Vol. 4 No. 2 July 1985

The Centre for English Cultural

Tradition and Language

THE CENTRE FOR ENGLISH CULTURAL TRADITION AND LANGUAGE The Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language is a research institution which acts as a national repository for material on all aspects of language and cultural tradition throughout the British Isles. Located at the University of Sheffield, where it forms part of the Department of English Language, it has close links with the Department of Linguistics and the Division of Continuing Education at the University and also the Departments ofFolklore, English and Linguistics at the Memorial University of Newfoundland

The Centre aims to stimulate interest in language and cultural tradition, encourage the collecting and recording of traditional material through individual contributors, societies and organisations, colleges and schools, and provide a forum for discussion on all aspects oflanguage and tradition. Through its Archives, the Centre ccroperates with local libraries, museums, record offices, societies and organisations, to draw attention to our traditional heritage through publications, courses, lectures, displays and exhibitions.

Material gathered in the form of taperecordings, written reports, questionnaires, manuscripts, books and printed sources, and items of material culture, is deposited in the Centre's Archives, providing a basic resource for reference and research. The Archives include a reference library ofbooks, periodicals, original monographs, dissertations, pamphlets, and ephemera In addition the Audiovisual section of the Archive includes photographs, slides and illustrations as well as some 2,000 audicr tapes and over 600 films and videotapes. The Archives include detailed information on regional and social dialects, slang and colloquialism, blason populaire, occupational vocabulary, proverbs and sayings. In the area of folklore studies the Centre holds a substantial body of data on childlore, custom and belief, traditional music, dance and drama

Special collections include: the Russell Wortley Collection (traditional dance and custom); the Edgar M Wagner Collection (European folkdance and topographical films); the Richard Blakeborough Collection (Yorkshire folklore and local history); the Geoffrey Bullough Collection (nineteenth century literature); microfilms of the Alex Helm, Maurice Barley and james Maddison Carpenter collections (traditional drama and custom); copies of the papers of Thomas Fairman Ordish (traditional drama); recordings and copies of field notebooks for the English and Welsh section of the Atlas Linguarum Europae; copies of the workbooks for the Survey of English Dialects.

The Centre's Museum includes a wide variety of items representative of urban and rural traditional occupations, pastimes, arts and crafts. Special collections include basketmaking, knifegrinding, silversmithing and filecutting, in addition to handicrafts, costume and domestic equipment. A selection of exhibitions is available for hire.

In association with colleges of education, schools and other interested groups and individuals throughout the British Isles, the Centre sponsors and directs numerous projects in the general field of children's language and folklore such as the role of tradition in teaching linguistic and social skills to children. In addition a systematic investigation of traditional verbal social controls is being conducted- attention being concentrated on the verbal constraints used by adults in controlling the behaviour of children.

Material is being assembled for a wide range of projects in the field of traditional drama, with special reference to geographical distribution and textual variation, context of performance and the influence of chapbook texts. A close liaison with the Traditional Drama Research Group has also been established

The Archives continue to gather information on occupational vocabularies and traditions, calendar and social customs and the rites of passage and on various aspects of belief, traditional health systems, and the lore of cosmic phenomena, plants and animals. Folk narratives, anecdotes and jokes are also well representated In the field offolklife the Centre is conducting a nationwide study of the traditional lore and language offood. Bibliographies and machine-readable files are being prepared on various aspects of English language and tradition.

An extensive publication programme has also been developed, including a journal Lore and Language, a series of research guides, facsimiles, bibliographies, community studies and conference papers. There is also a series of occasional publications, and the recently inaugurated Folklore Research Register, which is published annually.

The Centre contributes to both the postgraduate and undergraduate programmes in the Department of English Language at the University ofSheffield The Department offers undergraduate courses in Folklore and Contemporary English, and postgraduate students may read for the degrees of M.A. in Modem English Language and English Cultural Tradition (by examination and dissertation) and M Phil and Ph.D. in Language and/ or Folklore (by dissertation). The Centre is also actively involved in the MA. Course in Mrican Studies offered by the Department ofEnglish Literature, and has responsibility for the University Certificate Course in English Cultural Tradition offered by the Division of Continuing Education.

Each year a variety of conferences is sponsored by the Centre. In addition to hosting the annual Traditional Drama Conference, it has hosted conferences on Fieldwork in Folklore and Oral History; Language Varieties; Perspectives on Contemporary Legend; 13th Meeting of the European Ballad Commission.

WORKING WITH AND THROUGH CECTAL The Centre relies greatly on voluntary help at all levels. If you are interested in any aspects of the Centre's activities you are invited to write for further information to: The Director, Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language, The University of Sheffield, Sheffield, SlO 2TN. (Tel: 0742-78555, Ext.6296).

ME ORIAL UNIV SJTY OF r'EWFOUr~DLANV DE A EN OF FOLKLOR

Vol. 4 No. 2 July 1985

Contents

Rhymes and Songs for Halloween and Bonfire Night

Folk Etymology: Remarks on Linguistic Problem-Solving and who does it

Sustaining the Traditions of Police Work: A ~ociological Analysis

Hunter and Hunting in Yoruba Folklore

A Semantic Universal?

Just for Fun: Children's Playground Songs from Derbyshire

Reviews

Index to Volume 4 Uanuary and July 1985)

Ervin Beck 1

William Kirwin 18

Simon Holdaway 25

J Olowo Ojoade 36

Ellis Evans 55

Alan Teece 68

84

131

The Centre for English Cultural Tradition and language

©

. .. .. ~ : .. ·. :~

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The Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language, University of Sheffield, 1985

ISSN 0307 - 7144

No part of this journal may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission from the Editor.

Rhymes and Songs for Halloween and Bonfire Night

Ervin Beck

A survey of Sheffield schoolchildren in the autumn of 1981 elicited - among other information reported on elsewhere 1

- an interesting set of rhymes and songs currently being used by children for Halloween and Guy Fawkes activities. The collection printed below documents the repertoire of children's autumnal seasonal rhymes within the north-western part of the Sheffield Metropolitan District. In doing so, it characterises the tastes and usages of a specific local tradition in the same way that the Opies ' work did , although in a more general manner, for the nation as a whole about twenty five years ago. 2 In addition, the present collection adds a few hitherto unrecorded traditional items, prints for the first time rhymes and songs that accompany the new trick-or-treat convention at Halloween, supplies tunes for the rhymes that are sung, and clarifies the way children learn, use, and transmit these materials.

Most of the rhymes printed and commented upon here have clearly entered into the local folk tradition. They have been transmitted orally from person to person; they have developed significant variants; and they are actually used - spoken, chanted or sung - by child informants at special times during Halloween and Guy Fawkes celebrations. Occasionally, items are also included that do not possess all of these features but that either appear to be traditional materials or suggest new traditions in the making.

Depending on their topical reference, they are classified as " Halloween" or "Guy Fawkes" rhymes and presented in that order. As will be noted, however, children tend to disregard such categories and use some of the rhymes interchangeably. They apparently regard them as rhymes for the season, rather than rhymes for different days.

Halloween

The most traditional song used in Halloweening is the "caking" song - usually pronounced "cakin" and often spelled "kaking". This is found especially among children in the villages served by the Bolsterstone and Bradfield schools, where house­to-house visitation accompanied by singing by the child visitors and by gift-giving by the adult householders is a longstanding tradition, usually thought to be associated with November 1st, the eve of All Souls' Day. 3 As I have discussed elsewhere, 4

however, the gradually increasing importance of October 31st, or Halloween, as a time for children's nocturnal activity - whether mischief- or solicitation of gifts -has tended to move the caking convention away from November 1st and toward

1

October 31st. Consequently, the caking song is being regarded as a Halloween song much more than it used to be.

The typical version from the village of Stannington resembles the caking song that the Opies recorded for nearby Stocksbridge (p.299) and the Christmas song that they recorded for other parts of England (pp.307-8):

Cake, cake, copper, copper. Cake, cake, copper, copper. Have you got a penny For the old man's hat? If you haven't got a penny A hapenny will do. If you haven't got a hapenny, God bless you.

Nicola Ball, eleven, Bradfield Comprehensive School.

A student from Worrall knows a variant line that adapts the traditional rhyme to the more threatening convention of trick-or-treat (discussed below):

If you haven't got a hapenny, A window' II go through.

Hellen Bullivant, sixteen, Bradfield Comprehensive School.

The children in the survey who use this rhyme do not sing it to a tune. Rather, they tend to chant the first few lines in a sing-song fashion and then recite the rest, as Nicola did. She delivered her rhyme with a crisp, strictly observed rhythm. Although she began her recitation with a kind of tune, it eventually levelled off to normal speech patterns. The transcription that follows indicates the approximate pitches touched on in her performance, with the concluding A being her basic reciting tone.

~; P! I I I I * .,.. .. • ::;. -:;:. + • :;: ;. -::; + .. :;. ~· CQ~ , coy-per, ecp-rcr . HM ~~'~ j"t a p~n-~ fer & t~ ld rra\, h.t '?

® 1 \ tl J] E I , r ' r I I I I I l I I I t , I + 1- .,.. :;.':i- - - * ...... ~ • .... .... -If- * ... +-* .. '"* "*

..,_ ~ ~· tlV- en't 1ct o ptl\- "~' Azt h ' ' w,ll do . If ~ , av- f"'t crt AI' ho ' ' ~ !*Jj t'&U 1. a. r~ -p~ ,

2

Even this kind of sing-song chant is enough to prompt many children to call it a "song" and to say that they "sing" it. Indeed, one alternative local name for the caking activity is "singing", or even "bonfire singing", whereby the children link their Halloween activity with the Guy Fawkes Day, or Bonfire Night, activities that follow a few days later on N ovem her 5th.

A version of the caking song used in the nearby village of Loxley is longer, more nonsensical and more witty than the Stannington version:

Cake, cake, cake. Copper, copper, copper. Oil aboiler roaster, A bit of bread and toaster. Hole in my stocking, Hole in my shoe, Hole in my hat Where my hair peeps through. If you haven't got a copper, Silver will do. If you haven't got a silver, God bless you.

Joanne Frost, eleven, Bradfield Comprehensive School.

Other Loxley variants have "Oil, a boil, a roaster" for line three and "Side of bread and toaster" for line four. One child explains the logic of the first four lines of this variant by saying that the householder gives the child visitor either a cake (hence, "Cake, cake, cake") or money ("Copper, copper, copper") or something else ("A bit of bread and toaster"). Other children hesitate to speculate on the meaning of the "Oil aboiler roaster" lines.

In the village of Bolsterstone, the Loxley variant is sometimes used with the lines, "All in my stocking, I All in my shoe", which is the wording recorded by A Wortley in Sheffield around 1900. 5 The Bolsterstone variant, which is shorter and less witty than the Loxley song, normally begins with, "Kay Kay Kay. Kay Kay Kay." These words represent, of course, a reinterpretation of the traditional "Cake, cake, cake", as a result of the now lost association between what children do and the "soul cakes" earlier given house-visitors in exchange for their promise to say prayers for the dead on November 2nd, All Souls Day. Most children today who say "Kay kay kay" are unaware of the connection between their nonsense word and its standard English origin. When asked whether she goes "caking", one eleven-year-old girl said that she did not, but then soon added that she does go "kay-kaying". The only Bolsterstone child who ventured to explain what "Kay kay kay" means said that it meant, "Oh! Oh! Oh!", which transforms the opening exclamation into a woeful preface to the complaint, "Hole in my stocking, hole in my shoe."

3

Loxley children chant the rhyme before knocking on the door at Halloween. As Lorraine, twelve, put it: "We sing it, knock on the letter box, and the person comes." Other children sing their version of the song after they knock or when the householder opens the door. Paul , ten, of Bolsterstone sings his on Halloween before people open the door. "And then we run away," he says. The caking song is used almost exclusively by children in the small villages covered by the study, where caking has been a traditional autumnal activity. It was reported by only one pupil living in a densely settled residential area of Sheffield proper. Apparently children who go trick-or­treating do not use this song.

As I have discussed elsewhere, 6 trick-or-treat is similar to caking, except that the children say, "Trick or treat", to the householder, thereby giving him the option of presenting gifts of money or sweets (i.e., a treat) or of becoming the victim of a mischievous prank played upon him by his spurned visitors (i.e., a trick). Most children who go trick-or-treating apparently use no more poetry than the alliterative greeting­threat, "Trick or treat", in presenting themselves at the door. A substantial minority, however, say or sing additional things, perhaps because they sense that the standard utterance is too short or too blunt to use by itself in initiating a meeting that, the children hope, will end in the giving of gifts. The rhymes that they use are either coinages, borrowings from the United States, or adaptations from books or televised materials.

One set of rhymes is basically expansions and variations of the phrase, "Trick or treat". One has clearly been adapted from children in the United States, which is also the presumed source for the trick-or-treat convention itself:

Trick or treat Or smell my feet Or roll your dustbin Down the street.

Claire Smith, twelve, Tapton Comprehensive School.

Catherine Ainsworth reports a similar rhyme used in the United States: "Trick or treat I Smell our feet. I We want something I Good to eat." 7 Claire learned the rhyme from a friend in Barnsley, Yorkshire, and recites it in her normal voice "as soon as the people open the door'' on Halloween.

Another rhyme may also be related to American materials:

Trick or treat. Trick or treat. You give us a sweet. Trick or treat.

Beverly Perkins, ten, Hallam Middle School.

4

Beverly learned this rhyme from a friend about five years ago. A variant using the line, "A penny or sweets", is also known by a boy who moved to Sheffield from the United States. Two other " trick or treat" rhymes were created by Sheffield children for their own use, but have apparently not been adopted by other children, despite their obvious appeal :

Trick or treat. Stand and deliver.

Andrew Spriggs, twelve, Wisewood Comprehensive School.

Andrew made up this rhyme for 1981 but felt comfortable in using it only at two houses where he knew the people very well. The second line comes from the song by the same title, as sung in 1981 by the pop music group, Adam and the Ants.

Trick or treat. Treat or trick. Come on out And take your pick.

Beverly A. Knight, ten, Wisewood P. and I. School.

Beverly made up this rhyme two years ago and says it to people "before they open the door on Halloween night".

Materials readily available in books and the mass media are contributing some of the most important materials to children's Halloween activities. One example of an apparently "literary" poem that has made its way into oral tradition for Halloween is a rhyme reported to have been used in the informant's family for four generations:

Ghosts, witches, all creepy things Look so scary to be wind.

Lucretia Norman, eight, Hallam Middle School.

On the suggestion of her mother, Lucretia and her friends recited these lines at the end of the Halloween play, "Mistress in Distress", which they composed in 1981 and acted out in Lucretia's home and the home of a friend.

The most popular rhyme for Halloweening seems to be the song, "Witches of Halloween", which has been popularised through its use on the BBC 1V programme, ''Words and Pictures''. Children report having learned the song from the televised broadcast, from its videotaped reshowing in schoolrooms, or directly from school teachers or friends . The original version of the song, as composed by Cynthia Raza, is as follows: 8

5

\Vitcl1es of Hallo,veei1 ~_:~­~-4- J

We're

Am

wit- che~ of II:~ I - low - een -Woo - oo.

r ug - li - est you've cv - er seen- Woo - oo.

Dm Am

The

We

~--=r--=r-=r~~==='?i:=p==tR==r"'=r:::=J --r~lEJ ny 0!- round :Jt night And give you such :! frirht .

wit · - c-he~

~~ - - - :~~ -~ of lla! l'l'n -- \\'oo - oo .

\\ ' c · rc wit dw< of I·Ld lnwccn - \\' oo-oo, The uglit·q ynu'\-c ever ~tTn - \\'oo-no. \\'c fh· :around ;'11 night ,\nd gin· ynu ~urh a fri'-~ht, \\'c'11 · Will lw~ of I Ldlo\\ ITI1 - - \\' o11-011 .

\\' r··,, ''itrlw< rof ll :t!J.,,,crn- \\ 'no-on, ()ur facn an · r·n,nh·d ;tnd gn·cn -- \\'po-oo, \\' r h:wr bl.tl'k pointc·d hats .'\11d \\'irb·d wirrlw: • r;tl-" . \\-c'rc · witl'l•· · ~ cof ll.dl""' ·c·n \\'on-r•o .

Of course, few schoolchildren reproduce this text and tune perfectly in their informal use of it during Halloween activities. Variants abound. For instance, other forms of line two include, "They are all dirty and green" and "And we're known to be very dim". Other versions of lines three and four are, "We'll scare you in the night I And give you such a fright" and "We'll hide on the stair I And chase you everywhere". The greatest variation in the tune occurs in the third phrase, and is illustrated by the performance of Rachel Drake, nine, of Hallam Middle School:

/3' ~-~~?F---3~_.-EL~J~.~g~--~F-~1=~~~--~ .~J~J~t~ •------"'-----=-"'-~----------------.- - - . -- • - -- ~ . • --

\Je f\~ a- rounJ at hi~kt , A"d ~i~ yu ~11 '' ~;j~~ --- ----- - .- -------- ---- - --- - . -- --- -

---- - --- -------

6

In addition to the complex rhythmic and musical features to be commented on later, the facts of the song's composition and transmission by television obviously place it within academic or popular, rather than folk, culture. Even so, in content and imagery it is not far removed from a traditional Halloween verse recorded in Scotland by the Opies (p.297):

This is the nicht o' Halloween When the witches can be seen, Some are black and some are green, And some the colour o' a turkey bean. 9

Children, of course, are undisturbed - perhaps even pleased - by the song's origin in mass media. Attracted by its catchy tune and its concern for witches, which so fascinates them about Halloween, children are in the process of adopting it and transforming it into something of their own creation. Although they know other similar Halloween songs from classroom or television, this is the only one to be both widely reported and to have developed a significant number of variants.

Many children sing this song before people open the door on Halloween night. "Because people like to hear it", Deborah says. "Because I am quite shy of singing to somebody's face", says Vanessa, eleven. "To attract attention", says Sharon, fourteen. Deborah learned this song six years ago while trick-or-treating with her family. She says, "When we went trick-a-treating some boys were singing a different one and when they heard it (her song) they began to sing it". Lisa, twelve, has known the song for seven years and "taught this rhyme to my friends by writing it down and then I asked them to sing it to me and I sing it to them afterwards".

Mark, seven, sings the song while he walks around scaring people a~ their windows. Lisa also sings the song "just before we light the bonfire" on Bonfire Night; Natalie, nine, uses the song "when I go Halloween singing, and sometimes I sing it at bonfire night when we stand around the bonfire".

Other songs of similar style, content, and provenance are sung by Sheffield children while Halloweening. Although they have often been learned from other children, they usually can be traced back to a television programme or someone's teacher. Unlike "The Witches of Halloween", they have not been in circulation long enough or widely enough to have developed significant variants. The inventory of such songs that follows - identified by their first lines - may represent oral tradition in an early stage of development:

"Halloween's coming, Halloween's coming"; "There was an old witch, believe it if you can"; "One fine night in a witch's cabin"; "A witch has a long black hat"; "Five little pumpkins sitting on a wall"; "Three wee witches came to my door"; "The witches are coming, coming tonight''.

7

"The Witches of Halloween" and the seven songs cited above are reported as used almost exclusively by children who go trick-or-treating, not by children who go caking. Children who go caking are well served by their traditional song and may feel no need to adopt a new one. Children who go trick-or-treating tend to be unaware of the caking that their near neighbours have always done, which may explain why they have not borrowed their caking song. It is less easy to explain, however, why trick-or­treaters sing any song at all during their house visitations, since the American convention that they have borrowed does not include such singing. One possibility, of course, is that children themselves sense the natural appeal of a song in that context. More likely, though, their singing of a song comes from the influence of parents or teachers who are either consciously or vaguely aware of the protocol of other traditional English house-visitations, SlJch as carol-singing at Christmastime.

One well-known literary source of a Halloweening rhyme for children at two of the schools surveyed is Shakespeare's Macbeth, specifically the witches' lines:

Double, double, toil and trouble. Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Children seldom go beyond those lines and they usually transmute them into their own diction, as in the variants, "Hubble, bubble, toil or trouble", "Boil, boil, toil and trouble", and "Boil, boil, boil, trouble and toil". The children who know this rhyme, aged between ten and fourteen, were exposed to it in various ways. One saw it written on a wall at school, one learned it from a friend, one from television, and some from books, including books on "witchcraft" and "magic verse". As one said, the rhyme is "often taught in schools as a Halloween poem".

Children use the rhyme in various ways. A girl taught it to a few friends one year when she was making a tape to play at a Halloween party. "We all chanted the rhyme, imitating witches", she says. Children chant it while they wander around their neighbourhoods on Halloween and also before people open the door when they go trick-or-treating. One boy says it after he says, "Trick or treat". Decorum suggests that it be used only if someone in the trick-or-treat group is dressed like a witch. Then, "It is usually said in a witch's voice, i.e., croaky" in order to "frighten people". One boy says, "The rhyme is said aloud in a chant. When I want to I say it in a better sounding tone, I make my voice slightly squeaky". 10

Guy Fawkes Day

As one would expect, the Guy Fawkes rhyme most often reported is the traditional one:

Remember, remember the Fifth of November, Gunpowder treason and plot. I see no reason why gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot.

8

Of the 133 students sampled at one comprehensive school, twelve wrote down the first line, ten wrote the first two lines, and three knew all four lines. No doubt, many more also know at least the first line, since it is often used in school classrooms.

One rhyme uses a fragment found in the longer "Remember, remember" rhyme associated in particular with Lewes, Sussex: 11

For it was his intent To blow up the houses, The houses of parliament. Burn Guy Fawkes! And a Bow, Wow, Wow!

Helen Hall, fifteen, Wisewood Comprehensive School.

For Helen, this is a discrete rhyme; she did not begin with the "Remember, remember" lines. Her first three lines echo the lines from Lewes: "Guy Fawkes, Guy, 'twas his intent I To blow up the King and the Parliament". Her last two lines echo a rhyme from Folkestone, Kent, reported by the Opies (p.304): "Burn his body from his head, Then you'll say Guy Fawkes is dead. Hip, Hip, Hooray!" Helen's use of "And a Bow, Wow, Wow!" in place of the conventional "Hip, Hip, Hooray!" is peculiar. It may derive from the old "Guy Fawkes" song reported by Chappell as sung to the tune of "The Barking Barber" and including the refrain, "Bow, wow, wow." 12

Although "Remember, remember" is a very well known verse, the evidence for its transmission and use today raises questions about its current status as folk literature. Almost none of the students who commented on the poem learned it from parents or friends. Many learned it from television; even more learned it from teachers at school. One student learned it during a history lesson in middle school and relearned it in history class in comprehensive school. One boy learned it while preparing an assembly programme "on James I and the Gunpowder Plot (Guy Fawkes)".

Apparently, only a minority of schoolchildren who know the rhyme actually use it during the Guy Fawkes celebration. One girl said, "I just say it to myself on bonfire night". A few others chant it when they are with friends and even teach it to other children. One girl says she chants the rhyme "on Bonfire Night when we are round the fire eating all the goodies that we have. Mostly we sing the rhyme when the guy is just catching fire". More children, however, know the rhyme but do not use it, or even find it worthy of use. One girl, who learned the rhyme in primary school when she was eight years old and has taught it to her younger sister, says, "I never use this rhyme on Bonfire night or Halloween. I've never heard of anyone who does either". Another is even more contemptuous of its use: "It is usually just read and perhaps noted down - if in a history lesson .... The rhyme is learnt in school lessons and then 'brushed' aside". One boy adds, "It is just a song and not traditional".

9

Although statistical evidence for earlier use of this rhyme is lacking, one is tempted to speculate that, with the introduction of the rhyme into school curricula, the use of it in folk celebrations has declined. While one applauds the enterprise of classroom teachers in seizing upon a popular rhyme to teach a good lesson in history, one also regrets the consequent change in status of the rhyme from unofficial to official culture. Of course, such cause and effect may be a figment of rationalisation, rather than actual fact. The academic and folk usages of "Remember, remember" may always have been parallel, as they are today. Yet, this rhyme, the most traditional one for Guy Fawkes Day, stands in stark contrast in this regard with the caking song, the most traditional one in the Halloween season. All informants who know the caking song reported learning it from parents, siblings and friends, sometimes before they were even old enough to go caking. No child reported having learned it from teachers, the classroom, or television. The caking rhyme remains a vital piece of oral lore in the communities where it is at home; the Guy Fawkes rhyme, although familiar to many people, is usually known in part and not often included in actual folk festivities.

A final variant of the "Remember, remember" verse was used as the opening song for a television programme on Halloween and learned from there by a girl who later passed it on to a friend:

Remember, remember the Fifth of November. Bangers and rockets and Catherine wheels, too.

Stephanie ] Gascoyne, eleven, Wisewood Primary and Infant School.

"Last year I sung it when our first fireworks went off at our house", says Stephanie. "I sometimes sing it on Bonfire Night", says Kerry, eleven. The rhyme actually has a longer tradition than its transmission by television would suggest, since the two lines cited above made up half of a Guy Fawkes rhyme used near Barnsley at least as early as the 1940s:

Remember, remember the Fifth of November. Bangers and rockets and Catherine wheels, too. The wind, the wind, the wind blows high, Just like the old woman who lived in the shoe. 13

This rhyme was chanted by children in the village of Smithies while they danced around at a November 5th bonfire. In composition, it appears to be a kind of line­by-line patchwork of material from other children's verse: line one from the traditional Guy Fawkes rhyme; line three from a counting-out rhyme; 14 line four from the familiar nursery rhyme. Only line two is not an obvious borrowing, although its reference to the fireworks that accompany the November 5th bonfire gives it impeccable credentials for belonging to the poem.

The children in the survey referred to only one rhyme specifically associated with soliciting money with a Guy Fawkes figure:

10

Penny for the guy Or I will kick you in the eye And kick you in the thigh And I will get you on the floor And kick you even more.

Craig Bamford, eleven, Wisewood Comprehensive School.

Like the rhymes cited earlier that refer to "Trick or treat", this one also consists of a poetic variation upon a conventional, formulaic phrase: "Penny for the guy". The co-ordinate sequence of actions implicitly invites the next user to compose additional couplets, each one adding to the brutal assault. Craig learned the rhyme from a friend when they were guying in 1980 and has since taught it to another friend . They chant it while guying, he says. Although the swaggering brutality of the verse matches the picaresque hero it celebrates, it seems to violate the kind of tact needed for successfully getting a strange passer-by to part with his money - unless, of course, the rhyme is winsomely delivered.

A passing reference to Bonfire Night makes the following song appropriate for this time of year:

Bonfire night when the stars shine bright. Three little angels dressed in white. One with a fiddle, one with a drum, One with a pancake stuck to its bum.

Jane Curry, eleven, Bradfield Comprehensive School.

~: Cj r f J J l?i t 'f I J I l r-J I IJ r 'l I • I J j

• • • • • • • • Brn- f~ n~t !Jknti.e J1ai'J shillt bright lhru Iit-tY an-1ls ~ in ..,~;~ .

f+4tJ ,., , \ I J t ~ .. 1 t1 CJ \ n r • • • • • • • • • • • ~ ll~ t1 ~d-&~' 0" "'!HI a d~ , One ~(I r-' - C4~ )n.c,( it, ib h.m .

., u

Although its use has also been reported for Bonfire Night,] ane actually uses it when she goes from door to door singing (i.e. "bonfire singing") on Halloween. One girl claims it has been circulating "for ages"; others report using it for at least the past five or seven years.

11

In terms of its traditional use, Jane's song is composed of two discrete couplets that often combine with other fragments of children's verse. The Opies, for instance, cite a variant of the first couplet attached to: "Can you eat a biscuit? I Can you smoke a pipe? I Can you go a-courting I at ten o'clock at night?" (p.306). Similarly, at Barnsley in the 1940s children added the second couplet to other familiar lines (Opies, p.4 3) and formed the following rhyme:

You know last night and the night before Three tomcats came knocking at our door. One with a fiddle , One with a drum. One with a pancake Stuck to his bum. 15

The children of the village of Smithies used this song on Mischief Night, November 4th. They would knock on the door of a house, chant this rhyme to the person who answered, and then run away.

Some children know a song that combines a Guy Fawkes taunt (Opies, p .304) with four lines from the traditional caking song:

Guy, Guy, Poke him in the eye, Stick him up a lamp post Never let him die. If you haven't got a penny An ha'penny will do. If you haven't got an ha'penny God bless you.

Rachel Dickinson, eleven, Bradfield Comprehensive School.

"? ? -..... ? ~

* 7 .3 3

; J I 1 ' I j I j I j p-] J 4i1 I 1 ! • • • • . -• • Gu~' GWIJ , fo~ him il\ ~ Cjf. St.-ck hi,. "f q '""'P pMt

~Je - liCl" h;IT\ eVe let

,...---.- r--.. '3 ~ '3' ....-

~ ; iJ J J

§ $J.1·rt ' I ' 1 I J j I I .CJ_j _j I I I l!jh ... J J • • • • • • •

.If ~·av-c11't ~ A ff"-~' ... lw. '-f"j 11111 do . If ~0-\f~t~ ... ha '-p '"') , GoJ A>b.s '"" !

12

.., \

., II

One fourteen-year-old girl learned the song from her mother ten years ago and, in turn, taught it to her little sister on Bonfire Night, when they traditionally sing it. This verbal taunting of the guy on the bonfire substitutes for the pelting of the guy with rubbish that is customary in some places but not reported in Sheffield. A variant is also reported from Kensington. 16

The tunes for "Bonfire Night" and "Guy, Guy" are related to some very basic elements of children's folksong. Most noticeable are their similarities to the typical children's taunung song: ~'" ~

5 3

J f I fl • • s\s- s~,

This taunting song exploits one of the most basic intervals - the minor third - in children's folksong . In fact, the interval is used so extensively throughout the world that it has been called "the national chant of childhood." 17 In one use, it is the "calling interval" that we use in order to call to someone at a considerable distance from us:

$1 J Cl II Ji~ - Wt~!

The taunting chant adds only a thitd note, the G, as an ornament to the minor third. 18 Similarly, the tune of "Bonfire Night" uses only these three notes and concludes with the minor third. The tune of "Guy, Guy", although similar, is somewhat more varied. It adds a fourth note, the A, and ends on the major, rather than the minor, third . Originating in the non-folk tradition, "The Witches of Halloween" stands in sharp musical contrast to the other songs, since both its tune and its rhythm are more complex and less closely connected to the intonation and rhythmic patterns of everyday speech than are "Bonfire Night" and "Guy, Guy".

As noted in my essay on Guy Fawkes customs, 19 the most popular song for Bonfire Night seems to be "Build a Bonfire" (sung to the tune of "Clementine"), a song usually associated with childhood glee at the end of school term:

Build a bonfire, build a bonfire. Put the teacher on the top. Put the prefect in the middle And we'll burn the bloomin' lot.

Mark Thompson, ten, St Catherine's School.

13

Variant lines include "Put the maths books in the middle" or "Put the headmiss in the middle" or "Put the Yankees on the top I Put the Aussies in the middle". The verse is specifically adapted to the November 5th context in some versions:

Build a bonfire, build a bonfire. Put Guy Fawkes on the top. Put some paper in the middle And burn the bloomin' lot.

Helen Hall , fifteen, Wisewood Comprehensive School.

A version sung in Sheffield in 197 5 apparently adapts the song to the huge, civic­sponsored bonfires, where multiple guys are frequently burned on the heap:

Build a bonfire, build a bonfire. Put the guy up on the top. Put the others all around it And burn up all the lot. 20

Although Mark says this is a song for Bonfire Night, many other boys and girls who use it at this time of year do so while they go caking or trick-or-treating at Halloween. 2 1 "We say it as we knock on the door", says one eleven-year-old girl. "I sing it after they open the door", says a boy. "We say it when we knock on the door and then we say it when we are going to somebody else's house at Halloween", says another (i.e., twice at a house being visited -once at the very beginning and again at the end of the visit, before moving on to the next house).

Finally, one rhyme captures through onomatopoeia the effect of the final event of the Guy Fawkes celebration - the lighting of fireworks:

A hanger, a hanger, a boom, boom, boom! A rocket, a rocket, zoom, zoom, zoom! A sparkler, SSSSSSSSSSHH!

Neil Eady, fourteen, Wisewood Comprehensive School.

Neil learned this rhyme in 1981 from a friend in Rotherham, Yorkshire, who, in turn, had learned it from his little sister. Neil chants it around the bonfire, and says, "When you chant it, other people pick it up as you go".

Conclusion

In surveying one community's tradition of children's rhymes and songs for autumnal calendar customs, this paper has introduced some items that have not appeared in print before and has also documented the oral literature that children have begun to develop in connection with the relatively new custom of Halloween trick-or-treat. Yet the chief value of the study lies in the contextual dimension of the children's

14

use of these rhymes and songs and the implications that arise from verses viewed as something more than representatives of this or that genre or sub-genre. In particular, the study emphasises the freedom of discretion that children reserve for themselves in putting to use a rhyme on a particular occasion - no matter the adult critic's taxonomy of genres or calendar dates. Hence, "The Witches of Halloween" gets sung during Bonfire Night, which is reasonable enough, considering the horrific, spooky effect of Guy Fawkes melting with a wild grimace in the overwhelming flames. And "Bonfire night, I Stars shine bright" becomes a song for caking or trick-or-treat, perhaps because it is sung at night by disguised visitants, "three little angels dressed in white". Most interesting of all, "Build a Bonfire", which by all rights should be sung at the end of school term, becomes an appropriate song for Bonfire Night as well as caking or trick-or-treat.

At the very least, such use of traditional materials should remind the folklorist of the importance of the way the folk themselves regard and interpret their materials, thus vindicating again Alan Dundes' insistence on an "oral literary criticism" derived from the folk informants' own attitudes toward their materials. 22 In terms of the seasonal materials surveyed in this collection, that may mean more, however, than simply saying that some rhymes and songs have meaning for more than one day­that Halloween songs can be sung on Bonfire Night, and vice versa. Such observable facts are only part of the evidence available to suggest that many children actually perceive Halloween and Guy Fawkes Day, not as separate days and events, but as beginning and terminal poles of a single, unified season of activities. Only after that integrated view of children's autumnal activities is probed for its full significance - as it will be in an essay to be published elsewhere23

- will the true nature of these rhymes, in their fullest context, be described and appreciated.

Notes 1. The study was based on a questionnaire given to 649 children in seven schools, some

of which serve small rural communities. Additional information was obtained through interviews with over thirty of the respondents. Other essays based on the survey include "Children's Halloween Customs in Sheffield", Lore and Language, Vol. 3, No. 9, (July 1983 ), 70-88; 'Children's Guy Fawkes Customs in Sheffield", Folklore, Vol. 95 (1984), 191-203; and "Trickster on the Threshold: An Interpretation of Children's Autumn Traditions", to be published in Folklore. A full description of the survey and its goals will be found in the essay on Halloween customs. The study was carried out under the auspices of the Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language (henceforth, C .E.C.T.A.L.) at the University of Sheffield and was supported by the Lilly Endowment Faculty Open Fellowship. I am indebted to the many headmasters , teachers, and schoolchildren who contributed time and effort to the project. Dr Ian Russell and Mrs Win Bennett supplied variants of some of the rhymes. Anthony Bennett, Lecturer in Music at the University of Sheffield, prepared the musical transcriptions and contributed to the musical analysis of the items.

15

2. Iona and Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of Schoolchzfdren (1959; rpt. St Albans: Paladin, 1977), pp.298-99.

3. For an introduction to earlier caking, or "souling" customs, see A R Wright and T E Lones, British Calendar Customs, England, Vol III: Fixed Festivals, Publications of the Folk-Lore Society, CVI (London: William Glaisher Ltd. , 1940), pp.121-45; for a survey of more recent children's caking customs, see Iona and Peter Opie, pp.298-99.

4. "Children's Halloween Customs in Sheffield" (see n. 1).

5. Wright and Lones, p.142.

6. "Children's Halloween Customs in Sheffield".

7. "Halloween", New York Folklore Quarterly, 29 (1973) , 176.

8. Copyright 1975 by Stainer and Bell, Ltd , publishers of the book by Cynthia Raza, The Lollipop Man and Other Songs and Stories, and reprinted here with their permission.

9. Another variant of the Opies' rhyme will be found in James T R Ritchie, The Singing Street (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1964), p .117.

10. Another interesting rhyme chanted by trick-or-treaters in the Gleadless area of southeast Sheffield in 1981 was:

The sky is blue, the grass is green. Have you got a penny for Halloween?

(C.E.C.T.A.L. archives.)

