A Little Chin Music, Professor

Well, Men, it's finally official. Science has confirmed what most of us have suspected all along—anyone with half a brain can carry on a conversation. And it doesn't matter which half of the old fig one uses, the left or the right.

Trumpeted as a major scientific discovery, the news has set the savants' tongues awagging from Omaha to Moscow. "Two hundred astonished psychologists heard today how a patient with half his brain removed by surgery can still walk, talk, sing and do arithmetic," a Reuters correspondent recently reported from the queen city of the Soviet Union. "Dr. Aaron Smith of the University of Nebraska College of Medicine showed the scientists a film made five months after the 47-year-old patient, an American, had the left hemisphere of his brain removed."

In case you missed it, the movie was premiered at the 18th International Congress of Psychologists, where Dr. Smith told his astonished colleagues that " 'the textbooks are wrong' on how the brain works."

According to the textbooks, the left hemisphere of the human brain controls most of the functions that make man superior to his brother animals. Without his left hemisphere, man would scarcely be able to match wits with a cuddly little hamster or hold his own in the company of a middlebrow moose. Or so science believed, until Dr. Smith's Omaha patient recovered from the removal of his left hemisphere and began to demonstrate his ability to play checkers, assemble blocks and sing all the verses of Home on the Range—a roster of accomplishments that would instantly stamp him as a man to be reckoned with in the social and intellectual circles in which I usually move.

Most astounding, in the scientists' view, was the patient's ability to verbalize, since the power of speech had long been thought to be a function of the left side of the brain. Contrary to the textbook rules, the right-hemisphered Omaha man said his first words almost immediately after surgery—"he would curse when he tried to say something and was unable to." But curse words, Dr. Smith explained, "express a feeling, not an idea. Communicating thoughts is much more difficult."

Just ten weeks after surgery, however, "a nurse inadvertently asked the patient, 'Did you have a BM today?' The patient replied, 'What does BM mean?' " And in so doing, he communicated a thought—using only the right half of his brain!

The nurse's response to this epoch-making inquiry has not, as yet, been made a matter of public record. But, as historic words, the dialog was about as high-line and memorable as most of the other quotable quotes that Americans have been known to utter on occasions of great scientific significance.

The most ceremonious of all such historic expressions is "What hath God wrought?"—the reverential little one-liner that Samuel F. B. Morse used to inaugurate the first telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore, in 1844. But Morse's message was delivered in code. It was not a spoken statement, and history is curiously silent as to the reply made by the telegrapher at the other end. Considering the time-honored American tendency to lay a large verbal egg on such occasions, it was probably something hopelessly anticlimactic, such as "What does wrought mean?" or "Please wire 300 clams at once. Will explain when arrive Washington. Fred."

It was while messing around with the problem of recording Morse code on cylinders that Thomas Edison hit upon the idea of recording the human voice. The result was the world's first "talking machine," an invention whose cultural and commercial importance can hardly be measured in terms of dollars, usefulness or delight. But what were the first historic words to emanate from the speaker horn when the Wizard of Menlo Park presented his miraculous new machine to the public in 1877? Cup one hand loosely over your mouth and repeat the following. Slowly, and in your very best Mickey Mouse voice:

"How are you? ... Do you like the phonograph? ... I am very well....Mary had a little lamb ..."

Though Edison's material was not the sort of boffo stuff you and I might have chosen as appropriate for the first golden oldie on the all-time platter parade, it was at least on a par with the world's first telephone call—a strictly local, room-to-room hookup between Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson, which took place on the wondrous night of March 10, 1876.

To capture the full beauty of this one, loosely muffle your mouth as before and, switching to your most dramatic and tension-fraught Don Ameche voice, recite after me:

"Mr. Watson, come here! I want you!"

Good! That was a take—the world's first telephone call!

To round out the scene, we dolly in for a tight shot of page 128 of Helen E. Waite's authorized biography of Bell, Make a Joyful Sound, and pick up Tom Watson's reaction upon hearing Alec Bell's voice at the other end of the line:

"Tom dropped the receiver and flung himself out of the room, yelling, 'I heard you, Mr. Bell! I heard you! You asked me to come! What—what is it?'

"Alec had spilled some of the sulphuric acid from the cup on his trousers, but the fact went completely out of his mind when Thomas Watson's words made their glorious impact. The telephone had spoken! It had spoken.

"They stared unbelievingly, first at the wonderful transmitter and then at each other. Then, half laughing, half crying, they tested the telephone over and over. There was no mistake, no disappointment. Their words came beautifully clear.

"Finally, when they could think of no more intelligent messages to call each other, they began to recite, 'One-two-three-four.' "

There have been times, I am sure, when most of us have participated in phone calls of an equally chaotic nature. Substitute a few double bourbons for Alec Bell's cup of sulphuric acid, and the scene is one that might take place in Home Town, U. S. A., any night in the week. But it isn't the kind of call we ordinary phone subscribers would want to have singled out for special mention in our authorized biographies. Lacking greatness, we just hang up and say the hell with it.

