A great part of the show's success must be attributed to the personality and power of the main character as interpreted by the incomparable Carroll O'Connor, who exited the earthly stage this past June 21. The series has so touched the hearts and minds of the American viewing public that the name Archie Bunker has entered our language as the label for a lovable blue-collar ignoramus.
In the grand tradition of William Shakespeare's Doll Tearsheet and Richard Sheridan's Mrs. Malaprop, and the modern school of Dizzy Dean, Samuel Goldwyn, Yogi Berra, and Howard Cossell, Archie Bunker is also renowned for unfailingly tripping over his tongue. His word choice is so "legionary" that his hilarious tongue tangles have come to be called Bunkerisms. To use the great man's "epaulet," the name Bunker and the humorously illiterate misuse of words are like "to peas in a pot." Trust me, the following genuine, authentic, certified, and unretouched Bunkerisms ain't no "science friction" or "frigment" of my imagination:
© Richard Lederer
In the past two excerpts, I've let the cat out of the bag and made a feline for cat words. Now here are some statements about the felines hiding in our language.
In some cases the cat in a word or expression meows clearly. In other cases a cat jumps out from a phrase and catches us by surprise. In a caterpillar, for example, hides "a hairy cat," from the Norman French word catepelose.
What did one cat say to the other while watching a tennis match? "My mother's in that racket." Har, har -- but before aelurophiles experience a high-strung gut reaction, they should know that catgut is a misnomer. Cats aren't killed to manufacture the tough cords for violins and tennis strings; catgut is actually made from the intestines of sheep, and sometimes horses and mules.
Various theories explain the name of the child's game cat's cradle. It may be a reworking of cratch-cradle, the manger cradle in which Christ was born. or a corruption of cratch, a medieval word for hayrack, dating back to 1300. Cratch was, even before this, a verb meaning "to seize, snatch, grab," so maybe the cratching or grabbing of the string became the cat in the name. Then again, kittens playing with a ball of yarn may have suggested the play of children.
Other questions that follow refer to a word or phrase bears no relationship to the word cat beyond a mere coincidence of spelling. But each word or word grouping in the game you are about to play does begin with the letters c-a-t, and these letters are pronounced exactly like the name of the animal, as in "This cat throws rocks at castles: catapult":
The poet Carl Sandburg wrote, "The fog comes in on little cat feet." So does a large litter of our words and expressions. Let's categorize the cats that run and leap and pounce and slink and purr and meow through our English language. I hope you'll find them to be, in the idiom of the roaring twenties, the cat's meow, the cat's pajamas, and the cat's whiskers, so called because the cat is capable of looking enormously pleased and satisfied.
It is both ironic and telling that an animal without the power of human speech has made such significant contributions to our language. There abound a number of explanations for it's raining cats and dogs, including the fact that felines and canines were closely associated with the rain and wind in northern mythology. In Odin days, dogs were often pictured as the attendants of Odin, the storm god, and cats were believed to cause storms. But the true source appears to be quite literal: During heavy rains in 17th-century England some city streets became raging rivers of filth carrying many drowned cats and dogs.
Not long ago, city slickers had to beware of buying a pig in a poke from a country slicker who wasn't in any way a country bumpkin. The animals inside such pokes were sometimes cats the canny country folk had substituted for suckling pigs. When the merchant opened the poke, he often let the cat out of the bag, revealing the crafty farmer's secret. When the cat ran off, the city bumpkin was left holding the bag.
When a cat is attacked by a dog or other animals, it aggressively arches its back, a response that suggested the phrase to get one's back up to describe humans aroused into anger. On the other paw, cats are often pictured as grinning. Charles Ludwidge Dodgson, best known to the world as Lewis Carroll, popularized the Cheshire cat in his children-of-all-ages classic, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). The Cheshire cat in the story gradually faded from Alice's view, its smile being the last part of the animal to vanish. To grin like a Cheshire cat goes back before Carroll, and the source could be Cheshire cheeses, which were at one time molded in the form of a cat. Another theory contends that the cat grins because the former palantine of Cheshire once had regal privileges in England, paying no taxes to the crown.
An old British expression advised that "There's more than one way of killing a cat than choking it with cream." This implied that a method of doing something was rather foolish, since cats like cream and wouldn't be able to choke to death on it. But the saying changed to there's more than one way to skin a cat and gradually took on its present meaning -- that there are more ways than one of accomplishing something.
How did we get the expression that forms the title of this column? I'm glad I asked me that because the answer is a purr- fect example of how words wander wondrously.
Both the droopy pussy willow and the tall, reedlike cattail are so called for their resemblance to a cat's freely swinging tail. Because of that visual similarity and because it "scratched" the back like a cat, some black humorist coined the name cat-o'-nine- tails for the terrible whip. In addition, the first Egyptian scourges were made of thongs of cat hide.
Cats have long been regarded as tenacious of life because of their careful, suspicious nature and because they are supple animals that can survive long falls. The Old English saying a cat has nine lives goes back well before the sixteenth century, and the nine "tails" of the whip being similar to the nine lives of a cat might have suggested the full name cat-'o-nine tails. The anticipation of a beating by the cruel cat-o'-nine-tails, often shortened to the cat, could paralyze a victim into silence. That's why "Has the cat got your tongue?" came to mean "Are you unable to speak?"
In ancient Egypt, cats were worshiped as gods and killing one was punishable by death. In the Middle Ages, the pagan associations of cats caused them to become outcasts. Today cats have made a spectacular comeback as America's pet of choice.
