For the love of words, 82-year-old compiles dictionary of 4 south Indian languages

Njattyela Sreedharan is a class 4 dropout who went on to travel, train, read aplenty for 25 years to bring out the dictionary.

Njattyela Sreedharan sat looking at the page in front of him. He had written the words ‘seemantha rekha’ – the Malayalam term for hair parting where some married women apply vermillion. Next to it, he had added the translation in Telugu and Kannada. 

But the Tamil column lay blank. No one he asked seemed to know the Tamil equivalent for ‘seemantha rekha’, including men and women across ages, teachers, and Tamil scrap collectors who came home. Everyone either shrugged off or laughed at him. Finally, months later, a woman who also laughed in the beginning, gave him the term – ‘vakidu’. Thrilled, Sreedharan added it to the fourth column of his page. He just got one more entry for the multilingual Dravidian dictionary he had been preparing for years. The dictionary finally got published this November, 25 years after the 82-year-old began working on it. 

“For 25 years, I travelled and trained and talked to many for the dictionary. But it is in the last 10 years that I sat at one place, without going anywhere, without a social life, to fully focus on writing. Only then could I complete it,” Sreedharan says from his house in Thalassery.  

He also points out that Hermann Gundert, who created the first Malayalam-English dictionary in 1872, was also in Thalassery when he wrote that. “Maybe his spirit entered my body,” Sreedharan jokes.

But unlike Gundert, Sreedharan is no scholar. He dropped out of class four to work in a beedi making company. But he had read books like Sreekrishnacharitham Manipravalam by Kunjan Nambiar and Balaramayanam by Kumaranasan at school. His love for language must have begun around then, Sreedharan reckons.

He went on to read a lot, and as an adult, found a job with the Public Works Department. Nandan, who made a documentary on Sreedharan, says that it was during this time that he got acquainted with Dr TP Sukumaran, a professor at Nirmalagiri College, who gave him the idea of compiling a dictionary, containing colloquial usage of Malayalam words.

Sreedharan had by then become familiar with Tamil, learning it in Palakkad. He decided to train himself in the two other Dravidian languages of Telugu and Kannada before compiling the dictionary.

A Kannada-speaking colleague, Govinda Naik, taught him the language. Sreedharan also took Kannada lessons from writer Raghavan in Kasargod. In Taliparambu, a man from Andhra Pradesh helped him pick up Telugu. But Sreedharan didn't stop there. He made several trips to Mysuru, Mangaluru, Andhra and Tamil Nadu and spoke to the people. He collected words from 20 to 25 dictionaries. He learnt from vernacular newspapers and magazines.

"I read everything from horoscopes to cooking recipes. One must not mock them. You get the most common and useful words from the recipes," Sreedharan says.

The fact that there has still not been a comparative study of the words in the four languages kept Sreedharan, the language lover, going. “A lot of people travel between all these states for work or business. It will be very helpful if there is a resource for learning the everyday words they’d need – like drinking, bathing, eating. Another reason I wanted to work on the dictionary was the way dialects of some places were seen as inferior to those of other parts of the state. When people from one part of the state tease those from another for their pronunciation, it makes the latter think poorly of their dialect. Calling one dialect purer than another is like discriminating between castes, claiming one to be superior to the others,” Sreedharan says feelingly.

It also struck him as odd that people found it shameful to use words of their own language for private body parts but were not uncomfortable to use words from another language.

“I was also curious about why certain similar sounding words changed pronunciation when it came to Malayalam. 'Thodangu' – meaning start – is pronounced with ‘tho’ in Kannada, Telugu and Tamil but in Malayalam it becomes ‘thu’. 'Elaneer' – tender coconut water – is pronounced with ‘ila’ in Malayalam, but ‘ela’ in all the other languages. I put all of this together for the readers to interpret it in their own ways,” Sreedharan adds.

He kept finding Dravidian equivalents for Sanskrit words too. For instance, both ‘meen’ and ‘malsyam’, meaning fish, come from Sanskrit, Sreedharan says.

He found that it is easier to learn the scripts of other languages than that of Malayalam. That would also come out in the dictionary, he says.

The dictionary was not easy to publish. Having prepared the content, Sreedharan took it to a number of places to get it printed. Everyone was wary of getting the words wrong. Finally, a woman agreed to do the desktop publishing (DTP) for Rs 100 a page and she was paid Rs 1 lakh for the whole dictionary. It got printed by the Kerala Senior Citizens Forum.

“It is an expensive and exhaustive process. You travel, you read, you buy books and materials, and you sit for long hours to write. I have worked 10 to 14 hours on many days.”

Sometimes, he says, he cannot not believe that he achieved this at his age. All the reports of his dictionary even before it got published had him overwhelmed. And Nandan has made a documentary on him too – Dreaming of Words. The film has just got selected for the 18th Mindanao Film Festival. 

(Source: TNM)

A brief history of word games

When I began to research the history of crosswords for my recent book on the subject, I was sort of shocked to discover that they weren’t invented until 1913. The puzzle seemed so deeply ingrained in our lives that I figured it must have been around for centuries—I envisioned the empress Livia in the famous garden room in her villa, serenely filling in her cruciverborum each morning­­. But in reality, the crossword is a recent invention, born out of desperation. Editor Arthur Wynne at the New York World needed something to fill space in the Christmas edition of his paper’s FUN supplement, so he took advantage of new technology that could print blank grids cheaply and created a diamond-shaped set of boxes, with clues to fill in the blanks, smack in the center of FUN. Nearly overnight, the “Word-Cross Puzzle” went from a space-filling ploy to the most popular feature of the page.

PAULINA OLOWSKA, CROSSWORD PUZZLE WITH LADY IN BLACK COAT, 2014

Still, the crossword didn’t arise from nowhere. Ever since we’ve had language, we’ve played games with words. Crosswords are the Punnett square of two long-standing strands of word puzzles: word squares, which demand visual logic to understand the puzzle but aren’t necessarily using deliberate deception; and riddles, which use wordplay to misdirect the solver but don’t necessarily have any kind of graphic component to work through.

WORD SQUARES

The direct precursor of the crossword grid is the word square, a special kind of acrostic puzzle in which the same words can be read across and down. The number of letters in the square is called its “order.” While 2-squares and 3-squares are easy to create, in English, by the time you reach order 6, you’re very likely to get stuck. An order 10 square is a holy grail for the logologists, that is, the wordplay experts.

The ancient Romans loved word puzzles, beginning with their city’s name: the inverse of ROMA, to the delight of all Latin lovers, is AMOR. The first known word square, the so-called Sator Square, was found in the ruins of Pompeii. The Sator Square (or the Rotas Square, depending on which way you read it; word order doesn’t matter in Latin) is a five-by-five, five-word Latin palindrome: SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS (“the farmer Arepo works a plow”).

SATOR SQUARE, OPPÈDE, FRANCE

The Sator Square is the “Kilroy Was Here” of the Roman Empire, scrawled from Rome to Corinium (in modern England) to Dura-Europos (in modern Syria). It’s unclear why this meme was such a thing. “Arepo” is a hapax legomenon, meaning that the Sator Square is the only place it shows up in the entire corpus of Latin literature—the best working theory is that it’s a proper name invented to make the square work.

