The Mother Tongue (37 page)

An example of a French rebus is “Ga = I am very hungry.” To understand it you must know that in French capital
G
(“G grand”) and small
a
(“a petit”) are pronounced the same as “J'ai grand appétit.” N'est-ce-pas? But the French go in for many other games, including some we don't have. One of the more clever French word games is the
holorime,
a two-line poem in which each line is pronounced the same but uses different words. As you will quickly see from the following example, sense often takes a backseat to euphony in these contrivances:

“Par le bois du Djinn, ou s'entasse de l'éffroi,

“Parle! Bois du gin, ou cent tasses de lait froid!”

It translates roughly as “When going through the Djinn's woods, surrounded by so much fear, keep talking. Drink gin or a hundred cups of cold milk.” We have the capacity to do this in English—​“I love you” and “isle of view” are holorimic phrases and there must be an infinity of others. William Safire cites the American grandmother who thought that the line in the Beatles' song about “the girl with kaleidoscope eyes” was “the girl with colitis goes by,” which would seem to offer rich potential to budding holorimistes. A rare attempt to compose an English holorime was made by the British humorist Miles Kington (from whom the previous example is quoted) in 1988 when he offered the world this poem, called
A Lowlands Holiday Ends in Enjoyable Inactivity:

“In Ayrshire hill areas, a cruise, eh, lass?

“Inertia, hilarious, accrues, hélas.”

From this I think we can conclude that the definitive English holorime has yet to be written. However, an old children's riddle does seem to come close. It is the one that poses the question “How do you prove in three steps that a sheet of paper is a lazy dog?” The answer: (1) a sheet of paper is an ink-lined plane; (2) an inclined plane is a slope up; (3) a slow pup is a lazy dog.

We may not have holorimes in English, but we do have tricks that the French don't have.
Clerihews,
for instance. Named after their deviser, one E. Clerihew Bentley, an English journalist, they are pithy poems that always start with someone's name and purport, in just four lines, to convey the salient facts of the subject's life. To wit:

Sir Humphry Davy

Detested gravy.

He lived in the odium

Of having invented sodium.

The closest America has come to producing an equivalent to clerihews were the Burma-Shave signs that graced U.S. highways for half a century. Devised in 1926 by Allan Odell, son of the founder of the Burma-Shave company, these consisted of five or six signs spaced one hundred feet apart which give a witty sales jingle for Burma-Shave shaving cream. Some examples: “A peach / looks good / with lots of fuzz / but man's no peach / and never was. / BURMA-SHAVE.” Or “Don't take a curve / at 60 per. / We hate to lose / a customer. / BURMA-SHAVE.” Some of the best ones never made it to the roadside because they were considered too risqué for the time. For instance: “If wifie shuns / your fond embrace / don't shoot / the iceman / feel your face.” As recently as the 1960s, there were still 7,000 sets of Burma-Shave signs along American roadsides. But the Highway Beautification Act of 1965 put an end to the erection of any new ones, and the old ones were quickly whisked away by souvenir hunters. Now they are so much a thing of the past that a publicity woman at American Safety Razor, the company that now owns the Burma-Shave name, had never even heard of them.

We have a deep-rooted delight in the comic effect of words in English, and not just in advertising jingles but at the highest level of endeavor. As Jespersen notes: “No literature in the world abounds as English does in characters made ridiculous to the reader by the manner in which they misapply or distort ‘big' words,”
^*
and he cites, among others, Sheridan's Mrs. Malaprop, Fielding's Mrs. Slipslop, Dickens's Sam Weller, and Shakespeare's Mrs. Quickly.

