PROCRASTINATION THROUGH THE AGES.

Lexicographer Ben Zimmer (now of Visual Thesaurus) has a new Slate article on procrastination:

The promise of "another day" is the key to the word's origin. It derives from the Latin verb procrastinare, combining the prefix pro- "forward" with crastinus "of tomorrow"—hence, moving something forward from one day until the next. Even in ancient Roman times, procrastination was disparaged: The great statesman Cicero, in one of his Philippics attacking his rival Mark Antony, declaimed that "in the conduct of almost every affair slowness and procrastination are hateful" (in rebus gerendis tarditas et procrastinatio odiosa est).

(Shouldn't that be "tarditas et procrastinatio odiosae sunt"?) He discusses the (to me repugnant) concept "never put off till tomorrow what you can do today" and its analogues in various languages ("'Morgen, Morgen, nur nicht heute,' sagen alle faulen Leute"), pointing out that though the concept is ubiquitous, the word is not. And he mentions this wonderful feature of Egyptian:

Adherents to this view point to the evenhanded approach of the ancient Egyptian language, which had two verbs corresponding to procrastinate. One verb referred to the useful avoidance of unnecessary or impulsive efforts, and the other to the harmful shirking of tasks needed for subsistence, such as tilling the soil at just the right time during the Nile's annual flood cycle.

Anybody know the actual word for "the useful avoidance of unnecessary or impulsive efforts"? Because that is the kind of procrastination I practice. Actually, though, I don't so much procrastinate as perendinate, a wonderful word I learned from Ben's article meaning "to put something off until the day after tomorrow."

SURLY, SIRLY.

A remarkable etymology has been brought to my attention by the indefatigable aldiboronti at Wordorigins.org: "the word surly is no more than an alteration of sirly, which meant lordly, haughty, imperious, acting like a sir in fact." A couple of citations for the original form:
1579 SPENSER Sheph. Cal. July 203 Sike syrlye shepheards han we none, They keepen all the path.
1600 HOLLAND Livy XXXV. xxxviii. 911 Syrly lords (say they) were the Macedonians, and rigorous.

Here's Pope with the old sense of the new form:
1726 POPE Odyss. XXIII. 50 Stern as the surly lion o’er his prey.

And the first cite for the newer, less lordly sense nicely exemplifies the transition, from a lion to a dog:
1670 RAY Prov. 208 As surly as a butchers dog.

CONTEXT.

The Dalkey Archive Press's CONTEXT magazine "was started to create a context for reading modern and contemporary literature and addressing cultural issues," according to an interview with the founder:

It is founded upon the rather perverse idea—perverse in terms of how books are treated in our culture—that books do not grow old. That is, they are forever being read by someone for the first time, or even the second or third time. But our culture tends to treat literature as though it is "timely" and therefore books are usually written about only when first published, or later when—at least some of them—get written about in scholarly ways, or what passes for scholarship. It's also the case these days that individual writers do not get written about by critics. For instance, twenty-five years ago a serious writer who had, let's say, three or four novels out, would already have a body of criticism written about the work, several articles and a book. That doesn't happen any longer, partially as a result of what has gone on in academia. So it is even harder now than it was twenty-five years ago to find criticism about contemporary writers. CONTEXT is also concerned with a certain kind of literature and with establishing the historical context and tradition for this literature. When you read reviews in such places as the New York Times, there is a sense that this is the first novel that the reviewer has ever read, and inevitably the basis for liking the book and recommending it to readers is whether it has a good plot, likable characters, and tells us something that will be useful in our everyday lives. There is no sense that this particular novel has its place among—and should be evaluated against—a whole history of other novels.

The first article I clicked on was Dmitry Golynko-Volfson's Letter from Russia, which gave me an informed discussion of recent novels by Pelevin, Sorokin, Limonov, and some writers I had never heard of, Alexander Goldstein, Mikhail Shishkin, the team of Linor Goralik and Stanislav Lvovskii, Sergei Nosov, the team of Aleksandar Garros and Alexei Evdokimov, and Zakhar Prilepin. I look forward to ransacking the rest of the archives.

WACKADOODLE AND THE OED.

A couple of items of linguistic interest in today's NYT Magazine:

1) William Safire's column investigates the odd but pleasing word wackadoodle, an insult (comparable to kook(y) or nutjob) which he traces back to a 1995 use in the Philadelphia Inquirer. I plan to use it whenever it seems appropriate. He also, impressively, refuses to take the bait offered by a reader who deplores the phrasing "I approve this message" (rather than "approve of"); he writes:

The O.E.D. makes clear that in both the sense of the 1380 “to pronounce to be good” and the 1413 “to confirm authoritatively,” the verb stood alone; no of followed. In the 17th century, the construction approve on appeared, followed by approve of. For reassurance, I turn to Dennis Baron, professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois, who concludes that "for the two most relevant meanings of approve, the verb without preposition is both the earliest form and the one that continues through to the present."

2) Virginia Heffernan passes along the sad news that the OED will not publish a paper version of the new revision. I can understand the decision, but still—what happens when the internet collapses, hey? What price your fancy websites then?

A TOAD ON A STONE.

