TYPOS AREN’T BAD GRAMMAR.

Jan Freeman, who used to write an excellent Boston Globe column on language and now writes the equally excellent blog Throw Grammar from the Train, has a post making what should be an obvious point, but one that I have rarely seen put so explicitly:

At Grammarphobia, Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman wandered into the “confusion” quagmire and couldn’t get unstuck. A reader asked whether using its for it’s was a grammatical error or a spelling error; here’s their answer,* with my objections:

A: On a superficial level, this qualifies as both a punctuation error and a spelling error.
But on a deeper level, it’s a grammatical error, because it represents a failure to distinguish between (1) the possessive pronoun and (2) the contraction.

What “deeper level”? You’re saying the writer doesn’t know the difference between the actual words its and it’s? That he mistakenly writes “it’s tires are flat” because he thinks it’s OK to say “it is tires are flat”? Of course you don’t think that. Sometimes a mixup — reign in for rein in — could be either a simple spelling goof or a genuine confusion (resulting in an eggcornish reinterpretation of the metaphor). Not so with its and it’s. We could drop the apostrophe entirely and we’d still know which was which, because in fact we don’t confuse them grammatically.

And here’s the footnote attached to “answer*” above:

*I actually first wrote “here’s there answer,” though I caught it immediately. And no, I am not confused about the difference between their and there.

Brava! (Of course, the people who make such claims aren’t actually making intellectual points, they’re just slinging whatever mud comes to hand to express their revulsion—which reminds me of the nasty verbal tics in the later reviews of Pauline Kael, so memorably analyzed by the austerely eloquent Renata Adler in this classic 1980 takedown, which everybody who cared about movies read and argued about back in that time when people actually cared about movies.)

Comments

  1. John Emerson says


    Now, When the Lights Go Down, a collection of her reviews over the past five years, is out; and it is, to my surprise and without Kael- or Simon-like exaggeration, not simply, jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless. It turns out to embody something appalling and widespread in the culture. Over the years, that is, Ms. Kael’s quirks, mannerisms, tactics, and excesses have not only taken over her work so thoroughly that hardly anything else, nothing certainly of intelligence or sensibility, remains; they have also proved contagious, so that the content and level of critical discussion, of movies but also of other forms, have been altered astonishingly for the worse. To the spectacle of the staff critic as celebrity in frenzy, about to “do” something “to” a text, Ms. Kael has added an entirely new style of ad hominem brutality and intimidation; the substance of her work has become little more than an attempt, with an odd variant of flak advertising copy, to coerce, actually to force numb acquiescence, in the laying down of a remarkably trivial and authoritarian party line.

    Tell me how you really feel.

  2. This sentence and others like it mark this as writing from a different era:
    “What happens after a longer time is that he settles down.”
    The writer, a women, apparently felt it was ok to use ‘he’ or ‘his’ when ‘he or she’/’his or her’ was meant — even though the butt of her criticism turns out to be a woman.

  3. they’re just slinging whatever mud comes to hand to express their revulsion
    Well, it’s rather in the territory of authoritarian dicks accusing people of “bad grammar” for anything they dislike about the speaker’s language (dialect, colloquialisms, pronunciation, and maybe sometimes actual grammar).

  4. Bathrobe,
    Speaking of a different era, Adler also considered the title of Kael’s book I Lost It At the Movies to be “coarse”. How quaint.

  5. *I actually first wrote “here’s there answer,” though I caught it immediately.
    It is interesting that when we are typing fast and on autopilot (for example, taking dictation or transcribing something we have in paper form) the homophone errors come out: there/their/they’re, your/you’re… I don’t think this ever happens to me when I’m paying attention to the actual act of typing. Seems like you could get scientific proof for Freeman’s argument there: the part that decides which word (sound) to use functions on a different level than the part which decides how to spell it, which in turn is really more of a simple filter.

  6. In recent years, it was having insuperable problems with its other movie critic.
    That would have been Penelope Gilliat?
    A few critics, writing quietly and well, bring something extra into their work…Hilton Kramer, something in the realm of ideas.
    My God, really? Even back in 1981?
    Though this is a fairly brilliant piece by Renata Adler, it would have been even better if she had disclosed in it just what had caused her to want to be so mean.

  7. The review of the new LoA anthology from last weekend’s Book Review gives some context.

  8. On the morning before I saw Jan’s post I happened to see a bumper sticker: Somewhere in Rhode Island a Village has Lost It’s Idiot. For reasons of small print plus unfamiliarity with local politics, I was unable to identify the target of the joke. But another sticker indicated that the car belonged to a Tea Party supporter, so my indignation about the error overflowed easily to “Oh god these people are so dumb they can’t even spell”. If I hadn’t had the other sticker to tell me which side they were on, I would surely have felt differently about the spelling error.

  9. All the more reason for SPELLING REFORM!!!

  10. Gary Gapinski says

    A recent NPR article may be of interest.

