In his fine Threepenny Review essay French Without Tears, Luc Sante (whose last name is pronounced SAHNT [according to the author himself, who was kind enough to drop by the comment section to correct my mistaken two-syllable version]) reminisces about the process by which, as a young immigrant from Belgium, he settled into English without losing French; it contains the following delightful passage on the glories of French as used in comics:
But I had a fortuitous link to the world of francophone children: my father's sister and her husband, small-town newsagents, subscribed me to my favorite Belgian comic magazine. I read Spirou every week for ten years, and through it subcutaneously absorbed not just the living language but also a sense of daily life in a Belgium that was then changing much more rapidly than my parents realized. The comic weeklies (the others were Tintin and Pilote, the latter published in France) had no American equivalent; they combined about a dozen serial comic strips, on double-page spreads, with a handful of single-page gags, along with games, contests, educational tidbits, and some prose fiction I never so much as glanced at. I didn't care much about stories; I cared passionately about graphic style, and this affected my reading—I disdained the ostensibly serious yarns, with their conventionally realist draftsmanship, in favor of the wildest and funniest drawings. The funny strips also happened to be the most unbridled in their use of language, reveling in the singular ability of French to generate wordplay, puns in particular.
French-speaking children are schooled in puns from the start. Of course, this could be said of speakers of English and maybe every other language as well—that's what riddles are for. For example, I date my true immersion in English from the moment I understood the humor of Q: When is a boy not a boy? A: When he turns into a store. But puns lie much thicker on the ground in French, in large part because the language is so much more rigorous and willfully delimited than the sprawling mass of English, an elegantly efficient two-stroke engine to the latter's uncontainable Rube Goldberg mechanism. French does not necessarily have fewer sounds than English, but the protocols governing their order and frequency make their appearances predictable—hence the profusion of sound-alike phrases and sentences, which fueled Surrealism and ensure the ongoing appeal of Freudian and post-Freudian ideas in the French-speaking world: Les dents, la bouche. Laid dans la bouche. Les dents la bouchent. L'aidant la bouche. Etc. These phrases, which sound exactly alike, respectively mean "the teeth, the mouth;" "ugly in the mouth;" "the teeth choke her;" "helping her chokes her." You don't need to have been psychoanalyzed by Jacques Lacan to see from these examples how language can assist thought in swiftly tunneling from the mundane to the taboo. Children are instinctively aware of this, even and perhaps especially if they are being raised Catholic and are thus trained in the finer points of repression.He later discusses his introduction to the world of poetry thanks to a visit to a Montreal bookstore, where he bought "a fat paperback anthology of French poetry, published by Marabout":The most internationally famous characters in Spirou were Les Schtroumpfs, known in the English-speaking world as the Smurfs, small blue elfin creatures who lived in a toadstool village. In their English-language animated appearances they could be cloyingly cute, but in French they were spared this fate by their language, marked by an incessant use of the (invented) word schtroumpf, employed as noun, verb, adverb, adjective, and interjection. Every reader, no matter how young, understood this usage without a gloss, because it parodied the French conversational trope of substituting catch-alls such as truc, chose, and machin for words that cannot immediately be called to mind, in any grammatical position. What schtroumpf highlighted was the ability of such dummy words to suggest words prohibited from writing or speech, regardless of the fact that the actual words schtroumpf was substituting for were always clear from context. Truc or chose became neutral from exposure, but schtroumpf subliminally spoke to the unconscious; its surface strangeness could make it mean things that the child's mind does not yet know but can imagine with tantalizing vagueness.
Not all the wordplay was so freighted, of course. In the Astérix series (tales of a Mutt-and-Jeff pair of winged-helmeted first-century Gauls, serialized in Pilote), the characters' names were always elaborate puns that turned on their suffixes, -ix for the Gauls and -us for the enemy Romans (to pick two that don't require lengthy glosses, one of the former was Madamboevarix, one of the latter Volfgangamadéus). Deciphering such names—and puns of that sort were rife in all the funny strips—provided an agreeable gymnastic exercise, especially if it took a week or two of rolling the name around before it clicked open like a combination lock. Meanwhile, the adventures of Tintin, the boy reporter, a Belgian (and eventually international) institution since the 1920s, featured as a recurring character Captain Haddock, an alcoholic and irascible but good-hearted old sea-dog. He was noted for his pratfalls, and even more for the streams of insults he would launch at villains, thieving wildlife, cars that splashed puddle water at him on the street, or small boys who had hit him in the head with a ball: Accapareurs! Coloquintes! Ophicléides! Patapoufs! Cloportes! Anthropophages! Catachrèses! Moujiks! Rhizomes! Ectoplasmes! Anthropopithèques! Analphabètes! Cornichons! Va-nu-pieds! Saltimbanques! Moules à gaufres! Protozoaires! (Monopolists, bitter apples, serpents [the musical instrument], fatsos, woodlice, cannibals, catachreses, muzhiks, rhizomes, ectoplasms, Anthropopitheci Erecti, illiterates, gherkins, ragamuffins, mountebanks, waffle irons, protozoa.) It was an explosion in the dictionary, Finnegans Wake on a matchbook cover, a fantastically liberating surge of pure unshackled language. The comics provided an important lesson: language could be a medium of fun, and not just safe, approved fun, either, but wild, anarchic, disruptive fun. There was nothing lazy or slapdash about the comics' employment of words, though; that much was clear even to an eight-year-old. Therefore, the appendix to the lesson was that fun could best be achieved through a thorough grounding in ballistics and a heightened sense of precision.
I wasn't very much interested in poetry, except maybe stray bits of Beat stuff I'd seen here and there, but in flipping through the volume I noticed that many of the poems looked different from what I'd generally been exposed to: some had very long lines, some were studded with proper nouns, some were even in prose, if such a thing was possible. That night I lay on my bed in the motel room in Longueil and opened the book toRead (as they say) the whole thing.A la fin tu est las de ce monde ancien
"In the end you are tired of this old world." Thus began "Zone," by Guillaume Apollinaire.
Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin "Shepherdess o Eiffel Tower the flock of bridges is bleating this morning." The poem was speaking directly to me, to me alone, as proven on the second page: Voilà la jeune rue et tu n'es encore qu'un petit enfant / Ta mère ne t'habille que de bleu et de blanc. "Here is the young street and you are but a little child / Your mother only dresses you in blue and white," which was exactly true of my early childhood; that tu clinched it. Tu regardes les yeux pleins de larmes ces pauvres émigrants / Ils croient en Dieu ils prient les femmes allaitent des enfants / Ils emplissent de leur odeure le hall de la gare Saint-Lazare. "You look with your eyes filled with tears at the poor immigrants / They believe in God they pray the women suckle infants / They fill with their odor the hall of the Saint-Lazare station"—I had been there and seen that! Furthermore, the poem seemed to be about a yearning for modernity in the face of confusion as to the truth of religion, a clairvoyant depiction of my own central inner drama of the time. But there was more: the poem was fluid, rhyming but in an elastic meter like an improvised song, with phrases strung together without punctuation but always clear in their meaning, with an unlabored syntax close to conversational, with capitalized names like cherries in a box of chocolates, with sudden movements in time and space executed with a casual legerdemain, with a flash and whirl and continual surprise that was just what I wanted from the modern world but with a palpable kindness that reassured me as the poem flung me about.
At that moment I became a French modernist...
(Via wood s lot.)
Another great resource added to the internet: The Jewish Encyclopedia.
This website contains the complete contents of the 12-volume Jewish Encyclopedia , which was originally published between 1901-1906. The Jewish Encyclopedia, which recently became part of the public domain, contains over 15,000 articles and illustrations.Of linguistic interest is, for example, the immensely detailed article on the Hebrew alphabet. Obviously any remarks about the "earliest" this or that should be taken with a grain of salt in a century-old source, but it's full of information, like the discussion of how the cursive script developed. (Via plep.)This online version contains the unedited contents of the original encyclopedia. Since the original work was completed almost 100 years ago, it does not cover a significant portion of modern Jewish History (e.g., the creation of Israel, the Holocaust, etc.). However, it does contain an incredible amount of information that is remarkably relevant today.
Having gotten back to Isabel de Madariaga's Russia in the Age of Catherine the Great after a long layoff, I ran across this sentence at the bottom of page 350: "Inevitably Potemkin and the pro-Austrian party at court planned to take the slightest advantage of any carelessness on Paul's part and to watch his correspondence with his friends in Russia." (Paul was Catherine's sullen son, sent off on a European tour against his will.) This illustrates the kind of problems with negation the folks at Language Log are so fond of dissecting (example). It's perfectly in order to say "I wouldn't dream of taking the slightest advantage," but it only works in the negative; what she means is that Potemkin et al planned to take maximum advantage of any carelessness. But there's something about negation that can throw a monkey wrench into our linguistic factories unless we keep a close eye on the assembly line.
An earlier entry lamented the fact that there is no Arabic etymological dictionary; a Russian LJ site picked up on this and a commenter provided the following list of alleged counterexamples:
Murad FarajI wrote Professor Alan Kaye (who's done etymological work on Arabic) asking "if any or all of these are genuine scholarly works," and he responded "None of these are scientific etymological dictionaries as exist for other languages, such as English, which give the Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European etyma." So the problem still stands: there are no reliable/scientific etymological dictionaries for Arabic.
Multaqay al-lughatayn al-`Ivriyah wa-`al-`Arabiyah [The unity of the two Semitic languages Hebrew and Arabic, an etymological comparative dictionary].
Cairo: Al-Matba`ah al-Rahmaniyah, 1930-1937. 3 v.Abd Allah Bustani
al-Bustan, oahoa mujamoun lugaouioun [The garden: an etymological dictionary].
