Status, Preeminence, and Promiscuity

A Bawdy Language: How a Second-Rate Language Slept Its Way to the Top. By Howard Richler. Toronto: Stoddart, 1999. Pp. xiii + 208

This book is a compilation and reorganization of articles from Richler's column in the Gazette newspaper of Montreal, Quebec, though some new material appears in parts 1 and 2. Styled for the reading public, the book excludes standard scholarly aids like indexes and bibliographies. Nevertheless, Richler relies heavily on research from myriad sources. This approach may be an emerging trend. Nichols (1999), in her review of Wolfram and Schilling-Estes (1997), observes that Hoi Toide is a "book on linguistics for the public" and then asks, "About how many of the books in our libraries can we say this?" Of course, research into bawdiness has a certain compelling quality, and Richler's entertaining and witty style may be enjoyed by anyone. His mock-serious revelation at the end of chapter 3 is typical: "The [lexical] progeny of a pheasant and a duck would be . . . a deasant, of course" (18).

Richler's general thesis is that the prominence of English as the world's lingua franca is a result not only of the overwhelming global presence of Britain and the United States over the last few centuries but also of the English language's willingness to absorb words and phrases from a multiplicity of sources without worrying about retaining its purity. In adopting a skeptical posture toward attempts to keep language pure, journalist Richler is working in the tradition of linguists like Mencken, who, in The American Language (1979), devoted a whole chapter to condemning English attitudes toward American linguistic "barbarisms." Observed Mencken, "In language an Americanism is generally regarded as obnoxious ipso facto and when a pungent new one begins to force its way into English usage the guardians of the national linguistic chastity belabor it" (31). While Richler's book provides ample evidence that the success of English is partly because it was a language that "slept its way to the top," the last two sections, parts 5 and 6, move away from that general theme. Part 6 reviews some of the word games that have occurred in English throughout its history and ends by providing the reader with challenging language puzzles, riddles, and fill-in-the-blank exercises of the type available in airport bookstores.

In short chapters (two to four pages long) the other parts of the book discuss the "impure" conditions of English that have contributed to its rise. Each chapter culls the most bizarre and entertaining oddities pertaining to its topic rather than providing exhaustive scholarly discussions. The number of chapters in each part varies from five in part 5 to nine in part 4. These sections and chapters may be read in any order without sacrificing understanding, an organizational feature that may appeal to the reading public and enhance the book's general popularity.

Part 1 is devoted to a discussion of "the strength of English," by which Richler means its flexibility in adopting slang, portmanteau blends, colorful jargon, and words created out of new endeavors and occupations. An example is the phrase exit bag, which Richler traces to 1997 when it arose in connection with assisted suicide. Exit bag was an American Dialect Society word of the year, and Richler features some of the more unusual ones to emerge in the 1990s, like the self-explanatory starter marriage from 1995 and urban camping, a euphemism for homelessness, from 1996. Having ingratiated himself with the reader by appealing to contemporary linguistic innovations, Richler then freely explores more historical portmanteau words like Shakespeare's glaze, a blend of glare and gaze, and Herman Melville's snivelization, coined in 1849 from snivel and civilization (17). Illogical combinations like alcoholic are covered in chapter 2: "An alcoholic is not addicted to 'alco' but to 'alcohol'" (15). The contributions of slang form the topic of chapter 4, and part 1 ends with a brief discussion of the illogical and hypocritical nature of linguistic "purity" and...