The Miracle of Language

THE MIRACLE OF LANGUAGE

RICHARD LEDERER

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CRAZY ENGLISH The Ultimate Joy Ride Through Our Language

FRACTURED ENGLISH

THE WRITE WAY A Guide to Real-life Writing

THE PLAY OF WORDS Fun & Games for Language Lovers

Available from Pocket Books

PRAISE FOR

THE MIRACLE OF LANGUAGE

and Richard Lederer’s Other Fascinating Books

Richard Lederer has done it again—another delightful, witty, and hugely absorbing celebration of the English language. Is there no stopping the man?

—Bill Bryson, author of Made in America

"With THE MIRACLE OF LANGUAGE, Lederer, America’s foremost wag of words, has also become a sage…. That is not to say Lederer has abandoned humor—far from it. MIRACLE is filled with many gems."

—The San Diego Union-Tribune

A veritable Cook’s tour of the wonderful English language—from its major highways to its little-known but fascinating byways and back roads.

—Don Hauptman, author of Cruel and Unusual Puns

Lederer’s collection on the English language can be read from start to finish or browsed at will, and it is consistently enjoyable…. This witty compendium … both entertains and instructs.

—ALA Booklist

Entertaining and enlightening … a delightful and edifying collection.

—Publishers Weekly

Richard Lederer’s delight in English is itself delightful—and contagious.

—Edwin Newman, author of Strictly Speaking

CRAZY ENGLISH

"Crazy English is a gem."

—San Francisco Chronicle

Lederer beguiles and bedazzles.

—Los Angeles Times

"Crazy English is great fun."

—Pittsburgh Press

Hot dog! In a nutshell, Lederer is pleasing as punch.

—Indianapolis Star

A joyride … Lederer celebrates the semantic antics of our language.

—Boston Herald

"For sheer fun, you couldn’t find a nicer gift than Crazy English by Richard Lederer."

—James J. Kilpatrick

Holy cow! English has never been better.

—Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Crazy English? Crazy like a fox, this man Lederer. Ours is a language that reveals its secrets in winks, allusions, sighs, and giggles. Richard Lederer, being a genius, has taken the giggle road. Don’t be bothered that you will laugh from the first page of the book to the last—at the end you will be better equipped to convey exactly what you mean, however serious the subject may be."

—Willard Espy

THE WRITE WAY

An entertaining, clearly written, concise guide to writing … Ideal for anyone who wants to be a better writer.

—The Times Record (Brunswick, ME)

This commonsense approach to good writing belongs on every library shelf…. Anyone familiar with Lederer’s previous books on the use and abuse of the English language will not be surprised by the abundance of humor used on these pages to lighten what might otherwise be a very dreary topic.

—Kliatt

Books by Richard Lederer

Adventures of a Verbivore

Anguished English

Basic Verbal Skills (with Philip Burnham)

Crazy English

Fractured English

Get Thee to a Punnery

Literary Trivia (with Michael Gilleland)

The Miracle of Language

More Anguished English

Nothing Risqué, Nothing Gained

The Play of Words

Puns & Games

The Word Circus

The Write Way (with Richard Dowis)

For orders other than by individual consumers, Pocket Books grants a discount on the purchase of 10 or more copies of single titles for special markets or premium use. For further details, please write to the Vice President of Special Markets, Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, 9th Floor, New York, NY 10020-1586.

For information on how individual consumers can place orders, please write to Mail Order Department, Simon & Schuster Inc., 100 Front Street, Riverside, NJ 08075.

RICHARD LEDERER

THE

MIRACLE

OF

LANGUAGE

POCKET BOOKS

New York   London   Toronto   Sydney

Lyrics from What’s Love Got to Do with It (Terry Britten, Graham Hamilton Lyle), copyright © 1984 MYAXE MUSIC LTD. & GOOD SINGLE LTD. All rights on behalf of MYAXE MUSIC LTD. administered by WB MUSIC CORP. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Excerpts from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Hollow Men in Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright 1936 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., copyright 1963, 1964 by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Excerpt from Burnt Norton in Four Quartets, copyright 1943 by T. S. Eliot, and renewed 1971 by Esme Valerie Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

Emily Dickinson from And Pastures New: A Collection of Poems, copyright © 1956 by Melville Cane and renewed 1984 by Katherine Detre and Mary Robinson. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

Originally published in hardcover in 1991 by Pocket Books

POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright © 1991 by Richard Lederer

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions

thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books,

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lederer, Richard, 1938-

The miracle of language / Richard Lederer.

p.  cm.

