The Mother Tongue

by Bill Bryson

  In 1988 British papers were given an outstanding opportunity to update their position on obscenities when the captain of the England cricket team, Mike Gatting, reportedly called the umpire of an important match “a fucking, cheating cunt.” Only one newspaper, The Independent, printed all the words without asterisks. It was the first time that cunt had appeared in a British newspaper.

  Some words are less innocent than they seem. Bollix is commonly used in America to describe a confused situation, as in this quotation from the Philadelphia Inquirer [October 7, 1987]: “It was the winless Giants’ third loss of the bollixed strike-torn season.” Or this one from American Airlines’ inflight magazine, American Way [May 1, 1988]: “Our faux pas of the month for February was the crossword puzzle titled Heavy Stuff, which was all bollixed up.” It is probably safe to assume that neither writer was aware that bollix is a direct adaptation of bollocks (or ballocks), meaning “testicles.” It is still used in England to describe the testicles and also as a cry to express disbelief, similar to bullshit in American usage. As Pyles notes, Barnacle Bill the Sailor was originally Ballocky Bill and the original words of his ballad were considerably more graphic and sexual than the innocent phrases beloved by generations of children. The American slang word nuts also means “testicles”—though oddly when used as an exclamation it becomes wholly innocent. Other words concealing unsavory origins include bumf, which is short for bumfodden or “toilet paper” in German, and poppycock, an adaptation of a Dutch word meaning “soft dung.” (In answer to the obvious question, yes, they also have a word for firm dung—in fact two: poep and stront.)

  A few swear words have evolved different connotations in Britain and America. In America, a person who is pissed is angry; in Britain he’s drunk. Bugger, a wholly innocent word in America, is not at all welcome in polite conversation in Britain. As Pyles notes, until 1934 you could be fined or imprisoned for writing or saying it. A bugger in Britain is a sodomite. Although bugger is unacceptable, buggery is quite all right: It is the term used by both the legal profession and newspapers when someone is accused of criminal sodomy.

  * Published in The New York Times, September 19, 1989.

  15.

  Wordplay

  Six days a week an Englishman named Roy Dean sits down and does in a matter of minutes something that many of us cannot do at all: He completes the crossword puzzle in the London Times. Dean is the, well, the dean of the British crossword. In 1970, under test conditions, he solved a Times crossword in just 3 minutes and 45 seconds, a feat so phenomenal that it has stood unchallenged for twenty years.

  Unlike American crosswords, which are generally straightforward affairs, requiring you merely to fit a word to a definition, the British variety are infinitely more fiendish, demanding mastery of the whole armory of verbal possibilities—puns, anagrams, palindromes, lipograms, and whatever else springs to the deviser’s devious mind. British crosswords require you to realize that carthorse is an anagram of orchestra, that contaminated can be made into no admittance, that emigrants can be transformed into streaming, Cinerama into American, Old Testament into most talented, and World Cup team into (a stroke of genius, this one) talcum powder. (How did anyone ever think of that?) To a British crossword enthusiast, the clue “An important city in Czechoslovakia” instantly suggests Oslo. Why? Look at Czech(OSLO)vakia again. “A seed you put in the garage” is caraway, while “HIJKLMNO” is water because it is H-to-O or H2O. Some clues are cryptic in the extreme. The answer to “Sweetheart could take Non-Commissioned Officer to dance” is flame. Why? Well, a noncommissioned officer is an NCO. Another word for sweetheart is flame. If you add NCO to flame you get flamenco, a kind of dance. Get it? It is a wonder to me that anyone ever completes them. And yet many Britons take inordinate pride not just in completing them but in completing them quickly. A provost at Eton once boasted that he could do The Times crossword in the time it took his morning egg to boil, prompting one wag to suggest that the school may have been Eton but the egg almost certainly wasn’t.

  According to a Gallup poll, the crossword is the most popular sedentary recreation, occupying thirty million Americans for part of every day. The very first crossword, containing just thirty-two clues, appeared in the New York World on December 21, 1913. It had been thought up as a space filler by an expatriate Englishman named Arthur Wynne, who called it a word-cross. (Remember what I said about inventors never quite getting the name right?) It became a regular feature in the World, but nobody else picked it up until April 1924 when a fledgling publishing company called Simon and Schuster brought out a volume of crossword puzzles, priced at $1.35. It was an immediate hit and two other volumes were quickly produced. By the end of the first year the company had sold half a million copies, and crossword puzzles were a craze across America—so much so that for a time the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad installed dictionaries in each of its cars for the convenience of puzzle-solving travelers who had an acute need to know that Iliamna is the largest lake in Alaska or that oquassa is a kind of freshwater fish.