11. Jacqueline Simpson , The Folklore of Sussex (London: Batsford, 1973), pp.136-37.

12. W Chappell, The Ballad Literature and Popular Music of the Olden Time, Vol. II (1859; rpt. New York: Dover, 1965), pp.717-18. The sea shanty, "The Drummer and the Cook", also uses the refrain , "With a bow-wow-wow, Fal-la! the dow-a-did-dy bow-wow-wow." See the popular book of songs collected and edited by John Goss: "Dazfy Express " Community Song Book (London: "Daily Express" National Community Singing Movement, n.d. [ 1927?] ), p .60.

13. C .E.C.T.A.L. archives.

14 . The wind, the wind, the wind blows high, The wind comes scattering down the sky. He is handsome, she is pretty, He courts a girl from London city. You - are - out.

(C.E.C.T.A.L. archives .)

This counting out rhyme was also used by the children of Smithies village. A blindfolded child stood in the middle of a ring of children, who rotated, holding hands, in a circle. On each of the last three words, the blindfolded child would point to a different person; the last one pointed to moved out of the circle.

15. C.E.C.T.A.L. archives.

16

16. C S Burne, "Fifth of November Customs", Folk-Lore, 14 (1903), p .91.

17 . Shirley J Shelley, "Music", in Carol Seefeldt, ed., Curriculum for the Preschool-Primary Chtfd - A Revz"ew of Research (Columbus, Ohio: Charles E Merrill, 1976), p.207.

18. It is interesting to notice that some of the verses using "trick or treat", cited earlier, could be sung to this tune also.

19. " Children's Guy Fawkes Customs in Sheffield" (see n . 1).

20. C.E.C.T.A.L archives.

21. The song was specifically adapted for use at Halloween by some children in the Woodseats area of Sheffield in 1971. They sang:

Halloween night, build a bonfire, Put the witches on the top, Put the wizards in the middle And burn the whole lot!

They said they had " made it up .... like the one for bonfire night". (C.E.C .T.A.L archives .)

22. "Metafolklore and Oral Literary Criticism", The Monist, 50, No. 4 (1966).

23. "Trickster on the Threshold: An Interpretation of Children's Autumn Traditions" (seen. 1).

17

Folk Etymology: Remarks o n Linguistic Proble m-Solv ing and who does it

William Kirwin

Etymology itself has been pursued for many centuries, with grammarians and learned men speculating on essential meanings of words, somehow related to the nature of the things or to some earlier, more basic form and meaning. 1 It was felt that if a history or pedigree could be presented, then the meaning of the word was more fully comprehended.

Rigorous etymologising, based on growing collections of ancient manuscripts and books and theories of comparative linguistics, began seriously in the nineteenth century. As careful scholars looked into the antecedents of words, to discover their so-called "origins" or to write authoritative dictionaries, they discovered that many earlier explanations of words were unsupported speculations, ingenious yoking together of some sounds and meanings to fit the notions of a serious scholar or a scribbling eccentric - in short, fantastic guesswork. Our present reference works, like the Oxford English Dictionary or 'Webster's Third New International Dictionary, NID (1961), avoid speculating, and declare ''origin unknown'' when research cannot uncover documentary evidence of a source. A simple maritime word like squid is so designated in NID.

In addition to writers ' conjectures on etymological origins, interested observers perceived numerous examples of unexplained modifications, distortions, even apparent improvements in the spelling or pronunciation of words, developments which we have come to label popular etymology, or folk etymology . At first these were named "false spellings" or "false etymologising" (Wedgwood; Kennedy 54, 328), and by the 1870s, when the neogrammarians were advocating the principle of the regularity of sound change, so important in the historical study of languages, European scholars began the systematic repudiation of unsound conjectures about word origins which had been based on what we might call plausible interpretations of the sound, spelling or component elements in a word. I say this because a German, Karl Andresen, in his Deutsche Volksetymologie (1876), was apparently the first to use the term in print, and the French equivalent, etymologie populaire, appeared in the same year in a perceptive review of Andresen by M Gaidoz (Palmer xxvi). In 1882 A Smythe Palmer's dictionary entitled Folk-Etymology appeared in England, and the QED's first citation of the word is dated 1883, in a discussion of north European mythology. Folk etymology as a term for a language process has continued down to the present day, with numerous examples presented in all the textbooks: French ecrevisse has become crayfish; surname was felt to come from sir or sire; umbles, the viscera of a deer which

18

used to be eaten, has become humble-pie; hernshaw, a young heron, became in Shakespeare "I know a hawk from a handsaw" (Hamlet 2.2 .396).

What sort of linguistic problems are faced and responded to when, by popular etymology, the pronunciation of a word is changed or a gratuitous source or explanation is explicitly provided for a peculiar word? For the purposes of the analysis below, I would like to draw upon the insightful distinction made by Walter] Ong, among others, between oral cultures, alphabet or print cultures, and electronic culture - the last a recent development not relevant to the present discussion (17 -110, "Transformations of the Word"). Loosely speaking, oral cultures are what I associate with the term folk speech, as used by influential modern North American dialectologists (Kurath 7 -8). Script cultures, on the other hand, are heavily dependent on all the complex range of behaviours called literacy. Ong is quite staggering in some of the assertions he makes about literate people: "We are the most abject prisoners of the literate culture in which we have matured. Even with the greatest effort, contemporary man finds it exceedingly difficult, and in many instances quite impossible, to sense what the spoken word actually is" (19). Again, "For certain uses of language, literacy is not only irrelevant but is a positive hindrance" (21).

From the evidence that has come to my attention in Newfoundland, folk etymology as customarily conceived is not indulged in by folk speakers, but instead by members of the literate culture even up to the most highly sophisticated journalists, historians and literary artists - hardly "folk" etymologists. 2

Typically a folk speaker uses a special or peculiar word functionally, to communicate his meaning and attitude, and not selfconsciously or analytically. Typical "explanations" found in the Memorial University Folklore and Language Archive are phrased like these:

You'd have a little bogie made, that's what the old people call it ... .. would be a old kettle perhaps, with the side out of it. (MUNFLA T 247 66-24)

There's a tub or a barrel - covel they calls it, liver covel. (MUNFLA T 38 64-7)

A speaker usually does not become a commentator and discuss the word in itself. An occasional explanation is offered, however, but it does not appear to reveal why the term has its specific meaning:

After [the young seals] loses the white coat they're called beaters because they spends all their time in the water. (MUNFLA T 44 64-13)

A second group of folk speakers has to deal in some way or other with words which they hear that are strange to them, for example with foreign words, polysyllabic words, words novel in their experience. In this case if the word is echoed or adopted, various sorts of modifications may easily be made. The word may not be imitated exactly, but interpreted or modified to fit into the phonetic and other linguistic patterns of the speaker. It seems probable that many of the classic examples of folk etymology

19

are like this - a mistaken imitation, a close approximation falling within the speech system of the listener - for example, the local sparble for sparable or sparrowbzll, "a small nail driven in boot sole." A number of good examples of this alteration are found in the texts of Kenneth Peacock's Songs of the Newfoundland Outports . If the new form becomes imitated and widespread, even becomes the normal term in the area, a discrete change in the local language has taken place. However, the folk speakers do not volunteer explanations of how they heard the words or what meanings they attached to the newly uttered words: for the speaker it was a phonetic, not a semantic, development.

How would you imitate the following forms if you heard them in rapid conversation, uttered in an accent different from your own:

1. "to turn somersaults" - cocksiddle, cock-stiddle, cocks-diddle, cocksettle, cocksididdle.

2. "gossiping, talking idly" - carrowattin', corawattin'.

3. "piled-up ice on the shore, frozen water on rocks" - barricado.

This last, in the oral culture of Newfoundland, has produced a bewildering array of forms , from ballycatter and ballycader to ballyclaver and batticatter. Another word, copy, meaning "to jump on the ice-pans", has also been modified phonetically into many different forms.

One written report of childhood usage cites an imitated form, after phonetic modification, and then the author volunteers a plausible interpretation of the meaning: "We always called them 'darn banks', but really they were thornbacks, so called because of the little thorn on their backs. When I called them 'darn banks' I thought it was some kind of a curse on them as on the haddock." (Tizzard 327). Presumably the writer had these notions about darn (for damn) as a boy, not in his adult years. Thornback in Newfoundland would often sound like t'arnback. (In popular belief and legends the haddock is supposed to have the print of the devil's thumb on his back.)

People who can read and spell, members of the print culture, may modify regional language also as they come upon unfamiliar words in their reading. They approximate the pronunciation and maybe set in motion new developments. An example is gombeen "small lump of tobacco, used as stakes in a card game." The literate speaker perhaps sees little sense in this, but a shift to the sound gum makes it more comfortable, and soon the form appears in print in the journal of American Folklore as gum-bean (8:3 5 ), which, because of spelling, has taken on new senses. Or a person reads in George Allan England's Vikings of the Ice (1924) of "hunting scattered seals", and the word quinterin' is used. He might interpret its pronunciation according to the most frequent sound of qu-, and we have a new word, [ 'kw1-1'\ t: ~.J.. ] ,

20

unattested anywhere else in English. Was the original writer thinking of the Newfoundland word quintal, which is usually sounded something like cantle? Was the word he heard the sealers use canterin '? Reliance on spelling has produced a problematical form. Lin hay, "an attached room or stable", is another example of a spelling inviting a spelling pronunciation and ingenious semantic analysis. Some people perceive a connection with lean-to, and -hay seems related to the fodder in the stable. The local pronunciation is finny.

A more direct kind of semantic interpretation or popular etymology can be supplied by a generally educated person trying to devise a spelling for a newly heard term. He too will try to follow his familiar spelling patterns since he knows no phonetic symbols, and his choices for spelling the word imply new meanings and possible historical sources for the word. If a person hears a run-together phrase meaning "noisy, overbearing person" he might write down cocker d' boss (MUNFLA 40 71-123). This spelling might in fact represent the phrase he heard, but the boss looks like an interpolation; and similar phrases like cock of the school and cock of the walk, authenticated in the Oxford English Dictionary, are forgotten in this new word cocker. Two more examples of naive devised spellings for misunderstood words are Kitchuses "a settlement near Avondale, Newfoundland" (Seary 25-26; was it once Kit Hughes's?) and catch anchor "small anchor" (i.e., traditionally kedge anchor). Once spellings like these have been set into manuscript or print, we have little to help us to recreate the actual original pronunciation.

When we come upon the selfconscious amateur writer devising a written explanation for a strange word he is using, I feel we have an instance of folk etymology proper. The sound, spelling and slight interruption for the writer's plausible comment fulfil all etymological requirements- except that there is no historical or linguistic evidence cited. A good example from a recent book is related to kedge anchor, treated above; the word is catchy, meaning "inexperienced deck-hand":

The next spring Tom secured a berth in a schooner that was going fishing on the Grand Bank. His job was to work about the deck, blow the fog-horn and catch the lines when the dories would come alongside. The latter is the origin of the word "catchy". This is usually the job of a boy who goes to the Banks for the first time. 3

Several contributors to the Folklore Archive offer the following explanation for Tibb 's Eve (roughly December 23rd, and somehow related to a St Tibb mentioned first, according to the OED, in an English glossary in the eighteenth century). The pronunciation of the form in this writer's community has already been shifted to Tipp's Eve:

Christmas really starts in my home on Tipps Eve which is the day before Christmas Eve. I have heard that it is called Tipps Eve because when men used to put up their own homebrew etc. they wouldn't drink it before Christmas but I guess most

21

men would sneak a drink or two on this day because they felt that Christmas was close, and they probably got a bit tipsy, thus Tipps Eve. (a written report, MUNFLA M71-122)

Folk etymology, strictly speaking, should be a re-formation of a strangely pronounced or spelled form with the result that the new term makes plausible sense. A second stage in the process may be an expressed justification or explanation of the new term, when it is first used or by other commentators at a later time. To contribute at this second stage is the great temptation of many language enthusiasts who wish to explain a problematical term by something they have discovered or by an ingenious chain of reasoning. Instead of folk etymologies we might call them false, or pseudo, etymologies.

By far the greatest number of false etymologies, in Newfoundland and elsewhere, get into print and general circulation through the efforts of professional writers, happening upon an oddity not in their vocabulary or in standard dictionaries. Among these were the learned authors I cited in an earlier study of Newfoundland folk etymology (Kirwin 16-18), the sorts of authors whose views are quoted again and again, until their statements are considered gospel truth. The following explanations are all harmless whimsies, except that they are in print.

Caplin a word found in French in 15 58 and in English in 1620 (see Tresor de Ia langue franyaise: cape/an):

The name [cap/in] is supposed to be derived from the French. However, W G Gosling, in his Life of Sir Humphrey Gzlbert [London 1911: 210], has presented an unusual and interesting theory. Among those numbered among the Southampton Adventurers to Newfoundland in 1580 were two named Capelin. This, Mr Gosling suggested, may solve the mystery of how the caplin got its name. (Dazly News [StJohn's] 9 June 1959)

rodney "a small punt"

D W Prowse wrote in 1895 concerning the Governor of Newfoundland 1n 1749, Captain (later Admiral) George Rodney:

As Wellington has been immortalized in a boot, so Rodney is for ever remembered in the name of a small boat. 4

Placenames frequently stimulate the ingenuity of writers, one of whom P K Devine quotes:

"We have 'Horse Chops' near Trinity, 'Horse Island' in Fogo District, and piles of fish called 'Waterhorse'.'' There are no horses on Horse Island, and [my correspondent] suggests that the word is a poetic allusion to the white rolling waves that dash on the land in a storm. It is well known that seamen and fishermen often call these "white horses". 5

22

Finally, an example of an explanation so overwhelming in its circumstantial detail that subsequent students and writers hardly dare to question the etymology, but instead repeat it as authoritative:

bedlamer "an immature (harp) seal"

These seals got their name from the old Jersey or Breton settlers who took up residence at Bonne Esperance and other localities in the Straits of Belle Isle in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. They were surprised to find the young seals minutely examining everything. They found they had an ear for music, and would rise to a whistle like a dog. They called them "Bete de la mere" (Animal of the Sea) .. .. The English fishermen corrupted the pet expression .... into bedlamers, which is the present name for a young seal, without reference to variety, and until it is five years old. 5

This brief survey of language-users - ranging from folk speakers of an oral culture recorded on tape to writers and researchers of the print culture who feel the urge to comment on and historically explain the uncommon terms they use - is intended to distinguish a little more precisely what we mean by "folk etymology". It is usually the new spellings and especially the proposed explanations of reasonable but unattested sources created by the literate class. It has little to do with folk speech or with what has been called "folk-linguistics" (Hoenigswald 16-26). And as students of folk speech, the conjectures quoted above should put us on our guard when we have a sudden hunch and are prompted to write out of thin air an etymological source for an interesting term . 6

Notes 1. This study appeared in Languages z·n N ewfoundland and Labrador, 2nd Version (StJohn's,

Memorial University, 1982). I am grateful to Harold) Paddock, the editor, for permission to reprint it in this revised form .

2. The main corpus ofNewfoundland language that I have examined is the transcribed speech of free conversation of Newfoundlanders , made by phonetician J D A Widdowson , and student reports on regional speech collected in the Memorial University ofNewfoundland Folklore and Language Archive (MUNFLA). I wish to thank the Direc tor, Dr Neil Rosenberg, for permission to quote from Archive materials.

3. Bursey 27. K edgy , probably derived from kedge and kedge-anchor, is attested in Newfoundland (Story, Kirwin and Widdowson).

4. A H istory of N ewfoundland 290. Probably the term is from English dialec ts; see Wright rodney "anything useless or of inferior quality" ; adj . "of inferior quality".

5. W A Munn , in the introduction to Chafe, 8. Since Munn's assertion in 1923 provides no evidence from the sixteenth century, see instead the OED and EDD discussions of bedlamer "a lunatic" (1675, 1733) and bedlam . Bedlam er for "seal" first appears in a Newfoundland text in 1766.

23

6. Scrupulous etymology involves a thorough and discriminating search in all the relevant scholarly dictionaries , in several languages. For a recent effort in rigorous etymologising see Cassidy.

References

Bursey, W J, The Undaunted Pioneer, n .p ., [ 1977] .

Cassid y, F G , "Another Look at Buckaroo .", American Speech , 53 (1978), 49-51.

Chafe , Levi, Chafe's Sealing Book, 3rd edn., ed. H M Mosdell, StJohn's, Trade Printers and Publishers , 1923.

Devine, P K , Devz.ne's Folk Lore of N ewfoundland, StJohn's, Robinson and Co. , 1937.

England , George Allen , Vikings of the Ice , Garden City, Doubleday, Page and Company, 1924 .

Hoenigswald , Henry W , "A Proposal for the Study of Folk-Linguistics". In Sociolinguistics, ed. William Bright, The Hague, Mouton and Co., 1966, 16-20, and discussion . .

Kennedy, Arthur G , A Bibliography of Writings on the English Language , Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1927.

Kirwin, W , "A Collection of Popular Etymologies in Newfoundland Vocabulary.", Regional Language Studies ... N ewfoundland, 3(1971), 16-18.

Kurath, Hans, A Word Geography of the Eastern United States , Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1949.

Ong, Walter J, The Presence of the Word, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1967 .

Palmer, A Smythe, Folk Etymology: A Dictionary, London, Bell, 1882 .

Patterson , George, " Notes on the Dialect of the People of Newfoundland.", journal of American Folklore, 8(1895 ), 27-40.

Prowse, D W , A History of Newf oundland, London , Macmillan and Co., 1895.

Seary, E R, Place Names of the A valon Peninsula of the Island of Newfoundland, Toronto, University of Toronto Press , 1971.

Story, G M, W J Kirwin and J D A Widdowson, eds. , Dictionary of Newfoundland English , Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1982.

Tizzard , Aubrey M, On Sloping Ground, ed. J D A Widdowson, StJohn's, Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1979.

Wedgwood, Hensleigh, " On False Etymologies.", Transactions of the Philological Society , 1855 , 62-72 .

Wright , Joseph , ed ., The English Dialect Dictionary, 6 vols., London, Oxford University Press , 1898-1905, rpt . 1961.

24

Sustaining the Traditions of Police Work: A Sociological Analysis

Simon Holdaway

The description and analysis of the occupational world of the lower ranks has become a major theme of sociological research on the police. 1 Researchers have begun to chart an ethnographic map of routine policing, mostly of patrol work in the inner city, paying particular attention to officers' perceptions of the area where they work, of the task of policing and of the population they serve. Further, some scholars have been able to go beyond a description and analysis of perceptions to police behaviour - to the strategies and tactics officers routinely employ. This complex contouring of beliefs , values and attitudes and their associated actions, which officers regard as "commonsense", is what is meant by the term "the occupational culture" of the lower ranks.

Importantly, studies stress how the public imagery of the British police, with its appearance of formal rationality, bureaucratic rigour and professionalism, shields a rather different reality. 2 The lower ranks, particularly constables and sergeants, transpose formal policy and law to resonate with their understanding of effective police work; to resonate with their commonsense, which may be rather different from the perspective of their senior officers, people working in related institutions like the courts and social work, and from large sections of the public. It is therefore argued that police work is not what the law, formal policy or some other set of directives says it should be: policing is essentially what the lower ranks do in their day-to-day work on the streets and in police stations. To understand police work we have to probe beyond the public imagery gleaned from policing-in-the-books to observe and participate in policing-in-action.

In urban Britain, lower ranks continue to place an emphasis on work which pulsates with action, offers an appealing and continuing hedonism and which is principally concerned with crime. Officers certainly use the law but in so doing they act with discretion. Discretion involves a use of rules secured by knowledge of the occupational culture; these rules are often in tension with the law and/or with the disciplinary regulations of the service. For the lower ranks, policing therefore involves the preservation of a sure measure of secrecy, of interdependency between, and of team­work amongst, colleagues.

Clearly, this "practical policing" of the lower ranks is in conflict with the highly disciplined and formal models of police work which are readily presented for public consumption. The conflicts arising from the variance between what lower ranks are supposed to do and on occasion say they do, and what they actually do requires the creation and sustaining of a protective structure. This structure shields them from

25

police managers, lawyers, social workers and other people who have a legal right and duty to monitor police practice. Maurice Punch, in his own study of an urban force, describes one of the central problems facing research:

The core explanation has to be focussed on how the norms and practices of the police organisation, the police occupational culture and police work create a powerful informal system, protected by solidarity, secrecy, and astute accounting procedures, that deviates considerably from the rational administrative model and from the public image of unity, respectability, and responsibility presented to the outside world. 3

A related issue refers us not so much to how the rank-and-file protect themselves from scrutiny but to their affirmation and sustenance of the occupational culture itself. The lower ranks' commonsense world of action and hedonism, of crime work and of impending disorder is highly partial. Other researched evidence confirms that police work is quiet, spasmodic and largely concerned with incidents which are not directly related to crime; policing involves a vast diversity of tasks carried out in a setting of comparative calm. 4 Police perceptions of their work and the social environment within which they perform it are highly selective. Yet the occupational culture is the primary resource for a working knowledge of how to deal with the pot­pourri of incidents which require a police presence. The traditions of policing "live" within the occupational culture, as partial a view of the police mandate as that culture happens to be.

This paper takes a point of departure from the view that policing is socially constructed, which is to accept that the occupational culture of the lower ranks departs so dramatically from the actual conditions of police work that a range of supportive devices are needed to sustain it. The major objective is to ask how the world of policing is sustained from day-to-day. More specifically, attention will be given to one aspect of this social construction of policing - to storytelling which is often humorous in content and style, and to joking. The concern here is with a limited aspect of a range of controls and techniques of management employed by the lower ranks to sustain a semblance of what they regard as "normal policing". The narratives u;>on which analysis will be based cluster around two central themes of the police occupational culture. These are the designation of distinct roles adopted by individuals working within the team of police officers and, secondly, the theme of policing as an occupation which is shot through and through with action. The illustrative data used are taken from my participant observer study of policing on a British urban police sub-division, named Hilton. 5

Storytelling and Humo u r - t he use of Narrative

Researchers have neglected to study the function of story and joke telling within the context of police work. In some studies of the police the frequency of these forms

26

of communication is mentioned but no analysis of particular narratives can be found . Of course, sociologists researching other settings have concerned themselves with storytelling and jokes, arguing that these phenomena perform a number of social functions. The release of tension within and between groups, self-aggrandisement, easing the process of socialisation for a newcomer to a group, the creation of consensus and the relief of boredom are cited by researchers. 6 A considerable amount of academic work in this area therefore suggests the pertinence of relating the use of narrative to the tensions and contradictions experienced by the members of work and other organisations.

Most helpfully, Mary Douglas suggests that jokes, with no less application to other forms of verbal communication like stories, contain two elements. First , a control on human behaviour is juxtaposed with that which is controlled. Secondly, the juxtaposition is such that the behaviour which is potentially controlled triumphs. In relation to the police, humour is therefore a device which mediates between different levels of organisational structure. Humour and narrative expose the underlying reality of the occupational culture which, as we have noted, differs sharply from the public image of police work. Narrative expresses the adaptations by the rank-and-file to formal and potentially constraining structures; adaptations to force policy, to the law and so on. Further, Mary Douglas argues that humour confirms the importance and dominance, indeed, the supremacy of the adaptation over and against the constraints of the formal structure. She writes, ''Jokes can be judged dangerous because they risk exposure to values and actions too precarious or sensitive to challenge." 7

From this perspective, it is clear that the extensive use of narrative and jokes, so common to the police, may be related to conflicts between the values, beliefs and attitudes found in the occupational culture and to those of the formal police organisation, as they are framed by senior officers, by the law and by other possible sources of constraint. When polic~ officers tell stories to each other they are engaged in maintaining their definition of policing as the practical , commonsense way of performing the task of police work. This so-called practical definition is compared with and triumphs over other definitions from police policy, the law, the courts and people who can legally constrain the practices of the rank-and-file.

To an "outsider" who is not familiar with the nuances of meaning which pervade police action, many of the narratives and jokes will not seem funny. Nevertheless, once a researcher has cracked the veneer of the occupational culture and is able to place the narratives within their social context, an appreciation and analysis can be made. As the various themes of narrative and of the jokes are classified, exaggeration, dramatic inflection, a lack of factual accuracy and very probably untruth enters into them. The immediate context of storytelling is usually lighthearted. However, the scenes observed and documented are not settings where sociability takes place for

27

its own sake; narrative and jokes sustain the occupational culture in an intense fashion . In these contexts, lower ranks share their definitions which can and, in part, do threaten their manner of work. These gatherings are crucial to the work group because, as the anthropologist Ulf Hannertz points out with reference to "mythmaking" in urban America:

" .... definitions and evaluations of self, others and the external world are developed, maintained and displayed with greater intensity than in other interaction .... An individual's vision of reality is often a precarious thing: we can find comfort in the knowledge that it is shared by others, thus acquiring social anchoring in an objective truth." 8

The Relief - Roles and Rank

Although team-work, interdependency and secrecy are maintained by the lower ranks and deemed central to their culture, tensions which are sometimes expressed openly and sometimes left latent are found amongst any group of officers who work together regularly. 9 For example, some of Hilton's staff are not firmly committed to the ploys used by a number of their colleagues when suspects are interviewed. Other constables are not so much dissenters as likely to extend the limits of acceptable behaviour set by the work group. The excesses and dissent of colleagues are regular subjects of humour and narrative. Broad themes of these narratives concern the existence and importance of a cohesive work group; the boundaries of tolerance set by that group; the centrality and supremacy of the core of the occupational culture within the organisational hierarchy and its place in the continuing traditions of police work.

A probationer constable who did not use force when arresting prisoners; was generally rather restrained when dealing with people held in custody; and not tuned to the speed and hedonism so important to his colleagues was subject to comment when the shift met for a tea break:

P.C.: "There's something wrong with ----- (name) tonight, you know. There's definitely something wrong with him. He told somebody to "**** off' today. Then we had this "suspect shout" and he's running along beside this bloke he knows, asking him when he's going out for a drink and there could have been this P.C. getting his head kicked in some way down the road. There's something wrong with ----- (name)."

On another occasion and in the presence of colleagues, a sergeant commented on the constable's style of work:

"Have you been beating up prisoners, then?" Another officer said, "Yes, he has. I wouldn't mind so long as he didn't leave them paralysed in the corner of the detention room. Do you know what he (the prisoner) did to ----- (officer)? He pulled his tie off. Just flicked it off when he went to speak to him." Other Sergeant:

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"Didn't that annoy you -----?" P.C.: "Not really, Sarge." P.S.: "Well, don't hit him then." The officers who comment here draw a humorous response from colleagues. Their affirmation of the occupational culture, particularly of interdependence between colleagues and the use of force on "prisoners" are an attempt to integrate the young constable into the dominant culture. Further, directed to an audience of police officers who work together, the comments relate the individual actions of a constable to the collective experience and expectations of the occupational group. The dominance of the occupational culture is being affirmed as particular incidents and a particular individual are related to more generally based expectations of work, which are shared and accepted amongst the group.

Humour is also used to attempt to control the behaviour of an extremely excitable officer who rushes to the scene of any incident and displays a flair for provoking aggressive encounters with members of the public. He has a habit of using his personal radio to "speak-through" to colleagues, asking them to stop vehicles he has seen speeding in one direction or another and which he suspects are stolen. One excited request from him suggests that a suspected stolen car will have to be chased before it stops. Drawing laughter which is heard over the whole radio system, another P.C. interjects, "Is this a real chase or a----- (name) chase?" Limits of acceptable behaviour are being charted by this humorous comment; the role of the officer in question is being defined - points further clarified in the following data.

The shift are gathered for a tea break, P.C.s, Sergeants and the Inspector are beginning to tell stories, when a constable directs his entree to the Inspector in charge of the shift:

"You weren't here when it happened but it's the funniest thing I've heard. Old ----- was sitting on the pan out there on night duty when he heard a chase coming down ----- (names road in which station is situated). So he hoists his trousers up and the next thing we see he's standing in the High Road with his truncheon in his hand holding his trousers with his other hand. The car hadn't come down -----, it had iurned off somewhere. When we asked him, he said, "Well, I thought they were going to come down here and I was going to throw my stick at the windscreen." He had his shirt on, no epaulettes, his trousers weren't done up and his shirt tails were flapping and he had his stick in his hand. He was ready to throw the stick at the car.''

This narrative clarifies the officer's role amongst his group of colleagues; others can compare their style of work and acceptance of the traditions of the occupational culture with his exuberance. Boundaries of tolerance are marked out, prescribing limits of acceptable behaviour. The traditions of the occupational culture are being stated and sustained.

Similar points of analysis can be made about humorous comment directed towards other officers. A constable who is prone to the frequent, highly exaggerated telling of stories is "sent up" with equal frequency because he is so immersed in the excesses

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of the occupational culture that he almost discredits it. Here, as he begins a story about a car chase, ready to lace his account with a lavish sense of drama where danger and speed are evoked, a colleague interjects: "Tell us about it , Bill. Dangerous, I bet. Great chase, eh?" Another officer who has a reputation for driving at very fast speeds, whatever the nature of the incident he is heading for is subject to similar remarks, which always draw laughter from colleagues. This P.C. has just returned from a call to a premises where suspects might have been attempting to enter illegally. Inspector: "No 'suspects on' then? " P.C.: " No." Other P.C.: "Your imagination then?" Inspector: "But he was there first ."

Graffiti are another medium used to circumscribe unacceptable behaviour and to make the traditions of the occupational culture public knowledge. A constable has developed a reputation for using excessive violence on suspects. A cartoon is drawn on a toilet door, portraying the officer with a swastika on his forehead. His name and the words, "Obturbanfurer ----- is a wanker. Ya Vohl" are printed above the picture. Other captions are added as time goes on. A gun is drawn in one of the P.C.'s hands and a truncheon in the other. The caption, "Did you say that kid stole some sweeties? Let me sort him out" is added.

In these various ways, officers are made the subject of humour and narrative; work roles are clarified , deviance is proscribed and boundaries of tolerance etched into the working experience of Hilton's officers . Actions which are formally forbidden because they break discipline regulations and possibly the law are momentarily exposed within an acceptable form of communication and social context. The occupational culture is affirmed and sustained as a dominant and primary source of tradition.

Although the supervisory ranks are integral to the police team, some humour and stories also stress the hierarchy of rank, not least when misdemeanours committed by officers holding managerial rank are exposed for comment. By drawing attention to the behaviour of sergeants and inspectors , P.C.s are stating the importance of interdependency between ranks and also that if supervisors discipline or criticise them for their own shortcomings, they have some inside knowledge of their superiors' behaviour which can be used to embarrass them should the occasion arise. A constable asks an Inspector, " Would you get me a (take-away) meal, sir?" Inspector: "I see.' ' P.C.: "I'm always getting them for you, sir." When another constable uses the personal radio network to ask a sergeant to go to a particular address he replies that he was some distance from Hilton sub-division: "No, I'm off at ----- (names place) at the moment. Get somebody else to do it." The P.C. then asks a question on behalf of another constable who has heard the conversation: ·~----(name) wants to know what you are doing at ----- (place)? " Sergeant: "I want to know what ----- (P.C.) is doing in the station? He can go and check the premises." When a new sergeant arrives at Hilton and is seen patrolling with another sergeant who has a reputation for

30

"verballing" (the "adjustment" or creation of false statements of admission attributed to suspects), a constable asks this latter officer, "Are you patrolling with the new sergeant? Teaching him to bend the evidence. "Sergeant ----- (name) the swifter. Teaching him to give bent evidence.''

Of course, there are times when senior officers try to enforce discipline regulations, and there are regulations to control virtually any behaviour. Clear attempts by senior officers to discipline and to therefore challenge their subordinates can find their way into the corpus of tradition about the latent interdependency of all and , indeed, the particular power of the lower ranks. A Hilton officer often reminded his colleagues of a senior officer who had tried to discipline him for wearing a scarf under his uniform mackintosh, which regulations did not allow. His story stressed his refusal to stop wearing the scarf and that he obtained a doctor's note which stated clearly that he had to wear the scarf for medical reasons. The senior officer was defeated and a sense of triumph forms the central theme. As Mary Douglas has argued , in jokes but here also in a less tightly structured formulation , humorous narratives express the control by subordinates of other potential sources of control.

A similar theme is found in the following story:

P.C. : "Wouldn't it be nice to see him going over a red light just after he had retired?" Colleague: "Or before he had retired." P.C.: "I was in a bank up ----­on one occasion and we had a Superintendent----- (name) here. He had left the job but he came into the bank and yours truly was standing at the counter. He told me that he hoped he wouldn't be here too long because he had his car outside on a yellow line. I said, "Look, guv'nor, your car is on a yellow line there and you'll get a ticket no bother." So he's straight out of the bank and moving it.''

During a quiet Sunday afternoon tour of duty, several officers share stories about the challenge lower ranks return to senior officers when attempts are made to control them. A constable draws on his experience of working at another station, telling a story about a sergeant who has retired from the force and refused to move out of his police house. Senior officers try to make him leave, but he continues to resist their requests, waiting for the local council to evict him. The story of this crafty challenge to senior officers not only stresses that the officer is eventually rehoused by the council but also that a senior officer's directive has been resisted to the benefit of the lower ranking sergeant. This narrative is followed by another about an officer who has recently retired from the force and is suspected of an offence. Senior officers interview and ask him to go to the station with them. He refuses, arguing that if they want him at the station they will have to arrest him. Insufficient evidence is available to make an arrest on suspicion and the senior staff, tail between legs, have to abandon their enquiry.

The challenge lower ranked officers make to their senior officers is clearly stated in these humorous narratives; in other data it is clear that peers who might taint

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the occupational tradition by their inappropriate behaviour of one kind or another are similarly subject to potential control. The central theme being played out in these comments and narratives is the dominance of the rank-and-file definition of police work. As stories are told, personal experience is often related to the corpus of collective traditon. The lower ranks' interdependent, team-like character of police work is exposed and juxtaposed to the formal organisational model of policing. As the lower ranks' definition triumphs so, day-by-day, the occupational culture is richly sustained.

Action, Speed and Excitement

Long periods of quiet, interspersed with incidents of various kinds, typify the time­scale of routine police work. Around 40°/o to 50°/o of all requests for assistance made to the police have no direct relevance to the investigation of crime or to the detection of criminal offenders. 10 Most police work is reactive - a response to a request for help from a member of the public. 11 This mundane reality is at odds with the idea of the fast moving, action packed occupation which is central to the occupational tradition.

It is interesting that one of the favourite times for storytelling is the 4 a.m. tea break, when few requests for police assistance are likely to be made by the public. It is not uncommon for stories which emphasise action to be told at this quiet hour. These narratives generate an expectation of police work which pulsates with action, as a response to a challenge from a hostile world and as highly hedonistic. But the speed and the sheer pleasure of action is rarely present in the "real world of policing"; it has to be constructed and sustained within and by traditional narratives.

Details of car chases are frequently shared and respect for the skill of "bandit drivers" is expressed:

He was a pretty good driver and he had his wrist in plaster when he finished as well. He was pretty good. He didn't hit any cars on the way round and he didn't have any crashes at all. So he did pretty well.

"Bandit drivers" provide a sense of challenge to police action; chasing after a car that is thought to be stolen is a particularly attractive and potent experience. Indeed, a chase is of sufficient importance amongst the rank-and-file to take priority over official orders to desist from such activity. When force headquarters issue an order prohibiting all, except advanced police drivers, from pursuing a car, a chase takes place and forms the substance of a story.

P.C.: "Oh yes, he put up a good fight." SDH: "Well, did he stop of his own accord?" P.C.: "No, only because a couple of cars were put across the road and he didn't have much choice. Mind you, there were lots of cars there, all chasing him." Other P.C.: "Yes there were cars everywhere, Sarge. Pandas, R/T cars, everything." P.C.: "Yes, that police order really went down well." (Laughter.)

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Once again, the officers' definition of policing is juxtaposed with the attempt to control made by senior officers. A humorous narrative is a format which makes the challenge explicit, as well as resolving the conflict in favour of the lower ranks. The traditions of the occupational culture are sustained.