All of these were created for comic effect in plays and novels, but sometimes it comes naturally, as with that most famous of word muddlers, the Reverend William Spooner, warden of New College at Oxford University from 1903 to 1924, whose habitual transposition of sounds—
metaphasis
is the technical term—made him famous in his own lifetime and gave the world a word:
spoonerism.
A little-known fact about Spooner was that he was an albino. He was also famously boring, a shortcoming that he himself acknowledged when he wrote plaintively of his sermons in his diary: “They are so apt to be dull.” In a profile in the London
Echo
in 1905, the reporter noted that Spooner “has been singularly unsuccessful in making any decided impression upon his own college.” But his most outstanding characteristic was his facility for turning phrases on their heads. Among the more famous utterances invariably attributed to him are “Which of us has not felt in his heart a half-warmed fish?” and, to a delinquent undergraduate: “You have hissed my mystery lectures. You have tasted a whole worm. You will leave Oxford on the next town drain.” At an optician's he is said to have asked, “Have you a signifying glass?” and when told they did not, replied, “Oh, well, it doesn't magnify.” But as his biographer William Hayter notes, Spooner became so well-known for these transpositions that it is sometimes impossible to know which he really said and which were devised in his name. He
is
known to have said “in a dark glassly” and to have announced at a wedding ceremony that a couple were now “loifully jawned,” but it is altogether possible that he actually said very few of the spoonerisms attributed to him and that the genuine utterances weren't nearly as comical as those he was credited with, like the almost certainly apocryphal “Please sew me to another sheet. Someone is occupewing my pie.”

What is certain is that Spooner suffered from a kind of metaphasis of thought, if not always of word. These are generally well attributed. Outside the New College chapel he rebuked a student by saying: “I thought you read the lesson badly today.”

“But, Sir, I didn't read the lesson,” protested the student.

“Ah,” said Spooner, “I thought you didn't,” and walked on.

On another occasion he approached a fellow don and said, “Do come to dinner tonight to meet our new Fellow, Casson.”

The man answered, “But, Warden, I
am
Casson.”

To which Spooner replied, “Never mind, come all the same.”

Another colleague once received a note from Spooner asking him to come to his office the next morning on a matter of urgency. At the bottom there was a P.S. saying that the matter had now been resolved and the colleague needn't bother coming after all.

Spooner well knew his reputation for bungling speech and hated it. Once when a group of drunken students called at his window for him to make a speech, he answered testily, “You don't want to hear me make a speech. You just hope I'll say one of those . . . ​
things.
”

In addition to mangling words in amusing ways, something else we can do in English that they cannot always do in other languages is construct intentionally ambiguous sentences that can be taken in either of two ways, as in the famous, if no doubt apocryphal, notice in a restaurant saying: “Customers who think our waiters are rude should see the manager.” There is a technical term for this (isn't there always?). It's called
amphibology.
An admirable example of this neglected art was Benjamin Disraeli's airy note to an aspiring author: “Thank you so much for the book. I shall lose no time in reading it.” Samuel Johnson didn't quite utter an amphibology, but he neared it in spirit, when he wrote to another would-be author, “Your work is both good and original. Unfortunately, the parts that are good aren't original, and the parts that are original aren't good.”

Occasionally people grow so carried away with the possibilities of wordplay that they weave it into their everyday language. The most famous example of this in America is
boontling,
a made-up language once spoken widely in and around Boonville, California. According to one story on how it began (and there are several to choose from) two sets of brothers, the Duffs and the Burgers, were sitting around the Anytime Saloon in Boonville one day in 1892 when they decided for reasons of amusement to devise a private language based partly on their common Scottish-Irish heritage, partly on words from the Pomo Indians living nearby, but mostly on their own gift for coming up with colorful secret words. The idea was that no one would be able to understand what they were talking about, but as far as that went the plan was a failure because soon pretty well everyone in town was talking Boontling, or harpin' boont as they put it locally, and for at least forty years it became the common linguistic currency in the isolated town a hundred miles north of San Francisco. It became so much a part of the local culture that some people sometimes found it took them a minute or two to readjust to the English-speaking world when they ventured out of their valley. With time, the language grew to take in about 1,200 words, a good many of them salacious, as you might expect with a private language.

