1 It does not concern adverbs, but this may be a good place to mention that the sign at railroad grade-crossings, Stop! Look! Listen!, is said to have been devised by Ralph R. Upton, safety lecturer for the Puget Sound Power Company of Seattle, in 1912. He was killed in an automobile accident at La Porte, Ind., Aug. 4, 1935. See his obituary in the New York Herald Tribune, Aug. 5. Also, platinum-blonde is said to have been invented by Charles Washburn, publicity engineer for Jean Harlow. See Public Relations, II, by Alva Johnston, New Yorker, Aug. 26, 1944, p. 30.
2 Said to have been coined by Dan Maguinnis, one of the comedians of the Boston Stock Company from 1867 to his death. There is an account of him in Dan Maguinnis, 1834–1889, a Biographical Sketch With Ancestral Notes on His MacKenna Line, by Ella Lane Mielziner; Provincetown, Mass., 1935. I am indebted here to Mrs. Mielziner and to Mr. Paul North Rice, chief of the reference department of the New York Public Library.
3 This abbreviation, which quickly became a verb, is generally assumed to have been coined during World War I, but Elbridge Colby indicates in Army Talk; second edition; Princeton, N. J., 1943, p. 16, that it is, old in Army use, and I find the following in The Plain People of the Confederacy, by Bell Irvin Wiley, Baton Rouge, La., 1944, p. 31: “[In the Confederate Army] unwarranted absences of short duration were often unpunished and in many other cases offenders received such trivial sentences as reprimand by a company officer, digging a stump, carrying a rail for an hour or two, wearing a placard inscribed with the letters AWOL.…”
4 A List of Abbreviations Commonly Used in the U.S.S.R., by George Z. Patrick; revised ed.: Berkeley, Calif., 1937. This pamphlet runs to 124 pp. and lists nearly 1,500 terms. The Russian alphabet is used for both abbreviations and definitions, but there are also explanations in English. The first of the Russian abbreviations to come into use in either England or America seems to have been cadet, made of konstitutsionalnyie demokrati — constitutional democratic, or liberal party. It was formed c. 1905. The NED Supplement’s first example of cadet in English use is dated 1906.
1 I am indebted here to Mr. Robert F. Hicks of Baltimore.
2 Tonics and Sedatives, Journal of the American Medical Association, June 17, 1944.
1 Topics of the Times, April 6, 1944.
2 Hospital Talk, by Dorothy Barkley, American Speech, April, 1927, pp. 312–14.
3 Semi-Secret Abbreviations, by Percy W. Long, Dialect Notes, Vol. IV, Part III, 1915, pp. 245–46.
4 Nearly 5,000 English abbreviations (with a few American specimens included) are listed in A Dictionary of Abbreviations, by Eric Partridge; London, 1942. They show some juicy coinages, e.g., D.A.D.D.S. (deputy assistant director of dental services), L.R.F.P.S.G. (licentiate of the Royal Faculty of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow), and U.G.S.S.S. (Union of Girls’ Schools for Social Service).
5 Interlude on Jargon in On the Art of Writing; New York, 1916.
1 Quoted in Ponderous English, Manchester Guardian Weekly, Aug. 30, 1940, p. 149.
2 Associated Press dispatch from London, Aug. 3, 1939. One of Herbert’s targets is the verb to explore. When, early in 1936, to explore every avenue appeared in a House of Commons order paper he moved an amendment, backed by twenty other members, to substitute to leave no stone unturned. (Closed to Explorers, John o’ London’s Weekly, April 4, 1936). But hardly more than a month later, in a letter to the London Telegraph (Parliament and Divorce, May 22, 1936), he used it himself: “The government might, at least, explore opinion among leading churchmen and lawyers.” In Political Jargon the London Morning Post, March 18, 1936, said that to explore every avenue was “invented by the Marquis of Lansdowne when he was Foreign Secretary at the beginning of the century.” “It exercised,” said the Post, “a mortal fascination over politicians,… and it has done menial duty for them ever since. The exploring of avenues has become one of the main preoccupations of political life.”