Stories of chases are frequently embellished with drama and excitement. Officers reinterpret trivial offences in more serious terms. For example, a few days later they arrest a number of juveniles for causing a slight disturbance in the street, which the inspector in charge of the shift regards as a serious matter but which, in fact, ends without any offences being reported, officers reinterpreting the trivial disturbance as an affray, which is a very serious offence. Other stories restate the tradition by stressing excitement and bravado which is typical of the past:

Yes, you can think it's quiet but I can tell you if you were station officer on a Bank Holiday like ----- (names officer) was, and you expect nothing to happen and you have eighteen prisoners by midnight, then that's how this station goes. It was an affray. ----- was the duty officer and ----- (names prisoner) was in here and he'd already been pushed up against the wall by yours truly. Then Sergeant ----- walks in with a gun. It was a shotgun they'd fired into a pub. He went up to----- and said, "Who had the gun?" and smashed him straight round the face and the bloke went up the wall and up the ceiling. (Laughter.)

After attending a potentially serious disturbance at a club which caters for black youths, officers return to Hilton and recount what has happened, stressing the danger of the situation and their bold manner of dealing with it. A dog handler then comes into the main station office where most of the shift are gathered. His dog is carrying a large knitted hat in its mouth:

The Inspector asked, "Is that the war trophy? Good boy." P.C.: "Yes, we brought it especially for you." The Inspector then launched into a hostile comment on how "it is necessary to use dogs for the coloureds because they're so bloody violent and that's why you want them. I can tell you I was at ----- (names scene of violent demonstration) when we had the horses and I can tell you we were really pleased to see them." Other stories of similar incidents followed.

In this incident, which does place officers in potential danger, a dramatic imagery of war is invoked. The particular incident is soon transposed to more general themes of a world where a challenge to the police, speed, action and hedonism are dominant. Indeed, further data suggest that these aspects of tradition are wholly constructed by officers.

Having taken part in what a sergeant and inspector call a chase, one of them tells a story, emphasising what actually happened and includes the humorous line, "It must have been the only chase where we slowed down to avoid overtaking." On another occasion, two officers recall how they had played a cat and mouse game, travelling

33

back and forth along a road in pursuit of a car which they suspect is driven by a drunken driver. One of the officers adds that his colleague simply sat in the passenger seat, enjoying the bizarre episode, making no attempt to get out of the car and stop the other vehicle. The officer who is criticised uses wry humour as he replies:

"If you're not careful , I'll tell the true story. I'll tell the truth." I asked "What's this?" The police driver said, "I'm not worried. It doesn't worry me." His critic then ended the exchange. " Yes , I'd watch it because I'll tell the truth ." (Laughter.)

At times, humorous narrative mediates between the occupational culture and other aspects of the police organisation. In this example, the concern is a rather different one where the particular perspective of the occupational culture - the chase, and elements of excitement and action - are recognised as rather distant from the "real events" being described. The breach between the police perception, action and the reality to which they point is exposed and healed . Normal policing continues.

Sustaining the Reality of Police Work

Jokes and humorous stories are regular features of life at Hilton Police Station. Once situated within the tensions between the occupational culture, law and police policy their importance becomes clear. The tenuous character of the occupational culture, which is basically at odds with the "real" working experience of Hilton's officers, as well as with all the potential constraints that can be placed upon their work, needs to be continually sustained and enriched. Within this social context of police work, the traditions of the occupational culture circumscribe the behaviour of errant officers, boundaries of tolerance for what is considered to be normal policing are affirmed, possible interventions into the world of the rank-and-file officer are identified and challenged. So the individual working experience of an officer is placed within the collective tradition , being gathered up into the stock of knowledge which orients practical police work and retains for officers the semblance of commonsense. The shift of constables , sergeants and inspectors gathered together for a chat are literally sustaining police work itself.

Notes

1. For example M Chatterton , "The supervision of patrol work under the 'ftxed points system'" inS Holdaway (ed .), The British Police, London , 1979 , Edward Arnold , and S Holdaway, Inside the British Police: A Force at Work , Oxford , 1983, Blackwell.

2. P Manning, Police Work: The Socia/ Organisation of Policing , Cambridge, Mass. , 1977 , MIT Press, and M Cain , Society and the Policeman 's Role, London , 1973 , Routledge and Kegan Paul.

3. M Punch, ed. , Managem ent and Control of Organisations: Occupational Deviance, Responsibzfity and A ccountability, Leiden/Antwerp, 1981, HE Stenfen Kroesse B.V. p .28 .

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4. K Heal and P Morris, Crime Control and the Police, Home Office Research Study No. 67, London 1981, HMSO.

5. For a discussion of the theoretical perspective underlying this paper see P Berger and T Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, Allen Lane, Harmondsworth, 1966. All names and places are rendered to anonymity.

6. R Coser, "Some social functions of laughter: a study of humour in a hospital setting", Human Relations, 12, 171-181, 1959 and "Laughter amongst colleagues; a study of the social functions of ~umour among the staff of a mental hospital", Psychiatry, 23, 81-95, 1960, D. Roy, "Banana Time: job satisfaction and informal interaction", Human Organisation, 18, 156-158, 1960, A C Zijderveld, 'Jokes and their relation to social reality", Social Research, 35, 286-311, 1968.

7. M Douglas, Implicit Meanings: Essay in Anthropology, London 1975, Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp.90-114 .

8. U Hannertz, Sou/side: Inquiries into Ghetto Culture and Community, London and New York, Columbia, University Press, 1969.

9. M S Reed, et al, "Wayward Cops: the functions of deviance in groups reconsidered", Social Problems, 24, (5), 1977, 565-575.

10. M Punch and T Naylor, "The Police: a social service", New Society, 24, 1973, 358-361.

11. A K Bottomley and C Coleman, Understanding Crime Rates, Farnborough, 1981, Gower.

35

Hunter and Hunting in Yoruba Folklore*

J Olowo Ojoade

Emi ni Akara-ogun, 9kan ninu aw9n ogboju 9de aiye atij<,?. Ode ni baba ti o bi mi ise. . . Ologun ni si i~e pelu. Baba mi ni ~gb~run ado, at<,? r~ j<; <;gb<;run, onde si j~ ~gb~ta. Otalugba sigidi ni m b~ ni ile wa, 9sanyin i b~ ko si se f~nu~o; anj9nnu ni ima ~9 ile de baba mi, bi on ko ba si ni ile nitori ko si eniti iwo ile re lehin re: . . . . ew9 ni; sugb9n bi on ti ni ogun to ni, sib~ on ko ka apa iya mi: nitori ogbologbo aj<; ni iya mi i~e.

(For the translation see No. 4)

The intention of this paper is to recount some Yoruba folklore forms relating to Yoruba traditional hunting activities. That folklore is a microcosm of the lifestyle of the people that use it by now certainly needs no defence whatsoever. (See e.g. Ojoade 1980:43-71, 1982a (85-89 ).) Thus the few forms of folklore herein listed, especially proverbs, praisenames and songs, mirror every aspect of Yoruba traditional hunting activities. But it must be added that folklore alone cannot do the trick; folklore alone cannot give a rounded picture of the Yoruba traditional hunting activities. Therefore other useful evidence is brought in to augment the folkloristic data at our disposal. In the process of annotating or analysing these genres of folklore we discover that they shed important sidelights on other aspects of the Yoruba traditional lifestyle. (See e.g. Ojoade 1981:63-85; 1982b:37-44.)

The method used is first to discuss and group each relevant item according to themes. Then I list some illustrative genres of folklore which are germane to the points being

*The Yoruba, who constitute one of the three major ethnic groups in Nigeria, inhabit the southwestern part of that country.

This paper was inspired by Dr Venetia Newall 's article "The Unspeakable In Pursuit of The Uneatable: Some comments on Fox-hunting", Folklore, Vol. 94 (1983-i), 86-90.

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made under each theme. Usually I adopt the translations used by the sources that I quoted, e.g. Ajibola or Delano, and where I decided to use my own translations, I have made them as literal as possible in order to be close to the original. For this study I have collected as many folklore forms as possible and consulted all works relevant to the topic. These have been listed in the bibliography.

Theme One. Hunter: A Respectable Personality

That hunting is not only one of the earliest occupations (the others being fishing, farming and craft industries), but also one of the most respectable is attested by folklore. Of course it must be a very early occupation; in fact, as old as mankind, for the simple reason that man must feed himself and his family and also defend the same from attacks of wild animals. The proverb ''Agba ti o ri ejo ti ko sa, ara iku ni o nya a" means "an elder who sees a snake and does not run away is flirting with death". But the hunter does not need to run from the animal. He must kill it and drive others away from his neighbourhood. The same is true of other wild animals with which the Yorubaland used to teem in earlier days.

The fact that hunting was a very respectable occupation throughout the Yorubaland must be responsible for the attraction it had in some settlements in Yorubaland, particularly Oke-Igbo. According to Ojo (1966:38) about sixty percent of the male inhabitants of Oke-Igbo were hunters who farmed only as a subsidiary.

Theme Two. The Hunter's Other Occupations

The hunter was at one and the same time a farmer and a medicine-man. That the hunter was also a good farmer is reflected in the following song:

(2) Qd<; lo mu su de'l<; yi; Agb<; ko m9 'bi won gbe ngbinsu.

(It is the hunter who brought yam to this land; The farmer did not know where yam was planted.)

There is overwhelming evidence that the hunter was also a medicine-man. Tradition says that Ogun, the god of hunters, was himself a medicine-man. Says Dennett (1968:214):

Wandering through the woods as the hunter did, he (i.e. Ogun) is said to have been captured by Aja and taught the use of herbs, and so became a medicine-man.

In a similar way Ogun's worshippers, the hunters, pursued the animals into the forests, thereby obtaining knowledge of the characteristic behaviour of the flora and fauna of the forest. One could therefore rely on them for both preventive and curative medicines for the treatment of diseases. (Ojo 1966:40)

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Many hunters indeed understood the languages of birds and animals into whose forms they were capable of changing when need be. They also had close contact with other inhabitants of the forests such as spirits who were themselves authorities in medicine. After making a deal they revealed their secrets to the hunters. (Parrinder 1969:164) But like their Malian counterparts the Yoruba hunters understandably kept the magical knowledge so gained a top secret. (Cp. Bird 1974:105; Ajuwon 1982:25 .)As one Yoruba proverb says:

(3) Ki i se gbogbo ohun ti oju olode ri lo fi nse irohin . . . . de'le.

(It is not all that the hunter experienced in the forest that he relates (on getting home.))

Additionally, we know that by the nature of their occupation, and indeed by extension, hunters were also "explorers of the nation", because while hunting they unwittingly extended the bounds of their nation and returned home with news of newfound lands. They unconsciously created tracts which joined forests to forests and villages to villages, these eventually becoming footpaths used by both farmers and traders and other road users who shuttle between different settlements. Builders of modern roads had no choice but to adopt these traditional paths when they had to make new roads.

The hunters could be called self-appointed border-guards. Naturally it is only they who could discover any trespassing within their nation's borders. In this same capacity they also guarded their towns and villages against outside aggression, and thus they naturally became their nation's soldiers. (Cp. Ojo 1966:40)

Theme Three. Training and Types of Hunters

In the traditional Yoruba society hunters had to undergo special training. This training involves magical and artistic and practical skills. The hunter had to develop a great many virtues, the most important of which was courage. He had to learn to mimic the cries of certain birds and animals in order to lure them to their death . He also must learn to be patient, cautious and agile. The result of this training, which must have been rigorous, is seen in the different types of hunters which we have among the Yoruba. These include what Adeoye (1980:92-93) classified as:

(i) Qd~ gidi (i.e. the courageous type that hunts at long distances from home);

(ii)

(iii)

(iv)

(v)

Ode etile . . Qd~ Ajagun

Ode Asode . . Ode adedo . .

(the type that hunts near home);

(the type that can also serve as soldiers) ;

(the type that can also serve as guards);

(the type that fishes).

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The first type is the type we find in Fagunwa's Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmale (1981), translated by Soyinka as The Forest of a Thousand Daemons. (1982)

The following statement which forms the epigraph of this paper, is characteristic of the locutions of such hunters:

( 4) My name is Akara-Ogun, Compound-of-Spells, one of the formidable hunters of a bygone age. My own father was a hunter. He was also a great one for medicines and spells. He had a thousand powder gourdlets, eight hundred ato, and his amulets numbered six hundred. Two hundred and sixty incubi lived in that house and the birds of divination were without number. It was the spirits who guarded the house when he was away, and no one dared enter that house when my father was absent - it was unthinkable. But deep as he was in the art of the supernatural, he was no match for my mother, for she was a deep seasoned witch from the cauldrons of hell. (Soyinka 1980:9, Cp. Fagunwa 1981:2)

It would be incorrect to say that the above statement is purely fiction, for as Professor Bamgbose (1972:11) rightly remarks:

The numerous spirits, trolls, fairies and gnomes that the hero of Ogboju (short for Ogboju Ode ninu Igbo Irnnmole) fights with do not belong entirely to the world of fiction. The Yoruba believe in the existence of spirits of different form not visible to humans but which nevertheless play an important part in their lives.

In truth, one of the novels of Fagunwa, Igbo 0/odumare (1960), is named after an actual forest bearing that name. Igbo Olodumare, which in fact is twelve miles distant from Oke Igbo, is believed to be infested with supernatural beings. (Cp. Ojo 1966:38)

Theme Four. The Hunter's Equipment

The hunter could hardly do anything with his bare hands. Ogun himself possessed some instruments for his hunting activities, notably iron, cudgel and stones. In fact, irons and stones were the symbols of the hunters' god.

Now among the most important equipment of the hunter are invariably animal skins, as any picture of traditional hunters will clearly show. Certainly the wooden club was one of the first pieces of equipment used by the hunter. For one thing the club was naturally available to the hunter. This is confirmed by the following proverb:

(5) A ki ija ninu Igbo, ka rna a raun 9pa.

(During a fight in the forest the people concerned do not complain of unavailability of clubs (to use for hitting each other))

Even rodents and other animals that reside in burrows which were chased out by means of asphyxiation were later killed with clubs or cutlasses. (Cp. Ojo 1966:36). Thus

39

long before the introduction of bows and arrows the hunter obtained his meat by piercing the animals with pointed sticks or beating them to death with clubs or by hurling stones at them. (Cp. Dennett 1968:213)

As implied above, bows and arrows were obviously introduced after clubs and stones. The Igbira are famous for making arrows whereas the Saki people are renowned for attaching poison to them. This phenomenon is manifested in the song:

(6) Igbira lo l'ofa Saki l'o l'oro Saki l'o loro o! Igbira l'o l'ofa a.

(The Igbira know how to make the bow. The Saki the poison The Saki the poison The Igbira the bow).

The following proverb also alludes to the bow:

(7) Gbe orun gunlc; ta gfa.

Rest the bow on the ground to be able to shoot the arrow.

This is because some bows are rather heavy for the hunters.

Then the trap. There is a variety of these. They are set along the tracks of animals . The following proverb describes how the trap operates:

(8) Iwaju ni gpa ebiti nre si .

(The trap snaps forwards.)

Another proverb indicates the bait which is usually attached to the trap:

(9) Bi ebiti ko pa eku mg a fi eyin feleyin .

(If the trap fails to catch the rat, it returns the palm kernel to the owner.)

Compare the next one:

(10) Ago ti o gbgn ~biti pa a, ambgtori mglaju abara paipai.

(The trap kills the clever striped bush rat, how much more the sluggish grey bush rat?)

It is no t only small animals that are caught by traps. There are other types meant for bigger animals , particularly the ones called "oso", "gboro" and "ofin". There are proverbs or idioms alluding to the effectiveness of "gboro" and "ofin" :

40

For example, to say:

(11) Gboro gbe eniyan

(Gboro has caught a person.)

implies that that person is in a serious trouble from which he cannot easily escape. Similarly to say of a person:

(12) 0 ti jin si ofin

(He has fallen into a deep hole.)

means that the person has fallen into a big trouble from which he cannot escape. Picturesquely this is the kind of dilemma in which an animal caught by any of these traps finds itself.

The gun is another weapon utilised by the hunter, but this is a latecomer - one of the consequences of cultural contact with the Portuguese who introduced muskets and Dane guns into Nigeria through Benin. Yoruba blacksmiths, however, did not waste time in making "flint-lock guns in imitation of the imported type" (Ojo 1966:42). One proverb alludes to the gun:

(13) Atira ibon ko to atira etu, Ojo kan ni a nra ibon Ojojumo n1 a nra etu.

(To buy a gun is not as expensive as to buy gunpowder; a gun is bought once but the gunpowder is bought every day.)

Then the dog. The dog has always been the hunter's hunting partner from time immemorial (Cp. Ojoade 1981:63-85 ). It would have been surprising if Yoruba folklore did not reflect this. Indeed Yoruba proverbs, and especially folktales, abound in references to the hunter and his hunting dogs as Courlander's 0/ode the Hunter and other Tales from Nigeria (1968) clearly indicates.

(14) Aja ti ko leti ko s<; fi d<; igb<;.

(A deaf dog is not fit for hunting.)

(15) Aja ti 0 ni <;ni 1' ~hin a pa Q b~, eyi ti ko ni <;ni 1' ehin apa ofo ~bg ti oba ni ~ni 1 '~hin le pa gtgtg enia.

(A dog which has someone behind it can kill a monkey, but the one which has no one behind it will kill nothing. Even a monkey which has someone behind it can kill a man.)

(16) Bi aja r'Oju <;kun a pargrg

(When a dog sees a leopard's face it will be silent.)

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Charms are a sine qua non among the equipment of a good hunter. He needs them inter alia for protection against attacks from wild animals and supernatural beings. The importance attached to charms can be deduced from the fact that a hunter can spend between five and ten years in searching for good charms. Ingredients for a good charm must comprise:

(i) clothe(s) worn by a sacrificial person,

(ii) clothe(s) worn by a suicide,

(iii) the hair of a dead person, and

(iv) the fingernails of an "abiku" child.

(Cp. Olajubu 1978:129)

The last, but perhaps the most important, of the hunter's equipment is courage, for in spite of all the equipment enumerated above, if the hunter lacks courage with which to use it, the whole expedition will most likely end in a fiasco. One proverb pertinently compares charms with courage:

(17) Aya nini ju oogun 1<].

(To have courage surpasses having charms.)

Theme Five. Hunting Hazards

In early times hunting was hazardous and is so even today, and that is one reason for the training mentioned in theme two and the good equipment in theme three. The thick forests harboured a variety of wild animals and supernatural creatures, all of whom the hunter must encounter during some of his expeditions. This fact is amply illustrated in Fagunwa's Ogboju Qd~ Nin.u Igbo Irunmal~ (1981).

It is not surprising therefore that these hazards constitute a frequent folkloristic topic. For example, the following proverb:

(18) Iya ko to iya a-fada-pa~kun, ikun IQ, ada nu, 9dc; tun da lapa.

(One set of problems on another, the hunter attempts to kill a squirrel: the squirrel escapes, the cutlass is lost, the hunter breaks his hand.)

OR

(19) Qd~ ki ba ro~~ ro'ya, bo ba p~ran, ki ba ti fenikan j~.

(Were the hunter to consider all his suffering, if he happens to kill any animal, he will not give parts of it to anybody.)

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As Dennett has rightly said:

And hunting and its risks must have been the chief cause of death. As he beat down animals, so he was beaten down by the god called Ogun (the one who beats or pierces with a pointed stick.) (Dennett 1968:213)

Theme Six. The Hunters' Guild

Hunters in early days used to have their own associations or guilds, with their own officers. They also had special jurisdiction over each member of their societies. Some used to meet every seventh day in their own guild house. (Fadipe 1970:251.) Dennett (1968:122) distinguishes two types of guild:

(i) ~gbe gmgd~ (an ordinary hunters' society).

(ii) ~gb~ olori gd~ (the society of great hunters).

At least one proverb reflects the type of mutual assistance which existed among all the members:

Qd~ ni i gbe gd~ n'igbQnWQ, bi Qd~ ko ba gbe gd~ n'igbgnwg gd~ a t~.

(Hunters must support the other members of their society. If they fail to do so they will all be disgraced.)

They enacted taboos for their members who must religiously carry them out. Among the several taboos the following may be mentioned:

(i) The hunter must not tell lies against another hunter.

(ii) He must not steal.

(iii) He must not commit adultery with another's wives.

(iv) He must not swear false oaths.

(v) He must not sit on the same seat from which another hunter's wife has just got up.

(vi) He must not sleep on the same mat on which another hunter's wife had-slept.

(vii) He must not cover himself with the same clothes which the wife of another hunter uses.

(viii) He must not assist in lifting a load to the head of another hunter's wife. If there is no other person around to do the work, the hunter can do so but must give the woman a leaf or stone which she must show to her husband indicating that another hunter helped her because there was no other person around to give that assistance.

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(ix) He must not carry away the animal shot dead by another hunter but must announce that he has found such and such an animal in order to discover the killer.

(x) The hunter must not put salt in the stew while the pot is still on fire. He must add the salt before putting the pot on fire . (Olajubu 1979:132-133)

That is about the hunter himself. What about his wife? Dennett (1968:118) observes:

If while away hunting his wife commits adultery he will see a male and female animals copulating. If he loves his wife he dare not shoot either of these creatures, since, if he killed them, his wife would die. So he goes back at once to his town and taking his wife before Ogun's altar accuses her of the sin. If she admits her guilt, the adulterer is fined one dog to be sacrificed to Ogun, one goat for Ifa, and three bags of cowries together with kola for the husband. But if she denies it they ask her to take some of the kola from Ogun's altar, and if she eats the kola (being guilty) Ogun in two or three days (unless she confesses) will kill her. Sometimes a ram will run after her and butt her to death.

Theme Seven. The Hunters' God

And if any of the taboos are broken by any member of the guild , it is believed that Ogun, the hunters' god and patron, will discipline the defaulter. This point is clearly indicated by the following song:

Ogun rinu, Ogun rinu, Bi mo ba seke o, o rinu mi, Ogun rinu.

(Ogun sees the mind, Ogun sees the mind; If I tell lies, he sees my mind, Ogun sees the mind.)

Thus if two hunters swear by Ogun to keep something secret and one of them reveals it, some animals may fight with him and probably kill him; or a hunter who has not broken any taboo but continues to have bad luck believes that Ogun wants a present which he now gives to the God. (Dennett 1968:119)

As has been stated earlier, Ogun is the God of all hunters. Therefore, before going out, hunters offer kola nuts to him. Ogun himself comes after Shango and Ifa in popularity among the Yoruba. This is probably due to the fact that every village in Yorubaland has a number of hunters.

According to Abraham (1958:456), elaborate rites are performed by the Owa Ilesa, for this god is worshipped only by men, not by women. His position in the Yoruba pantheon is indicated by the following saying:

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(22) "Ori~a ti o wipe tOgun ko to nkan, a fowo J. e isu re nigba aimoye" . . . . . ("Whichever divinity looks at Ogun as of no consequence, will eat his yams with his hands for times without number".)

OR (23) Ori~a ti yio s~ bi Ogun ko si;

Oju lasan ni gbogbo nwgn nya.

(There is no God who can act like the God of iron; the rest are only boasting. (The God of iron was the God charged with the execution of felons.))

Or the following ljala song:

(24) Orisa ti yio se bi Ogun ko si mo Laisi Onire a ko roko Laisi Onire a ko yena Laisi Onire a ko ti eru godogbo saaju.

(There is no God that can act like Ogun; without him we cannot cultivate the land. Without him we cannot clear the paths Without him we cannot obtain slaves.)

The following proverbs also manifest the position and assooauon of Ogun with hunters:

(2 5) Omi lo mg oju ina, <]de lo m<] ju Ogun.

(As water knows how to deal with fire, so the hunter knows how to treat Ogun.)

(26) Bi Ogun <]d~ ba da gd~ loju, a a fi gba ori.

(If the hunter is sure of his case (that is, the matter over which he has sworn on iron), he will knock his head with the iron. (Instead of just touching his head with the iron when swearing, he will knock his head with the iron.))

The practice of swearing by Ogun survives in our modern courts where a non-Christian or a non-Muslim uses Ogun's iron etc. in place of the Bible or the Koran in order to swear an oath.

Theme Eight. The Hunter and His Game

The picture of hunting cannot be complete without a few lines about the hunter

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and his game. The hunter who has to go into dense forests for several days and nights is certainly bound to gain a good knowledge of the flora and fauna around him. It is no wonder therefore that an experienced hunter has great knowledge of the notable characteristics of both animals and plants, especially the animals that constitute his game. This knowledge is reflected in the hunter's salutes or greetings to these animals which the Yoruba call Ijala (Babalola 1966).

As we know, the hunter's game includes all edible animals in the forest, but space will permit me to mention only the most important ones here.

These Ijala about animals throw so many sidelights onto the hunting activities as well as other aspects of traditional Yoruba society, for in the descriptive references of these animals we glean information about the characteristic behaviour of the hunters, especially when they have combined to kill a big animal (No. 27), and the hunter's achievements (Nos. 28, 30 and 32); what animals are held with veneration, what animals when killed must be reported to the Oba (King) or the head chief (No. 34). From the Ijala we also see a reflection of the problems faced, for example, by a hunter who wishes to kill a buffalo (No. 38). We also see why some animals, e.g. the antelope, are so highly prized (No. 40).

It is significant to mention that not all Ijala songs are associated with hunting because Ijala artists, being highly considered as general entertainers, have often been requested by the public to entertain them on social occasions which are by no means connected with hunting (Babalola 1964:33 ).

To return to the animals: of these we may mention the elephant, the leopard, the lion, the buffalo, the bush cow and the chimpanzee. According to Dennett (1968:120):

When a hunter shoots at one of these he immediately sprinkles a medicine called Kaji in front of him in the direction of the animal so that it will not get up and charge him.

One proverb, however, suggests that very dangerous animals are normally killed by a team of hunters. Thus the Yoruba say:

(27) Bi c;ran ba bale;, Oju gdc; a yan.

(When the animal killed in chase is lying on the ground the hunters become anxious.)

That is, after the animal has been certified dead, the next problem is how to distribute it equitably among the killers.

At this stage I wish to treat the animals one by one.

The Elephant

Elephant hunters must have medicine for "egbe" (i .e. a medicine that will carry the hunter from the spot) because when the hunter shoots an elephant and the animal

46

is angry, it starts to uproot all the trees on that spot in an attempt to kill the hunter. It is only "egbe" that can save the hunter at that time. When the elephant thinks that all is now over, that the hunter has died, then the hunter emerges again and shoots the animal until finally the animal dies. The following proverbs allude to some aspects of elephant hunting.

(28) If you have captured an elephant, be satisfied, for you have done a good day's work.

This is used to describe a greedy hunter. This proverb some twenty yeat:s ago inspired a woodcarving called the "Greedy Hunter" which was given to an American folklorist who was doing research in Yorubaland. Below is what the scholar, Professor Lorenzo D Turner, (1960:45-46) said:

It (that is, the carving) represents a hunter who has captured a small elephant but is not satisfied. While on his way home with the elephant on his head, he stops to kill several smaller animals and crams them into bags which hang from his belt; but he is still not satisfied. Before reaching home he uproots a nest of crickets and is carrying home a number of these on the top of his right foot.

(29) Qd~ afi fila pa erin, Qj\l kan ni iyin r~ ID<].

(The hunter who kills an elephant with his cap, his praise lasts only one day.)

This is used in the sense of "A wonder lasts but nine days".

(30) A ~e ki a ri 'ni sa, Qd~ a fi fila p'erin.

(The wonder worker from whom people run away, the hunter who kills elephant with a hat.)

This kind of feat can be performed only by hunters with very powerful medicines.

(31) Ajanaku ko tu l'oju alaja; Onigba aja ko gbgd<] lepa erin.

(An elephant does not run away in the presence of the owner of the hunting dogs; one who has two hundred hunting dogs must not hunt an elephant.)

Finally there is a hunter's salute to the elephant:

(32) Elephant, a spirit in the bush, Elephant who brings death. He swallows a whole palmfruit, thorns and all. He tramples down the grass with his mortar legs. Wherever he walks the grass is forbidden to stand up again. He tears a man like an old rag and hangs him up in the tree.

47

With his single hand he would tear the Heaven to shreds. An elephant is not a load for an old man -nor for a young man either.

The Leopard

The leopard also has a few proverbs and salutes to its credit. It has three names which show its characteristics:

( i) Ekun - the fearless one;

(ii) Ogidan - the one ready to scratch;

(iii) Jakumu - the striker.

(33) Yiy9 ~kun, tojo k9.

(the fact that the leopard is walking stealthily does not mean that he is a coward) because the leopard is indeed a very powerful animal.

It is common knowledge that when this animal first sees a person it stealthily moves away. It will not fight unless it is attacked. Some people believe that God has given man some quality which makes lower animals fear him.

The next proverb has an imponant cultural background to it:

( 34) Qd~ ti o pa ogidan ran ar~ r~ lo Ado.

(The hunter who kills a leopard sends himself to Ado.)

Ado here stands for Benin City. This proverb can be said of a situation in which a person knows the actual results of his action. The proverb alludes to the extent of the greatness of the Benin Empire during the fifteenth century when the Empire was in its apogee. The custom was that the Oba of Benin must receive dues from his subjects. For instance, a hunter who happened to kill big animals like the elephant or the leopard must take personally some pans of the animal as a gift to the king. When an elephant was killed, "one leg and the biggest tusk" (Egharevba 1946:24) must be sent to the king. As for the leopard, this animal is believed to be the king of the forest whereas the king of Benin represents the house leopard. Accordingly "every leopard killed or caught alive in any pan of the Benin Empire had to be taken to the king as a special tribute" by the killer in person (Egharevba 1946:24). During the presentation ceremony the Uwangue, or someone from the House of lwebo representing him, would ask the hunter seven times as follows:

Questioner: What leopard did you kill?

Hunter: I killed bush leopard and not house leopard.

If the killer made any mistake he would be killed, but if he answered accurately the king would marry a wife for him or confer the honour of beads on him.

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The influence of the Benin kingdom which expanded into an empire during the reign of Oba Ewuare the Great (1440-1481) continued to increase under Oba Esigie in the next century and extended from Lagos to the Niger Delta, and the Oba put governors in charge of the major towns of the Empire. (Egharevba 1946:33)

As for the Yorubaland itself where the proverb originates, the leopard is similarly regarded as the king of the forest . Thus when it is killed its face is covered with a cloth and its pardon asked because it is a king and the king is not expected ''to look anyone in the face for fear of frightening him". (Dennett 1968:120) This popular belief is responsible for the assumption by the Alafin of Oyo of the title of "Leopard". (Lucas 1948:15 7)

As was the case with the hunter and the Oba of Benin, the Yoruba Oba was presented with the skin of the leopard and in exchange the hunter was given the "apparels worn by the Oba when the presentation was made". (Ojo 1966:38)

It must be remarked here that it is not only when the hunter killed any big animal that he had to send presents to the Oba or head chief of the town. Normally parts of any of the hunter's proceeds went to the Oba on his return from his hunting expedition. The following salute to the leopard also throws some light on the characteristic behaviour of the animal:

Lion

(35) Gentle hunter his tail plays on the ground while he crushes the skull.

Beautiful death who puts on a spotted robe when he goes to his victim.

Playful kill whose loving embrace splits the antelope's heart.

The two genres of folklore that allude to the lion are very significant. The first one, a proverb, refers to the dispute between the lion and the leopard, as to which is superior to the other:

(36) Kaka ki kiniun ~e akapo ~kun, olode a maa r' ode lotooto. • • • • • • • Instead of the lion becoming the servant of the leopard, each will go out separately.

The Yoruba, however, regard the leopard as king as can be seen above.

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The next genre, a salute, refers to the stand of the lion, that it is not inferior to the leopard because the only animal foe it fears is the elephant:

(3 7) Kinniun a fi ito gbaju, janta inun igbc;, ti i le gmgde gun ori eede barabara. . . . 0 ni, afenion, afigi dudu, kijgn-kijgn, kijgn-kij9n, afolorun!

(Lion who urinates* round about in the scrub! You giant of the "bush" who drives children helter-skelter on to their verandah! He says "I fear no foe but elephants, men, the dense thickets and the Almighty.")

The Buffalo

The buffalo is another dangerous animal. Its hunter must have a medicine called "afeeri" (meaning "a thing searched for which cannot be found" ).

Some of its characteristic behaviour is reflected in the following two salutes to the animal:

(38) Cudgel , child who rumbles like rain which does not fall! Cudgel who thunders in the soggy places! The coward is seeking a tree to climb. Black cannon! Olumeri, sprite with a razor-sharp horn! If you have some of last year's drugs left, do not pursue the bush-cow!

(This) beast will devour you: he is an animal who does not care if you say "I'll flee for refuge to my mother! " When some meat of a bush-cow

*The Yoruba believe that any animal that goes inside the circle formed by the lion's urine will fall a prey to the lion.

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is left in the soup, a child (is still so afraid that) he devotes his efforts to eating pounded yam! When the bush-cow roars in the forest, a child runs and dim bs a tree.

(39) The buffalo is the death that makes a child climb a thorn tree. When the buffalo dies in the forest the head of the household is hiding in the roof. When the hunter meets the buffalo he promises never to hunt again. He will cry out: I only borrowed the gun! I only look after it for my friend! Little he cares about your hunting medicines: he carries two knives on his head; little he cares about your Dane gun, he wears the thickest skin. He is the butterfly of the savannah: he flies along without touching the grass. When you hear thunder without rain -it is the buffalo approaching.

The Antelope (Cephalophina)

( 40) The antelope is sweet to eat and he is pleasant to sell .... The pregnant wife wants your skin.* For lying on it, she will bear a beautiful baby.

The Colobus Monkey

( 41) Silver face that needs a full charge of powder,**

*It is believed that a pregnant woman who lies on the skin of an antelope will give birth to a beautiful baby. (Cp. Babalola 1966:20)

**Because this monkey lives so high up on the tree the hunter must have a very good charge of powder to reach the animal.

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Black monkey that throws himself as if from a sling .

Conclusion

Surely h u nting was one of the oldest occupations of man, not just the Yorubaman. It was certainly also a respectable occupation. This was even more so because the hunter was not only a hunter per se, but also at one and the same time a farmer, a medicine-man, a guard, a surveyor, and a warrior. He was also an entertainer because he was often invited to perform on social occasions where he entertained people with Ijala songs.

Those, however, were the days of yore. Yet, there are still at least a few hunters, as well as game to hunt, that is, in spite of the dense forest now cleared for agriculture and human habitation. In add ition there are some forests now declared game reserves. Now, too, even those of the higher income bracket such as permanent secretaries, professors and business executives take to hunting as a hobby, although with sophisticated guns.

Formerly it was serious hunting with farming as a subsidiary: now the reverse seems to be the case. The kind of respect given to hunting is now nostalgically a thing of the past. But one consolation which the hunter has is that modern night-guards are recruited mainly from their number, which is obviously a recognition and a reflection of the position and respect that hunters had enjoyed in olden days. However, one aspect of the hunter's trad ition survives today, namely the custom of swearing by Ogun, the God of hunters, even in Western-type courts.

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Johnson, Samuel (1921), The History of the Yorubas, London, Lowe and Brydom.

Lucas, 0 (1948), The Religion of the Yorubas, Lagos, C M S Bookshop Press.

Meek, C K (1971), The Northern Tribes of Nigeria, Frank Cass, London.

Olajubu, 0 0 (Chief) (1978), !we Asa Ibtle Yoruba, Ikeja.

Ojo, Afolabi (1966), Yoruba Culture, Ife and London .

Ojoade, J 0 (1980), "Reflections of Hospitality in Classical Proverbs", Proceedings of the Classical Association of Nigeria, Vol. 3.

Ojoade, J 0 (1981), "The Dog In Classical Proverbs", Proceedings of the Classical Association of Nigena, Vol. 4.

Ojoade, J 0 (1982a), "Proverbs as a Mirror of Birom Life and Thought", Studies in the History of Plateau State, Nigena, ed. E Isichei, London, Macmillan.

Ojoade, J 0 (1982b), "Nigerian Animal Proverbs and Their Importance. The Tortoise as depicted in the Life of Ilaje Africans", Folklore (India), Vol. 23 , No. 2, First Part.

Ojoade, J 0 (1983 ), "Reflections of History in African Folklore", paper read at the Ninth Congress of the Pan African Association for Prehistory and Related Studies, Jos Museum , Jos Plateau State, Nigeria, 11th-17th December.

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Parrinder, G (1969), !¥'est African Religion , London.

Soyinka, Wole (1980), The Forest of a Thousand Daemons, Panafrica Library, Walton-on-Thames, Surrey.

Turner, Lorenzo, Dow. (1960), "The Role of Folklore in the Life of the Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria", in Austin , 1960.

Willet, Frank (1959), A Hunter 's Shn.ne in Yorubaland, !¥'estern Nigena, Man , 59, 215-216 (Art 334).