Beirut: El matbaa el amrikia, 1927-1930. 2 v., 2784 p.Jubran Mas`ud
al-Ra'id,
mu`jam lughawi `asri rutibat mufradatuh wafqan li-hurufiha al-ulá
Beirut: Dar al-`Ilm lil-Mallayin, 1965. 1637 p.Avraham Shtal; Avraham Robinzon
Milon du-leshoni etimologi le-`Arvit meduberet ule-`Ivrit [Bilingual etymological dictionary of spoken Israeli Arabic and Hebrew].
Tel-Aviv: Devir, 1995. 2 v., 711 p.
PF, in the course of his troubadouresque wanderings, has washed up for the night here in Peekskill, where he has brought to my attention the remarkable Douglas Young translations from Greek into Scots, in particular his translation of The Frogs [which he called The Puddocks] by Aristophanes:
Aeschylus will heave his verses,(It turned out he had mentioned this translation in the comments to this entry, which would have embarrassed me except that I've grown impervious to embarrassment at my own negligence and/or forgetfulness; besides, PF says that the comment had slipped his own mind.) Young sounds like someone well worth investigating:
ruit and word, and gar them flee,
breenge, and skail the monie stourbaths
whaur he rowes his poesie.
C'wa then, begin, and gie us your crack. And mak it braw and witty;
nae similes and siclike stuff; nae sentimental ditty.
Auntran Blads, in the space of fifty-two pages, constitutes a truly extraordinary demonstration of the range of Young’s intellect as well as his literary talent. In accordance with the internationalism which was a central aim of the Scottish Renaissance writers, the book contains translations from ten languages (though those from Lithuanian, Russian and Chinese were made from English versions) as well as an original verse in Latin, translations of two poems by Burns into Greek, and a short squib stated poetically in English, Latin, Greek, French and German. Scots is the medium of most of the translations as well as of the original poems in the collection: a passage from Dante’s La Vita Nuova is rendered in a quasi-mediaeval register:He did another translation of Aristophanes called The Burdies, and "in 1942 he was put on trial and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment for refusing conscription." A man after my own heart.Ae time that I our flownrie life appraisitand the scene of Hector’s farewell to Andromache from the Iliad is in continuous prose but with a consistent rhythm suggestive of the Homeric hexameter:
and saw hou brief and bruckil its duratioun,
i ma hert, whaurin he wones, Luve sabbit sairlie,
and wi Luve’s sabban then my saul was frazit,
sae that I sychit and spak in conturbatioun:
“Siccar my luve maun dee, maun dee fu shairly”.Sae spak gesserant Hektor, and raxt out his hand til his bairnie. Och, but the wean outskraugh, sclentan back on the breist o his nourrice, fairlie dumbfounert he was at the sicht o his daddie that loed him, fleggit sair at the bress and the crest wi its wallopan horsehair, kelteran doun frae the tap o the bassanat, unco the sicht o’t.
I am a dreamer of words, of written words. I think I am reading; a word stops me. I leave the page. The syllables of the word begin to move around. Stressed accents begin to invert. The word abandons its meaning like an overload which is too heavy and prevents dreaming. Then words take on other meanings as if they had the right to be young. And the words wander away, looking in the nooks and crannies of vocabulary for new company, bad company.Via wood s lot, where you will find a number of Bachelard links under 06.27.2004.
- Gaston Bachelard
A charming NY Times story by Melissa Sanford on the perilous flight training of urban falcons (the NY Times link generator won't give me a blogsafe link for some reason, so this link will rot in a week) says "It takes a young falcon, known as an eyas, a week or so to learn to fly," which of course sent me to the dictionary to find out how to pronounce eyas. It's EYE-as, and the etymology turns out to be worth knowing as well: Middle English eias, from an eias, alteration of *a nias, an eyas, from Old French niais, from Latin ni:dus, nest; see sed- in Indo-European roots (AHD). So eyas, like orange and umpire, is the result of metanalysis (false division of the article + noun unit: "a nias" > "an eyas"). Another piquant fact: the French word niais, which once had the same meaning as the English word, now means 'silly' (or, in the words of Larousse, 'simple, un peu sot').
OK, I'm the last blogger on earth to get around to writing about Louis Menand's scathing New Yorker review of the hot new language-scold best-seller, Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss (whose title, as everyone points out, needs a hyphen after "Zero"). But I'm not going to let it go unmemorialized here, because Menand is an excellent writer with no patience for ignorant cant, and people keep asking me about the book. Since I have no intention of actually reading the damn thing, I'll quote enough Menand to convince any doubters that she's not worth bothering with. He begins with a catalog of her own misuses and mistakes:
The preface, by Truss, includes a misplaced apostrophe (“printers’ marks”) and two misused semicolons: one that separates unpunctuated items in a list and one that sets off a dependent clause. About half the semicolons in the rest of the book are either unnecessary or ungrammatical, and the comma is deployed as the mood strikes. Sometimes, phrases such as “of course” are set off by commas; sometimes, they are not. Doubtful, distracting, and unwarranted commas turn up in front of restrictive phrases (“Naturally we become timid about making our insights known, in such inhospitable conditions”), before correlative conjunctions (“Either this will ring bells for you, or it won’t”), and in prepositional phrases (“including biblical names, and any foreign name with an unpronounced final ‘s’”). Where you most expect punctuation, it may not show up at all: “You have to give initial capitals to the words Biro and Hoover otherwise you automatically get tedious letters from solicitors.”He continues with a complaint about the absurd decision "not to make any changes for the American edition, a typesetting convenience that makes the book virtually useless for American readers," and goes on to a hilarious dissection of her motives in writing the book:Parentheses are used, wrongly, to add independent clauses to the ends of sentences: “I bought a copy of Eric Partridge’s Usage and Abusage and covered it in sticky-backed plastic so that it would last a lifetime (it has).” Citation form varies: one passage from the Bible is identified as “Luke, xxiii, 43” and another, a page later, as “Isaiah xl, 3.” The word “abuzz” is printed with a hyphen, which it does not have. We are informed that when a sentence ends with a quotation American usage always places the terminal punctuation inside the quotation marks, which is not so. (An American would not write “Who said ‘I cannot tell a lie?’”) A line from “My Fair Lady” is misquoted (“The Arabs learn Arabian with the speed of summer lightning”). And it is stated that The New Yorker, “that famously punctilious periodical,” renders “the nineteen-eighties” as the “1980’s,” which it does not. The New Yorker renders “the nineteen-eighties” as “the nineteen-eighties.”
Why would a person who is not just vague about the rules but disinclined to follow them bother to produce a guide to punctuation? Truss, a former sports columnist for the London Times, appears to have been set a-blaze by two obsessions: superfluous apostrophes in commercial signage (“Potatoe’s” and that sort of thing) and the elision of punctuation, along with uppercase letters, in e-mail messages. Are these portents of the night, soon coming, in which no man can read? Truss warns us that they are—“If we value the way we have been trained to think by centuries of absorbing the culture of the printed word, we must not allow the language to return to the chaotic scriptio continua swamp from which it so bravely crawled less than two thousand years ago”—but it’s hard to know how seriously to take her, because her prose is so caffeinated that you can’t always separate the sense from the sensibility. And that, undoubtedly, is the point, for it is the sensibility, the “I’m mad as hell” act, that has got her her readers. A characteristic passage:Go get 'em, Louis. And I don't want to hear any mutterings that he and I are renegades battering down the walls protecting Language from the barbarians. It is those who care more about invented rules and silly shibboleths than about good writing who are the true barbarians.For any true stickler, you see, the sight of the plural word “Book’s” with an apostrophe in it will trigger a ghastly private emotional process similar to the stages of bereavement, though greatly accelerated. First there is shock. Within seconds, shock gives way to disbelief, disbelief to pain, and pain to anger. Finally (and this is where the analogy breaks down), anger gives way to a righteous urge to perpetrate an act of criminal damage with the aid of a permanent marker.Some people do feel this way, and they do not wish to be handed the line that “language is always evolving,” or some other slice of liberal pie. They don’t even want to know what the distinction between a restrictive and a non-restrictive clause might be. They are like people who lose control when they hear a cell phone ring in a public place: they just need to vent. Truss is their Jeremiah. They don’t care where her commas are, because her heart is in the right place.
No, that's not a multicultural dinner menu, it's a couple of interesting etymologies I ran across in my research for my last post.
Fajita is an American Spanish diminutive of faja 'band, strip,' from Latin fascia 'band, bandage,' which is the source of fascism. Would Mussolini have liked fajitas?
And falafel is from Arabic fala:fil, no surprise there, but that's the plural of filfil 'pepper.' I had no idea.
Mark Liberman of Language Log has an enjoyably discursive post on the use and misuse of the word fakir, properly 'a Muslim religious mendicant' (it's from Arabic faqi:r 'poor') but with an extended meaning 'Hindu ascetic or religious mendicant, especially one who performs feats of magic or endurance' (in the words of the AHD definition); when I asked my wife what image she associated with the word, she said "a guy lying on a bed of nails," which fits the second sense exactly and I think would be the most common answer if you took a poll.
But Mark seems to think the meaning has been broadened even farther, to overlap with faker; his entry begins:
In connection with a post on Thomas Jefferson's attempt to learn Gaelic, I read an interesting paper by Jack Lynch entitled "Authorizing Ossian", in which he calls James MacPherson "history's most perfidious literary fakir". Lynch is being unfair to fakirs -- though in a characteristically American way. Fakirs were not fakers, before a series of 19th-century American shifts of meaning.After an excursus on Edmund Wilson, he goes on: "Wilson was reflecting a common usage that arose out of the American spiritualism craze of the 19th century..." The implication, it seems to me, is that 'faker' is not just an occasional misuse but a common US meaning, and I don't agree. It's certainly an easy mistake to make, and I'm sure one could come up with more citations than the OED's four, but I would interpret each as an individual confusion rather than a feature of American English. But I'll throw the floor open for discussion; my awareness of the Arabic and of the Indian use may be blinding me to vox populi. (I'll add also that it's possible the word is a simple typo in the online paper.)