  11. it would have been even better if she had disclosed in it just what had caused her to want to be so mean.
    There may have been personal stuff as well (this can never be ruled out in the incestuous New York literary/critical world), but there needn’t have been: Kael was ripe for a demolition job, having been (as the essay so convincingly lays out) writing indefensible crap for years and yet (due to the usual Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome) not being called on it. I vividly remember the combination of horror and glee with which I read the piece—like many others, I had been letting my memories of Kael’s early work cloud my reaction to the recent stuff, and seeing the evidence laid out shook my intellectual world. My movie-loving brothers and I had long, intense conversations about it. It’s sad that it’s now impossible to conceive of anyone being able to inspire such reactions with their criticism.
    (N.b.: When I first hit Post, I got “Your comment could not be submitted due to questionable content: incest.” Hoist by my own lazy Blacklist habits!)

  12. From the piece Gary links to:

    In an excellent 1995 essay that he wrote about Kael for The New York Review of Books, literary critic Louis Menand tells an anecdote about how the eminent public intellectual Dwight Macdonald reviewed Kael’s book I Lost It at the Movies in 1965. In that review, Macdonald asked, in puzzlement, “What did she lose at the movies?”

    Ha! Poor old Dwight.

  13. rootlesscosmo says

    I have conflicted feelings about this. My knowledge of Kael goes back to when she was programming, and writing program notes for, a tiny repertory house in Berkeley in the late 50’s; not only did she introduce me to some terrific movies (often in whiplash-inducing double bills), she also was the first critic I read who admitted that low-budget genre flicks could be more fun and better made than the upholstered studio products that used to win Oscars and get good reviews from Bosley Crowther. On the other hand, Adler has her later stuff dead to rights, and a plausible guess about what happened in between. On the third hand, Adler’s sniffy tone is pretty irritating–almost Crowtherish, in fact.

  14. j. del col says

    The straw horse isn’t dead enough yet?

  15. “The writer, a women, apparently felt it was ok to use ‘he’ or ‘his’ when ‘he or she’/’his or her’ was meant”. Well of course it was OK. “He” in my childhood was called the masculine pronoun but did not, we were instructed, necessarily refer to a male person. It’s not that ‘he or she’ was meant so much as that ‘he’ then meant what is now laboriously spelled out as ‘he or she’. Who it was that first pretended that he misunderstood ‘he’ I don’t know. Presumably he was from California or Manhattan, and, I dare say, was a female person.

  16. Well, now I’ve read an awful lot about Pauline Kael, and except for what Rootless writes she does seem to have been pretty awful most of the time. I still believe Renata Adler’s piece would be improved if it were less vicious.
    I always enjoyed Andrew Sarris’s reviews in the Voice. The idea of a horrible clash over the auteur theory seems pretty quaint nowadays – of course a good director produces a body of work, just as a good actor or cinematographer does; it just contains a different selection of films, how could you dispute that? Sarris wrote a typically self-effacing piece about their relationship when she died.

  17. dearieme, did you see the Stephen Colbert clip where he interviews the people from OWS in his office? The woman refers to herself as a “female-bodied person” because to call herself a “woman” or a “female” would be exclusionary to non-female-bodied persons who identify as “women” or “females.”
    What’s really (to me, anyway) hilarious about that is that they don’t seem to realize that that means that only person who can refer to [christ, whatever-]self as a “woman” is a “male-bodied person.”

  18. Crown, you underestimate the evils of auteurism in its original form: it’s not just the theory that directors have a body of work, it’s the theory that directors create movies in the same sense that poets create poetry, that nobody but the director contributes anything to a film except in the sense that the typesetter contributes something to a book of verse. Cassavetes is my favorite refutation of auteurism: he may be a muscular director, but he only succeeds when he gets some poor shmuck to actually write his movies.

  19. For evils read evilness. Sorry.

  20. rootlesscosmo says

    I have the impression that there’s a weak version of auteurism which is just the recognition that the studio system didn’t eliminate every trace of originality or distinctiveness from Hitchcock or Sirk or even the less-well-known journeymen, though they were studio employees under contract like writers and cinematographers etc. in the old days. I don’t know enough about the history of film criticism to know if it took Cahiers du Cinéma to get this point across, but I think it was worth making.

  21. Mark Hazard says

    “I don’t know enough about the history of film criticism to know if it took Cahiers du Cinéma to get this point across, but I think it was worth making.”
    Check out “The Genius of the System,” by Thomas Schatz. It came out in 1988, so it’s post-‘Cahiers,’ but IIRC the whole point of the book had to do with this issue of the sometimes-fruitful relationship between studio system and director. There’s a lot of discussion of Hitchcock’s first years in Hollywood, and his aggravated collaborations with Selznick.