Includes index.

ISBN: 0-671-02811-1

eISBN 13: 978-1-4391-3940-0

ISBN 13: 978-0-6710-2811-4

1. English language—Style.

2. Language and languages—Quotations, maxims, etc.

I. Title.

PE121.B68  1991

428—dc20                    91-18639

CIP

First Pocket Books trade paperback printing April 1999

10  9  8  7  6  5

POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

Text design by Stanley S. Drate/Folio Graphics Co. Inc.

Cover design by John Fontana

Printed in the U.S.A.

To my father and my mother

and my sisters and my brothers

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Anne Lederer, my daughter, for making How Do We Know What We Know? a family affair; to Marty Capodice for the research on One Word Can Change the World; to Merriam-Webster for suggesting many of the Brave New Words; to Andre Hurtgen for his wisdom about foreign languages; to Beverly McDonald, Gertrude King Ramstrom, Lorraine Stickney, and Larry Katzenbach for their compact and indestructible contributions to this book; and to my students at St. Paul’s School, especially Charles Shaffer, Celia Wren, Jennifer Home, and Ashley Elinor, for their enrichment of these chapters.

I am especially grateful to my editor Jane Rosenman, whose work so embodies an abiding love for the miracle of language.

Versions of some of the chapters in this book have appeared in Verbatim, Writer’s Digest, and Writing!

CONTENTS

Introduction

1

WINGED WORDS

The Miracle of Language

How Do We Know What We Know?

In Praise of English

The Case for Short Words

English at Play

Brave New Words

II

CRACKS IN THE PANE

Is English Prejudiced?

Words We Need

The Department of Redundancy Department

One Word Can Change the World

III

THE LOOM OF LITERATURE

Literary Wordmakers

A Man of Fire-New Words

No Harmless Drudges, They

The Word Magic of Lewis Carroll

The Year of Mark Twain

The Hilltop of the Heart

The Legacy of T. S. Eliot

George Orwell Is Watching You

IV

WRITE ON!

Bookmobility

A Celebration of Libraries

Ya Got Any Good Books Here?

What Is Poetry?

You Can Be a Poet

A Letter Is Forever

V

A GALLIMAUFRY FOR WORD LOVERS

Words About Words

Index

INTRODUCTION

A few years ago my daughter Katy was getting ready to play in a jazz band concert at our local junior high school. Her group was scheduled to perform after the orchestra and the regular band, and I, not wanting to hear other people’s unidentifiable children extracting unidentifiable sounds from unidentifiable instruments—and not knowing my brass from my oboe anyway—asked some other parents to take Katy to the concert, where I would come to see her at the appropriate time.

Just as I was about to leave for the performance, the telephone rang. One of my New Hampshire Public Radio listeners wanted to know, "Why is it sheep and cattle on the hoof but mutton and beef on the table? I get calls like this all the time, just as each day in my mailbox piles of letters about language greet me from readers of my weekly newspaper column, Looking at Language." From the citizens of Concord, New Hampshire, alone, a megalopolis of some 35,000 souls, I have received more than enough inquiries and observations about word and phrase origins, bloopers, puns, grammar, usage, and spelling to fill my column space in the Concord Monitor at least once a month for the past ten years. My adventures in columny and radio commentary have led to a career as an itinerant lecturer. Many a night have I traveled to a small New England library, school, or city hall to speak to and with a group of townspeople who have come through the darkness to spend an evening in a clean, well-lighted place rapping about language.

That’s one of the strange paradoxes about our times. The standard Sunday supplement jeremiads tell us of the decline of language, how the seductive luminescence of film and television and the hum and buzz of video games are blinding and deafening us to the meanings and nuances of words. But whatever you may be hearing about the closing of the American mind and cultural illiteracy (I do not deny that much of it is true), there has never been a more passionate moment in the history of the American love affair with language. Visit your local bookstore and count the volumes that line the shelves of the Language, Humor, and Reference sections; look in your local newspaper, and you may well find a column about language by somebody like me.

It is the best of times to be a person who makes his or her living spreading the word about words. As people perceive that all about them things fall apart—education, the environment, the moral fabric—they are concerned to preserve and enlarge the hallmark of their humanness, and that hallmark is their language. To paraphrase Mark Twain, who makes an appearance in the middle of this book, rumors of the death of English are highly exaggerated.