There's a fascinating discussion going on at Crooked Timber about the proposal that Irish should be an official language of the EU. Maria's attitude in her post "What’s the Irish for boondoggle?" is clear from the title alone, and the opening paragraph nails it down further:
It’s not every day that Fine Gael, the Progressive Democrats and Sinn Fein agree on something. But they all say Irish should be an official language of the EU, and complain that the government (which the PDs are part of) hasn’t done enough to make this happen during the Irish presidency. Our presidency of the EU is at best a partial success because we haven’t managed to force the EU to spend an extra 50 million euro a year to translate speeches and documents into a language that no one actually needs them in. It’s the principle, you see.I agree with her, despite my fondness for an Gaeilge, but a number of her commenters don't, and the debate spills over onto Maltese as well while staying remarkably civil. (Via MetaFilter.)
Reading today's NY Times, I ran across a sentence (in the story "Separatist Revives Movement in Quebec" by Clifford Krauss) whose ungrammaticality was even subtler than the one cited in my entry OF OF: "A government audit found that the federal government had furtively passed out tens of millions of dollars to friendly advertising companies involved in antiseparatist publicity efforts deeply offended Quebecers." I'm betting the people who had to reread the Fernea sentence will have to parse this one even more carefully, while my fellow editors will grasp the problem right off the bat.
Frequent commenter Tatyana sent me a link to a Russian blog where there was a discussion of the Arabic word SiraaT 'path' (famously used in the first sura of the Qur'an, the Fatiha: Ihdina al-sirata al-mustaqima 'Show us the straight path'), mentioning that it was from Latin stratum 'path.' Not having any way to determine whether this was true, I wrote to an Arabic scholar about it, asking also where one could go to look such things up. He confirmed the derivation and added "There is no Arabic etymological dictionary." I found this shocking, and am hard put to explain it. I can understand why the cultural emphasis on the Arabic of the Qur'an as the perfected form of the language might have made native speakers less likely to look beyond it and work on its Semitic connections, but how could the avid European Orientalists of the Victorian era have omitted to produce such a thing? In an age obsessed with philology, when Edward William Lane was producing his monumental Arabic-English Lexicon and men like Theodor Nöldeke and Carl Brockelmann were doing groundbreaking work on Semitic, how could no one have done an etymological dictionary? And how could no one have done one since? Get cracking, people!
In the course of reading Elizabeth Fernea's Guests of the Sheik (a lively account of a year in Iraq which anyone interested in life in the Shiite south should read), I came across the following sentence: "Probably it was a combination of particular circumstances, many of which I remained unaware, plus the fact that people were just becoming used to our presence." I instantly noticed that there was one "of" too few in the clause beginning "many of which...," but I wonder how many readers pass right over it? I suspect that my job as an editor may make me hypersensitive to the inner workings of syntax.
Avva says that Evan says that half of all Google searches are conducted in languages other than English, and Evan works for Google, so he should know. Avva says he would have thought the non-English searches only amounted to 20%; I would have guessed it was higher than that, but I'm surprised and pleased to discover it's half and half. Let the world search!
Faithful correspondent Andrew Krug sent me a link to a BBC story by Oliver Conway claiming that:
The world's most difficult word to translate has been identified as "ilunga" from the Tshiluba language spoken in south-eastern DR Congo.It came top of a list drawn up in consultation with 1,000 linguists.
Ilunga means "a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time".
It seems straightforward enough, but the 1,000 language experts identified it as the hardest word to translate.
In second place was shlimazl which is Yiddish for "a chronically unlucky person".An amusing story, and I like the word ilunga (assuming it has been correctly rendered and translated, which may be a rash assumption). But of course a more rigorous examination makes the whole thing look rather shaky, and Mark Liberman of Language Log has provided such an examination. And his correspondent Alexander Koller adds:Third was Naa, used in the Kansai area of Japan to emphasise statements or agree with someone.
Although the definitions seem fairly precise, the problem is trying to convey the local references associated with such words, says Jurga Zilinskiene, head of Today Translations, which carried out the survey.
"Probably you can have a look at the dictionary and... find the meaning," she said. "But most importantly it's about cultural experiences and... cultural emphasis on words."...
not to mention the problem that the notion of a "most untranslatable word" is inherently ill-defined anyway. Surely you need to fix the target language to decide what the most untranslatable word would be. I can easily translate "shlimazl" into German "Pechvogel", and that seems to express exactly the same meaning (although I don't know about the finer points of the cultural references associated with "shlimazl").But never mind: semantics is fun, regardless of analytical rigor!Yes, I suppose it means "hard to translate into English". But the news article carefully avoids this level of precision.
Or for persons with a great fondness for seal meat. Desbladet has a tasty report on a couple of books on Greenlandic. My favorite bit:
Now, Janssen's phrasebook was prepared for Europeans in Greenland, hardly doctors. So it was probably also handy that when all these sicknesses were treated, there a consoling word to close with: "Have no fear, God and his help are always with you and will make you hale again."A section on groceries starts with Greenlandic food: "Are you in the habit of eating seal-meat?", to which there are two (2) answers: "Yes, I often eat seal-meat" or "Since I've just eaten, no thanks".
The Dico du Net is a collaborative French dictionary of words having some relation to the internet; its ambit includes:
des domaines aussi variés que : le référencement, la mesure d'audience, l'hébergement de sites, la création de sites web, le développement de logiciels, le moteur Google, DMOZ, les weblogs, les noms de domaine, les normes d'Internet, l'e-Marketing et l'e-Commerce...For blog, for example, they have a brief definition ("A la base, un blog est un journal personnel ou un carnet de voyage disponible sur le web"), a longer description, several related entries ( Blogroll - Joueb - Permalink ), other sites on the subject, the author's name, and commentary; they urge participation from readers. (Via La Grande Rousse.)
"Minding my p’s & q’s" by Denny Johnson is a loving account of his career in typesetting, starting out as a printer’s devil back in the days when "upper case" meant a literal case:
The Job Case in our shop resembled a huge dark green wood bedroom dresser, built at that time, I supposed, certainly somewhere in California, maybe just after the Gold Rush. It stood five feet high, about a foot over my head. It was almost six feet wide, and stained with years of printer’s ink and chewing tobacco; it was sturdy and unmovable. Ever at its side on the floor -- a mucky red Hills Brothers coffee can was the compositors’ constant companion -- his spittoon.Instead of three or four deep drawers for underwear, t-shirts and socks, there were sixteen drawers, eight down per side. All the drawers were labeled but their identification tags had long since been obliterated by ink smudged fingerprints. Each drawer was three inches deep by three-feet square and separated by small individual wood fences or dividers that allotted the drawer into special custom cubicles. Every drawer was designed to hold a different, complete font of hand-type from six to twelve point. This is twelve point; this is eight point; so it’s clear that not only did the compositor have to separate and put away each letter in their appropriate letter home, he needed to put the correct letters with their identical sized brethren in the proper drawer as well. If not, sentences would unquestionably suffer and the reader be put upon to wade through dissimilar sized letters and misspelled words, in a sort of alphabet soup that the proofreader would routinely mark: W/F (Wrong Font).
All twenty-six letters of the alphabet, punctuations and numbers were allotted a different size partition in the drawer according to their order of significance: i.e. how often they turned up in words. A line of type was set by hand, letter by letter, character by character, one at a time. Words and the resulting sentences and paragraphs were compiled using an iron composing stick which was just over eight inches long and two inches broad. This the typesetter held in his left hand while the other was free to go for the necessary letter, piece by piece...It's not written in the most professional manner, but it's a joyous romp through the history of modern typesetting by someone who's got the molten-lead burns to show for it ("Everyone who worked at and around the Linotypes was burned or injured at one time or another"), and anyone who's ever felt the romance of those days should enjoy this as much as I did. The link comes via Teresa at Making Light, who adds her own, and needless to say better written, reminiscences ("I remember the Linotype, with its inscrutable keyboard, matrixes falling down chutes like a literate pachinko game, lead pig hung up on a chain to melt, bucket hanging off one side of the machine for collecting and re-melting old slugs, and all too eloquent splashes of now-cooled lead on the floor around it"); the comments, as usual, are a rich source of supplementary vitamins.In all probability it was a good logical mind some time early in the 15th century that had configured these spaces so that there were larger cubicles and smaller cubicles depending on that letter's consequence in the news of the day -- an associate perhaps of John Guttenberg or one of his moveable-type cronies in 1448? In the early days of printing the compositor would sit or stand -- depending upon the charity of his employer -- beside an angled frame upon which he would set type. There were usually two drawer cases of type in use at a given time -- one UPPER and one lower case...
That brings us to the four demons of which hardly anything has been written, yet they seem to be the cause of a good deal of anxiety for readers and typesetters alike over history. Now, you might propose that a d is a pretty recognizable and well-thought-of-character, and not one to discover himself mixed up with other letters of lesser popularity. But in fact the d finds himself in some very dubious company when he goes getting mixed up with the b, p, and q, aka: the four demons. They’re so named because they most often were the characters that ended up in some other letter's stall causing chaos between compositor, proof reader, and printer's devil -- whose job as it turns out was to see that it never happened. And that certainly didn't mean that it didn't or couldn’t. In fact it happened all the time. There was always someone in the print shop yelling: “Wrong Font!”
