Can I Have a Word with You?

By Howard Richler

In his fifth book about language, Howard Richler moves from A to Z with a specifically chosen word for every letter of the alphabet. What especially intrigues him is how words come to mean what they mean, how they lose some meanings and gain others. Always humorous, Richler invites readers into the intimacy of language and allows us to delight in the ever-shifting glories of English.

Not since Lynn Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves has a book about language been so hilarious and informative. This book is a must not only for the bookshelves of all logophiles, but also as the bible for the many family members and friends whose get-togethers often spark lively linguistic argument.

"Howard Richler is an intoxicated and intoxicating wordaholic who gets unrepentantly high on all flavors, savors, bouquets, and proofs of words. He is a genuinely certified verbivore who feasts on words. "

—Richard Lederer, author of Anguished English, Crazy English, and The Miracle of Language.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ronsdale Press
• Release date: Oct 7, 2007
• ISBN: 9781553802914

Howard Richler

Howard Richler is a long-time logophile who has served as a language columnist for several newspapers and magazines. He is the author of seven previous books on language, including The Dead Sea Scroll Palindromes (1995), Take My Words:A Wordaholic’s Guide to the English Language (1996), A Bawdy Language: How a Second-Rate Language Slept its Way to the Top (1999), Global Mother Tongue: The Eight Flavours of English (2006), Can I Have a Word with You (2007), Strange Bedfellows: The Private Lives of Words (2010), How Happy Became Homosexual: And Other Mysterious Semantic Shifts (2013), and most recently, Wordplay: Arranged and Deranged Wit. Richler resides in Montreal with his partner Carol, where he struggles to be fluent not only in French but in the many flavours of the English language. You can check out his language musings and daily word puzzles on Facebook at facebook.com/howard.richler and on Twitter @howardrichler, or visit his wordnerd blog at howarderichler.blogspot.com.

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language.

ABORTIONIST

Some years ago, National Post columnist Andrew Coyne began his column with the following words: Tuesday’s horrific knife attack on Dr. Garson Romalis, a Vancouver abortionist (that’s the word in the dictionary, though the CBC for some reason insists on using ‘abortion provider’), is of course ‘outrageous, untenable’ and whatever other word of condemnation Stockwell Day can muster.

I would suspect that if the CBC uses the term abortion provider instead of abortionist it would be because the person being interviewed requested to be introduced with that title. In any case, a perusal of dictionaries explains why one would eschew the word abortionist. The Oxford English Dictionary (henceforth, OED) defines abortionist as one who procures abortion or miscarriage. Surprisingly, it only gives one citation for the term, and it is a particularly jarring one from 1872: Professional abortionists — men and women who make a business of infant murder. The Encarta World English Dictionary defines abortionist as an offensive and disapproving term for somebody who performs abortions, especially suggesting the illegality of the procedure. Webster’s Third International Dictionary is succinct in its definition: One who induces abortions, especially illegally. The Canadian Oxford Dictionary offers two definitions: 1. A person who carries out abortions, especially illegally; 2. A person who favours the legalization of abortion."

Entering the words abortionist and abortion provider into search engines provides another clue as to why the term abortionist might be avoided. Abortionist yields usages such as A Kansas City abortionist is out of business after investigators discovered a grisly house of horrors at his clinic — with fetuses kept in Styrofoam cups in his refrigerator; and Noted abortionist finds God and faith. On the other hand, when one enters abortion provider as the key phrase, such items as the following are elicited: Car found in abortion provider killing and How to find an abortion provider in North America. As becomes apparent, abortion provider generally yields sites that provide reproductive choices available to women.

From the early 1970s, opponents to abortion had described their position as defending the right to life of a fetus. The opposing camp — previously known as pro-abortionists — rhetorically softened their preference by renaming their position pro-choice. By doing so they cast their adversaries as anti-choice, and by extension, because many in this camp were men, as patriarchal tsars. The first citation of pro-choice in the OED comes from Ms. Magazine in 1975: The legal battles … have virtually all been decided in favor of pro-choice….

Considering that the term abortion is anathema to the religious Right, it might surprise some to know that the Bible contains no particular references against the procedure. Michael Luo wrote in the New York Times on November 13, 2005, that indexes at the back of Bibles found in evangelical churches offer a list of specific words mentioned therein and where they are referenced in the text: A reader can find … how many times Jesus talked about the poor (at least a dozen), or what the Apostle Paul wrote about grace (a lot). But those who turn to their concordance for guidance about abortion will not find the word at all.

