Business & Finance: Word Game

Nearly four years ago Charles H. Phillips Chemical Co. started a word game to promote toothpaste sales, offered prizes totaling $600 for the longest list of three-letter standard English words built from such phrases as: “Try Phillips Dental Magnesia,” “Get Phillips Magnesia Toothpaste,” “Try Phillips Magnesia Toothpaste.” Among the 40,000 contestants was a young Queens, N. Y. lexicologist named Ira Gustave Gillman, who compiled six lists, one for each phrase, ranging in length from 150 to 297 words.

Ira Gustave Gillman did not win. Many of his words were rejected as Scottish slang, dialect, obsolete. Contestant Gillman later lost a similar contest held by Consolidated Cigar Corp., won an out-of-court settlement on the prize money. With this experience behind him he filed suit against Phillips Chemical for all of the $600, charging that the judges had fraudulently deleted words from his lists. Last April the case was tried in Manhattan Municipal Court before Referee John M. Cragen. Vigorously Plaintiff Gillman challenged the findings of Contest Judges Walter K. Van Olinda and Andrew J. Davis, both of whom had a hand in preparing the Funk & Wagnall’s New Standard Dictionary. The courtroom rang for a fortnight with such words as: aha, ama, hep, aim, ani, pah. Aha, said Plaintiff Gillman, was either a sunken fence a religious service, or an exclamation. Ama was a wine vessel used in the early Christian Church, also a medical term for “an enlargement of the semicircular canal of the internal ear.” Quoted from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda was Hep, a cry of the Crusaders, derived from the Latin for “Jerusalem is destroyed!”

Branching into elementary zoology Gillman informed the court that an ahu was a Central Asian gazelle, an ani a Brazilian variety of the keel-billed cuckoo. No slang, he insisted, was pah, which meant “bah, faugh, fudge.”

For five months Referee Cragen thumbed through dictionaries, scratched his pate, learned enough about lexicology to state that “the English language is not on trial.” Said he: “If the court could sit in judgment on the dictionary, every one of the 40,000 contestants could come into court, contending that his or her list was the proper winning roster of words. . . .” Last week, having boiled down the case to the real issue of whether or not the contest judges had fraudulently deleted words from Gillman’s roster, Referee Cragen dismissed the suit with a two-letter word: NO.