Three in a Row: or, from Evaluative Lexis to Conjugating Adjectives Richard Alexander The article demonstrates that language play is a feature of Anglo-American English. This holds especially when speakers weigh up people’s behaviour in relation to their own. They use the conjugrating game. As an illustration consider: “I am well off, you are well remunderated, he is a fat cat.” A brief discussion is given of how word choice is dependent on evaluation or the statnce of the speaker. The link to humour or irony is prominent in the language game under analysis. A selection of authentic cases from current English writings illustrates the continuing occurrences of the game. Introduction This article discusses a stylistic phenomenon occurring in Englishspeaking cultures (especially in Britain) in which lexical variation is playfully centered upon. Some call it the Russell conjugation. In 1948 the philosopher Bertrand Russell gave examples of the phenomenon on the BBC Radio programme The Brains Trust, citing the following: “I am firm, You are obstinate, He is a pig-headed fool.” The article has three parts. First the background to evaluative lexis is briefly presented. Part 2 discusses the English-language ‘game’, while Part 3 gives contemporary examples of conjugating adjectives demonstrating that the trope is still very much alive and well. 1. Evaluative lexis Folk wisdom has long been aware of variation in language between individuals and groups. Consider the proverb ‘one man’s meat is another man’s poison’. In a wider sense one person may like what another hates. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 38 (2013) · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Richard Alexander 204 As we know from a further proverb, beauty exists only in the consciousness of those who see it. How people view the actions and manners of others is likely to be different from how they consider their own activities. Arguably, this is a widespread feature whereby oneself is considered more favourably than others. At the lexical level this means that when speakers refer to behaviour that is conceptually similar if not identical, they choose (perhaps unconsciously) items with varying affective or emotional connotations, depending on their focus. The general feature involved here is evaluation, or “the expression of the speaker or writer’s attitude or stance towards, viewpoint on, or feelings about the entities or propositions that he or she is talking about” (Thompson/ Hunston 2000: 5). Partington (1998: 74-75), for example, notes a range of words which have a pejorative discourse prosody, and which are used to refer to other people, but not to ourselves, such as: ‘cults’, ‘extremists’, ‘fanatics’, ‘fundamentalists’ or ‘militants’. The evaluative element in word (lexical) choice has to be learned when learning a foreign language. Maybe the task of being able to actively find the mot juste grows in difficulty proportionately to the size of the available vocabulary. Whether there are more words available in English than other languages we will not discuss at this stage. But notice that socalled ‘hard words’ are sometimes a problem for people who have not had a secondary or even a university education today. Lexical choices can manifest judgmental and evaluative or ideological stances on the referents (issues, person, events) being referred to or denoted. Thompson and Hunston tellingly put their finger on what the analyst’s, and presumably also the language user’s, take on evaluation is. It is a matter “of identifying signals of comparison, subjectivity, and social value” (2000: 13). Francis (1994) drew attention to how anaphoric nouns like ‘these words, this question’ act as labels marking and organizing the foregoing discourse. These labels may be evaluative in varying degrees. This would be especially the case if items like the following were used: ‘this claim, this nonsense’. Such usage clearly reverberates with collectively or socially widely shared attitudes, estimations, or valuations, when speakers express opinions or maintain relations with their co-speakers. This is, also, a pervasive feature of contemporary power politics and media representation. We only need to consider the news on radio and TV. One person’s ‘rebel’ is another person’s ‘assassin’. One person’s ‘freedom fighter’ is another person’s ‘terrorist’. One person’s ‘marksman’ is another person’s ‘sniper’. Or take your ‘salesman’ versus my ‘twister’. The conceptual core is the same in these cases, but the affective polarization is different - productive versus destructive. Three in a Row: or, from Evaluative Lexis to Conjugating Adjectives 205 When it comes to drawing up scales or stages of connotative meaning, we find lexicographers resorting to labels such as the following: polite, positive, affirmative, neutral, negative, derogatory, pejorative, impolite use. In cartoons we sometimes find evaluative lexis forming the punchline. Consider the Dennis the Menace cartoon where he comments on his sister’s activity: ‘Meditation, an exercise. I call it goofin’ off’. Martin (2000) uses the term ‘appraisal’ for this phenomenon, which he has represented as a systemic network. Systemic networks are sets of choices. The question he poses about his systemic network AFFECT is most apposite here (Martin 2000: 149): How are the feelings graded - towards the lower valued end of a scale of intensity or towards the higher valued end; or somewhere in between? To be sure, low, medium and high are not necessarily discrete values. But Martin expects “that most emotions offer lexicalizations that grade along an evenly clined scale” (Martin 2000: 149). Martin (2000: 151) contains a table representing the AFFECT system. This system groups a number of emotions including ‘in/ security’, ‘dis/ satisfaction’ and ‘un/ happiness’ in terms of verbs (mostly) in one column (Surge of behaviour) and adjectives (Disposition). Consider the extract from the table for ‘un/ happiness’. SURGE (of behaviour) DISPOSITION UN/ HAPPINESS unhappiness misery whimper down (low) (mood: ‘in me‘) cry sad (medium) wail miserable (high) The low to high abstract range maps onto the state or mood of ‘misery’ and onto verbs that represent sounds people (can) produce in this mood extending from ‘whimper’ to ‘wail’. Corresponding adjectives ‘down’ to ‘miserable’ certainly might remind one of the conjugating game. There are serious writers on politics and economic issues who explicitly employ such variations for making substantive points. One such writer is Edward Herman who has a track record in analyzing US political discourse and the discourse of media from a very critical and often sardonic perspective. In Herman (1992) there is an appendix called the Doublespeak Dictionary. Definitions of abstract nouns and adjectives referring to behavioural traits frequently display Herman’s use of irony. This is underlined by his allusion to the conjugating game. The dictionary format of cross-referencing is employed in these ironic pairings: First, consider these noun pairs and their definitions: Faith - my deeply held belief (Herman 1992: 138) Richard Alexander 206 Fanaticism - his deeply held belief (op.cit: 138) Value - my moral judgement; also, price (op.cit: 182) Prejudice - your moral judgement (op.cit: 165) Propaganda - their lies (op.cit: 167) Public information - our lies [see propaganda] (op.cit: 168) Secondly, contemplate the following threesome of adjectives: Resolute - Stubborn, unyielding, uncompromising, merciless; a term applicable to our own and allied leaders (See Defiant and Ruthless) (op.cit: 170) Defiant - Stubborn, unyielding or uncompromising; applied to a leader of an enemy state. (See Resolute) (op.cit: 131) Ruthless - Merciless and brutal; a term used to describe rulers of enemy states. (See Resolute and Tough) (op.cit: 172) Herman is writing in the tradition of the nineteenth century American journalist, Ambrose Bierce (1978). In 1911 Bierce published The Devil’s Dictionary, which is essentially a collection of epigrams. The definitions contained in this were witty and satirical and frequently sarcastic or even caustic. So, in short, we are dealing with the social values of lexical items when we note their evaluative power. Many jokes and humorous modes in English also play on the ‘hard words’ tradition in the English lexicon and the accompanying difficulties they reputedly pose for less well educated fellow citizens (Alexander 1997: passim). It is certainly not chance that most intelligence tests, like, once the ‘eleven plus’ examination, in the UK or the GMAT (in the USA) and even the TOEFL examination for potential foreign students in the US, expect examinees to demonstrate a wide knowledge of sometimes Latinate words and their synonyms. The 1970s version of the TOEFL contained in “Section III: Reading Comprehension and Vocabulary Part A” test items that focused in discrete-point