  22. michael farris says

    I still have a lot of affection for Kael up through the late 70’s. Yeah she had her tics (what writer doesn’t?) and blind spots (what critic doesn’t) and past a certain point became of a poh (parody of herself) but the tone of the Adler piece is far too nasty for my taste. It makes me think worse of Adler rather than Kael.
    Kael’s biggest problem was one that she outlined in one of her books (KKBB?) the more movies you see the harder it is to get enthused about one particular movie. Less experienced viewers find it easier to find something new or interesting in a movie than experienced viewers who will become fixed and sedate in their tastes.
    I think she should have been forced out of her comfort zone and made to review stage and/or tv (or books or ballet). It might have refreshened her perspective.

  23. the tone of the Adler piece is far too nasty for my taste. It makes me think worse of Adler rather than Kael.
    You have the luxury of looking back on it from the distance of thirty years; Kael is now seen as a semi-revered figure from antiquity when she’s remembered at all. You have to try to put yourself back in a time when nobody dared say a bad word about her, when she was (so to speak) the Putin of movie reviewing, and imagine that you are (or feel like you are) the only person who sees through the hype to the rottenness beneath. You’d be nasty too. I remember thinking at the time it was a bit over the top, but I understood why. You tend to use a little extra dynamite if you want to make sure the statue falls.

  24. It is interesting that when we are typing fast and on autopilot (for example, taking dictation or transcribing something we have in paper form) the homophone errors come out: there/their/they’re, your/you’re…
    I have a theory that this mostly happens when one of the pair of homophones has an irregular spelling. Thus you don’t get confusion of hair/hare, hour/our, dear/deer, or, stretching the notion of regularity, right/write/rite. Of course, its/it’s are both regular, but I’ll blame interference from the possessive ‘s for that. The /ðɛɚ/s are a three-way irregular set, so it’s a miracle anyone gets them right.

  25. xyzzyva: I love your theory, but I have actually found myself typing “have” for “of” (I never type “of” for “have”; but “‘ve” for a homonym of “of”…)
    I couldn’t believe I’d done it. Your mileage must vary!
    Overcompensation?

  26. Trond Engen says

    I’ve seen knowledgeable people claim that homonyms are stored as the same word in the brain, however disparate their meanings, and to discern them in writing we have to, so to speak, overrule our native language. If so, there’s some truth to the cited article’s deeper level and failure to discern, although the errors say nothing about the writer’s command of grammar. True or not, it makes me almost proud of doing those errors in my non-native English!

  27. the tone of the Adler piece is far too nasty for my taste. It makes me think worse of Adler rather than Kael.
    I don’t mind her nastiness, except that I thought it weakened her argument to write in a style that imitated Kael’s own (but wasn’t parody).

  28. xyzzyva: Their is spelled regularly, because ei regularly represents the FACE vowel in English ever since the vain-vein merger (which is complete in all living accents).

  29. I knew a German who pronounced “height” like “hate”. I never corrected him.

  30. marie-lucie says

    Perhaps because he was thinking of “weight”. “What’s your height and weight?” should rhyme, no? (How do Australians say it?).
    A British prof once told me that he grew up pronouncing “weight” and “wait” differently and had to unlearn the difference in order for his speech to become more acceptable.

  31. Most Australians pronounce it, roughly, “wozza”.

  32. Marie-Lucie: Australians say vain, vein, weight with their regular PRICE vowel, which is [ʌɪ~ɐɪ~ɑɪ] depending on sociolect.
    Your professor probably had a Yorkshire accent. In Middle English, weight was pronounced /wɛxt/, which later became /wɛɪxt/ as a result of a general diphthongization of /ɛx/. In the varieties leading to the standard, /x/ was lost, and this /ɛɪ/ merged with the /ai/ of wait (a French borrowing) and the /aː/ of late to give the FACE vowel. But in Yorkshire, /x/ survived longer, so that /ɛɪ/ < /ɛɪx/ did not merge with the FACE vowel. Instead, the WEIGHT vowel remained /ɛɪ/ while the FACE vowel surfaced as /eː/.

  33. marie-lucie says

    Thanks, JC, but “wait” as a French borrowing?

  34. It’s apparently from Old North French waitier, which is of Germanic origin.

  35. The original Germanic verb’s modern English reflexes are wake and (with palatalization) watch. See the PIE root *weg-.

  36. I remember that the “its/it’s” difference was one which took me the longest to learn, because of course in proper names one does put the apostrophe for a possessive. So we might say “Jane’s bag” (due to the historical ‘e’ that the apostrophe is replacing) but similarly one could say “Jane’s going to the shop” where the apostrophe replaces the “i” of “is”. It’s easy with “his/hers” versus “he’s/she’s” but when you get to “its/it’s” the answer isn’t nearly so straightforward.