Joel of Far Outliers has an interesting post called "Political Shibai or Kabuki?":
The Japanese word shibai 'performance, drama', as in Okinawa shibai or Ikari ningyo shibai 'Ikari puppet theatre', now seems well established in at least one regional dialect of English as a way to denote an empty political performance.(See his post for citations and further explanations.) I have never heard either phrase, but kabuki is reasonably familiar and I would think "political kabuki" might catch on; shibai is unlikely to expand beyond the circles in which it is already used, but that restricted use may be enough to win the favor of the OED (which, after all, includes a fair number of nonce words).It has been used for a long time in Hawai‘i political talk, and someone recently (after 1999) submitted the following entry to the OED.
political shibai – (Hawaiian, from the Japanese) political shamming...
The more common synonym elsewhere seems to be kabuki...
The Pedagogical Grammar of Nuer is a product of the IU Libraries African Studies Collection in collaboration with the IU Digital Library Program (the former has a useful page of websites for Africanists); besides the lessons and exercises, there is a translation of the Book of Genesis into Nuer (one of the Nilotic languages of the southern Sudan). Via wood s lot.
Bill Poser at Language Log has an entry on cooking verbs, comparing the large variety available in English to the four of Japanese and the two (dry cooking versus steaming/boiling) of Carrier. This reminds me that I once tried to compare the semantic ranges of English and German cooking verbs and found they didn't match up at all well, but my dictionaries weren't as much help as they might have been, which brings up my standard complaint: bilingual dictionaries don't do food terms as well as they should. Let's change that, lexicographers!
Addendum. The Apply_heat frame is useful in this context. (Found via a blog pointed out by MM in the comments.)
Neologisms - a Dictionary of Findable Words and Phrases is just what it says.
This website is being developed as a record of new and evolving words and phrases in the English language, with special reference to UK English usage. One of its prime aims is to act as a repository for new words and phrases which are not otherwise listed on the Net - or at least not found by Search Engines. Hence the working title: Dictionary of Findable Words and Phrases.And of course they welcome "comments, corrections and contributions." A few sample entries:Content is intended to include etymology, definitions, derivations, origins, neologisms, coinages, usage, dialect, slang, first citations, abbreviations and acronyms.
Devil's delphinium Definition: A telecom transmitter tower.(Via the indefatigable aldiboronti at Wordorigins.)Derivation: Probably coined by Vikram Seth.
Citation: "...a grey telecom tower with its pustules of transmitters and receivers, a devil's delphinium. " [Vikram Seth, An Equal Music, Phoenix 1999 p.78]
Gate
Definition: The # keyboard symbol.
See OctothorpeVariant spellings: gatesign; gatemark; gatesymbol
Haemosexuality
Definition: The sexual basis of the vampire relationship.Derivation: Coined by Christopher Frayling in "The Vampyre".
Citation: "Whether vampirism is related to civilization and its discontents (Freud), to suppressed memories in the collective unconscious (Jung), to breast-feeding and the projection onto others of the need to bite (Melanie Klein), or to monstrous manifestations of eroticism for any othe reason, I have chosen 'haemosexuality' as the most apt general term to describe the sexual basis of the vampire relationship " The Vampyre by Christopher Frayling, 1978; London: Victor Gollanz.
I was not familiar with this archaic phrase until I read about it just now in Language Log (Mark Liberman division)—which surprised the heck out of me, since I've been stuffing my brain with archaic material for nigh on half a century now (I presume the first few years were taken up with more modern words and phrases, like "mommy" and "no!"). Furthermore, my wife did know the expression, a discrepancy in knowledge that gave her no little pleasure. At any rate, the short version is "by no manner of means is an archaic emphatic form of by no means, just as in no kind of way is an modern emphatic form of in no way"; if you want the details, including the many ways the phrase has been distorted, go read Mark's excellent entry with its plethora of citations.
Andrew Krug has sent me a link to this amazing census map from the MLA. Pick a language and find out where it's spoken, in the US as a whole or in any state. You can zoom, have it show the data by county or by zip code, and play with it in other ways I haven't tried yet. Enjoy!
MadInkBeard is a blog dedicated to the idea of formal constraints in writing; as the About page says:
I've been interested in the (mostly French) group called the Oulipo (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle) ever since I discovered the writings of Italo Calvino and (thanks to him) Raymond Queneau (both being members, the latter one of the founding-presidents). To put it as succinctly as possible the idea of the group is to create new forms of literature for the possible use of other writers. It's not about creating new literature qua literature, but about creating forms for new literature. Now using the words "form" is pretty damn open, and that is something that I need to work on thinking through. Basically, the Oulipian concept involves "formal constraint", voluntarily chosen constraints on the process of writing (such as writing a novel without the letter 'e' (Perec's La disparition a.k.a. A Void) or writing a book whose structure is based on the drawing of a sequence of tarot cards (Calvino's Castle of Crossed Destiny (sorry, the Italian escapes me)), in many cases this involves starting with a base text that is then transformed through constraints.Long-time readers will know that I am a fan of Oulipo and will remember my exuberant praise of Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai, an enthusiasm shared by the Beard, so I'm pleased to discover his blog.I have created this blog to discuss the idea of formal constraints (mostly in writing, but also in other media) as well as offer explanations and examples of various constraints. My hope is that this will help proselytize a bit for the idea of writing under constraint and also offer some practical places to start.
1) E-mail. One of the things I was glad of when I got my own domain was that I would be able to use it for mail; my Yahoo inbox was almost full, and the NeoMail one had a great deal more capacity. Alas, not only was it quickly aswarm with spam, but lately I've discovered that a couple of my valued correspondents have sent me messages that I did not get. I only found this out because they told me; I fear that others must have had the same experience and simply thought I hadn't cared enough to respond. Coincidentally, Yahoo (under pressure from Google's Gmail) has increased its inbox capacity from 4 MB to 100 MB, which means mine is now almost empty as opposed to almost full, and I can go back to using it. So I hereby suggest that y'all write to me at languagehat AT yahoo DOT com; I'll keep using the other for comments on other people's blogs (hoping to keep the spam there) and I'll keep checking it, so if you send mail there I should get it -- [I have given up on it now] but if you've ever sent me mail and not heard back, please try again at the Yahoo address. I am very good about answering mail -- even if I'm pressed for time, I send a quick "Thanks!" -- so if I didn't respond, it's because I didn't get it. Thanks for your understanding.
2. Comments. A number of people have expressed diffidence, either in a comment or via e-mail, about commenting here: they're worried about their English, or afraid they're not expert enough to be worth hearing, or something. Please don't feel that way! This is not an Expert's Corner, it's a place for everyone with an interest in language (or poetry or any of the other things I occasionally discuss) to talk about it. I like to think of LH as your friendly corner cafe/bar, where people can wander in and stay as long as they like. You can contribute information, ask questions, or just joke around. But please don't ask me if you're Jewish -- for the last time, I don't know!
OK, this is the best lexicographical development I've seen in ages. Chris J. Strolin has started a completely insane project: "rewriting the highly revered OED... completely in limerick form. Possible? Yes. In one lifetime? I sincerely doubt it." (The FAQ is here.) Here are his first few entries:
aBut my favorite is by another member, wordnerd:
The very first word here is "a."
It's used with a noun to convey
A singular notion
Like "a duck" or "a potion"
Or top notch as when used in "Grade A."aa
In geology this word is autonomous
And with rough-surfaced lava synonomous,
Yet the meaning it conveys
With two capital A's
Is, of course, Alcoholics Anonymous.(a sidenote: This is the first example of where I have corrected the old OED which defined "aa" as "a stream or a water course" with no mention of the more widely-known definition involving lava.)
aal
An aal is a plant (this is clear)
Which yields a red dye kings revere.
Should you, Fred, and Ted
Go to paint the town red,
Sing out "Hail, Hail, the gang is aal here!"
Consider this curious word:Thanks to Grant Barrett for the link!
He who steals cows from your herd
Commits the infraction
That's known as abaction
(But rustling's the term that's preferred).
Update. OEDILF has moved to a new site, and I have replaced the links accordingly.
The action of Ulysses took place 100 years ago today. Read about it in Andrew Lewis Conn's Voice essay; follow the links in riviera's MeFi thread; listen to the Symphony Space reading hosted by Isaiah Sheffer being broadcast by WBAI at this very moment (audio here) [Note: "very moment" guarantee has expired]. Added value: Sean O'Faolain's "50 Years After Bloomsday" from the NY Times of 1954.
Update. Fionnula Flanagan read the Penelope chapter so brilliantly my wife and I were mesmerized and hated having to go to bed before "...yes I said yes I will Yes."
Also, John Banville has a disillusioned take on the whole thing in the NY Times Sunday Book Review, "Bloomsday, Bloody Bloomsday," which ends with this sad anecdote:
[Anthony] Cronin was the instigator of another Bloomsday event in 1982, when writers from around the world were invited to Dublin to celebrate Joyce's own centenary. Among the many notable artists who came was -- yes -- Borges, who by then was in his 80's and totally blind. He was collected from the airport by a couple of volunteer meeters-and-greeters, who deposited him in his suite at the Shelbourne Hotel and went off to do more meeting and greeting. When they returned, late in the day, Borges was still in his room, and in fact had not left during the intervening hours. What was he to have done, Borges asked, since he did not know the city or anyone in it? Ever since, when I hear talk of Bloomsday celebrations, that, I am afraid, is the image that springs immediately to mind: an old, blind writer, one of the greatest of his age, sitting alone in a hotel room overlooking an unseen St. Stephen's Green.
"Ty vydumal menya..." ['You invented me...'] has Anna Andreyevna's poetry and much other material by and about her (including a Russian translation of Amanda Haight's biography). (Via wood s lot.)
