webster's New World, and
American College dictionaries, among others. Some
of these dictionaries contain notes describing contentious
issues of usage (e.g., infer/imply, reason is
because/that , etc.), but those are, essentially, reflective
of the concerns of many users of the language, hence
can be set forth as descriptive.
On page 366 Green refers to the MW-III as containing
450,000 headwords: it does not, of course; it
contains 450,000 entries. The notion of entry, as described
many times in these pages, includes (1) head-word,(2)
inflected forms (which, in the sole case of the
MW-III , includes regular inflections, which pumps
up the entry count considerably), (3) changes in parts
of speech, (4) embedded boldface entries (like idioms
and phrases), (5) run-on forms (those that are added at
the ends of entries to illustrate headwords with suffixes
of transparent meaning added, e.g., national and nationally
run on to nation and nationalization run on to
nationalize , (6) spelling variants (like British honour,
nationalise, nationalisation , etc.). Thus, a dictionary
with approximately 80,000 headwords, the size of
American college dictionaries, contains more than
170,000 entries. I do not know how many headwords
the MW-III contains, but it is far, far fewer than
the 450,000 entries claimed. (Those who greet with
consternation what might seem to be a publisher's fiddling
with counts in dictionaries ought to know that the
system for such counting was worked out in the 1930s,
mainly between Merriam-Webster and the US
Treasury Department, which was then in charge of all
government purchases, as a means for assessing the information
content of dictionaries being purchased for
the government, a responsibility later shifted to another
department.)
On page 379 Green writes:
There are, after all, a number of books of Americanisms
but none, although there have been plans to fill
this gap, of Briticisms.
That is not quite accurate, for, in 1973 Macmillan
(US; Johnson & Bacon 1974 in the UK) published
Norman W. Schur's British Self-Taught; revised and
expanded, it was published as English English by
VERBATIM BOOKS in 1980; revised and expanded further,
it was published as British English A to Zed by
Facts On File in about 1990. It is not entirely accurate
to describe Schur's book as a dictionary, for, although
it is in alphabetical order (by Briticism, with
the American equivalent in the Index), it combines
definitions with descriptions of cultural phenomena
(as in the entry for the Ashes , which needs an explanation
rather than a mere definition).
Green's treatment of the Modern World of lexicography
is very thin on the ground. Bare mention is
made of the most important and best-selling dictionaries
published in the last fifty years, when the sales of
all kinds of dictionaries exploded throughout the
world. It is probably true to say that an entire book
could be written about this recent period in dictionary
development, including not only the reflection of
sound linguistic philosophy but the effects of the introduction
of computers into the dictionary research,
compilation, composition, and accession (as through
personal computers to CD-ROMS and diskettes): certainly
there is more documented information about it than
the period of several hundered years covered in the first
fourteen chapters of Chasing the Sun .
But one must be grateful to Jonathon Green at
least for the first fourteen chapters, which gather in
one place an enormous amount of interesting, useful
information about (deceased) lexicographers and the
dictionaries they prepared. The title, which will make
the book difficult to find amongst others that deal
with dictionaries, is from Johnson's Introduction to
his dictionary.
P. 239: for Guildford Connecticut, read Guilford.
P. 244: If asks is correct, then there should be a ? at
the end of the quoted matter.
P. 244: new-dangle—ok?
P. 245: for accumen read acumen.
P. 276: (bottom) for Allan Walker Read read Allen...
P. 298: for no less than 83 readers read no fewer...
P. 306: correct to join at the this period.
P. 307: for reconsituted read reconstituted.
P. 310: for enormity read immensity.
P. 311: for slacked read slackened.
P. 319: for Minor, it turned, out... read Minor, it
turned out,...
P. 329: for The Beaux Strategem read The Beaux'
Stratagem .
P. 333: for fulsome read flattering or effusive, etc.
P. 361: for pronounciation read pronunciation.
P. 369: (in extract) for grey read gray (the way the
word was spelt by McDavid).
P. 370: for Encyclopedia Britannica read
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
P. 378: for soldily read solidly.
P. 392: Notes (13.4) what does IEL stand for?
Ibid.: (13.5) Trench [2] is not in the Bibliography.
P. 418: for Random House College Dictionary 33-4
read ...35-6.
Health Care Terms
We need not be bludgeoned with the information
that the world has become more bureaucracy-ridden
in the past few decades, a trend that probably began
in the 1930s to be reinforced through World War II.
It is probably the language that has borne much of the
burden in that development: the first citation for
acronym in the OED , 1943, quotes American Notes
and Queries , which refers to earlier, unidentified
usage of the term. In the early 1940s we were besieged
by repl depots (pronounced REPil DEPOZe), GI ,
and thousands of other acronyms and abbreviations
the meaning of which we learned through daily repetition
on news broadcasts.
(I find it convenient to distinguish an abbreviation
as a shortening that is not or cannot be pronounced,
like USA, UN, IOC, GB, NIH, NAS, RC, OED, IBM ,
etc., from an acronym as a shortening that is pronounced
as a word, like ad lib, NASA, WREN,
OPEC, COMSAT, NATO , etc. Those who specialize
in this area prefer to subsume them all under the general
rubric, initialism , a term quoted by the OED
from the 1890s in Notes and Queries, but one that
did not become current, I believe, till Gale Research
Company published Acronyms and Initialisms Dictionary ,
in 1965. An enormous work, that book has
grown by the publication of periodic supplements.)
Health Care Terms contains a good deal besides
initialisms, but I focus on those because they are probably
most representative of the jargon we are faced
with whenever we encounter the Bureaucracy: as if
the compounding of incomprehensible, undescriptive
jargon were not enough, those who concoct that obfuscating
gobbledygook are not content till they have
turned it into an abbreviation or an acronym. The jargon
also becomes sprinkled with euphemisms, among
which I count health care professional , a definition for
which—too long to repeat here—appears in this book
under professional . Part of it (excluding the awkward
pronoun of reference) is pertinent:
...[S]ome individuals may call themselves professional
with little or no training. For example, there
are no minimum requirements to be a nutritionist,
so anyone can call him or herself one.
During a recent hospital stay (my first), I learned that
the person who mops the floor is referred to as a
health professional, along with what I would have
called the medical orderly who has the responsibility
for taking blood samples, the registered nurse in attendance,
the head floor or ward nurse, and the various
doctors. Having been the editor in chief of
Mosby's Medical and Nursing Dictionary (first edition),
it occurred to me that I, too, might be termed
a health care professional; so too, perhaps, might
an inveterate hypochondriac.
This book can do nothing, of course, to relieve us
of the sort of vocabulary that makes a garbage man or
dustman into a waste removal consultant, but it is
enormously helpful in explaining, in a straightforward
way and (unfortunately) without rancor, what bureaucracy
has bequeathed us. Evidently, the GP no
longer exists, having been replaced by the family
practice practitioner, now considered a medical specialty.
