Radio: Three Little Words

MIDWAY SIGNS LIMEY PROF TO DOPE YANK TALK.

This irreverent headline in Chicago’s Britain-baiting Tribune had to be decoded for Sir William Craigie when he reached the Midwest’s capital in 1925. The “Limey prof,” a shy, spike-bearded little Scotsman, was charmed. That was the kind of talk he had come to the U.S. to codify; No one could question his fitness for the job. One of the world’s great linguists, he was co-editor of the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary, for which monumental task he was knighted.

The story of Sir William and his Dictionary of American English on Historical Principles (first volume, 1936) was dramatically told last week on Mutual Broadcasting System’s educational program, The Human Adventure (Thurs., 7:30-8 p.m., C.W.T.). The producer: the University of Chicago Radio Department. It was the University’s sixth demonstration (others: The Great Plains, The Origins of the Earth, Penicillin, Studies of Marriage, War Edema) that radio can be interesting though educational.

In explaining what Sir William and his collaborators have been up to for nearly 20 years, The Human Adventure dramatized the stories of some American words:

Tuxedo. A tailless dinner coat, first worn by a daring young man (Griswold Lorillard) at a formal ball at fashionable Tuxedo Park, N.Y., in the 1880s.

O.K. One explanation claims that when rugged, unerudite President Andrew Jackson finished reading the papers designed to dissolve the second United States Bank, he marked them “O.K.” (oll korrect). Another explanation points out that when Jackson’s henchman, President Martin Van Buren, ran for re-election in 1840, his slogan was OK—the watchcry of his political organization, the Old Kinderhook Club, of New York. Before the election, which William Henry Harrison won, the New Orleans Picayune chortled: “OK. These initials, which in party parlance are understood to mean Oll Korrect, are now used for—Orful Katastrophe.”

The radio program considered additional slanguage tidbits:

> New Deal is a poker term used by General William Tecumseh Sherman in 1863.

> Smugglers who carried liquor in the legs of their boots in 1889 became known as bootleggers.

>Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. invented the word anaesthesia (1846); Jane Austen gets credit for the first recorded use of baseball, in Northanger Abbey (1803).

> William Dean Howells first used installment plan in 1886.

> Thomas Jefferson found himself holding the bag in 1801.

> Americans speak of first and second joints of chicken because it was once impolite to use the word leg. It was also bad taste to mention the breast of a chicken — hence white and dark meat.

The University of Chicago’s The Human Adventure radio program is not a new idea. It was used successfully for 42 weeks on CBS in 1940. The originator was William Benton, advertising man emeritus (Benton & Bowies), now a University of Chicago vice president. Sherman Dryer, head of the University’s radio department, produces it with the assistance of the faculty and Chicago radio actors. As a dramatization of the factual research going on in colleges and universities, Chicago’s show has already scored heavily with students of many degrees of learning.