Willet, Frank (1965) , "A Further Shrine for a Yoruba Hunter", Man , 65 (May-June), 82-83 (Art 66).

University of )os, Nigeria.

54

A Semantic Universal?1

Ellis Evans

it is in the nature of language to be overlooked

l.Duis Hjelmslev

Let us look at a simple example of communication between human beings. A little girl chooses her prize at the village fair. Too shy to speak, she points to a doll, which is then handed to her.

Let us suppose for the sake of simplicity that there are just four prizes that she can choose from - say a box of chocolates, a picture-book, a doll and a tea-set - and that she is free to choose any one of the four. The possibilities may be displayed as follows.

Prizes from which sh e can choose

the chocolates the book the doll the tea-set

Let us also take it for granted that she and everyone else concerned in the incident are native English speakers, and that a number of other people are standing around watching as she makes up her mind which prize she will choose. Everything is as ordinary as one could wish.

She might have made a different choice, and she might also have expressed her choice by some means other than that of pointing. One could prepare to list certain of the means that are available to her by adding a right-hand heading to the table, as follows.

Prizes from which she can choose

the chocolates

the book

the doll

the tea-set

Possible ways of expressing her choice

There is now room on the right for four entries showing how she might, in principle, have expressed any of the four choices that she might have made. Four such entries could comprise a set of similar ways of expressing the choices concerned. For example,

55

she might have expressed her choice by means of speech. Instead of pointing to the doll she might have said, "The doll please, Mummy", or "I want the doll", or even just the single word "Doll" to the same effect. Similarly, if she had decided on the chocolates, she might have conveyed her choice of that prize by saying "Chocolates", or "Chocolates, please", or "Want the box of chocolates"; and so on. Suppose she had in fact just said "Doll" to that effect. She could be thought of as employing one of a set of four similar ways of expressing the choices open to her, as follows. 2

Prizes from which she can choose

the chocolates

the book

the doll

the tea-set

Possible ways of expressing her choice

(a)

saytng "Chocolates"

saytng "Book"

saytng "Doll"

saytng "Tea-set".

The four ways comprising set (a) are similar in that each consists in the utterance of the ordinary English word for the prize supposed to have been chosen. No more is being suggested by listing these four ways than everybody knows is the case. It is not being said for instance that any utterance whatever of one of those four words by the little girl under these circumstances would necessarily count as an expression of her choice of a prize. It is entirely conceivable that she might utter the word " Doll" for example in some way which did not constitute an expression of choice. Nor is it being said that using her native language to express her choice would necessarily involve using the appropriate one of those four words. It is not very likely, but she might have expressed her choice by means of some English locution which did not comprise or include the ordinary word for the prize she had chosen as shown in the table. All that is being said is that she might have expressed her choice, whatever it was, by uttering just that ordinary English word for the prize concerned. Indeed, it is difficult to see what the fact of there being ordinary English words for books and dolls and chocolates and so on consists in, if it does not partly consist in a child's being able to use them for such purposes. But in the example with which we began she expresses her choice in a different way, by pointing to the doll , and this too can be seen as one of a set of four similar ways available in principle to her for expressing her choice under such circumstances, thus:

the chocolates

the book

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(b)

pointing to the chocolates

pointing to the book

the doll

the tea-set

po1nttng to the doll

pointing to the tea-set.

(The previous headings apply). Certainly, not all the prizes might be capable of being picked out in this way, and it is not being implied that somehow they all must be: only that, as everybody knows, people do sometimes convey their choice in this way when offered a choice of objects displayed in front of them: such means are available to them under appropriate circumstances. The little girl might also, of course, have expressed her choice by means of a combination of methods (a) and (b), for example by saying "Doll" while pointing to the doll.

What sort of language is being used in (b)? The answer that comes to mind is gesture­language. There are, however, at least two different kinds of language that may seem to deserve that name. In the one kind, it would be the evident and visible character of the gesture itself - what the g esture was like - that would serve to identify, via the conventions of the language, the prize whose choice was being expressed. What the gesture was like, in the sense of, perhaps, what parts of the body were involved in making it, whether head or eyes or hand: the movements made, whether fast or slow or repeated: or the shapes outlined by those movements, or their mimetic quality, if any: or the particular attitude struck: and so on. With a gesture-language of this first kind, someone who knew the language would only need to look at the person making the gesture in order to be able to identify the prize, because it would be that gesture (movement, pose, stance) itself that constituted the identifying element, much as the utterance itself would constitute the identifying element if a spoken language was being used. As the identifying word or phrase would be all one needed to hear, so, in this first kind of gesture-language, the gesture would be all one needed to see. But with the second kind of gesture-language that I have in mind, this would not be so. Gestures would not themselves constitute the identifying elements. Those elements would lie elsewhere. The gesture would merely constitute the means of employing (locating, presenting) such a particular element in order to -express the choice of a prize. And it would be that element - whatever sort of thing it was -and not just the mediating gesture, that someone who knew the language would normally need to see in order to know which prize had been chosen.

Let us consider some imaginary exam pies of the use of these two kinds of gesture­language under these village-fair circumstances. Such examples are intended to bring out differences in types of structure: they are not offered as instances of exotic practices to be found in this or that community, still less as representations of anything that one would be likely to come across in an English village. Sometimes a good way of seeing what it is that we have, is to compare it with something that we very evidently do not have. To demand evidence for the actual occurrence of such practices would be rather like mistaking a blueprint for a traveller's sketch .

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Let us imagine a gesture-language whose use consists in outlining certain shapes in the air, such as circles, squares, triangles and the like. We may imagine that the language would provide the following means of expressing the choice of a prize.

the chocolates

the book

the doll

the tea-set

(c)

outlining a cross

outlining a diamond

outlining a spiral

outlining a circle.

Here it would be the shape of the gesture itself, in the sense of the shape traced out by means of the gesture, that would indicate, via the rules of the language, which of the four prizes had been chosen. If the gesture took the form of a cross, the chocolates would have been chosen: if it traced out a diamond, the book would have been: and so on. In order for a bystander to know which prize had been chosen, it would only be necessary for him to look at the gesture and apply the appropriate rule of interpretation, as shown in the table. But now let us imagine a language whose use consists, not in tracing out such shapes on the air, but in pointing to graphic instances of them: and let us imagine that it offers a user the following means of expressing his or her choice of a prize.

the chocolates

the book

the doll

the tea-set

(d)

potnung to a cross

pointing to a diamond

pointing to a spiral

pointing to a circle.

(We could imagine that boards with these and other similar graphic shapes on them have been set up on stalls where prizes are displayed.) So now, in order to know which prize had been chosen, it would no longer be enough to look just at the gesture. One would have to look where the gesture led, that is to say at the particular shape on the board to which the gesture was directed. Then if it was a cross that had been indicated, the chocolates would have been chosen: if a diamond, the book would have been: and so on. The subject of the rule of interpretation - the identifying element- which in the previous example was constituted by the gesture, would now be the particular shape singled out on the board, and the role of the gesture will accordingly be different in either type of gesture-language. In a language of type (c) its role will be actually to compose the element appropriate to the desired prize: in a language of type (d), however, the appropriate element will be already there, waiting to be located by the gesture.

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In language (c) the gestures identify the chosen objects by virtue of the shapes they outline, and are hence capable of having ready graphic analogues, such as are provided by the identifying elements of language (d). But it is not necessary that the gestures of a language of type (c) should trace out distinct shapes, and so have ready graphic analogues. The gestures of such a language might, rather, identify the chosen objects by virtue of the particular parts of the body involved in making the gesture, together with the nature of the movement thereby performed, as in the following example.

the chocolates

the book

the doll

the tea-set

(e)

opening the left hand

turning the head right and then left

raising the right arm level with the shoulder

touching the back of the right hand with the left.

Here all similarity with the graphic elements of (d) has disappeared. Indeed, the identifying movements of (e) are now such as will frequently occur during everyday non-communicative activities, unlike the outline-tracings of (c). But (e) is no less representative of its type than (c), for as we have been conceiving the matter, the distinctive feature of this type is that the identifying element actually consists of the gesture, and not of some other thing which the gesture is merely employed to locate: and this feature is equally present in both (c) and (e). Correspondingly, it is not necessary that the identifying elements of a language of type (d) should consist of graphic objects. The objects constituting the identifying elements could be of any kind, provided only that they were capable in principle of being picked out by means of bodily movements made towards them. As then in (e) we imagined a gesture­language of the first type- the type to which (c) belongs- whose identifying elements consisted of ordinary everyday bodily movements, so now we may imagine a gesture­language of the second type - the type to which (d) belongs - whose identifying elements consist of ordinary everyday material objects. The range of possibilities here is of course very great, the following being one.

the chocolates

the book

the doll

the tea-set

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(f)

potnttng to a cup

pointing to a chair

pointing to a flower

potnttng to a stone.

One could also imagine gesture-languages of this type in which the identifying elements consisted of creatures, or of people.

It seems clear then that the term gesture-language might be casually applied to languages of two very different kinds, namely that represented by (c) and (e) on the one hand, and that represented by (d) and (f) on the other. Only the elements of the former kind would actually comprise gestures or bodily movements. The elements of the latter kind would comprise ostensively locatable material objects (including graphic objects), creatures, and people. The difference between a bodily movement and a material object is categorical, and in view of this one would perhaps not wish to call languages of the latter kind gesture-languages at all, even though gestures would necessarily be employed in their use. I would like to call them allective3

languages. By affection I mean the business of singling out, locating, or presenting, by pointing or some other ostensive bodily movement, the linguistic element one wishes to be taken as employing. The element so employed may then be called the a/feet. Thus if (d) were used to express the choice of the book, the allect would be the diamond shape on the board that the user's ostensive movement singled out. If the allective language employed to express the choice of the doll were (f), the allect would be the flower exhibited or gestured towards by the user of the language: and so on. There would be no allects in the use of (c) and (e): these are consequently not allective languages, but true gesture-languages, according to this proposed usage.

There is a further distinction within allective languages which it would be useful to recognise formally. In (d) the identifying elements are graphic, whereas in (f) they are either natural objects, or man-made objects produced for purposes other than those of graphic (or pictorial or representational) communication. Where the allective language is of this latter kind - the kind represented by (f) -or where its identifying elements are creatures or people, I will say that it is an entian4 language, and that the language is conducted in the entian mode, as distinct from the graphic mode represented by (d). Language (a) is in the vocal mode. Entian may thus be thought of as a division of language alongside speech and writing.

What sort of language is (b)? Is it gestural, or allective, or does it belong to neither type? In order to answer this, we must first ask what it is about this business of pointing to the chocolates, pointing to the book, and so on, that determines the identity of the prize whose choice will thereby be expressed in any particular case. If it is some intrinsic quality of the gesture itself, say its shape or style or the parts of the body it involves, as in (c) or (e), then the language will be gestural: but if the identity of the chosen prize is determined, not by the character of the gesture itself, but by some other thing that the gesture is merely being employed to locate, or present, or direct attention to, as in (d) or (f), then the language will be allective. So what would a bystander who understood the use of the language need to see, in order to understand which choice was being expressed by the little girl? Imagine the prizes

60

screened off from his view, so that he cannot see (and does not know) which prize lies where, though he can see what gesture the little girl makes. He would not be able to tell, just from his observation of the gesture, which prize she had chosen. It is not as if the sight of her raising her right arm level with her shoulder will be enough to tell him that she has chosen the doll, for example, as it would be in language (e). He will need to see something more, namely, what prize she is pointing at, in order to know which prize she has chosen. And that is surely all he will need to see. As soon as he sees what prize she is pointing at - imagine the screen being withdrawn as she points- he will know which prize it is whose choice she is expressing. It is not, then, the gesture that is the identifying element in this language: there is indeed some other thing which determines the identity of the chosen prize, namely the identity of the prize which the gesture singles out. (It is a fallacy to imagine that the two must be the same). The identifying elements of language (b) are thus the prizes themselves, 5 and we must accordingly conclude that (b) is an allective, not a gestural language. Moveover, since those elements are not graphic objects (though one of them will contain such objects), the language is in the entian mode.

The fact that the prize located by the ostensive movement need not be the prize whose choice is thereby expressed is shown by the mere possibility of the existence of a language in which this would not be the case. For example, there could be a language in which the indication of a tea-set counted as an expression of the choice of a box of chocolates, the indication of a box of chocolates counted as the expression of the choice of a picture- book, and so on, as follows.

the chocolates

the book

the doll

the tea-set

(g)

potnttng to a tea-set

pointing to a box of chocolates

pointing to a book

pointing to a doll.

Then the choice of each of the four prizes could be expressed by means of the indication of some other one of the four. Alternatively, rather than kinds of objects being arbitrarily paired off in this way, a principle of interpretation could be imagined which utilised a relation capable of holding between particular members of a set of prizes: a spatial relation, say. Thus for example, it could be the case that the prize whose choice is expressed is to be the one on the immediate left of the indicated prize, unless the indicated one is the last on the left, in which case the one whose choice is thereby expressed will be the last on the right: and so on. No doubt such a language would sometimes be impractical to use. But speech is also sometimes impractical, and in any case, the point is not the relative convenience of any such particular practice, but rather that its mere possibility shows that the principle underlying the use of language (b), whereby the prize whose choice is expressed is

61

none other than the prize which has been indicated, is indeed a matter of convention rather than necessity. Incidentally, we do ourselves employ such alternative relations from time to time, setting them up as we go along by means of speech. Thus when making a choice from among a number of objects displayed in front of us, we sometimes say such things as, "The one just behind this one, please", or "I'll have the one the next size up from that", while pointing to one of the objects concerned. Certainly, if there is no such accompanying description, and one says just "This one please", or " I'll have that", or perhaps, as it might be in a foreign country, nothing at all, or nothing understandable, as one points , the object one has chosen will be taken to be the object one is pointing to, and not some other one: and this seems to show that the principle that the chosen object is the indicated object is assumed to apply unless specifically varied by accompanying words, or other linguistic means . But that it can be varied shows that after all it is only a particular convention, or possible case: and if the use of the principle is indeed universal among human communities, then it is a convention, or case, that has somehow been universally adopted , or has somehow universally arisen.

Let us call allective languages which utilise the principle, autolective languages , and allective languages such as (f) and (g), heterolective languages. Then the principle operating in (b) may be called the principle of autolection. 6 The object is not to multiply jargon but to serve a conceptual need.

Certain aspects of the structure of (b) which may tend to be overlooked because of its very familiarity can be brought out in the following way. Let us imagine that we have been commissioned to design a language for general use by human beings on any such occasion: that is to say, any occasion on which a person is required or invited to express a choice of one of a number of objects displayed in front of him. Let us imagine also that an important consideration is the degree of adequacy or reliability of the language so designed. It should be incapable of failure on the kind of occasion for which it is intended, so far as this can be secured. The beings offering us this commission express no preference as to mode.

So what mode should it be in? Speech, entian, gesture, writing? Let us first of all consider how the language might theoretically fail to serve the purposes for which it is intended. Then we may be able to see whether those ways in which it might fail could be precluded by an appropriate choice of mode.

How might such a language fail? Let us look again at languages (a)- (g), and consider how some of them might fail, if in each case just those four means of expression were available. The point is not to suggest that any actual community might be linguistically restricted in this way, but rather, by imagining the restriction, to imagine general kinds of failure to which even languages with very extensive resources in the way of expression might in principle be subject. Suppose a skipping-rope is added to the prizes in language (a). The choice of this new prize cannot be expressed if

62

the prize-winner is restricted to the words shown. An equivalent of this particular difficulty is sometimes encountered in fully-fledged languages. There could be a newly-developed toy on such a stall, for example, for which there was as yet no common English word: and even adults can find themselves stumbling over a verbal description when there is no readily-available single word for an object they require. Or suppose a second doll is added to the prizes in (a). So far from being able to cope with this additional prize, language (a) as it stands is actually diminished in power, as the utterance "Doll" now becomes ambiguous as between the two dolls, and it will now only be possible to make an unambiguous choice from among three of the original four prizes, failing the introduction from outside, as it were, of some additional means of expression. Something like this can happen in a shop, for example, if there are several very similar articles on display, of which one wants a particular one. A common noun for the article may not be lacking, but one may nevertheless have to give quite complicated instructions in order to get what one wants, relative that is to the use of the single noun. Or imagine that in language (d) a prize-winner wants the book, but the stallholder has forgotten to put the relevant shape up on the board, and there is no other diamond shape around. Or imagine that in (f) the prize-winner wants the doll, but no flower is available. Difficulties somewhat analogous to these occur when for example one needs to write but there are no materials available, or no surface that will take a mark: or when one simply forgets the word one needs, in one's own language or in the relevant foreign language.

These four examples are intended to illustrate two theoretical ways in which a language might prove inadequate to the purposes which we have in mind. First, it might have developed no means for the expression of a certain choice that its user wished to make on a certain occasion. (This is illustrated by the examples of the skipping-rope and the extra doll.) Secondly, while it might have developed a means for the expression of such a choice, that means might not be available when required on a particular occasion. (The examples of the diamond and the flower.)

Consideration of the latter kind of inadequacy might seem to lead one quite firmly in the direction of the choice of speech or gesture as the mode. For utterances and gestures can- with obvious reservations- be produced at will: and if the elements of the language can be produced at will, they can hardly prove unavailable. It is true that a user might on occasion forget how to produce a particular element, or might not even have learned what element to produce, but that would not constitute a design-fault in the language. On the other hand, having decided in favour of speech or gesture as the mode, safeguarding the proposed language against the first kind of inadequacy would be a considerable task, for the language would have to be provided with vocal or gestural resources capable of expressing the choice of an indefinitely large variety of material objects that might from time to time be displayed in front of any of its users. Catering for such a range of possibilities would be rather like re-inventing pan of a natural language, with the added difficulty that it would

63

need to be a language appropriate to members of the most diverse kinds of human community. However, let us recall the purposes of the language to be designed. Certainly, if speech or gesture is adopted as its mode, its elements will , with reservations, always be available. But they are not in fact required to be always available. The commission is not to design a language for continuous use, or for use on a variety of kinds of occasion. The language is intended for use only on a certain kind of occasion, which was described. So it would be quite sufficient if its elements were always available on occasions of that kind . It is true that the language could be safeguarded against a failure of the second kind by m aking its elements things that can, in general, always be produced, like utterances and bodily movements. But it could also be safeguarded against that kind of failure by making its elements things that were always present on such occasions, supposing that there were any such things. Its elements would not need to be producible, if they were already there.

So let us now consider this possibility. Let us consider what, if anything, will necessarily be present on any occasion of the kind for which the language is intended, and see whether the elements of the language can be constituted out of that. If they can be, the language will never fail for want of elements, since the presence of its elements will be implied by the occasion of its use. An added advantage would be that, since the user would not have to produce (articulate, form) any of them, there would not be any such thing as his forgetting or failing to learn how to do so.

What then is bound to be present when a person is required or invited to express a choice of one of a number of objects displayed in front of him? First, that person himself. Secondly, the objects so displayed. Thirdly, taking express to imply communicate, at least one other peson to whom the choice is to be communicated. On any occasion of the kind for which the language is intended, therefore, objects and persons in these three categories will necessarily be present.

Can the elements of the language be constituted from among them? Let us consider the simplest possible case. Let us suppose that the choice lies between just two objects, o 1 and o2

, and that there is just one person B to whom the choice is to be communicated: and let us call the person who is to make the choice, A . So under these circumstances, A, B, o 1 and o2 will be candidates for the status of identifying elements in the language to be designed.

Let us simplify matters by taking it that not more than one element is to be needed in order to express a choice. Then the following schema will show the form of any such language.

(1) If the element employed is ( ), the choice will be of o1•

(2) If the element employed is ( ), the choice will be of o2•

Here the brackets enclose places for the entries "A", " B", "o 1" and "o2

", to be filled in differently with just one such name in each, for example thus:

64

(1) If the element employed is A, the choice will be of o 1•

(2) If the element employed is o 1, the choice will be of o2

•

So there are twelve possible languages here. (They are still really only forms of languages, since a particular language will not come into being until some actual occasion of use arises, when particular objects and people can constitute its elements: but it will be convenient to think of them as twelve different languages). Which of them would be best for our purposes?

There is perhaps little point in reviewing all the possibilities. The most suitable language would surely be the one which offered the simplest rules for its use and interpretation, that is to say, the simplest way of proceeding from the object whose choice is to be expressed to the element that must therefore be employed, and from the element being employed to the object whose choice is therefore expressed. And of such possible rules the simplest for human beings must surely be that which lays it down that object and element are to be the same: that the chosen object and the element employed are to be identical, thus:

(1) If the element employed is o 1, the choice will be of o 1

•

(2) If the element employed is o2, the choice will be of o2

•

This implies that the objects available for choice, and only those, shall constitute the elements of the language, that the language will be what I have called autolective, and that it will be in the entian mode. It is true that another rule might be said to be equally simple in the case which we have imagined, namely that whereby either such element could be employed to express the choice of the other: the employment of o 1 to express the choice of o 2

, and conversely. However, this would only work where there were just two objects of choice. With three or more there could be no principle of the other: some more complex relation would be needed as a basis for the rule: whereas the autolective principle will accommodate any number of such objects, the above table being continued thus:

(3) If the element employed is o3, the choice will be of o3 ,

and so on. We may note that the first kind of inadequacy we considered, that of a lack of resources in the language, is also precluded, and that the daunting task of, as it were, redesigning a natural spoken language, or a gestural analogue of one, becomes superfluous.

Now the elements o 1, o2

, o 3 and so on can be any appropriate objects. So what we have arrived at in undertaking this imaginary commission is less a language with a fixed stock of elements than a method of language-construction. The "stock" is as it were indefinitely variable, but the same principles establish that stock for each occasion of use, and the same rules for its use and interpretation apply to it on each such occasion.

65

Our blueprint for such a language will now say something like this - on any such occasion, let the objects from among which A may make a choice constitute the elements of a language available in principle to him for the expression of his choice: let the use of the language consist in his making a distinctive bodily movement towards one or other of those elements, thus singling it out: and let the object whose choice is thereby expressed be the element so employed. This final stipulation expresses the autolective principle.

The blueprint, taken together with examples (a)- (g) and schema (1)- (2), can now appear as a theory claiming predictive, classificatory and explanatory power. It predicts that the means shown in (b) will be available to the little girl for the expression of her choice, as is indeed the case: it classifies those means, systematically relating them to and distinguishing them from other relevant structures: and it explains how it is that a mere bodily movement possessing no equivalent of phonemic or graphemic organisation is nevertheless capable of being used to express a perfectly definite choice.

Do all human communities possess this means of expressing a choice under such circumstances? If so, then there exists, not exactly a universal language, but at least a planet-wide method of language-construction. 7 Perhaps it deserves the name of a semantic universal.

Notes

1. This is a version of two previous papers, one delivered under the same tide to the University of Birmingham English Language Research Seminar on Dec. 11th 1984, and the other delivered under the title "Remarks on the Concept of Language" to the Human Sciences Seminar, Manchester Polytechnic, on Nov. 15th 1984.

2. Cp. the four-word building-language in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Part I, paragraph 2. The use made of the present example is very different however.

3. From Lat. ad + Iegere, choose.

4 . From O.E. ent , giant.

5. Cp. B F Skinner's view that when we point to the cake we wish to buy in a pastry shop instead of describing it, we are "acting verbally" and "use the cake in making the response" (Verbal Behaviour, 1957, pp.l24-5). Cp. also G E Moore's report of a remark by Wittgenstein that where we have an ostensive definition of a word, "the gesture of pointing together with the object pointed at can be used instead of the word." (Philosophical Papers, 1959, p .260).

6. The existence of this principle may throw some light on the fact that to the child "the word for a long time appears ... as an attribute or a property of the object" and that "the child grasps the external structure object-word before he can grasp the internal relation sign-referent" (L S Vygotsky, Thought and Language, 1962, p.28). Let us suppose that the child first learns to ask for things by means of the principle alone, so that his earliest asking-language has the structure of (b): then that he learns to use the principle together with a word for the object, his asking-language now combining structures (b) and (a):

66

and that finally he grasps that the utterance can be used to the same effect alone, structure (a) now occurring independently of (b). Schematically

Linguistic element

Stage 1

object

Stage 2

object + word

Stage 3

word

At stage 2 , before the stage 3 realisation that the word can be used independently, it would surely be natural for the object + word complex (Vygotsky's "external structure" ) to appear as an elaboration of the object.

7. Cp. F de Saussure's remark that "what is natural to mankind is not oral speech but the faculty of constructing a language" (Course in General Linguzstics, 1960, p .10).

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Just for Fun: Children's Playground Songs from Derbyshire

Alan Teece

Walk past any Primary school and listen to the activity in the playground. There will be the usual energetic crowds of boys chasing a football, small groups playing in corners, cowboys , skippers, netballers, the marble experts, and the unsociable few leaning against the railings. Then, above all this noise and confusion, there may be heard the rhythmic clapping and singing of the playground songs. The best time of year to observe this activity appears to be between Easter and Whitsuntide, for, as in other child activities, there is a set season.

In 1972 a survey and recordings were made of these singing games in the Matlock area of Derbyshire. The games were recorded on tape, not as special performances, but as they were played in the school breaks. As soon as the games began, the children forgot all about the recordings and it was usually the whistle sounding the end of break that sent them crowding round the recorder clamouring for a playback.

The greatest distance between any of the schools in the survey is five miles, and although at first glance this may appear rather limited, some versions of the same song are incredible; and what is even more incredible is the fact that children living in bordering catchment areas are ignorant of some of their neighbours' songs. Mainly, it was the older girls who performed, but on occasion boys would join in , particularly during the more energetic or horrific songs.

The first song, recorded at only one school, produced a storm of giggles, squeals and catcalls as skirts were flashed in the air at the appropriate moment:

I'm Shirley Temple, The girl with curly hair. I have two dimples And wear my skirts up there. I am unable To do my dancing cable. For I'm Shirley Temple The girl with curly hair.

Oh! Salome, Salome, You should see Salome; Hands up there, Skirts up there. You should see Salome!

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Apart from the suggestion that she was the wife of Paul Temple who was appearing on television at the time, none of the children knew who they were singing about!

A skipping song remembered from about 1950 has now been converted to an action song, but only recorded at two of the schools, is:

Measles! Measles! The eat's got the measles. Measles! Measles! The measles got the cat!

As usual, a large circle is formed, and the children jump up and down in time to the chanting- crossing and uncrossing their legs and trying to be sure that the legs are uncrossed at the end of the chant. If they are crossed, then a shoe is removed. It is possible to lose both shoes and both socks, but this does not often happen, as landing in the right position gives the girl the right to replace an article of clothing.

A sad, lilting tune traced back locally as early as 1912, and produced by all six schools, IS:

All. Poor Mary sits a-weeping A-weeping, a-weeping; Poor Mary sits a-weeping On a fine Summer's day.

All. 0 Mary what you weeping for What you weeping for What you weeping for, 0 Mary what you weeping for On a fine Summer's day?

Solo. I'm weeping for a playmate For a playmate For a playmate, I'm weeping for a playmate On a fine Summer's day.

All. 0 please get up and choose one And choose one

Girl chooses one from circle

And choose one, 0 please get up and choose one On a fine Summer's day.

Now Mary has a playmate A playmate, a playmate Now Mary has a playmate On a fine Summer's day.

As the circle of children moves slowly round, the girl in the centre makes a pretence

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of crying, and when she eventually chooses her friend from the circle, they dance gaily in the centre, whilst the circle of girls liven up their movements.

The big ship which sailed at all six schools can certainly be traced to the beginning of the century, but obviously goes back much further. The ship may have sailed through the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal, or have been the one which broke the French line at Trafalgar, first braved the shallows of Aboukir Bay, or led the attack on the Danish batteries at Copenhagen. Whichever it was, it is still sailing!

The big ship sails through the alley-alley-0, The alley-alley-0 The alley-alley-0 The big ship sails through the alley-alley-0 On the last day of September.

Maybe the date is an historical clue, but then we are confounded, for some versions give " ... the first day of September" in the last line. The children hold hands in one long line, with the first child placing her hand on a wall forming an arch. As the singing proceeds, the last child in the line advances, bringing the rest of the line with her, and passes under the arch made by the first girl. The singing proceeds and the line goes round and round, passing under the successive arches so that eventually each child ends with her arms crossed over her chest. When the line is complete, the two end children link up thus forming a circle, and they then jump up and down quite vigorously. The words remain the same, but at two of the schools the final jumping action was accompanied by:

Queenie, Queenie Caroline, She dipped her head in turpenune, To make it shine, To make it shine, Queenie, Queenie Caroline.

Could this be a reference to the notorious, yet well loved Caroline of Brunswick, wife of George IV, who was excluded from the Coronation? This chorus is recorded by the Opies as a separate rhyme and is remembered locally by older generations, though they used "Serpentine" and not "turpentine".

Four versions of another old favourite were recorded:

In and out the dusty windows, In and out the dusty windows, In and out the dusty windows, My fair lady.

Pat a little donkey on his shoulder, Pat a little donkey on his shoulder,

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Pat a little donkey on his shoulder, My fair lady.

Arches are formed with outstretched arms and girls pass beneath and in and out of the circle, as the song is sung, until they are back in their own place in the circle. The outstretched arms suggest Gothic style windows, but at two of the schools this was replaced by "dusty bluebells" and suggests a more rustic scene.

Another old song whose tune is now used by chanting football crowds, ts:

The farmer went to town The farmer went to town, Ee-ay Jericho, the farmer went to town.

The farmer bought a wife... etc.

The wife bought a child ... etc.

The child bought a nurse ... etc.

The nurse bought a dog ... etc.

The dog bought a cat ... etc.

The cat bought some cheese ... etc.

We all lay on the cheese, We all lay on the cheese. Ee-ay Jericho, We all lay on the cheese.

And ONE FOR GOOD LUCK And ONE FOR BAD LUCK And ONE FOR NOTHING AT ALL!

When this song begins, many of the less popular children make themselves scarce. A big girl is usually chosen as the farmer in the centre of the circle, choosing a wife from the ring as the second verse is sung. The wife then chooses a child, and so on. The fun starts when the child is chosen to be the cheese, for she is dragged into the centre of the ring and everyone falls on top of her and thumps her on the back. As a means of paying off old scores, the game is ideal. Children at only three of the schools knew this song, and the same three provided another "revenge" song:

Solo. There came a Duke a-riding A-riding, a-riding, There came a Duke a-riding Rat-a-ma-tat-a-ma-teazer.

All. What are you riding here for Here for, here for?

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What are you riding here for? Rat-a-ma-tat-a-ma-teazer.

Solo. I'm riding here to marry... etc.

All. Who are you going to marry.. . etc.

Solo. I'm going to marry .... rude name known to all.

All. Who do you call (name)?

This dialogue goes on for as long as the soloist can find names for the one she is to marry. When she has to reveal the proper name eventually, then the game ends either in laughter or in fierce argument, but usually the soloist is careful not to reveal the one name which will provoke her butt beyond endurance.

Marriage and babies are favourite topics in girls ' songs and there are varying degrees of vulgarity. This one was recorded at two of the schools, where, amidst whispering and a great deal of giggling, the wind began to blow:

The wind, the wind, The wind blows high; The rain comes scattering down the sky. She is handsome, she is pretty, She is the girl of London city. She goes a-courting A ONE TWO THREE, Please won't you tell me who he'll be?

Chorus shouts out a boy's name ...

She hugs him, she kisses him, She sits him on her knee. She says, "Me little darling, Will you marry me?" She says tomorrow, he says today, Let's get in a taxi and drive away.

The chorus of girls decide beforehand whose name is to be called out, but there are frequent interruptions from the bystanders, as this song always attracts a giggling audience. Sometimes the name called is facetious and is received with head tossing and a long pink tongue, but at others somebody hits the bullseye and there are blushes and screams of delight.

Many energetic and complicated kicking and clapping songs abound, startling one with the speed and accuracy at which they are performed. A high-kicking routine as in the "Can-Can" leaves the children breathless:

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Keep your sunnyside, Keep your sunnyside, Keep your sunnyside up. Never let it go down, down. See the soldiers marching along, See the Beatles singing their song. So bend down and touch your knees look like a Japanese, Bend down and touch your toes look like an Eskimo, See Elsie Tanner Showing her knees; So keep your sunnyside, Keep your sunnyside UP OR DOWN!

This was known at four schools and the beginning is recalled by a local from about 1950; the Beatles were not included then, and Elsie Tanner is a comparative newcomer to the playground scene. Earlier versions would presumably have included heroes of the day.

In addition to high-kicking, there is nowadays a highly developed clapping technique. It is usually done in pairs, but often this is increased to a trio or quartet, and sometimes to a huge ring of girls performing an astonishingly complicated series of clapping movements. It appears that some of the songs which accompany this technique are also new:

Miss Nelly had a baby, She put it in the water, The baby drank the water, The baby ate the soap FULL STOP!

She called for the doctor, She called for the nurse, She called for the lady With the alligator purse.

In walked the doctor, In walked the nurse, In walked the lady With the alligator purse.

"Measles," said the doctor, "Measles," said the nurse,

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"Measles," said the lady With the alligator purse.

"Dead," said the doctor, "Dead," said the nurse, "Dead," said the lady With the alligator purse.

The above version was recorded at two schools, whilst across the valley, only one mile away, the opening was completely different, illustrating the difference in tradition and practice between schools in the same area:

Miss Molly had a baby, She called it Tiny Tim, She put it in the bath tub To see if it could swim. It drank up all the water, It ate up all the soap; It tried to eat the bath tub But it wouldn't go down its throat!

the saga then being continued as before. The baby is wiped out without the slightest compunction. This is something which the children frequently do in their stories. The same finality is noticeable in the next song, along with some innocent naughtiness. There is more action too. Not only is there clapping, there is also mime and some very affecting grief. Another difference here, is that the chorus sings the verse and the girl in the middle of the circle gives the responses:

Chorus. Sally is a good girl,

Solo.

Chorus.

Solo.

Chorus.

Solo.

Chorus.

Solo.

Chorus.

A good girl, a good girl, Sally is a good girl And this is what she does.

I WILL... I WILL... I WILL

Sally is a bad girl, A bad girl, a bad girl, Sally is a bad girl, And this is what she does.

I WON'T ... I WON'T ... I WON'T

Sally is a-married ... etc.

A wiggle of the hips.

Sally is a-married ... etc.

Here comes the bride, sixty inches wide.

Sally has a baby ... etc.

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Solo. Rocking motion with arms and "shushing" sound.

Chorus.

Solo.

Sally's baby dies .. . etc.

Wailing noises.

Chorus.

Solo.

Chorus.

Sally's husband dies ... etc.

HURRAY ... HURRAY.

Sally dies herself. .. etc.

Solo. Girl falls into arms of another girl who in turn becomes "Sally".

This terrifying song was recorded in its entirety at two of the schools, and although it was gaily performed, the soloist's actions were quite convincing; and on the death of Sally's husband the whole group joined in with three mighty cheers. A very similar song was recorded at the four other schools; the heroine becoming ''Susie'' and two additional verses at the end see her first as a skeleton with the appropriate rattling sounds, and then as a ghost complete with moans and groans. There was also added an intermediate verse which saw "Susie" as a teenager, the response here being:

Ooh! Aah! I've lost my bra, I don't know where my knickers are!

this often being emphasised when teachers on playground duty are thought to be in earshot!

A less macabre clapping song found in five of the schools is:

I am a little Dutch girl As pretty as can be. And all the boys from Matlock Go crazy over me. My boyfriend's name is Tony He lives at Macaroni, He's ten feet tall With a dimple on his nose, And this is how my story goes: One day when I was walking I heard my boyfriend talking To a pretty little girl With a golden curl, And this is what he said to her: "I L.O.V.E., love you, I K.I.S.S., kiss you, I kiss you in the D.A.R.K. night DARK NIGHT."

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The school furthest away from the Matlock area - about five miles- came up with a completely different "Dutch girl". Where the children from other schools perform as individuals, those in this school performed as pairs; clapping, walking, waving and singing this ditty:

First.

Second.

First.

Second.

First.

Second.

First.

Second.

First.

I'm a little Dutch girl , Dutch girl , Dutch girl , I'm a little Dutch girl Tip-a-tap-teazer.

I'm a little Dutch boy ... etc.

Go away I hate you .. . etc.

Why do you hate me... etc.

'Cos you stole my necklace ... etc.

Going away to London ... etc.

Come back I love you ... etc.

Now we're getting married .. . etc.

Now we're having children ... etc.