Naturally, family practice is referred to as
FP—what else? why not FamPrac?—for which
Health Care Terms offers the following definition:
The specialty of medicine which deals with providing,
supervising, and coordinating the continuing
general medical care of patients of all ages, primarily
in family groups. The care provided is primary care.
One of the medical specialties for which residency
programs have been approved by the Accreditation
Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME).
See specialty.
I suppose that means that as an aging divorcé who
lives alone, I am only marginally entitled to treatment,
for a single individual can scarcely be considered a
family group. This specialty reminds me of a time,
some decades ago, when my doctor advised me, indignantly,
that he was not a GP: gesturing to a
framed certificate hanging on the wall of his office, he
told me in no uncertain terms that he was an internist,
to which I replied that I should thereafter
require only two doctors, an internist and a dermatologist.
He didn't see the humor of that remark.
If one's field touches on the medical profession,
insurance, or any other area concerned with the bureaucracy
(which I am always tempted to spell bureaucrazy),
this is an essential aid in unraveling and
clarifying—insofar as is possible—the verbiage that
assails one from all sides. Although the average victim
of the medical bureaucracy need not have this as a
vademecum, public, private, and, especially, hospital
librarians should note its great value as an adjunct to
the other reference books available, none of which
covers the same territory. Three appendices round
out the usefulness of this work.
It would be only fair to mention that the terminology
is that used in the United States.
Laurence Urdang
Ship to Shore
My aim in this work is to illustrate what I believe is
the astonishing debt that our idiomatic speech owes
to the nautical language of the past. English is extraordinarily
rich in metaphor, and it is the intention of
this book to show that many of the figures of speech
that we use from day to day derive from the language
and customs of the sea.
—From the Preface.
Peter D. Jeans is an Australian who writes a column
in The West Australian on the origin of words.
This is a substantial, useful, interesting work, but if the
reader/user is seeking an authoritative, documented
archive of nautical expressions, he may be disappointed.
As readers of VERBATIM are aware, we give
short shrift to the trappings of academia in our pages:
we eschew footnotes (with rare exceptions) as well as
bibliographies. But in reviewing the works of others,
attention must be paid to such materials, and the
Bibliography of Selected Sources and Dictionaries
Consulted include only twenty-five titles under the
former category (plus fifteen of Patrick O'Brian's Jack
Aubrey novels) and only ten under the latter, some of
which are curious choices indeed: Robert Hunter's
Universal Dictionary of the English Language, New
York: Collier, 1897, which I have never heard of; Eric
Partridge's Origins: A Short Etymological Dictionary
of Modern English contains a great many errors and
ought to be avoided by serious researchers; the author
evidently chose not to wade through Johnson's Dictionary,
relying instead on McAdam and Milne's A
Modern Selection.
Still, it is unfair to judge a book by its peripherals.
Before getting to the content, let us look at the appendices,
of which there are four. The first, Nautical
Prepositions, includes aback, abeam, about, abox,
a-cockbill, adrift, and other words that are adverbs,
not prepositions, along with ahoy and a few others
beginning with a -: evidently the author believes that
many nautical words beginning with a- are prepositions,
which is simply not the case. Appendix 2 contains
Changed Spellings and Corrupted Word Forms;
although the information given here is accurate as far
as I could tell, it is confusing to have some words
listed under their original spelling (studding sail,
treenail) and others in their corrupted form (gunnel,
bosun) —and what happened to trunnel? I fear that
there is a great deal more to the question of spelling
and pronunciation than has been allowed for.
Appendix 3, Nautical Terms Related to Human
Anatomy, shows nauticalisms that were borrowed
from anatomical terms, not the other way round. The
coverage is a bit loose, but no one is likely to consider
earring an anatomical term, and forelock, a
small iron wedge of pin driven through a hole or slot
at the end of a sheave-pin to prevent it from working
out, contains a - lock from a door, not from a forehead,
which has a different etymological origin.
Nautical Terms Derived from the Land, Appendix
4, is divided into the sublistings Domestic
Environment and General Environment. The suitability
for such treatment varies: bosun's chair is listed
simply because it is a chair; cap is listed presumably
because it is thought to refer to an item of apparel.
But a chair is virtually anything for an individual to sit
on and cap, etymologically at least, originally meant
cape (with a hood) or so the OED has it. Without
dated citations for the earliest occurrences of these
words in a nautical context, how is one to know if they
were derived from the Land or merely coincidental
with them?
Still, no serious harm. Let us now turn to the
main body of the work. Opening it at random we
find, appropriately enough,
Hogwash Sailor's slang for nonsense, rubbish, a tale
with no truth in it; and worthless stuff:
His claim that he is an experienced
motor mechanic is all hogwash.
Aside from the unfortunate quotation, which hardly
seems nautical at all, hogwash is ordinary English,
which, it may be assumed, (English-speaking) sailors
used as a medium in which to couch their nauticalisms.
Thus, the direction would seem to have been
from everyday word to language of the sea, and not,
as advertised, vice versa. The same must be said for
hitch, go without a hitch, get hitched, hoist, hold off,
hold on , and scores of other entries: these were everyday
words in the general language before they were
used by sailors. The problem—and it is a serious one—
is that there are, indeed, many words and phrases that
originated at sea and were brought ashore for ready
embodiment in everyday speech, but to find the same
terms in both does not justify the assertion that the sea
term came first.
It must be said—and I believe I shall be borne out
on this—that relying on citations appearing in the
OED or in works written long ago is a precarious business:
the only accurate, safe statement that can be
made about such information is that it provides evidence
for the existence of a word in a given context at
the time of publication of the work: it cannot and must
not be construed as the first time the word appeared
on the face of the earth, merely as the first written
evidence we have of its appearance. Clearly, that is not
to say that most words appearing in quotations in the
OED and in any other (original) source are being used
for the first time: on the contrary, it is very likely—and
this might well apply to terms of art of a specialized
field and, particularly, the speech of sailors, who did
not enjoy an entirely savory reputation—that the terms
were in oral use for a long time before they were written
down. Consider how long it took lexicographers to
include four-letter words in their dictionaries; yet we
know from long experience with spoken English that
a researcher five hundred years hence would be wrong
to conclude that those terms were invented or even
came into general use at the end of the 20th century.
(And still not all are listed.)
A problem arises when those who would swallow
dictionaries whole are left to conclude that their content
is sacrosanct. Those who try to apply a scientific
approach to the assessment of data become rapidly
aware that what we are examining is not likely to be
complete—which is certainly true when dealing with
language—or even accurate, as the alchemists and
other early researchers in science discovered.
There is a certain charm seen in working the
alchemy of language, and we can well appreciate it in
the context of artistic license. But it is quite another
thing when it is foisted on an unsuspecting public as
fact, when, indeed, it is either pure speculation or a
writer's interpretation of the best way to make data fit
into the procrustean bed of his theory.