  37. “It’s” was indeed the original and etymological spelling of its, which only replaced the original form his around 1600. The conservative language of the original King James Version uses his or periphrases with thereof. Modern KJVs have one instance of its at Lev. 25:5, but the 1611 version read it there, another competitor for the role of neuter possessive pronoun that was lost early on except in the dialects of the northwest of England. The last use of neuter his the OED knows was 1675; of possessive it’s, ca. 1800.

  38. The last use of neuter his the OED knows was 1675; of possessive it’s, ca. 1800.
    1800? I thought lexicographers weren’t prescriptivist. Tons of people write possessive it’s today, John.

  39. Well, oooookay: the OED basically describes Standard English, like all general dictionaries of English, so that was the last time possessive it’s was in standard use as far as the OED knows:
    1801 M[aria] Edgeworth “Forester” in Moral Tales I. 57 Her warning only accelerated it’s fate.
    See a modern version with its fate at Project Gutenberg, and an 1806 edition with it’s fate at Google Books.

  40. John, two quibbles:
    Even if ‹ei› is etymologically justified as /eɪ/, its large variability among /eɪ/, /aɪ/, /iː/ surely makes it irregular in the minds of most. Though what is and is not irregular spelling in English is more a matter of opinion than of fact anyway.

    Marie-Lucie: Australians say vain, vein, weight with their regular PRICE vowel, which is [ʌɪ~ɐɪ~ɑɪ] depending on sociolect.

    Surely you mean their FACE vowel [æɪ], which happens to sound like others’ PRICE vowel?

  41. xyzzyva: Indeed, what you said is what I meant.

  42. The writer, a women, apparently felt it was ok to use ‘he’ or ‘his’ when ‘he or she’/’his or her’ was meant — even though the butt of her criticism turns out to be a woman.

    I will comfort myself with the thought that I came from yet another “different era” (for I feel it is “ok” for a man to use “she”…)

  43. I frequently make the point from the OP, usually about Russian -ться/-тся.

    Actually, some people who write пишеться may actually not be sure what is the proper spelling. Others just make typos. And as I know that I do confuse unstressed Russian vowels when typing fast (but not when writing), those others must be quite numerous.

    But honestly: you can of course take one’s confidence in spellings as a sign of a virtue. And you can of course take one’s typing skill as a sign of the same. All of this is idiotic.

  44. January First-of-May says

    The woman refers to herself as a “female-bodied person”

    I still have no idea what’s the accepted term for a female-bodied person, such that it includes those female-bodied persons who identify as male (or indeed as neither male nor female). The only remotely reasonable option I know of is AFAB, which I feel is too restrictive and/or in the wrong direction, but any other attempted options I tried to propose (including, IIRC, “female-bodied person” itself, though I wasn’t aware of its Colbert precedent) were deemed extremely impolite.

    or, stretching the notion of regularity, right/write/rite

    Certainly the now-obscure word rite is frequently confused with the other two, despite (or perhaps because of?) having the most regular spelling of the three. I think I’ve seen the other two confused with each other as well but I’m not sure how much of it was unintentional.

    The /ðɛɚ/s are a three-way irregular set

    …what would be a regular spelling for that, if any? Only other option I can think of offhand is “thear” (as in “bear”) and that would probably still imply the wrong vowel.

    (inb4 “nothing, because the allophony of English th-sounds would normally require a /θ/ in this position”, which could easily be true but I don’t know enough to tell if it really is)

    I’ve seen knowledgeable people claim that homonyms are stored as the same word in the brain, however disparate their meanings, and to discern them in writing we have to, so to speak, overrule our native language.

    That surely cannot be true as stated because there are words that are homonymous in some parts of the paradigm but not the other parts (e.g. the two verbs to lie in English), and there must be some way to distinguish those to produce the correct inflected forms.

    (Indeed AFAIK there are known examples of “homonyms” that are clearly of the same etymological origin, whose paradigms nevertheless developed differently, such that the citation form is a homonym but some other forms aren’t.)

    Actually, some people who write пишеться may actually not be sure what is the proper spelling.

    Some colloquial words don’t seem to have a proper spelling; I’ve seen some quite extensive discussions of whether кипеж or кипиш or кипешь or any of the other half-dozen options is “the” correct spelling of that (well-known but very colloquial) word, and offhand I don’t recall what (if any) is the official correct answer either.

  45. That is indeed remarkable; Wiktionary has кипеж ‘бурное выяснение отношений, ссора’ and кипиш (“Встречается также вариант написания: кипеш”) ‘шум, суета, суматоха, переполох,’ which are clearly different words (besides the different meanings, cf. genitives ки́пежа vs. ки́пиша) but must be related, and there’s a ПишемПравильно page on the latter that begins:

    Сленговое (жаргонное) слово, обозначающее суматоху, шумиху любого рода, пишется «кипиш» или «кипеш»; ударение падает на первый слог, на «-ки» («ки́пиш», «ки́пеш»). (Но никак не с мягким знаком – «кипишь». Это уже если только второе лицо ед.ч. от глагола «кипеть»). В настоящее время наиболее распространено написание на два «и» («А знатный же они кипиш устроили по пустякам»). Однако писать «кипеш» тоже правильно, эти слова равнозначны во всём.

