LEND ME YOUR EAR: NAME CALLING: BUILDING A BRIDGE OVER ONOMASTICS

Although I receive frequent requests to look up the meaning of names, no one has ever questioned me about the study of names. To the studious, the word for this field of study is onomastics. It comes from the Greek onoma, meaning, not surprisingly, name.

Some weeks ago, I came by a book entitled "Names and Nicknames of Places and Things," by Lawrence Urdang. Urdang, whose nickname is Larry, is widely known as the creator, author, and publisher of the prestigious quarterly "Verbatim." His book, however, does not include nicknames of people, so Whitebreads and Japanazi are among the missing.

Whitebreads, according to an ill-informed critic, are "people who are very middle class." Most of the people I consider middle class shun white bread in favor of whole wheat, rye, or oatbran. Store-bought white bread is usually less expensive and we associate it with low-income families. I can't believe those who bake or can afford better would settle for that horrid cottony white stuff.

Urdang refers to Japan as The Land of the Rising Sun, a far cry from Japanaziland. In a New Yorker review of a book about the changing face of comic artists and their art, I learned that comic books began to clear the world of Japanazis around 1941. The title of the book, by Art Spiegelman, is "Maus," and the author tells us Nazi Jews were mice in the comics. Poles were called pigs, Frenchmen, frogs, Swedes, reindeer, and Americans, dogs "reflecting our mongrel racial origin." I have never read a comic book, but time was when almost everyone in the language field seemed to consider the comics funny. Much of what passes for funny today strikes me as sick. I see no humor in violence.

Nonetheless, I am always firmly attentive to new words relating to names, especially unusual nicknames. In an article subtitled "One-Ring Mud Show," also in a recent New Yorker, I learned of a small circus that typifies many others now springing up throughout the land, and the jargon used by its members would well be called slanguage. Anyone who sells anything under the tent is termed a butcher. Souvenirs are garbage, cotton candy is candy floss, lemonade or any other drink is flukum. What old-timers still refer to as a rest room is a donniker, a word understandably omitted from Urdang's nicknames of places.

In the same (April 20) issue of The New Yorker, Barbara Ehrenriech, a delightful writer we have met before, avoids naming names of candidates who have outlived their usefulness by calling them incumbents a word we hardly need define. Her comment: "If we hate incumbents, it's because they no longer know what they're incumbing for."

Jesse Helms, however, is one exception. Along with the religious right, Helms has been accused by radical leftists of trying to vanillaize American art. At least the accusers have given us another ize word to add to our list of funnies. Anthropomorphize, appearing in National Geographic in a feature about apes and related species, is another superb addition. The author writes: "We anthropomorphize them (apes) as personalities, yet they occupy their own world and live by their own rules."

Why did my thoughts revert to Congress when I read this? The difference between our congressmen and apes is that the apes limit their trickery to their own kind.

A critic accused several incumbents of mellospeaking. Until recently, our president was among the mellowspeakers, but another critic announced that what President Bush needed was to kickstart the economy. Bush lost no time in kicking back, and he sometimes shows evidence of starting.

Any time news becomes too depressing, we can look to Bil Keane's Dolly to lift our spirits. Lately, Dolly gave us some exceptional names of things with which to wind up this ever-so scholarly column. She explained to Jeffy that babies are connected to their mothers' bodies by a biblical cord, and advised Billy not to ditch school "because that would be playing hockey."

So much for this effort to build a bridge over onomastics.