There is no doubt that much controversy has surrounded
the interpretation of the word devil in nautical
contexts and, particularly, with the expression
between the devil and the deep blue sea. Likewise, it
is indisputable that many nautical expressions have
come ashore to be used metaphorically by landlubbers.
The problem is that although many such expressions
have been included in Ship to Shore, many
that were not nautical have also been listed. As it is
impossible for the non-expert to sort them out, it remains
for people like Jeans to do so, and he has incautiously
included many for which insufficient
evidence exists that they were originally nautical, and
he has failed in his duty by not identifying questionable
entries.
Shardlow's drawings are a model of clarity and
character.
Nineteenth-Century English
It is always a good idea to read an author's preface
(or foreword) to discover the purpose of a book
before reading and, certainly, before reviewing it.
From Professor Bailey's, we quote the following,
which pretty much sums up his attitude toward language
in general and English in particular:
English is a single language full of variety, and I believe
that no speaker is beneath notice and no single
one has exclusive rights to represent the language.
Models assuming metropolis and hinterland, capital
and colony, standard language and dialect have little
to offer except fragmentation and prejudice.
It is virtually impossible to argue against such a point
of departure from the standpoint of the linguistic scientific
investigator. After all, researchers into cancer,
heart disease, virology, and bacteriology would look
quite foolish were they to adopt the high moral
ground by damning the causes of disease as sinful or
bad. Yet the issue of good vs. bad is always at
the forefront when language comes up for discussion,
not, perhaps, among linguists but, to be sure, among
the rest of the population. In some cases, murder,
mayhem, and, to borrow a tasteless euphemism from
social conflict, linguistic cleansing have been
aroused by language—not by vituperation, cursing,
and blasphemy but simply by being in the wrong
place at the wrong time speaking a particular language
or dialect. Dialect differences can cause strife
and disharmony, as can be witnessed in the contemporary
dispute over the decision by a California school
district to use Ebonics as a vehicle to teach
Standard English.
Linguists might well distance themselves from
such mundane anti-intellectualism, but that does not
make it go away nor does it solve the problem or
come close to answering the question of what should
be done about teaching language. A very telling point
in such disputes is that those who speak a dialect
other than Standard (which we persist in putting in
quotation marks because it continually changes, both
temporally and geographically) are condemned to accept
work that is below a level, socially and economically,
to which they aspire and to which they feel they
are entitled, at least from the standpoint of opportunity.
As I have held, while language itself can the subject
of cool analysis in some contexts, it is a social institution
and our means of communication. While it
is not only scientific and scholarly but noble to maintain
that such matters as pronunciation, usage, dialect,
and other features are all part of the description
of language and are neither good nor bad, the fact
remains that using a dialect or speech pattern that is
unacceptable to those who are giving out the jobs may
mean that one either gets the job or not, other qualifications
being equal, hence the scientific and
scholarly considerations may be effectively put into
their academic niches where they belong.
There is another aspect to the entire subject, invariably
ignored by linguists and linguistic scientists
because they remain unable to measure or quantify it,
namely, style. Language is language says the scientist,
totally ignoring (sometimes deliberately, usually owing
to lack of discernment) any art—or lack thereof—that
might be involved in the speech or writing of individuals,
whether professional writers or not. (Some
might protest that the study called stylistics deals with
art in language, but those who know the nature of
stylistics are aware that it does not even come close to
measuring effectiveness, poetry, eloquence, beauty,
and other characteristics associated with artistic expression.)
Third, the language of an individual reflects his
culture, which is a catch-all term covering many
things. There are those of an older generation that
considers itself better educated than almost anyone
younger who understand culture to mean familiarity
with the better and more important works of art (of all
kinds) of the world. This interpretation of culture, is
admittedly, of decreasing importance to an increasing
proportion of the population, who place rock 'n' roll
stars on the same scale of artistic accomplishment as
Milton, Rembrandt, Mozart, Gershwin, Hemingway,
et al.; because the last do not speak to them, they
are peremptorily shouldered out of consideration.
This aspect of language should not be construed solely
as a demonstration of knowledge (as in knowing how
many symphonies Beethoven wrote, whether Caruso
was a tenor or a bass, or being able to hum melodies
from Puccini's operas), though that is certainly a reflex
of a cultured individual. Rather, it is the artistry that
rubs off on the person steeped in the best parts of
the culture, the phrase unconsciously plucked from a
17th-century poem or 16th-century play, (no matter
how corny, like Methinks the lady doth protest too
much), the single word that indicates at least passing
familiarity with history (like defenestration ), the fragment
of an air associated with a Bach fugue.
These aspects of language are social, philosophical,
artistic, largely ignored by linguists, sometimes
out of devotion to what is perceived as the scientific
method, sometimes out of sheer philistinism and the
inability to exercise taste, sometimes out of abject ignorance.
One need only read the academic papers
published in linguistic journals to be convinced that,
notwithstanding their specialty, linguists at large are
incapable of writing simple, expository, declarative
sentences without resorting to turgid syntax, obscure
vocabulary, and uncompromising sesquipedalianism.
In short, considering that their specialty is language,
it is astonishing how few of them use it effectively.
In this regard, I am pleased to say that Richard
Bailey is an exception. Though a linguist—and a good
one—he knows how to write, and how to write persuasively
and informatively. Most of the preceding
commentary has nothing whatsoever to do with the
substance of Nineteenth-Century English, which
traces the spread, growth, and increasing universality
of the English language during that period. Bailey examines
the Writing, Sounds, Words, Slang, Grammar,
and Voices of English, to quote the chapter headings,
and he does so without expressing much opinion
about them, letting the facts speak for themselves.
Well, almost. Bailey's presentation is tinged by an
underlying suggestion of disapproval of those who
would dictate the way the language should be used.
He does not say as much expressly, but his characterization
of such do-gooders as pedants (p. 215) and
purists (p. 223), his persistent placing of quotation
marks around words and phrases condemned by contemporary
purists and pedants to signify—what?—
their quaintness? their curiosity?
For the most part, despite the occasional campaigning
for linguistic liberalism (aimed, obviously, at
20th- and, presumably, 21st-century readers), what
emerges is an engaging picture of concerned speakers
of English, some of them pedants trying to establish
(or preserve) some purity in the language, the remainder
readers of the works published by the former
in the shape of grammars, usage guides, pronunciation
guides, spellers, etc. Because English spelling is often
unrelated to its pronunciation and inconsistent with it,
the majority of spellers were used as teaching tools in
schools; but there was also an opportunity to acquaint
adults with accepted spelling forms (just as there is
today, among the bad speller's dictionaries).
