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It is true that the etymology of homo confirms the biblical story of the creation of man, but I am not aware of any other word for “man” that is akin to the word for “earth.” Latin mas (long vowel, genitive maris; masculinus ends in two suffixes), whose traces we have in Engl. masculine and marital and whose reflex, via French, is Engl. male, referred to “male,” not to “man.”

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By Philip Furia

Today marks the 116th anniversary of the birth of Ira Gershwin, lyricist and brother to composer George Gershwin. There are many fascinating details about Ira, ten of which are collected here.

1. When Ira was growing up, he held a lot of odd jobs, one of which was shipping clerk at the B. Altman department store housed in the same building where today Oxford University Press has its offices.

2. Ira loved to play Scrabble. In one game he triumphed by using all seven of his letters to spell out CHOPSUEY. I don’t know which letter was already on the board that he built upon.

3. One of Ira’s neighbors on Maple Drive in Beverly Hills was Angie Dickinson, then at the height of her success with television’s “Police Woman.” Angie was a good poker player and frequently joined the poker games at Ira’s house with the likes of Harold Arlen (“Over the Rainbow”), Arthur Freed (“Singin’ in the Rain”), and other prominent songwriters. At the time, she said, she didn’t realize what august company she was in — still, she frequently cleaned the old boys out. She also learned what a stickler Ira was for grammar. After he had lost a lot of money to her, she said, “Ira, I feel badly that you lost so much.” Ira snapped, “Would you feel ‘goodly’ if I had won?”

4. Ira was also a stickler for proper pronunciation. It annoyed him if someone said “Ca-RIB-be-an” instead of “CA-rib-BE-an.”

5. So it annoyed him when singers took upon themselves to “correct” his deliberate grammatical and pronunciation errors — singing “I’ve Got Rhythm” instead of “I Got Rhythm,” “It’s Wonderful” instead of “‘S Wonderful,” “The Man Who Got Away” instead of “The Man That Got Away.”

6. Ira admired Dorothy Fields as a lyricist, the one woman among that tight-knit group of male songwriters, but he thought it was unforgivable that she playfully distorted the proper accent of “RO-mance” in “A Fine Ro-mance (my friend this is, a fine Ro-mance with no kisses…)”

7. Ira loved all sorts of verbal play. He once built an entire lyric out of “spoonerisms,” named after a British clergyman who loved the reversal of syllables that produces “The Lord is a shoving leopard” instead of “The Lord is a loving shepherd.” Technically such reversals are termed “metathesis” (which can be “spoonered” into “methasetis”). In The Firebrand of Florence Ira concocted such hilarious spoonerisms as “I know where there’s a nosy cook (instead of “cozy nook”)… where we can kill and boo (instead of “bill and coo”)… I love your sturgeon vile (instead of “I love your virgin style”).

8. Three of Ira Gershin’s lyrics were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song: “They Can’t Take That Away from Me,” “Long Ago and Far Away,” and “The Man That Got Away.” All three lost. Ira decided it was because he had used the word “away” in the title and vowed “Away with ‘Away’!”

9. In London, he attended a rehearsal for a revue of Gershwin songs. Backstage, one of the English singers said she simply did not understand his lyric for “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.” When Ira asked what the problem was, she sang, “You say eye-ther and I say eye-ther, you say nye-ther and I say nye-ther…” then said “I just don’t get it, Mr. Gershwin.”

10. He had friends over for cocktails one afternoon and someone suggested they all go for dinner at a prominent restaurant in Beverly Hills. Ira offered to call and see if he could get a table for all of them. He came back to say he could not get a reservation because the restaurant was booked. One of his friends asked to use his phone and came to say he had gotten a table for the entire group that would be ready in a few minutes. When Ira asked how he was able to do that, the friend said, “I used your name.”

Philip Furia is a professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He is the author of The Songs of Hollywood (with Laurie Patterson), Ira Gershwin: The Art of the Lyricist, and The Poets of Tin Pan Alley.

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The post Ten things you didn’t know about Ira Gershwin appeared first on OUPblog.

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By Anatoly Liberman

I am looking at the backlog of questions and comments for two months (there were no monthly gleanings at the end of August) and, first of all, want to thank everybody who has read the blog, reinforced my conclusions, disagreed or corrected me, given additional information, and asked questions.

Can American Sign Language (ASL) be viewed as having literacy?  Words mean what people make them mean, and perhaps literacy can be understood in senses not familiar to the majority of speakers.  The term computer literacy has almost turned literacy into a synonym for skills, and yet literacy presupposes an ability to read and write.  Someone who can do neither is illiterate.  Oral societies that later introduced a script are sometimes referred to as preliterate.  From this point of view, ASL does not look to me as a language having literacy.  I am not a specialist in ASL and argue from the position of an outsider.  All the deaf and mute Americans I know use English as their medium of written communication, even though they consider ASL their native language.

Is Standard English pronunciation a viable concept? I think it is, even if only to a point.  People’s accents differ, but some expectation of a more or less leveled pronunciation (that is, of the opposite of a broad dialect) in great public figures and media personalities probably exists.  Jimmy Carter seems to have made an effort to sound less Georgian after he became President.  If I am not mistaken, John Kennedy tried to suppress some of the most noticeable features of his Bostonian accent.  But perhaps those changes happened under the influence of the new environment.  In some countries, the idea of “Standard” has a stronger grip on the public mind than in North America.  I have often heard people remarking: “He speaks beautiful French” or “Her Italian is wonderful,” and those remarks referred not only to style and vocabulary but also to the speaker’s delivery.  Additionally, some local accents are usually called ugly, though from a linguist’s point of view, an ugly native accent is nonsense.

This brings me to some questions of usage.  Discussing lie and lay for the umpteenth time would be even less productive than beating ~ flogging a dead horse.  In some areas, the distinction has been lost, and so be it.  English has lost so many words in the course of its history that the disappearance of one more will change nothing.  So lay back and relax.  The same holds for dived/dove, sneaked/snuck, and the rest.  I only resent the idea that some tyrants wielding power make freedom loving people distinguish between lie and lay.  Editors and teachers should be conservative in their language tastes.  In works of fiction, characters are supposed to speak the way they do in real life, but in other situations it may be prudent to lag behind the latest trend as long as several variants coexist.

A curious detail of usage is the word dilemna.  Our correspondent asked why several decades ago this form had become current on the East Coast.  I confessed that I had never heard about this monster, but later searched the Internet.  It turned out that some other people are as ignorant of it as I was, but I discovered that dilemna had invaded the English speaking world from New Zealand to Canada.  Some children were even taught to pronounce -mn-.  Here is probably a situation that will provoke no disagreement: dilemna is unacceptable.  The first suggestion that comes to mind is that someone decided to change the spelling of dilemma under the influence of words like column,