ACTRESS

The whole world may have been in love with Shakespeare on Oscar night, March 21, 1998, but Montreal Gazette reader Ned Barrett was annoyed at how his newspaper had rendered the Bard’s language. He immediately fired off the following letter to the editor, entitled Take a bow, Sir Judy Dench, to register his dislike of people’s use of the word actor to refer to an actress:

Take a good look at the picture of a radiant Gwyneth Paltrow clutching her Oscar, awarded for the best actress of 1998. You may never see this actress again. After her acceptance she stepped back into the audience and she became an actor. There she joined another actor (according to the Gazette): Sophia Loren. What’s going on here? Newspapers have never been considered guardians of our language but neither have they been licensed to bastardize it. An actress is an actress is an actress — political correctness and militant feminism notwithstanding.

In an April 7, 1998, article, Gazette editorial writer Henry Aubin entered the fray. In a letter addressed to dear god of political correctness, Aubin intoned: "You will be delighted to hear, O great influential one, that this usage of the word ‘actor’ was no fluke. The Gazette’s style guide for its writers lays down this rule: ‘Actress’ is acceptable, but ‘actor’ is preferred for both sexes.

Ned Barrett dropped me a note apprising me of this debate, stating, This is not a private discussion. Any number can play. So play I will.

Gentlemen, it’s easy to denigrate a new language usage with the epithet politically correct, but in this instance we’re not facing the fickle winds of political correctness. Even conservatively bent wordsmith William Safire said, "In some cases, the advocates of linguistic sex neutrality have indisputable logic on their side. If women are going to be firemen, policemen, and mailmen, then we’re better off with firefighter, police officer and mail carrier. If the boss of your company is a woman, you can’t call her a businessman; she’s an executive…."

Frankly, I don’t understand why the use of actor to refer to a woman is raising hackles. Increasingly, English usage is eliminating gender distinctions and using the masculine version of the noun to refer to both sexes. Observe authoress, aviatrix, Jewess, and patroness. These words are used rarely now, and both sexes are called authors, aviators, Jews and patrons, respectively. The –or suffix in actor does not denote maleness in other forms such as director, facilitator or translator, so actor is also free to undergo this all-inclusiveness.

Actually, when women were first permitted to act on the English stage in the seventeenth century, the definitive term for a female theatrical player was actor. It was only several decades later that the term actress was coined to differentiate female actors.

By the 1980s, women in theatre and films began to reclaim the term actor in referencing themselves and other women. By the 1990s, the term actor was widely accepted as referring to both sexes. In the early ‘90s, the CD ROM database Periodic Abstracts used actor to refer to anyone who acts. A 1994 Maclean’s magazine article about Martha Henry, star of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night at the Stratford Festival, was headlined as A Great Actor Comes Home.

The term actress is hardly moribund. Rosalie Maggio, in The Nonsexist Word Finder, written in 1987, said that of "all the words ending in –ess, this is one of the least offensive and if you use it out of respect for a woman who prefers to call herself an actress, you are probably not sinning grievously. The word actress serves a purpose in dichotomizing between male and female roles when such a distinction is needed. It is less cumbersome to say Gwyneth Paltrow won the 1998 Best Actress Oscar than to say Gwyneth Paltrow won the 1998 Best Female Actor Oscar."

An additional problem with feminine suffixes is that over time they have a tendency to connote a pejorative sense — in contrast to the masculine. Observe governor and governess, master and mistress, and major and majorette. An –ess suffix can also imply lower status. Someone described as a manageress is more likely to be managing a launderette than a Fortune 500 corporation.

Ironically, many nineteenth-century feminists argued that sex-specific terms for females were necessary to highlight women’s accomplishments. The self-described editress of the nineteenth-century journal Godey’s Lady’s Book, Sarah Josepha Hale, advocated terms such as Americaness, paintress and scholaress. Henry Fowler, in his 1926 Dictionary of Modern English Usage, lobbied for doctress, inspectress and tailoress.

Such is obviously not the trend today. Over time, I expect that most –ess suffixes will be eliminated as we undergo gender neutralization. Hostesses will be referred to as hosts, and waitresses will be referred to as waiters or as servers. It probably will take more time for entrenched terms such as headmistress and empress to become gender neutral.