  46. John Cowan says

    Certainly the now-obscure word rite

    I don’t think it’s obscure in connection with religion, especially non-Protestant Christianity.

    the allophony of English th-sounds would normally require a /θ/ in this position

    Once upon a time [θ] and [ð] were indeed allophones, but nowadays ðey are only partly so. See ðis list of ðe four categories of /ð/ (which is unproductive), specifically the first one.

  47. Keith Ivey says

    What about the now-obscure word wright?

  48. I don’t think it’s obscure in connection with religion, especially non-Protestant Christianity.

    Nerdview. Only the intelligentsia uses that word with any clear idea of its meaning; if the rank and file use it, it’s as part of a proper name (X Rite).

  49. Stu Clayton says

    What about the now-obscure word wright?

    Stravinsky was the Wright of Spring.

  50. David Marjanović says

    or, stretching the notion of regularity, right/write/rite

    Certainly the now-obscure word rite is frequently confused with the other two, despite (or perhaps because of?) having the most regular spelling of the three. I think I’ve seen the other two confused with each other as well but I’m not sure how much of it was unintentional.

    Copywrite has somehow become so common that I’ve even seen copywritten (“copyrighted” = “under copyright protection”), and not just once.

  51. LH, wiktionary кИпеж has кипёж (кипеть – кипёж, галдеть – галдёж) in bibliogrpahy:/

    I can’t derive kípezh from kipét’. The root -kip- ‘to boil’ is unstressed…


    I recognise кипиш and кипеш, though when a south ukrainian author I’m reading uses кипишь, I am not confident I should correct him. The guy uses the word and I do not (maybe rarely, because sometimes we want to use synonyms we rarely use just for the sake of using synonyms we rarely use).

  52. A few Russian words have variative spelling калоши/галоши is the usual example. I always thought (without any basis) that kipish is from Yiddish, but apparently there is no such word in Yiddish. Surprisingly, there is somewhat similar word in Hebrew, חַפֵּשׂ (hapes), search, biblical pedigree and all. Is it possible that it made it to Yiddish slang of Odesa, jumped into Russian, but disappeared in Yiddish?

    Russian ш doesn’t have hard/soft change and at the end of the word -шь means that its feminine. But кипиш declines and agrees as masculine, which means -ь at the end is simply wrong.

  53. PlasticPaddy says

    Could kipish be a word like hullabaloo, imitating the sound of (probably women) having an argument? Compare the bird called Kiebitz in German and peewit in English.

  54. For кипеж, etc., В.С. Елистратов (2000) Словарь русского арго (Материалы 1980–1990-x гг.), p. 514, has the following:

    ХИПЕЖ, -а, ХИПЕС, -а, ХИПЕШ, -а, ХИПИЖ, -а, ХИПИС, -а, ХИПИШ, -а, КИПЕЖ, -а, ХИБЕЖ, -а, ХИБЕС, -а, ХИБЕШ, -а, ХИБИЖ, -а, ХИБИС, -а, ХИБИШ, -а, м. Шум, скандал, крик. ~ поднять (или навести) — поднять шум, устроить кому-л. крупную головомойку.
    Уг. «хипе(и)ж(с)» — грабительство с помощью — женщины-проститутки, заманивающей жертву, ср. «хипесник» — соучастник такого ограбления; возм. связано с уг. «хипа» — женский половой орган, восходящим к древнееврейскому спиро — балдахин, имеющий отношение к свадебному обряду (chupe stl’len — устроить свадьбу). Уг. «хипес», таким образом, есть мн. от «хипа» (сhupo).

    (уг. = уголовные арго, criminal argot. The ultimate etymon is Hebrew חֻפָּה ḥuppāh ‘canopy, bridechamber’.)

    Similarly, at the entry for хипеж, хипеш, etc., М.А. Грачев (2003) Словарь тысячелетнего русского арго: 27 000 слов и выражений, p. 990, derives these words from хипес, with a cross-reference to the following entry:

    ХИ́ПЕС, -а, м. 1. Особый род воровства при участии красивой проститутки (Брейтман, Трахт., Поп., Пот.). «Соня Золотая Ручка прибегла в конце концов к обыкновенному хипесу, что принесло бы ей доходу полторы тысячи» (И. Ильф, Е. Петров. Золотой телёнок). «Пожалуй, особым видом мошенничества можно считать хипес, сложнейшая акция с наёмом квартиры и полной бригадой действующих лиц» (С. Родионов. Теория Ломброзо). 2. Проститутка, обкрадывающая гостя (Лебедев). ХИ́ПИС, -а, м. Кража. «Гораздо опаснее так называемые хиписницы (“хипис” вообще значит кража) или кошки (мелкие воровки)» (А. Куприн. Вор). [Форма множ. числа от др.-евр. chupo — «балдахин, имеющий отношение к свадебному обряду» — Фрид.].

