Thursday, December 7, 2023

The Rebus Principle

I took two years of Latin in high school and our teacher Mrs. Albritton was able to instill in me a respect and admiration with how precise the language is.  A noun in Latin, for example, can have a number of meanings just by changing its suffix.  The noun manus for "hand" can mean "with or by hands" by changing it manibus.  The -bus suffix is quite common and also appears when res for "thing" becomes rebus meaning "with or by things".

We see an illustration of this in what's called a rebus puzzle. For example, the solution to the drawings of an eye plus a can plus a sea plus a female sheep would be "I can see you".  There was even a TV quiz show (Concentration) where contestants had to solve rebus puzzles to win prizes. 

When I first encountered "rebus" used to refer to a crossword puzzle that had multiple letters in a single grid square, I thought that was wrong.  If you're going to use a word from Latin for that, it should be litteris (by way of or with letters) or verbis (by way of or with words).  But I thought "No big deal" so I wasn't motivate to speak up about the error.

That changed in 2020 when I watched the PBS Nova show "A to Z: the First Alphabet" in which "The Rebus Principle" was used to describe how writing went from pictographs and hieroglyphics to modern alphabets.  Here's the relevant excerpt from the show's script:  

[begin quote]  NARRATOR: Such pictograms would be the basic building blocks of the first writing systems. And thousands of tablets like this one suggest that the reason for moving beyond a purely oral culture was something utterly prosaic: the need to keep ledgers. As far as we can tell from the evidence, for several centuries, the use of pictograms was limited to primitive accountancy. But then, sometime around 3000 B.C. there was the crucial conceptual leap.

IRVING FINKEL: The giant leap came when somebody conceived of this matter: that you could draw a picture which represented something that someone could recognize, but at the same time that sign could be used just for the sound of the thing it looked like. So, on this tablet here, there is an ear of barley. Now the word for barley in Sumerian is, is pronounced like “sheh.” So your Sumerian sees this and says “ah, “sheh,” “barley.” But at the same time, this scribe or a fellow scribe, in writing a totally different kind of document, could use this sign not to mean barley, but just to write the sound of “sheh.” And this giant leap is something rather simple, and it’s something which could have occurred to a child, but nevertheless it is of great lasting significance.

NARRATOR: Using a picture to represent a sound in this way is called the “rebus principle,” and it allows pictures to spell out words.

IRVING FINKEL: To give a really clear example. There’s a word “shega” in Sumerian, which means “beautiful” or “pretty” or “nice” or something like that. And so a scribe would write it syllabically, “she” “ga.” So, he would use this sign, the barley sign, for the “she” bit, and then he’d have to write “ga” for the second bit. As it happens, “ga” means milk. So, he would draw the picture which represented milk. And barley and milk together would spell “shega,” which had nothing to do with either barley or milk. So, this is a kind of rebus writing. Rebus is a smart word for it. It is really a pun in some sense. It is a kind of pun that you get another meaning out of the sign. [end quote]

When I came to this part of the program I had an "aha!" experience, sort of an epiphany lite.  And my attitude about the misuse of "rebus" in crosswords changed.  It was no longer a minor matter not really worth the effort to try to correct but now a much more serious one because "rebus" is presently used by learned scholars---historians, linguists, philologists, Egyptologists and the like---in a very different way, much closer to its Latin definition, "by way of things", than to how it is used in crosswords, "with multiple letters in a single puzzle grid square".  

So my question is can we continue to bring discredit to the crossword community by using a Latin word in a very different way than it is being used by contemporary scholars?  And these are people who crossword world should hold in high esteem and respect and not use one of their core terms in a blatantly incorrect way.

By the time we get to letters we have gone past the Rebus Principle.  Multiple letters in a single grid square do not a rebus make.  Non rebus sed litteris, not with things but with letters.  If the letters form an actual word then it would be Non rebus sed verbis, not with things but with words.  


3 comments:

  1. I agree with some of what you're arguing here, but I question your narrow interpretation of res and the definition you've chosen for the crosswordese meaning of rebus.

    Res for "thing" is a somewhat vague definition (I'm speaking about the actual definition – I have no issue with "thing"), but you make it specific through examples to mean "a physical object." However, res can also refer to "an idea" or "an affair" in other phrases and words. I struggle to immediately dismiss the idea that those things or subjects could not be letters and therefore throw out a definition of rebus for crosswords meaning "with multiple letters." You might say then that we should then use another word which instead refers to there being multiple letters or simply say "multiple letters puzzle," but the vagueness of "rebus" is important.

    A rebus square does not have to contain multiple letters. Sometimes it contains words (which would not be adequately represented if we were to call these puzzles litteris puzzzles, for example). Sometimes it contains colours. Sometimes, a rebus square can be a rebus puzzle in the traditional sense. These possibilities are similar in that they each communicate a thing (be it multiple letters, an idea or an object) in a different way than through single letters in boxes, giving reason for them to be grouped together in the category of "rebus" and fitting the definition "with or by things."

    While it may be true that linguists use "Rebus Principle" in a particular way, this phrase has little bearing on how the word "rebus" is used in other fields. Why should linguistics scholarship define the entire scope of "rebus"? While Latin words are very precise, if your issue is with direct linguistic meaning then why is "with or by things" closer in meaning to "representing sounds with pictures of things" than "containing multiple letters in a square"? If both fit the definition, does their arbitrary closeness matter for a word that has become part of English?

    To provide an example, "ego" having a particular meaning in philosophy doesn't mean we ought not refer to people with "big egos." "Ego" entered English from Latin far later than "rebus", so if anything it should be 'more Latin' and merit more outrage when its contemporary academic meaning is ignored, but this is clearly not the case.

    Just my thoughts.

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  2. Hi, Anoa Bob. It's Nancy from the Rexblog.

    I imagine that this special crossword use of "rebus" morphed over the years. The use of the rebus probably began with something that could be drawn pictorially, like OX or CUP or PEN or HAT. But not all solvers can draw well and some can't draw at all. (I'm sure you don't want to see my OX.) And anyway it's easier to keep track of what new words are being formed by writing out the letters. So solvers stopped drawing and wrote out the letters. Then constructors had multi-letter ideas for squares that couldn't be drawn -- like PB and AU. And they thought "Why not? It's a fun idea for a theme."

    We all have our puzzle hobby horses, Bob. @Mathgent's is the "terrible" threes. Mine are LOTR and Star Wars. Yours is the misuse of the term rebus. It's probably not worth another nanosecond of your time :)

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  3. Hello Nancy,
    Thanks for your thoughtful comment. The PBS NOVA show "A to Z: The First Alphabet" motivated me to speak up on Rexblog about how "rebus" is used differently in crosswords than how it is used by language scholars and historians. I'm not trying to make a federal case out of it and I definitely don't lose any sleep over it but I feel compelled to continue to be a gadfly in the ointment. I believe if you or other puzzlers saw that show---I think it's available online---you would better understand where I'm coming from.

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