There is no gainsaying that standardization of
spelling (and of other mechanics of language) can be
helpful to communication, but like other reflexes of
language proficiency, it can also mark the relative literacy
or education of a person. Spelling and conventional
hyphenation can be linked; while I noted not
so much as a single typographical error in this book, I
saw once again confirmation of the encroaching ignorance
of those who write automatic hyphenation programs
for computers, presumably employed in the
production of the work: the oft-repeated word English,
properly hyphenated Eng-lish, has been made to
conform to the other words having -ng- at a syllable
break by appearing as Eng-lish throughout. This
rule is well known to traditional compositors, though,
curiously, it does not extend to Angle or Anglo (as in
Anglo-Saxon ) though they are all linked etymologically.
The same point was raised in our review
[XIX, 1, 15] of Bailey's Images of English (1991, also
University of Michigan Press).
In his assessment of the century as a whole,
Bailey discusses the progress of education, especially
public education and the spread of literacy. In that
regard, a point to be made about the culture of the
period in contrast to the language, is the publication,
late in the century, of a number of reference books,
especially readers' handbooks and particularly A Dictionary
of Phrase and Fable, by E. Cobham Brewer,
which went through many printings and, revived in
the latter part of the 20th century, through several updated
editions. It is significant because its enormous
popularity reflects the public's interest in metaphor
based on classical and cultural references understandable
only to those steeped in the literature, not
to those who, having learned to read, seldom read
anything but a dime novel, a popular magazines, or a
newspaper. Those who aspired to broader knowledge
used Brewer's and others' books as a ready-reference
guide to culture. It is not insignificant that their popularity
has seen a reflowering a hundred years after
their original appearance, late in the 19th century.
Nineteenth-Century English is an interesting if
somewhat staid tracing of the development of English
into a world language, though its influence today is
probably owing directly more to events of the past
sixty years than to the growth and spread it enjoyed
during the century of colonialism. Still, there is no
gainsaying Bailey's ultimate argument:
Nineteenth-century English was part of a social
transformation that changed the language and
changed the world.
It remains to be seen what will be written about the
20th century, the close of which is seeing a spread of
English via the Internet that is regarded as so pernicious
by the French that they have seen fit to prosecute
a company (with a pied á terre in France) for
advertising on the medium in English without the accompaniment
of a French translation. Will the 21st
century see still more diversification of English and
encouragement of that diversity or more standardization
and conformity to the medium employed by
major industrial powers? There is little doubt that
people who are driven by economic necessity will
cleave to the language most closely associated with
financial reward, and the opportunities offered by the
Internet are immense compared with those formerly
offered by books, motion pictures, television, and
other media. Still, it is impossible to predict accurately
what the future will bring, and a hundred years
hence everyone might well be lisping in Swahili.
Laurence Urdang
English Accents and Dialects
[Note: The publisher originally sent only the cassette,
and that is what is reviewed here.]
This hour-long tape recording, employing the casual
format of the candid microphone, offers thirteen
diverse English speech patterns gleaned from as
many off the cuff interviews.
Because no other information accompanied the
tape, this reviewer was forced to depend on the more
than slightly helter-skelter impression it leaves on the
chartless listener.
The quality of the tape itself is often fuzzy (no
matter that the interviews appear to be unrehearsed).
The table of contents on the sleeve omits the Dublin
segment, even though the speaker is very much
there, in his recollections of the 1916 uprising,
Lloyd George, the Black and Tan, as well as bits and
pieces of his own life's history.
The interviews are preceded by a set of drill-words,
presumably to establish the regional pronunciation
of English vowel sounds, which have, over the
centuries, undergone many striking changes. Not altogether
surprisingly, the drill-words are almost without
exception spoken with great clarity, from Bristol to
Northumberland and Liverpool to Lowland Scots.
But once the polite obligation to enunciate these
sounds is got over, the narrators are back on familiar
ground, most of them buoyantly loquacious and quite
at home with the art of the monologue.
Their stories range from a mirthful account by a
Bristol woman about her shiftless next-door neighbor
whose overflowing drain gutters flooded her property,
to a somber story by a man from South Wales
whose son's leg was amputated in a fearful childhood
accident.
There is no high drama in these everyday stories:
they are simply abstract and brief chronicles of time
and place, spoken artifacts for preserving the everfluctuating
accents and dialects of Great Britain's intricate
linguistic hierarchy.
It should be noted, however, that these singular
odds and ends of regional accents are far from being
useful for an actor aspiring to become the next Meryl
Streep, mistress of the (virtual) dialect. Although they
are indisputably accurate, none of the excerpts is sufficiently
heightened to be a model for simulation,
especially given the unfocused quality of the tape itself.
In his 1912 preface to Pygmalion, George Bernard
Shaw wrote, It is impossible for an Englishman to
open his mouth without making another Englishman
hate or despise him. And, in 1989, John Honey, an
English professor and phonetics expert, wrote Does
Accent Matter? [rev. XVI,1,10] in which he champions
the cause of teaching the Queen's English (RP, or received
pronunciation) in order to achieve social and
economic equality for those who are passed over in the
job market because of unacceptable regional accents,
such as the nasal twangs and glottal stops of Cockey,
Liverpudlian, and Glaswegian.
Both Pygmalion arguments are sound as well as
altruistic; but at a time when certain civilizations and
cultures are in danger of losing their spoken heritage,
these slight, quirky renderings of native speech may
prove to be as valuable as the archaeologist's fossil
finds. Only this year, the Ainu, an indigenous people
of the Japanese island of Hokkaido, are struggling
valiantly and often painfully to relearn their native
language, which almost died out over the past fifty
years. An Ainu farmer speaks for the strange, tenacious
hold of one's mother tongue: It's true the language
is almost lost, but there's a lot of spirit still, so
I don't think it's too late. And that appears to be the
underlying purpose of English Accents and Dialects, a
fitting epigraph to which might be added Lady Percy's
tribute to her husband killed on the battlefield:
...[H]e was indeed the glass / wherein the noble
youth did dress themselves... And speaking thick,
which nature made his blemish, / Became the accents
of the valiant.
[Henry IV, II, 3]
Mary Douglas Dirks
Old Lyme
Deranged Diction
Sometimes, when speakers use the wrong word,
its context, that Great Disambiguator, as John
Ellison Kahn has called it [XXII, 2], will make the
meaning emerge. Thus, when a family-planning expert
was interviewed on CBS's 60 Minutes and said,
The [Clinton] White House is so abhorred by the
anti-abortionist lobby..., even though abhorrence
may indeed have been the sentiment of anti-abortion
lobbyists, the context made clear to some listeners
that intimidate had been meant. So, too, when
halfway through a report on cases of fraud, a local
Consumer Affairs reporter for NBC News, Ursula
Lipari, said, This was obviously a sham, some listeners
knew that scam was the word she should have
used. Likewise, when in May 1996, on CBS News,
Joe Cook said of gay marriage (a term cynics of an
earlier era might well have labeled an oxymoron),
The [Roman Catholic] Church sets the standard
which people adopt to, some listeners knew that
adapt was meant. I say some listeners because it is
evident that many listeners and readers, like many
broadcasters and writers, are unable to distinguish
one word from another.