  Despite this huge popularity, the most venerable papers on both sides of the Atlantic refused for years to acknowledge that the crossword was more than a passing fad. The Times of London held out until January 1930, when it finally produced its first crossword (devised by a Norfolk farmer who had never previously solved one, much less constructed one). To salve its conscience at succumbing to a frivolous game, The Times printed occasional crosswords in Latin. Its namesake in New York held out for another decade and did not produce its first crossword until 1942.

  Only one other word game has ever challenged the crossword puzzle for popularity and respectability, and that’s Scrabble. Scrabble was introduced by a games company called Selchow and Righter in 1953, though it had been invented, by one Alfred Butts, more than twenty years earlier in 1931. Butts clearly didn’t have too much regard for which letters are used most often in English. With just ninety-eight tiles, he insisted on having at least two of each letter, which means that q, j, and z appear disproportionately often. As a result, success at Scrabble generally involves being able to come up with obscure words like zax (a hatchetlike tool) and xi (the fourteenth letter of the Greek alphabet). Butts intentionally depressed the number of s’s to discourage the formation of plurals, though he compensated by increasing the number of i’s to encourage the formation of suffixes and prefixes. The highest score, according to Alan Richter, a former British champion writing in The Atlantic in 1987, was 3,881 points. It included the word psychoanalyzing, which alone was worth 1,539 points.

  Wordplay is as old as language itself, and about as various. As Tony Augarde notes in his scholarly and yet endlessly absorbing Oxford Guide to Word Games, many verbal pastimes go back to the furthest reaches of antiquity. Palindromes, sentences that read the same backwards as forwards, are at least 2,000 years old. The ancient Greeks often put “Nispon anomimata mi monan opsin” on fountains. It translates as “Wash the sin as well as the face.” The Romans admired them, too, as demonstrated by “In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni” (“We enter the circle after dark and are consumed by fire”), which was said to describe the action of moths. The Romans also liked anagrams—scrambling the letters of a word or phrase to form new words or phrases—and turned “Quid est veritas?” (“What is truth?”) into “Est vir qui adest” (“It is this man here”).

  Among the earliest instances of wordplay, Augarde cites a Greek anagram dating from the third century B.C. and, earlier still, a lipogram by the Greek Lasus from the fifth century B.C. in which the poet intentionally avoided using the letter s. So it is safe to say that wordplay is very old and effectively universal. Even Christ reputedly made a pun when He said: “Thou art Peter: upon this rock I shall build my Church.” It doesn’t make a lot of sense from the wordplay point of view until you realize that in ancient Greek the word for Peter and for rock was the same.

  Wordplay in English is as old as our literature. In the eighth century A.D., Cynewulf, one of the
first English poets, wrote four otherwise serious religious poems into each of which he artfully wove acrostics of his own name, presumably for no other reason than that it amused him. Verbal japes of one type or another have been a feature of English literature ever since. Shakespeare so loved puns that he put 3,000 of them—that’s right, 3,000—into his plays, even to the extent of inserting them in the most seemingly inappropriate places, as when in King Henry IV, Part I, the father of Hotspur learns of his son’s tragic death and remarks that Hotspur is now Coldspur. The most endearing names in English literature, from Lewis Carroll to James Joyce, have almost always been associated with wordplay. Even Samuel Johnson, as we have seen, managed to insert a number of jokes into his great dictionary—an action that would be inconceivable in other languages.

  The varieties of wordplay available in English are almost without number—puns, tongue-twisters, anagrams, riddles, cryptograms, palindromes, clerihews, rebuses, crossword puzzles, spelling bees, and so on ad infinitum. Their effect can be addictive. Lewis Carroll, an obsessive deviser and player of wordgames, once sat up all night trying to make an anagram of William Ewart Gladstone before settling on “Wild agitator, means well.” Some diligent scholar, whose identity appears now to be lost, set his attention on that famous Shakespearean nonce word in Love’s Labour’s Lost, honorificabilitudinitatibus, and concluded that it must contain an anagram proving that Shakespeare didn’t write the plays, and came up with “Hi ludi F. Baconis nati tuiti orbi,” which translates as “These plays, born of F. Bacon, are preserved for the world.” Think of the hours of labor that that must have involved. According to the Guinness Book of Records, a man in the English county of Hereford & Worcester wrote a palindrome of 65,000 words in 1983. Whether or not it makes much sense—and I would almost bet my house that it doesn’t—we can but admire the dedication that must have gone into it.