fashion on meaning distinctions between words (often in the ‘hard word’ category). Take this example and the instructions (From Model Test Two, in Barron’s How to Prepare for the TOEFL, Sharpe 1979: 121): You are to choose the one word or phrase which would best keep the meaning of the original sentence if it were substituted for the underlined word. 21. Since he had a reputation for being a careful businessman, his bankruptcy came as quite a surprise. (A) erudite (B) vigilant (C) prudent (D) trenchant Related to this is a view of the lexis in elitist or egocentric or ethnocentric terms. As we shall see in the next section the third person is the lowest Three in a Row: or, from Evaluative Lexis to Conjugating Adjectives 207 stratum, representing the crude, unsophisticated ‘plebs’. The second person is the middle-ranking stratum, knowing its place, - ‘above the working class, but below the upper-class’. The first person can be viewed as representing the ‘me-first’ principle (Cooper and Ross 1975). Malkiel’s (1959) category of ‘priorities inherent in the structure of a society’ was adduced to explain the ordering of items in binomial structures like ‘husband and wife’, ‘man and beast’, ‘rich and poor’. In many languages, English included, one finds that that the more powerful element precedes the less powerful. In discourse, a speaker egocentrically rates themselves as superior to others. There is a famous satirical “Three Men on Class” sketch from The Frost Report - written by Marty Feldman and John Law (1966) - in which arrogance and deference - the extremes of the British social spectrum - are humorously articulated. 2. An English-language ‘game’ This brings us to a figure of speech where trinities of ideas seem to rhetorically recur. As mentioned, it is sometimes called the ‘Russell conjugation’; other terms are also used, e.g. ‘emotive conjugation’. Alexander (1997: 58) talks of “conjugating adjectives or nouns” and notes that this humorous mode involves the use of semantically related words or near-synonymy. It constitutes a game in Anglo-Saxon company and is referred to by Fromkin and Rodman (1978: 172): “One attempts to think of words with similar meaning but different social value.” Here are a couple of examples: (2.1) I’m easy-going, you’re lazy, he’s slovenly. (2.2) I am an epicure, You are a gourmand, He has both feet in the trough. Ayto also uses this term. In his Dictionary of Euphemisms (2000: 59) he comments: Rawson […] quotes […] Rapoport’s Semantics 1975: “A game said to have been invented by Bertrand Russell is called ‘Conjugating Adjectives’. It is played by mentioning three adjectives having the same denotation but different connotations. Example: I am thrifty, you are tight, he is stingy.” Ayto focuses on the euphemistic aspects of varying choices along a scalar range stating that “tight can be middlingly euphemistic - more outspoken than thrifty, but milder than stingy.” So this is how the game works. Ego is put in a favourable light and given a triple AAA rating. The person face-to-face opposite one is adjudged to be slightly inferior (dodgy? ) BBB. The third person, non-present individual, is given a multiply trash rating - minuses only. Richard Alexander 208 Often the designation given to this trope is that of ‘conjugating adjectives’. But, as the foregoing examples show, copula plus nouns also figure. So we are perhaps justified in extending the label to talk about ‘conjugating adjectives and epithets’. 3. Contemporary examples of conjugating adjectives and epithets The author has collected a number of real examples of this conjugating game over the past few years. These few samples - though not selected according to objective criteria - demonstrate how current, widely known and alive it still is, at least in literary and journalistic circles in the UK. On the web it is also to be found judging by websites such as Wordcraft [see esp. http: / / wordcraft.infopop.cc/ eve/ forums/ a/ tpc/ f/ 410600694/ m/ 8751056694] The first example (Goldhill 2009), to be adduced, is from the British weekly magazine Times Higher Education. The topic the author of this instance, Simon Goldhill, professor of Greek, University of Cambridge, is writing about is ‘pedantry’. Interestingly he makes a fine distinction between a definition and what he terms a conjugation. Note also how he brings in a first person plural pronoun to form a foursome in the example: (3.1) As with so many of our virtues