I was watching a Scientific American Frontiers episode in which a scientist named Syndonia Bret-Harte was quoted, and I was struck by her name—not so much the last name, allusive though it is, as her given name, which a Google search showed to occur every once in a while (mostly in 19th-century names) but which I could not find in any reference works (dictionaries of names, Greek, Latin, &c). I won't bore you with the details of how I tracked it down, but I eventually discovered that it's a variant of Sidonia, whose most common English variant is Sidony. I've found two online explanations. The first is here:
Sidony: this name was formerly used by Roman Catholics for girls born about the date of the Feast of the Winding Sheet (i.e. of Christ), more formally alluded to as 'the Sacred Sendon'. 'Sendon' or 'Sindon' (from Latin 'sindon,' Greek sindon 'fine cloth, linen') was used in Middle English for a fine cloth, especially one used as a shroud. The Sacred Sendon is supposed to be preserved at Turin. That 'Sidony' or 'Sidonia' ='Sindonia' is shown by an example from Shropshire, 1793, 'Sidonia or Sindonia Wilden.' 'Sidonie' is not uncommon in France, and the Irish 'Sidney' is probably really 'Sidony.' No early example of the name has been found, but it seems likely that the surname 'Siddons' has this origin.But the Dictionary of First Names has a more scholarly version:
From Latin Sid{o_}nia, feminine of Sid{o_}nius, in origin an ethnic name meaning 'man from Sidon' (the city in Phoenicia). This came to be associated with the Greek word sindon 'winding sheet'. Two saints called Sidonius are venerated in the Catholic Church: Sidonius Apollinaris, a 4th-century bishop of Clermont, and a 7th-century Irish monk who was the first abbot of the monastery of Saint-Saëns (which is named with a much altered form of his name). Sidonius was not used as a given name in the later Middle Ages, but the feminine form was comparatively popular and has continued in occasional use ever since.It was all worth it to discover the origin of the name of Saint-Saëns!
For a little added fun, the Czech equivalent (originally a diminutive) is Zdenek (masc.)/Zdenka (fem.).
No-sword has posted another entry (earlier LH posts on this here and here) about wacky Japanese verbal forms, this time involving an English suffix:
Here are some words that would probably be understood by a Japanese speaker my age:wakattingu
komacchingu
hashittinguCan you spot the English? Yep, -ing. Present continuous tense. Of course Japanese has its own present continuous -- -te form + iru (or just ru) -- which if applied to those three words would make them look like this:
wakatteru (literally "[I am] understanding", generally used to mean something like "all right, all right, I get it")
komatteru ("[I am] troubled/in trouble")
hashitteru ("[I am] running")To make the borrowed -ing form, apparently one takes the -te form (stem + -te: wakar + te = wakatte, etc.), removes the final e, and adds ingu. So, for hashiru:
hashir-u --> hashir-te --> hashitte --> hashitt --> hashittingu
Two things are worth noting about this transformation:
1. The resultant /ti/ in the final word might be pronounced [ti] or it might become [tSi], depending on the speaker. [ti] is a sound that was only introduced to Japanese quite recently, in loan words from other languages (especially English); the native Japanese syllable /ti/ is always pronounced [tSi]. (And /tu/ is [tsu], which is why the Hepburn Romanisation system for the t-row goes "ta, chi, tsu, te, to". The vocalised versions have the same pattern, so "building" is generally pronounced/written "birujingu").While I'm at it, here's a funny post about tones.So, saying [ti] instead of [tSi] sounds foreign -- I believe in a slightly sophisticated/pretentious (depending on viewpoint) way, like an English speaker who can pronounce French words properly. On the other hand, pronouncing a foreign word in the Japanese way might reflect the speaker's unfamiliarity with the "correct" foreign pronunciation, or it might be an intentionally cutesy affectation. Foreign words usually written in katakana are sometimes written in hiragana to get a similar effect.
Which is why two of those "ing" words up there are "t", and two are "ch".
2. Note the hard g at the end. Lots of Japanese people with no interest in English (beyond what they were forced to learn in high school) make this mistake. It obviously derives from the spelling, and represents further proof that high-school-level English education in Japan is still too hung up on the written side of things, because that's what's on the standardised tests.
All three of these words, incidentally, I have either seen or heard in unprompted discourse. This ingu thing is not standard Japanese, there's a definite playful feel to it, but it is nevertheless a loaned pattern that can (apparently) be applied to any verb.
An ionarts post on the new French translation of Ulysses from Gallimard includes a tantalizing excerpt of Bruno Corty's interview with the head editor of the translation, Jacques Aubert, in Le Figaro Littéraire. Unfortunately, it seems to be impossible to get to the original interview (you get redirected to the Figaro home page; if you're interested, a Le Monde interview with Aubert is here), but I'll quote a couple of exchanges from the translation:
In 2000, Joyce's grandson asked Gallimard to start a new translation of Ulysses, to be placed under your leadership. Why did you choose a team instead of a single translator?It was clear to me from the start that this new translation should be entrusted to several people. This was not only to give in to the spirit of the times, by influence, by example, for a project like a new translation of the Bible. We were ordered to publish it in 2004, and the work that had to be done made it seem difficult to me to conduct this work in a rigorous way with only one translator. Group translation is not the easy solution at all. Particularly in this case, where there are resonances, echos, and repetitions in the text that are furthermore subjected to variation throughout.
Joyce plays constantly with words and languages. Isn't that the biggest danger for this translation?Ionarts adds that "the same team will proceed now to the even greater challenge of translating Finnegans Wake into French."In effect, Joyce tells us that there is translation inherent in reading. He says that and he puts it into action. Buck Mulligan himself plays on his nickname from the second page of Ulysses. We made the decision not to translate the word "Buck." Leaving the English nickname, from the moment where the rest of the text illuminates it, this is part of the mixture of languages that Joyce begins to unfold. In the third episode, among the traps that Joyce lays for us, there is "Los demiurgos." You could read "Los" as the article that goes with "demiurgos." In fact, the context indicates that this "Los" is a proper name borrowed from William Blake [The Song of Los] and that, as a result, it should not be put in italics like the word that follows it. This is just one of numerous polyglot traps. It's one of those aspects by which Ulysses already has, I dare say, one foot in Finnegans Wake.
(Via wood s lot.)
An LA Times story by Ken Ellingwood reports on belated efforts to preserve Ladino (discussed at LH here and here):
More than 500 years after Jews were expelled from Spain, an effort is afoot here to save Ladino, a medieval dialect that helped preserve the exiles' culture as they scattered across Europe and the Middle East.Ladino, also called Judeo-Spanish, is slowly dying. Israel is believed to have the largest number of people — perhaps as many as 200,000 — who can speak or understand the language. But many are older than 60.
Recognizing that the oldest generation of Sephardic Jews soon will disappear, some Israelis are trying to pump life into the flickering language — collecting written works, recording Ladino love songs and teaching Ladino to young people.
The Israeli government joined the efforts seven years ago, establishing the National Ladino Authority, which has prompted a surge of interest in the language and culture. The agency spends $275,000 a year on organizing lectures, promoting festivals and sponsoring language courses.Thanks to Andrew Krug for the link.Thanks to the push, Ladino is now taught in several of the largest Israeli universities. Two schools recently opened centers devoted exclusively to the study of Ladino language and culture.
And the second national Ladino music festival, to take place here today, already is a popular showcase for young composers and musicians from all over the world, including the United States.
"It is a disappearing language, but more and more people I know are starting to play it," said Yasmin Levy, a 28-year-old Israeli singer who has recorded two CDs in Ladino and performs often in Europe. "It's beautiful."...
Long before the Israeli government invested in promoting Ladino culture, a few activists collected folk stories, poems and songs. Perhaps the most ambitious was Levy's father, Yitzhak Levy, who compiled 10 volumes of Ladino liturgy before his death in the 1970s.
Ladino language and culture enthusiasts in Israel and abroad are continuing the work, scouring bookshops and attics for overlooked Ladino writings. Some of the literature has been saved in the original language, some translated into Hebrew. One Israeli enthusiast is at work translating Homer's "The Iliad" into Ladino from ancient Greek.
Eliezer Papo, the coordinator of a new Ladino culture center at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, said Ladino enthusiasts are taking their cue from the United States, where people are encouraged to celebrate their diverse cultures.
That's the Catalan word for 'dictionary,' and I've just discovered the wonderful Diccionari català-valencià-balear, where you can enter a Catalan word and get definition, pronunciation, and etymology with historical excursus, for example:
TIBIDABO topon.(Via a kaleboel entry in which Trevor bashes poor Bill Poser for alleged sloppy dialectal description. Bill defends himself manfully, and MM quite properly complains about the lack of comments at Language Log. Yes, yes, comment spam, I know. Delete it, what's the big deal? Your readers want to kvetch in situ! Oh, and I found the Battle of the Linguists via Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey.)
Muntanya de 532 metres, situada al nord de la ciutat de Barcelona, la vista de la qual es domina esplèndidament des del cim d'aquella.
Fon.: tiβiδáβu (Barc.).
Etim.: del llatí tibi dabo, ‘te daré’, frase presa de l'evangeli de Sant Mateu quan conta que el dimoni temptà Jesucrist des del cim d'una alta muntanya dient-li: «Haec omnia tibi dabo si cadens adoraveris me». El nom medieval de la muntanya del Tibidabo era Collserola.
I knew the things would come in handy:
Being Bilingual Could Protect Your Brain(Thanks, Bonnie!)
--Robert PreidtMONDAY, June 14 (HealthDayNews) -- Being fluent in two languages could protect against age-related cognitive decline, says a study in the June issue of Psychology and Aging.
Researchers from York University in Toronto compared the results of 154 bilingual and monolingual middle-aged and older adults on the Simon Task, which measures reaction time and aspects of cognitive function that decline with age.
All the bilingual people in the study had used two languages every day since the age of 10.