But the Sator Square has more tricks up its sleeve. If you reshuffle the letters around a central n, you can make a Greek cross that reads PATERNOSTER (“our father”) in both directions. Four leftover letters—two a’s and two o’s—stand for alpha and omega. Early Christians might have used the square as a discreet way to signal their presence to one another.

Through the Middle Ages and beyond, the Sator Square persisted as a magical object, gaining a reputation as a talisman against fire, theft, and illness. The devil, apparently, gets confused by palindromes, not knowing which way to read, so a five-by-five two-dimensional palindrome is an extra-powerful snare. The square appears etched on tablets as prevention against mad dogs, a snakebite cure, and a charm to protect cattle from witchcraft.

While word squares maintained their quasimagical reputation for hundreds of years, other visual word games became popular during the nineteenth century. The Victorian era saw a boomlet of visual word games, such as double acrostics, that paved the way pretty directly for the crossword. Queen Victoria, an ur-cruciverbalist, constructed the “Windsor Enigma” to teach her subjects how to bring coals to Newcastle:

QUEEN VICTORIA, “WINDSOR ENIGMA,” IN VICTORIAN ENIGMAS, OR WINDSOR FIRESIDE RESEARCHES BY CHARLOTTE ELIZA CAPEL (1861)

Oxford mathematician Charles Dodgson, better known by his pseudonym Lewis Carroll, invented a game called doublets, in which you transform one word into another of equal length, changing a single letter at a time, using as few moves as possible; all the linking steps also have to be legitimate words. As in a crossword, the process of moving stepwise from letter to letter forces you to think about all the possible word combinations. And each doublet has a theme, a kind of mini-alchemy: Drive PIG into STY. Raise FOUR to FIVE. Make WHEAT into BREAD.

CHARLES DODGSON, “DOUBLETS: A WORD PUZZLE” (LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO., 1880)

But the particular magic of the crossword came when riddles entered the grid.

RIDDLES

Crossword clues trace their origins to riddles, ancient and ubiquitous little games that run the gamut from divine spells to dick jokes. The Exeter Book, an eleventh-century Old English manuscript, has about a hundred riddles of all types: a sweet ditty about a bookworm, barely veiled double entendres about swords in scabbards and bread rising in ovens, and solemn liturgical hymns. There are “about” a hundred because these riddles are still maddening their readers. In the ten centuries since their composition, scholars haven’t conclusively solved every one, which also means that some of the things that get treated as separate puzzles might actually be one giant long riddle, or what we think is a long clue might have two or three answers. Riddle snark is a cottage industry among medievalists, who love to argue about solutions to the riddles, mostly by means of long, ostentatiously thorough academic articles. There ain’t no scholarly rap battle like a multigenerational face-off over whether Riddle 86’s answer is an “organ” or a “one-eyed seller of garlic.”

There are four basic ways that riddle logic operates: true riddles, wordplay, neck riddles, and anti-riddles. The enigma, a metaphorical statement that’s designed to feel like it has one solution but actually contains unresolvable multitudes, is different. Think of koans, like What is the sound of one hand clapping?, or meditative statements like 1 Corinthans 13:12: “For now we see through a glass, darkly.” These are logic knots that want to stay knotted, or (k)not solved.

Riddles, on the other hand, do want to be solved.

TRUE RIDDLES

A true riddle transforms thing A into solution B (A—>B). Take Little Nancy Etticoat:

Little Nancy Etticoat

In a white petticoat

And a red nose;

The longer she stands,

The shorter she grows.

The answer? A candle: the “white petticoat” is the wax, the “red nose” the flame, and of course the longer you leave a candle standing, the shorter it’s going to become. True riddles rely on a logical connection that’s not obvious on the surface, so you have to twist your brain to get it. They’ve been around for millennia, and the best have been repeated for that long. Take, for example, “What has six legs but walks on four feet?” (Answer: a horse and rider.) Or the Sphinx’s riddle: “What walks on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening?” (A human: crawling as a baby, standing upright as an adult, and using a cane when old.)

When riddles become baked into culture, they can turn into in-jokes. Consider an egg. Egg’s a great solution for lots of images: a house without doors or windows; a house that cannot be reentered; begets parent; and more. In fact, one egg riddle has become synonymous with the whole genre of riddling itself: Humpty-Dumpty—or, if you prefer, his counterparts: Boule Boule (France), or Tille Lille (Sweden), or Wirgele-Wargele (Germany), or Hümpelken-Pümpelken (also Germany)—was originally printed as a riddle with the answer “egg.” The true riddle can thus become a meta-riddle.

WORDPLAY RIDDLES

A wordplay riddle does the same thing as a true riddle, but adds an extra layer of trickiness (A—>∀—>B). Wordplay riddles include puns and other bits of linguistic gymnastics to take the anticipated answer to the next step. A rebus, for example, uses letters as part of the clue. One simple French rebus riddle uses just two letters—G and a—to be read as J’ai grand appetit (“G grand, a petit”). A syllable riddle acts as a game of charades, connecting seemingly disparate parts, as in this eighteenth-century example:

My first is expressive of no disrespect,

But I never call you by it when you are by;

If my second you still are resolved to reject,

As dead as my whole, I shall presently lie.

The answer: “herring” (her + ring).

NECK RIDDLES

A neck riddle gives a solution that would be impossible for the solver to arrive at without context (?—>B). The term “neck riddle” comes from stories in which the hero uses an unsolvable riddle to outwit a judge and save himself from being hanged: a neck riddle saves your neck. One typical folktale example:

As I walked out and in again

From the dead the living came.

Six there is and seven there’ll be,

So tell me this riddle or set me free.

The answer is a horse’s skull that contains a bird hatching eggs; six have hatched but one is still to come. A neck riddle has an answer that’s so specific it’s deeply unsatisfying, because that’s precisely the point: after all, it’s not actually a solvable, it’s got to be such a stumper that you get off scot-free. Often that’s achieved through overprecision, but sometimes a change in perspective will do the trick. In The Hobbit, our hero Bilbo Baggins bests Gollum in a riddle contest by asking him the unknowable “what’s in my pocket?”

ANTI-RIDDLES

An anti-riddle is one that tricks the reader by looking like a riddle but not actually being one at all (A—>A). “Why did the chicken cross the road?” smells like a riddle, but the answer, “To get to the other side,” is just the literal answer. “What’s black and white and red/read all over?” might not be “a newspaper” but rather “a zebra with blood on it,” defying the anticipated pun with the unexpectedly ultraliteral.

 *

If you’re a piece of artificial intelligence software, you might have a hard time solving a crossword. You’d have to separate the puzzle into two separate strands of problems to tackle the issue: how to figure out what a clue is saying (or, rather, what it’s precisely not saying); and how to fill the letters in the grid in the way that makes the most sense. Crosswords force the brain to cross wires and solve both these problems at once, balancing the visual-spatial part of the brain with the logic-pun part of the brain. This is part of the reason why even the best crossword-solving AI in the world isn’t yet better than the best human: the AI can fill in the grid pretty quickly, but in terms of resolving that grid through riddle logic, humans are still a step ahead. The most innovative aspect of the crossword is that, through braiding together tasks the mind already wanted to do, it created an itch we didn’t know we had. And yet we’ve always been primed to solve them.