This begins as a ,clapping song but then progresses - they part, wave goodbye etc. , and gradually come together again on the declaration of love. A charming little song, well performed, and remembered by a local resident as early as 1948.

A clapping song referring to some unusual physical disabilities, was recorded at three of the schools with only slight variations:

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Have you ever, have you ever In your long legged life, Seen a long legged sailor With a long legged wife? No I've never, never, never In my long legged life, Seen a long legged sailor With a long legged wife.

Knock-kneed sailor ... etc.

Hunch-back sailor ... etc.

Chinese sailor... etc.

Short-legged sailor ... etc.

The actions, involving clapping and doing the various actions to describe the condition of the poor sailor and his wife, are very complicated and demand lengthy practice.

Another song requiring action co-ordinated with clapping and recorded at all six schools is "A sailor went to sea". This has been traced back to 1950.

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Repeat .

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.

A sailor went to see, sea, sea, To see what he could see, see, see, And all that he could see, see, see, Was the bottom of the deep blue sea, sea, sea,

... went to chop, chop, chop ... etc.

. .. went to knee, knee, knee ... etc.

. .. went to sea, chop, knee ... etc.

. .. went to Hawaii ... etc.

. .. went to Chin, Chi nee ... etc.

. .. went to Japanee ... etc.

The actions which go with the song are:

When the sailor goes to sea salute

When the sailor chops cross arms over chest.

When the sailor knees

When he sea, chop, knee

When he goes to Hawaii

When he goes to China

When he goes to Japan

touch knees

combination of all three.

wiggle the hips.

slant eyes with fingers .

bow like a Japanese.

The song can be sung like "One man went to Mow" or "Old McDonald".

The most popular clapping song of all and recorded at all the schools appears to be:

Under the brown bush, Under the tree Boom, boom, boom, True love for you my darling, True love for me. When we are married We shall raise a family. So under the brown bush Under the tree.

The above version is presumably correct, but children in three of the schools replaced "tree" with "sea", which seems to be inconsistent with the idea of "brown bush". But here again, the children are unconcerned.

A relatively rare clapping song - only recorded at two of the more rural schools -combines naughtiness with nonsense:

My Mother told me If I was goody,

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That she would buy me A rubber dolly. My sister told her I kissed a soldier, Now she won't buy me A rubber dolly. 1WO ... FOUR ... SIX ... EIGHT Knickers on the line! The line broke They all got soaked And they all went to heaven In a little red boat.

The lack of reason is exceeded by the following song which was only to be heard in one school:

Batman and Robin Sitting on a river bank, Along came Superman And knocked him in the pond. Batman and Robin, Hup Robin! Hup Robin! Hup. Hup. Hup. Peeping through the keyhole What can you see? A big fat man from Tennessee. I bet you five dollars That you kill that man, Raise your skirts and raise your knees And go right on to Tennessee. Ooh ... Aah ... I've got a pain in my chest. Ooh ... Aah ... Tenny. Ooh ... Aah ... Tenny. Boom ... Titty ... Rarra. Boom ... Titty ... Rarra. HEY!

This song must be comparatively new as the heroes only became really well known in this country in the mid-sixties. The rivalry between Batman and Robin and Superman - a hero of longer standing - is understandable, but the whole thing becomes confused with the introduction of the fat man from Tennessee and the actions of skirt lifting and knee raising. However, it would appear, that as mere adults, we have no right to question such things!

"A Hunting we will Go" is so old that it bridges the impassable gap which separates

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us from the people of only a hundred years ago who lived out their lives bound to the wheeling agricultural year, knowing nothing of the things which we take so much for granted. It was performed at Harvest Home, Christmas Revels, weddings, and for all we know, at Church Ales and Fairs long years before then:

A hunting we will go, A hunting we will go, We'll catch a fox and put him in a box And never let him go.

The procedure remains the same, and was identically performed in all six schools. The dancers form two long lines facing inwards, and as the song begins, the top couple join hands, skip down to the bottom of the line and back again, then turn outwards and lead their lines down to the bottom. There, they turn inwards, join hands to form an arch under which all the other couples pass. This brings the second couple to the top and the whole procedure is gone through again. All the other couples follow in their turn until the first couple again reach the head of the line.

A rare action song, found in only one school, is:

Hop-a-cheese and lettio, lettio, lettio, Hop-a-cheese and lettio Early in the morning. This is the way the teacher stands, Folds her arms, claps her hands, This is the way the Scottish dance, Whoops! Don't be cheeky.

The first three lines are accompanied by a jumping dance, crossing and uncrossing the legs. The children then imitate a lady teacher's stance to some fair degree. Then comes a short, energetic highland fling, and finally a flicking up of dresses. This dance cannot be traced, either at other schools within the survey or from older generations.

A song which was traced as far back as 1950 but only found in two of the schools, gives an opportunity for everyone involved to become a soloist:

Chorus.

Solo.

Chorus.

Chorus.

What can you do Punchinello, little fellow? What can you do Punchinello little dear?

I can do this Punchinello little fellow. I can do this Punchinello little dear. We all can do this Punchinello little fellow. We all can do this Punchinello little dear.

SPIDER, SPIDER, TURN YOUR WEB TURN IT INTO A GOLDEN THREAD!

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On being asked what she can do, the girl in the centre of the circle performs some action, making it as complicated as possible by jumping and twisting or some similar manoevre. The whole group then has to repeat this action as they sing their response. The choice for the next person to take the centre as soloist depends upon the chanting of "Spider, Spider ... ", for here, the child in the centre closes her eyes and spins round pointing a finger. When the chorus ends, the child to whom she is pointing takes her place in the centre.

"There is a Thvern in the Town" provides the tune for the next song. As it is sung, the singers touch themselves on the appropriate part of the body:

Head, shoulders, knees and toes Knees and toes; Head, shoulders, knees and toes Knees and toes, And eyes and lips And mouth and nose, Head, shoulders, knees and toes.

The elephants, however, are far more active, as this song ends with a sinuous line of stamping children being led all over the playground, with children who took no part in the chant constantly joining the line in a " Conga" type procession:

One elephant began to play Upon a spider's web one day. He found it such enormous fun He called for another elephant to come.

Two elephants ... etc.

Four elephants. .. etc.

Eight elephants ... etc.

The chosen soloist lumbers around in a circle of children, with head down and arms swinging in front like the trunk of an elephant. At the end of the verse she chooses a partner who joins in behind, clinging to the first girl's hips. At the end of the second verse, both girls choose a partner. Thus, as the song progresses the number in the centre is doubled each time. At the end, the whole line of swinging, stamping children is led all over the playground whilst the chant goes on.

The above two songs were peculiar to one school, as is the next one, recorded at a school in Matlock itself, but somewhat remote, being across the valley from the other two town schools:

My name is Chinky-China, I live in Chinatown; I do my washing every day

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Six or seven times: Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! KAREN - KAREN - KAREN You ought to be ashamed, To marry, marry, marry A chap without a name; Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Repeat ..... with another girl's name.

An uncomplicated song with little action, and possibly not worthy enough to "catch on" at other schools.

Three schools provided a song demanding sharp wits and concentration:

All. Who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?

Judy.

All.

Judy.

Alison.

All.

JUDY stole the cookie from the cookie jar.

Not I stole the cookie from the cookie jar.

Then who stole the cookie from the cookie jar?

ALISON stole the cookie from the cookie jar.

Not I stole the cookie from the cookie jar.

Then who stole the cookie from the cookie jar? etc . ... ........ .

As each girl is accused of the theft, she must answer to this and then accuse someone else in the circle. The game ends when the named girl does not respond in time to the chant, or cannot name another person quickly enough. At this point the rest of the children shout out, "THIEF! THIEF!" This song is remembered by a local person who dates it as early as 1952. The term "Cookie jar" would suggest an American influence - how it has become to be used in a rural English primary school is a mystery.

Two songs are peculiar to the small Darley Dale school:

All. Johnny went to London To London, to London, Johnny went to London To see what he could see.

Solo. A LION.

Group then imitates a lion.

The success of this song depends to a great extent on the inventiveness of the soloist. She must try to outdo the group with unusual subjects for them to imitate. The verse is repeated time and again with a variety of things which Johnny saw in London.

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The second song is devoid of action, usually performed sitting on the low stone wall, or in a quiet sunny spot in a corner of the playground:

Who'll put a penny on the drum, drum, drum? The drum, drum, drum, The drum, drum, drum. I only need a tanner To buy a new piano, So who'll put a penny on the drum, drum, drum?

Come and join us, Come and join us, Come and join our happy band.

The last three lines are reminiscent of the cry of the Salvation Army, and it does appear to be some sort of street begging song. Why it is now sung by children in the playground is open to discussion.

Songs which were recorded at most of the schools but have not been discussed are:

"When we get Married" "A ship sailed from China" "If you're Happy and you know it" "Under the Lilac Tree" "The Igloo Dance"

All of these coming directly from the Girl Guides or Brownies. They have not been included for this reason, but whether these and other songs will be fully adopted and become part of the playground culture of following generations must be left for future investigation. It is possible, of course, that some of the songs which are included in this paper have indeed been adopted from other "cultures" and extensive research may well reveal this. Another song which is not included comes from the pop record of the mid-sixties - "Simple Simon Says", and this was well known at all six schools. In this case, it is possible that the pop record originated in the . playground and has now gone full circle.

The choosing of a soloist for a given game or song still involves the ancient art of "Dipping". Various versions were heard during the survey, but the two most popular were:

and:

Dip, dip, my blue ship, Sails through the water Like a cup and saucer, YOU are OUT!

Eeny-meeny-macca-racca,

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Rare- rie-dominacca, Jicka-pacca, lolli-pacca, RUM-PUM-PUSH!

The first, involving pointing to hands or feet, is reported by the Opies as being the most popular in the country, whilst the second has eighteen variations recorded by them, and is known in one form or another as far away as Australia and New Zealand. A group of children observed during the survey used "My blue ship" before the start of a skipping session. The last two girls, who had not been "dipped out", then shouted "FOG-END", meaning that they wished to be first into the game when someone had made a mistake.

It is incredible to think that in the space of six short weeks, our ten and eleven year­old girls lay these songs aside forever. For in the transition period between Primary and Secondary school they "forget" them. Is it because they are afraid of being ridiculed by much older children at the Secondary school; or is it because they now consider themselves "grown-up" and must leave behind childish things?

In a survey such as this, the conclusions reached cannot be clearly stated. The "Lore and Language" are blurred; often the songs are so nonsensical that they have no reason, and therefore no attempt should be made to define them. The children themselves are less confused. For them, logical explanations or searches for derivations are unnecessary. They merely sing and play their games for enjoyment. In fact , "just for fun''.

References Opie, I and P, The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1951.

Opie, I and P, The Lore and Language of Schoolchtldren , Oxford, Clarendon Press , 1954.

Opie, I and P, Chtldren 's Games in Street and Playground, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1969.

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Reviews

AUGARDE, Tony, The Oxford Gutde to Word Games, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984, 240pp., £6.95.

This attractive book covers all kinds of word games and word play, from acrostics and crosswords to rebuses and tongue-twisters. The origins of many games are revealed, their history to the present day outlined, and descriptions about the playing of the games reveal the many variations that have proliferated over the years. A game and its offshoots are examined in each chapter, illustrated with copious examples and diagrams.

This guide examines traditional forms of word play such as anagrams, word squares, and riddles, as well as such popular games as Scrabble and Consequences. Verbal manipulations such as spoonerisms and puns vie with guessing games like Hangman and the perennial favourite, Charades. Letter games, alphabet games, games involving diagrams and patterns, games linking the sounds and shapes of words - all can be found in this delightful collection of verbal ingenuity. Do you know what lipograms and univocalics are? We can read that human ingenuity has sometimes found an outlet in composing writings which either omit a particular letter of the alphabet or include only one of the vowels. The former are called Lipograms, the latter, Univocalics! There is even a section on how to Play with Poetry in this fascinating and highly instructive book.

The Oxford Guide to Word Games is easy to digest - it could be taken three times a day with no trouble at all. My postscript emulates the Guide's twenty sixth chapter, called The Longest Word. Let the bard himself have the last word on words ..... "They have lived long on the alms- basket of words. I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word; for thou art not so long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier swallowed than a flap-dragon" - Costard in Love's Labour's Lost. Honorificabilitudinitatibus is a Latin ablative plural meaning "with honourablenesses" - a fitting epithet to apply to the writer's erudition and comprehensiveness in this first-rate book.

W Bennett

BAILEY, Nick, Fitzrovia, New Barnet, Historical Publications Ltd in association with the Camden History Society, 1981, 72pp., 45 black and white plates, £2.90.

"Fitzrovia? Where's that?" you may be forgiven for asking, and indeed this old-established part of London "stretching north from Oxford Street and defined by the ancient boundaries of the Bedford Estate in the east and the Portland Estate in the west" has been the target of developers to such an extent that it is remarkable that it has retained an identity of its own. The former Fitzroy Square area acquired its soubriquet as late as the 1940s and it was not until the 1970s that the Fitzrovia Neighbourhood Association was formed to save what remained of the character of this section of the ancient parish of St Pancras.

This attractive little book with its eye-catching cover illustration of a local Carton-Pierre ornament workshop in 1908 will certainly help to put this part of London back on the map. Particularly effective is the alphabetical street-by-street history, ably complemented by a judicious selection

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of photographs which add people to the places described and evoke the picturesque character of this hitherto neglected area of the capital.

J D A Widdowson

BARRACLOUGH, K C, Steelmaking Before Bessemer: Volume 1, Blister Steel, the birth of an industry , 273pp., Volume 2, Crucible Steel, the growth of technology , 387pp., illus., London, The Metals Society, 1984.

It is hard to imagine anyone better qualified than Dr Kenneth Barraclough to write the early history of the steel history. For over forty years he held a responsible position in the manufacture of special steels and for much of that time, inspired early in his career by daily contact with men who had been involved in crucible steelmaking, he pursued his historical research through the study of documents and fieldwork to unravel a story that had been inadequately told before. A man of wide interests, Dr Barraclough has the gift of explaining technological processes in a clear and interesting manner to the layman. These two handsomely produced volumes will surely become accepted as the definitive work on the pre-Bessemer steel industry.

This is intentionally a history of technology, not a social-and-economic history. Volume 1 deals with the cementation process whereby iron bars were converted into blister steel in furnaces which resembled pottery kilns. Nineteenth century Sheffield had well over two hundred cementation furnaces; now only the Daniel Doncaster No 5 furnace in Hoyle Street survives. Dr Barraclough shows how this method was used in central Europe in the second half of the sixteenth century and how it became established in this country during the seventeenth century, at first in the region drained by the river Severn and its tributaries, then in the North-east, particularly in the valley of the Derwent, a tributary of the Tyne. The crucial factor in the North-east's dominance was the ease by which high-quality Dannemora iron could be imported from Sweden, though local supplies of coal, charcoal and refractory sandstones were also important. At this time the Sheffield region was involved only in a modest way; Thomas Oughtibridge's 17 3 7 view of the town depicts only one pair of steel furnaces and only a handful were in operation in the surrounding area.

Dr Barraclough has been industrious in gathering together the random pieces of documentary evidence that shed some light on the early development of the cementation steel industry. He offers new interpretations of some known sources and provides vivid illustrations from the travel accounts of Swedish visitors, which have not been translated or used before. He establishes the importance of the cementation process, which by 1800 was the major primary source of steel in Britain . By that time Sheffield had overcome many of its former transport difficulties and was emerging as the main centre of British steelmaking.

Benjamin's Huntsman's crucible process did not replace the older methods, for blister steel was the product that he remelted and refined. Demand for blister or cementation steel therefore increased. Nineteenth century engravings of Sheffield steelworks commonly show an integrated unit comprising a group of cementation furnaces which supplied the rows of crucible holes. Nevertheless , Huntsman's discovery was of major importance. Dr Barraclough writes that, "It is no .exaggeration to claim that Benjamin Huntsman laid the foundations on which all ingot­making steelmaking processes are based. He was responsible for Sheffield becoming the quality steel producing centre of the world ." Before 1740 only about 200 tons of steel per annum were made in the Sheffield area; a hundred years later production had increased 100 fold and

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Sheffield was responsible for about forty percent of the total European production. In 1778 a Swiss commentator wrote, "The cast steel of England is , without contradiction, the most beautiful steel in commerce; it is the hardest, the most compact and the most homogeneous; one can recognise it at a glance."

Dr Barraclough therefore concentrates, quite rightly, on the biographical details of Huntsman's career and the story of his triumph in establishing his business. Foreign visitors undertook long journeys to talk to him. The locals were less impressed until they realised that foreigners were using crucible steel to make better cutlery, whereupon they turned to his products wholeheanedly. Steelmaking activities from the death of Huntsman in 1776 to the establishment of the large East End steelworks in the 1850s are not well documented, but Dr Barraclough is able to convey an impression of enormous growth, not only in Britain but in many parts of Europe, Asia and the New World . His study broadens out from the minutiae of local detail (so necessary in establishing the context and chronology of the early history of steelmaking) to the story of the worldwide development of a basic industry. He begins his preface by saying, " The number of people still alive who remember the old Sheffield methods and to whom 'blister steel', 'shear steel', and , above all, 'crucible steel' were everyday items, is now exceedingly small , and the past played by the production of these materials in building up the prosperity of the area is almost forgotten. So much is this so, that the idea that steelmaking began with Bessemer is commonly held ." It is a measure of Dr Barraclough's achievement and a tribute to his long and patient investigation of the history of the steel industry that this idea can no longer be entertained. The crucial importance of the cementation and crucible processes in helping to make Britain the first industrialised nation has been firmly established.

D Hey

BEADLE, Richard , and Pamela KING, eds., York Mystery Plays: A Selection in Modern Spelling , Oxford , Clarendon Press, 1984, 279pp., £17 .50 hardback, £5 .95 paper.

This publication follows Richard Beadle's unmodernised edition of the complete text of the York Plays (Arnold, 1982). While the latter is clearly a standard edition in an established tradition of textual scholarship, the selected and modernised edition is less clearly definable in terms of potential readership and use. Presumably the new book is envisaged as a replacement for J S Purvis's abridged and modernised version which has done good service since the plays were revived in production for the York Festival of 1951. The Purvis version has no pretensions to scholarship and contains no apparatus other than a brief preface, but it has nonetheless been found useful to the general reader and to those wishing to perform the plays, and it has continued to provide the text for the Festival productions right up to the most recent of 1984 . The Beadle and King selection of twenty two of the extant forty seven or forty eight plays, is likely to appeal less readily to this general readership, being more encumbered with introduction, headnotes, and glossary at the foot of each page. Moreover, the notes (single entries appearing only at the beginning of each play, not where individual obscurities arise) do not seem to offer all that a reader might wish to know (e.g. in 'The Harrowing of Hell" Lz.mbo is neither glossed nor explained). Editorial stage-directions are not introduced to amplify the few, and often random , stage-directions of the original, on the grounds that "given that very varied alternatives exist in many places as to the mise-en-scene , we have thought it best that readers and directors should attempt to reach their own conclusions on the basis of what is implicit in the dialogue, together with the factual information offered in the introduction."

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In contrast to the lack of guidance in this respect, the glossary is full to the point of excess. Does any reader need to know, for instance, that wend means "go", that din means "clamour", and that have done! is an "expression of impatience"? Furthermore, a few glosses are inaccurate: leaders in the expression lords and leaders of our law is glossed "upholders", but cp. OED leader of laws, 'one who has power in the state, ruler'. This is besides the normal problems of a modern-spelling edition, as when the manuscript

Sen we are comen to Caluarie Latte ilke man helpe nowe as hym awe

is rendered

Since we are come to Calvary Let ilk man help now as him owe.

In the edition Sen is modernised to "Since", but awe is neither modernised nor left unchanged, being rendered owe to rhyme with knowe, but still requiring the line gloss "Let each man help now as he ought to". Such complications are inevitable in an edition which seeks to make an old text available to an untrained readership.

Students are the most likely users of this book. They will benefit from the concise and authoritative introduction, but may have cause to complain about the selection of texts. "The Annunciation" (which is not included) is obviously doctrinally more important than "Joseph's Troubles about Mary" (which is). The plays by the so-called "York Realist" on "Christ before Annas and Caiaphas", "Christ before Pilate I", "Christ before Herod", and "Christ before Pilate II" are all included, seemingly on the somewhat dubious grounds that "the underlying theological structure of the Corpus Christi cycle made it inevitable that the Passion be treated with much more amplitude and detail than any other subject"; on the other hand, important plays like those of Cain and Abel and of the Shepherds are omitted, presumably because of the defects in the manuscript. Doctrinal "balance" is therefore lacking, partly as a result of these local difficulties and partly as an inevitable result of the process of selection in general.

In short, this book demonstrates the need for a modernised edition, with more detailed notes and with a rather less obtrusive glossary, of the whole of the extant cycle of York plays. Such an edition would give a clearer idea of the cycle as a whole and would enable any aspiring director to select the material himself.

G A lester

BINGHAM, Sand] BINGHAM, Between Sacred Mountains: Navajo Stories and Lessons/rom the Land, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1982, 287pp., $19.95.

This collection of stories, drawings, maps, and poems, was written with the intention of giving present-day Navajo and Hopi Indians on their reservation some idea of the past of their peoples. The material was gathered by younger members of the families, some still attending school, from written records and from the memories of their older relations. The result is a curious mish-mash of gushing sentimentality and talking-down as if to a five-year-old (it is not clear which age group the book is designed for). Information is given about the ancient history of both peoples and of their land, bounded by the six sacred mountains, but , perhaps needless to say, there is almost nothing about the appalling treatment of these and the other Indian peoples during the territorial expansion of European settlers in the late eighteenth and

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nineteenth centuries, nor about the continuing disgrace of Indian reservations and the accompanying white racism. Mention is made of the arrival of the Spaniards in the seventeenth century, which makes the silence on more recent events that much more eloquent. If the young Navajo and Hopi people are to be made truly aware of their inheritance, they must turn to writing much more politically aware than this anaemic offering.

G Cawthra

BOLTON, W F, The Language of 1984: Orwell's English and Ours , London , Blackwell in association with Deutsch, 1984, 252pp., £19.50 hardback , ;£7.50 paper.

It is not difficult to imagine that this book will upset some of its readers, for although the idea is good its execution is another matter. As Orwell is the inventer of Newspeak, it is reasonable to see how far his pronouncements on language have validity today. Unfortunately, as Professor Bolton realises, most of what Orwell had to say about language, and English in particular, is neither very profound nor very new. Linguists may be dissatisfied with this book because it takes as its starting point such an unsatisfactory basis for a linguistic analysis. Literary critics are likely to be equally disappointed for although Orwell 's views on language are the starting point, Orwell himself and his writings are quickly lost sight of in the ensuing discussion about particular points of language. Professor Bolton's approach is to relate what Orwell had to say or implied about such things as language change, language variety, literary language etc. and then to put those remarks into a more linguistic framework in an account of the position since Orwell's day. Often he takes a much wider historical view than that. The result is a sensible book which is useful for the general reader provided he does not want to know too much about Orwell or to discover modern developments in linguistics . As a general introduction to language study and how literary authors have responded to language it has much to recommend it.

N F Blake

BROWN, M, Left Handed: Right Handed, Newton Abbot, David and Charles , 1979, 139pp. , ;£4 .95.

This book contains the fascinating information that cats are left-pawed! Apparently, they are the only animals , apart from humans, which show a preference for one side over the other. The majority of humans are right-handed, and there do seem to be differences between right­and left-handed people. Mr Brown first looks at the obvious fact of handedness, (it seems to be hereditary), and the advantages and disadvantages of being left-handed. This question of handedness is related to the structure of the brain. We have, in effect, two brains, loosely connected by nerves, and the evidence is that one side of the brain controls different functions to the other. These functions are related to the handedness of the person. For example, the author tells us that the right brain seems to be superior in musical ability. The right brain controls the left hand side of the body, and left-handed people are more likely to be superior in musical ability (and spatial awareness, nonverbal communication etc.) than right-handed people.

The last part of the book takes an even more general look at the way we deal with problems, and how we see the world. People have always seen the world as two halves (light and dark

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etc.), and the symbolism of left and right is a very old one. The right side seems to be associated with logic, order and reason, and the left with intuition and the artistic. This seems to reflect the nature and structure of the brain.

The book is full of interesting facts and theories, although some statements are made without a great deal of validation.

J Dickenson

BROWN, Margaret R, comp., Boxes: For the Protection of Rare Books: Their Design and Construction, Washington, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982, xxviii, 290pp., $22.50.

This is a comprehensive review of one of many conservation techniques developed at the Library of Congress in Washington, U .S.A., and will serve as a standard reference book in this area which covers the preservation of library materials . This book is the result of the expansion of some workshop notes used in the Congress library's restoration office as in-house instructional material. Presented here are detailed directions for the construction of eight book boxes ranging in complexity from the relatively simple yet effective phased box to the more elaborate rare book box with portfolio. All are designed to provide a high degree of protection to volumes singled out for their rarity, aesthetic qualities or value. The individual drawings can be used as guides at the workbench, thus enabling anyone with some degree of manual dexterity to make the boxes without difficulty. The illustrations are clearly laid out for book conservationists, custodians and curators in libraries and archives who wish to utilise the latest methods for boxing important bound materials. Even the general public is becoming aware of the importance of preserving the bibliographical integrity of rare volumes for as long as possible. If these volumes are deteriorating, boxing can provide a "phased" protection as a stabilising action until permanent conservation techniques can be introduced to preserve a nation's cultural heritage.

W Bennett

BRYANT, F Carlene, "We're All Kin: A Cultural Study of a Mountain Neighborhood, Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press, 1981, xiv, 146pp., $11.50.

The mountain neighbourhood of Carlene Bryant's study is that of four Appalachian communities in the Cumberland mountains known to the residents simply as "top of the mountain". While at first sight the locals' use of the saying "we're all kin" is true in the literal sense that virtually all of them are the descendants of the four founding ancestors, this analysis reveals that their concept of kinship, as perceived through membership of three social groupings­families , communities and churches - extends far beyond mere consanguinity. And this is the paradox posed in the study because "although residents frequently use the terminology of kinship in speaking of their social world, the mountain's major social groupings- churches, communities, and even the neighborhood's four large extended family groups - often seem to be based on principles of organization and recruitment that are radically different from those of kinship. That is, social relationships and groupings are frequently spoken of as though they owed more to individual strategies and decisions based on a variety of personal considerations than to any discernable logic or principle of kinship."

Following a series of visits to the area as part of a research project on the social effects of surface mining in mountain neighbourhoods during which she familiarised herself with the people

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and the area, Carlene Bryant lived with a family in one of the four communities, Bradley Flats, in 1975 and 1976, and collected the material at first hand for this challenging and economical study which is a model of its kind and convincingly invites a reappraisal of the whole concept of kinship in future research.

J D A Widdowson

BRYSON, Bill, The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words, London, Allen Lane, 1984, 173pp., £.7.95.

There is no end to the making of books on English usage, which is what this book is though its tide might not reveal that fact. The author is an American, as the troublesome of the tide intimates. His approach is sane, though necessarily prescriptive. He claims to provide a guide to the complexities of standard written English, even if that means telling people what they ought to do but usually do not. Of "between you and I" he writes "It is perhaps enough to say that it is very common and that it is always wrong." But for the most part he is concerned with making written English as intelligible as possible, even if that means promoting lost causes. He relies too much on older quotations and authorities, and so his examples are not always as pertinent as they might be. He has his fun by finding "grammatical mistakes" in other grammarians and arbiters of usage. No doubt the discerning reader will do the same with Mr Bryson's book. For those who are troubled by standard English usage this is a perfectly reasonable work, though they will not find much discussion in it about the reasons for the recommendations.

N F Blake

BURROW, J A , Essays on Medieval Literature, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984, 218pp., £.17.50.

It is a tribute to Professor Burrow's standing in the field of medieval English literature that the publishers should have asked him (as I assume was the case) to allow the publication in one volume of eight previously published essays and three notes, from between 195 7 and 1981, all dealing with English and Scottish writings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Also included are three essays and one note which have not appeared in print elsewhere.

The new work is as important, persuasive, and urbanely-presented as readers of Professor Burrow's other publications have come to expect: a note on the honorific sir of Chaucer's Sir Thopas argues that the tide, found nowhere else in Chaucer, may have been used to mark the hero as a "sire bourgeoise"; "Honour and Shame in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" explores the related themes of the title from an anthropological starting point; "Allegory: The Literal Level" takes on a huge subject, and interestingly discusses whether allegories, at the literal level, obey laws, mainly by considering what are here called "Nee-Medieval" and "Neo­Classical" approaches to the question; "Chaucer's Knight's Tale and the Three Ages of Man", previously delivered as the) A W Bennett Memorial Lecture in the University ofPerugia, extends observations which have been made by other critics about the presentation of the themes of Youth and Age in the Tale.

Admirable as this new material is, it is scant justification for the publication of so much easily available material in a book of this price. The previously-published material is reprinted with only slight alterations , except in the case of "The Audience of Piers Plowman", which has

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a three-page postscript. Although Professor Burrow struggles in his Preface to draw out the links between the essays, the reader is left with the impression that the material has been assembled not because of scholarly needs but because of market opportunities.

G A Lester

CARPENTER, Carole Henderson, Many Voices: A Study of Folklore Activities in Canada and their Role in Canadian Culture, Canadian Centre for Folk Culture Studies, Paper No. 26, Ottawa, National Museums of Canada, 1979, x, 484pp.

Canada is fortunate not only in having a number of institutions and many more individuals investigating the wealth of cultural traditions within its far-flung borders but also in having officially sponsored bodies such as the Centre for Folk Culture Studies dedicated, among other concerns, to the publication of current research. It is also significant that folklore research in Canada is sufficiently longstanding and wide-ranging to merit a study of its origins, development, present state and potential future. The sheer size of the country and the heterogeneous nature of its population, including the Indian and Eskimo peoples, the British and French settlers, Blacks, Chinese, Doukhobors, Germans, Icelanders, Japanese and Ukranians, among others, all of whom maintain individual cultural identity, make such a survey a daunting task.

This is a comprehensive study which opens up the whole field of folklore work across Canada in an extraordinarily revealing way. Dr Carpenter succeeds in avoiding the under- or overstating of the various claims for consideration, whether on the part of the various ethnic groups she describes or of the many individual researchers. She strikes a delicate balance between the different approaches to folklore studies and refrains from criticism of any kind. Although at worst this approach might lead to a somewhat inward-looking mutually congratulatory celebration of the success of such studies, at best it permits a sober appraisal of the remarkable achievements in the field since the pioneering endeavours of de Gaspe, Tache, Beaugrand, Frechette, de Saint Maurice, le May, Drummond, LaRue, Gagnon, Tierscot, Massicotte, Prevoste, Macmillan and of course Barbeau. One of the many bonuses in this book - and a welcome development in this series - is the excellent photographs of most of these pioneers, and even of some of their equipment. The photograph of David Boyle, the founder of the short-lived Canadian Folk-Lore Society, for example, is a delightful glimpse of the style of the early researchers, and the photograph of the incredibly antique recording equipment used by Barbeau and others reminded me vividly of my own fieldwork in Newfoundland in the early 1960s when the portable recorder I took with me to the outports was hand-cranked. Photographs of more recent folklore scholars also add a further important dimension to the book, enabling the reader to identify many of the names in the text.

Dr Carpenter's survey demonstrates most effectively that Canadian folklore studies have built on their long and honourable history and that the older generation of folklorists continue to pass on their knowledge and enthusiasm to younger researchers whose task it will be to advance the discipline in the future. Although I sometimes found it a little difficult to follow the line of progression of the text as a whole - always a problem in rewriting a thesis for publication - I found it compelling to read, especially with regard to the pioneers. Above all, I responded to Carole Carpenter's enthusiasm for and dedication to the subject whose history and current state she has charted so well. Developments since 1979 clearly demonstrate the maintenance of the impetus of Canadian folklore studies from coast to coast.

J D A Widdowson

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CASSIDY, G E, Kew As It was, Nelson, Hendon Publishing, 1982, 44pp., 67 black and white photographs, £2 .90.

"A village set around its modest Chapel, Fronting the velvet pasture of the Green; Here in the halcyon days of England's summer Noble and commoner alike are seen In manly sport and emulation keen."

Anon.

This verse introduces Kew As It U/as, a compilation of photographs of a place known the world over for its Royal Botanic Gardens. Distinguished for its royal connections, Kew is also a village of great charm with a fascinating history.

This volume has that little bit more than other As It U/as collections in this series - one valuable addition being the map of the place shown on the frontispiece. A further note that strikes the viewer of the photographs is the air of dignity and peace that prevails throughout the volume. Not shown are any pictures of poverty or industrial ugliness as the accent is strictly that of village beauty and "halcyon days of England's summer". Of particular interest to traditionalists are photographs of the Easter Fair held on Kew Green each Easter Monday and two fascinating prints of The Olde Englishe Fayre held on the 22nd July, 1914. Kew As It U/as is a tribute to the dedicated research of Mr G E Cassidy, President of the Kew Society at the time of publication.

W Bennett

CAVENDISH, R, The Magical Arts, (first published as The Black Arts, 1967), London, Arkana, 1984, 375pp., £4.95.

Richard Cavendish has attempted to write a study of magic in its myriad forms in 300-odd pages. This has been a brave attempt, but it really cannot be done without some parts of the study being hopelessly inadequate. To discuss the origins of Satan without mentioning Zoroastrian dualism is a little careless, for example.

Despite the briefness of the accounts, however, this is a very broad-ranging display. Mr Cavendish discusses numerology, astrology, the Cabala, alchemy, and ritual magic. Obviously, in a work as general as this it is difficult to be thorough in every subject, but the author is very knowledgeable about modern ritual magic (although less so about modern witchcraft). The bibliography is helpful, as is the index, but it is not the most thorough work on magic available. Even so, it is written with enthusiasm and understanding, and it does contain much information for anyone interested in aspects of magic.

J Dickenson

The Celtic way of Life, Dublin, O'Brien Educational, 1982, 72pp., £2.30.

This book was first published in 1976 and this is its third reprint. It is an excellent introduction to the Celts, written clearly and simply, with good illustrations. Many excerpts from translations of Celtic literature are also included, both poetry and prose. Thus, for example, information

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about the role of women is supplemented by the long and bitter poem, "The Old Woman of Beare"; by a description of Edain the fairy; by a brief love song; and by ''Jealousy" :

Love like heat and cold Pierces and then is gone, Jealousy when it strikes Sticks in the marrowbone

(translated by Frank O'Connor)

Altogether the book is a pleasure to read, and many more reprints may be anticipated.

G Cawthra

CHAPMAN, Raymond, The Treatment of Sounds in Language and Literature, Oxford , Blackwell, 1984, 262pp. , £19.50.

This volume treats of the way in which literary authors attempt to convey an impression of sound through the medium of writing. Professor Chapman is concerned with the representation of both speech and non-speech sounds, i .e. with such matters as stress, intonation and dialect on the one hand, and the natural, mechanical and musical sounds on the other. He also considers the treatment of non-verbal or paralinguistic features in conversation.

He examines in particular the writings of those post-Restoration authors who have displayed a special awareness of the problems of representing speech in writing (Dickens, Hardy, Shaw, Tennyson, etc.), and considers the techniques (typography, spelling, punctuation) which they have used. Although examples are chiefly drawn from English literature, there is some reference to European literatures as well. The texts chosen are for the most part post-Restoration, as it is only when English is following a consistent orthography that one can hope to draw definite conclusions about what a given spelling is meant to represent. Only when one has an established orthography for a language can one hope to classify some spellings as "deviant" and as therefore implying something different from the norm.

Although there is reason to suppose that Professor Chapman is using words such as "deviant" in a sense which is not derogatory, it would have been helpful if he had made this perfectly clear from the outset . There are occasions when one is uncertain where the author feels that the concept dialect ends and the other concepts such as careless sp eech begin .

There is little mention of dialect writing for a dialect-speaking readership in this book. The traditions of dialect writing in Lancashire and Yorkshire are largely ignored. Extensive use of deviant symbols and diacritics is portrayed here as a vice. Dialect in literature is seen from the point of view of a Standard-English-speaking reader, or at any rate of a relative outsider to the dialect in question. There is virtually no consideration of dialect writing from the point of view of an insider to a culture.