The study found that both older and younger bilingual people performed better than those who spoke just one language. Being bilingual offers widespread benefits across a range of complex cognitive tasks, the authors concluded.
The Australians are fond of the phrase "Yeah no," according to a June 11 Bridie Smith article in The Age:
The verdict from Monash University chair of linguistics Kate Burridge is that the apparently non-committal expression will stick around. And, like it or loathe it, linguists say "yeah no" is a surprisingly effective communication tool."It's not going to disappear," Professor Burridge says. "It's always hard to predict with language change, but it looks like its use is on the increase."...
"All of these little markers have a very important role in conversation. They have roles in showing the relationship between speaker and hearer and this one has a linking function as well," Professor Burridge says.(Thanks for the link to John Hardy of Laputan Logic, who calls it "a quite prevalent Australian linguistic weirdism" and says "the 'yeah' is to acknowledge the possible validity of the other person's remark, the 'no' to deflect its implications.")In Australia, where the phrase has become entrenched in the past six years, "yeah no" can mean anything from "yes, I see that, but can we go back to the earlier topic" to an enthusiastic "yes, I can't reinforce that point enough". So, where does the distinction lie?
Professor Burridge says the phrase falls into three main categories, each determined by context. The literal agrees before adding another point, the abstract defuses a comment and the textual lets the speaker go back to an earlier point.
The next time a footballer answers "yeah no", be aware that there is more to the reply than just an "um-ah" prefix. In this sporting context, Professor Burridge says "yeah no" is often used in its abstract context; as a way to defuse a compliment by a bashful footballer.
"You've got to downplay the compliment but you can't reject it because that seems ungracious. It's a complicated little thing."
The OED's June 2004 Newsletter is called "19 April 2004: a day in the life of the OED" and contains descriptions of what the various editors, managers, planners, &c did on that day. It's full of great tidbits of the lexicographical life. One entry that puzzled me was:
Katherine Martin, Assistant Editor (North American Editorial Unit)Is anyone familiar with this verb "to other"? I'm guessing that it means something like 'to render alien or unfamiliar' (like German verfremden), but I'd like to know more.I was working on a draft entry for the verb other (and the related adjective othered). Due to the complex and philosophical nature of these terms (and our mutual interest in the subject matter), Abigail and I decided to split them up — she took on the noun othering — so that we could discuss the definitions in detail and share our research.
(Via aldiboronti at Wordorigins.)
Update. The draft entry is up, and here it is:
trans. (refl. in early use). To become conscious of by viewing as a distinct entity; (in later use) spec. to conceptualize (a people, a group, etc.) as excluded and intrinsically different from oneself. Cf. OTHER n. 9.I don't like it any better now that I see the examples.
1936 G. E. MUELLER Philos. of our Uncertainty 89 Thought posits and realizes itself by othering itself and taking the expression of this seeming other as its own. 1963 A. W. WATTS Two Hands of God Introd. 25 In mystical traditions, God ‘others’ himself in creating the world, in creating the appearance of innumerable creatures acting on their own. 1980 Boundary 8 301 Absorption of what we have already ‘othered’ can never return us to a state of paradisal identity; it can only identify us demonically with the terrifying alienated products of our differentiating consciousness. 1995 Grand Royal No. 2. 13/3 People who are ‘Othered’ in whatever way, made to feel marginal or suppressed or oppressed or whatever. 2003 Jrnl. Women's Hist. 15 159 Kurds similarly have been ‘othered’ by Turkish discourse as ‘backward’ and ‘traditional’, in opposition to the modern secular image of the Turk, and this image has been exported to the West.
othered a.
1980 P. WEISS You, I & Others 336 An *othered complex of individuals is quite different from othered individuals. 2003 Michigan Q. Rev. 42 653 The assumed ‘universality’ of straight white men's writing, and the policing and self-policing, the marginalization and self-marginalization, of othered groups' writings are two sides of the same racially and sexually delimited coin.
A correspondent has very kindly apprised me of an addition to the Online Books Page, namely A briefe and a playne introduction, teachyng how to pronounce the letters in the British tong, (now comenly called Walsh), by W. Salesburye (London, 1550)—it's available as a pdf file, accessible from here. It's a 39-page booklet doing just what the title promises, even if the continuation is perhaps false advertising: "...wherby an English man shal not only w[ith] ease read the said tong rightly: but markyng the same wel, it shal be a meane for him with one labour and diligence to attaine to the true and natural pronuncation of other expediente and most excellente languages." At any rate, here's the description of ch:
Ch, doeth whollye agree wyth the pronunciation of ch, also in the Germayne tonge, of the Greke chy, or the Hebrue cheth, or of gh, in Englyshe: And it hath no affinitie at al wyth ch, in Englyshe, excepte in these wordes, Mychael, Mychaelmas, and a fewe suche other. Ch also when it is the radical letter in anye Walshe worde, remayneth immutable in every place.
George[s?] Coedes (more properly Cœdès) was a remarkable scholar who "bestrode the field of Southeast Asian study for over half a century." What I am concerned with here, however, is his name. I don't know how to pronounce it. For a long time, apparently assimilating it to words like cœlacanthe, I pronounced it "say-DES" (to myself, that is—I don't think I've ever had occasion to discuss him with anyone else). But it occurs to me that it could equally well be "ko-eh-DES" (like coefficient). Since I have no idea of his family background or the origin of the name, I am at a loss. Does anybody know? (And by "know," I mean have actual information, like how they say it at the Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient where he taught for many years.)
[Note: o-e ligatures added in Cœdès and cœlacanthe.]
Update (July 2008): French Wikipedia says "prononcer 'cédesse'."
I was amazed and delighted, reading the fat double Summer Fiction issue of the New Yorker, to come across the following in the Aleksandar Hemon story "Szmura’s Room" (an excellent but grim story—I love Hemon's manic, word-drunk style, but he does have a Balkan sense of the world):
“Микола, I would have liked so much to have you as my grandson-in-law.” “Пани Майска, I am too young to get married,” Szmura said.Although it's normal to see Roman text in Cyrillic books, I think this is the first time I've seen Cyrillic text in an English context (outside of scholarly works, of course). The odd thing is that in the online version, the passage reads like this:
“Mikola, I would have liked so much to have you as my grandson-in-law.” “Pani Majcka, I am too young to get married,” Szmura said.I would have thought it would be easier to put the Cyrillic online than in the print version, but such does not appear to be the case. And why is the Ukrainian name Майска rendered "Majcka" when in the rest of the story it is given (correctly) as Mayska?
I've run into several excellent online resources today, and voilà, I share them with you!
1) Via the most excellent Grande Rousse, Charles Baudelaire, with sections on his life, his works, and "regards" (texts about him and his work). Here, to give you a sample, is the first edition of Les Fleurs du mal, one of the great explosions of poetry into an unsuspecting world (they also have the second).
2. wood s lot celebrates Anna Akmatova's birthday today with a splendid collection of links, the most astonishing of which to me is a video clip of the poet reading a bit of her poem "To the Muse."
3. Finally, but far from leastly, a hypertext edition of my favorite Faulkner novel (and one of my favorite novels, period), The Sound and the Fury. There are many more good Faulkner links at matteo's MetaFilter post, from which I took this gem.
I will have to look for a copy of Chto neponyatno u klassikov, ili Entsiklopediya russkogo byta XIX veka [What you don't understand in the classics, or Encyclopedia of daily life in the 19th century] (Moscow, 1998), a few excerpts of which are online here, dealing with the ways people addressed one another. As anyone at all familiar with prerevolutionary Russian society knows, inferiors called superiors by resounding titles while superiors used the equivalent of "my good man," or simply a name, to them. The most interesting of the excerpts concerns the suffix -s, a contracted form of sudar' 'sir,' omnipresent in prerevolutionary literature as an indication of politeness or servility, depending on the situation. It was known as слово-ер-с [slovo-er-s], from the old name of the letter s (slovo, literally 'word') and er (pronounced "yer"), the name of the hard sign formerly used after all words ending in a consonant. In The Brothers Karamazov the disgraced Staff Captain Snegirev says to call him Captain Slovoyersov, since in the second half of his life he has had to begin humbly using the -s ending. And there's a wonderful quote from Pushkin's Pikovaya dama [Queen of spades] (the beginning of Chapter 6):
—Atande!
—Kak vy smeli mne skazat' atande?
—Vashe prevoskhoditel'stvo, ya skazal atande-s!
["Wait!"
"How dare you say 'Wait' to me?"
"Your Excellency, i said 'Wait, sir'!"]
(Via Avva.)
Addendum. I finally found slovo-erik in Dahl, hiding two-thirds of the way down column 256 of Volume 4 (of the third edition, 1903-1909, edited and corrected by Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, the only one worth getting from a linguistic point of view); the definition reads: "-s, added to words v znak osoboi vezhlivosti prezhnikh vremen ['as a mark of special politeness of former times,' an odd phrasing that leaves it unclear whether it is the politeness or the suffix that is obsolete]." This implies that even before the revolution the slovo-er-s or slovo-erik was considered a relic.
Update. When I wrote this entry, I had no idea why the final -s of slovo-er-s was there, but I suppose I figured it was too picky a detail to get into. Now, thanks to a commenter on this post, I know: in the old system of reading Russian by syllables, using the old names of the Cyrillic letters, a final hard sign was read with the preceding consonant following it, so that, e.g., великъ [velikъ] would be read "веди езь, ве; люди иже, ли, вели; како еркъ, великъ" [vedi + ez' = ve; lyudi + izhe = li > veli; kako + yerkъ > velikъ], where yerkъ is yer (hard sign) plus the preceding k (called kako). In exactly the same way, the suffix -съ (in the old spelling) was read "слово-ер-съ." Mystery solved!