  Possibly the most demanding form of wordplay in English—or indeed in any language—is the palindrome. The word was first used in English by Ben Jonson in 1629. A good palindrome is an exceedingly rare thing. Most of them require a generosity of spirit to say that they make much sense, as in “Mad Zeus, no live devil, lived evil on Suez dam” or “Stiff, O dairyman, in a myriad of fits” or “Straw? No, too stupid a fad. I put soot on warts,” all three of which deserve an A+ for length and a D– for sensibility. Or else they involve manipulations of spelling, as the short but notable “Yreka Bakery” or the rather more venerable “Lewd I did live, & evil did I dwel.” This last, according to Willard R. Espy in The Game of Words, was written by the English poet John Taylor and is the first recorded palindrome in English, though in fact it isn’t really a palindrome since it only works if you use an ampersand instead of and.

  The reason there are so many bad palindromes, of course, is that they are so very difficult to construct. So good ones are all the more cherishable for their rarity. Probably the most famous palindrome is one of the best. It manages in just seven words to tell an entirely sensible story: “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!” That is simply inspired. Others that have the virtue of making at least some kind of sense:

  Norma is as selfless as I am, Ron.

  Was it Eliot’s toilet I saw?

  Too far, Edna, we wander afoot.

  Madam, I’m Adam.

  Sex at noon taxes.

  Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?

  Able was I ere I saw Elba.

  Sums are not set as a test on Erasmus.

  Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas.

  This last, I realize, does not even begin to pass the plausibility test, but so what? Anyone ingenious enough to work oscillate, metallic, and sonatas into one palindrome is exempt from all requirements bearing on sense. The Greeks and Romans also had a kind of palindrome in which it is the words rather than the letters that are read in reverse order—rather as if the English sentence “Jack loves Jill, not Jane” had its word order reversed to read “Jane, not Jill, loves Jack,” giving an entirely new sense. This kind of palindrome has never caught on in the English-speaking world, largely because English doesn’t lend itself to it very well. I’ve been working on it most of the afternoon (I told you wordplay is addictive) and the best I can come up with is “Am I as stupid as you are?” which reads backwards as well as forwards but, alas, keeps the same sense in both directions.

  Not far removed from the palindrome is the anagram, in which the letters of a word or name are jumbled to make a new, and ideally telling, phrase. Thus “Ronald Wilson Reagan” becomes “Insane Anglo Warlord”; “Spiro Agnew” becomes “Grow a Penis.” Again, one can but gasp at the ingenuity and dedication that have gone into some of them. What kind of mind is it that can notice that “two plus eleven” and “one plus twelve” not only give the same result but use the same letters? Other famous or notable anagrams:

  Western Union = no wire unsent

  circumstantial evidence = can ruin a selected victim

  a stitch in time saves nine = this is meant as incentive

  William Shakespeare = I am a weakish speller (or) I like Mr. W. H. as a pal, see? (or) We all make his praise

  funeral = real fun

  The Morse Code = Here come dots

  Victoria, England’s Queen = governs a nice quiet land

  parishioners = I hire parsons

  intoxicate = excitation

  schoolmaster = the classroom

  mother-in-law = woman Hitler

  Another form of wordplay is the rebus, a kind of verbal riddle in which words and symbols are arranged in a way that gives a clue to the intended meaning. Can you, for example, guess the meaning of this address?

  Wood

  John

  Mass

  It is “John Underwood, Andover, Massachusetts.” Many books and articles on word games say that such an address was once put on an envelope and that the letter actually got there, which suggests either that the postal service was once a lot better or writers more gullible than they are now. These days the rebus is a largely forgotten form, except on American license plates, where owners sometimes feel compelled to tell you their name or what they do for a living (like the doctor who put SAY AH), pose a metaphysical question (Y ME) or a provocative one (RUNVS), or just offer a friendly farewell (ALLBCNU). My favorite was the license plate on a truck from a McDonald’s Farm that just said EIEIO. If nothing else, these vanity plates tell us something about the spirit of the age. According to a 1984 report in the Los Angeles Times,* the most frequently requested plate in 1970 was PEACE. By 1984 that had been replaced by GO FOR IT.

  The French, in accordance with their high regard for the cerebral, have long cultivated a love of wordplay. In the Middle Ages, they even had a post of Anagrammatist to the King. One of the great French wordplayers was the novelist Georges Perec, who before his early death in 1982 was a guiding force in the group called OuLiPo (for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), whose members delighted in setting themselves complex verbal challenges. Perec once wrote a novel without once using the letter e (such compositions are called lipograms) and also composed a 5,000-letter palindrome on the subject of, you guessed it, palindromes.

  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.