Bell was made of sterner stuff. Having goofed in the memorable-words department in 1876, he was given a second chance to say something remarkable for posterity, 39 years later, when he picked up the receiver to make the world's first transcontinental phone call, in 1915. This time, Bell was in New York and Thomas Watson was in San Francisco. In a diplomatic attempt to upgrade the phone company's image and to prevent the great inventor from falling flat on his verbal kisser a second time, phone-company officials wrote "several appropriate messages for Dr. Bell to use, but he waved them all aside. He had decided upon his own, he informed them, and with everyone crowding breathlessly around, the father of the telephone took his place and waited for the signal. When it came, he raised his voice: 'Hoy, hoy, Mr. Watson! Mr. Watson, come here, I want you!' "

Bell's biographer refrains from describing the groaning and whimpering that must have broken out among the public-relations-conscious phone execs. For all his inventive genius, their boy Alec had blown the whole bit again—this time with a hoy, hoy! For generations to come, historians, subscribers and school children would be left with only one impression, and a rather questionable one at that: Alexander Graham Bell wanted Thomas Watson. But badly.

In justice to Bell, however, we have no right to criticize his choice without first having read the suggestions submitted by the phone company. A glance at your local directory should be enough to indicate that the phone company's idea of a memorable phrase is apt to be something like "Let your fingers do the walking" or "Wait for the dial tone." When American Telephone and Telegraph prexy Walter S. Gifford got on the line to make the world's first transatlantic phone call, in 1927, he handily managed to elude both significance and eloquence with—would you believe "Hello, London"?

Continuing in what had by now become a grand old telephone-company tradition, engineers William C. Jakes and Walter K. Victor inaugurated the age of space communications, in August 1960, with a two-way conversation via the moon's surface that ranks among the most underwhelming historical exchanges in the humdrum pageant of man. "There were some unexciting words bounced off the cooperative moon last week," Robert C. Toth chronicled in the now sadly defunct New York Herald Tribune, "but they made history as the first two-way conversation by way of space.

" 'Hi, Walt, can you hear me?' asked the engineer on a rain-soaked hilltop at Holmdel, New Jersey. Almost six seconds later, from the 100-degree desert at Goldstone, California, came the answering 'Yes, yes, you're coming in fine.'

"And over this long-long-distance connection, much of the talk was about the weather," Mr. Toth reported. " 'It seems almost as hot here,' William C. Jakes sent back from the Bell Telephone Laboratories here. 'And the humidity is terrible.'

" 'The sky is clear and very blue here,' said Walter K. Victor at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories in California. 'It's a beautiful moon coming up at about ten degrees on the eastern horizon.' "

Fortunately, someone put on a recording of America the Beautiful, so Walt and Bill were never reduced to reciting nursery rhymes or mumbling consecutive numbers. But, according to Mr. Toth. newsmen were "a little disappointed at the pedestrian words of Bill and Walt which made the historic connection."

The newsmen's sense of letdown was, of course, understandable. But on the basis of past performance, the journalistic fraternity had no right to complain (continued on page 144)A Little Chin Music, Professor(continued from page 82) about the inadequacy of anybody's historic utterances. When the New York Herald sent ace correspondent H. M. Stanley into the wilds of Africa to search for the missing Dr. Livingstone in 1871, the intrepid newshawk had eight whole months in which to think up something smashing to say. Upon coming face to face with the lost missionary-explorer, however, Stanley confessedly drew a large verbal blank: " 'It might not be Dr. Livingstone after all,' doubt suggested. If this be he, what shall I say to him? My imagination had not taken this into consideration before. All around us was the immense crowd, hushed and expectant, and wondering how the scene would develop itself.

"Under the circumstances. I could do no more than exercise some restraint and reserve, so I walked up to him and, doffing my helmet, bowed and said in an inquiring tone:

" 'Dr. Livingstone, I presume?' "

Immortal phrase! The gentlemanly, old-school equivalent of "Hi, Doc. is that really you?" But the seldom-quoted response of Dr. Livingstone was even more engagingly banal:

"Smiling cordially, he lifted his cap and answered briefly, 'Yes.' "

Livingstone apologists—who, when found, usually prove to be well-mannered types with a faulty sense of direction and no end of good will—persist in attributing the explorer's monosyllabic reply to British reticence. But the saga of exploration refutes this kindness. Whether British, Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese or Norse, the world's great explorers have contributed even less to mankind's treasury of noteworthy utterances than have the world's great inventors.

A similar lack of memorable expression is characteristic of most of the easy, good-guy chatter that has passed between the heavens and earth during America's recent explorations of space. For all their extraordinary heroism and skill, our astronauts have been notably men of few words. To date, the apogee of astronautical expressiveness was reached with John Glenn's exultant "Oh, that view is tremendous!" delivered early in his historic three-orbit mission in 1962. On most occasions, however, the NASA style runs to a relaxed, brass-tacks kind of understatement, brightened by occasional spurts of highly mundane joshing. "Small Talk out of the Blue" was the way the New York Daily News capsulized its tabloid account of the verbal exchange that marked the historic eyeball-to-eyeball rendezvous of Geminis 6 and 7. in 1965:

Said Gemini 6 to Gemini 7:

"You've sure got big beards."

Said Gemini 7 to Gemini 6: "For once we're in style."

