Report from the Jungle

"I have a mind like blotting paper," British Lexicographer Eric Partridge once said. In the past dozen years, he has blotted up enough odd facts about words ("It becomes a dreadful habit") to fill a Dictionary of Slang, a Dictionary of Cliches and a Dictionary of the Underworld. Last week the latest product of his addiction was on U.S. bookshelves. Name into Word (Macmillan; $4.50) was a colorful catalogue of "proper names that have become common property."

To Lexicographer Partridge "no word is a mere word." Words, says he, become the "mirror of society and the index of civilization." * Sometimes a word travels as far as history itself. Sherry was "the wine of Jerez," cambric the "linen made at Cambrai," and tobacco the product of the West Indian island of Tobago.

Other words spring from men and events. In the 1880s members of the Irish Land League gave the silent treatment to a hated estate agent named Captain Charles Boycott. The method they used stuck, and so did boycott. A century before, France's finance minister, Etienne de Silhouette, introduced a series of such niggardly reforms that his name became a synonym for anything meager and finally for a portrait in barest outline.

Such names had made the full descent to lower case; others had been borrowed intact, capitals and all. Prime Minister Gladstone, a busy traveler in his day, became a traveling bag. Prince 'Albert became a watch chain, a long coat and, among Australian beggars, a toe-rag worn in place of socks.

Partridge clears Charles Dickens of all responsibility for the expression "go to the dickens," a Victorian nice-nellyism for "go to the devil." But Dickens' perpetually optimistic Mr. Micawber produced micawberish and the pompous Mr. Bumble lent his name to incompetence forever after. Similarly, a hangman named Derrick is immortalized in hoisting devices, French Physician Joseph Guillotin in a machine which struck him as more humane than the ax, and be-trousered Suffragette Amelia Bloomer in billowing pantalets. It is a process that has never stopped, concludes Partridge happily--from Solon, who became a synonym for lawyer, to Mae West, who became a life jacket.

Meanwhile, with names accounted for, the indefatigable Partridge had turned to another word study. He was spending his days deep in the British Museum, but he wasn't saying just what he was up to. "You may not know much about the world of scholarship," he explained to a reporter, "but it is like a jungle. If any other group of scholars should get an inkling of what I am doing, they might beat me to it."

*For other news of words, see PRESS.

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