    (Apologies for any remaining OCR errors.)

  55. Crawdad Tom says

    Certainly the now-obscure word rite

    Doesn’t seem at all obscure, or nerdview, to me, either: rite of passage, initiation rite, funeral rites, burial rites, marriage rites, purification rites….

  56. I feel like I have seen a film in which a criminal gang stages a хипес… A prostitute plays an innocent young woman and brings the victim into her apartment, the two enter the bedchamber, and at the right moment, another man playing the young woman’s husband kicks in the door, bursts in, and makes a noisy show of outrage, while others playing the husband’s family pour into the room and scream and shout, until the victim pays all he has just to make his escape. I was thinking the film was Once Upon a Time in America, but it’s not that (there is only the rooftop scene beginning around the 1:00:20 here, in which the boys obtain kompromat on a local policeman). Maybe I am just thinking of the scene with Senator Geary and the dead prostitute in The Godfather Part II. Or maybe it was a Turkish television show. Ulan İstanbul?

  57. “Some colloquial words don’t seem to have a proper spelling” —

    In English:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/style/jeuje-zhoosh-zhuzh.html

    https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/ill-have-the-usual

    …and some tangential thoughts:

    Those who pronounce fellow “member” differently from “chap” may use fella/feller for the latter.

    Compounds with and sometimes get ‘n with variation in apostrophe — rock n roll, fish n chips, R n B, d&b…

    Nautical apostrophes— bos’n/bosun, fo’c’sle/fo’c’s’le…

  58. simply wrong
    (a) does not have phonetic value and does not even follow etymological principle (for once -ь was a vowel…)
    (b) instrumental has -em when unstressed (as in masculine -ь words like лебедь). But -óm when stressed:-/
    (c) also used in 2p sg -шь

    apparently this mess does not let people associate it with feminine… Nevertheless, мыш – an ad hoc masculine from мышь “mouse” – is invariably formed as мыш.

  59. ХИПЕЖ, -а, ХИПЕС, -а, ХИПЕШ, -а, ХИПИЖ, -а, ХИПИС, -а, ХИПИШ, -а, КИПЕЖ, -а, ХИБЕЖ, -а, ХИБЕС, -а, ХИБЕШ, -а, ХИБИЖ, -а, ХИБИС, -а, ХИБИШ, -а

    I am in awe.

    The ultimate etymon is Hebrew חֻפָּה ḥuppāh ‘canopy, bridechamber’.

    Now, that was unexpected!

  60. Doesn’t seem at all obscure, or nerdview, to me, either: rite of passage, initiation rite, funeral rites, burial rites, marriage rites, purification rites….

    Maybe you only hang out with people to whom such phrases are part of daily usage, but I assure you such people are not the majority among English-speakers. “Hey, buddy, been to any good purification rites lately?”

  61. Stu Clayton says

    Maybe you only hang out with people to whom such phrases are part of daily usage

    #
    „Sage mir, mit wem du umgehst, so sage ich dir, wer du bist; weiß ich, womit du dich beschäftigst, so weiß ich, was aus dir werden kann.”
    #

    [Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, known to his friends as Smarty-Pants]

  62. I wonder if playwright was coined as a pun. Were wright and write homophonous in them days?

  63. Am I the only one who thinks the “teenager” part of Once Upon a Time In America is way better than the “adult” part?

  64. @Xerîb:
    o! the badger game! (apparently taking its name from one of the better-forgotten british bloodsports)

    and i could easily see yiddish ganovem-loshn using “khupe” for that particular scam, given the class & caste dynamics of formal marriage and the usual misogyny.

    separately, i’d be surprised if too many anglophones wouldn’t recognize and be able to parse “rite” in the kinds of phrases CT listed, even if it’s not part of most people’s actively used vocabulary. i doubt that applies to its other use, as in “greek rite catholicism”, except among freemasons and /what does one call a trainspotter-of-religions?/.

  65. Oh, all right, I guess I’m exaggerating the demotic as usual.

  66. David Marjanović says

    I’ve seen right of passage pretty often.

  67. The third Discworld novel is Equal Rites.

    And anyone who is Catholic knows about Last Rites.

  68. Ah yes, last rites is a good example of a common phrase.

  69. rozele!

    Badger game! Thanks for putting the English name to that scam.

    Do you know of a reason for apparent use of the plural חפות (Ukraynish khipes, I presume) for the scam, and thus the form of хипес in Russian? Is it simply that the plural is sometimes used to refer to a single canopy, instead of the singular חפה (khipe)?