The wisecracking came after command pilot Wally Schirra skillfully maneuvered Gemini 6 into the nose-to-nose position.

Then, from Schirra: "There seems to be a lot of traffic up here."

From Gemini 7: "Gall a policeman."

Houston control asked if the pilots could see each other through their windows.

"Roger," astronaut Frank Borman shot back.

"We're flying nose to nose," Gemini 6 chimed in.

And of the spectacular rendezvous, Schirra said it for everybody: "That sure was a big deal."

And it was—in everything except meaningful and memorable verbal expression. Conversationally, Geminis 6 and 7 got no farther off the ground than did the Gemini 4 mission of the previous June. It was during that one, you may recall, that the U.S. chalked up a famous first by inaugurating the world's first hubby-wife space chat:

Mrs. McDivitt: Jim! Jim!

McDivitt: Huh?'

Mrs. McDivitt: Do you hear me?

McDivitt: Roger, I can hear you loud and clear.

Mrs. McDivitt: Well, you're doing great.

McDivitt: Yeah, we seem to be covering a lot of territory up here. How are you?

Mrs. McDivitt: I'm fine. Are you?

McDivitt: Pretty good. I'm over California right now.

Mrs. McDivitt: Get yourself over Texas.

McDivitt: We'll be over Texas in about three minutes.

Mrs. McDivitt: Hurry it up.

McDivitt: How are the kids making out?

Mrs. McDivitt: Fine. They think you're at the Cape.

McDivitt: Still think we're at Cocoa Beach, huh?

Mrs. McDivitt: That's what they think.

McDivitt: Is everything going OK?

Mrs. McDivitt: Yes, beautifully, beautifully.

McDivitt: Behaving yourself?

Mrs. McDivitt: I'm always good. Are you being good?

McDivitt: I don't have much space. About all I can do is look out the window.

"New U. S. First: Back-Seat Orbit," the News needled in its page-one Sunday headline. And, for reasons that needed no explanation from NASA, the world's first hubby-wife space chat was also the world's last.

For sheer understatement, no historic exchange can match the ground-zero comments attributed to flight director Chris Kraft and command pilot Gordon Cooper when Gemini 5 broke all existing endurance records, 119 hours and six minutes after lift-off. "Sitting at his control panel, Kraft said just one word: 'Zap!'—a Buck Rogers exclamation to describe the blast of space guns. Then he got on the line to Cooper: 'How does it feel for the U. S. to be a world record holder, Gordo?' Replied the laconic spaceman: At last, huh?' "

Significant as the moment was, it left little in the way of words for posterity to latch onto, nothing to etch in brass or immortalize in marble. Inscribed on a public wall plaque, "Zap!" and "At last, huh?" would only look like clean graffiti.

More closely akin to the true graffito style are the even-less-quotable reports on the astronauts' "blue-bag activity"—the space-medical equivalents of "Did you have a BM today?" Following the Gemini 5 flight, for example, a worldwide announcement was made of the fact that "Conrad had only one bowel movement and Cooper none" during the first 100 hours in orbit.

Soviet security regulations are such that the Russian cosmonauts' performance in this area is a complete mystery. But indications are that Soviet blue-bag activity was all very much A-OK by the time Major Gehrman S. Titov made his 17-orbit flight aboard the Vostok II. "I am Eagle! I am Eagle! I can hear you very well! I feel excellent! My feeling is excellent!" the ebullient major exclaimed. And though the quote sounds almost certifiably manic by American standards, it was—and still remains—the most memorable Soviet space utterance on record.

When the lady "Seagull," Valentina V. Tereshkova, and the male "Hawk," Lieutenant Colonel Valery F. Bykovsky, were lofted into the blue for a two-capsule attempt at the world's first boy-girl space rendezvous, Russian cosmotalk was confined mainly to party-conscious formalities. According to the Soviet news agency Tass, the orbiting cosmocouple "established radio communications and then sent a joint message to Premier Khrushchev. They reported. 'We are at a close distance from each other. All systems in the ships are working excellently. Feeling well.' "

Which was nice to hear, but more appropriate to a picture postcard than to a bronze tablet. It was only when the Premier himself got on the horn to reply, that the Soviets began to reveal how far they had progressed toward verbal supremacy in space. "I can hear you very well," he assured the orbiting birdlady. "You are called Seagull. With your permission, Valentina, I will call you simply Valya. I am very glad and feel a fatherly pride that it is our girl, a girl from the land of the Soviets, who is the first in space, for the first time in the world, equipped with the most perfect technique. It is a triumph of Leninist ideas. It is a triumph of the struggle of our people and we are proud of you. We are proud that you glorify so well our people, our homeland, our party, our ideas. I am listening to you."

"Dear Nikita Sergeyevich!" the sweetheart of the Soviet space program responded. "We are moved and deeply touched by your attention. Many, many thanks for your kind words, for your fatherly concern. I wholeheartedly thank the Soviet people for their good wishes. I assure you, dear Nikita Sergeyevich, that I will spare nothing to fulfill the assignment of the homeland."