Some terms, however, will never change. In a 1995 article in English Today, Professor Rachelle Waksler argued that the few examples of female suffixed forms that will not change will be those in which the suffix itself has become linked to the denotation of the root. Observe dominatrix.

Hmm. This could lead to Governor Schwarzenegger doing a movie dressed in drag called The Terminatrix.

ALPHABET

The OED’s first citation of the word alphabet is in 1580, where it is defined as the set of letters used in writing the Greek language; extended to those used by Romans and hence to any set of characters representing the simple sounds used in a language or speech generally. This definition probably slights the Phoenicians, as the Greeks actually copied the Phoenicians’ Semitic letters and used them to write Greek.

Sometime before 1000 BC, the Phoenicians began writing their language in a 22-letter alphabet. They didn’t invent the alphabet ex nihilo, but inherited their 22-consonant alphabet from a prior Semitic tradition that was developed around 1700 BC in Canaan and Phoenicia. The innovation of the Greeks was the invention of the vowels by reassigning certain Phoenician letters to symbolize vowel sounds. Around 700 BC, the Etruscans of Italy copied the Greek letters, from which derived the letters of the ancient Roman alphabet, and ultimately all western alphabets. Most alphabets contain 20 to 30 symbols, but the relative complexity of the sound system leads to alphabets of varying size. The smallest alphabet with eleven letters is Rotokas, used in the Solomon Islands, while the largest is the Khmer of Asia, with 74 letters. Western alphabets, however, have far fewer letters than the approximately 1,000 characters (based on the 214 traditional root characters) that the young Chinese student must learn, or the hundreds of hieroglyphics that the ancient Egyptian student had to memorize.

If you ask people to name the most consequential invention of world history, invariably you’ll get a list that includes the wheel, the printing press and the telephone. The alphabet wouldn’t make it to many short lists but judged on its longevity and extent of modern daily use, it compares favourably with many of the other key inventions.

This is not to say that knowledge of the alphabet has always been widespread. In a medieval precursor to Sesame Street, Giovanni de Genoa writes in 1286 in Catholicon: "You must proceed everywhere according to the alphabet. So, according to this order you will easily be able to find the spelling of any word here included. For example, I intend to discuss amo before bibo. I will discuss amo before bibo because a is the first letter of amo and b is the first letter of bibo and a is before b in the alphabet."

Knowledge of the alphabet among adults was still restricted in Elizabethan England. In the first English dictionary published in 1604, Robert Cawdrey cautions in Table Alphabeticall that to profit by this Table … thou must learne the Alphabet, to wit, the order of the letters as they stand … as (b) neere the beginning, (n) about the middest, and (t) toward the end.

Have you ever wondered why so many words for mother in different languages have an m sound to start the word? We have Basque ama, Finnish emo, Hebrew ema, Hindi maa, Latin mater, Malay emak, Mandarin and Quechua ma and Vietnamese me, to name but a few. It is so because the letter M belongs to the category of consonants known as labials, from the Latin word for lip. Formed at the lips, this sound does not require any tricky use of the tongue, no need of teeth, and is simple enough to be uttered by an infant as young as two or three months.

Letter shape is also of some interest. Why is an O round? Its distinctive shape goes back to ancient Egypt where its painted image was a human eye. This was later adopted by Semitic people, calling it ayin — eye in their languages. Why does X symbolize an unknown quantity? This process began when René Descartes wrote his treatise La Géométrie in 1637. While he assigned the letters X, Y and Z to symbolize any three unknowns in a geometric equation, he favoured X and this association of X with an unknown quantity remained.

Of course, any discussion of the letters of the alphabet should end with a discussion of why we say zed in Canada, Britain and other Commonwealth countries, whereas the Americans say zee. The Romans called this letter zeta and this letter has passed into modern Italian. Although zed became the official designation in England, other variants such as zad, izzard, and zee crop up in British writings well into the nineteenth century. As a result, both zee and zed were exported to North America, with zed dominating in the North and zee in the South. The matter was finally decided when Daniel Webster wrote his American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828. Webster ordained that henceforth the letter was to be pronounced zee.