We are probably indebted to spelling-check
functions on computers and electronic typewriters for
an apparent decrease in spelling errors such as the
following:
Brest Cancer
[A caption displayed on
NBC News, 16 January 1995.]
...skin conditions such as excema...
[From an article by reporter
Meredith Goad, in the Maine Sunday
Telegram about the uses of St. John's
wort, 11 August 1996.]
The Good Shepard [a soup kitchen]
[A caption displayed on
NBC News, 24 January 1995.]
Electronic spelling checkers cannot detect phonetic
errors where one homonym—or near-homonym—replaces
another, e.g.:
I was taken aside and balled out by a vice-president...
[From an article about how
businesswomen should dress, in the
Portland Press Herald, 1 March 1995.]
The book contains a forward by Dr. Brian A. Fallon.
[From an article, Phantom illness:
Shattering the Myth of Hypochondria,
in the Portland Press Herald, Section C,
31 July 1996.]
...parents who share custody are likely to horde the
time they get with their children.
[From A Camping Tradition, Section F,
the Maine Sunday Telegram, 11 August 1996.]
On-Sight Supervision
[A caption describing a segment of a report
on renovations to the Portland [Maine]
High School building, NBC News,
26 January 1995.]
Reliance on electronic proofreaders may, in fact, increase
phonetic errors. In Honolulu, the student editor
of the University of Hawaii's campus newspaper,
a native English-speaker, was unable to understand a
professor's telephoned complaint about the paper's
use of band as the past tense of to ban. She understood
the meaning of ban; she had apparently heard
its inflected past tense form; but the infinitive and
the present tense forms were unknown to her. The
editor's electronic reader had not rejected band and
therefore the word must be correct. We can expect to
read more of such phonetic errors since even highly
literate and careful writers will sometimes make such
mistakes and occasionally proofread in haste, as well,
though if it is pointed out, they will always understand
what the error is.
Joe Cook's adopt (for adapt ) might have been a
mere slip of the tongue; but when NBC's Los Angeles
reporter, David Bloom, said on 30 July 1996, Bob Dole
came not to censor Hollywood but to... and the context
demanded censure , he cannot be allowed the same
excuse—he has been guilty of too many bloopers.
But slips of the tongue, phonetic and spelling errors
are the least of our word woes. On 26 June 1995,
a local political commentator, speaking with general
approbation of Maine Governor Angus King, said, ...
which [the governor] equivocated to ... meaning
equated to. At about the same time, National Public
Radio's Terry Gross on All Things Considered said
of an artist she had interviewed, He flouted his radical
opinions [in order to shock]. Flaunt was the verb
she should have used. NBC's Tokyo correspondent,
Lucky Severson, reported 15 January 1995 that
crowds of people had gathered, hoping to catch a
glance of the Pope, when it was a glimpse they really
hoped for. Bruce Stokes, of the National Journal, a
political affairs magazine published in Washington,
DC, said during the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour
30 June 1994, It was incredulous! Again and again
we read or hear that some bank or other commercial
establishment services its customers better than
some other; and how often in recent years have we
heard and read that a terrorist group has claimed
credit for yet another atrocity?
There is more and—some of it—worse. Nor does
context always render the meaning intelligible.
Deceptively spacious! was the leading phrase of an ad
which ran for months in the Portland Press Herald
Real Estate Weekly section. Was the house bigger than
it looked? Or smaller? The following list is a small
sample of the deranged diction offered by the media
over a two-year period. Not all the examples were the
work of professional journalists or broadcasters, but all
the writers and speakers are supposedly educated.
Why are their recruiting methods so backwards?
[NBC News reporter Ed Rabel,
21 May 1996. The context
indicated backward was meant.]
... [Few poor people] would want their names bantered
around by strangers.
[NPR, All Things Considered, on
which Christine Holmgren described
the forms of charity at the church
of which she is the pastor in
Minnesota; 23 August 1996.]
Its simple houses, built of concrete blocks and
chaff...
[From The Quandary by Mary Anne
Weaver, The New Yorker,
19 August 1996, p. 24.]
It's a never-ending surprise to see some of the stunning
coiffeurs that have been hidden under bowl
cover-style [sic] shower caps.
[From an article about women who
meet only at the Y swimming
pool, by a guest columnist, Portland
Press Herald, 8 March 1995.]
The kayaker, donned in a bright yellow raincoat...
[From On the Bay, by columnist
Nick Mavodones, Portland Press
Herald, 25 May 1996.]
[Lifeguard] David Cowell lives what most consider
an envious lifestyle...
[From Ogunquit Life,
Section B, Portland Press
Herald, 13 August 1996.]
[The US Government station housed] a crew whose
job was to watch for shipwrecks and rescue survivors.
They [presumably the crew] were forebears
of today's Coast Guard.
[From the fifth in a series of
articles on Maine islands,
Island Odyssey, by Edie Lau,
staff writer for the Portland Press
Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram,
18 August 1996.]
This was obliging for all.
[Reporter Chris Rose, NBC
First News, 16 May 1996.]
[Brooke Shields] knows what it is to have a career in
Hollywood rise and fall and then plummet again.
[NBC First News anchor Rob
Caldwell, speaking of the
ultimate success of stars
whose careers have been
uneven, 31 July 1996.]
A man with not one redeemable quality...
[Dr. Elissa Eli, a Massachusetts
psychiatrist on NPR's All Things
Considered, 20 August 1996.]
A tougher training regiment [for New York City police]...
[Tom Brokaw, NBC News, 12 June 1995.]
Thomas L. Kinney says he wants to revive strained
relationships between Time Warner and local communities
[Subheading of Cable firm picks
new Portland president, an article
in the Portland Press Herald by staff
writer Eric Blom, 14 April 1995.]
Insurance companies may be unwilling to venture
into unchartered territory...
[Reporter Susan Chisholm, Maine Public
Radio, Maine Things Considered,
2 August 1996.]
When a nation's best-educated citizens and professional
wordsmiths can unblushingly commit
blunders such as these, is it any wonder that public
discourse so often degenerates into slanging matches
and the bitter exchange of empty slogans? Words fail
me, we say when at a loss. But here it is not the
words that have failed us but the so-called literate
elite: and their failure is both a symptom and a cause
of the increasing confusion.
Sad Stories of the Death of Kings
Can there be any significance in the disappearance
of euphemisms for death? Does it provide proof
that death is no longer taboo, or are such euphemisms
the victims of a modern contempt for flowery, imprecise
language? For whatever reason, phrases such as
pushing up daisies, breathed his last, is no more, gone
to a better world , etc. sound decidedly old-fashioned
these days. In some parts of Africa, however, the
death of a king is seen as a return to chaos and disorder
and is never announced directly. Dare to announce
that the king is dead in so many words and
you could soon be feeding the worms yourself. The
accepted formula varies from place to place. The
Baule people of Ivory Cost say that the King has
hurt his foot, while the Diola of Senegal say that the
earth is broken. For the Fon people of Benin the
appropriate phrase is Night has fallen or The King
has returned to Allada . In the Indiene kingdom of
Ivory Coast people say The world has lowered its eyes
With his stentorian gaze and minimalist technique,
Yevgeny Mravinsky (1903-1988) presided over the
Leningrad Philharmonic for almost 50 years... [Form a
mailing piece sent by BMG Classical Music Service, n.d.