For all its propagandistic schmaltz, the Kremlin-to-capsule schmooze between the first woman in space and the voluble Nikita Sergeyevich obviously had a lot more class than the first American hubby-wife space chat. To some degree, of course, the polite yet comradely tone was attributable to the fact that Nikita and Valya were not husband and wife. To the best of my knowledge, in fact, they weren't even going together. But, wordwise, the Russians had stolen the lead, and their commitment to a policy of linguistic overkill soon became evident in other areas of communications. When the historic Washington-Moscow "hot line" was installed in September of 1963, to permit a hurried exchange of famous last bye-byes in the event of a thermonuclear boo-boo, the Associated Press reported that the first Soviet test message "described in lyrical language the beauties of a Moscow sunset," while American communications men "used nothing more original than: 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.' "

Never was the contrast between the two national styles more lamentably apparent to language-conscious Americans. "Are we losing the dialog race?" I wondered. At a time when history demanded nothing less than our verbal best, was America to be represented by hackneyed phrases gleaned from the wastebaskets of its secretarial-school students and typewriter repairmen?

If so, we had only two major statements left: "This is a specimen of the work done on this machine" and "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party"—the latter being virtually useless, in that it was susceptible to a Marxist-Leninist interpretation that could convert it into a militant rallying cry for solidification of the Soviet bloc!

In pondering this national dilemma over a period of more than 15 minutes, I gradually came to realize that—all things considered—the quick-brown-fox line had been a rather fortunate choice. In order to avoid the misunderstandings that might arise from telephonic distortions of speech, the U. S. and the U. S. S. R. had agreed that hot-line messages should be communicated by teletype. But, regardless of this sensible precaution, verbal originality at the teletypist level might easily have been the death of us all. Taking his cue from the historic past, our man at the keyboard might have triggered an instant holocaust by batting out something like: "Hoy, hoy! Hello, Moscow. How do you like the hot line? Dr. Strangelove, I presume? ... Five-four-three-two-one ... Zap!"

The quick-brown-fox message was nonbelligerent, nonpolitical and brief. Though old stuff to us, it was new to the Russians, who may even have admired it and wished that they had said something snappy and amusing like that.

For the most part, however, the dialog between East and West is most seriously hampered by the fact that the Russians insist upon speaking Russian, while Americans are accustomed to being understood when they make a reasonably good stab at expressing their thoughts in American English. The average American's knowledge of Russian consists of a very short word list—nyet, da, sputnik, bolshevik, borscht, vodka and troika—and many are often confused as to which is a three-horse sleigh and which is an order of beet soup. Though the Soviets reportedly work like mad at language studies in order to train translators, diplomats and intelligence personnel, the ordinary Russian's English vocabulary is said to be limited to such expressions as, "OK," "biznizman," "Brodvay" and—as a generic name for all cigarettes—"Looky Strooky."

In many instances, moreover, Russo-American language confusions are compounded by our mutual reliance upon translators—as was evidenced by an Associated Press report of aircraft designer Sergei Yeger's visit to an exhibit of house trailers at the San Diego County Fair. " 'Do you have house trailers in Russia?' a newsman asked.

"Mr. Yeger replied in a word: 'Nyet.'

"The newsman had a pretty good idea what the word meant, but he asked Mr. Yeger's interpreter for an explanation. The interpreter replied: 'He says that' they do not like houses on wheels in Russia. They prefer a more permanent, stable type of housing.' "

The AP report implies that the translator may have been taking a few propagandistic liberties. But if a simple nyet could be interpreted to mean all that, da might be translated as anything from "May the bluebird of happiness unilaterally establish a permanent type of housing in your left nostril" to "Looky Strooky Green is back, and Doris Day has got him!"

To reduce the reliance upon human interpreters and speed translation of Russian news articles and scientific papers, some U. S. Government agencies have resorted to the use of computer-type scanning devices that can provide "a rough but meaningful translation." But computer men are still working on the problem of producing a machine that can do the same for speech. To date, our computers have been hard-pressed to cope with spoken English, and the level of conversation between man and machine has been such that only a latter-day Bell could be expected to endure it. In one historic chat, the computer—a gabby IBM 650—was instructed to "Remember this month is August, today we had rain and severe heat. Yesterday it was sunny and hot. Tomorrow it will be cold and cloudy. That is all." The conversation then ran as follows:

Man: Did you enjoy the rain we had this afternoon?

Machine: Not really, what I like is sunny weather.

Man: In hot weather one needs at least one bath every day.

Machine: Yes, I was just out and it was sweltering.

Man: When Christmas comes, we will have some colder weather.

Machine: Cold? Yes, it's usually pretty frosty during December.

Man: Today is clear weather. Will it last?

Machine: Let me have no lying. It becomes none but tradesmen. How can overcast weather and the clear day you mention coexist?

As can be seen from this historic exchange, which took place at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in December 1959, Mr. Machine was not only a crashing bore but was capable of getting quite snotty. Science had, in fact, programed it that way—requiring the machine "to call its interrogator to task" whenever he tried to mislead or deceive it.