ANORAK

Jack Straw is the first person to admit that he is something of an anorak who likes nothing better than to entertain his family with regular rounds of Name 10 Famous Belgians. So it came as little surprise when the new foreign secretary bounded up to Louis Michel, his outspoken Belgian counterpart, to flaunt his knowledge soon after taking office last June (Guardian, January 4, 2002).

I read this paragraph while on holiday in the United Kingdom some years ago. Knowing that an anorak is a type of winter coat, I was somewhat bemused to find that the word was being used to describe a person. It was clear from the context that the designation was not meant to be complimentary, and because I wear a winter coat of this ilk, I took a certain amount of umbrage that I too might be deemed to be a Straw-like anorak.

A consultation with the OED did not enlighten me. It describes an anorak as a weatherproof jacket of skin or cloth, with hood attached, worn by Eskimos; a similar garment in countries other than Greenland.

I then entered the word anorak into a search engine and received this explanation: "Most people know of Trainspotting the movie, but there is another kind of trainspotting — a hobby that is peculiarly British. Trainspotters are usually anorak-clad men who watch trains and write down the engine numbers in order to cross them off their Book of British Engines, with the lifetime aim of encountering every train engine in the book. They usually live with their mothers, rarely have girlfriends and are generally seen as sad and laughable. The designation ‘anorak’ is directed almost exclusively at men. Such men are usually obsessively interested in an obscure subject or activity — the archetypal one being trainspotting. Such activities often require the participant to spend hours outdoors doing little aside from occasionally writing something in a notebook. Such people often wear anoraks because these coats have lots of pockets for notebooks, pens and pencils. The word anorak, therefore, has come to mean something along the lines of nerd," and it is in this sense that the Guardian used it to allude to the Right Honourable Minister.

The anorak is not the only garment used to describe distinctive members of our species. Many such terms combine a colour word with a name for an item of apparel: Blackshirts, Green Berets, black belt, white-collar and blue-collar are some examples. In the case of blue-stocking, the term was used contemptuously. Although it was first used derisively in 1757 about men who frequented literary evenings, by 1790 it referred to women who wore casual blue worsted stockings, instead of black silk stockings, to these literary gatherings. Nowadays, it is used to refer to a woman having or pretending to have intellectual interests or literary tastes. The term gumshoe was used at one time to refer to galoshes as well as something done stealthily, such as the work of a detective, and so it came to be applied as a synonym for the word detective. Terms such as suit to describe a business executive and skirt as a description for a woman, although used at times in a derisive manner, are more descriptive than value-laden.

The term pantywaist, on the other hand, is an example of a clothing term that is used wholly in a mocking fashion. Originally, it referred to a piece of clothing for children, consisting of a shirt and pants that are buttoned together at the waist. By the 1930s, it was used as a synonym for sissy in the United States, and it is now used as an offensive term calling into question a man’s courage and masculinity.

A word with a clear clothing pedigree is sabotage. The word comes from the French sabot, wooden shoe. The first citation in the OED is from The Church Times in 1910: We have lately been busy in deploring the sabotage of the French railway strikers. The verb saboter in French means to botch and came to refer to the destruction of machinery in a factory in order to win a strike. While there is no clear understanding of why the French made a verb out of the word for wooden shoes, there are several colourful theories. One claims that wooden-shoed peasants trampled down a landowner’s crops to exact better wages and working conditions. According to another version, the verb was born after a French railway strike in the early twentieth century when strikers either cut the shoes holding the railway lines or threw their shoes into factory machinery in order to disrupt the plant.

Sometimes the name from an item of clothing comes from the type of person who wears it. Such is the case with the quintessential Stanley Kowalski-esque undershirt commonly known as a wife-beater. Apparently the sleeveless, tight-fitting tanks have been dubbed wife beaters because they seem to be the style most often worn by men arrested for battering their spouses on the popular TV show Cops.

Quite the choice modern women have in men — anoraks or wife-beaters!

APTRONYM

What do the Dickensian character Ebenezer Scrooge, the Shakespearean character Mistress Quickly, and Richard Sheridan’s Mrs. Malaprop have in common?

They are all aptronyms. The Oxford Companion to the English Language defines an aptronym as a "name that matches its owner’s occupation or character, often in a humorous or ironic way, such as William Rumhole, a London taverner. The word was coined in 1938 by American newspaper columnist Franklin P. Adams. He rearranged the first two letters of the word patronym, naming from one’s father, and arrived at the word aptronym, which refers to an apt" name.