This passage from Isaac Babel's story "My First Fee" (Мой первый гонорар) nicely captures the dilemma of a young man who wants to write but knows good writing too well to be satisfied with his own efforts:

Nothing was left for me but to search for love. Naturally, I found it. Whether luckily or not, the woman I chose turned out to be a prostitute. Her name was Vera. Every evening I stole along behind her on Golovinsky Avenue [in Tiflis, now Rustaveli Avenue in Tbilisi], unable to bring myself to start speaking. I didn't have money for her, and as for words—those tireless vulgar and burrowing words of love—I didn't have them either. Since my youth all the powers of my being had been given over to the composition of tales, plays, and thousands of stories. They lay on my heart like a toad on a stone. Possessed by a devilish pride, I didn't want to write them down prematurely. To write worse than Lev Tolstoy seemed to me a pointless pursuit. My stories were destined to outlive oblivion. Fearless thought, exhausting passion, are worth the labor spent on them only when they are arrayed in fine clothes. How to sew such clothes?

A man lassoed by an idea, silenced by its serpentine gaze, finds it hard to foam with the insignificant, burrowing words of love. Such a man is ashamed to weep from sorrow. He lacks the wit to laugh from happiness. A dreamer, I had not mastered the senseless art of happiness. For that reason I had to give Vera ten rubles out of my scanty earnings.

(The story was written in the 1920s but not published until 1963; the translation is mine. The original Russian follows.)

Continue reading "A TOAD ON A STONE."

KARSHUNI? GERSHUNI?

First off: bulbulovo is back! Those of you who (like me) had started to think of the blogroll link as a sentimental reminder of the good old days can go back to clicking it regularly. And the latest post is a doozy. I didn't even know there was a practice of writing Arabic in Syriac script, let alone that the name for it could be written "Karshuni, carshuni, carchouni, carschouni, karschuni, karšūnī, karshūnī, karschūnī, garshuni, garschuni, garšūnī, gerschuni, gershuni, geršūnī or even akaršūnī and akarschūnī." The intrepid bulbul does his best to disentangle the word's history and usage, and I commend his discussion to all fans of obscure and useless knowledge.

WAMPANOAG REVIVAL.

A few years ago I did a post about the pronunciation of the tribal name Wampanoag that wound up (thanks to reader Martin) discussing revival efforts as well; now Martin sends me a link to a very interesting Technology Review article by Jeffrey Mifflin on the revival, covering the ground from John Eliot's 1663 Mamusse Wunneetupanatamwe up-Biblum God naneeswe Nukkone Testament kah wonk Wusku Testament [Entire Holy his-Bible God both Old Testament and also New Testament], the first Bible published in Ameri­ca, to three-year-old Mae Alice, "the first native speaker of Wôpanâak for seven generations." It's well worth the read, and I hope there are many more such revivals.

PSEUDO-WORD FEAST.

I'm trying, I really am. When I was younger I was an intolerable snoot (to use DFW's silly term), picking apart texts and holding up errors (real or factitious) with repellent glee. Years of linguistics courses, followed by more years of absorbing their descriptive approach, not to mention the tolerance that comes with middle age, have left me readier to roll with the punches, accepting the fact that the language changes faster than I can change with it, amused by my own irritation with usages I happen not to like. Even within the history of this blog, I've grown less eager to seize on linguistic misdeeds found in my endless reading; life is short and one can't expect reporters and editors, increasingly pressed for time, to get everything right. I've even stopped expecting The New Yorker to live up to its former hard-earned reputation for accuracy. But some things are too much to be borne.

In this week's issue, one of the "Talk of the Town" segments, Word Feast by Lauren Collins, is a chatty squib about the practice (imposed by a new general manager) of poetry readings before the "family meals" at the Union Square Café (which was one of my favorite restaurants back when I lived in NYC and could afford to eat at such places). My pleasure at the thought of people sharing poetry is, unfortunately, more than outweighed by my resentment at bosses who force their employees into jolly group activities. But that's neither here nor there; the bone I wish to pick is with the very last sentence, describing the aftermath of the reading:

“Did we order forks, by the way?” someone asked, which could be considered iambic quadrameter.

This is so egregiously stupid a sentence, in two completely different but equally easily avoidable ways, that I am compelled to bring it here for public keelhauling.

In the first place, there is no such word as "quadrameter." I can, alas, believe the twentysomething Ms. Collins was never exposed to even the most basic analysis of poetics in her doubtless expensive education, but could she not have opened a dictionary? And more to the point, did no one at the magazine (once famed, let me repeat, for its eagle-eyed editors and fanatical fact-checkers) read that sentence and say "Wait a minute, that doesn't sound right"? The word is tetrameter, which comes from Greek tetra- 'four-' (combining form of tettara 'four') and metron 'measure'; it has been in standard English use for four hundred years. The fact that "quadrameter" is a bastard, half Latin and half Greek, like television, would be annoying if it were a real word, but it's not—there's not even a nonce usage recorded in the OED (which I certainly hope will ignore this citation).

Secondly, no it could not "be considered iambic quadrameter," or even iambic tetrameter. This would be iambic tetrameter: "The forks! The forks! We must have forks!" The quoted sentence has no meter at all; if you inserted an extra syllable—“Did we order the forks, by the way?”—it would make a nice anapestic trimeter, and if you read it with a slight pause where the inserted word would be you could fit it into such a context ("How delightful a banquet we'll have!/ Did we order forks, by the way?”), but it is neither iambic nor tetrameter, and no amount of strained emphasis will make it so. The last paragraph of that story is so wrong, so bad, that it should shame the once-proud magazine that ran it.