What science had in mind in 1959 is anybody's guess. But to me, the unexplained and wholly gratuitous slur at the honesty of bourgeois "tradesmen," and the odd use of "coexist" in speaking of the weather, suggested that the computer crowd may have been grooming the device to serve as a kind of mechanical Khrushchev—possibly with a view to pairing it off with a multicircuited mock-up of Richard M. Nixon, for the world's first fully automated East-West kitchen debate.

What with the vagaries of American and Soviet politics, and the subsequent decline in prominence that both statesmen endured, any such plan would have had to be scuttled, of course. But could any mere computer ever have captured the sincerity and deep warmth of Mr. Nixon's linguistic style? I think not. The world may little note nor long remember his moving farewell speech to the American press, but can any American—be he Republican, Democrat or young-Turk vegetarian—ever forget Mr. Nixon's heart-rending allusion to his children's dog, Checkers, during his (Mr. Nixon's) campaign as candidate for Vice-President in 1952? A lump caught in the nation's throat, and every cocker spaniel in America walked a little taller the next day.

In the final sense, you cannot program greatness into a machine. But the repetition of certain key ideas voiced by New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller during his hard-fought failure to win the Republican Presidential nomination in 1964 inspired reporters to devise a shorthand that did, in fact, resemble the abbreviations used in computer programing. "Bomfog," The New York Times reported, was the one-word journalistic shorthand for the governor's oft-repeated reference to "the brotherhood of man under the fatherhood of God." "Moat" stood for "mainstream of American thought." "Fisteg" for "fiscal integrity" and "Goveclop" for "government closest to the people."

In reviewing the list, I could not find any phrase or idea that a mechanical brain couldn't have handled as easily as a discussion of the weather—and if it could, additionally, promote world Bomfog by providing a "rough but meaningful" translation into other languages, so much the better. "But what is actually being done in this vital area?" I occasionally wondered in the period between 1959 and today. Possibly the Computerspeak program had been taken over by Defense and was now subject to Secregs (security regulations), I speculated. And, for a while there, I was sure of it.

As anyone the least bit familiar with the Goveclop's budgetary strategies well knows, appropriations for hush-hush defense projects are often subsumed under purposely misleading categories—like putting Z-bomb funds under urban renewal. So when the United Press International's Washington bureau released the following lightly censored "portion of a transcript of a hearing of a House Appropriations subcommittee on military aid to Morocco," I was able to draw my own conclusions:

Representative Otto Passman: Beyond the ----, and the ---, what is the next item? Are there any other ---?

Brigadier General Stephen O. Fuqua, Jr.: There are no --- involved in this transaction.

Mr. Passman: What else do you have in the package?

General Fuqua: There are some ---.

Mr. Passman: How many ---?

General Fuqua: ---.

And there it was, plain as the nose on a Nike missile. It was no longer a question of whether or not General Fuqua had any Computerspeak devices in his package. It was merely a matter of how many and how soon. In the interest of promoting universal Bomfog, science and government had teamed up to crack the language barrier!

World Peafrip (peace and friendship) was just around the corner, to be had at the turn of an automated, multilingual phrase! Optimism spiced my own conversation like seeds in a loaf of crusty rye. The possible failure of Computerspeak was a thing unthinkable—until some four years later, when the University of California at Los Angeles issued a report on a "polite conversation" between a professor and a quick brown computer called Agile—a report so effulgent with dialogic defeat as to qualify as a droll, bottom-of-the-page column stuffer in The New Yorker:

Professor: Are you a man?

Agile: No power man.

(A Bad button was then pushed to cause some decrementing of matrices.)

Professor: Are you a man?

Agile: No power man.

(The Bad button was pushed again.)

Professor: Are you a man?

Agile: No power man be.

(Again the Bad button was pushed.)

Professor: What are you?

Agile: I be machine.

(This time the Good button was pushed.)

Professor: Are you a man?

Agile: I no be.

(Now the Good button again.)

Professor: Are you a machine?

Agile: Be I bad machine?

(A Neutral button—the only choice other than good and bad—was pushed.)

Professor: I think you are all right.

Agile: ---.

That was it. End of polite conversation.

Decrementing my own matrices, I pushed a mental "Oh, pshaw" button—the only choice other than "#%&?!" and "---."

Good old science had done it again. With the world in the throes of a massive communications crisis, the Computerspeak contribution was "No power man."

The phrase had a curiously hippie sound, I thought, as did most of Agile's replies. After seven solid years of discussing the weather and kindred inconsequentials with their human masters, were the new-generation computers rebelling—going psychedelic? Would their Good and Bad buttons have to be altered to read Go Naked and Legalize Pot? Were they, indeed, turning on, tuning in ... dropping out?

In what seemed like a desperate establishment move to forestall any such trend, a research psychologist at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, came out with "a new form of English that could improve man's ability to communicate with computers," The New York Times reported less than two months later. "The language is called FASE for Fundamentally Analyzable Simplified English."

"Sentences written in FASE can be readily broken down by a computer into subject, predicate, object and modifiers," the report explained. "While the machine still does not know what the words mean, it 'comprehends' their function as indicated by the order in which they appear in the sentence.

"Ambiguous words and phrasing, therefore, must be avoided. Figures of speech and slang are acceptable if the computer can distinguish their function in a sentence. An expression like 'cool it, man' would baffle the machine."

