28/2/92

Language Lover’s Leap

THE PLAY OF WORDS: Fun and Games For Language Lovers by Richard Lederer. New York, Pocket Books. 274 pp. $9

Okay, word lovers, you've bought the book, now, have fun. Real fun. Got a pencil? Good. Activate your thinking cap, this first question is a toughie. Fill in the missing word: "Not my cup of ------." Think, people, think! You need a hint? This zinger is in the chapter on food metaphors. Tick, tick, tick. Time is running out, folks, c'mon, think! Not my cup of chicken soup? Gnocchi? Tunafish? Cholent? Ding! You didn't get it, but hey, wasn't that exhilarating?
    The cover says it is a book of "Fun and Games for Language Lovers," a "delightful volume of linguistic revelry," " ... a collection of matchless semantic antics." For a six year old, maybe, or a hostage with nothing to do.
    From the very first mind-bender ("------ of a needle") there are 478 such linguistic revelries - in the first 66 pages alone. It goes on and on and ---.
    The author's enthusiasm for boredom is unrelenting for more than half the book, with rare bits of lexical lore scattered among the long, feckless lists. I actually did start out with a pencil and thought I'd give it the old college try, but within moments I was seized by a traumatic deja vu, and I was doing homework again for Miss Brown, founder of the Talmud Torah Terror-Teaching Method.
    Oddly, after over 150 pages of almost unrelenting tedium, it seems author Richard Lederer ran out of bad ideas and was forced to come up with some pretty dandy stuff.
There's a chapter on thingamajigs, doodads and whatchamacallits, in which you have to identify the names of the world's most obscure gizmos. Some I knew (the plastic tip of a shoelace: aglet), some I didn't (windowpane frame: muntin), but this time I rather enjoyed the challenge of matching them up. Likewise the body parts (the bone separating the nostrils: vomer; the thin muscle under the tongue: frenulum).
    The list of 50 phobias includes one I don't know how I've lived this long without having used in casual conversation (fear of computers: logizomechanicophobia). However, the list lacks my two favorite phobias: arachibutyrophobia: the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth; and medectaphobia: the fear of the contours of one's penis showing through one's pants (you shouldn't know from such things).
    At this stage, near the end of the book, I began to get a little sweaty with the excitement of discovery, as the fellow who chanced upon the Thousand Islands must have felt. Now I was perfectly happy to be matching left and right columns. William Claude Dukenfield, Doris von Kappelhoff, Arnold Dorsey, Cherilyn LaPierre, Maurice J. Micklewhite, Marion Michael Morrison: famous people, all of them. I peeked at the answers to get their stage names: W.C. Fields, Doris Day, Engelbert Humperdinck, Cher, Michael Caine, John Wayne.
    Lederer spins a set of fascinating histories of words derived from place names, stuff Miss Brown never taught me. I particularly like this one:
    "The inhabitants of an ancient Greek city were noted for their ability to say a lot in a few words. During a siege of their capital, a Roman general sent a note to this city's commander warning that if the Romans captured the city, they would burn it to the ground. From within the city gates came back the terse reply: 'If!' The city's name lives on in an adjective that describes spare speech." The city was Laconia, he wrote laconically.
    Perhaps the best section is the list culled from the files of the Committee on Public Doublespeak, a no-nonsense arm of the (US) National Council of Teachers of English. (I could hazard a guess that Miss Brown is a flag-waving activist on the committee. "You failed again," she used to tell me in no uncertain terms. "You're stupid," she would explain, not hiding behind diplomatic euphemisms. )
    Lederer provides 60 samples of treacherous doublespeak taken from the media, alongside a column of translations into honest English. Some preselected representational illustrative specificities (i.e., examples): form persuader (translation: girdle); interdental stimulator (toothpick); genuine imitation (fake); non-goal-oriented member of society (bum); entropy control engineer (janitor); nonpositively terminated (fired); reclassified (fired); outplaced (fired); deselected (fired); for your convenience (for our convenience); permanent prehostility (peace); governmental unconsolidation (overthrow); collateral casualties (civilian deaths); pre-dawn vertical insertion (invasion with parachutes); memorial park (cemetery); negative patient-care outcome (death); death situation (death); therapeutic misadventure (malpractise); tax reform (tax increase); user's fee (tax); negative investment increment (loss).
    Like the saying goes, the only sure things in life are negative patient-care outcome and user's fees.