and vices, there seems to be a conjugation rather than a definition: ‘I show proper concern for the niceties’, ‘you are a bit of a stickler’, ‘he is a pedant’ - and ‘we are lawyers’. (Here and in the following examples, my emphasis.) The preceding sentence sets the scene and provides an introductory comment on the elaboration which the conjugating epithets in this case provide: Does anyone really believe himself to be a pedant (and it is usually a male complaint)? You can probably feel your own lust if you are lucky, smile proudly at your own shabby-genteel clothes, and be complacent about your complacency, but when the wretched bore on the committee says, ‘I may be being pedantic here …’, he usually means ‘at least one of us has the seriousness to care about the regulations in the due manner’. A further contemporary example of the ‘game’ comes in a piece by Bibi van der Zee (2010) “Here’s to happy endings” in the weekly New Statesman. The author refers explicitly to what she calls “the old trope.” (3.2) As the old trope goes, I have been completely vindicated; you have been cleared; he has been whitewashed .[…] I think that sums up the points of view on Muir Russell’s Climategate report that came out on 7 July. Later on she talks of “A difference of opinion.” And she mentions that “The ambassador begged to differ.” Here the operative element is differ- Three in a Row: or, from Evaluative Lexis to Conjugating Adjectives 209 ence/ differ. What the conjugating or evaluation game pinpoints is this difference of perception of something and the corresponding linguistic choices speakers make to underpin or articulate them. Bibi van der Zee is discussing an extremely serious and controversial issue in the context of a report on a British court case in which reference is made to Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip. Here is the relevant section of the article: A difference of opinion on a similarly titanic subject was taking place between the Israeli ambassador to Britain and the judge George Bathurst- Norman. Bathurst-Norman said in court, as he presided over the trial of five activists charged with conspiracy to commit criminal damage at an arms factory, that ‘hell on earth would not be an understatement’ to describe the life of Gazans during Operation Cast Lead, in which hundreds of civilians died under Israeli bombardment. The ambassador begged to differ, saying that the case showed it was ‘not a great era of the British justice system’. An interesting conclusion to reach, given that he was not present for any of the trial. I was, though, and it was fascinating. Someone described it as being ‘like one of those Hollywood films’. Even the judge agreed, telling the jury at the end that he hoped they had been interested by a case which was quite out of the ordinary. In an article about the informal economy operating in Britain, Miles (2010), the sub-editor or author has chosen a title which alludes openly to the conjugating game: (3.3) ‘You avoid tax, I work cash in hand’. In The Media Column of the New Statesman even the media columnist and ex-editor Peter Wilby employs the ‘game’ (Wilby 2006). He starts his column in a week that saw perversion and perverts in schools being discussed in the popular press, as follows: (3.4) The red tops do love a pervert. This is because pervs, to use the redtop headline contraction, can be clearly distinguished from the respectable folk who read newspapers and produce them. They are what sociologists call ‘the other’. I take a healthy interest in barebreasted 16-year-olds. You ogle schoolgirls. He is a perv. But he shows how this is the linguistic technique for distancing ourselves from what we dislike or show distaste for. The allusion to the sociologists and ‘the other’ is indeed most apposite. It is a game of oneupmanship that is being played here. A few years later Wilby (2011) can be seen to be practically a serial ‘conjugater’. Here we find two occurrences of emotive conjugation in the same article (Wilby 2011). Firstly he is discussing the Strauss-Kahn case: (3.5) The answer is that serial seduction, like rape, is an expression of power and a clear line cannot easily be drawn between the two. I seduce, Richard Alexander 210 you harass, he rapes. Our ancestors understood that better than we do, as the novels of Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy show. And a little later in a discussion of Tony Blair’s notorious dossier on the case