(Source: The Paris Review)

First ever in India : Odisha publishes 21 bilingual tribal dictionaries to preserve and promote languages

Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Saturday unveiled bilingual tribal dictionaries to help preserve and promote tribal languages in the state, The Hindu reported. The dictionaries will be used in multilingual education at the elementary level in tribal-dominated districts.

“The bilingual tribal dictionaries for MLE [multilingual education] and trilingual tribal language proficiency modules in all the 21 tribal languages have been formulated by the Special Development Council,” he said. “Both will help in enhancing proficiency in tribal languages.”

Odisha has a unique place on the tribal map of India for having the maximum number of Scheduled Tribe communities. The State is home to 62 different tribal communities, including 13 particularly vulnerable tribal groups. These tribes speak 21 languages and 74 dialects. Of the 21 tribal languages, seven have their own scripts. However, Odia is used as the medium of communication in the dictionaries.

(Source: Bhubaneswar Buzz)

Teacher creates 'Gen Z dictionary' to help him learn slang words his students use

The document defines terms like 'I'm dead', 'low key' and 'spill the tea'

A document created by a teacher to help him learn slang words has gone viral.

On Tuesday, a Twitter user who goes by the handle @mewtailv2 shared a series of photographs of a document titled “Generation Z Dictionary”.

In the caption, @mewtailv2 explained that the document was created by a teacher, writing: “My sociology professor keeps an alphabetic list of new slang terms he learns from students and I will never get over it.”

The trio of images show a Google Doc with a list of slang terms like “I'm dead”, “low key” and “spill the tea” alongside definitions of each one.

The teacher described the term “pull up/come through” to mean “an invitation”, while “rashing” was defined as “to make fun of someone”.

Other definitions include “hip/get hip” meaning “adopt a new tend” and “jams” meaning “an old enjoyable song”.

Since sharing images on Twitter, the post has received more than 42,000 retweets and 139,000 likes.

It has also garnered hundreds of comments from people praising the teacher for making an effort to understand more about his students.

“This is actually pretty cool of him and kinda sweet too [sic],” one person wrote.

Another added: “I've never seen someone do this and it actually be accurate.”

Others said they empathised with the teacher, revealing that his list actually helped them learn the definition of some slang terms.

“I'm officially out of touch with the youth of today,” one person commented.

My sociology professor keeps an alphabetic list of new slang terms he learns from students and I will never get over it pic.twitter.com/UxOxRsNJbb

— Ehhhhhh (@mewtailv2) 30 April 2019

Another wrote: “How embarrassing is it that I only know a couple of these?”

A third person added: “I need the translations I don’t understand nobody nowadays.”

Following the significant amount of attention the document received online, @mewtailv2 said they would show the teacher the tweet and share a link to the document so people can view it in its entirety.

Best one pic.twitter.com/UICu404QzF

— DJ Cwittz Natsu (@DJCwittzNatsu) 1 May 2019

In 2018, a number of new words were added to the Oxford English Dictionary, including “mansplaining” and “hangry”.

“Mansplaining” refers to the action of a man explaining something to a woman in a condescending way, while “hangry” is the feeling of being both starving hungry and increasingly angry at the same time.

In April 2019, the Merriam Webster dictionary also added 640 new additions including “buzzy”, “on-brand”, “swole” and “stan".

(Source: Independent) 

On cussing

So. We cuss. Some of us cuss by saying mercy me or suffering succotash. I like to say shooty-pooty, which I learned from a nice Baltimore boy back in 1963. It’s a Cub Scout version of shitty-pity, which is a cutesy diminutive for just plain shit.

This kind of substitution for a cuss word is what linguists call an amelioration. It softens the blow while still addressing the topic. This is not the same as a euphemism, by the way, which tries to evade or screen the subject. Americans are big on substitute amelioration. We invent thousands of them daily, it seems. Darn for damn, gosh for God. They often sound as though we started to say the taboo word but caught ourselves.

Almost all of us have darker vocabularies if we’re pushed. We all have strong vocal reactions to pain and surprise, to anger or fear. We often use the same language in response to the strong positive stimulus of pleasure or awe or humor. Cuss words and phrases, whatever they may be in our individual vocabularies, are the most potent words we have for expressing emotion.

However, as writers, we now face a loss of power in the classic obscenities—the draining of shock value, the depletion of such terms’ ability to offend. Our challenge is to revive the language with vivid reinvention.

Case in point: I was out on my balcony a while ago as two young men walked by on the sidewalk and one of them was telling a story in which every other word was fucking. It went along the lines of, “So I fucking told the fucking guy that it wasn’t my fucking beer, I’m just fucking here for fucking apples… ” And so on.

Now this made me sad. Here is this potent word being drained of all its juice and snap by overuse. We often call such cuss words expletives. Technically an expletive is any word or phrase that adds nothing to the meaning of the sentence. A few years ago, for instance, TV reporters took to sticking in the phrase “if you will” in the most inane way. That was a smarmy, Uriah Heep–style expletive. For the guy under the balcony, the word fuck was an expletive. It had no more weight or meaning than like for the proverbial Valley Girl or um for the tongue-tied. It’s superfluous filler. It isn’t shocking. It isn’t vivid or engaging. It’s simply monotonous. He was boring and his story was unintelligible.

In real-life cussing we are probably at our most creative when on a furious roll, and ranting. At a time like that we might discover profound reservoirs of image and vocabulary. Or we might find ourselves stating the same lame word repeatedly. But we must always be on guard against mediocre cussing in our writing. If you’re a fiction writer, please don’t create a primary character who talks like the guy beneath the balcony. If you’re a nonfiction writer stuck with someone who talks like that, don’t quote him much. As writers we are not just allowed, we are required to decide how and when or whether to use cussing language.

A writer’s aim should be to give genuine thought to the use of this limited but significant vocabulary, and above all to avoid cliché and tedium.

Other cultures and tongues have their own powerful taboo language, and we can certainly learn from them. As English speakers, it’s worth thinking about the ways we use bad words and how to make our own use more vital and effective.

Now, linguistic researchers tell us that we learn to cuss early, usually between the ages of two and four. So this is primal stuff. We each have our own history and cussing language. For example, I remember how and when I learned the meaning of the word fuck.

This was back in 1950. I was not quite five years old and had heard the word all my life. My big brother and his friends said it when they were angry or upset. On the rare occasions when my mother said it, it meant we were all in serious trouble. My dad, the mechanic, made it into a poem. He’d be sweating under the hood of some gasping Ford or Chevy on a hundred-degree day, and he’d chant it. “Fuck the fuckity fuckin’ fucker.” Now this music of his delighted me. It became my secret song. Later in school I used it to learn the parts of speech and the forms of a sentence. This chant had it all. Verb, adverb, adjective, noun—action, modifiers, and subject—all in this one magnificently dangerous word.