Oh, yes: that telephone call. As succinctly as I could, I addressed my listener’s inquiry. I told him that I was delighted with his question about sheep and mutton because it touched on a fascinating aspect of the history of our English language. In 1066 the Norman French invaded England and within a year ruled all of the country. The Norman Conquest signaled the end of the Old English period and the beginning of Middle English, but the French that the Norman nobility spoke did not reach down to the lower classes, the folk who, in the long run, were to determine the nature of our language.

This separation explains why live animals, which were tended by the Saxon peasants, had English names—sheep, cow, ox, swine, calf, deer, and chicken—while the animals that were carried to the castle hall to feast among the nobles, as Walter Scott writes in Ivanhoe, had French names—mutton, beef, pork, bacon, veal, venison, and pullet.

All this took me about ten minutes to outline, and the tutorial made me late for the concert. I tore downstairs, jumped into my car, and sped toward the event. At the last major intersection before the junior high school, the car in front of me made a left, and I floated in behind it. Sure enough, as I arrived at the school parking lot, right behind me were the blue flashing lights of a police car. When I stopped, a young officer strode over to my automobile and said, License and registration, please.

Yes sir, I sighed and presented the documents.

Do you know why I stopped you? he asked.

Well, I knew, but I wanted him to say.

Why did you stop me, officer?

Because you didn’t come to a complete stop at the intersection of South Fruit and Clinton streets.

Sensing a redundancy aborning, I asked, Well then, what did I do?

You only came to a partial stop.

Seizing on the oxymoron, I fixed him with a steely gaze. Officer, what in the world is a partial stop?

His head jerked back and he exclaimed, Are you the guy who writes those books about language?

I said I was and he let me off.

That’s one of the advantages of being a guy who writes those books about language. You intimidate people—and you save $33 on a traffic ticket.

Most people perceive us English teachers as prissy, fastidious characters, and being in the presence of a so-called language expert brings forth certain stock responses: Gee, English was my worst subject in school. I hated diagramming sentences. Or: So, you’re an English teacher. I guess I’d better watch my grammar. Or: You’re the language person, eh. I’m afraid to say anything in your presence. To which I often want to reply, Yeah, between you and I, you better speak and write good or I ain’t gonna give you no respect irregardless!

But those of us who truly cherish language are not linguistic sheriffs who organize posses to hunt down and string up language offenders who have the temerity or misfortune to split their infinitives, float their hopefullys, and dangle their participles in public. The last thing in the world we want to do is to make people uptight about the epicenter of their identity—the way they communicate. We celebrate language as the most glorious of all human inventions, incomparably the finest of our achievements. We marvel at the fact that, as you pass your eyes over the pages in this book, you experience ideas similar to those that I was thinking when, in another place and another time, I struck the symbols on my keyboard. Because I write and you read, we can both extend ourselves beyond the creatures we each were when we were born and the people we each were before I began the writing and you the reading.

If you are a genuine wordaholic, an authentic logolept, and a certifiable verbivore, you are in for a lifetime of joy. You don’t have to go to a special room like a laboratory or a theater or a special part of the country or the world to experience your delight. You have only to listen to the sounds that escape through the holes in people’s faces and pay heed to the messages that flow from their pens and luminesce up on their computer screens. That is the stuff that this book is made on. That is the miracle that we call language.

RICHARD LEDERER

San Diego, California

richard.lederer@pobox.com

pobox.com/~verbivore

I

WINGED

WORDS

THE MIRACLE

OF LANGUAGE

"Language is the Rubicon that divides man from beast," declared the philologist Max Müller. The boundary between human and animal—between the most primitive savage and the highest ape—is the language line. In some tribes in Africa, a baby is called a kuntu, a thing, not yet a muntu, a person. It is only through the gift of language that the child acquires reason, the complexity of thought that sets him or her apart from the other creatures who share this planet. The birth of language is the dawn of humanity; in our beginning was the word. We have always been endowed with language because before we had words, we were not human beings.

The limits of my language, wrote the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for. Without the word we are imprisoned; possessing the word, we are set free. Listen now to the stories of four thinkers—two men, two women; two whites, two blacks—as they give eloquent testimony to the emancipating power of language.

Most of us cannot remember learning our first word, but Helen Keller recalled that event in her life with a flashing vividness. She remembered because she was deaf, mute, and blind from the age of nineteen months and did not learn her first word until she was seven.

When Helen was six, an extraordinary teacher named Anne Mansfield Sullivan entered her life. Miss Sullivan was poor, ill, and nearly blind herself, but she possessed a tenacious vitality that was to force her pupil’s unwilling mind from the dark, silent prison in which it lived: "Before my teacher came to me, I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious yet conscious time of nothingness. I did not know that I knew aught,