A 1903 book, Folk Tales From the Russian, has been put online. It has very nice Art Nouveau-ish illustrations and the translations are quaintly charming, but I confess the reason I'm memorializing it here is the name of the author, Verra Xenophontovna Kalamatiano de Blumenthal. She hereby replaces Astrid Pouppez de Ketteris de Hollaeken and the rest of the Belgian aristocracy in my onomastic affections. (Via Plep.)
I went to the Donnell again and this time found fewer pickings—but I was glad to discover A.V. Fedorov's Vvedenie v teoriyu perevoda [Introduction to the theory of translation] (Moskva, 1953) for 25 cents. As soon as I saw the date I knew what I would find, and sure enough, the Foreword begins: "Questions of translation, linked in the closest fashion on the one hand with the disciplines of scientific linguistics—general linguistics, lexicology, grammar, and the stylistics of separate languages, and on the other with the history and theory of literature and the wide field of historical and philosophical sciences, can be fruitfully decided only in the light and on the basis of the works of I.V. Stalin on linguistics." Chapter One, after a quick couple of paragraphs of groundwork, gets down to business: a quote from Marx and Engels ("Language is as old as consciousness"), a quote from Lenin ("Language is the most valuable means of human intercourse [obshchenie]"), and an entire paragraph by the Great Leader and Teacher (language as tool—I can't bring myself to translate the whole gobbet of verbiage). But the book isn't valuable only as a curiosity; it's got lots of bilingual passages, with detailed discussion of the problems involved. I just wonder how quickly a revised edition came out after Stalin died that very year.
A Latin Wiki! "Ave! Vicipædia (sive Wikipedia) cooperandi opus est ut creatur Libera Encyclopaedia. Omnes ad participandum invitati sunt. Nunque sunt 2453 articuli." (I note with a sigh that the only actual article so far under Linguistica is on Noam Chomsky. At least it's nice and short.) The list of
Nationes mundi is lots of fun, and leads to questions like "Why do they Latinize Djibouti (as Dzibutum) but not Burkina Faso, particularly when Burcina would be such a fine Latinate form? (Via Avva, who links to its short but useful Sententia section in the course of his discussion of the phrase in vino veritas and Blok's distortion of it.)
The transcript of the Nova program "In Search of the First Language" is well worth reading; the discussants are real linguists, unlike so many of the talking heads that wind up on TV (I went to grad school with one of them), and you can learn a lot from what they say. But as I wrote on the Wordorigins thread where this was posted, you should take this caveat very seriously:
This picture that Dolgopolsky paints of the Proto-Nostratic world is controversial and not widely accepted. In fact, most linguists argue that any attempt to come up with a language spoken fifteen thousand years ago is pure speculation.Nostratic is wishful thinking. The rest is real linguistics.
Larry McMurtry, in his NYRB review of Grant and Twain: The Story of a Friendship That Changed America, by Mark Perry, quotes Grant's famous description of meeting the defeated Lee at Appomatox, one paragraph of which reads:
What General Lee's feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result, and was too manly to show it. Whatever his feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation; but my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly....(I urge you to read the rest of the quote at the linked article; Grant was a wonderfully vivid writer.) McMurtry then remarks on one word in the passage:
Spelling, in the nineteenth century, was, in the main, a field for creativity; Grant spelled as the spirit moved him. In the passage quoted, from the Library of America edition, there is one word that bears looking at: "impassible," referring to Robert E. Lee's face. Jean Edward Smith, in his excellent biography of Grant, corrects this to "impassive," which is no doubt what was meant; but the word suggests at least a few of the seven types of ambiguity the critic William Empson used to brood over. Was Grant merely saying that Lee had such perfect control over his emotions that no shadow of what he might be feeling could pass across his features? But might the word also have a military shading? The fact, or at least the legend, of Lee's "impassibility" was a big problem for the Union generals, until Grant came along and started winning battles.However, Merriam-Webster gives 'impassive' as a second meaning of impassible, so I'm not sure why Smith would feel the need to emend it. In any event, I always enjoy such ruminations over the implications of a word.
Addendum. While I'm on the subject of Grant, I should quote the last of the notes he passed to his doctors as he was dying of throat cancer:
I do not sleep though I sometimes doze off a little. If I am up I am talked to and in my efforts to answer cause pain. The fact is I think I am a verb instead of a personal pronoun. A verb is anything that signifies to be; to do; to suffer. I signify all three.
No, I don't mean another warblog, I mean Martialis, a blog devoted to the poet Martial. As Nick says:
This is an insanely ambitious project. On this blog I intend to present the Latin text and an English translation of all the epigrams of the first-century AD poet Marcus Valerius Martialis, better known to the English-speaking world as Martial. By my reckoning there are 1565 epigrams together with the five prose prefaces - which at a rate of one a day will take the better part of four-and-a-half years to cover.He's only three poems into it at the moment, so it's a good time to start reading. (Via Uncle Jazzbeau’s Gallimaufrey.)By concentrating on one poem a day I hope to encourage readers to make their own observations in the comments section and develop a discussion to which anyone can contribute on matters of translation and interpretation: some books and some poems are rather better served than others by existing translations and exegetical works.
Update. Alas, the project seems to have died in March 2005, in the middle of Book III. Ave atque vale!
I just discovered that each major English-speaking region has its own way of pronouncing this word, and apparently (to judge by this WordOrigins thread, where I discovered the situation) each is unaware of the others. I had always assumed everyone pronounced it SODD-er, as we do in the US (short o, no l). Now I find that Australians say SOHL-der (long o, with l), while the OED says "('sQld@(r), 's@Ud@(r))," which means Brits use a long o (SO) when they omit the l but a short one when they pronounce it (SOL). So what I want to know is, what do Canadians say? Other variants and anecdotes are, of course, welcome.
The Telegraph has begun a series of excerpts from Port Out, Starboard Home by Michael Quinion, to be published by Penguin at £12.99 on July 1 (in the UK, obviously). The first begins with a good summary of various wrong ideas people get about where words come from and continues with a discussion of the marvelous phrase "all mouth and trousers"
This strange expression comes from the north of England and is used, mainly by women in my experience, as a sharp-tongued and effective putdown of a certain kind of pushy, over-confident male. Proverbial expressions like this are notoriously hard to pin down: we have no idea exactly where it comes from nor when it first appeared, although it is recorded from the latter part of the 19th century onwards. However, we're fairly sure that it is a pairing of "mouth'', meaning insolence or cheekiness, with "trousers'', a pushy sexual bravado. It's a wonderful example of metonymy ("a container for the thing contained'').
The phrase seems to have become known, and surprisingly popular, among southern English writers in the last decades of the 20th century, perhaps as a result of the airing of a series of television comedies based in the North, such as the BBC's Last of the Summer Wine. What is interesting about the saying from a folk etymological point of view is that its opaqueness has led its modern users to reinterpret it as "all mouth and no trousers''.I look forward to forthcoming excerpts, and to the book. (Via Catalogue Blog.)For example, an article in the Daily Record in 2002 quoted a Scottish politician as saying, "The First Minister is all mouth and no trousers''; a piece in the People newspaper described a pop group in the same terms; the Guardian in June 2002 said: "Bloody men. All mouth and no trousers.'' It has reached the stage in which the older, non-negative form is in great danger of vanishing, though Australia and New Zealand seem to be staying with it (when they use it at all, which isn't often).
Metropolitan writers are trying here to make sense of something obscure that they have not often heard in its native surroundings, and are getting it muddled. They confuse it with other put-downs that are conventionally phrased with a negative, such as "all talk and no action'' or "all fur coat and no knickers''. To have no trousers on is not only embarrassing, the argument seems to go, but is a state in which one is not ready for action (outside the bedroom, that is).
It's a pity it should be changing through ignorance. It's a lovely phrase, as effective a snub as anyone could want – all the better for being slightly obscure – and it's one that ought to be preserved pristine.
Music speaks for itself,The great soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy passed away yesterday at the painfully early age of 69 (Ben Ratliff has a good obituary in today's NY Times). I can't communicate to you his keening, inimitable tone or explain how perfectly attuned he was to the oddly-angled music of Thelonious Monk (if you want to give him a try, there's a list of recommendations here—I'd start with Reflections, whose plangent "Ask Me Now" and "Reflections" make my eyes smart every time); fortunately, as Ratliff says, he "insisted on a literary dimension to his work, incorporating texts by novelists, poets and philosophers," so I can honor his memory by quoting a couple of poems he set so brilliantly on one of his best records, Owl (1977, available on the Saravah compilation Scratching the Seventies):
And needs no explanation
Or justification:
Either it is alive, or it is not.
Le Hibou
Mon pauvre coeur est un hibou
Qu'on cloue, qu'on décloue, qu'on recloue.
De sang, d'ardeur, il est à bout.
Tous ceux qui m'aiment, je les loue.
[The Owl
My poor heart is an owl
That gets nailed and unnailed and renailed.
It's had it with blood and ardor.
All those who love me, I praise them.]
Notre Vie
Nous n'irons pas au but un par un mais par deux
Nous connaissant par deux nous nous connaîtrons tous
Nous nous aimerons tous et nos enfants riront
De la légende noire où pleure un solitaire
[Our Life
We won't get where we're going one by one but by twos
Knowing each other by twos we'll all know each other
We'll all love each other and our children will laugh
At the black legend in which a solitary cries]
Update. My favorite jazz station, WKCR, is playing Lacy until 7 PM EDT today (Sunday) and all day Monday (midnight to midnight). You can access the internet streams (RealAudio and mp3) here. Enjoy!
Another new language blog, by Billy McCormac: "Lagomduktig documents my quest to unravel the mysteries of translating the Swedish language." The title "is a combination of two more or less 'untranslatable' words: lagom (just enough, just right) and duktig (clever, smart)." If you have any interest in Swedish, check it out.