Still, I had no notion what it meant; just that it was extremely bad.

Then one sleepy summer afternoon, Maggie Hatfield, the five-year-old down the street, climbed up our maple tree to where I was sitting and asked if I knew what fuck meant. Having this taboo broached out loud was stunning. I just shook my head.

This is what she said: “My big brother told me. It’s when a man gets mad at his wife and kills her and lays her out flat on the floor in the back bedroom. Then her brother finds out and kills the husband and lays him out right on top of her. And then the husband’s sister finds out and kills the brother and puts him on top of the husband. And then the mother kills the sister and lays her on top, and all the relatives kill all the relatives and lay them one-on-one, up and up, until the whole room is filled with stacks of bodies up to the ceiling and all the relatives are dead and rotting and they stink. That’s what they mean when they say fuck.”

The weight of this explanation rang true to the power of the word as I heard it, so I believed it completely. And compared to that, the puny definitions I learned later lack gravitas. But I’ll come back to this in a minute.

The words we view as bad vary from era to era, but they all have a lot in common. They snatch our attention. They smack us with the image they depict. Research substantiates this. Say, for example, that I provided a list that included a hundred ordinary words with two cuss words mixed in. Let’s further say I asked those in the room to write down as many as they could remember. The only two words that every single person would recall are the cuss words.

The power of curse words comes from their explicit literal meanings, but they are often used metaphorically. If you fuck up there’s no sex going on, but you have made a serious mistake. If you get fucked over, you’ve been betrayed. Saying What the fuck? expresses indignant surprise. If you’re just fucked, you are caught, inextricably, in a bad situation. But the word can also be benign. He was just fucking with you means he was joking.

Our strongest words are used metaphorically as well as literally. When we use bad words, they may not communicate much actual content, but they carry emotional TNT. They are all connotation. Bad words affect our brains and bodies in different ways than most words.

Most language is stored in the cerebral cortex—the rational decision-making part of our brains. But researchers now believe that swear words are stored in the ancient, reptilian amygdala, which is the seat of automatic actions, breathing, heartbeat, as well as reflexes, hunger, thirst, lust, and, most significantly, emotion. This is why people with Alzheimer’s or other forms of brain injury can still swear even when all other language is lost.

Why is this so? As in my case, learning the word fuck, we learn bad language as toddlers. We hear it said loudly or with intense emotion or in moments of crisis. We learn its emotional message before we learn the literal meaning, so it implants in our emotional core.

So when we hear it or see it written, and most of all when we use it, our bodies respond emotionally, with a degree of activation syndrome—the fight or flight response. Our heart rate and respiratory rate jump. Our skin’s electrical conductivity—what’s often known as the galvanic skin response—changes dramatically. We sweat.

This gives bad words real power to shock and to offend. Our response is immediate and emotional. We may also have intellectual reasons to be irritated, but that clicks in seconds behind the first, visceral reaction. This effect can be very mild or extremely intense, depending on the circumstances. Long before science was able to measure it, the law in many jurisdictions recognized our reactions with what were referred to as “fighting words” rulings. That is, some words were acknowledged to be so profoundly offensive that an immediate violent response was considered justified.

If you stub your toe or whack your thumb with a hammer, the first sounds out of your mouth may well be cuss words. There’s a good reason. Cussing helps us deal with pain. Recent studies show that people whose hands are immersed in extremely cold water can endure it far longer if they chant swear words such as shit than if they say nothing or repeat a neutral word like shoot.

In some circumstances, cussing also has an interesting psychological effect on those who hear it. Research shows that juries tend to view witnesses who use cuss words on the stand as slightly more credible than those who do not. Traditional cuss words are blunt language, directly expressive of whatever the person is talking about. Cuss words are manly. They don’t pussyfoot around any bushes. Cuss words call a spade a spade. So sometimes vulgar language is viewed as “truer” language.

These are all effects we can be aware of and take advantage of when we write. We should be conscious of eliciting these responses from our readers. We should be deliberate in embedding these responses in the people we create or describe. We must be alert to the fact that overuse will blunt the dramatic emotional effect, and can diminish it to nothing.

(Source: The Paris Review)

Oxford English Dictionary adds new entries: chuddies, jibbons and fantoosh

An Indian English word for underpants joins a host of Scottish insults after the dictionary crowdsourced regional terms

English speakers from around the world have flocked to help the Oxford English Dictionary expand its coverage of regional vocabulary, with a new update including suggestions such as jibbons, chuddies and sitooterie.

The dictionary launched its Words Where You Are appeal to the public last year to mark the 90th anniversary of the completion of its first edition. The regional vocabulary suggestions which have poured in from readers ever since span the globe, from the Welsh English term for spring onions, “jibbons”, to the name for the regional dialect heard in New Orleans, “Yat”, which is derived from the greeting: “Where y’at?”

The public appeal also yielded a host of Scots terms, from “bidie-in”, which the OED defines as “a person who lives with his or her partner in a non-marital relationship”, and which it says was first recorded in 1916, to “bigsie”. Meaning “having an exaggerated sense of one’s own importance”, bigsie’s first recorded use was in 1881, when the Aberdeen Weekly Journal told the story of a tailor who was known locally as a “gey bigsie kin’ o’ bodie”. The Scottish word “fantoosh” has a similar meaning – dating from the 1920s, it is used to describe anything showy or flashy, often disparagingly. The OED points to a 1936 article in Scots Magazine: “Ony sensible body wad be only too pleased if I washed their windows for naething, but jist because ye think yersel’ fantoosh, I’m no’ guid enough.”

The word “sitooterie” is another Scottish term to make the cut in the OED’s latest update, with editors Jane Johnson and Kate Wild saying that there is “something just generally pleasing about the word”. Meaning “a place in which to sit out”, it dates to at least the 1920s.

 Chuddies … the Indian English term joins the OED. Photograph: Todd Terje PR

A host of Scottish insults were also submitted by members of the public, from “bam”, defined as a foolish, annoying, or obnoxious person, as in the pronunciation from Aberdeen: “Awa ye ham, Yer mither’s a bam”, to “geggie”. Meaning mouth, geggie is frequently used in “shut your geggie”, said the OED, which found the earliest evidence of its use in William Miller’s 1985 short story Andy’s Trial: “‘Good fur you, wee Andy!’ shouted his grandmother. The judge looked over his specs. ‘Mah dear wumman,’ he said patiently, ‘will ye kindly shut yer geggie?’”

The OED’s Indian English vocabulary is updated with the phrase “kiss my chuddies”, or underpants, used as a catchphrase by Sanjeev Bhaskar in Goodness Gracious Me, while South African English in the dictionary is expanded with the inclusion of “dof”, a borrowing from Afrikaans meaning “stupid, ill-informed or clueless”, and “gramadoelas”, “an etymologically mysterious word for a remote rural region, especially one regarded as unsophisticated or uncultured”.