The message was loud and clear. Agile's hippie-dippie dropout days were numbered. But if the new breed of organization computers are incapable of digging isolated figures of speech and slang, their usefulness as promoters of universal Bomfog can be scored off as next to nil. World Peafrip will never come about through the parsing of sentences. Instant understanding is essential, and there is no quicker route to comprehension than through the use of figures of speech and slang. "Cool it," I suddenly realized, is probably the single most pacifistic utterance ever coined by the mind of man, while "OK" is the most widely used and universally understood expression in the modern world.

"The two American English words that have had the greatest fortune abroad in recent times are 'OK' and 'nylon,' " Professor Mario Pei of Columbia University declared in his informative and entertaining Story of English. "The former is heard practically all over the world, and the latter [nylon] became so popular during and after the War that in languages like Greek and Turkish it has become an adjective meaning 'superfine.' "

While sports, commerce and jazz have all contributed to the use of such Americanisms, the biggest single influence has been the American GI. Before World War Two, Italy had "already rendered cold cream and football by colcrem and futbol," Pei pointed out in 1952. But with the GI occupation of Italy, tegedizi for "take it easy" and tumorro for "tomorrow" became current—the latter being "used as an adjective to mean 'lazy,' 'slow.' ... Latest among Italian appropriations," Pei added, were "buki buki (boogiewoogie), pulova (pullover) and gomma americana (bubble gum, as distinguished from ordinary gum, which is ciuinga)."

The American occupation of post-War Germany brought about a similar assimilation of useful Americanisms, Pei found. German conversation "swarmed with such phrases as 'Macht nix to me!' ('It makes no difference to me!'), 'That's for bistimmt!' ('That's for sure!'), 'Get raus!' ('Get out!') and 'Let's go essen!' ('Let's go eat!'). German musical pieces," he concluded, "are replete with expressions like boogiewoogie and hillbilly, and German sporting pages with team and comeback."

More recently, of course, "rock 'n' roll" has replaced "boogiewoogie," and the affluent Germans have been glomming onto such useful Yankee commercialisms as "discount house," "ready to wear," "shopping center" and "cash und carry." According to latest reports, a favorite phrase among the lively ones in German advertising is now "Ziehn wir's um Flaggenmast hoch und sehn wir wer gruesst" ("Let's run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes"). But, happily, the new Deutsche idiom bespeaks a desire to emulate the folkways and phraseology of Madison Avenue, rather than an effort to rally the Germans around the Flaggenmast for new military adventures.

During the past decade or so, it has become culturally chic to deplore the spread of the Mad Ave influence—otherwise known as Coca-Colonialism. But no critic, at home or abroad, can truthfully say that world acceptance of American exports and expressions has been imposed at the point of a gun. Run the name "Coca-Cora" up a flagpole in Japan, for example, and thousands will salute of their own free will. Apart from the perpetually ruffled political wings of the Japanese left and right, the only protest will come from those whose first allegiance is to Coca-Cora's competitor, "Pepusi-Cora."

Like his American counterpart, a typical member of the Japanese "Pepusi" generation now goes to work in the "rushawa" (rush hour) and takes an "ere-be-ta" (elevator) up to his office. He wears a clean "shatsu" (shirt) with a buttondown "kara" and natty "neckutai." At home, he watches "terebi" (TV) or "terebision," and when the umpire calls "Pray borru!" and the home team scores a "hoomurun," lie's apt to be munching a "hotto dogga." Part Amer-English and part Japanese, the new lingo has been dubbed "Japlish," and old Tokyo hands have all they can do to keep up with its growth. "Wondafaru Words Are Slipping into the Japanese," Emerson Chapin recently cabled The New York Times. "How far this linguistic assimilation may go, no one can say. But the sight of the Japanese chiineijya (teenager) savoring his baniira aisu kurimu (vanilla ice cream) as he shakes his head in rhythm to the 'Riibapuru saundo' (Liverpool sound) emanating from the jyuku-baaksu (jukebox) makes clear that this once isolated nation is becoming attuned to the modern West."

The bafflement that such fundamentally analyzable Japlish expressions would cause a computer fed on Bell Telephone's FASE is too enormous to contemplate. Blown fuses and burned-out circuits would result from "baniira aisu kurimu" alone. But the mind of man is still beautifully resilient. In Vietnam, where American English is a relative newcomer among foreign tongues, both the Vietnamese and the American GIs refer to anything wondafaru as being "number one"—an expression borrowed from early Japlish. Anything inferior is called "number ten." Among themselves, the Vietnamese refer to Americans as "big feet," just as they still refer to the old French colonialists as "long noses." Among American GIs, all Orientals are known as "slopes" or "slants"—presumably in allusion to the shape of their eyes. And both the "big feet" and the "slants" are given to using the old "long nose" term beaucoup as a superlative for practically anything—a beaucoup female slope, a beaucoup muggy day or a situation that is "pretty goddamned beaucoup lousy."