I encountered a number of words new to me in an enigmatic post chez l'Eudæmoniste (chez whom there is nil postiche) that is either a riff on the word post itself or a gloomy meditation (or of course both). It consists of words and phrases built around the syllable post, beginning with the hapax postation (OED: 'The placing of one thing after another'; only in 1607 Schol. Disc. agst. Antichr. i. ii. 95 The postation of the wine doth not preiudice it, therefore the postponing of the Crosse doth not preiudice it neither) and ending with a second hapax, postreme ('Last, hindmost; absol. one who is last': 1553 Bale Gardiner's De vera Obed. G j b, They were counsailed of som bodye not to contende to be called supremes, as longe as they are still postremes), but the word that buttonholed me was postliminy, which turns out to mean 'In Rom. Law, The right of any person who had been banished or taken captive, to assume his former civic privileges on his return home. Hence, in Internat. Law, The restoration to their former state of persons and things taken in war, when they come again into the power of the nation to which they belonged.'
There are, incidentally, two italicized phrases in the list which do not contain post; if your classical education is up to snuff, however, you will know why they are there. If not, Google is your friend.
The ArtLex Art Dictionary has "definitions for more than 3,600 terms used in discussing visual culture, along with thousands of supporting images, pronunciation notes, great quotations and cross-references." A sample entry:
Rayonism - A type of abstract or semi-abstract painting characterized by the fragmentation of forms into masses of slanting lines. It was practised from 1912-1914 by Natalya S. Goncharova (Russian-French, 1881-1962), Mikhail Larionov (Russian-French, 1881-1964), and a few other Russian painters. Larionov's manifesto on Rayonism stated that it is a synthesis of Cubism, Futurism, and Orphism." Aspects of each of those isms can indeed be seen in Rayonist paintings -- Cubism's breaking up of forms, Futurism's movement of forms, and Orphism's rich color. In addition, the Rayonists expounded a theory that objects emitted invisible rays which the painters could manipulate to their own purposes. "The rays which emanate from the objects and cross over one another give rise to rayonist forms. The artist transforms these by bending them to his desire for aesthetic expression." Goncharova and Larionov often applied the paint in their Rayonist works with palette knives.All the significant terms are linked to other entries, and the text is followed by reproductions of five Rayonist paintings. A very useful site. (Via wood s lot.)Also called "Rayonnism," "Rayism," and, in Russian, "Luchism."
Reading a review by A. Alvarez (one of my favorite depressive Brit writers) of a Caroline Moorehead biography of Martha Gellhorn (one of my favorite reporters) in the April 8 NYRB, I came across an excellent little snippet from a youthful letter of hers:
The great temptation is to do what I call "fine writing," the beautiful mellow phrases and the carefully chosen words. That I must avoid like the plague; only the simple words; only the straight clear sentences. I am terribly frightened of "style."Not the final truth, of course, but a useful corrective to one's florid tendencies.
Mark Liberman has a most interesting series of posts at Language Log, taking off from a querulous comment of mine on a Semantic Compositions entry ("I was disappointed in Mark's post; I hate to see him joining the bandwagon of people making easy jokes about winetalk"). Anyone at all interested in the topic should read Apologia pro risu suo, Grand Cru Smackdown, and More on winetalk culture. I should say that I did not mean to imply that the exotic descriptions used by so many wine writers are all exact and scientific, or that I do not myself often find them funny as hell. In the immortal words of Theodore Sturgeon, "90% of everything is crud," and that certainly applies to wine babble. I merely resent the fact that the noble art and science of wine appreciation is so frequently the target of free-floating populist resentment and suffers indignities not often heaped on, say, art historians (who are at least equally given to unverifiable specifications and unsuitable metaphors). I just wish Americans drank wine as routinely as soft drinks so they wouldn't see it as some sort of Old World boondoggle.
Oh, and as to the ruckus over the 2003 Chateau Pavie: no one in their right mind would try to judge a Bordeaux that soon; it's not going to be drinkable by normal people for several years, and it's a waste to drink a good Bordeaux before a decade has elapsed. I'm not surprised the experts differ.
A new language blog—they're coming thick and fast! Joshua (of Foolippic and Books Do Furnish A Room) has started Logomacy (Between logomachy and logomancy...) because:
First: I wanted to play around with the Wordpress blogging software so that I can move away from the now moribund MovableType 2.6xHis latest entry makes an interesting point about learning languages: "all language learning is over-learning. In other words the entire point of learning something in a new language should be to learn it until recall is not just effortless, but comes to mind unbidden before you even have to direct your attention to recall."Second: Recently I’ve been doing a lot of stuff relating to words and language (reading linguistics blogs, studying Latin and Old English, creating wikis and blogs relating to both those pursuits) and while I’ve been blogging about some of it, I’ve been feeling that none of my current blogs is really appropriate for these topics. The handful of readers of Foolippic, for instance, don’t care about Old English at all (and nor should they).
'I started to translate in seventy-three
in the schoolyard. For a bit of fun
to begin with – the occasional "fuck"
for the bite of another language's smoke
at the back of my throat, its bitter chemicals.
Soon I was hooked on whole sentences
behind the shed, and lessons in Welsh
seemed very boring. I started on print,
Jeeves & Wooster, Dick Francis, James Bond,
in Welsh covers. That worked for a while
until Mam discovered Jean Plaidy inside
a Welsh concordance one Sunday night.
There were ructions: a language, she screamed,
should be for a lifetime. Too late for me.
Soon I was snorting Simenon
and Flaubert. Had to read much more
for any effect. One night I OD'd
after reading far too much Proust.
I came to, but it scared me. For a while
I went Welsh-only but it was bland
and my taste was changing. Before too long
I was back on translating, found that three
languages weren't enough. The "ch"
in German was easy, Rilke a buzz...
For a language fetishist like me
sex is part of the problem. Umlauts make me sweat,
so I need a multilingual man
but they're rare in West Wales and tend to be
married already. If only I'd kept
myself much purer, with simpler tastes,
the Welsh might be living...
Detective, you speak
Russian, I hear, and Japanese.
Could you whisper some softly?
I'm begging you. Please...'
Via Frizzy Logic, where you will find some wonderful remarks on the sexiness of foreign languages (mentioning the immortal A Fish Called Wanda). And I will have to investigate Lewis further:
Gwyneth Lewis is bilingual in Welsh and English and after being recognised as a poet in English whilst she was studying at Oxford in the early 1980s published a Welsh collection, Sonedau Redsa a Cherddi Eraill (1990) before her English debut Parables and Faxes (1995). Her early poem sequence 'Welsh Espionage' was notable for sustaining its conceit of Welshness as a concept to be smuggled through the lines of the dominant English culture over many formal stanzas, inspired by Auden's early spy-in-the-northern-landscape poems:'Close shave at the station when I asked my way.
Ticket collector quizzed me: Did I know
The pubs or the chapels better? Got awayWith mumbling 'Neither' and then leaving fast.
I mustn't let on that I speak Welsh
Or they're sure to connect me with my past.'...
The excellent Grant Barrett (aka Mo Nickels) has started a new word site:
Double-Tongued Word Wrester records words as they enter and leave the English language. It focuses upon slang, jargon, and other niche categories which include new, foreign, hybrid, archaic, obsolete, and rare words. Special attention is paid to the lending and borrowing of words between the various Englishes and other languages, even where a word is not a fully naturalized citizen in its new language.There are a lot of word sites out there, you say? Yes, but most of them are seriously untrustworthy, being concerned more with fun than with facts. This one you can take to the bank; Grant is an actual lexicographer, for Oxford University Press in New York City. The entries are not only fun and interesting, they come with extensive citations. The latest, for example, is "jitterbug n. a gang member; a juvenile delinquent." Now, this is a meaning I was totally unaware of; I knew only the Merriam-Webster definition 'a jazz variation of the two-step...; one who dances the jitterbug.' (I checked Cassell to get the British perspective, and was surprised to find that the dance-related meanings are labeled "Hist." and the primary meaning is given as 'a person who spreads alarm,' yet another meaning unknown to me!) The definition is followed by nine citations, from a 1941 Bosley Crowther movie review ("The big holdup job gets messed up by a couple of 'jitterbugs' who are assisting on it, the girl turns out a great disappointment, the gunman is rendered a fugitive with a moll and a dog who love him") to a quote from last Sunday's Palm Beach Post ("...he would join the idle, young black males in jail. 'Jitterbugs,' Lupo called them, using street lingo"). I'm going to bookmark the site instantly, and I suggest you all do the same.
Oh: what is a "double-tongued word wrester"? Glad you asked. The FAQ page explains:
What About That Weird Name? "Double-Tongued Word Wrester" comes from a citation in the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, under the entry for word, n.:(Thanks to plep for the link.)1571 GOLDING Calvin on Ps. xii. 3: This dubblehartednesse..maketh men dubble~tunged & woordwresters.
It's a reference to Arthur Golding's translation of Calvin's commentary on the Psalms.
Anyone who studies theology will immediately note that to be called a "double-tongued word wrester" is not to be complimented. To be double-tongued is to speak with a forked tongue, to be a liar and a deceiver, while a word wrester is one who picks and chooses his own interpretation of scripture in order to have it conform to his own lifestyle, rather than modifying his lifestyle according to the standard doctrine of his faith.
Outside of Arthur Golding's work, I have not been able to find the two parts of the term—double-tongued and word wrester—together. So I'll join them here as a new, different word, and say that a double-tongued word wrester is one who finds a home in more than one language and who draws forth words from the zeitgeist like plucking drowning sailors from the sea, or like pulling thorns from the paw of a lion, or like picking blackberries from the brierpatch.