The OED’s Jonathan Dent also pointed to the expansion of the dictionary’s definition for the verb “get”, following the appeal, with the “humorously euphemistic way of referring to the ‘withdrawal method’ of contraception”, “to get off at Edge Hill”, now featuring in the dictionary.

“This jokey linguistic meme uses the idea of disembarking – a sexually suggestive ‘getting off’ – at the last stop before the terminus of a railway line,” said Dent. “The appropriately precipitous sounding Edge Hill is the penultimate station on the only line into Liverpool Lime Street, but there are multiple local variations in British and English – getting off at Gateshead rather than Newcastle, Haymarket rather than Edinburgh Waverley, and so on. Ultimately, though, the idea seems to be Australian in origin: in our earliest evidence, entered in Partridge’s Dictionary of Slang in 1967, the passenger steps off the train (so to speak) at Redfern, a suburb of Sydney.”

The OED is continuing its search for regional vocabulary, Dent continued, and will include “many more words” in future updates.

(Source: The Guardian)

The best word ever

"What actually makes a word great? How do you determine that 'zephyr' is more delightful than 'zaftig'? How do you decide that 'isthmus' is just slightly less awesome than 'kerfuffle'?" If you have doubts, read what Megan Garber writes in the Atlantic:

A man, his blog, and an adventure in lexicographic awesomeness.

Ted McCagg is a creative director in advertising in Portland, Oregon. In his spare time, for the past five years or so, McCagg has been keeping a blog,"Questionable Skills" -- the content of which consists almost entirely of drawings, some of them the bracket-style rankings that are a familiar feature of March Madness.

A few months ago, McCagg began using his blog and his bracket system to answer a question: What is the best word ever? Not the funniest word or the most erudite word or the most whimsical word ... but The Best Word, full stop. What if, you know, the scallawag could eke out a thingamajig that would help him select the least milquetoast morsel from our linguistic smorgasbord?

Today, McCagg has answered his question. The best word ever -- according to deep lexicographical research, science, taste, and common sense -- is this: diphthong.

McCagg got the idea for the project, he told me, while he was sitting in a restaurant. "I was listening to a few people talking at a table near me (I'm a chronic eavesdropper) about their least favorite words," he explains. "The requisite 'moist' and 'panties' came up, each met with the collective 'ewwws.'" It occurred to McCagg how passionately people feel about words -- not only in terms of their hatred for certain words (underpants, slacks), but also in terms of their admiration for others. "I started thinking about the words that I loved," McCagg says. "Ubiquitous. Kiosk. And yes [your correspondent's personal preference among the choices], Hornswoggle."

At first, McCagg was going to explore English's lexicographic wonderment via a simple, single bracket. He'd choose his favorite words, and whittle them down from there. "But once I got into it," he says, "I had much more than the usual eight that I fit into a bracket. So I expanded it to have each letter get its own bracket." 

How did McCagg decide which words, out of the hundreds of thousands we've dreamed up, deserve inclusion? "Hornswoggle" is a given, obviously ... but what about the others?

"I read the dictionary," McCagg says. "And picked out about 20-30 great words for each letter." He based those selections on a couple of factors. "For me, it has to be something you've heard. Something that sounds fun. Something that's fun to say. Basically, something, should you ever come across it in day to day life, you stop and think, 'I love that word.'"

From there, though, things got trickier. What actually makes a word great? How do you determine that "zephyr" is more delightful than "zaftig"? How do you decide that "isthmus" is just slightly less awesome than "kerfuffle"?

"The brackets were my opinion only (with some help from my wife)," McCagg says. And "I tend to gravitate towards words that, like I said, you rarely come across. 'Fuck' was the most problematic. It's an awesome word. And it even got its own bracket. But in the end, it felt too everyday to win."

Then again, challenges like that have been part of the point. "It's been amazing the amount of opinions and conversations this has started," McCagg says. "People love words, as it turns out. It's quite heartening. One of the best compliments has been from a teacher who said he thought it would be a great thing for him to assign to his English students."

So why, in the end, "diphthong? Which is also to ask: Why not "hornswoggle"?

"That was a tough call," McCagg concedes. But "that silent 'h' in diphthong made all the difference."

On making oneself less unreadable

Grammar enthusiasts either love Henry Watson Fowler or they have yet to encounter his work. It is possible to read his Dictionary of Modern Usage (1926) from cover to cover as a weird, wonderful essay; it is impossible to do so without laughing out loud. A few entries from the second edition, revised by Ernest Gowers:

avoidance of the obvious is very well, provided that it is not itself obvious; but, if it is, all is spoilt. [If the reader believes] that you are attitudinizing as an epicure of words for whom nothing but the rare is good enough, or, worse still, that you are painfully endeavouring to impart some much needed unfamiliarity to a platitude, his feelings towards you will be something that is not admiration. The obvious is better than obvious avoidance of it …

Frankenstein. … A sentence written by the creatress of the creator of the creature may save some of those whose acquaintance with all three is indirect from betraying the fact: “Sometimes I endeavoured to gain from Frankenstein the particulars of his creature’s formation; but on this point he was impenetrable” (Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley). Frankenstein is the creator-victim; the creature-despot and fatal creation is Frankenstein’s monster … The blunder is very common indeed—almost, but surely not quite, sanctioned by custom: If they went on strengthening this power they would create a F. they could not resist …

if and when. Any writer who uses this formula lays himself open to entirely reasonable suspicions on the part of his readers. There is the suspicion that he is a mere parrot, who cannot say part of what he has often heard without saying the rest also. There is the suspicion that he likes verbiage for its own sake. There is the suspicion that he is a timid swordsman who thinks he will be safer with a second sword in his left hand. There is the suspicion that he has merely been too lazy to make up his mind between if and when …

soccer, -cker. Soccer did not deserve its victory in the competition between these alternative spellings …

Born in Kent in 1858, H. W. Fowler was one of our greatest lexicographical geniuses. He led an ascetic life: he was a runner and a swimmer (lakes, rivers, ocean); he lived with his brother in relative seclusion on the island of Guernsey; and he held—and proved—that anyone should be able to subsist on a hundred pounds a year. He devoted his life to literature: he won the fifth prize in the immensely popular competition with which the Encyclopedia Britannica celebrated its tenth edition; he rediscovered and translated Lucian; he took on, almost single-handedly, the herculean project of boiling down the entire Oxford Dictionary to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, which is, to this day, one of the most widely used reference books in the language. He was a politely outspoken atheist who lost his teaching position for being unwilling to prepare his students for confirmation. During World War I, he refused to collaborate on the recruiting campaign to send young men into harm’s way while he remained safe. Instead, he lied about his age (forty-four), got enlisted, and was sent to the front. After a rather hermitic life, he got happily married when he was in his seventies and died three years after his wife, in 1933. In the words of Ernest Gowers, “The simplicity of his habits has a counterpart in the simplicity of diction he preaches.”