3 The Jacobean Age, by David Matthews; London, 1938, p. 8.
4 Simple English, by Cornelia Craigie, Commonweal, Jan. 7, 1938, p. 295. An example from the standing orders of the House of Commons was cited in Week-End Puzzle, London Sunday Times, Nov. 13,1938: “Government business shall have precedence on as many Wednesdays immediately before Good Friday as the number of Wednesdays before Christmas on which it has not had precedence, and on as many Fridays immediately before Good Friday as the number of Fridays (reduced by three) on which it had not precedence before Christmas.” The subject is often discussed in the English newspapers, e.g., in M.P.S Pass Clause They Cannot Fathom, by William Barkley, London Daily Express, June 17, 1936; A Journey in Jargantua, by Ivor Brown, Manchester Guardian Weekly, March 14, 1941, and Official Jargon, Manchester Guardian Weekly, Sept. 12, 1941.
1 Jargon a Danger, Tweedsmuir Says, New York Times, Jan. 18, 1936.
2 In the New York Time: Magazine, May 21, 1944, p. 11, Maverick explained that he was driven to action at a committee meeting “at which the chairman spoke at length of ‘maladjustments co-extensive with problem areas,… alternative but nevertheless meaningful minimae,… utilization of factors which in a dynamic democracy can be channelized into both quantitative and qualitative phases.’ ” “People ask me,” he said, “where I got gobbledygook. I do not know. It must have come in a vision. Perhaps I was thinking of the old bearded turkey gobbler back in Texas who was always gobbledy-gobbling and strutting with ludicrous pomposity. At the end of this gobble there was a sort of gook.”
1 I borrow this from Surname or Trade Name, the Purpose is the Same, by Edward S. Rogers, American Druggist, March, 1944, p. 95.
2 New Yorker, March 4, 1944, p. 62. “Income-tax prose,” said Simeon Strunsky in Topics of the Times, New York Times, Sept. 22, 1943, “is also a favorite literary style with the men who compose the text on the back of express baggage receipts in which are set down the conditions on which you may expect to get your trunk delivered to the house without yourself landing in jail.”
3 I take this from The OPA and the Common Tongue, by Marcia Winn, printed in the Chicago Tribune during June, 1944.
1 This is from a field manual for quartermasters. The officer who sends it to me suggests that it should have been translated as follows: “Replacements must be kept at a low evel by a rigid system of truck servicing. When emergencies cut off the normal flow of supply, all trucks in the unit, plus those in reserve pools, should be pressed into service by making transfers within the organization.”
2 Coördinator was invented by Herbert Spencer in 1864 to describe the cephalic ganglion in primitive animals. It was used by the New Deal bureaucracy to designate a functionary told off to adjust differences between different agencies. Sometimes a given coördinator had as many as a dozen to deal with.
3 Used to designate a common store, whether of persons or of materials. In Dear Washington, Washington Times-Herald, March 9, 1943, Helen Essary expounded its meaning in the following dialogue:
4 Bottleneck may have been borrowed from England. It was denounced by a contributor to the Bristol Evening Post, April 3, 1943, as causing “a tedium merging on nausea” there.
5 “Of all Washington words,” said James D. White in an Associated Press dispatch from Washington Sept. 18, 1943, “over-all is the most habit-forming. Talk long enough to enough government officials, and you’ll find yourself telling the little woman that she overcooked the Brussels sprouts, but that the overall impact of the dinner was not bad.”
6 White, just cited: “Potomac medicine men say a rationale is an OPA explanation of an OPA order.”
7 Directives are defined in Washington Is What We Make It, by Paul Grabbe, Harper’s Magazine, June, 1944, as “instructions about policy, procedure or conduct, aimed at no one in particular, therefore at everybody.”
8 Pattern also had a vogue in England. It was attacked as “truly monstrous” by A. R. Cripps in the London Times Literary Supplement, July 1, 1944, and defended by Herbert Furst in the same, July 15.
9 White, before cited: “Plateaus are the
thing now. War production is on a plateau, meaning that it is way up and has been up long enough to establish a plateau in the curve of production figures.”
10 White: “Level is a trusted, war-essential word, almost as inescapable as overall. Four levels have been discovered publicly. Biggest distinction is between operational and policy levels. On the operational level you do things. On the policy level you tell others how and why. Bureaucrats on the operational level get their ears pinned back if they speak publicly of things on the policy level.”
11 Grabbe, before cited: “The policymakers must be consulted on everything that is not part of the established routine. Getting their okay is known as clearing on policy, or clearance:’ It will be recalled that “Clear it with Sidney” was a familiar slogan during the 1944 presidential campaign. Sidney was Sidney Hillman, chairman of the CIO’s political action committee. The phrase was apparently first used by President Roosevelt at the time of the Democratic national convention, at which Hillman was told off to act as moderator in the struggle for the vice-presidential nomination. Later the Republican campaign orators sought to make it appear that he was the President’s representative and spokesman in various other fields.