There are times when it is difficult to avoid a feeling of a certain confusion and lack of direction, and definitely of a lack of a clear theoretical framework. This is , however, probably inevitable in a work which is , after all, an exploratory study in a neglected field . The author himself is abundantly aware of the exploratory nature of the work, and makes no extravagant claims for it. There are a number of errors in the text, most of which I imagine are printing errors: there is at least one instance of curious syntax, some spelling mistakes (p .156, p .175, p .184),

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and a number of errors in the phonemics. A curious occurrence of I fJ I is to be found on p.21 (two symbols seem to be used for this phoneme: cf. p.21 , p .69 , p.203 and the table of phonetic symbols), /a/ on p.57 should be /a:/, I ;Jrl on p .79 should read I • : ~/, whilst it is unclear to me that the spelling blankit on p . 71 "shows raising and fronting of I - / ", since this word is normally prounounced with I~ I in RP, not I ;J /. On p.32 it might be noted that gin English spelling can also represent the phoneme I J /, and that there are a number of other problems involved in correlating onhographical conventions with consonant phonemes: the situation is nowhere near as simple as the author makes it out to be. A potential difficulty for the reader arises on p.41, where technical and non-technical terms are mixed: "The repeated /y/ vowel in the French word [ murmure] gives a higher and softer sound than the more muted effect of the English [murmer] with its neutral I ~I vowels." Phonetically "higher" certainly; but "softer" than the "more muted" English central vowel? This is very subjective, and most certainly open to question .

An interesting detail which might well prompt further investigation is the question of stylised accents. Given that most writers use just a few features to suggest dialect speech , the point is easily reached where the choice of features becomes stylised or stereotyped. At an extreme: "A stylized version of cockney has become an accepted way of rendering sub-standard pronunciation rather than a serious attempt at showing the London dialect" (p. 74 ).

In his discussion of the linguistic background, Professor Chapman is, I feel, on dubious ground when he asserts that the mutual intelligibility of dialects in England is largely a question of phonemic variation: " Problems of mutual intelligibility may sometimes arise through extreme phonemic difference but lexis and syntax do not diverge so far as to be no longer referable to the common core accepted as 'English"' (p.58). There is some recent work in dialectology which suggests that grammatical variation is considerably greater than the above statement would imply, whilst a swift perusal of Wright 's English Dialect Dictionary ought to provide a salutary warning in respect of lexis . The fact that literary authors tend to indicate differences at the phonetic and phonemic levels, and to slot only the occasional morphological form or lexical item into a more or less standard syntax, is , of course, a separate issue altogether.

On several occasions (p.69, p. 71 , p.23 7), Professor Chapman draws our attention to the fact that the use of certain orthographical conventions (representing features of dialect speech) by particular literary authors is irregular. This may be so, but it is perhaps worth noting that dialect speakers often switch codes and use features from different varieties of speech. It is therefore not inconceivable that "inconsistent" spellings might (in some instances, at least) be a reflection of normal variation in dialect speech.

To sum up, we may say that generally speaking deviant spelling is the chief means of suggesting deviant speech, and that writers usually employ just a relatively small number of conventions to suggest " what is heard". "What is heard" will, of course, depend upon the idiophone of the individual anyhow - even if it did not, the limitations of conventional orthographies are such that a complete transcription of what is heard could not be essayed. "A few well-chosen signals" (p.84) are to be preferred to a large number, in order to suggest an accent or dialect to the reader, who may then use his knowledge to fill out the picture as best he can. Some very widely used conventions have developed for the most familiar accents and dialects.

G Shorrocks

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CHAUCER, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales, A verse translation with an Introduction and Notes by David WRIGHT, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985, xxvii, 482pp., £15.

Having made a prose translation of The Canterbury Tales some time ago, David Wright has now decided to make a verse one. The first thing that one must say is that this is not a complete translation, since the two prose tales have been omitted, though no reason for doing so is offered. The verse of the translation imitates that of the original in stanza and couplet forms, but rhyme has been abandoned if it interferes with the overriding needs of an easy style and the dictates of translation. Even so the style can be a little stilted at times, as for example in a line like "Nature so prompts them, and encourages". The sense of stress in each line is not marked, and David Wright is quite happy to break up a nominal group, for example, and spread it over two lines. The effect is thus more often like free verse than a couplet. On occasion the translator keeps the Middle English word in a modern form, such as cloister, without using the modern form , in this case monastery. The translation is very lively and gives the reader quite a good impression of the original except in that essential poetic quality which is here lacking. The organisation of the poem follows traditional patterns, even to the extent of putting Group B2after Group B 1

. Although David Wright seems to be aware of some modern textual studies, he is not influenced by them. If one is looking for a translation which keeps closely to the original and sees the poem in a traditional way, then this new one will suit that purpose admirably.

N F Blake

COMMAGER, Steele, ed., Society for Pure English, Vols. I-VII, Tracts 1-66, facsimile collection, New York and london, Garland Publishing, 1979, $46 per vol., $275 per set.

Fashions in language criticism come and go with almost predictable regularity. After a time of comparative permissiveness ushered in by the establishment of linguistics as an academic discipline in the 1950s and 1960s it is perhaps inevitable that in the 1980s the tide should be flowing the other way and the right wing backlash so long forecast is revealing itself in recent publications on language as well as in many other spheres of social and political interaction. So far as attitudes to language are concerned, the signs are all too obvious and public, from the conscious rectitude of such recent prescriptive approaches to grammar as that of the redoubtable editor of the second Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary on the one hand, to the crass equation by an influential politician of riotous behaviour with supposed declining standards of spelling and punctuation in our education system on the other. No wonder then that in this climate individuals and societies are once again fulminating against what they see as morally and culturally reprehensible corruption which, according to them, threatens the "purity" of the language. Such critics are presumably ignorant of the fact that English has never been, and never will be, a single homogeneous structure. Indeed its strength rests solidly on its remarkable and unique heterogeneity- the wealth of its varieties, whether social and regional dialects, slang, colloquialism, occupational vocabularies or whatever, its extraordinary receptiveness to borrowing from other languages, and above all its historical development, uniting Germanic and Romance streams into a mighty river, whose many lesser tributaries flow or trickle from the languages of numerous other cultures. Any "purity" such

9 5

a language enjoys can hardly be historical, and if this is so where should one look for its "pure" essence? Those who write regularly to the "responsible" press inveighing against the "corruption" of the language, for example, by importations from American English, are fond of tracing the language back to the "pure Saxon", apparently forgetting the "pure" Anglian and Jutish, let alone the Celtic and Latin underlay before our more immediate ancestors planted the rich mixture of Low Germanic dialects in these islands in the fifth century A.D.

But the neopurists, flushed with the heady wine of vogueishness, brush aside the simple facts and, worse still , are arrogant and ignorant enough to imagine that the mass of the population (which happily revels in the full freedom of linguistic usage) will pay attention to their futile attempts to lash the wind. Samuel Johnson learned the lesson by dint of hard experience. Given time perhaps his late twentieth century counterparts will learn it too. There is no better way of exploring the worst excesses of the purist crusade than to dip into the pages of that extraordinary miscellany, the sixty six tracts of the Society for Pure English which were published between 1919 and 1948. The very word tracts suggests the prescriptive zeal underlying these essays. Often difficult to come by, especially as a full set, the tracts have now been made available again by Garland Publishing as a stoutly bound and handsomely produced set in seven volumes, edited , with an introduction, by Steele Commager of Columbia University who describes the tracts as "perhaps the most important, and certainly the most engaging, collection of essays devoted to the English language that we possess." While many would disagree with this judgement, it is certainly true that the tracts have influenced scholarly attitudes to language, and remain of interest today, if only as the most extensive set of statements concerning one extreme of the continuing language debate.

The Society began somewhat casually in the library of the poet laureate, Robert Bridges, in January 1913 , and its manifesto was laudable enough and included much that the modern scholar would happily echo, not least the intention to explore "the richness of differentiation in our vocabulary ... its traditional idioms, and the music of its inherited pronunciation." To be fair, as Steele Commager notes in his introduction, the Society's title was "deliberately adopted to protest against current notions of purity in language, and to suggest, ironically and perhaps too subtly, the great linguistic truth to purists that in their discriminations and denunciations they are almost always wrong." Yet this group of distinguished men of letters, at least one of whom thought of it as the Academy which the eighteenth century scholars had so wisely rejected , evidently felt themselves fully qualified to lay down the law in sundry linguistic matters.

But (sorry, Mr Fowler) there is a great deal here to interest the modern reader, written over three decades by some of the most eminent scholars and writers of the time. Of particular note is the now famous debate on the nature of Standard English in Volume IV, notwithstanding its inevitable datedness . The pieces on vocabulary and idiom, by Logan Pearsall Smith are invariably informative and abounding in commonsense, as are Jespersen's on grammar. Kurath's item on American pronunciation in Tract 30 is admirably complemented by Craigie's two­stage account in Tracts 56 and 57 of the growth of American English. One might also single out Lascelles Abercrombie's instructive little piece on colloquial language in literature and Bernard Groom's note on compound epithets in English poetry. These and several other essays help to dispel the uneasy feeling one has in reading certain of the tracts that one is in the presence of an el itist coterie to whom intellectual snobbery is second nature, if not dominant.

The scholarly world owes a debt of gratitude to the publishers for making these volumes available again , for at best the tracts present the typical attitudes of their time and are therefore of

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historical importance. Whether they will justify the publishers' faith in reprinting them on acid-free, 250-year-life paper remains to be seen .

J D A Widdowson

COTILE, T, ed., Christmas with the Famous & Not So , Dyfed, Christopher Davies, 1983 , 112pp., £2 .95 .

This book, dedicated to the Save the Children Fund , began when Tony Cottle wrote to six well-known people asking if they would care to contribute to a collection of Christmas anecdotes to be called Christmas with the Famous & Not So . First and second replies proved negative, but when the Rt. Hon. David Steel agreed to participate the project was underway.

Christmas has always been a time for the children, and it should be stressed that sales of this book will benefit greatly the millions of children less fortunate than our own. In the introduction , the reader is reminded by one of the richest men in England, His Grace the Duke of Westminster, that "we should take time to reflect on the children who, through no fault of their own - whether it be war, pestilence, famine or poverty - are unable to enjoy the material benefits of Christmas."

In this volume can be found stories , anecdotes and reminiscences about Christmas spent the world over, from Windsor Castle to the White House, from Dartmoor Prison to St Mary's Convent. Along with contributions from such luminaries as Lady Baden-Powell, James Callaghan , Peter Jay, Lord Soper, Cyril Smith and Nancy Reagan are the sparkling anecdotes of show-business personalities such as Terry Scott, Angela Rippon, David Hamilton and Jean Metcalfe. Barbara Cartland contributes the inevitable account of how she gets what she wants for those she loves . She identifies her motherly role at Christmas with the Virgin Mary's and advises Mother to take two tablets of ginseng, a couple of Gev-e-tabs, and two B6 vitamins . Why don't you spend Christmas with the Famous and Not So?

W Bennett

DAVISON, Peter, Contemporary Drama and the Popular Dramatic Tradition in England, London, Macmillan , 1982, 193pp., £20.

Professor Peter Davison attempts to demonstrate connections between some of the techniques employed by contemporary writers for the theatre and techniques to be found in the "illegitimate" theatre of the early nineteenth century, in the acts of music hall stars and in early radio comedy and cinema. These techniques he relates to audience expectation and response and particularly to the capacity of audiences to enter sympathetically into the performance and also to be aware of themselves, individually and collectively, in their spectatorial roles. Professor Davison wishes to point to essential continuities between the contemporary theatre and its audience and the theatre of Ben Jonson and to emphasise the importance of indigenous popular culture to contemporary playwrights, thereby correcting what he feels to be an exaggeration of the importance of continental writers such as Brecht. Indeed, he stresses the influence of Shakespeare and Jonson upon the work of Tieck, Tieck's influence upon Pirandello and Brecht's indebtedness to "a curiously assorted mixture of English literature" in order to make clear that even the pattern of literary influence is a somewhat more complicated matter than some writers have assumed.

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Professor Davison's prose style is lively, his erudition is wide, his collection of anecdotes concerning music hall and radio performances is entertaining, and his arguments are cogent. An area of inadequacy is to be found in his failure to relate performances in the popular theatre of the early nineteenth century to other forms of spectacle, such as the ritual of the public execution documented in the volumes of The Newgate Calendar, and to the forms of street theatre (particularly "Punch and Judy") described so vividly in the pages of Henry Mayhew. I was surprised also, that Professor Davison missed the opportunity to strengthen his scholarly documentation with reference to Mr Wopsle's Hamlet - a small illustration, perhaps, of the tendency of experts to miss the obvious.

These areas of omission perhaps help to account for the value judgements implicitly underlying Professor Davison's general argument, value judgements which involve attaching high significance to the work of writers for the theatre such as Beckett, Pinter and Howard Brenton. He seems to have missed the point that these writers, and the audiences who attend performances of their works, do not share any modern equivalent of the vigorous (if, on occasion, brutal) popular culture which accounts for the energy of the "illegitimate" theatre in the nineteenth century and arguably generates the vital spark of shared wit, affection and sentiment (and fierceness and coarseness) which connects audience and performer in the music hall tradition . This true vitality (albeit vulgar) is more likely to be found nowadays at a football match than in the dust bins of Endgame .-

Although Professor Davison is no friend of the sophisticated sensationalism of some modern playwrights - in the conclusion to his book he asserts , "the determination to use popular dramatic techniques as a means of shocking an audience .. .. is to pervert the use of one of the most valuable traditions in theatre" - nevertheless it seems to me that one of the unfortunate effects of his argument is to endow the efforts of modern playwrights with more significance than most of them possess, a significance more appropriately to be celebrated in the sombre silliness of the review pages of The Guardian, where the theatre of "The Living Newspaper" and the actual newspaper can exist together in sinister rapport. Are there not analogies to be drawn between fashionable contemporary "dramatists" and "poets" associated with Auden in the 1930s- productions of an industry rather than of a culture? However, Professor Davison does discriminate between the efforts of his various playwrights; it is not his intention merely to reinforce a passing fashion, and there is always a case to be made for living in hope.

S E Clarke

DE'ATH, Richard , Tombstone Humour, with an introduction by Spike MILLIGAN, London, Unwin Paperbacks, 1983, 112pp., £1.50.

This is a collection of epitaphs, which depart in some way from the normal - objectionable testaments , intentionally grotesque epitaphs, and those unintentionally so. This author seems to have been predisposed towards this little compilation by his name and early upbringing. Some choice items are to be found in the section "Holy Deadlock", for instance:

' 'This stone was raised to Sarah Ford Not Sarah's virtues to record For they're well know to all the town No, Lord, it was raised to keep her down." (p.62)

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Occasionally an epitaph has been altered for the better at a later date, as in this example from London:

"God works wonders now and then; Here lies a lawyer and an honest man."

A later hand has added:

"This is a mere law quibble, not a wonder; Here lies a lawyer, and his client under." (p.4 3)

One young lady of a very practical bent from Aurora Falls in America erected the following monument:

''To the Memory of JARED BATES His widow, aged 24, lives at 7, Elm Street, Has every qualification for a Good Wife And yearns to be comfoned." (p.70)

Equally enterprising was the gentleman who engraved this inscription:

"Here lies JANE SMITH Wife of THOMAS SMITH, Marble Cutter. This monument erected by her husband As a Tribute to her Memory.

Monuments of this style are $2 50." (p. 7 2)

It is unlikely that his was a dying business.

The student of paronomasia will find any number of gems buried m rhis little rome . Jusr one very brief example for the reader to get his teeth into:

"Stranger, tread this ground with gravity, Dentist Brown is filling his last cavity." (p.90)

Single puns are legion, and many have elected to go in for a very extended form of punning. Some have clearly not known where to stop (see e.g. p .lOl).

The reader probably either cares for this type of humour, or simply does nor. Ir may well be a limited taste. If, however, we disregard the humour for a moment. and approach rhe book in deadly earnest, i.e. with the grave demeanour of the linguist and folklorist. we find that there is much of incidental interest in such a corpus of epitaphs. Some inscriptions contain regional dialect forms (the rhymes often help with pronunciation), and there are quire a number of hypercorrect forms, such as '"twixt you and I" (p.60). There are proverbial comparisons - "dead as a door nail", "dead as nits" (sorry about the choice of epithet. but the range is rather limited), and a frightening figure is evident in this inscription from Gwenr :

"Whoever here on Sunday, Will practise playing at ball, It may be before Monday, The Devil will have you aW " (p.53)

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Unintended humour arises from a lack of attention to deep structure evident in:

''Erected to the memory of JOHN MACFARLANE Drowned in the Water of Leith By a few affectionate friends." (p.21)

By way of contrast, the author of the following inscription from a grave in Cornwall seems to have been rather more intent on exploring the syntactic possibilities of the language:

"SHALL

WEE

ALL

DIE

WEE

SHALL

DIE

ALL

ALL

DIE

SHALL

WEE

DIE?

AlL.

WEE?

SHALL." (p.54)

Obviously a good one for the next undergraduate examination paper in syntax.

G Shorrocks

DELBRUCK, Hans, History of the Art of Wtlr, vols. I-III , Westport, Greenwood Press, 1980, 604pp., 505pp., 71lpp., £46.95, £38.95, £47.50.

The trend of reprinting older works continues with Delbriick's tomes here translated from the German . Although much work has been done since these books were first published, the reader cannot but benefit from the thorough knowledge of military matters exhibited by Hans Delbriick, together with his masterly interpretations of the primary sources; many of which are handily excerpted in translation.

The period which Delbriick chooses to work in is large, well in excess of a thousand years, and pitfalls are many if one attempts to see the period as a cohesive unit. The historian moves one step at a time discussing in great detail military organisation, strategy, theory and other concepts within the political framework of history. Hellenes, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Franks and Germans come under intensive scrutiny as Delbriick highlights the development and redevelopment of armies and fighting methods within Europe and the Near East. As is to be expected from militaristic societies, the part played by the fighting man throughout the centuries resulted in a constant rise and fall of peoples and empires as professional armies and methods were introduced, developed or discarded. Delbriick moves into the Middle Ages proper to follow western warfare and tactics through the development of the kingdoms of England, France and Germany to the Crusades and then to the "new" fighting methods and tactics used by the Swiss Leagues and the growing use of mercenaries. Excursi on individual campaigns and battles are supplied in plenty throughout to illustrate or prove arguments. The translations are readable and fluent.

R A C Axe

EBERHART, G M., Monsters: A Guide to Information on Unaccounted-for Creatures, Including Bigfoot, Many Wtlter Monsters, and Other Irregular Animals, New York, Garland Publishing, 1983, 344pp., $25.

"Monsters" are defined by the author as any animal uncatalogued by science, but with evidence

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amassed as to its existence. The scope is quite wide, as the title shows, and the book has chapters on dragons, the Loch Ness monster, various humanoids, and even phantom kangaroos!

The format comprises a brief chapter with some information on the animal concerned, and then a long and detailed bibliography. The information is usually a brief description of sightings and evidence, with some eyewitness quotes, and a summary of the extent of the sightings, either chronologically or geographically. These snippets of information stimulate interest in the animal and then one can use the varied and thorough bibliographies to search for more details. Some of the journals referred to are a little obscure, but, as Mr Eberhart points out, this is a hazard of the rather unorthodox subject matter. All in all, this is a most useful and informative work.

J Dickenson

ELLIOTT, Ralph W V, Thomas Hardy's English, The Language Library, London, Blackwell in association with Deutsch, 1984, 387pp., £22.50.

Most people probably think of Hardy's style in terms of the Dorset dialect and the occasional incongruous expression. It is this attitude which Elliott sets out to modify by providing the data for a rather different view of Hardy. There is, it is true, a long chapter on Hardy's use of dialect features, which reviews all aspects of his use of dialect though it concentrates on the lexis . There are two other chapters which are devoted to Hardy's other experiments with vocabulary, in which his borrowings and his new creations are detailed exhaustively. These chapters present a side of Hardy's creative process which has been undervalued hitherto. Another chapter is labelled "Tapestries of Rhetoric", and it contains those features of Hardy's style which could not easily be accommodated in the other chapters. Here, for example, we are given some idea of his exploitation of syntax, naming and rhyme. These aspects are not dealt with so fully as the vocabulary and they do not fit together very easily in the same chapter. A lot of material has been collected for this book, though its main emphasis is on lexis rather than on syntax . It achieves its aim of showing that Hardy took great care with his vocabulary and was prepared to look in very diverse places to find what he wanted; it is a pity that more attention could not be given to his syntax which is just as interesting as his lexis.

N F Blake

ELVIN, Laurence, comp., Lincoln In The 1930s & '40s, Nelson, Hendon Publishing, 1()82, 44pp., 71 black and white photographs, £2.90.

This volume is the first in a proposed new series to be published by the Hendon Publishing Company about town life during the 1930s - '40s . After producing four volumes of Lincoln As It U/as the Lincolnshire Library service can take just pride in the wealth of photographic material in its Local Studies Collection, ably compiled and researched by Laurence Elvin.

The greater part of the 1930s were years of depression throughout the country, Lincoln being no exception with its many unemployed and its areas of real poverty. The photographs reproduced in this book show a cross-section of life during two decades; thus the misery yet community spirit of the thirties presents an optimism that can be followed up with the recording of the development of Lincoln city services after the war.

The photographs illustrating Lincoln In The 1930s & '40s are of exceptional interest, one personal

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pleasure showing Lincoln Cathedral partially enveloped in scaffolding during its ten years of restoration work prior to the great Service of Thanksgiving in 1932. The aerial photograph reveals the perfect proportions of this glorious building - reminding the viewer that the Cathedral is not only a monument of a great city's past, a record of Lincoln In The 1930s & '40s , but also a vision of future stability.

W Bennett

FELD, Steven, Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression , Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982 , 264pp. , $10.95 .

It is all too rare to find the analysis of any given phenomena or state of affairs related to a wider philosophical or cultural background. Thus, for example, we have numerous descriptions of the music of Dufay, or of Mozart, but no attempt to explain why it is that the medieval ear found the interval of a fourth pleasing and described the third as diabolus in musico, while the Classical Viennese reversed those preferences; nor, indeed, why it is that we perceive some harmonic structures and melodic shapes as musically acceptable, while others are not , at all. The same unwillingness to connect specifics to general principles is evident, too, in art criticism, literary criticism, politics, and so on.

Anthropology is fortunate in having at least one young scholar who is both willing and able to attempt such a connection. Like many other researchers, Steven Feld has gathered and assimilated a large body of material concerned with his special interest, in his case the Kaluli people of central Papua New Guinea. Much less commonly, he has followed his research beyond its surface impressiveness to try to understand its profounder implications. The result is a book which is engaging, enthusiastic, a pleasure to read, and which offers an important new approach to the study of culture and society.

The Kaluli , with their belief that bird noises reflect the world of spirits and thus evoke death and mourning, regard poetics , song, and weeping, which all emulate the cries of birds , and thus produce a sense of sorrow, as their most important forms of expression. Feld demonstrates the connection between them all by describing Kaluli bird classification, weeping, poetics , and song, and demonstrating their shared characteristics. He then relates these characteristics to aspects of Kaluli belief and society. During his investigations, we learn as much about him as we do about his subject: the naive young American who prefers playing jazz to an academic life develops rapidly in maturity and understanding as the account of his life and work progresses.

If there is a drawback to the book, it is in the musical examples. Even when the idiom is familiar (Mozart , Dufay ... ) conventional musical notation is recognised to be at best inadequate. As the idiom becomes more foreign (jazz ... ) it becomes even less helpful. To read the music of a Balinese gamelan orchestra and then to hear it played is to experience the shock of a Western ear mishearing an Eastern sound: surely the same gap exists between the mental hearing of the examples cited here and their actual sound? The problem is not unique to this particular study: would it not be possible to provide a record or cassette to supplement the text and pictures?

G Cawthra

102

FIELDHOUSE, Harry, Good English Guide, London, Dent, 1984, 270pp., £2.95.

In the area of English expression, it is fashionable to question whether there is such a thing as correct form. Most people undoubtedly believe there is, for to them dictionaries are authorities on what should be said or written. Modern dictionaries follow a "descriptive" policy, reluctant to prescribe one form rather than another.

The Good English Guide covers most forms of English usage, the choices being governed by certain tests of selection. The most important test used would appear to be that of conservation: "The established sense is preferred to the upstart, the native term to the trendy import, the informed pronunciation to the latest guess." Thus, the progressive reader gains the impression that this dictionary pursues its policy of conservation with too much conservatism. More flexibility in selection would have added further interest to the compilation.

First published in 1982 , Everyman's Good English Guide has an aura of pretentiousness in its entries which echoes that propounded in the introduction. Mr Fieldhouse believes: "Some palliative is needed for the consensus mania, with its spurious air of underpinning by majority rule." I would welcome a cure for bad English which would instigate a healthy "plain" English - natural , unaffected by personal pretensions, and understood by most people.

W Bennett

FISIAK, J acek , Historical Syntax, Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs 2 3, Berlin, New York and Amsterdam, Mouton , 1984, xii, 636pp., DM 198.

Professor Fisiak is known as a great organiser of conferences and this present book contains the papers delivered at a conference he organised on historical linguistics in Poland in 1981. It is nor possible to cover all the articles in the book within the confines of a short review. The bulk of the articles deal with English, tho~gh some less familiar languages like Japanese and Old Iranian are also the subjects of investigation. Within English it is still Old and Middle English which hold the greatest fascination for historical linguists. Nevertheless, in this book there is a welcome sign that more attention is being paid to more recent periods of English. Mats Ryden has an interesting article on the study of eighteenth century English syntax. There are also more general papers which tackle smaller problems from a wider historical angle such as Manuel Gerritsen's paper on divergent word order developments in Germanic languages. There is a great deal of solid scholarship in this book and most of the papers have something to offer. It is unfortunate that it is by English standards so expensive, though it is a book which should be found in any respectable library.

N F Blake

FLETCHER, Ian, ed., The Collected Poems of Lionel johnson, 2nd edn., New York and London, Garland Publishing, 1982, 381pp., $60.

Few would argue with the need for a complete edition of Lionel Johnson's poems. Although not the greatest English poet, both in his own right and as part of the literary movement of the 1890s, he is worth reading and remembering. But surely not at such a price? The volume is well bound, but the paper does not feel expensive (even if, as the publishers state, it is acid-free with a 250-year life), and the print is of visually very poor quality. Ian Fletcher's editing may be good, but his introduction is pretentious and self-admiring, an example of the writer

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who picks up the worst aspects of his subject's style. It is hard to see who will buy the volume: far too expensive for the individual, it is doubtful whether libraries will prefer it to more urgent and cheaper demands.

G Cawthra

FORD, Colin and Brian HARRISON, A Hundred Years Ago: Britain in the 1880s in Words and Photographs, Harmondsworth, Allen Lane/Penguin, 1983, 336pp. , 230 plates , £25 hardback, £10 paper.

Nothing is more evocative of times past than the photographic record . Whether in its approach to its subjects, the selfconsciousness of its style, the dress, artefacts and context, it has an unmatched immediacy which instantly transports the viewer into a bygone age. While all too many of such collections are content to let the photographs speak for themselves, a handful are prepared to dig more deeply and provide commentaries and elucidation along with the photographs. Colin Ford and Brian Harrison, however, offer far more than this. Their captivating anthology combines 230 judiciously chosen photographs with an authoritative and eminently readable social history of the 1880s which together present an extraordinarily penetrating and wide-ranging portrait of the period.

Following an informative and economical introductory chapter documenting the crucial role of photography in social history, the photographs and discussion extend to thirteen further chapters, including coverage of childhood, education and newspapers, home and family, church and chapel, work , recreation, regional loyalties, social tensions , aristocratic magic, discipline and authority, pomp and ceremony, illness and old age, and death - running the whole gamut of the social scene.

The book ends with a compact series of useful notes, an extensive section suggesting further reading relevant to each chapter, an invaluable chronology of events in that decade and a full index. Anyone interested in the social history of the 1880s will want to own this remarkable survey, and for those who find the hardback too expensive, the paperback version is very good value for money.

J D A Widdowson

FOX, Robin, Kinship and Marriage: an Anthropological Perspective , Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984 , 273pp., £15.

This is a reissue in hardback of the original paperback edition published by Penguin in 1967. It incorporates a new introduction, but otherwise few changes are made. The style remains that of the best lecturing, with extensive referencing and awareness of complication taking second place to simple exposition and clear supporting evidence. The bewildering intricacies of kinship and family are hence introduced in a way which makes the subject approachable and which impels funher study. This reissue gives a clear indication of the continuing imponance of the book for all interested in any aspect of anthropology.

G Cawthra

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GAFFNEY, Sean and Seamus CASHMAN, eds., Proverbs and Sayings of Ireland, Dublin , Wolfhound Press , 1982, 128pp., £.2.75.

This is the fourth reprint of a book published in hardback in 1974, and is a collection of over a thousand Irish sayings. Some are familiar in other communities too, but many are unique to Ireland. For example, sixty triads from the west of Ireland are quoted (e.g. "Three things a man should not be without; a cat, a chimney and a housewife."). Cats seem to be often cited in one connection or another (bringing recollections of the old hermit's poem, "Pangur, white Pangur, how happy we are, alone together, scholar and cat .... "), and perhaps this bears witness to Ireland's Celtic past (the Celts were fond of cats: if anyone was found to have harmed one, he had to pay as much corn as was required to completely cover the animal when it was held up by its tail with its nose touching the floor). Other Irish preoccupations evident in these proverbs are priests and drink.

The sayings are arranged in order of subject and numbered, so reference is easy. All that is needed to complete the collection is the living social situations in which they are used.

G Cawthra

GARVEY, Catherine, Children's Talk, Fontana Paperbacks, 1984, 236pp., £.2.95 .

Chtfdren 's Talk is part of the series The Developing Chtfd edited by Jerome Bruner, Michael Cole and Barbara Lloyd, which reflects the importance of social research as a resource for improving children's wellbeing. Children's Talk tells us what happens to children's language after they learn their first words, and how children use language - in talk.

Catherine Garvey's book gives a vital picture of the minds of children, analysed through the medium of their talk in conversations and interviews. The different stages of children's talk (taking turns, or the use of speech socially acceptable and appropriate) are clearly shown; the manner in which these stages lead to the development of children will prove to be of great interest to all who seek to encourage the developing child.

W Bennett

GILMORE, Hilary, Irish Art Heritage from 2000 B.C.: Design Legacy from the Mid-J.Vest, Dublin, O'Brien Press, 1983, 96pp., £.10 hardback, £.6 paper.

This slender volume is intended as a design source reference for the small industries of Limerick, Clare, and Tipperary North Riding. By giving a brief history of the art of the region from 2000 B.C. to the present day, it is hoped that today's craftsmen and women will be able to

maintain an industry and culture with peculiarly local reference, and thus to continue traditions otherwise threatened by mass production and indifference.

The historical outline is interesting, and the cover illustration also provides ample scope for the creative imagination. However, the book's main drawback is in the lack of similar illustration in the text. There are many drawings, provided (and often very obviously labelled) by the author, but they are rather smudgy and lack the detail that is surely indispensable if another creator is to follow their pattern. Clearly cost is a major consideration in a book of this type, but it would seem worth it on this occasion to offer good photographs of the designs and artefacts referred to, in order to enable craftsmen to work directly from the book. With the

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presentation as it is , a lot of follow-up work would be required to check the impressions gained from the drawings with their originals.

G Cawthra

GREEN, Stephen, Cricketing Bygones, Princes Risborough, Shire Publications, 1982, 32pp., 95p.

It is probably as a result of nostalgia for an age when nearly all players of the great game seemed larger than life characters, that the collecting of cricketana has become relatively popular over recent years . There can surely be no one more qualified to advise us on such collectanea than Stephen Green, holder of the enviable position of curator of the MCC's historical collection, who has here adapted well to the restrictions of a Shire Album, managing to find a balance not only between the text and illustrations, but among the many areas of the collectanea themselves , giving us an attractive, if brief, survey of the subject.

J Smith

HERZFELD, Michael and Margot D LENHART, comps., Semiotics 1980, New York and london, Plenum Press, 1982, 594pp., $69.50.

The all-embracing claims of semiotics as a burgeoning academic discipline are well attested in this volume which comprises no less than fifty nine of the papers presented at the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America in Lubbock, Texas in October 1980. In their preface the compilers note that "The varied styles, topics, methodologies, and intellectual traditions represented here reflect the current state of flux in semiotics" which they regard as "a healthy chaos, in which new ideas vie for survival and experiment is at a premium." The wide variety of papers has persuaded the compilers to refrain from imposing any topical classification and they simply present the papers by alphabetical order of author. While avoiding any accusation of "loading" certain topics or authors at the expense of others, this has the disadvantage that the reader is obliged to plough through the table of contents, which extends to six pages, to identify individual papers of interest.

And there is much of interest here, from papers on the semiotics of architecture to an analysis of rock and roll concerts to lorraine Wynne's perceptive piece on "The Poetic Function of the Stage Audience and Embedded Performance in Drama". Linguists in particular will find numerous constructive and challenging views on many aspects of language, including syntax, semantics (of course), metaphor, idiom and nonverbal forms, and there are papers on music, art, medicine, legal science and mathematics. Amid such a plethora of information, allied to the proselytising fervour of a "new" discipline striving for recognition, the reader is left with the tantalising question of where, if anywhere, the boundaries of semiotics are to be t1Xed. It is in the nature of signs to signify, but is it feasible, or desirable, for a single discipline to claim sovereignty over the whole range of intellectual endeavour? Ignoring the often futile shadow boxing of the more recondite papers here, one has the uneasy feeling that semiotics can be all things to all men, and is therefore in danger of being nothing substantial to anyone. Even so, the freshness of the approaches it engenders provides valuable new insights for the toilers in less glamorous fields to contemplate and respond to.

J D A Widdowson

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HOLMES, Christine, ed., Captain Cook's Final Voyage: the Journal of Midshipman George Gilbert, Horsham: Caliban Books, 1982, 158pp., £10.

Christine Holmes has been working on subjects relating to the Pacific Ocean and its exploration by Europeans for some time, and this edition of Gilbert's journal is a continuation of that interest. Written after his return to England, this account of Cook's search for the North West Passage via the west coast of America and Canada gives a vivid impression of life and conditions aboard a small exploring ship. The Resolution and the Discovery were away from their home port on the River Thames from 1776-1780. During their voyage the explorers found previously unknown islands, mapped little known coasts, navigated dangerous waters, suffered from lack of food and water, met new peoples, left European animals to establish themselves in a different climate if they could, and lost fifteen men (seven by sickness, three by accidents, and five, including Cook himself, by attack). These events are all related in a laconic style which gives us plentiful information about wind and weather conditions, but none about personal matters. How did these sailors feel about being away from home, indeed away from all possible contact with home, for so long and in such uncertain conditions? What relationships were established in the close living and working quarters of the ships? What anxiety was felt when major repairs had so often to be carried out? - and many more questions of the sort. Perhaps the very reticence of the journal gives us a clue to the strict discipline necessary to maintain a small and fragile community in the face of constant danger. Certainly it is a fascinating addition to other documents of late eighteenth century life.

G Cawthra

HSU, Francis L K, Exorcising the Trouble Makers: Magic, Science and Culture, Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood Press, 1983, 164pp., £25.95.

Professor Hsu is well known for his work on anthropology and especially for his contributions to the comparison of Chinese and Western culture. Exorcising the Trouble Makers both continues that exploration of similarity and difference, and forms the eleventh volume of the Greenwood Press's imaginative series, Contributions to the Study of Religion. It gives a detailed account of how the people of West Town, on the Burma Road in the Yunnan province of China, coped with an outbreak of cholera in 1942; then describes similar responses in the Shatin suburb of Hong Kong in 1975 to catastrophic events that took place over one hundred years earlier; and finally finds evidence of comparable practices of response and thanksgiving in other parts of the world, including the white USA. The account of the findings of the first edition of the book, published in 1952, are thus supplemented by additional evidence and observation.

The study of events in West Town and Shatin is thorough and scholarly, and the work is uniformly well written and interesting. However, it may be that the conclusions to be drawn from such research might be better explored more deeply in a second book. It is all too rare to see Western culture through non-Western eyes, and, equally, to see non-Western culture through non-Western eyes. As it stands, this study gives us some idea of the latter approach, and a tantalising glimpse of the former. For Professor Hsu to give us as detailed a description and analysis of, say, the role of the Christian church in coping with national crises in the United States, as he has of West Town and Shatin, would be fascinating indeed.

G Cawthra

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Isleworth As It wtls , compiled and annotated by the Department of Arts and Recreation , Libraries Division, London Borough of Hounslow, Nelson, Hendon Publishing, 1982 , 44pp., 70 black and white photographs, £2 .90.