Hackneyed phrases, worn-out humor, and clichés bothered Fowler only as much as novelty hunting, formal words, and any form of officialese (all words in italics are entries in his dictionary). It is no surprise, then, that his main target is the combination of both: exquisite commonplaces and abstruse voids—or, in one word, pretentiousness:

abstractitis. The effect of this disease, now endemic on both sides of the Atlantic, is to make the patient write such sentences as Participation by the men in control of the industry is non-existent instead of The men have no part in the control of the industry … The danger is that, once the disease gets a hold, it sets up a chain reaction. A writer uses abstract words because his thoughts are cloudy; the habit of using them clouds his thoughts further; he may end by concealing his meaning not only from his readers but also from himself, and writing such sentences as The actualization of the motivation of the forces must to a great extent be a matter of personal angularity …

genteelism. By genteelism is here to be understood the rejecting of the ordinary natural word that first suggests itself to the mind, and the substitution of a synonym that is thought to be less soiled by the lips of the common herd, less familiar, less plebeian, less vulgar, less improper, less apt to come unhandsomely betwixt the wind and our nobility …

inc

A photo of HW Fowler in sporting attire from his biography The Warden of English 

inongruous vocabulary. Austria-Hungary was no longer in a position, an’ she would, to shake off the German yoke. Be in a position to is a phrase of the most pedestrian modernity; shake off the yoke, though a metaphor, is one so well worn that no incongruity is felt between it and the pedestrianism; but what is an’ she would doing there? … The goldfish an’ cannot live in this sentence-bowl unless we put some water in with it, and gasps pathetically at us from the mere dry air of be in a position. Only a child would expect a goldfish to keep its beauty when out of its right element; and only the writer who is either very inexperienced or singularly proof against experience will let the beauties of a word or a phrase tempt him into displaying it where it is conspicuously out of place …

vogue words. Every now and then a word emerges from obscurity, or even from nothingness or a merely potential and not actual existence, into sudden popularity … Ready acceptance of vogue words seems to some people the sign of an alert mind; to others it stands for the herd instinct and lack of individuality. The title of this article is perhaps enough to show that the second view is here taken … [Some words owe] their vogue to the joy of showing that one has acquired them …

Because his is a usage dictionary, Fowler goes beyond the lexical level. But whether he discusses split infinitives, the use of the subjunctive, or a syntactical problem, he objects, once again, to vacuous pedantries. Grammar should not be confused with the worship of “popular fallacies” (to quote from the title of another of his books) or with idées reçues fossilized into unquestioned rules:

superstitions. “It is wrong to start a sentence with ‘But’ … The word should either be dropped entirely or the sentence altered to contain the word ‘however’.” That ungrammatical piece of nonsense was written by the editor of a scientific periodical to a contributor who had found his English polished up for him in proof, and protested. Both parties being men of determination, the article got no further than proof. It is wrong to start a sentence with “but”! It is wrong to start a sentence with “and”! It is wrong to end a sentence with a preposition! It is wrong to split an infinitive! See the article fetishes for these and other such rules of thumb and for references to articles in which it is shown how misleading their sweet simplicity is; see also substitute for an illustration of the havoc that is wrought by unintelligent applications of an unintelligent dogma … Well, beginners may sometimes find that it is as much as their jobs are worth to resist their editors’ edict, as the champion of “But” did. On the other hand, to let oneself be so far possessed by blindly accepted conventions as to take a hand in enforcing them on other people is to lose the independence of judgement that would enable one to solve the numerous problems for which there are no rules of thumb.

Some of Fowler’s grievances remain uncannily current, after ninety years:

literally. We have come to such a pass with this emphasizer that where the truth would require us to insert with a strong expression “not l., of course, but in a manner of speaking”, we do not hesitate to insert the word that we ought to be at pains to repudiate; cf. veritable. Such false coin makes honest traffic in words impossible. If the Home Rule Bill is passed, the 300,000 Unionists of the South and West of Ireland will be l. thrown to the wolves … / Our eyes were l. pinned to the curtain / Marie Corelli, when she settled in Shakespeare’s native town, l. took the bard to her bosom …

literary critics’ words. … The better the critic, the fewer literary critics’ words he uses. The good critic is aware that his public wants to understand, and he has no need to convince it that he knows what he is talking about by parading words that it does not understand. With the inferior critic the establishment of his status is the first consideration … The reader is to have it borne in upon him that a more instructed person than himself is talking to him. One mark of the good literary critic is that he is both able to explain his meaning without resort to these lingo words and under no necessity to use them as advertisements.

-tion and other -ion endings. Turgid flabby English is full of abstract nouns; the commonest ending of abstract nouns is –tion, and to count the –ion words in what one has written, or, better, to cultivate an ear that without special orders challenges them as they come, is one of the simplest and most effective means of making oneself less unreadable. It is as an unfailing sign of a nouny abstract style that a cluster of –ion words is chiefly to be dreaded … Writers given to overworking these words would be wise to try doing without them altogether; they would seldom find any difficulty in it, and they would have a salutary exercise in clear thinking. See also abstractitis.

Others haven’t aged so well:

gender, n., is a grammatical term only. To talk of persons or creatures of the masculine or feminine g., meaning of the male or female sex, is either a jocularity (permissible or not according to context) or a blunder.

Still, it really doesn’t matter whether we agree with him or not. Everywhere, even when he is showy—because despite his intolerance for any form of affectation, his could be a rather ostentatious austerity—Fowler’s true love for language is always above his love for himself.

In his Dictionary of English Language (1755), Samuel Johnson famously defined lexicographer as “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge … ” Johnson himself was the first to prove that there was little in the way of drudgery in the task of the lexicographer. Fowler, one of his heirs, confirmed it.

(Source: The Paris Review)

The seventy-four best entries in The Devil’s Dictionary

Anthony Madrid, re-reads Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary (1906), and gives cherry-picked the seventy-four best bits out of the approximately three thousand billion trillion entries, and gives those seventy-four words in the Paris Review. Read on: 

In my village, we have an idiom. “When’s last time you looked in on [X]—?”

“X” is always some acknowledged literary classic everybody reads early in life and then forgets. For example, More’s Utopia. I did read it, but I might as well not have. I was nineteen. Anyone today who had just read the back cover of a copy of Utopia would, in a knowledge contest, smoke me like a cheap cigar. About the book’s narrative I remember … well, nothing.

Wait. They didn’t think gold was valuable. I forget why. Their toilets were gold. Or the chains that they loaded prisoners with. Or something. Not toilets; chamberpots. And the narrator had some cross-eyed name like Holofernes Hwum-buppa-zipplebibble or something.


However! Suppose that I (prompted by shame) decided to engineer a little ol’ Utopia project. I pore over the book for a week and think, Huh—this is full of good stuff! At that point I would say to my neighbors, Hey, when’s last time you looked in on More’s Utopia—?

We’re like this in my village. Humane. We know very well that to read a book is not to have read it. Forgetting and noncomprehension must be given their due. And more than their due.

You’re about to reread The Mayor of Casterbridge. That’s excellent. Then you can remind me what happens in it. You just opened Paradise Lost to a random page and found something surprising? Do tell. I promise to be equally surprised. It’s been quite a while since I looked in on it.

All of which is to say it is especially frustrating to people from my village when critics or theorists write about literature with the assumption that the typical reader remembers everything. Or worse: that we not only remember everything but that we know where all the good stuff is in it.