Submitted by .]
Doug Briggs's nearly serious article [XXII,4] about
the bowdlerizing of recent editions of Webster's reminds
me that the same censorship is rife in the
United Kingdom. For years I have used Chambers's
Twentieth Century Dictionary, first published in
1901—I have the New Edition of 1939, latest impression
1960)—and, like Erskine Caldwell's Webster's, it
shows its age. Chambers's head office is in Edinburgh,
the printers are in the same city; that might account for
the hundreds of Scottish words therein: some are easily
recognized, some are more obscure.
But what attracted me to the dictionary was its
sense of humour. Some definitions:
Sea-serpent an enormous marine animal of serpent-like
form, frequently seen and
described by credulous sailors, imaginative
landsmen, and common liars.
non-smoker a railway compartment in which smoking
is supposed to be forbidden.
bull a ludicrous inconsistency in speech,
often said to be an especial prerogative
of Irishmen—I was a fine child, but
they changed me.
bump a protuberance on the head confidently
associated by phrenologists with
qualities or propensities of mind.
leal, adj. true-hearted, faithfull. —noun, lealty
Land o' the Leal, the home of the
blessed after death; heaven, not
Scotland.
There were many more. But no longer. Some twenty
years ago came another New Edition and the gentle wit
of some of the definitions was done away with. This
bowdlerizing was the subject of extensive correspondence
in the Guardian (London) bemoaning that the
new edition had dropped the witty invention of earlier
editions. Why new lexicographers (I'm suggesting
they belong to a new generation) want to make their
mark by eliminating these harmless jokes beats me.
I have some sympathy for Doug Briggs's stance
against American circumlocution. Too often prisons
are called correction facilities; a lavatory with urinals
a bathroom; and as Briggs wrote, dope a controlled
substance.
But I take issue with him on one thing. According
to Briggs the Texas Penal Code, not noted for leniency,
has softened its attitude to car theft. May I offer a better
solution? As a long-time magistrate (English—
now retired), I understood the legal definition of theft
was something akin to to take possession permanently
and illegally. There were many joy-riders in
England, as there are in the US, mostly juveniles, who
abandon their prize when they run out of gas. To
bracket them with serious car thieves would be unjust.
As far as I know, the problem has been solved in
England by a creating another offence, less serious,
with lower penalties, driving and taking away.
Offenders, especially young ones, are usually charged
with driving without insurance and with no licence as
well, thus increasing the penalties and going some way
to mollifying the feelings of the car owner.
A few comments that arise from XXII, 3:
On Some Secrets of English Nicknames, by Ralph
Emerson: the article did not mention a common
Australian nickname pattern. Some examples:
Barry Bazza Gary Gazza Warren Wozza
Sharon Shazza Darryl Dazza
The nicknames can be shortened to Bazz, Shazz, etc.
(I've never seen or heard Hazza for Harry .) Bazza
was the nickname of the title character in The Adventures
of Barry McKenzie , a comic strip created by
Barry Humphries and artist Nicholas Garland. The
strip first appeared in Private Eye and was the subject
of two films in the early 1970s. Barry Humphries
(also known for his alter ego Dame Edna Everage) is
an Australian with a sharp ear for language. I don't
know how much use the nickname pattern had before
the 1970s, although I'm inclined to think that the
films increased the use of the pattern. The suffix - s
for nicknames still seems to be used, as in the following,
which I have heard in the last year or so:
Kylie Kyles Julie, Julia Jules
Shirley Shirls
On computer language (David Isaacson's Power
Users Dump Baudy Language...), I've noticed that
the expressions can be humorous and often cynical.
For instance, the head has been called a neck-top
computer , on the lines of desk-top computer . The
early portable computers were more aptly described
as luggable . Software which is promised but whose
release is repeatedly delayed or even abandoned, is
called vapourware , and shelfware is software that is
bought but never used, i.e., it just sits on the shelf.
New hardware or software, which the marketers have
trumpeted as leading-edge technology , is called bleeding-edge
technology by those who have experienced
the many problems accompanying new products.
On apostrophes (John Felts's Safire's Syndrome),
I have occasionally wondered if I need an apostrophe
if the word already has an apostrophe. For example,
if the Burger King chain puts out a new product, it's
called Burger King's new product . On that basis, if the
organisation McDonald's puts out a new product,
shouldn't it be called McDonald's new product? Or
am I just making things too complicated?
In your article [Indo' and Outdo' European,
XXIII, 1, 14], you cite postmaster-general and attorney-general
n. + n. I would take them as n. + adj.,
where general indicates on the whole, in general,
for the public at large. After all, general , as in general
of an army , is said to be derived on the model of
sergeant-major-general sergeant acting for a large formation
of men; eventually, sergeant-major was
dropped, yielding general for the person in charge of
an army.
Your readers, treasuring punctilio the way we do,
will have written you in hot numbers about the familiar
solecism that slipped past author Bill Ramson
and the copy editor who sits next to you: in Dharuk
Words in English, XXIII, 1, 10], we find, Aboriginal
language must have mitigated against borrowing.
Mitigate is a voracious and incestuous cannibal, eating
militate at every chance.
How many readers wrote?
[You were the only one. However unmitigated Ramson's
sin might be, he is in good company: In A Private
View , Vintage Contemporaries (New York), 1996, page
49 (evidently not reset from the original 1994 publication
by Jonathan Cape (London)), Anita Brookner, winner
of the Booker Award in 1986 for Hotel du Lac , wrote:
There was the same hieratic passivity, as if she were
waiting for his response to complete the sequence. In
a way this mitigated somewhat against her appeal...
—Editor]
The piece titled Cyberspace and Khyber Pass
[XXIII,1,11] is unfortunate, to say the least. Contrary
to assertion, the language of the internet and some of
the associated culture and attitudes of its writers, as of
a certain time, is captured quite well in The New
Hacker's Dictionary 2d edition, (1993, MIT Press).
Your correspondent missed the point on so much.
For example, stress was not soothed by a cookie monster
which locked up your terminal and kept you from
working until you provided a required response
(whose exact form was not necessarily known by the
victim) to its demand for a cookie. Some of the definitions
are quite wrong. A flame is not distinguished
by its being ill-considered: a flame is usually insulting
or provocative (in the sense of causing irritation); it
can also be simply persisting incessantly and rabidly
on a topic others find uninteresting (or past the point
of interest). Flames are not any more ill-considered
than all the rest of human communication, unless you
are of a particularly pacifist philosophy that deems all
acrimony ill considered.