But whatever the status of cats, their mysterious aloofness, their prowess as hunters, their elegant grace and supple agility and their kittenish curiosity are all recorded in our everyday speech and writing. Whatever their ups and downs, cats have usually landed on their feet and have left their paw prints on our mother tongue.
Herewith I present the first of three columns in which, quick as a cat, I make a feline for cat words in our English language.
The words cat and pussy derive from the Latin and Anglo Saxon names for the animal -- cattus and puus. In some African languages, a man is referred to as a cat, which in American slang gives us the likes of cool cat, hepcat and fat cat.
Cats have kittens, and so does our English language. Kitty- cornered issues from "cater-cornered," which comes from "quatre- cornered," which in French originally meant "four-cornered." By a process called folk etymology, speakers thought that in "quatre- cornered" they were hearing an analogy to a certain domestic feline. In the card game of faro the tiger was the bank or house, possibly because the tiger was once used on signs marking the entrance to Chinese gambling houses. Over the years gamblers transformed the tiger into a kitty, and it became the name for the pot in poker and other card games. Thus, when one contributes to the common store of betting money, one sweetens (or fattens) the kitty.
When the pussycat is absent (or taking a catnap), the mice have free run of the place, and when the cat's away, the mice will play, a proverb that reposes in many languages. Cats, of course, have long been belled to prevent them from killing songbirds, but the expression to bell the cat, meaning "to take on a dangerous mission at great personal risk for the benefit of others," derives from the observation of a wise mouse.
In one of Aesop's fables, the mice held a general council to consider what measures they could take to outwit their common enemy, the Cat. A young mouse stood up and said: "I propose that a small bell be procured, and attached by a ribbon around the neck of the Cat. By this means we should always know when the Cat is in the neighborhood." The proposal was met with general applause, until an old mouse rose and said, "That's all very well, but who will bell the cat?" The mice looked around at one another, and nobody spoke.
On the subject of cat-and-mouse games, we find a curious relationship between social history and phrase origins. Surprisingly, feminists arrested during the suffragette agitation in England in about 1913 inspired the first popular use of the expression to play cat and mouse with. When imprisoned, the suffragettes often went on hunger strikes, and the British Parliament retaliated by passing the "Prisoners' Temporary Discharge for Ill-Health Act." The bill provided that hunger strikers be set free while fasting, but, when they recovered, they were liable for rearrest to complete their sentences. Critics compared the government's action to a big cat playing with a little mouse and dubbed the legislation "The Cat-and-Mouse Act," which entered common parlance as to play cat and mouse with.
Harking back to its larger and fiercer ancestors, many cats have a passion for chipmunks, field mice, birds and other outdoor animals. They proudly deposit the corpses at their owners' doorsteps or behind and under furniture, a practice that gave rise, about 1920, to the expression looking like something the cat dragged in. While cats are valued for hunting pests, they do not always discriminate among their prey, and the cat that goes after its owner's prized pet bird may be in for a good scolding. To look like the cat that ate the canary originally meant to look guilty, but nowadays means to appear smug and self-satisfied.
Does this means that the Company prepares tax returns that are more complex (which is how most consumers interpreted the claim) or that it prepares a greater quantity of complex tax returns? Grammatically, does the adjective "more" modify "complex" or "returns"?
Challenged by the New York State Society of CPAs, an H&R Block assistant vice president said that the company defines "complex" as individual returns with schedules. He added that the qualification "makes it clear that H&R Block does not purport to prepare tax returns that are more complex than the tax returns prepared by CPA firms."
Whether by accident or on purpose, H&R Block ended up with an ambiguous statement that just happened to serve their bottom line.
Such corporate doublespeak harks back "L.I.A.R.," a little book by Robert Thornton that appeared more than a decade ago. Like the H&R Block ad, "L.I.A.R." demonstrates that language can fly in the face of the physical law that says two things can't occupy the same space at the same time. In fact, two entirely opposite meanings can do just that.
Writing letters of recommendation is no easy task. For one thing, it is exceedingly difficult to honestly evaluate a person with whom you have worked closely, whom you have taught or near whom you have lived. And these days your statements may not be confidential. The person you are recommending can exercise a legal right to read your letter - and can even sue you if the contents offend his or her sensibilities or are insufficiently substantiated.
Don't despair. A solution is at hand in the form of "L.I.A.R.," a bacronym for "Lexicon of Intentionally Ambiguous Recommendations." Thornton's loopy guidebook uses cleverly ambiguous phrases to steer a sane course between the Scylla of the desire to write an honest, informative recommendation and the Charybdis of the wrath of the recommendee and the threat of a lawsuit.
Now it is possible to write statements about a candidate's personal qualities, work habits, and motivation that are guaranteed litigation-proof because they can be interpreted both positively and negatively.
If the candidate has been habitually absent from work, for example, you can write, "A man like him is hard to find," which can mean either "He disappears frequently" or "He is an unusually fine employee." If she is afflicted with alcohol or drug problems, "She was always high in my opinion" or "We remember the hours she spent working with us as happy hours" or "I would say that her real talent is getting wasted at his current job" will do the ambiguous trick.
What to say about an employee with a criminal background? Try "He's a man of many convictions" or "She has a long and notable record" or "While he worked with us, he was given many citations" or "Give her the opportunity and she will forge a name for herself."
If you want to fudge just plain incompetence on the job, slip in any of these pushme-pullyou testimonials from "L.I.A.R.," each of which manages to praise and damn at the same time:
© Richard Lederer
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