When’s last you looked in on W. H. Auden’s preface to Shakespeare’s sonnets? Here’s a vexing bit:

On going through the hundred and fifty-four of them, I find forty-nine which seem to me excellent throughout, a good number of the rest have one or two memorable lines, but there are also several which I can only read out of a sense of duty.

Every time I think of this passage, I GET SO ANGRY. I’m like, Why, why, and why-why-why do you mention having picked out the forty-nine best, and then not tell us which ones you mean? What, you think I’m going to go through all 154 of those jumping-jack-doing, nine-dimension hieroglyphs, on the outside chance I can spontaneously regenerate your list?

To quote Gloucester in King Lear: “Give me the letter, Sir!”

I am about to come to the point. Auden had “done the work” on the sonnets, and then withheld the results. This was evil, but … that was a different time. The point is, I’m not going to do that to you. Get ready for this. I, unlike you, have read every word of Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary (1906)—and read it recently. And it gets better. I, at the cost of an ocean of labor, have cherry-picked the seventy-four best bits out of the approximately three thousand billion trillion entries, and I am going to give you those seventy-four: yours, free of charge, to judge and find wanting.

I wish to note, before the presentation, that in assembling this set I looked at no other. I would have looked, if H. L. Mencken, who was a great admirer of Bierce, had made one. But as far as I can see, he did not. Also, it bears mentioning that my original selection contained around 250 entries, was winnowed to 100, and then further winnowed to 74.

So what do you think, Subhuti? When’s last you looked in on The Devil’s Dictionary—? Here, allow me, like a good neighbor, to refresh you.

The cover of the University of Georgia Press edition of The Devil's Dictionary

Abdication, n.  An act whereby a sovereign attests his sense of the high temperature of the throne.

Absent, adj.  Peculiarly exposed to the tooth of detraction; vilified; hopelessly in the wrong; superseded in the consideration and affection of another.

Acephalous, adj.  In the surprising condition of the Crusader who absently pulled at his forelock some hours after a Saracen scimitar had, unconsciously to him, passed through his neck.

Admiration, n.  Our polite recognition of another’s resemblance to ourselves.

Advice, n.  The smallest current coin.

Air, n.  A nutritious substance supplied by a bountiful Providence for the fattening of the poor.

Alliance, n.  In international politics, the union of two thieves who have their hands so deeply inserted in each other’s pocket that they cannot separately plunder a third.

Applause, n.  The echo of a platitude.

Archbishop, n.  An ecclesiastical dignitary one point holier than a bishop.

Armor, n.  The kind of clothing worn by a man whose tailor is a blacksmith.

Babe or Baby, n.  A misshapen creature of no particular age, sex, or condition, chiefly remarkable for the violence of the sympathies and antipathies it excites in others, itself without sentiment or emotion.

Back, n.  That part of your friend which it is your privilege to contemplate in your adversity.

Blackguard, n.  A man whose qualities, prepared for display like a box of berries in a market—the fine ones on top—have been opened on the wrong side. An inverted gentleman.

Cabbage, n.  A familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man’s head.

Cat, n.  A soft, indestructible automaton provided by nature to be kicked when things go wrong in the domestic circle.

Cemetery, n.  An isolated suburban spot where mourners match lies, poets write at a target, and stone-cutters spell for a wager.

Centaur, n.  One of a race of persons who lived before the division of labor had been carried to such a pitch of differentiation, and who followed the primitive economic maxim, “Every man his own horse.” The best of the lot was Chiron, who to the wisdom and virtues of the horse added the fleetness of man.

Cerberus, n.  The watch-dog of Hades, whose duty it was to guard the entrance—against whom or what does not clearly appear; everybody, sooner or later, had to go there, and nobody wanted to carry off the entrance.

Childhood, n.  The period of human life intermediate between the idiocy of infancy and the folly of youth—two removes from the sin of manhood and three from the remorse of age.

Christian, n.  One who believes that the New Testament is a divinely inspired book admirably suited to the spiritual needs of his neighbor. One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin.

Consul, n.  In American politics, a person who having failed to secure an office from the people is given one by the Administration on condition that he leave the country.

Conversation, n.  A fair for the display of minor mental commodities, each exhibitor being too intent upon the arrangement of his own wares to observe those of this neighbor.

Curse, v.t.  Energetically to belabor with a verbal slap-stick. This is an operation which in literature, particularly in the drama, is commonly fatal to the victim.

Deputy, n.  A male relative of an office-holder, or of his bondsman. The deputy is commonly a beautiful young man, with a red necktie and an intricate system of cobwebs extending from his nose to his desk. When accidentally struck by the janitor’s broom, he gives off a cloud of dust.

Die, n.  The singular of “dice.” We seldom hear the word, because there is a prohibitory proverb, “Never say die.” At long intervals, however, some one says: “The die is cast,” which is not true, for it is cut. The word is found in an immortal couplet by that eminent poet and domestic economist, Senator Depew:

A cube of cheese no larger than a die
May bait the trap to catch a nibbling mie.

Dog, n.  A kind of additional or subsidiary Deity designed to catch the overflow and surplus of the world’s worship. This Divine Being in some of his smaller and silkier incarnations, takes, in the affection of Woman, the place to which there is no human male aspirant. The Dog is a survival—an anachronism. He toils not, neither does he spin, yet Solomon in all his glory never lay upon a door-mat all day long, sun-soaked and fly-fed and fat, while his master worked for the means wherewith to purchase an idle wag of the Solomonic tail, seasoned with a look of tolerant recognition.

Education, n.  That which discloses to the wise and disguises from the foolish their lack of understanding.

Elegy, n.  A composition in verse, in which without employing any of the methods of humor, the writer aims to produce in the reader’s mind the dampest kind of dejection.

Envelope, n.  The coffin of a document; the scabbard of a bill; the husk of a remittance; the bed-gown of a love-letter.

Epicure, n.  An opponent of Epicurus, an abstemious philosopher who, holding that pleasure should be the chief aim of man, wasted no time in gratification of the senses.

Exhort, v.t.  In religious affairs, to put the conscience of another upon the spit and roast it to a nut-brown discomfort.

Exile, n.  One who serves his country by residing abroad, yet is not an ambassador.
An English sea-captain being asked if he had read “The Exile of Erin,” replied: “No, sir, but I should like to anchor on it.” Years afterward, when he had been hanged as a pirate after a career of unparalleled atrocities, the following memorandum was found in the ship’s log that he had kept at the time of his reply: “Aug. 3d, 1842. Made a joke on the ex-Isle of Erin. Coldly received. War with the whole world!”

Fork, n.  An instrument used chiefly for the purpose of putting dead animals into the mouth. Formerly the knife was used for this purpose, and by many worthy persons is still thought to have many advantages over the other tool, which, however, they do not altogether reject, but use to assist in the charging of the knife. The immunity of these persons from swift and awful death is one of the most striking proofs of God’s mercy to those that hate Him.