  70. If the term came from the plural of חֻפָּה, wouldn’t the Russian be хупес?

  71. Badger game

    OED (updated December 2008):

    4. Criminals’ slang (originally and chiefly U.S.). A person who participates, either as the person who lures the victim, or as the accomplice, in the ‘badger game’ (see Compounds 2); (also occasionally) a participant in the similar ‘panel game’ (see panel game n. 1). Now historical and rare.

    1858 Spirit of Times 27 Feb. 412/2 He was the ‘badger’ at Moll Hodge’s famous ‘panel’ establishment, in West Broadway and was sent up for 4 years and 8 months.
    1896 E. G. Redmond Frauds of Amer. (1902) 175 A female badger and her lover may be poor and unable to rent a house.
    1902 W. I. Cole in R. A. Woods Amer. in Process vii. 216 Some of these street-walkers are ‘badgers’, or women whose business it is to entice men to rooms where they may be robbed by accomplices.
    1928 M. C. Sharpe Chicago May xxxi. 281 I have been a badger, pay-off, note-layer, creep, panel and blackmailer.
    1993 G. Simes Dict. Austral. Underworld Slang at Badger game Originally, a badger was a thief who rifled a client’s clothes while he was engaged with a prostitute at a panel-crib.
    […]

    C1. b. U.S. Criminals’ slang. In various compounds relating to the ‘badger game’ (see Compounds 2) or (occasionally) the ‘panel game’ (see panel game n. 1). Cf. sense 4. Now rare.

    1859 G. W. Matsell Vocabulum 63 Panel-cribs are sometimes called badger-cribs, shakedowns, touch-cribs.
    1879 ‘J. Slick’ Snares N.Y. 80 We have spoken specially of ‘panel’ and ‘badger houses’.
    1890 Marion (Ohio) Daily Star 26 July 2/6 (headline) A successful ‘badger’ worker. Tim Oaks and his gang despoil Cincinnati mashers.
    […]
    1950 J. Lait & L. Mortimer Chicago: Confidential i. ii. 25 Buda Godman..finished as a prematurely white-haired ex-convict after a unique career as a badger-worker, gem-thief, and associate of nabobs, robbers and murderers.
    […]

    C2. badger game n. slang (originally and chiefly U.S. Criminals’) an extortion scheme in which the victim is lured, usually by a woman, into a compromising situation and is then surprised and blackmailed by an accomplice.

    1858 N.Y. Times 4 June 8/1 Jane was wanted to answer a charge of having come the ‘badger’ game a few evenings since on a respectable elderly gentleman, whom she encountered in Houston-street.
    1924 G. C. Henderson Keys to Crookdom 228 I know of one case where a man alone worked a variation of the badger game on women.
    […]
    1962 H. Kane Killer’s Kiss xx. 156 She stood naked… ‘You’re in one hell of a lot of trouble,’ he said. The old badger game.
    2003 Mainichi Daily News (Nexis) 26 June 8 The boys admitted to playing the badger game after reading a magazine article saying that such a trick was lucrative because few victims would report the affair to police.

  72. Trond Engen says

    Badger Man ought to be a Marvel character.

  73. Trond Engen says

    Or D.C. comics. I don’t know the difference.

  74. Zap Comix, more like.

  75. One would-be victim of the badger game is Elmer Gantry, in the book at least.

  76. If the term came from the plural of חֻפָּה, wouldn’t the Russian be хупес?

    I am no expert on Yiddish, but as far as I understand it, Proto-Yiddish *u-vowels (long and short) are generally fronted and unrounded in Southeastern Yiddish varieties (Poylish, Ukraynish). So גוט ‘good’ is Poylish /ɡɪt/ and Ukraynish /ɡɨt/, and פורים ‘Purim’ is Poylish /ˈpiːʁəm/ and Ukraynish /ˈpiʁəm/. For an exact parallel to the development of חֻפּוֹת ḥuppôṯ, ‘chuppoth’, compare the Yiddish outcomes of סֻכּוֹת sukkôṯ offered here: Poylish /ˈsɪkəs/ and Ukraynish /ˈsɨkəs/.

    Linguistic treatments on page 64 here and p. 32 here with a very handy chart. (Also page 683 in Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language, volume 2 (2008 = 1980, I think).) Also compare the first line of the song here.

    Since D.O. mentions that the Russian word may have originated in the Odessan sphere, it is interesting that the Ukraynish vowel, presumably /ɨ/ (if that was the value in Odessa), shows up in Russian as и, not ы. Perhaps Ukrainian influence/mediation is responsible for this?

  77. The “my husband!” twist also appears in H.E. Bates’s short story, A Funny Thing (here), one of his Uncle Silas stories. Sugary nostalgia aside, they are funny.

  78. Xerîb: Oh, right—southern *o>u was part of a chain shift, with *u fronting. I vaguely remember a diagram of the whole thing in Vol. I of Labov’s trilogy.