The only other old colonial Frenchism that the GIs have adopted from the Vietnamese is fini—pronounced "fee-nee" and used to signify "finished, through, all washed up, over and done with." Thus defined, the word might well be used to describe the present status of French as a major world language. Once the lingua internaciona of diplomacy, philosophy, science, art, commerce and polite society, French has experienced a decline from world favor that has been as spectacular as the rise of English. In terms of use, the language of Racine, Rabelais, Diderot and De Gaulle is now number eleven—one below number ten, which is Portuguese, and two below Bengali.

It is this loss of linguistic prestige that underlies recent French protests against the wholesale use of Americanisms by Frenchmen in France. So grave a threat is creeping Americanism to the "purity of the French language," that Premier Georges Pompidou himself has assumed leadership of a "High Commission" for the defense of the French tongue against such common Franco-Americanisms as "le weekend," "le drugstore," "la striptease," "le knock-outé," and le like. A happy hybrid of français and anglais, the new language of convenience is known as "Franglais" and serves to cover a whole slew of tilings for which French can provide no appropriate word—pour example, "la starlette," "un bikini," "les shorts," "la callgirl," "le self-service," "un best seller," "le sandwich," and even (sacred blue!) "la sex-appeal."

Earlier on, when the Franglais flap was aborning, American language experts sought to allay French fears by pointing out that the English language had been borrowing freely from the French since the Norman Conquest. "It is a natural thing to augment our stock of words with whatever is useful," explained Professor Alan Walker Read of Columbia University. "For example—cordon sanitaire, enfant terrible, cause célèbre—there's nothing in English with the same flavor; and derrière, there's a useful euphemism."

Sane words and sound reasoning. French lends class to much that might otherwise be considered crass. Without derrière, Americans would indeed be flat on their plain old backsides, rumps, bottoms, tails, behinds, asses, arses, buttocks, posteriors, prats, slats, fundaments and fannies. Lacking couture and cuisine, they would have only clothes and chow. If, as one American dictionary editor maintains, few new words are being imported from France, it is because "we have borrowed all we need. Now they borrow from us the vocabularies originating in the fields of engineering, electronics and automation," he observes. "That's because the French Academy is slow to translate or replace them."

Slow is hardly the mot. There is no word in French or English to describe the stately pace at which the French Academy proceeds about its endless task of producing "new" dictionaries. The present edition was begun in 1935. When last heard from, in February 1967, the Academy had advanced as far as the letter C. Barring unforeseen delays, the "Immortal" members should get around to debating the merits of "la sex-appeal," "les shorts" and "la striptease" sometime in the 21st Century. Meanwhile, a chic smattering of Americanisms is considered essential to all who would shine in French society. "Brainstorming," "le bull (market)" and "nervous breakdown" are among the 40-odd Franglais expressions that the weekly Le Nouveau Candide has recommended to those of the French upper crust who desire to remain à la mode without having to resort to a topping of baniira aisu kurimu. In addition, all should know how to pronounce and when to let drop such prestigious noms de American commerce as "Saks Fifth Avenue," "Alka-Seltzer," "Women's Wear Daily" and "Fruit of the Loom."

What the inclusion of the last-named forebodes concerning the future of French couture, I do not know. But it is rather apparent, I think, that the family of nations cares less for our Bomfog than it does for our Coca-Colloquialisms. While pretending to deplore our material culture, it turns a deaf ear to our philosophy and poetry—preferring instead to speak of our soft drinks, skivvies, sports, supermarkets and brand-name pharmaceuticals.

It is also curious to note that, despite all criticism and protests, the voluntary adoption of such Americanisms is one of the few truly hopeful and harmonious phenomena in the world of modern language. "Nineteen Injured and 41 Arrested in Brussels Riots over Language," one reads. "Flemish-speaking Belgians clash with their French-speaking countrymen during parade of Flemings in Brussels." "Language Issue Annoys Swedes." "One Slain and 91 Hurt in Ceylon in Revival of Linguistic Conflict." "Norway is Split by War of Words. Vehement Factions Battle over Possible Merger of Two Official Languages." "Madras Students Riot on Language. Oppose Law to Make Hindi India's Official Tongue." "Indian Is a Suicide by Fire in Language Protest." "Second Man is Suicide by Fire in Madras. Student Also Slain as Police Fire on Anti-Hindi Rally." "Youth Killed as Language Riots in India Go On."

As background to the anti-Hindi riots of 1965, the National Geographic Society noted that the 469,000,000 people of India speak 179 languages and 544 dialects. Of these, about 40 percent of the population speak pure or dialectal Hindi, the language of the ruling Congress Party—though official business between language groups has traditionally been conducted in English, in accordance with the pattern established under Britain's colonial rule. Rioting erupted when the Congress Party declared Hindi to be the official national language, and offered special preferment to civil servants who either spoke or learned it.

The non-Hindi-speaking majority rebelled at thus having Hindi rammed down their throats and demonstrated in favor of preserving the regional integrity of all Indian languages by retaining English as the universally accepted tongue. During the resulting riots, 50 deaths and five self-immolations were tabulated. Peace was restored only after Prime Minister Shastri took to the airwaves to broadcast assurances that English "would continue as the alternative official language for as long as the non-Hindi-speaking states wanted it to."