If the reader doesn't know what a flag is, defining
it as a piece of information that is either true or false
is worse than not defining it at all. You can think of a
flag as a marker associated with something else: the
flag can be one or zero, on or off, yes or no. One
use of a flag is to mark whether information currently
in use in a computer application has been changed
since it was last saved. If yes, the user is asked
whether it should be saved upon exit; if no, the program
simply exits. A flag is true or false only in the
very limited sense of asking the question, Is it true
that the information on the screen is different from its
counterpart on the disk? It has nothing to do with
the correctness of the information, and the flag itself
is presumably always true.
Almost as misleading is the idea that real time is
an amount of time such as the time it takes real people
to communicate on a telephone: real time as applied
to a computer system is actually a respected
technical term that describes using a computer for
something that is happening while the program is running,
like the computer's modification of the angles of
the flaps of an airplane in flight based on the rate of
change of the altimeter, independent of commands
from the pilot. This term distinguishes such programs
from the more common type, for example, calculating
a flight path based on weather predictions for use
later in the day. Real time in jargon applies to doing
something without time for planning or previous
thought, as in the minutes before a presentation (or
indeed during it), creating a display to replace the
key prop someone forgot. Other terms define a duration
of time in the real world as opposed to the
amount of computer processing time required for
something. One such term is wall time (from the
clock on the wall).
I do not claim to be a member of the society that
uses this language, but I have traveled there and
learned a little from the natives. Nor are my definitions
of these terms intended to be rigorous.
I am delighted that Ruth Flanders has tried to
show the interesting imagery underlying French and
German idioms [Foreign Treasures, XXII,1,21].
Unfortunately, she only browsed through the dictionary
and, thus, committed a number of deplorable inaccuracies
and infelicities.
Ms. Flanders lists bö hmische Dörfer and
Wortsalat as synonyms. These two words are, however,
far from interchangeable. Wortsalat means obscure
phraseology and mysterious wording, often
referring to page-length sentences that can crop up in
the writing of bureaucrats and politicians. The phrase
jemandem / fiir jemanden böhmische Dörfer / ein böhmisches
Dorf sein could be translated as to appear
incomprehensible, inexplicable, or strange.
Originally, the phrase expressed the fact that to
Germans living in Bohemia the Slav village names
sounded strange and that the Germans could not understand
them precisely.
Also, Germans would never say or write Senf
dazugeben , when they had in mind the meaning to
meddle in other people's affairs / conversation by
adding one's own piece of wisdom. In this case it is
especially important to add the possessive adjective,
hence: seinen Senf dazugeben . Otherwise it would
be assumed that you were talking about sausages and
seasoning.
The last German phrase in Ms. Flanders' article,
ein Gesicht wie 37 Regenwetter haben , is also not
quite correct, as Robert J. Powers notes [EPISTOLA,
XXII,3,14]. It should be added, however, that four
figures can be used in connection with the phrase ein
Gesicht wie 3/7/10/14 Tage Regenwetter haben .
In More Foreign Treasures [XXIII,1,13], die
öffentliche Hand (singular, not plural) denotes the
state and the municipalities in their function as administrators
and dispensers of taxes and public funds.
Although Grille (in Grillen im Kopf haben)
means, quite correctly, cricket in its first and literal
meaning, and strange and surprising idea in its figurative
sense, it ought to be mentioned that there is a
direct, traceable link between the two: Grille acquired
its figurative sense in the 16th century when—at least
in Germany—the superstition prevailed that the
demons of illness appeared in the guise of an insect.
The phrase Das pabt wie die Faust aufs (not
ins) Auge, lit. That goes like a fist into the eye, is interesting
from a semantic viewpoint. The comparison
signified that two ideas or objects did not go together
at all, because if someone hits you on the eye with the
fist, it would, obviously, hurt very much. Because of
frequent and ironic use, however, the proverb
changed its denotation to the opposite in Standard
German. The old meaning has, meanwhile, declined
in social status, frequency, and familiarity.
As regards the term ein Achtgroschenjunge , I really
would like to know from which reference work
Ms. Flanders has dredged up that term.
The French treasures are also somewhat mutilated,
queue [XXII,1] is feminine not masculine: tirer
le diable par la queue; appuyer sur le champignon
means to step on the gas, le champignon being the
slang term for accelerator; in vivre comme un coq
en pâte there is no acute accent on the e; it is une
[not un ] autre paire de manches that the French
use for something that is entirely different. In More
Foreign Treasures, se noyer dans un verre means to
be incapable of overcoming even small problems and
obstacles, quite different from to make a mountain
out of a molehill.
J.A. Davidson's The Problem of Names [XXIII,1]
is a very good article and highly entertaining. I have for
years suffered those who know what my particular
method of signing says about me.
However, some of us are simply victims of circumstance.
In my case, when very young, the whole
immediate family resided in close proximity... including
my father and grandfather (James David, Jr.,
and James David, (Sr., added later). After the customary
Jim, James, JD, and the like were exhausted,
there was not much left readily identifying yours truly.
Logically, then, I became David rather than another
variant of James . As a result, I have been signing
J. David (or just David ) since the beginning. The
choice was not even mine to make, since my signing
James D. would simply make folks call me Jim. Not
improper on its face, it leads to embarrassing moments
when people yell Jim as I walk away, not even
suspecting they are talking to me. After all, Jim and
JD were my granddad and dad, not me. During
childhood, when someone yelled Jim!.. I wasn't sure
whom they were looking for, but it was a safe bet that
it wasn't me. On the other hand, a loud David was
unmistakable evidence that (alas!) I had done something
to warrant the sudden attention.
All in all a pleasant and very entertaining article,
save the skipping of those of us who have stylish
signatures by circumstance rather than by choice.
In OBITER DICTA [XXIII,3,16] Tony Hall writes...
the square of 5.5 is not a simple piece of mental
arithmetic. But it is! The square of any number
that ends in 5 (typically n5) = [n(n+1)]25. Thus the
square of 5.5 = (5.6)25, or 30.25.
I had a good laugh over J.A. Davidson's experience
with the chummy young lady who called him
John. If someone uses my real name, as in an opening
telephone conversation, for example, I know that
they do not know me as I rarely use it myself. I go
through this all the time and I have several answers to
the question, What is your first name? If it is a
woman I have just met, I say that I only reveal my real
name when we become intimate. This, of course, has
killed off several potential relationships, so I have
given up on it. I often say that I have the same name
as General George Armstrong Custer's father. This
has stumped almost everyone with one exception. My
third comment is, I have an unlisted name. You're
familiar with unlisted telephone numbers, aren't you?
Well I have an unlisted name.
Now that one generally stops them in their tracks.
I cannot resist the temptation to comment on
Israel Wilenitz's comment in his EPISTOLA [XXIII,1,24]
about my EPISTOLA [XXII,2,10] in response to Milton
Horowitz's A Discouraging Word [OBITER DICTA,
XXII,1,13]. The subject of our epistolary dialogue is
the etymology of the word balagan , a buzzword in
modern Hebrew.