Frog, n.  A reptile with edible legs. The first mention of frogs in profane literature is in Homer’s narrative of the war between them and the mice. Skeptical persons have doubted Homer’s authorship of the work, but the learned, ingenious and industrious Dr. Schliemann has set the question forever at rest by uncovering the bones of the slain frogs.

Gallows, n.  A stage for the performance of miracle plays, in which the leading actor is translated to heaven. In this country the gallows is chiefly remarkable for the number of persons who escape it.

Geology, n.  The science of the earth’s crust—to which, doubtless, will be added that of its interior whenever a man shall come up garrulous out of a well. The geological formations of the globe already noted are catalogued thus: The Primary, or lower one, consists of rocks, bones of hired mules, gas-pipes, miners’ tools, antique statues minus the nose, Spanish doubloons and ancestors. The Secondary is largely made up of red worms and moles. The Tertiary comprises railway tracks, patent pavements, grass, snakes, mouldy boots, beer bottles, tomato cans, intoxicated citizens, anarchists, snap-dogs and fools.

Graces, n.pl.  Three beautiful goddesses, Aglaia, Thalia and Euphrosyne, who attended upon Venus, serving without salary. They were at no expense for board and clothing, for they ate nothing to speak of and dressed according to the weather, wearing whatever breeze happened to be blowing.

Handkerchief, n.  A small square of silk or linen, used in various ignoble offices about the face and especially serviceable at funerals to conceal the lack of tears.

Harangue, n.  A speech by an opponent, who is known as an harangue-outang.

Hearse, n.  Death’s baby-carriage.

Hemp, n.  A plant from whose fibrous bark is made an article of neckware which is frequently put on after public speaking in the open air and prevents the wearer from taking cold.

Hog, n.  A bird remarkable for the catholicity of its appetite and serving to illustrate that of ours. Among the Mahometans and Jews, the hog is not in favor as an article of diet, but is respected for the delicacy of its habits, the beauty of its plumage and the melody of its voice. It is chiefly as a songster that the fowl is esteemed; a cage of him in full chorus has been known to draw tears from two persons at once.

Hostility, n.  A peculiarly sharp and specially applied sense of the earth’s overpopulation.

Idleness, n.  A model farm where the devil experiments with seeds of new sins and promotes the growth of staple vices.

Innate, adj.  Natural, inherent—as “innate ideas,” that is to say, ideas that we are born with, having had them previously imparted to us. The doctrine of innate ideas is one of the most admirable faiths of philosophy, being itself an innate idea and therefore inaccessible to disproof, though Locke foolishly supposed himself to have given it a “black eye.” Among innate ideas may be mentioned the belief in one’s ability to conduct a newspaper, in the greatness of one’s country, in the superiority of one’s civilization, in the importance of one’s personal affairs and in the interesting nature of one’s diseases.

Interpreter, n.  One who enables two persons of different languages to understand each other by repeating to each what it would have been to the interpreter’s advantage for the other to have said.

Interregnum, n.  The period during which a monarchical country is governed by a warm spot on the cushion of the throne. The experiment of letting the spot grow cold has commonly been attended by most unhappy results from the zeal of many worthy persons to make it warm again.

Introduction, n.  A social ceremony invented by the devil for the gratification of his servants and the plaguing of his enemies.

Kilt, n.  A costume sometimes worn by Scotchmen in America and Americans in Scotland.

Lap, n.  One of the most important organs of the female system—an admirable provision of nature for the repose of infancy, but chiefly useful in rural festivities to support plates of cold chicken and heads of adult males. The male of our species has a rudimentary lap, imperfectly developed and in no way contributing to the animal’s substantial welfare.

Litigation, n.  A machine which you go into as a pig and come out of as a sausage.

Logomachy, n.  A war in which the weapons are words and the wounds punctures in the swim-bladder of self-esteem—a kind of contest in which, the vanquished being unconscious of defeat, the victor is denied the reward of success.

Mayonnaise, n.  One of the sauces which serve the French in place of a state religion.

Me, pro.  The objectionable case of I. The personal pronoun in English has three cases, the dominative, the objectionable and the oppressive.

Meander, vi.  To proceed sinuously and aimlessly. The word is the ancient name of a river about one hundred and fifty miles south of Troy, which turned and twisted in the effort to get out of hearing when the Greeks and Trojans boasted of their prowess.

Medicine, n.  A stone flung down the Bowery to kill a dog in Broadway.

Misdemeanor, n.  An infraction of the law having less dignity than a felony and constituting no claim to admittance into the best criminal society.

Miss, n.  A title with which we brand unmarried women to indicate that they are in the market. Miss, Missis (Mrs.) and Mister (Mr.) are the three most distinctly disagreeable words in the language, in sound and sense. Two are corruptions of Mistress, the other of Master. In the general abolition of social titles in this our country they miraculously escaped to plague us. If we must have them let us be consistent and give one to the unmarried man. I venture to suggest Mush, abbreviated to Mh.

Mustang, n.  An indocile horse of the western plains. In English society, the American wife of an English nobleman.

Nose, n.  The extreme outpost of the face. From the circumstance that great conquerors have great noses, Getius, whose writings antedate the age of humor, calls the nose the organ of quell. It has been observed that one’s nose is never so happy as when thrust into the affairs of another, from which some physiologists have drawn the inference that the nose is devoid of the sense of smell.

Notoriety, n.  The fame of one’s competitor for public honors. The kind of renown most accessible and acceptable to mediocrity. A Jacob’s-ladder leading to the vaudeville stage, with angels ascending and descending.

Ostrich, n.  A large bird to which (for its sins, doubtless) nature has denied that hinder toe in which so many pious naturalists have seen a conspicuous evidence of design. The absence of a good working pair of wings is no defect, for, as has been ingeniously pointed out, the ostrich does not fly.

Piano, n.  A parlor utensil for subduing the impenitent visitor. It is operated by depressing the keys of the machine and the spirits of the audience.

Piracy, n.  Commerce without its folly-swaddles, just as God made it.

Plague, n.  In ancient times a general punishment of the innocent for admonition of their ruler, as in the familiar instance of Pharoah the Immune. The plague as we of to-day have the happiness to know it is merely Nature’s fortuitous manifestation of her purposeless objectionableness.

Polygamy, n.  A house of atonement, or expiatory chapel, fitted with several stools of repentance, as distinguished from monogamy, which has but one.

Prejudice, n.  A vagrant opinion without visible means of support.

Quiver, n.  A portable sheath in which the ancient statesman and the aboriginal lawyer carried their lighter arguments.

Rear, n.  In American military matters, that exposed part of the army that is nearest to Congress.

Recruit, n.  A person distinguishable from a civilian by his uniform and from a soldier by his gait.

Sycophant, n.  One who approaches Greatness on his belly so that he may not be commanded to turn and be kicked.

Telephone, n.  An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

Telescope, n.  A device having a relation to the eye similar to that of the telephone to the ear, enabling distant objects to plague us with a multitude of needless details. Luckily it is unprovided with a bell summoning us to the sacrifice.

Tenacity, n.  A certain quality of the human hand in its relation to the coin of the realm.