This further edition to the Hendon Publishing series of places as they were, shown through a compilation of photographs does not fail to keep up the standard of former volumes. One small deviation in this particular volume from many others in the series, however, is the prominence of prints showing the local dignitaries of Isleworth's ancient parish carrying out parochial duties . This can be explained by the fact that it was the Department of Arts and Recreation, Libraries Division, the London Borough of Hounslow who compiled and annotated the selection of photographs. However, it does not explain why, for the purpose of this book, all parts of the ancient parish of Isleworth have been included - except Hounslow! No credit was given on the cover of this compilation of photographs to the worthy collector, selector and caption writer, Miss Andrea Cameron, A.L.A., Librarian in charge of Local Studies. Her name is merely listed under the acknowledgements; but this reviewer acknowledges Miss Cameron's central contribution to an efficient and workmanlike presentation of Isleworth As It J¥-as.

W Bennett

JONES, Ian H., ed., Granitis in Macedonia: An Educational Study by the Pupils of the Federated Primary Schools of Ebrington and St james, Gloucestershire, Compton Scorpion Lane, Darlingscote, Shipston-on-Stour, Warwickshire, Ian H. Jones, 1984, ix, 195pp., £5.50.

This is the report of a remarkable ethnographic fieldtrip undertaken in 1983 by twenty three ten- to eleven-year-old students, and their adult advisors, comparing memories and living conditions between the North Cotswolds and rural Macedonia. The first such fieldtrip took place in 1978, when editor and headmaster Ian Jones took a group of children on a study tour to the Hebrides. In 1980, he led a group to Fair Isle, the report of which, Fair Isle (1981; available from the same source) includes diagrams, vocabulary and descriptions of the ear­cuts used for identifying sheep on the island; a listing of the seventeen crofts, with census details of the occupants, land and buildings, amenities and necessities, animals, crops and related information; and considerably more hard statistical/descriptive data. Granitis, although designed along the same lines , represents a far more ambitious project, if only in the logistics of financing and transporting children, four teachers, a doctor and a cook to the north of Greece, housing and feeding them in the mountain village for two weeks. A preparatory visit took place in 1982, when Jones met with the Granitis Village Council, priest, legal representative, schoolmaster and inhabitants, and in Thessalonika with medical and educational officials. Interpreters were arranged, who supported the children - divided into four study-groups -in their assigned task of interviewing every village inhabitant using a predetermined questionnaire. Soil samples were taken, the Old and New villages of Granitis were surveyed and a map produced, building style and structure were studied, representatives of local government, transport, education, religion, medical and legal systems interviewed according to predetermined questions. Photographs were taken, weather recorded, drawings, diagrams, descriptions and poems made.

Fair Isle was more completely an ethnographic field-report, and while Granitis includes the statistics gathered from the various interviews, Jones' editorial focus for the body of the work is the reactions of the children: their drawings, stories, and brief reports, which give an impression

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of Granitis through the children themselves. They are the recording instrument, an interesting and effective device, which would be more effective and meaningful if supported by a contextualising commentary. The adults are remarkable for their low profile throughout the study.

The report is not altogether satisfying. There is a fine map of Granitis produced by the children, but not one locating Granitis within Greece. The exact dates of the study visit are not given, nor is the whereabouts of the complete information that was collected. Taperecorders were apparently not used, and this must be seen as a serious omission. Although considerable detail of planning and logistics is given one could wish for more information from the adult members of the team .

The ethnographic field trip is only the culminating element of a long and detailed preparation given the children as part of headmaster Jones' educational philosophy. It is this preparation, and a great deal of hard work, that ensures the success of the operation. One has the impression that Granitis, in the end, proved too ambitious; but one never gets any sense of irresponsibility, or of the many dangers that could follow a group of young children set onto a village to conduct a "study". One hopes that Ian Jones will, at some point, set out in greater detail his philosophy, and the methods through which he successfully realises it. The concept of working with children as collectors and collaborators in hard field-research is an exciting one, and clearly feasible - given sufficient forethought, insight and labour.

C Fees

KAPPELER, Susanne, and Norman BRYSON, eds., Teaching the Text, London, Routledge, 1983, 219pp., £5.95.

This is a collection of lectures by some of the members of the Faculty of English at Cambridge and by visiting lecturers. The contributors are John Barrell, Norman Bryson, Stephen Heath, LisaJardine, Susanne Kappeler, Anita Kermode, Frank Kermode, Colin MacCabe, Christopher Prendergast, J P Stern, Tony Tanner and Raymond Williams. The topical impetus for the collection was the controversy surrounding the Faculty's refusal to extend the appointment of Mr Colin MacCabe, which earned the attention of the national press in 1981, and the editors justify their publication on the grounds that, "the reality of teaching in a university English department" has not been sufficiently reflected in published work. According to the editors, "academic publishing has largely aligned itself with the category 'research' ... an essential vehicle in the career structure of academics", whereas "the criteria of delineating the subject of a lecture or class are markedly different from those of a research paper or learned article for a journal", so they claim "it is these criteria of teaching that we wish to make visible with this volume."

This volume presents a strange mixture of disquisitions upon unrelated topics including "Monologue in Macbeth", "Opinion in Troilus and Cressida", Roben Musil, Collins, Hawthorne, Sanre, Milton, Emerson, Dorothy Richardson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Emily and Charlotte Bronte. "Curriculum", the editors remark, "determines to a large extent the literary texts to be taught and studied", but even the arbitrary influence of this deity surely did not oblige his luckless votaries to present such oddly assorted offerings. The diversity of subject matter makes it difficult to compare the differing critical approaches of the various authors, as it seems to constitute wilful misreading to concentrate on the idiosyncrasies of critical method when the authors are dealing with works so extremely dissimilar as Sartre's "La Nausee" or Collins'

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"Ode to Evening", Robert Musil's " Torless" or Milton's "Paradise Lost". Nor can we be certain (except perhaps in the case of the two visiting lecturers) that the books chosen for discussion reflect each critic's individual sense of what is currently important, interesting or significant: "Curriculum" may merely have decreed that a book be discoursed upon. As to pedagogic technique, with the exception of Mr Barrell's contribution, there is none- the authors merely hold forth at length in typical lecturers' style before maybe indifferent audiences. The "criteria of teaching" remain totally invisible. As a "volume", therefore, this collection is an addition to the world's already copious supply of questionably useful books.

What of the value of the individual contributions? John Barrell 's essay on Collins' "Ode to Evening" is interesting, as is Colin MacCabe's discussion of Milton (though his notion that Lea vis's account of Milton is simpleminded seems to me itself to be simpleminded); Professor Kermode's consideration of "opinion" in Trot/us and Cressida is scholarly (though perhaps somewhat ostentatiously so), Professor Williams' work on Macbeth is logical and in earnest, interesting for the writer's ideas on dramatic structure (though unimpressive as literary criticism and unconvincing as an exposition of appropriate literary critical procedures); what is disturbing, however, about this collection is that so many of the individual contributions are worse than mediocre. Apparently it is possible to pass off as literary criticism talk which is really little better than posturing. An adverse judgement as severe as this cannot be demonstrated beyond doubt in a short review, but consider the following brief quotations, which seem to me to be representative:

"Hence the project of the book, stream of consciousness as self-creation, not the novel but writing, not the surface but the underlying movement, a kind of elliptical concatenation of pauses in what for the novel would be reality, a story in elsewheres and silences."

(Stephen Heath on Dorothy Richardson.)

'Jane Eyre has to learn how to control the dialectic of inside and outside, containment and release, structure and space, just as she has to establish for herself a sort of middle psychological geography, avoiding the extremes of the West Indies and India, and even the wicked south of France where Rochester would take her as a mistress but not as a wife. From one point of view her narrative is an act of psychological cartography."

(Tony Tanner on Wuthering Heights and jane Eyre.)

"It may be lisible in comparison to the nouveau roman, but it does not for that reason fall within the category below the very best. On the contrary, its 'readability' is employed in the service of its keener pleasure, bursting the binary opposition between readable pleasure and the ecstasy of writing-reading."

(Susanne Kappeler on Gabriel Garcia Marquez.)

I would be surprised if even the most amiable eighteen-year-olds can be fooled for very long with this sort of writing. Perhaps the authors have mastered the art of mass hypnosis? The recent unfair treatment of Colin MacCabe reminds one of a greater injustice: the grotesque behaviour of the Cambridge academic establishment towards the late F R Leavis, an historic error largely responsible for the present state of English Studies at Cambridge, a state reflected in this, for the most part, exasperating volume.

S E Clarke

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LINDELL, Kristina, H~kan LUNDSTROM, jan-Olof SVANTESSON and Damrong TAYANIN, The Kammu Year: Its lore and music, Studies in Asian Topics No. 4, London and Malmo, Curzon Press, 1982, xii, 191pp., illus., £5.

Kristina Lindell and her colleagues at the University of Lund have a well-established reputation for their work on the folklore of the Kammu people of northern Laos. In this volume they turn their attention to the calendric customs, the agricultural year and the music performed at decisive points in these cycles. Following a concise and informative introductory account of the Kammu people there is a full discussion of the Kammu year and its lore with its lunisolar calendar, the identification of the months, division of the day and the cycle of sixty terms which successively number the days and years. An especially interesting section deals with "good and bad days" with their taboos and proscriptions.

The second part of the book is a detailed account of music in the fields, including a number of line-drawings illustrating the various traditional instruments used. This is followed by three appendices on ceremonies and taboos, song and prayer texts, and transcriptions of the music. The book ends with useful notes, an essential Kammu vocabulary and a bibliography. Cheaply produced in clearly printed offset-litho form, it is a most readable and worthy successor to the previous volumes and is available at a very reasonable price.

J D A Widdowson

IDCKWOOD, W B, The Oxford Book of Bn"tish Bird Names, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984, 174pp., £7.95.

There are many books about birds, usually excellently produced and illustrated: they tell you how to recognise and identify birds; they inform the reader about avian feeding habits, breeding practices and migration patterns; birds are identified by their names - both the Latinate ones used by the specialist and the more familiar household names. The present volume has no pictures, no Latin names and only incidental information about habits and other scientific matters, since it is the names of birds which form the subject of the book - not the scientific names, but the popular ones - and what a feast of linguistic riches they provide.

The author is a retired Professor of philology whose special hobby has always been birdwatching, and this book combines his interests in ornithology and etymology. The main part of the book is a dictionary of 1500 items, with an etymology of each, in many cases offering considerable detail.

Professor Lockwood explains that traditional bird names are of three main kinds: those derived from a bird's habits- the Shearwater, the Treecreeper, the Turnstone, for instance; those derived from a bird's appearance- Redbreast, Black-headed gull, Goldcrest; and those which, however crudely, are based on imitation of a bird's call: Heather Bleat and Gaverhal are both names for the snipe, and refer to the drumming noise produced by that bird in display flight . Gaverhal is a relic of the Celtic language once spoken in Devon and literally means goat (gavar) of marsh (hal).

To help the reader with the etymology, the author provides a useful introductory section incorporating a compact history of the Indo-European-derived languages, including an account of the Germanic Sound Shift. There is also a section on Dialect and Standard Language. And while one may not necessarily agree with his assertion that " .. .. dialect speaking proper is now

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extinct in England .... ", it is impossible not to acknowledge the effects of the trend towards the standardisation of the language in rendering obsolescent many previously widely used terms.

Anyone interested in birds and words will find hours of happy browsing in this book. It is a splendid example of accessible erudition.

K Reah

LOUGHMILLER, Campbell and Lynn LOUGHMILLER, comps. and eds., Big Thicket Legacy , Austin and London, University of Texas Press, 1977 (first paperback printing 1980), xxiv, 224pp., £6 .7 5 paper.

The technique of oral history, using taperecorded testimony, can at its best preserve for posterity the essence of a community as expressed in the unique language of the individuals who have experienced in their own lives the passing days and years, the significant events of which for them are indelibly printed on the memory. To penetrate the highly personal and often jealously guarded preserves of those members of the older generation whose reminiscences are the very stuff of history requires special skills. It is abundantly clear from this highly evocative book that the authors possess those skills in full measure. As Francis Edward Abernethy notes in his foreword: "Few books are able to catch the spirit as well as the sound of a place, especially when that place has as strong an identity and personality as the Big Thicket has. But Campbell and Lynn Loughmiller have, and they have been able to catch the speech and figures and rhythms without resorting to cracker-barrel dialect writing. They have also kept honest. They haven't tried to make the people corn-pone folksy nor have they laundered the language for polite society. They wrote down what these old settlers said in the way that they said it, so if some of the terms used jangle the sensibilities, remember that they are writing fact not fiction." If only others engaged in similar tasks would heed these wise words.

To the outsider, these reminiscences of life in the Sabine River forest area of southeast Texas are a graphic reminder of the startlingly recent date of pioneer settlement in the United States. Those who first penetrated this wilderness, which is still remarkable for its variety of unspoiled flora and fauna, established isolated homesteads, many of which remained dwelling places of those interviewed in this extraordinary picture of life as it was in Big Thicket within living memory.

In spite of the inevitable changes brought about by the modern incursions of lumber companies, escaping urbanites and "city-born hunting clubs" it is clear that "The old clannishness can still be felt , along with a general distrust of outsiders." And what a wealth of character, and characters, survived to bear witness to a rapidly disappearing lifestyle, so faithfully documented by the Loughmillers . Each individual stands foursquare in his or her own right, exemplifying the pioneering spirit of the early settlers. The vigour and colourfulness of each individual's contribution make compelling reading, and the memories of many of those interviewed reach back with vivid clarity for in some cases almost a century.

At a time when it is fashionable to study a carefully balanced sample of a population, this book is a vindication of those who continue to seek to capture the reminiscences of the oldest stratum while they are still there for the asking. Each one of the many individuals recorded for this study comes to life in his or her own words, and through their memories and the excellent photographs which add a whole new dimension to the book we come to know them as if they were our own friends -women like Ethel Osborn Hill who was still writing a weekly

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column for the Woodville newspaper at the age of ninety five, and "Uncle Bat" Charpiot who "was considered a supreme optimist when, at 95, he planted a peach orchard because he liked peaches, but he ate many baskets of his favorite fruit before he died at 105 ", having lived a year less than his father who settled in the area from France. Pioneer life may have been tough, but so were the Big Thicket pioneers themselves. The legacy they have left us will live on, thanks to the work of Campbell and Lynn Loughmiller, to whom we are all indebted .

J D A Widdowson

MALOTKI, Ekkehart, Hopi Time: A Linguistic Analysis of the Temporal Concepts in the Hopi Language, Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs 20, Berlin, New York, Amsterdam, Mouton, 1983, 677pp., £75.30.

Since Whorfs contention that Hopi is a "timeless language" first drew public attention, scholars have been fascinated by the possible difference between such a language and those in which the conceptualising of time seems to be a central preoccupation. Ekkehart Malotki's in-depth study of Hopi speakers in the Third Mesa villages of Hotvela and Paagavi in the 1970s painstakingly constructs detailed and convincing arguments to disprove Whorfs findings. In a full and excellently exemplified analysis , he identifies Hopi concepts of time in the use of spatio-temporal metaphor, the expression of units of time, horizon-based sun time, stellar orientation and the ceremonial calendar. He considers various timekeeping devices such as the knotted calendar string, notched calendar stick, sun holes alignment and shadow observation, and comments in detail on the pluralisation and quantification of time expressions, and on temporal particles and miscellaneous time words .

Whereas the means of expressing time in Hopi may differ in many respects from those in other languages, this thorough and definitive study leaves us in no doubt that Hopi manifests elaborate and imaginative concepts of temporality and a wide variety of ways of communicating them.

J D A Widdowson

MAYELL, Leslie: Further Memories of Birmingham, Padstow, Lodenek Press , 1982 , 64pp., 23 photographs, £6 .25 hardback, £3 .9 5 paper.

Leslie Mayell was born in Sparkbrook, Birmingham, in 1911, and this book is a continuation of his memories of the city before the bombing of the Second World War and subsequent redevelopment altered its appearance beyond all recognition. The text is mostly reminiscence, and the photographs usually amateur. For someone of Mr Mayell's age and background there is probably ample opportunity for exclamation as long-forgotten memories are reawakened, but for younger readers whose acquaintance is with the modern city, many of the observations are trite and uninteresting. Vague hostility is aroused , too, at such gratuitous remarks as "Doubtless these potato fields have now gone. In our present permissive days such fields would be probably [sic] plundered in a single night by an organised band of thieves." Such opinions show us only a rather tetchy author, not the city he once loved .

It is curious to note the book's publication in Cornwall- was no Birmingham firm interested?

G Cawthra

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MILLS, David , introd., The Chester Mystery Cycle: A Facsimile of British Library MS Harley 2124, Leeds, Leeds Texts and Monographs, Medieval Drama Facsimiles VIII, 1984 , xxii, 143pp. , £40.

With the publication of this splendid facsimile the dream of making available the whole manuscript corpus of English medieval drama moves one stage nearer to realisation. This is the eighth in the series, and supplies the third of the five main manuscripts of the Chester plays. If one looks back and compares the first in the series , also a Chester play, one notices that the quality of the reproduction of the text is now much improved: the paper, still an antique laid , is smoother and lighter in weight , the printing is in an attractive dark brown ink, not black, and the contrast of the photographic reproduction is much less harsh. Nonetheless, Dr Mills and the general editors consider that some of the entries in red ink in Harley 2124 have not been rendered sufficiently clearly in the facsimile and they provide a list of transcriptions of illegible or partly illegible words; this provision is more than adequate.

Like all others in the series after the first, the introduction of this latest volume is reproduced from typescript, not typeset, which inevitably detracts from the overall appearance. A small objection is that not all the essential elements of a basic description of a manuscript are given; there is no collation formula , for instance, and it is only implied, not clearly stated, that all the gatherings were destroyed through mounting the folios on guards for the modern binding. On the whole, though , the introduction follows the trend towards greater fullness (it is at least twice as long as in the first volume). Altogether this will prove to be a most useful publication, and a welcome addition to the rapidly expanding resources available in the field of medieval English drama.

G A Lester

NELSON, Keith E, ed ., Children's Language , 2 vols ., New Jersey/London, Lawrence Erlbaum, 1982, 984pp., £24.95 , £39.95.

The Chtfdren 's Language series began when it became apparent that extensive work in new areas along with a great deal of re-interpretation of old data would be necessary before any orderly account of language development could be assembled . All volumes in the series have a common scheme of operation, using two tactics. The first is to give authors sufficient freedom and time to plan an account of their area of thinking that will show both the progress and the problems in that area; the author of each chapter is free to find a workable proportion of new experimental reviews and theories. This flexible approach means that formats vary among chapters, with authors and editors requiring much patience of each other before the final organisation of a chapter is realised . None of the chapters are simply reviews, and none of the volumes are introductory texts. The second tactic covers the selection of topics for each volume; no stress is placed on representing all facets of children's language in one volume. Rather, the chapters placed within one volume are chosen because there are some common themes that tie subordinate sections together, and the author's theoretical and experimental programme has reached the point where a systematic account will be stimulating to other . . Investigators .

These volumes capture the excitement of thinking and research that govern the broad fields of children's language, and will prove interesting to specialists in speech, reading and language pathology, educational psychologists and others in related fields.

W Bennett

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PALMER, Arnold, Movable Feasts, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984, 153pp., 4 line drawings, 4 plates, ,£2 .95 .

Movable Feasts, or "A Reconnaissance of the Origins and Consequences of FLUCTUATIONS IN MEAL-TIMES with special attention to the introduction of Luncheon and Afternoon Tea" is an investigation into the ways in which meal-times have changed, and the reason why.

The investigation is confined to the vanished world of "gentlefolk" - more evidence on their habits being available; the upper class world is also one that the author knows well.

The book is well illustrated with decorous line-drawings and plates. Of particular interest is the new introduction by Professor David Pocock of the Mass-Observation Archive at the University of Sussex, covering the period from the mid-1950s to the present day.

W Bennett

PEIL, Margaret, with contributions by Peter K MITCHELL and Douglas RIMMER, Social Science Research Methods: An African Handbook, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1982 , vi, 234pp., .£6.9 5.

The need for constant updating of guides to research methods in the social sciences produces surprisingly few practical publications , and still fewer which focus on the data and research problems of specific cultures. This eminently utilitarian handbook is therefore especially welcome, not least for its direct application to the African context.

D ivided into three sections - Preparations, Fieldwork and Analysis - the book offers a wealth of detailed instructions and suggestions essential to successful research. The writers succeed in packing a great deal of information into each section, and take pains to alert the reader to numerous pitfalls into which the trainee researcher in particular may fall. The refreshingly down-to-earth text is a notable feature of the book, notwithstanding the complexity of many issues under discussion. There is a helpful and clearsighted appendix on financing a small project, followed by a bibliography and index. Above all , the writers encourage a critical approach to research (and to the handbook itself), and in their typically commonsense way rightly insist on the importance of adequate data: " There are a large number of increasingly sophisticated ways of handling data. To some extent, one needs to 'keep up' in order to understand the reports of research in journals and books. However, it is well to keep in mind that sophisticated methods cannot make up for inadequate data. It is better to keep the analysis simple, within the limits of the data, and concentrate on meaning rather than striving for spurious precision. When reading reports , do not be so impressed with the techniques that you ignore obvious flaws in the argument. If the right questions have not been asked no computer or scale can provide the answers." In saying a hearty amen to that, one wishes that all social scientists would strive to follow this excellent example.

J D A Widdowson

POLLOCK, Linda A , Forgotten Children, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983 , 334pp., .£25, hardback, .£9.50 paper.

This monograph, based on a doctoral dissertation, presents a history of childhood that draws upon such sources as diaries and autobiographies. A clear review of the information on childhood

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keeps the evidence and interpretation sections separate. Thus, confusion is avoided in an area full of distortion and misinterpretation. Both English and American primary sources are analysed, questioning the validity of recent theories on the evolution of childhood and the treatment of children; many theories see a movement from a situation where the concept of childhood was almost absent to our present Western recognition that children should be treated with love and affection.

Forgotten Chzfdren has a substantial body of original material on child-rearing practices and the relations of parents and children. This material is set in the wider framework of sociology, social anthropology and developmental psychology. An erudite account of the continuous process of parental care, this book has a prose style which would interest not only the scholarly but also the caring parent of today. However, the cost of both hardback and paperback copies of this book may be considered by some to be rather too high a price to pay for the perusal of parent-child relationships from 1500 to 1900.

W Bennett

PRICE, Glanville, The Languages of Britain, London, Edward Arnold , 1984 , 245pp. , .£16.50.

This is a study of all the languages which have been spoken by the natives of Britain. Its format is the chronological order in which these languages arrived, more or less, and their various branches (e.g. the P-Celtic language is treated separately as British, Cornish, Cumbric, and Celtic Pictish).

The book is best approached as an introduction to the study of a particular language, and its historical context in Britain. In such a work, it is possible only to give a brief outline to some important matters, but there are very good bibliographies at the end of each chapter for those interested in particular aspects.

This volume is most interesting in its study of the lesser-known languages such as Manx or Cornish. However, the chapter on Scottish Gaelic is very inclusive and informative, if a little keen on statistics.

Rather sadly, the book is a list of dead or declining languages except for English itself, and the possibility of a revival of the Welsh language. Scottish Gaelic still leads a precarious existence, and the author does not seem very optimistic about its survival, having charted the reasons for its decline very carefully and incisively.

Students of the English language (or most other languages for that matter), and others interested in the history of the British people will find this an informative and useful work, if a little dry and academic in places.

J Dickenson

REED, T J, Goethe, Past Masters Series, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984, 114pp., £7 .95 hardback, .£1.95 paper.

The greatest difficulty with the Goethe phenomenon is trying to do justice to it in 114 pages. Goethe's literary, scientific and administrative activities were so stunningly far-reaching as to defy brief description and analysis, and Reed rightly indicates the impossibility of examining Goethe's literary output independently of his scientific work. Within this obvious limitation

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of space, however, Reed has produced a stimulating study. The book would to some extent serve the needs of the beginning student, but the chapter on Faust would be too obscure for anyone not already familiar with that play.

The reader will gain an impression of the freshness and youthfulness of Goethe's approach to life and literature throughout his days, of his ability to conceive of all things as being related ( cp. the link between his scientific investigations and his creative writings), and of his positive attitude to life. After a long period during which pessimism and nihilism have held sway, when "few of the writers who compose the modern canon have given a positive overall view of the human condition and the world man lives in" (pp.95f.), Goethe's willingness constantly to say " yes" to life is both refreshing and importantly different . Reed contrasts Goethe's affirmation of life and art , his optimism (in no facile sense of the word) with

" ... developments in literature and men's thinking about literature since his time: the growing existential gloom; the social marginality of writers; the 'poetes maudits', with their deliberate deranging of the senses; the pursuers of art for its own question-begging sake; the hermetically obscure, the agonisers over how to write at all , the despairers of ever conveying thought; and most recently the dehumanisers of literature who would detach it from its roots in life and make it a self-referential game, sabotaging men's most valuable form of open communication by simplistic doubts of its viability." (pp.101f.)

Goethe is able to say "yes" to life as b ecoming, as striving, without needing to appeal to ideal states , to religion , or to historical processes.

Although at one time extremely influential outside of Germany as well as within it , and well known in this country through such figures as Carlyle and Arnold , Goethe has in recent times been less in evidence in intellectual circles and in the literary world . In the German-speaking countries he has been too often seen as a monument which is to be revered, rather than as a stimulating and vital force, whilst in the English-speaking countries we have had for the most part only a vague impression of a great figure. He deserves to be better known.

G Shorrocks

REES, Nigel, Sayings of the Century , London, Allen and Unwin , 1984 , v111, 270pp., £8 .95.

When quotable quotes pass into popular speech and writing, their cliched relevance tends to render them anonymous and their original creators cease to be credited with them. More regrettable than this, however, is the loss of the often fascinating context in which these sayings were born and later developed . In a lively and witty personal selection from the thousands of candidates for inclusion, Nigel Rees takes as his sole criterion the fact that the context of a given quotation has something further to be said about it which singles it out for attention . This is a sensible and ingenious way of choosing the 750 quotations in the compendium and also allows the compiler to correct certain of the errors and misapprehensions surrounding some of them .

Nigel Rees's wide experience of quotations, notably on the highly successful BBC radio programme Quote.. . Unquote which he first devised and presented in 1976, leads him to formulate two laws about the use and misuse of quotations: 1. When in doubt, ascribe all quotations to Bernard Shaw (or the nearest obvious speaker); 2. There's always an earlier use of a phrase, however far back you go. He makes the further point that although he has sometimes suggested that such and such a speechwriter coined a phrase, "the important fact must always

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be: who gave the phrase currency or popularised it ." He is careful to define quotation , catchphrase and slogan , but wisely notes that the three categories overlap, and that indeed a saying may even be all three of them simultaneously. Altogether an informative, entertaining and highly readable anthology.

J D A Widdowson

RILEY, Glenda, Women and Indians on the Frontier , 1825-1915 , Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press , 1984, 336pp., $24.95 cloth , $12 .95 paper.

Glenda Riley has used a large number of letters and diaries of pioneering women to show us the often conflicting ideas and attitudes which these women possessed about the Native Americans through whose lands they traversed , and would eventually possess . For a long time it was assumed that pioneering women shared the viewpoint of their menfolk about their neighbours. This book gives us a much deeper insight into the situation. Despite the many fears which were encouraged at the start of the trip West over the " marauding savages", many women became friendly with many of the Indian people, and often were critical of the aggressive attitude of their husbands or their fathers .

What makes this case particularly interesting is that these women retained the same critical view of Mormons, for example, without changing their view on contact with these people. Women faring West were encouraged to see themselves as a civilising influence on the savage country, and also as weak and defenceless. Women came to re-examine these ideas of themselves as well as those pertaining to the "savage" Indians as they learned to cope with their new envuonment.

The book is a fascinating insight into the lives and feelings of these brave women, as well as the relationships which developed between the settlers and the Indians. Glenda Riley is especially interested in the question of intermarriage, and the differing reactions it provoked . Altogether a fascinating book, occasionally marred by a rather meandering style.

J Dickenson

ROBINSON, Eric and David POWELL, eds., john Clare , Oxford , Oxford University Press , 1984, 530pp., £4.95 .

The precedent set by Clare's first publisher, John Taylor, of "correcting" the poet's "provincial expressions" has been followed , to a greater or lesser extent, more or less unanimously up to the present day, and a definitive complete works cannot be recommended. However, the appearance of this selection of John Clare's poetry and prose seems at least to have settled any debate as to which select anthology should come top of the pile.

The editors have kept as close as possible to Clare's manuscripts as regards spelling and punctuation, though they do confess to having made a few "corrections" themselves, omitting the poet's ampersands and correcting the odd slip of the pen. However, what is preserved proves to be a laudable representation of Clare's originals, provincial spellings causing little trouble for the thoughtful reader.

The choice of works also seems a good one, representing Clare's many facets : nature, love, folksong, metaphysics and a strong sense of injustice, in a balanced way. On the other hand,

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it is unfortunate that the editors could only print a fragment of The Pan:Sh, which I believe to be a unique testament to early nineteenth century village life, and should be guaranteed its proper place in any Clare anthology. True, a note states that this long poem has never been properly edited and the present editors aver to correct the situation in the near future, but this one exception somewhat devalued an otherwise excellent volume. Nevertheless, as it contains nigh on five hundred pages of excellently treated Clare material I can do nothing other than recommend this in the "best buy" category.

RACAxe

ROGERS, Mary F, Sociology, ethnomethodology, and experience: A phenomenological cntique, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983, 219pp. , £17.50 hardback, £5 .95 paper.

This is an appeal to fellow sociologists to re-examine the possible contributions of phenomenology to their undertaking. To illuminate these, Rogers must first overcome some outstanding prejudices against phenomenology. She shows that highly successful phenomenologically-oriented works of sociology have been written (and could have gained in clarity and rigour by explicit use of phenomenological methods). She then demonstrates that ethnomethodology, posed and taken by many as a phenomenological sociology, to the detriment of phenomenology, in fact distorts phenomenology by ignoring fundamental phenomenological findings and using phenomenological terminology for non­phenomenological insights. In short, apart from a general tendency underlying sociology and some phenomenologically-influenced works, there is not yet a fully rigorous sociological phenomenology.

Without launching into an exemplary study, Rogers indicates what such an approach would look like. Among the attractions of phenomenology is its offer of a dogma-free methodology, grounded in universals of human being; its ability to heal the current Western Crisis by restoring confidence in the wisdom and dignity of commonsense knowledge against the appropriative claim of scientific knowledge; and its intense scientific rigour.

In terms of access , phenomenology is burdened with a dense technicality of vocabulary that arises from the inadequacy of everyday language to describe the intimacies of consciousness and experience. The only recourse for a novice or outsider seems to be to accept phenomenology on faith, and plunge into the thick of discussion. Rogers does not overcome this problem; having assured us of the value of phenomenology, she conducts us straight into a tour of the major findings of phenomenology relevant to sociology and bristling with phenomenologese. We emerge in a central chapter on the phenomenological method, which smoothly shows how those findings were achieved; it also serves to contrast ethnomethodology's apparent lack of consistent and rigorous method, which is Rogers' next concern. Having negotitated the language at the beginning, Rogers' case for a reappraisal of phenomenology in the social sciences emerges strongly. If not convinced of phenomenology, the reader who sticks the course must come out with a better understanding of its approach and findings, and struck with the need to take it seriously.

C Fees

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RUTHERFORD, lain, Hull As It "Was , Nelson, Hendon Publishing, 1982, 41pp., 60 black and white photographs, £2 .90.

This compilation of photographs from the collections of Kingston Upon Hull Museums and Art Galleries is typical of the many pleasing volumes of historic photographs published by the Lancashire company of Hendon Publishers, Ltd. In Hull As It U/as, to quote from the book, "two amateur photographers have captured some of the earliest images of the city in the 1850s."

The selection of photographs for this volume demonstrates the meticulous research of lain Rutherford. The buildings and streets, the commerce and transpon, and perhaps most important of all, the people of Victorian and Edwardian Hull evoke a recent past with real immediacy.

W Bennett

SAMPSON, Geoffrey, Schools of Linguistics: Competition and Evolution, London, Hutchinson, 1980, 283pp., £4.95.

The aim of this volume is to increase the amount of contact amongst adherents of different linguistic traditions, so that they may gain from studying other onhodoxies, and perhaps by rejecting some elements in the thought of their own particular school. The book is consciously restricted to what the author terms "core linguistics", i.e. it excludes applied linguistics, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics. The author is to be complimented on the clear style in which it is penned.

The main area of concern is twentieth century linguistics, but Sampson rightly begins with a prolegomenary chapter of respectable length on the nineteenth century. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which biology and physics served as models for linguistics (although in the former case it was by no means one-way traffic). In his Conclusion, Sampson returns to the nineteenth century, and expresses the view that Schleicher was essentially correct in treating linguistics as a branch of Darwinism, i.e. of biology.

The second chapter is about de Saussure, and highlights the synchronic-diachronic distinction, and de Saussure's view of langue as a social phenomenon. The third chapter, "The Descriptivists", treats of the American tradition founded by Boas, " ... which turned out to be enormously fruitful, and which was never seriously disputed until Noam Chomsky appeared on the scene in the late 1950s" (p. 57). In the descriptivist school, of course, linguists "tended to think of abstract linguistic theorising as a means to the end of successful practical description of particular languages, rather than (as Chomsky does, for instance) thinking of individual languages as sources of data for the construction of a general theory of language" (p. 59). A chapter follows on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which to be sure was not a school, but rather " .. . an idea which has held a perennial fascination for linguists of diverse schools ... " (p.81). Sampson is able to subscribe only to a very weak version of the hypothesis.

Language is viewed in terms of function in "Functional linguistics: the Prague School". For linguists of the Prague School, an interest in the different speech styles appropriate to different situations followed naturally from their functional approach to language. The most recent development of the work of the Prague School on linguistic variation is that of William Labov. The modifications which people make to their speech in seeking higher social status results in gradual changes to the language as a whole. The strict separation of the diachronic from the synchronic, so strongly insisted upon by de Saussure and then the Descriptivists, is seen

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to be no longer the absolute division it was once thought to be. This blurring of the synchronic­diachronic division is one of the most important developments in modern linguistics.

The next chapter is entitled "Noam Chomsky and generative grammar". Chomsky is seen as having made a positive contribution to linguistics by virtue of his having brought syntax into the fold of scientific linguistic description ( cp. de Saussure, who accounted syntax an aspect of parole ), and his having established its hierarchical structure in human languages. Sampson has little time, however, for most other aspects of transformational-generative grammar - the linguist 's intuition as a source of data (at any rate, when there is no empirical check on it), transformational rules, the attempt to formalise semantics, Chomsky's search for a universal theory of language, and so on; and equally little time for the transformational grammarians' neglect of and dismissiveness towards work carried out by adherents of other schools, and their propensity for "underground" publishing. He laments the fact that

" ... for a decade or more, the energies not just of a few enthusiasts but of almost an entire discipline have been diverted away from the task of recording and describing the various facets of the diverse languages of the world, each on its own terms, towards that of fitting every language into a single, sterile formal framework, which often distorts those aspects of a language to which it is at all relevant, and which encourages the practitioner to overlook completely the many aspects of language with which it is not concerned" (p.165 ).

Chapters follow on "Relational grammar: Hjelmslev, Lamb, Reich" and "Generative phonology". Sampson is never afraid to state his opinions: "One factor which enabled the theory of binary phonetic features to survive is that, to put it bluntly, American linguists tend not to be very good at Phonetics" (p.209). He contrasts the American situation with that in Britain, where phonetics was established as a discipline well before linguistics, and where we have long been accustomed to the subtleties of IPA transcription, and notes that Language could not even print IPA symbols until it moved to a British publisher. The American system of notation is "cruder and less codified", and it therefore follows that " ... a theory which claims that only a few crude distinctions between sounds matter will appeal to scholars who can hear only a few crude distinctions and are deaf to the finer details" (p.209).

The last school to be considered is the london School. Halliday's notions of rank and delicacy are rejected , the Firthian linguistics is felt to have failed in its attempt to handle semantics (as have all other schools) , but systemic linguistics is thought worthy of serious consideration, and prosodic phonology is given a very strong vote of confidence. Sampson's worry is that permanent international recognition of the london School might be difficult to obtain in the current climate:

" The discipline of linguistics seems to be peopled largely by intellectual Brahmanists, who evaluate ideas in terms of ancestry rather than intrinsic worth; and , nowadays, the proper caste to belong to is American. The most half-baked idea from MIT is taken seriously, even if it has been anticipated by far more solid work done in the 'wrong' places; the latter is not rejected, just ignored" (p.23 5 ).