If in Mr. Wilenitz's EPISTOLA he had written
Perhaps [instead of Surely ] the vehicle for carrying
the Russian word into modern Israeli Hebrew was
Yiddish, I would agree with him without reservation.
But recent experiences in San Francisco, as well as
casual earlier observations in the New York area and in
Israel suggest to me that Russian is to the current
Ashkenazic Diaspora what Yiddish was to earlier
Jewish communities in Europe and America.
The analogy is not perfect; analogies hardly ever
are. Unless Yiddish is merely a dialect of German
and not a separate language spoken almost exclusively
by Jews, it differs from the Russian spoken by the
bulk of Jewish emigrants from the USSR in being the
Jews' own language rather than a shared language like
Russian. In the following anecdote substitution of
the word Russian for Yiddish kills the joke, though I
am sure that many more Jews today speak Russian
than speak Yiddish.
An old Jewish lady in Israel was chided by her children
for talking to their Sabra children in Yiddish,
the dialect of the ghetto, instead of in Hebrew.
But, the old grandmother protested, I talk to
them in Yiddish because I want them to know
they're Jewish.
Nevertheless, Jewish immigrants to America and
even in Israel, despite pressure to learn Hebrew, communicate
among themselves mainly in Russian, hardly
ever in Yiddish. When Soviet Jews were allowed to
emigrate and poured into New York, the HOBOE
PYCCKOE CJIOBO, previously an anti-Communist
Russian-language newspaper published in New York,
became more Jewish than Christian in orientation,
running ads for Jewish funeral parlors and Jewish
summer camps. The best Soviet Jewish writers, in
contrast to Isaac Bashevis Singer from Poland, wrote
their masterpieces in Russian. I have in mind Babel,
Yevgeniya Ginsburg and her half-Jewish son Aksyonov,
the poets Osip Mandelshtam and Joseph Brodsky, and
in my opinion the best novelist of World War II, Vasily
Grossman.
Recently I accompanied my wife to San Francisco
where she underwent a series of diagnostic tests
at the UCSF/ Mount Zion Medical Center, which, I
gathered, was basically a Jewish institution. I was bemused
to notice that throughout the hospital there
were signs in Russian as well as English. I found myself
chatting with one of the nurses in Russian. While
waiting for my wife in the reception room, I saw a
dapper little old fellow approach the information desk
and attempt in Russian to get directions from the uncomprehending
woman in attendance there behind a
sign in several languages, including Tagalog—but not
Yiddish. I interpreted for the old gentleman and then
having nothing better to do, walked with him to the
building he had been directed to. He was from Kiev.
I was once at a Jewish friend's birthday party where
somehow the guests, mostly Jewish, got to talking
about their grandparents, most of whom came from
Kiev and thereabouts. One of the guests, laughing,
hyperbolically remarked, Well, everyone's grandmother
came from Kiev. (Of course, politically the
Ukraine, or Ukraine tout court as it is now officially
called, is no longer Russian, but as for language, it is
at least as Russian as it is Ukrainian.) So I guessed
that the old gentleman was Jewish, and I would bet
that he was fluent only in Russian.
If indeed Russian is the principal language of the
current Jewish Diaspora, balagan , at least in Milton
Horowitz's example where it applied to a computer
screen, might have come directly from Russian into
Hebrew without the intermediary of Yiddish. Or perhaps
it was simply Russian in English transliteration
rather than the Hebrew or Yiddish word borrowed
from Russian.
The phenomenon of names matching professions
[EPISTOLAE, XXII,4,20] has been the subject of much
discussion this year in the British magazine New
Scientist , where it termed nominative determinism.
However, my two favourite example have not appeared
in the pages of that magazine: an officer of the
British Trust for Ornithology called Sue Starling, and
two researchers in the field of asthma called Ichinose
and Sneeze.
To Ms. Flanders' brief list of More Foreign
Treasures I would like to add one of my late father's
French favorites: La moutarde m'est monté en nez,
lit., the mustard ascended into my nose, I lost my
temper.
Regarding Mr. Chris Bayliss's enquiry [XXIII,2,17],
I give below the Alphabet he asked for:
`A for horses Nfurl banners
Beef or Mutton? O for a drink!
C for yourself Peter Wimsey
Defer payment Q for fish
Eve a brick Rf a mo'
Ffervescent Es ter Williams
G for Staff Tea for two
H for call-up Ufa films
Ivor Novello Vive la France!
Jaffa Oranges W for a drink
Kave canem X for hatching
L for Leather Yf or husband
M phasis Z the old man
[Too many replies were received in response to
Mr Bayliss's EPISTOLA for printing here. They have
all been forwarded to him.
—Editor
Never has there been a more critical need for the
NAACP, a strong and virulent organization with teeth and
muscle and intestinal fortitude, [Chairwoman Myrlie
Evers-Williams] said in remarks prepared for delivery at
the convention. [From an AP story by Margaret Taus in
The [San Bernardino] Sun , , p. A2. Submitted
by .]
This is not the nanny-state, this is the daddy-state
and it's another cockup, said Teresa Gorman, the
Eurosceptic Tory MP, last week. It is disgraceful that taxpayers'
money is used in this way. We could reach a position
where manufacturers of condoms get prosecuted because
their users get overexcited. [From The Sunday Times , , p. 1/15.]
Jim Ed Rhodes attained something most people never
do, he achieved his dream. He died Thursday, December
14, 1995, at the age of 86. [From the Corpus Christi
Caller-Times , . Submitted by .]
There is no obligation to buy. There are no annoying
reply cards. There are only superb reference works at the
best prices we offer. [From the advertisement for the
Oxford Reference Book Society in VERBATIM, .
Submitted by .]
As soon as doctors will allow me,... I will share again
my emotions at Carnegie Hall with the public that respects
the past of an fartist and gives him hope for the future.
[From an advertisement in The New York Times , . Submitted by ]
A rock slide on Sunday crushed a car in Glacier
National Park, killing a Japanese driver who was driving
and injuring his sister. [From The New York Times , . Submitted by .]
Mr Muskie broke down before the cameras while defending
his wife's honour on a flatbed truck in New
Hampshire. [From an obituary for Edmund Muskie in
The Economist , , p.83. Submitted by .]
R.M. Alexander's response (Nuisance dust better than
no jobs, March 2-3, 1996) to concerns raised about dust
generated by a local mining operation reply in large part on
irrelevant ad homonym tactics by conjuring up the Sierra
Club, their tree hugging ilk, and mining jobs lost to communities
elsewhere. [From a letter, by David B. Johnson of
Socorro, to the Editor, Defensor Chieftain , . Submitted by .]
Answers to Anglo-American Crossword No. 77
Answers to Anglo-American Crossword No. 78
Answers to Anglo-American Crossword No. 79