1 White: “Small fry are said to be severed. Not severed from anything, just severed. The big shots withdraw or return to private jobs.”
2 The division of the Bureau of Internal Revenue which sorts out reports from employers of payments to employés is now called the Processing Division.
3 Letter from the Hon. Henry L. Stimson, Secretary of War, to the Hon. Louis Ludlow, congressman from Indiana, Congressional Record, April 17, 1944, p. A1937: “In a recent study of all men processed at reception centers … 20% of the Negroes and 74% of the whites were rated in grades I, II and III.” Memorandum of the War Department Service of Supply, Officer Procurement Service, Feb. 27, 1943, Journal of the American Medical Association, March 13, p. 843: “This memorandum states the procedure … in processing physicians, dentists and veterinarians for appointment as officers.” Headline on an article in the same Journal, June 17, 1944, p. 499: “Processing of Physicians,” i.e., for the Veterans Administration. Female Physicians, same Journal, May 8, 1943: “The procedure for the processing of male physicians [in the Army] will apply to the processing of female physicians.”
1 Headline on an article by Dr. Fred B. Wishard, medical director of the Delco Remy Division of the General Motors Corporation, Journal of the American Medical Association, March 13, 1943, p. 810: “Processing Technics in Physical Examination.” AP Starts Service to Sweden, Finland, Editor and Publisher, April 8, 1944, p. 9: “The Associated Press this week began … the first AP news report processed in a language other than English in the Eastern Hemisphere.” Daily Penalized for Exceeding Paper Quota, Editor and Publisher, Aug. 19, 1944, p. 24: “With two publishing companies already penalized for unauthorized consumption of print paper, the compliance section of the War Production Board is processing several other cases.” Report of the Manuscript Division, New York Public Library, for 1943, p. 53: “The staff at the Central Building has kept up well with current accessions.… In addition to the processing of single items … it put through a collection of personal papers.”
2 Both are flogged in Suggestions to Medical Authors and A[merican] M[edical] A[ssociation] Style Book; Chicago, 1919, p. 9, but in vain. See also The Verb Operate, by Marion L. Morse, American Speech, April, 1930, pp. 287–89. Another shortening, apparently invented by the Army Medical Corps, is to survey out of the service, used in the sense of to retire from the service after a medical survey. It is used twice in Peptic Ulcer, Gastritis and Psychoneurosis, by Hugh Montgomery and others, Journal of the American Medical Association, July 29, 1944, p. 893.
3 This may have been borrowed from the undertakers. The undertakers, become morticians, now use patient themselves.
4 Headline in the Weekly Bulletin of the New York City Department of Health, May 22, 1926, p. 81. Unhappily, to diagnosticate is traced by the NED to 1846 and the more seemly to diagnose no further back than 1861, so the former has seniority, if not beauty.
5 I take most of these from Medical Jargon, by Hobart A. Reimann, Journal of the American Medical Association, May 17, 1941, p. 2335. Dr. Reimann lists many others, and includes a brief bibliography of papers by distinguished medical men protesting against such forms. See also The Decay of Medical Language (editorial), New Zealand Medical Journal, Dec., 1942.
1 Psychoanalysis, in the German form of psychoanalyse, was coined by Sigmund Freud c. 1900. It first appeared in English in 1907. The first International Congress of Psychoanalysis was held in 1907. The popular craze for the new revelation struck the United States in 1912 or thereabout, in succession to Couéism, the Emmanuel Movement and paper-bag cookery.
2 In American Speech, Nov., 1926, p. 95, Edna Heidbreder printed a sheaf of sapphics made up entirely of psychoneurotic terms. See the Jargon of Psychology, by W. Béran Wolfe, Forum, Feb. 1932, pp. 81–85.
3 Some examples of its use are assembled in The Living Language, by Dwight L. Bolinger, Words, Oct., 1937, p. 154, and Jan., 1938, p. 11. The parent noun, allergy, is traced by the NED Supplement to 1913, and allergic to 1925.
4 Weare Holbrook, writing in This Week, quoted in American Speech, Dec., 1936, p. 297, says that reaction became a counter-word in 1935. See also The Jargon of Psychology, by W. Béran Wolfe, Forum, Feb., 1932, pp. 81–85. Lord Tweedsmuir, then Governor-General of Canada, denounced reaction in 1936, but it laughed at him.