To Americans, the fervor of the Indian protesters may seem to have been far in excess of their grievance. But the anti-Hindi willingness to die for the continued use of English becomes rather understandable when one learns that the citizens of one Indian town construed a Hindi announcement of a baby contest to mean, "There will be a wrestling match of three-year-old children," and that the closest Hindi can come to the English word "telephone" is "ear tickler." The word "radio" is rendered even more inexactly as "celestial voice," while the ultimate in linguistic confusion is reached with the Hindi for "necktie"—which is "loincloth for the neck."

As the Indian donnybrook once again indicated, the growing popularity of English stems not from its ability to convey the noble Bomfogisms of Western thought but from the usefulness of its lesser coinages—the innumerable small precisions that enable a man to distinguish between his necktie and his nether garments, and to know for an absolute certainty whether he is wanted on the telephone or desired by some pranksome seductress who would tickle his ears with a little pink feather.

Time and again, our linguistic less has proved to be both more and best, I belatedly came to realize. Small words on great occasions humanize the course of events. By eschewing Bomfog and favoring the commonplace, our astronauts and inventors have—albeit unwittingly—done much to point the conversational way to Peafrip among all the peoples of the earth. "Hi, Mahatma, can you hear me?" "Mr. Moto, come here, please, I want you!" "Hello, Paris. Have you had an Alka-Seltzer today?" These are the locutions of everyday life, and it has been through just this kind of small talk that our dialog with the world has been most successful.

"Tegedizi," "OK," "cool it," "pray borru!"—no other language has contributed so many verbal deterrents to violence. But despite its increasing use, Amer-English still ranks in second place. In numbers of speakers, it is yet surpassed by Chinese-Mandarin, whose 460,000,000 adherents talk mostly among themselves within the confines of mainland China. But even here there is reason to hope. Notwithstanding all present barriers to communication, a Chinese ear tickler is still called a te lu fêng, and five-card stud in Peking is still a game of p'u k'e.

A third Chinese borrowing is one that seems to have fallen sadly into disuse of late. It is yu meh, for "humor"—a word that was "number one" when Chinese trade with the West was conducted in a language called "pidgin." A linguistic Moo Goo Gai Pen concocted of English words and Chinese syntax, pidgin took its name from the Cantonese pronunciation of the English word "business," and gave rise to a no-tickee-no-shirtee patois that spread to the South Seas, where natives of a thousand different tongues now communicate in what Professor Pei has called "pidgin par excellence....Here we find expressions like put clothes belonga table (set the table); what for you kinkenau knife belong me? (why did you swipe my knife?)."

New Guinea, which has an estimated total of 700 unwritten languages, now boasts its own pidgin newspaper, the Nu Gini Toklok—or "New Guinea Talk-Talk"—with a "Piksa Lesen Belong Sande Skul" ("Picture Lesson Belonging to Sunday School") and a headline style that American newspapers might do well to cultivate as an antidote to declining circulations. "Trenin Kos Long Yut Wok Asisten Long Pot Mosbi," one intriguing banner talk-talks in announcing a "Training Course for Youth Work Assistants at Port Moresby." "Dispela Tok Indonesia I-Bin Kalabusim Luluai Ino Tok Tru," another declares. "This Fellow Who Talks that Indonesia Has Calaboosed a Headman, He No Talk True."

In addition to all the pidgin that's fit to print, New Guineans also enjoy the use of such beautifully apt expressions as kiranki cuss-cuss for "irritable person" and long-long-along-drink for—you guessed it—"drunk." Equally vivid and apt are the homey pidginisms of Samoa and Tahiti, where belly-belong-me-walk-about-too-much is the synonym for "upset stomach" and water-belong-stink is alla same "perfume." This is not to be confused with kill-'im-stink-fella, which is the pidgin for "disinfectant" in the Australian bush, where a mosquito is a sing-'im-along-dark-fella, and a traveling salesman is spotted a mile away as being a big-fella-talk-talk-watch-'im-that-one!

Clearly, this is English with a difference—creative, colorful and perceptive. It grabs the ear, the eye and the imagination. It communicates, and demonstrates that our language is indeed an instrument that any number can play. Plunk it, strum it or tootle it as you will, English is alla same one-fine-fella-for-make-talk-talk.

Most important of all, pidgin English has the power to make us see our world anew—as through the eyes of the Solomon Islander who summed up his impressions of New York in this wise: "Me look urn big fella place. He high up too much. He alla same one fella mountain."

As a lifelong resident of that same city, I can vouch for the fact that no one has ever said it better. Any fella belong Nu Yok, or ride um pok-'im-along-choo-choo to wok from suburbs, knows dispela tok tru. He be man. He no machine be.

But hold on a second. Tegedizi. The voice is familiar. Is it possible that our old friend Agile, the computer, hadn't been such a conversational dud, after all? Could it have been that in its "polite conversation" with the professor, Agile had been practicing to talk pidgin? If so, then there is still a chance that Computerspeak may yet emerge as the number-one weapon in the war of words. The ultimate peacemaker, programed to translate all the world's dullness, Bomfog and blather into fundamentally understandable pidgin!

Let's see now....How many of those big-fella-talk-talk machines did the general say he had in his package?

Ah, yes: "---."

It hardly seems enough.