BOOKS AND THE LOST PAST.

Luan Starova (Луан Старова) is a Macedonian author and diplomat whose best-known work is "the autobiographical cycle Balkan Saga, of which ten volumes have been published so far. My Father's Books is the first work in the cycle. His books have appeared in more than fifteen languages, but the segment featured in Words without Borders is the first to be featured in English." The excerpt tells a sad story (which I hope is at least to some extent fictionalized) and contains a passage that reminds me of the role of books in my own peripatetic life:

Of all that materially remained in the world at the end of my father's life, it is possibly his books that most clearly reveal the lost past. It is also possible that one of the secrets of my parents' durable and harmonious marriage was my mother's good-natured encouragement and support of my father's love for his books, and her transformation into a kind of holy patron of his library. It is, in fact, from the pages of my father's movable library that one can most clearly read and understand the history of my family that my parents constructed. Wherever the path of migrations and the instinct for family survival drove us, my father's books accompanied us.

A new book was like a newborn in the family, with its own place in our family's life, or like a new footpath that allowed one to walk yet farther along the long road of life.

During the family's frequent migrations, during the frequent changes of Balkan borders, which often fatally and tragically split the destinies of individuals, families, and nations, we left everything behind except the books.

The books also befriended us in those moments when there was only enough time for life itself to be saved, as if hidden on one of their pages was the riddle to the family's salvation.

BIRTHDAY LOOT.

It's been a long day, starting with the roofers showing up at 7 AM and banging away and ending with a delicious birthday dinner followed by lemon meringue pie and the opening of presents, so before I toddle off to bed I will just list books I was given and trust that the LH readership can guess why each of them is particularly appropriate to the recipient. I will doubtless be posting about most of them individually as I make my way through them.

Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary, by Dr. Lynda Mugglestone

Krazy & Ignatz 1939-1940: "A Brick Stuffed with Moom-bins", by George Herriman (see this impassioned post)

The Stalin Epigram: A Novel, by Robert Littell

Unforgiving Years, by Victor Serge

When Russia Learned to Read : Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917, by Jeffrey Brooks

The Venture of Islam, Volume 3: The Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times, by Marshall G. S. Hodgson (see the third paragraph of this post)

Good thing I'm a fast reader.

IT DOESN'T EAT BREAD.

Chocolate & Zucchini, according to the About page, "is a blog written by Clotilde Dusoulier, a 29-year-old Parisian woman who lives in Montmartre and shares her passion for all things food-related -- thoughts, recipes, musings, cookbook acquisitions, quirky ingredients, nifty tools, restaurant experiences, ideas, and inspirations." It shows up here because of Clotilde's penchant for explaining food-related French idioms; those posts are conveniently listed here. I am unfamiliar with most of them, so it's a good resource for me; I liked, for instance, "Ça ne mange pas de pain":

Literally translated as, "It doesn't eat bread," it is used to say that a thing or an action can't hurt: it may never amount to much or be of much use, but if it costs nothing and entails no risk, why not?

It is a colloquial expression that is usually delivered with a shrug, and when spoken, the ne and the de are often swallowed, so that you will hear it as, "Ça mange pas d'pain."

Example: "Passe un coup de fil à ton médecin, ça ne mange pas de pain !" "Give your doctor a call, it doesn't eat bread!"

If you're interested in cooking blogs qua cooking blogs, you should of course have Caviar and Codfish bookmarked; it's run by the impressive Robin Damstra, who cooks on a regular basis for LH commenter jamessal, the lucky dog.

(Thanks for the idioms link, Jon!)

TIP OF YOUR TONGUE.

Chirag Mehta has come up with a nifty word-search tool at Tip of My Tongue ("Find that word that you've been thinking about all day but just can't seem to remember"). You can enter letters you think are or aren't part of the missing word, as well as elements of the meaning, and you get a list of words with definitions (some of them hitherto unknown to me: "scrimshank British military language: avoid work," "Bawson A badger"). I'm puzzled, though, by his insistence on spelling blog with an initial apostrophe (see his About page). Yes, it's shortened from weblog; I'm guessing, though, that he doesn't write 'phone, 'plane, or 'flu'. (Via MetaFilter.)

TRACKING LANGUAGE CHANGE.

I just read an interesting post at Anatoly's blog (whose ever-changing name is now "Somehow Keats will survive without you"). He's rereading The Twelve Chairs (something I keep meaning to do) and has realized that the dvornik's "Ходют и ходют" [Khódyut i khódyut, 'They come and they come'] at the end of the novel provides valuable information about the chronology of a change in Russian pronunciation. Until some time after the 1917 Revolution, it was standard (especially in Moscow) to pronounce unstressed -ят (-yat) in third person plural verbs as -ют (-yut) (and, similarly, unstressed -ящий in participles as -ющий—see Comrie et al.). Ushakov in 1935 gives this as the only acceptable pronunciation, but Avanesov in 1947 says it's less widespread, and in 1950 calls it archaic. As Anatoly points out, Ilf and Petrov's use of it as a marker of nonstandard speech shows that it already seemed old-fashioned in Moscow in 1928.

VINEGAR(R)OON.

The Daily Growler's latest post talks about the creatures that inhabit the Southwest: "the coyote, the bobcat, the puma, the Gila monster, the vinegaroon..." Hold on, said I, "vinegaroon"? Not in M-W, so I tried Wordnik, and there it was, cited from the Century Dictionary: "1. A corruption of vinegerone." And vinegerone is "The whip-tailed scorpion, Thelyphonus giganteus: so called on account of the strong vinegar-Iike odor of an acid secretion noticeable when the creature is alarmed. Also called vinaigrier and vinegar-maker."

Now, the interesting thing is that when I checked the physical AHD (since it's not online anymore) I found the following entry:

vinegarroon also vinegarone n. A large whip scorpion (Mastigoproctus giganteus) of the southern United States and Mexico that emits a strong vinegary odor when disturbed. [American Spanish vinagrón, from Spanish vinagre, vinegar, from Old Spanish, from Old French vinaigre. See VINEGAR.]

SOMEWHAT CALIGINOUS.

A delightful quote, cribbed from Anatoly:

Professor Edgeworth, of All Souls', avoided conversational English, persistently using words and phrases that one expects to meet only in books. One evening, Lawrence returned from a visit to London, and Edgeworth met him at the gate. "Was it very caliginous in the Metropolis?"

"Somewhat caliginous, but not altogether inspissated", Lawrence replied gravely.

—Robert Graves, Good-Bye to All That, p. 372.

THE FIRST MS.

Congratulations to Ben Zimmer, who's been hunting the elusive "first known proposal for using the title Ms. to refer to a woman regardless of her marital status"; he's found it on page 4 of the Springfield (Mass.) Sunday Republican of November 10, 1901: "There is a void in the English language, which, with some diffidence, we undertake to fill..." Visit his post for a scan of the article and an account of the search, which was finally resolved because the the Republican "had been digitized by America's Historical Newspapers (Readex/NewsBank), the same database that yielded the 1916 citation for jazz from the New Orleans Times-Picayune." Ain't antedating fun?