Many expressions were taken from local characters. Coffee was called
zeese
after the initials of a camp cook named Zachariah Clifton who made coffee you could stand a spoon up in. A hardworking German named Otto inspired the term
otting
for diligent work. A goatee became a
billy ryan.
A kerosene lantern was a
floyd hutsell.
Pie was called
charlie brown
because a local of that name always ate his pie before he ate the rest of his meal. A prostitute was a
madge.
A doctor was a
shoveltooth
on account of the protruding teeth of an early GP. Other words were based on contractions—
forbs
for four bits,
toobs
for two bits,
hairk
for a haircut,
smalch
for small change. Others contained literary or biblical allusions. Thus an illegitimate child was a
bulrusher.
Still others were metaphorical. A heavy rain was a
trashlifter
and a really heavy rain was a
loglifter.
But many of the most memorable terms were onomatopoeic, notably one of the terms for sexual intercourse,
ricky chow,
said to be the noise bedsprings make when pressed into urgent service. A great many of the words had sexual provenance, such as
burlapping,
a euphemism for the sexual act, based on a local anecdote involving a young couple found passing an hour in that time-honored fashion on a stack of old gunny sacks at the back of the general store.

Although some people can still speak Boontling, it is not as widely used as it once was. In much better shape is cockney rhyming slang, as spoken in the East End of London. Rhyming slang isn't a separate language, but simply a liberal peppering of mysterious and often venerable slang words.

Cockneys are among the most artful users of English in the world. A true cockney (the word comes from Middle English
cokeney,
“cock's egg,” slang for a townsperson) is said to have been born within the sound of Bow Bells—these being the famous (and famously noisy) bells of St. Mary-le-Bow Church on Cheapside in the City of London. However, for a generation or so no one has been born within their sound for the elemental reason that they were destroyed by German bombs in World War II. In any case, the rise of the City of London as the capital's financial district meant that cockneys had long since been dispersed to more outlying districts of the East End where the bells of Bow rang out exceedingly faintly, if at all.

The East End of London has always been a melting pot, and they've taken terms from every wave of invaders, from French Huguenot weavers in the sixteenth century to Bangladeshis of today. Many others have come from their own eye-opening experiences overseas during the period of empire and two world wars.
Shufti,
for “have a look at,” and
buckshee,
for “something that is free,” both come from India. “Let's have a parlyvoo” (meaning “a chat”) comes obviously from the French
parlez-vous.
Less obvious is the East End expression
san fairy ann,
meaning “don't mention it, no problem,” which is a corruption of the French “ça ne fait rien.” The cockneys have also devised hundreds of terms of their own. “Hang about” means “wait a minute.” “Leave it out” means “stop, don't keep on at me.” “Straight up” means “honestly, that's the truth.” Someone who is misbehaving is “out of order” or “taking liberties.”

But without a doubt their most singular contribution to English has been rhyming slang. No one knows when cockney rhyming slang began, but it has certainly been popular since the mid-nineteenth century. As with general slang, some of the terms exist only for a short while before dying out, while others live on for scores of years, sometimes moving out into the wider world where their low origins and true meanings are often mercifully unappreciated.

The two most often cited examples of rhyming slang are
apples and pears
=
stairs
and
trouble and strife
=
wife.
In point of fact, you could live a lifetime on the Mile End Road and not once hear those terms. But there are scores of others that are used daily, such as “use yer loaf” (short for
loaf of bread
=
head
), “have a butcher's” (short for
butcher's hook
=
look
), or “how you doin', my old china?” (short for
china plate
=
mate
). A complicating factor is that the word that rhymes is almost always dropped, and thus the etymology is obscure.
Titfer
means “hat”; originally it was
tit-for-tat
=
hat. Tom
means “jewelry.” It's short for
tom-foolery
=
jewelry.
There's a technical term for this process as well:
hemiteleia.