for invading Iraq, he has this to say: (3.6) Perhaps I am being obtuse, but I cannot see the distinction between bringing ‘improper pressure’ on those providing material for the dossier and ‘sexing up’ the case for war. Another conjugation comes to mind: I sharpen the words, you stretch the evidence, he sexes it up. A British cartoonist writing in the New Humanist (Rowson 2005) employs a standard British joke introduction to make witty use of the three in a row ‘game’ format to mock religious people’s behaviour that appears to be hypocritical. (3.7) As the bishop said to a couple of drag queens: He is a sinful sodomite, Your sexuality is a grey area and I am a confirmed bachelor. Well, an ordained one actually. In a 2011 BBC Radio play “Welcome to the wasteland” by D.G. Britton, transmitted on 28 July 2011, one character comments ironically on her partner’s political commitment, saying (3.8) I’m committed, you’re strong-willed, he’s a bigot. I have referred to this figure of speech as ‘Three in a Row’. But it could perhaps be called ‘three of a kind’. But note that in certain cases four or five of a kind might also be more apt (see 3.9). (3.9) A clammy handed piss-artist, The Ancient Mariner, Bull-shitters, A marketing executive, A PR associate. In conclusion, we can see that this is an element English language speakers employ that appears to have no corresponding trope in any other language the author is familiar with. It is thus an activity made up of a unique amalgam of linguistic and cultural elements that is deeply immersed in ‘Anglicity’, to use the term of Strang (1968: 24-5). But more importantly, it is ‘interpenetrated’ by socio-cultural colouring, it is steeped in ‘experience’ of ‘living’ in an English setting, as a member of society within the specific social configurations of the British (English) class system. Which of course is not to deny that non-British English speakers such as Americans are familiar with the ‘game’. References Alexander, Richard J. (1997). Aspects of Verbal Humour in English. Tübingen: Narr. Ayto, John (1993/ 2000). Dictionary of Euphemisms (2000 2nd edition). London: Bloomsbury. Three in a Row: or, from Evaluative Lexis to Conjugating Adjectives 211 Bierce, Ambrose (1978). The Devil’s Dictionary. Owings Mills, Maryland: Stemmer House Publishers Inc. Cooper, William/ John Ross (1975). “World order.” In: R. Grossman/ L. J. San/ T. Vance (eds). Papers from the parasession on functionalism. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. 63-111. Feldman, Marty/ John Law (1966). “Three Men on Class. Sketch from The Frost Report. Broadcast on BBC.” In: Roger Wilmut (1982). ‘No More Curried Eggs For Me’. London: Methuen. 41-43. Fromkin, V.A./ R. Rodman (1978). An Introduction to Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Francis, G. (1994). “Labelling discourse: an aspect of nominal-group lexical choice.” In: M. Coulthard (ed.) (1994). Advances in written text analysis. London: Routledge. 83-101. Goldhill, Simon (2009). “Pedantry.” THE (Times Higher Education), 17 September 2009. 37. Herman, Edward S. (1992). Beyond Hypocrisy. Decoding the News in an Age of Propaganda. Including the Doublespeak Dictionary. Boston: South End Press. Hunston, Susan/ Geoff Thompson (eds) (2000). Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse. Oxford: OUP. Martin, J.R. (2000). “Beyond exchange: appraisal systems in English.” In: S. Hunston/ G. Thompson (2000). 142-175. Malkiel, Yakov (1959). “Studies in irreversible binomials.” Lingua 8. 113-160. Miles, Alice (2010). “You avoid tax, I work cash in hand.” New Statesman, 14 June 2010. 17. Partington, A. (1998). Patterns and Meanings. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Rowson, Martin (2005). “Buggering on a pinhead.” New Humanist May/ June 2005. 27. Sharpe, Pamela J. (1979). Barron’s How to Prepare for the TOEFL Test of English as a Foregn Language. 3 rd edition. Woodbury, NY: Barron’s Educational Series. Strang, Barbara M.H. (1968). Modern English Structure. London: Edward Arnold. Thompson, Geoff/ Susan Hunston (2000). “Evaluation: an introduction.” In: S. Hunston/ G. Thompson (2000). 1-27. van der Zee, Bibi (2010). “Here’s to happy endings.” New Statesman, 11 July 2010. 36. Wilby, Peter (2006). “The Media Column.” New Statesman, 23 January 2006. 10. Wilby, Peter (2011). “First Thoughts.” New Statesman, 23 May 2011. 9. Richard Alexander Department of Foreign-Language Business Communication WU Wien, Austria