There is a brief conclusion, in which Sampson addresses himself to the question of whether linguistics is an art or a science. Phonetics and phonology can by long tradition most easily be assigned to science, and linguists not of an extremist bent would probably agree with Schleicher in accounting morphology a part of science as well. Chomsky has now shown that syntax too should be regarded as a part of this same realm, although he has not helped to make syntax scientific in practice in advocating the linguist 's intuition as the source of data,

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and by his lack of respect for empirical observation generally. Semantics, however, is for Sampson in principle not amenable to scientific investigation, and to think otherwise is to believe in the fallacy of scientism. Sampson takes the empiricist account of human nature to be the correct one, and rejects Chomsky's notions of linguistic universals and a specialised , innate knowledge of language in the new-born infant:

''The true general theory of language is that there is no general theory of language; the only features common to all human languages are predictable consequences of principles belonging to other, established disciplines, so that there is no room in the intellectual arena for an independent theoretical subject called 'general linguistics'" (p.241).

Constraints on human languages are not psychological but biological. The book returns then, in a sense, to its starting point - to biology, and to Schleicher.

G Shorrocks

SEKERS, Simone: Grandmothers' Lore: A collection of household hints from past and present, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1980, 192pp. , £4.95 .

The dustcover of this book extols it as "an amusing and invaluable must for every kitchen bookshelf', but, even given allowance for advertising enthusiasm, such praise is exaggerated. The collection of "hints" is wide-ranging, but lacks pattern: had it been simply a list of snippets from old household books to make us marvel at the quaint practices of long ago, or a list of tried and tested advice for dealing with perennial problems, it would have more cogency. As it is , it is often not easy to see why a particular quotation from an old book has been included ("To prevent the creaking of a Door. Rub a bit of soap on the hinges." A New System of Domestic Cookery, 1818); or why hints which are ineffective are cited ("A simple rule to remember when cooking veget ables: cook underground [root] vegetables with the lid on, and green vegetables with the lid off.' surely the best way to get soggy, tasteless cabbage. Or the advice about peeling onions under water to stop your eyes watering - it makes no difference at all .) The book will probably sell because of its dustcover encomium, but more "amusing" and "invaluable" help is to be found elsewhere.

G Cawthra

SENG, P ], ed. , Tudor Songs and Ballads from MS Cotton Vespasian A -25, Cambridge, Mass. , Harvard University Press , 1978, 160pp., £15 .

This is a most proficient re-editing of a manuscript first partly put into print, rather badly, over a century ago. It is a matter of regret that the editor did not choose to publish the entire contents of the manuscript as an integral collection, since it also contains late Middle English material , in sixteenth century copies , mostly of a devotional or theological character, Catholic in origin and a testimony to the recusant interests that led to its preservation. However, the bulkiness of these would have made for a longer and costlier book, and presumably detracted from his major interest in the volume, which is almost wholly confined to fols. 127-179.

The editor informs us that his task has taken eighteen years . This has certainly ensured thoroughness , since, apart from some dependence on the work of Professor H E Rollins who started a (later abandoned) edition in 1919, he has amassed a wealth of information on the

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material in the manuscript, revealing much about the dissemination of similar texts in other collections, and about the cultural milieu in which such commonplace books and anthologies were assembled. The notes are very full, and the editor's engagement with the difficulties of interpretation, not less than with the difficult palaeography and structure of the manuscript, is everywhere evident. Such matters as the construction, the contents, and the traceable provenance, are outlined in the Introduction, which is, however, disappointingly short. It is perhaps appropriate for this book to be reviewed here, as it has South Yorkshire associations. Unfortunately, these are not pursued as far as they might have been.

There are, for instance, various placenames written on foL 148v, which had t.o be read under ultra-violet light. The editor is correct that they are all in the (former) West Riding; it would hardly have been difficult to localise the area more precisely in the (present) South Yorkshire. He shows no hint of enquiring why these names were written. Perhaps even a simple plotting of the names on a map might suggest an origin near the centre of the name-cluster, since they appear within a very limited area. As to his interpretations of the names, most seem to be correct; but it might be objected that Bramston, identified as Brampton-Bierlow (really a district, not a single place), is as likely to be Brampton-en-le-Morthen. He gives four unidentified names. Chetle, the first, remains unidentified, although I suggest it may be related to names like the Cheadle of Cheshire and Staffordshire ("a wood"), or the Cheddle- names of Staffordshire, or the Chittle- names of Devon ("a valley"). Ramarshe , the second, must be Rawmarsh, near Rotherham. Hamworth, the fourth, must be Hemsworth. As for Ratlyffe, the third , I suggest Radcliffe Moat, a moated manor-house site near Bentley, north of Doncaster (seeS 0 Addy, ''Some Defensive Earthworks in the Neighbourhood of Sheffield'', Transactions of the Hunter Archaeological Society, I (1918), 362).

Finally, the editor claims that this manuscript, written c.l5 70s, is second in importance, among commonplace manuscripts of verse, only to the Percy folio of about eighty years later. This is a large claim, even if well-founded. Nevertheless, he might have done well to consider it in relation to other activity near the same area and time, as for instance in the Mexborough Manuscript of early seventeenth century verse, compiled mainly by Sir John Reresby (1611-46), now in Leeds; and the copies of similar poems, and topical verse, in the Middleton Papers in the library of the Yorkshire Archaeological Society in Leeds. If the editor's claims derive from great enthusiasm for his manuscript, he may be forgiven for that, for he has produced an edition of great value to those who wish to explore the byways and minor productions of a cultural milieu far removed from that generally of most concern to students of this period .

B S Donaghey

SMITH, Olivia, The Politics of Language 1791-1819, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984, xiii, 269pp. , £19.50.

This book contains six essays dealing with politics and language at the end of the eighteenth century, a subject which has been largely neglected hitherto. Although the essays are not specifically linked, they deal with related topics and illustrate a main theme. That theme is the use of language as a system of social and political control through the use of standard language and grammar as a means of preventing the uneducated and those in the lower classes from making their opinions felt because they could not express themselves correctly. The book charts the various means by which this use of language was attacked and defeated so that ordinary language could be used for political discussion. The book thus deals with the relationship

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between vulgar and refined language, something of interest to the literati like Wordsworth as well as to the radicals like Paine and Spence. The essays are well researched and the results are presented in a readable way. However, the book deals in the main with ideas about language rather than about language itself. There are few linguistic examples offered to the reader so that what actually constituted either vulgar or refined language is sometimes difficult to decide. This volume opens up an area of study which could benefit from more linguistically oriented research, though that is clearly not the author's main interest. She is to be complimented on producing a fine book which has important bearings on many disciplines; it deserves to be widely read.

N F Blake

SUDDARDS, Roger W, Listed Buildings, The Law and Practice , London, Sweet and Maxwell , 1982, xxxiii, 343pp., £.27.

This book constitutes an excellent summary of all aspects of the law concerning listed buildings, conservation areas and ancient momuments. Under "Practice" the exercise of the law in relation to threatened or dilapidated buildings of merit is considered and there is a detailed consideration of grant and loan facilities available, problems of taxation and the rights at law of the various concerned institutional and statutory bodies, in addition to an examination of the rights of members of the general public. This book is of interest to anyone concerned with the fate of listed buildings and is essential reading for anyone actually concerned with their preservation. It should be available for consultation in every reference library in the country: one hopes that it may be, and that it is regularly updated. Although Mr Suddards modestly remarks that his book owes a great deal to the "constant and ready help of many colleagues", he deserves great credit for the coherent and economical way in which he has organised a large body of often complex information. His book meets a genuine need.

S E Clarke

Those were the days: a photographic album of daily lzfe in Britain, 1919-1939, introduced by Frances DONALDSON, London, Dent, 1983, 281 photographs, £.10.95 .

This collection of photographs forms a companion volume to Memory Lane: a photographic album of datfy life in Bn.tain, 1930-1953 introduced by James Cameron. The photographs were taken by Planet News, survived difficult circumstances, and were restored for publication by the Topham Picture Library. Their quality is excellent, and the accompanying captions balanced and informative.

Any record of the inter-war years is bound to take notice of the General Strike, poverty, and the rise of Fascism. There are pictures of want, hunger, the ]arrow March, and so on, but those associated with the General Strike show the scabs rather than the strikers. Oswald Mosley is shown addressing a crowd; close-up on a platform raising his hand in salute; and as best man at the wedding of his Chief of Staff, at which the cake was cut by the bride with an axe while the groom held the fosces beside her. (Axe and fosces were the symbols of power in imperial Rome which Mussolini adopted for the Fascists). Although there are many pictures of "ordinary" people, perhaps the majority are of those in high political or aristocratic circles, and of course of royalty.

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No collection of pictures can evoke the whole atmosphere of any given time, but this volume offers a representative selection . It will prove itself value for money both for the student of the time and for those who lived through it and wish to be reminded.

G Cawthra

TRUDGILL, P and J HANNAH, International English: A Guide to Varieties of Standard English , London, Edward Arnold , 1982 , xiii, 130pp., £3.95.

The book is accompanied by a recording, available on cassette only.

International English is concerned with varieties of Standard English throughout the world . An introductory chapter on the varieties of Standard English is followed by chapters on English, Australasian, South Mrican and Welsh English; The Pronunciation of North American English; English and North American English: Grammatical , Orthographical and Lexical Differences; Scottish and Irish English; and Other Varieties of English. This last chapter deals with English­based creoles and non-native varieties of English. Appended are a glossary of technical terms, a list of selected references and recommendations for further reading, and a reading passage. The cassette recording illustrates thirteen varieties of Standard English , using word lists and the aforementioned reading passage.

The book aims to provide "at least a partial solution to the problem of recognising and coping with differences among the standard varieties of English by covering differences at the levels of phonetics, phonology, grammar and vocabulary" (p.3 ). It is intended particularly for teachers and students of EFL, but also more generally for anybody with an interest in English linguistics and dialectology. However readers may on occasion find the concept of Standard English employed in this work rather arbitrary and monolithic. If some allowance is made for chronological, regional and stylistic variation, the line between English English and other varieties is not always easy to draw.

Not surprisingly in a book dealing with such a wide range of varieties of English, one or two details would seem to be questionable. It is therefore something of a pity that sources for the observations made and for the illustrative material are not given. It is also a pity for another reason, namely that many of the statements made are of a quantitative nature in essence ("usually", "sometimes" etc.), and one can only wonder on what evidence such judgements are based. The coverage of the different varieties is somewhat uneven in breadth and depth, and is at times rather thin. However, some problems of this sort are unavoidable in a short, introductory text. All in all, the book serves a useful purpose, and should be successful in its appeal to students and teachers of EFL. It constitutes a readable introduction to what is in fact a truly enormous field.

G Shorrocks

TULLOCH, Graham, The Language of Sir Walter Scott - A Study of his Scottish and Period Language, London, Deutsch, 1980, 351pp., £12 .95.

Tulloch describes Scott's lexis and grammar. With its rigorous classification and index verborum, The Language of Sir 1-Valter Scott replaces Paul Roberts's 1948 University of California thesis The Influence of Sir 1-Valter Scott on the Modern English Language as the most detailed description of Scott's language available. Probably Tulloch's greatest contribution is the

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distinction between Scott's literary language which was in every respect the language of his day and that which Scott used to represent the language of an earlier period . Scott's practice was ahistorical. He postdated frequently, by as much as several centuries , so that his medieval characters speak Elizabethen English. This scrupulous documentation, for which we owe a considerable debt to Graham Tulloch, is just one of the ways in which Scott might rightly be thought of as a linguistic innovator. Another thesis running through the book is that Scott's vocabulary disadvantages the non-Scot more than the non-scholar. In other words, those who are well read might easily recognise Scott's Spenserianisms and Shakespeareanisms. Some of Scott's vernacular-speaking characters are remarkably literary in lexical choice. Tulloch's painstakingly careful historical authentications (much aided by the OED , MED , and SND) refute literary criticism which would maintain the pseudo-historical language of Ivanhoe (1819), for instance, as mere "tushery". Tulloch appears to have left no stone or word in all the Waverley Novels unturned . As a reliably exhaustive treatment of lexis (by source and functional type as well as by semantic field) and grammar, future and particularly stylistic studies will begin - or have to negotiate - with Tulloch . It is remarkable that literary reviewers have been shy of awarding the book its full merit.

J M Kirk

VINCE, Ronald W, Ancient and Medieval Theatre: A Historiographical Handbook , Westport, Connecticut and London, Greenwood Press, 1984, 156pp., ;£27.95.

The implications to Theatre History of Traditional Drama's break from Folk Drama Studies will be made clearer by a critical reading of this book. "Folk Drama", both the field of study and the category, belong to Theatre History; that is immediately clear. Their meaning lies in the history of Theatre History, and specifically in the invention, and almost immediate traditionalisation of the "three-crises" structure of theatre history in the eighteenth century: birth in Greece, death with Rome, rebirth in the Middle Ages, a perfect exposition of the underlying Christian/Biblical theory of History. "Folk drama" is that which keeps the pre­Greek period devoid of theatre, and keeps the distinct eras of theatre thrown up by this structure from running into one another. This was not necessary until the "three-crises" theory took hold, and the classical language of "theatre" and "drama" replaced the vernacular vocabulary of "playhouse", "stage", "players" and "plays" in which shows and exhibitions of all descriptions had merged in an extended performative field . Before this vocabulary change, Roman theatre quite naturally rambled into medieval theatre in mimes, minstrels, and the rest of the rabble dismissed from Theatre History by Thomas Percy in "An Essay on the Ancient Minstrels in England" (1765 ). It was in this banishment, or rather, in the cultural movement that supported this banishment, that the concept of " Folk drama" appeared.

Percy was not the first to put forward the "three-crises" theory, although his "An Essay on the Origins of the English Stage", which appeared with the other in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, was subsequently very influential. Robert Dodsley expressed it in the 1744 preface to A Select Collection of Old Plays, and we can find it expressed in Fran~ois Hedelin's The Whole Art of the Stage, 1684. It is a theory which arose naturally out of the commonsense world view of the educated Westerner, given evidence ready-to-hand: the testimony of classical authors as to the birth of theatre out of religious ritual; the ruins of Roman theatres and am phi theatres, which bespoke the effectiveness of the early Church's strictures in killing theatre; and the proof of the Elizabethan age that theatre had not only been reborn, but had achieved the heights

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even of the classical theatre. The latter was to be expected of an era which had thrust Western Europe to the summit of an inevitable Philosophic (Scientific), Technological, Literate evolution, a height surpassed in the Restoration and subsequent Enlightened Age in which even Shakespeare could be improved with rationalisation. And from this summit all the world's cultures stood arrayed as its childhood, with divine creation at its beginning. In this concept of the world, which certainly fired English imperialism, the three-crises structure appeared natural, and so secured in its obviousness by subsequent generations of scholarship that Vince can still speak of it as something that "needs no justification". Outside of Theatre History the twentieth century has intervened, and the naturalness of the theory disappeared.

Traditional Drama, discovered in the field, owes no allegiance to Theatre History, and in pulling the struts from under fulk Drama is not aware that it is causing the buried cultural assumptions of Theatre History to reappear. It is therefore not fully capable of pushing its insights and discoveries further into the region of Performance Studies to which Theatre History ultimately belongs (and which it for so long dominated), nor of realising to the full the contribution it is already capable of making. The next step is to gain this awareness, and to this end, Ancient and Medieval Theatre is particularly useful. It is, in the first place, an exponent of the old tradition of Theatre History, with its fundamental Literary base and roots in the eighteenth century. More especially, however, it is written as an historiographical bibliography: Vince has selected what, to him, are the most significant and useful works in each era or area of Theatre History, and written an analytical introduction to each separate bibliography. In an appendix, he brings us up to date on the current state of medieval dramatic texts, and current thinking about them. In short, the book is an insider's guided tour of Theatre History, a schematic introduction to the Tradition.

The basic three-crises structure of Theatre History remains intact, but it must be said that within this structure there is considerable scholarly ferment. The architecture and machinery of theatre are being considered more closely, for example, and Vince's book itself, as an historiography, indicates that self-criticism is more and more becoming a part of the doing of Theatre History. Here again Traditional Drama, and fulk Studies generally, with their recent history of self-criticism and renewal, can take a lead.

C Fees

WARD, Benedicta, Miracles and the Medieval Mind, London, Scolar, 1982, x, 321pp., £17 .50.

Miracles have usually attracted attention today because they appear to go beyond the limits of what is possible, and so the main interest in them has been whether in fact they happened or not. This book, however, is more concerned with miracles as a historical and social phenomenon. Benedicta Ward deals first with medieval discussions of miracles and then goes on to describe the various kinds. These are associated with particular people or places. She also includes a chapter on those places which failed to develop into shrines with particular saints. There is much interesting material in this book, though inevitably there is considerable retelling of miracles, most of which are not so different from one another. Miracle stories do provide some insight into how medieval people thought and lived, and the author feels they should be used more frequently to flesh out the more usual historical documents such as wills and charters. Because of this concern, the tone of the book is academic; it is suitable for serious scholars of the medieval period and should not be tackled as a first sample of the period. It is not clear whether the author has been able to marshall enough evidence to convince

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historians to put miracles in a more central position in their assessment of the middle ages .

N F Blake

WELLS, Stanley, Re-editing Shakespeare for the Modern Reader, Oxford Shakespeare Studies, Oxford, Clarendon Press , 1984 , 131pp., £15.

This book is based on lectures delivered at the Folger Shakespeare Library; they deal with old and modern spelling, emendation policy, editorial treatment of stage directions, and discussion and edition of the first act of Titus Andronicus. Wells has already discussed the question of whether Elizabethan texts should be modernised in their spelling. Here the case for modernisation is laid out fully. Although not everyone will agree with the conclusions, it is important that the case should be made so that discussion of the problems involved may be undertaken fully and dispassionately. Wells is quite right that old spelling is often insisted upon for emotional rather than scholarly reasons, and that what modernisation has occurred has often been introduced rather unrigorously. The rest of the volume concerns problems of editing, and these essays are rather more technical in their approach, though Wells writes easily and fluently. The essays should be of interest to a wide audience. Aspects which receive little attention include language and punctuation. The latter has often been ignored by editors , who try to keep the Folio punctuation while doing some modernising at the same time. The former is recognised as important by Wells, but he refers only to Cercignani's recent book without going into linguistic matters in the same depth as other features of editorial policy. But Cercignani's book is much less helpful than some for editors, and the failure to tackle language matters in depth may encourage future editors to ignore the importance of this side of editing and emendation. Otherwise this is an important book which could be read with profit by all editors , whether Shakespearian or not.

N F Blake

WRIGHT, David: see CHAUCER.

ZETTERSTEN, Arne, ed. , East African Literature: An Anthology, London, Longman, 1983, 222pp. , £4.95.

Longmans have long established themselves as the foremost British publishers of Mrican literature, and this volume continues that invaluable tradition. Included are some of the best written works from Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda, produced in the last twenty years. There are examples of poetry in English and Swahili, short stories, drama, novels, essays and criticism, and works deriving from the oral tradition. In all, the book represents a fascinating and important handbook of East Mrican literature which makes one eager to go away and read more.

G Cawthra

ZIPES, J, The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, South Hadley, Mass., Bergin and Garvey, 1983, 298pp., £34.95 hardback, £16.95 paper.

This is essentially a history of the tale known to Western children as Little Red Riding Hood.

128

Jack Zipes has collected various versions of the story, from its first appearance in print in 1697 up to some very recent interpretations. Some foreign versions are also included.

For those who have not studied folktales at all, it may come as a shock to find that the story has changed quite considerably since it was first read, and it seems to have had quite a long life before that, possibly arising out of tales of werewolves . The selection of tales presented here covers most genres, including comedy, poetry, moralistic tale, and even one or two plays. The collection includes Angela Caner's short story "The Company of Wolves", which has been made into a film, and stands out from much of the collection.

Jack Zipes has written an interesting introduction to the story, considering its changing face through the centuries. He sees it as originally portraying a strong-minded girl coming to terms with her own adulthood. The tale was transformed to conform to bourgeois ideas of the discipline and obedience of sex and nature, portraying a helpless Red Riding Hood, punished for her disobedience, but often saved by the protecting huntsman. The later tales in the collection show that the wheel may have turned full circle, with more powerful heroines (one of whom shoots the marauding wolf with a revolver!) and some of the stories exploring the rather sensual nature of the tale.

J Dickenson

Recordings MacCOLL, Ewan and Peggy SEEGER, Blood and Roses, Vol 3, Beckenham, Blackthorne Records, 1982.

This is the first ballad project that Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl have done together in over a decade, the recording featuring traditional ballads from Scotland and North America. The two have been singing ballads for many years now, but they both seem to have the knack of finding something new in a ballad each time they return to it.

Ewan MacColl has pinpointed his belief in ballads when he wrote on the sleeve of this album: "What is it about the ballads that we find so fascinating? Well, the stories themselves are first rate. They have certainly stood the test of time, and that isn't a bad recommendation. Then again - their poetry can be breathtaking." Ewan MacColl is extremely talented in all forms of artistic creation and a resounding success in whatever he does. Both his wife and himself have been active in the British folksong revival since the mid-1950s as singers, songwriters, arrangers and teachers.

A most welcome addition to this record is the sheet of words given with it so that the listener can sing along to such traditional ballads as Geordie; The Laird 0' Logie; The Grey Cock; Young Peggy; Eppie Morrie. Sons of the pair, Calum and Neill MacColl provide good accompanimental support on this disc, and Neill has produced the whole with professional skill. The excellent sound was engineered by Nick Godwin, and Dave Scott's artistry designed the cover of this pleasing recording.

W Bennett

129

MacCOLL, Ewan and Peggy SEEGER, Freeborn Man, Beckenham, Blackthorne Records, 1983 .

One could almost call Freeborn Man a personal request album, for it contains some of the most frequently requested songs in the repertoire of Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger. Fifteen ofEwan's vast output, plus one song by Peggy, include such well-known titles as I'm a Rambler; Dirty Old Town ; Sweet Thames, Flow Softly and my personal favourite The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face . The latter song, sung by Peggy Seeger, was the only disappointment I felt in the entire album. This is a song that should be sung with great feeling (as it should have been, because this is the song sung over the phone when the two first fell in love) but the feeling seemed rather muted in Peggy's rendition. If only it had been transmitted through the low, warm, throaty tones of Ewan MacColl! Mter all, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face reached the top of the hit parade in Roberta Flack's rendition. This still leaves a score of nine out of ten for the album as a whole. Peggy Seeger and the two sons of the talented twosome, Neill and Calum MacColl, provide excellent vocals and accompaniments to Ewan MacColl , who undoubtedly emerges from this particular album as one of the most talented individuals in folk music today.

W Bennett

130

Index to Lore and Language, Volume 4 , numbers 1 and 2 (January and July 1985) .

Prepared by Jean Alexander, Julia Bishop, Syndonia Donnelly, Michael Guy and Sara Michaels.

AUTHOR INDEX

Asagba, 0 A

Beck, Ervin

Doctor, R

Evans, Ellis

Holdaway, Simon

Kelsey, Nigel G N

Kirwin, William

Ojoade, J Olowo

Shorrocks, G

Simpson, Jacqueline

The Folktale Structure in Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard

Rhymes and Songs for Halloween and Bonfire Night

Gujerati Proverbs: An Analytical Study

A Semantic Universal?

Sustaining the Traditions of Police Work: A Sociological Analysis

The Lady on the Mountain: A Century of Play Rhyme Tradition

Folk Etymology: Remarks on Linguistic Problem-Solving and who does it

Hunter and Hunting in Yoruba Folklore

Further thoughts on the Labovian Interview

The Lost Slinfold Bell: Some Functions of a Local Legend

1(31-39)

2(1-17)

1(1-30)

2(55-67)

2(25-35)

1(78-85)

2(18-24)

2(36- 54)

1(46-56)

Smith, J B

Teece, Alan

A Selection of Proverbial Material from "Tail Corn"

Just for Fun: Children's Playground Songs from Derbyshire

1(57-67)

1(68-77)

2( 68-83)

1( 40-4 5) Upton, C S Solihull: A Note on a Placename Pronunciation

GEOGRAPHICAL INDEX

Abbots Bromley (Staffordshire)

Aboukir Bay (Algeria)

Ahmedabad (India)

Alfold Dean (Alfoldene) (Surrey)

Arun (W Sussex)

AUSTRALIA

131

1(86,87)

2(70)

1(1,30)

1(5 7,59,63)

1(57 ,58,63)

1(82,84), 2(83)

Avondale (Gwent)

"Babylon"

Banbury (Oxfordshire)

Barnsley (S Yorkshire)

Baroda (India)

Basingstoke (Hampshire)

Benin (Nigeria)

Birmingham (W Midlands)

Bolsterstone (S Yorkshire)

Bombay (India)

Bonne Esperance (Newfoundland)

Bordon (Hampshire)

Bosham Harbour (W Sussex)

Bourton (Oxon.)

Bradfield (S Yorkshire)

Brigh tlingsea (Essex)

BRITAIN

BRITISH ISLES

Brunswick (W Germany)

Buckinghamshire

Caernarfonshire (Wales)

CANADA

Cardiff (S Glamorgan)

Challock (Kent)

CHANNEL ISLES

Cheshire

Chichester (W Sussex)

CHINA

Chobham (Surrey)

Copenhagen (Denmark)

Cornwall

Cotswolds

Coven try (W Midlands)

Darley Dale (Derbyshire)

132

2(21)

1(82)

1(72)

2(4f)

1(1,30)

1(88)

2( 41,48,49)

1( 40,41,86), 2(66)

2(1ff)

1(1,30)

2(23)

1(88)

1(60,64)

1(88,89)

2(1ff)

1(82)

1(47,57,59)

1(82)

2(70)

1(73)

1(69)

1(82,84)

1(80)

1(88)

1(82)

1(70)

1(5 7)

2(77)

1(88)

2(70)

1( 69,70, 71)

1(69,71)

1(41)

2(81)

Derbyshire

Devon

Dorset

Droitwich (Hereford and Worcester)

Dudley (W Midlands)

Durham (Co Durham)

Edinburgh (Lothian)

ENGLAND

Essex

Farnworth (Gtr Manchester)

Fogo District (Newfoundland)

Folkestone (Kent)

Forraby (Cornwall)

Gateshead (Tyne and Wear)

Gloucestershire

Grand Banks (Newfoundland)

Guildford (Surrey)

Gujerat (India)

Hampshire

Hawaii (USA)

Herefordshire

Horse Island (Newfoundland)

Horsham (W Sussex)

Hyderabad (India)

INDIA

IRAN

IRELAND

JAPAN

Jericho Gordan)

Jersey (Channel Isles)

Kensington (London)

Kent

Kentsham (Kent)

Kidderminster (Hereford and Worcester)

133

1( 69), 2( 68)

1(71)

1(69,71)

1( 41)

1(41)

1(71,82)

1(81)

1(84)

1(69,70)

1(51,56)

2(22)

2(9)

1(61)

1(49)

1(70)

2(21)

1(63)

1(1-30)

1(70,71)

2(77)

1(70)

2(22)

1(57,58,63)

1(1,30)

1(1,28)

1(1)

1(84)

2(77)

2(71)

2(23)

2(13)

1(87)

1(61)

1( 41)

Lagos (Nigeria)

Lancashire

Lewes (E Sussex)

Lichfield (Staffordshire)

Lightwater (Surrey)

Liverpool (Merseyside)

London

Loxley (S Yorkshire)

Marden (Hereford and Worcester)

Marylebone (London)

Matlock (Derbyshire)

Mississippi (USA)

Nasik (India)

NEWFOUNDLAND

New York (USA)

NEW ZEALAND

Niger Delta (Nigeria)

NIGERIA

Norfolk

Northamptonshire

North umbria

NORWAY

Nottinghamshire

Nowhurst (Surrey)

N uneaton (Warwickshire)

Oke-Igbe (Nigeria)

Panama (Canal)

Patcham (E Sussex)

Poona (India)

Poynings (W Sussex)

Rajasthan (India)

Reading (Berkshire)

Rome (Italy)

Romford (Essex)

134

1(31), 2( 49)

1(50,51,69, 71,89)

2(9)

1( 41)

1(88)

1(82)

1(82,83,88), 2(72, 76, 78)

2(3£)

1(64)

1(82)

2(68 ,75,76 ,80)

1(83)

1(1)

2(19ff)

1(70)

1(84), 2((83)

2(49)

1(31), 2(36,41)

1( 68 ,69, 71)

1(72,73)

1(69)

1(52)

1(70)

1(57,58)

1(41)

2(3 7 ,39)

2(70)

1(87)

1(1,30)

1(87)

1(30)

1(82)

1(5 7)

1(82)

Rotherham (S Yorkshire)

Rowhook (W Sussex)

Rudgwick (W Sussex)

San Francisco (USA)

SCOTLAND

Serpentine (London)

Sheffield (S Yorkshire)

Sherborne (Gloucestershire)

Shropshire

Slinfold (W Sussex)

Smithies (S Yorkshire)

Solihull (W Midlands)

Somerset

Sompting (W Sussex)

Southampton (Hampshire)

Stannington (S Yorkshire)

Stepney (London)

Stocks bridge (S Yorkshire)

Straits of Belle Isle (Newfoundland)

Stratford-upon-Avon (Warwickshire)

Suez (Canal)

Suffolk

Surat (India)

Surrey

Sussex

Sydney (Australia)

Tamworth (Staffordshire)

Tennessee (USA)

Tipperary (Co) (Ireland)

Trafalgar (Spain)

Trinity (Newfoundland)

Tyneside

Ulster (N Ireland)

USA

135

2(14)

1(58)

1(58)

1(82)

1(70-7 3,84 ), 2(7)

2(70)

2(1ff)

1(88,89)

1(71)

1(57-67)

2(10 ,12)

1( 40-56)

1(68,70,72 ,73)

1(88)

2(22)

2(2£)

1(82 ,84)

2(2)

2(23)

1(41)

2(70)

1( 69,81)

1(1,30)

1(70,87)

1(5 7 ,60 ,87)

1(79)

1( 41)

2(78)

1(87)

2( 70)

2(22)

1(51)

1(71)

1(82 ,84 ), 2(4ff)

WALES

Walworth (London)

Warwick (Warwickshire)

Weardale (Co Durham)

Wereham (Norfolk)

WEST AFRICA

West Midlands

Whitnash (Warwickshire)

Wisewood (S Yorkshire)

Wolverhampton (W Midlands)

Worcestershire

Worrall (S Yorkshire)

Wychwood Forest (Hereford and Worcester)

Wye (Kent)

York (N Yorkshire)

Yorkshire

YORUBALAND (Nigeria)

SUBJECT INDEX

Abbots Bromley Horn Dance

Abimbola, Wande

All Souls' Day

Animals

Antelope

Belief

Birds

Bonfire Night

Buffalo

Burstow, Henry

Caking

Calendar Custom

Carol Singing

Chappell

Charms

136

1(69,73,82,84)

1(82,83)

1(41)

1(72)

1(82)

1(37)

1(40,41)

1(61)

2(5,9ff)

1( 41)

1(69)

2(2)

1(89)

1(88)

1(57)

1(68-72)

2(3 7,44,47 ,49)

1(86-87)

1(31)

2(1,3)

1(15-16), 2(23 ), 2(3 7- 54), 2(79,81)

2(51)

1(5 7 -67)

1(16)

2(1-17)

2(50-51)

1(5 7 ,58)

2(1-15)

2(1-17), 2(21-22), 2(68), 2(79)

2(8)

2(9)

2(42)

Chiasmus

Child lore

Christmas

Church Ales

Church Bells

Clapping Songs

Communication

Counting Out

Countryman, The

Custom

Destiny

Devil

Dialect

Dialectology

Dipping

Douglas, Mary

Easter

Economic Environment

Elephant

Epiphonemic Level

Fagunwa, D 0

Fairs

Fate

Fieldwork

Folk Dance

Folk Etymology

Folk Medicine

Folk Music

Folk Narrative

Folksong

Folktale

Function

Games

Gesture

137

1(5-6,22)

1(78-85 ), 2(1-17), 2( 68-83)

2(2,8), 2(79)

2(79)

1(5 7 -67)

2(72-79)

2(55-67)

2(82)

1(68)

1( 61-64 ), 2(1-17), 2(21-22 ), 2( 68), 2(79)

1(16)

1(57,63)

1(40-45), 2(18-24)

1( 46- 56)

2(82)

2(27 ,31))

2(68)

1(11-13)

2(46-48,50)

1(2-4)

1(31,32)

2(79)

1(16-17)

1(47-51)

(1(88-89)

2(18-24)

1(15 ), 2(3 7-39,42,46-4 7)

2(13)

1(57-67), 2(26-35)

2(1-17), 2(3 7 ,40), 2( 68-83)

2(26-35)

1(5 7 -67)

1(79-82 ,84)

2(55-67)

Gomme, A

Graffiti

Gujerati

Guy Fawkes Night

Halloween

Harvest

Heredity

Hindu Calendar

House Visits

Humour

Hunting

Ijala

Interviewing

Jokes

Juju

Kicking Songs

Kinship

Labov, William

Language

Lexematic Level

Leopard

Legend

Liminality

Linguistic Analysis

Linguistic Theory

Lion

Macbeth

Material Environment

Mass Media

Methodology

Mischief Night

Mnemonic

Monkey

138

1(80-81,84)

2(30)

1(1-29)

2(1-17)

2(1-17)

2(79)

1(16-17)

1(14-15)

2(1,8)

2(26-35)

2(36- 54), 2(78-79)

2(45-46,52)

1(50-51)

2(26-35)

1(34,3 7)

2(72)

1(9-11)

1( 46- 56)

1(1-29), 1( 40-45 ), 1( 46- 56), 1( 60,63 ), 1( 68-77), 1(89), 2(18-24),

2(36-54)

1(17-22)

2(48-49)

1(5 7 -67)

1(61-64)

1(1-29)

1(48-50)

28(49-50)

2(8)

1(11-13)

2(9,10)

1( 4 7-48,50- 51)

2(12)

1(2,5)

2(51-52)

Morris Dancing

Murdoch, Iris

Occupational Folklore

Ogun

Opie, Iona and Peter

Physical Environment

Place names

Plants

Playground Songs

Police Work

Print Culture

Pronunciation

Propp, V

Proverbial Sayings

Proverbs

Rhymes

Rites of Passage

Rotini, Ola

Sampling

Semiotic and Logical Level

Seven Ages of Man, The

Sharp, Cecil

Shibboleths

Skipping Rhymes

Singing Games

Social Environment

Sociolinguistics

Soul Cakes

Soyinka, Wole

Supernatural Figures

Thematic Level

Taboos

Tipps Eve

Treacle Mines

139

1(88-89)

1(61,65,66)

2(25-35), 2(36-54)

2(37-52)

1( 68), 1(82), 2(1,2 '7 ,9,12 ), 2(70,83)

1(13-16)

1(40-45), 1(60,63), 2(21,22)

1(15 ), 2(3 7,46-4 7)

2( 68-83)

2(25-35)

2(19-23)

1(40-44)

1(34,3 5)

1( 68- 77)

1(1-29), 1( 68,72-77), 2(36- 54)

1(78-85 ), 2(1-17), 2( 68-83)

1(61-64)

1(31)

1(47-48,50)

1(2,17 -26)

1(7-8)

1(68)

1(89)

1(82-84)

1(79-82,84)

1(9-11)

1( 46-56)

2(3)

1(31,3 7)

1( 57-59,63-64 ), 2(5 -8), 2(39 ,42)

1(2,7-17)

1(61-64), 2(43-44)

2(21-22)

1(87 -88)

Trick or Treating

Trudgill, P

Tutuola, Amos

Weddings

Witches

Women in Society

Yoruba Folklore and Mythology

Yoruba Operatic Theatre

140

2(1-15)

1( 46-56)

1(31-39)

2(79)

1( 58 ,5 9,63-64 ), 2(5 -8)

1(9)

1(31-39), 2(36-54)

1(31)

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LORE AND LANGUAGE The journal of the Centre for English Cultural Tradition and Language was established in 1969 and is published twice a year.lt includes articles on all aspects of folklore and language, notes and queries, book and record reviews and many other items of concern to all who share an interest in language and traditions etc. Each volume has an index.

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