5 Used in the sense of to diminish in mental power, to become dull, stale or stagnant. As a legal term to stultify means to escape responsibility by pleading one’s own insanity. In the sense of to make one’s self appear foolish or absurd it is traced by the NED to 1809, and in that of to render nugatory to 1865. The sense in which psychologists use it seems to be peculiar to them. I am indebted here to Miss Nina Ridenour of New York.
6 The NED traces outstanding, in the sense of conspicuous, important, superior, to 1830, but it was little heard in the United States until the gogues began to labor it. In AL4, p. 211, n. 1, I recorded the case of an American superintendent of schools who managed to use it five times on a single page of a book. On Nov. 25, 1940, when Columbia University gave honorary degrees to Bela Bartok, the Hungarian composer; Sir Cecil Thomas Carr, an English lawyer; Dr. Karl T. Compton, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Paul Hazard, a member of the French Academy, Dr. Harry-Morgan Ayres, who presented the candidates to Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, read citations describing Bartok as “a truly outstanding artist,” Compton as “chief administrator of an outstanding institution of scientific training,” and Hazard as the author of “works of outstanding importance.” A derivative noun, stand-out, made its debut in the Jackson Hole Courier (Jackson, Wyo.), Jan. 28, 1943, p. 1. In the Congressional Record, Sept. 15, 1943, p. 7654, col. 1, the variant upstanding appeared. In the literal sense the NED traces it to c. 1000.
1 The plural alone is swagger: the singular does not mark the supergogue.
2 “Educator,” said American Speech, Oct., 1938, p. 235, “has lost vogue.” But educationist has a rival in educationalist.
3 In Word Study, Feb., 1937, p. 3, an anonymous writer (probably the editor, Dr. Max J. Herzberg) reported that the use of creative in such combinations as creative listening and creative janitorial service was launched by a schoolma’am sweating for credits (and a lift in salary) at Teachers College, Columbia, the Vatican of American pedagogy. “She claimed,” says this writer, “that she was entitled to a copyright fee on every employment of it made in educational circles,… and was prepared to collect $173,677 for the use made of the word in Teachers College alone.”
4 There is a long list in Educational Lingo, by Olivia Pound, American Speech, Feb., 1926, pp. 311–14, but many of the terms cited have now been supplanted by later inventions. See also The Language of Modern Education, by Lester K. Ade; Harrisburg (Pa.), 1939, which defines the more seemly pedagogical terms a
nd pays little attention to the trade argot.
5 Some of the euphemisms devised by the latter are listed in AL4, pp. 292–93. More are in The Terminology of Social Workers, by LeRoy E. Bowman, American Speech, June, 1926, pp. 478–80. For the vocabulary of sociologists see Sociological Nomenclature, by Maurice Greer Smith, American Speech, Sept., 1927, pp. 507–08; Jargon, Bulletin of the Associates in the Science of Society at Yale University, May, 1940, pp. 4 and 5; and A Student’s Dictionary of Sociological Terms, by Constantine Panunzio; Berkeley (Calif.), 1941.
1 Speech at the annual meeting of the American Association for Adult Education in New York. See Neil-son Condemns Academic “Jargon,” New York Times, May 22, 1938. An assault directed especially at teachers of English is in The Faculty Style, Saturday Review of Literature, Dec. 18, 1937, p. 8.
1 For long a favorite with bad newspaper reporters, in the general sense of aspect or point of view. Editor and Publisher, Sept. 2, 1944: “Betty-has been writing sports from the feminine angle.… She knows the feature angle as well.” Peter Tamony says, in Angle, San Francisco News Letter and Wasp, June 16, 1939, p. 5, that angle was borrowed from the vocabulary of billiards, along with good break and bad break. It has reached England, and I find the following in The Commoner’s New Forest, by F. E. Kenchington; London, 1943 (reviewed in the London Times Literary Supplement, Jan. 22, 1944). “ My angle … is that in any part of England’s green and pleasant land the rights of the folk,” etc. See The Supplement to O.E.D., by George G. Loane, London Times Literary Supplement, March 8, 1934, p. 162.
2 Another journalistic pet, used in the sense of continuous, regular, habitual, persistent, etc. Editor and Publisher, March 25, 1944: “Hygeia has been a consistent advertiser in women’s, medical and baby magazines.” Counting in consistently, the term is here used four times in one column. Associated Press dispatch from Mauch Chunk, Pa., June 12, 1939: “To clear up certain consistent rumors,” etc. In such senses consistent is old in England, but it fell out of use in the Seventeenth Century. Who revived it in the United States, and when, I do not know.
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