  79. John Cowan says

    it is interesting that the Ukraynish vowel, presumably /ɨ/ (if that was the value in Odessa), shows up in Russian as и, not ы. Perhaps Ukrainian influence/mediation is responsible for this?

    However, the Ukrainian sixth vowel is consistently not /ɨ/ but /ɪ/. The orthographical development is complex. In the civil script of 1708, this sound was variously spelled и, і, ы on etymological grounds. The first phonetic orthography, the Western Ukrainian shashkevychivka of 1837, consistently used the modern spelling и for /ɪ/, whereas /i/ was written either і or ѣ on etymological grounds (in Ukrainian Church Slavonic ѣ is always /i/).

    In the Russian Empire, Russian spellings were used: that is, either и or і for /i/ and ы for /ɪ/; this spelling was known as yaryzhka, a pun on yery and yaryga ‘man of low social status, man on the run’. This was optional from 1798 to 1876 and then mandatory until 1905 and again after 1915. Western dialects and standard Ruthenian adopted ї and і for soft and hard /i/ respectively: this was known as zhelekhivka and was in use from 1886 to 1922 and in some regions until the 1940s. Eventually, ї was used only for /ji/ and і became the unique spelling for /i/.

  80. @Xerîb: i can’t really see why it would be in the plural. my best guess is that it could be a way to take it from a particular instance of the game (which i kinda expect – with no evidence, i hasten to add – would be phrased something like “we put a yold under the khipe yesterday, and got 10 rubles out of him”) to a name for the game in general (“him? he’s no akhsanik* – he does khipes”). but that’s a guess based on how it would be done in english (spades; hearts; ducks & drakes; etc), and i don’t know very much about ganovem-loshn.

    i do know you can hear nice southern-style “חופּות” in yiddish duolingo, though. they use more-or-less-satmar pronunciation, as i understand the final decision, which aligns southward in its vovs (vuvs, i should say).

    * hotel theft specialist, according to refoyl.

  81. David Marjanović says

    the Ukrainian sixth vowel is consistently not /ɨ/ but /ɪ/

    Nothing is consistent about it. I’ve heard the following:

    – [ɪ];
    – [ɨ], like Russian ы;
    – a diphthong approaching [ʊɪ̯], also like Russian ы;
    – [ɘ], like Polish y;
    – [i], differing from і only in that it doesn’t palatalize the preceding consonant;
    – and the recording in the English Wikipedia article on Kyiv is the remarkable [ˈkʚːjə].

    Anyway, by far the most common language in Odessa is supposedly “Russian with a few Ukrainian words and a few Ukrainian pronunciation features” – and I have no idea which ones.

  82. Nothing is consistent about it

    But [ɪ] is the standard/official pronunciation.

  83. David Marjanović says

    If that’s true (is the standard really that strictly defined?), it has no bearing on the question:

    it is interesting that the Ukraynish vowel, presumably /ɨ/ (if that was the value in Odessa), shows up in Russian as и, not ы. Perhaps Ukrainian influence/mediation is responsible for this?

  84. Sure, I was just pointing out a fact about Ukrainian, and implicitly disputing the “presumably.”

  85. the recording in the English Wikipedia article on Kyiv is the remarkable [ˈkʚːjə]

    ʚ? I don’t hear any rounding. It sounds like a backer ɪ to me. The first two formants are about 300 and 1900 Hz.

    I can hear a hint of the final fricative but I’m not sure what it is I’m hearing.

  86. David Marjanović says

    (Direct link to the file.) Well, it sounds (even) more [œ]-like than [ɤ] or [ɜ] to me, so I figured it must be rounded…

    Upon rehearing, I imagined a hint of /v/ the first time, but the next 20 or so times showed there’s no trace of it. In Ukrainian, unlike Russian, it’s not supposed to be a fricative anyway in syllable-final position, but an approximant at the most. I think we’re simply hearing the volume go down.

  87. @David Marjanović: “I’ve seen right of passage pretty often.”

    As a legal term, “right of passage” should always be spelled that way (“the right of passage of all ships through such and such an international waterway,” etc.).

    Have you seen that spelling when “rite of passage” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rite_of_passage) is meant?

  88. David Marjanović says

    Only the latter, in fact. That’s why I forgot to even mention the right to pass through places.

  89. I guess хы is pretty unusual syllable for Russian…

  90. I guess хы is pretty unusual syllable for Russian…

    That is an excellent point, D.O.! Thank you for that.

    (I have always found this aspect of Russian phonology difficult to internalize—even more so since my office mate and good friend of many years is кыргыз (and perfectly bilingual in Russian and Kyrgyz) and I have another wonderful Turkologist colleague from Кыргызстан.)

  91. phrased something like “we put a yold under the khipe yesterday, and got 10 rubles out of him”) to a name for the game in general (“him? he’s no akhsanik* – he does khipes”)

    This is a very satisfying explanation. Thank you for that, rozele!

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