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From `Waltzing Matilda' to `Went with the Wind,' nobody's perfect

"Boy, you really butchered those Waltzing Matilda lyrics," exclaims a cheerful member of the Gotcha! Gang, Australian division.

The version of A.B. (Banjo) Paterson's dialect lyric I recently quoted went "Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong/Under the shade of a codibah tree,/And he sang as he sat and he waited for his billy-boil/Who'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me?"

Other versions exist. It's a coolibah tree, a type of fragrant eucalyptus that grows beside a billabong, which is not a water hole but a section of still water adjacent to a river, sometimes called an "oxbow lake" in the US.

And "there is no such thing as a billy-boil," which I defined as a "teapot," tartly observes another correspondent from Down Under. "A billy is a tin can used to boil water to make tea, more a kettle than a teapot."

As for swagman, one meaning in American English -- a carrier of loot -- is different in Australian English, defined as "an itinerant worker who carries his belongings, or swag, in a bedroll or knapsack."

And who was the famous Matilda?

"A matilda is a swag," notes Henry Ansgar Kelly of University of California, Los Angeles, "and one `waltzes' it by carrying it in front, not over the shoulder." (I pass this interesting thought along -- without verification -- while I soak my head, as some Aussie readers have suggested, in a billabong.)

WENT WITH THE WIND

Patrick Fitzgerald, the prosecutor on the CIA leak investigation, on announcing the indictment of the vice-presidential aide Scooter Libby, came up with this convolution in a press conference: "I would have wished nothing better, that, when the subpoenas were issued in August 2004, witnesses testified then ... No one would have went to jail."

"Really, is this the way an educated attorney speaks?" asks Eve Suffin, of Holden, Massachusetts.

Fitzgerald's clear abuse of the subjunctive would invites a charge of "aggravated solecism." He confused the past tense of the irregular verb to go -- that is, went -- with the past participle, gone. The subjunctive mood with its iffy "would have" takes the past participle of the verb, not the simple past; therefore, "would have gone" is correct and "would have went" is mistaken.

GRODY TO THE MAX

In a column about ickiness, I wrote that yuck "has resisted replacement by gross and its derivative grody." Derivative wrong.

Kate Styrsky of Berkeley, California, recalls "a scene in the Beatles' Hard Day's Night in which a smug designer shows a preposterously overstyled shirt to George Harrison, who comments, Liverpudlianishly, `Grotty.' When asked his meaning, he explains, `Grotesque."'

BLATANT VS. FLAGRANT

In an exegesis of raunch, I came out bluenosedly against "blatant sexual arousal."

"What, you, too?" This from Richard Hirschhorn in Jerusalem. "Confusing blatant and flagrant?"

Blatant means "noisily offensive," and has in it a strong element of "brazen, contemptuously unconcealed."

Flagrant, rooted in "flaming," is more outrageous, possibly flouting morality and law, as in the Latin in flagrante delicto, "during the blaze of the crime."

I didn't think about it at the time, but on review from the booth, I'll stick with "blatant sexual arousal" -- much heavy breathing and raunchy noise but no crime.

SURE

While looking up murder board for a recent column about preparation for Senate testimony, I happily noted a citation in the Oxford English Dictionary from a column of mine in 1976: "W. Safire: `Program murder boards' have been established to insure [sic] that the concept is structured properly." That lexicographer's severe [sic] wiped the smirk off my face.

In British usage, assure applies to giving confidence to a person, ensure generally "to make certain" and insure specifically "to guard against financial risk."

In American English, ensure and insure have merged and are now interchangeable.

You know what? The Brits have a useful distinction; that [sic] should stick. Everybody back up on the ramparts.

ON LINCOLN

Shouldn't a rhetorical question end with a question mark?

In Abraham Lincoln's "Second Inaugural Address" ("with malice toward none"), the Civil War president posed this complex, provocative religious question: "If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?"

In the Collected Works, as well as in the manuscript in Lincoln's handwriting at the Library of Congress, the question mark appears.

But on the marble wall of the Lincoln Memorial, the sentence ends with a period.

George Van Cleve, a lawyer in Arlington, Virginia, has been petitioning the National Park Service to change it to the way Lincoln wrote it. He has been getting the bureaucratic runaround.

Other mistakes can't compare. Restore Lincoln's question mark.
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