HAT AND LOG IN PORTUGUESE.

Tiago Tresoldi, a Brazilian blogger, is reposting entries from here and Language Log in Portuguese on his site Ars Rhetorica. I'd like to thank him for taking the trouble; may his efforts help jump-start a renaissance of linguistic understanding in the home of o jogo bonito! Here's the start of his version of my Bakhtin post, Smoking your own:

Fumando tudo

Esta é uma história terrível com toques de humor negro em si. Mikhail Bakhtin passou os últimos anos da década de 1930 trabalhando naquilo que muitos consideram sua obra-prima, um estudo sobre o romance alemão do século XVIII (em especial, o Bildungsroman). Vou citar o restante da história a partir de dois livros publicados, já que há muito material impreciso rodando pela internet (por exemplo, algumas pessoas situam o fato durante o cerco a Leningrado, mas pelo que sei Bakhtin vivia nas cercanias de Moscou durante a guerra). O primeiro é a p. xiii da introdução de Michael Holquist à coleção de Bakhtin Speech Genres and Other Late Essays...

As lagniappe, here's a piquant bit from Beckett's short monologue Krapp's Last Tape, courtesy of wood s lot:

(reading from dictionary). State—or condition—of being—or remaining—a widow—or widower. (Looks up. Puzzled.) Being—or remaining?... (Pause. He peers again at dictionary. Reading.) "Deep weeds of viduity"... Also of an animal, especially a bird... the vidua or weaver bird... Black plumage of male... (He looks up. With relish.) The vidua-bird!

XAPO.

I recently bought Deez to Blues, the new album by the wonderful bassist Mario Pavone, and was struck by some of the song titles, in particular "Deez," "Xapo," and "Ocbo." Google is no help with the first and last because of competing acronyms and hip respelling respectively, but xapo gets some good linguistic information... too much, in fact. It's evidently a word in Basque, Uzbek, and Portuguese, though it's not in my dictionaries, so I don't know what it means in any of them. In Nahuatl it means 'perforated, pierced.' It's part of a couple of compound verbs in Pirahã. In New Caledonia, u xapo means 'spirit of him.' It's the name of a hill tribe in Vietnam. And it's doubtless other things as well. But what it means to Mario Pavone, I have no idea. All I can tell you is that the album is a delight, a marriage of tradition and modernity, adventurous without ear assault, melodious without moldy-figgery. As Troy Collins says in a rave review for All About Jazz, "Deez to Blues is a high water mark in a consistently exceptional discography."

RECURSIVE STARLINGS.

There's been a lot of talk about a new study that claims "European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) accurately recognize acoustic patterns defined by a recursive, self-embedding, context-free grammar." I'm not competent to evaluate it (and have an admitted prejudice against the whole talking-animal thing), so I'll send you to Mark Liberman for a thorough discussion of the merits of the study. Me, I'm just going to quote Yreka Bakery in the highly respected Speculative Grammarian:

An apparently new speech disorder a linguistics department our correspondent visited was affected by has appeared. Those affected our correspondent a local grad student called could hardly understand apparently still speak fluently. The cause experts the LSA sent investigate remains elusive. Frighteningly, linguists linguists linguists sent examined are highly contagious. Physicians neurologists psychologists other linguists called for help called for help called for help didn’t help either. The disorder experts reporters SpecGram sent consulted investigated apparently is a case of pathological center embedding.

All I have to say is, starlings linguists language loggers readers follow commented on the work of studied are damn smart!

YORUBA.

I just finished Jane Stevenson's The Winter Queen, which considerably disappointed me: Elizabeth Stuart had a long and interesting life, intimately tied up with the maddeningly complex Thirty Years' War (which began with her husband's election as King of Bohemia, making war with the Habsburgs inevitable, and one strand of which was the couple's long struggle, from their Dutch exile, to recover the Palatinate), but the book (despite the promise of the title) focuses almost entirely on an invented character, a prince of the Yoruba kingdom of Oyo who after spending years as a slave in the Dutch East Indies is freed and sent to Leiden to study theology. The plot is absurd, but my main complaint is that by forcing together two utterly different histories and cultures, each complex and obscure enough to deserve (and require) its own book to establish its reality in the reader's mind, the novel fails to do justice to either, tossing in a few facts about each more as exotic ornaments than as parts of a coherent pattern. (Contrast, say, Mary Renault, who brilliantly brings an alien time and culture to vivid life in her novels about Ancient Greece.) Furthermore, though this is a minor irritation, it's written in standard Historical Novelese, with solemn avoidance of contractions and use of musty words and turns of phrase: "I cannot tell. Charles has no money to pay mercenaries and is not like to get any. I do not think that the war will go beyond the seas, since I cannot see that anyone will aid my brother. In any case, Parliament blockades the sea..."

However, I did learn some interesting words. For instance, did you know that spagyric is an old word meaning 'alchemy,' 'alchemist,' or 'alchemical'? (1593 G. HARVEY Pierce's Super. 29 Yet who such monarches for Phisique, Chirurgery, Spagirique,.. as some of these arrant impostors?; 1613 DRUMMOND OF HAWTHORNDEN Cypress Grove Wks. 127 Can the spagyrick by his art restore, for a Space, to the dry and withered Rose, the natural Purple and Blush; c1643 LD. HERBERT Autobiog. 49 As for the Chymic or Spagyric Medicines, I cannot commend them to the use of my posterity.) And in investigating the Palatinate I learned that "In the Golden Bull of 1356, the Palatinate was made one of the secular electorates, and given the hereditary offices of Archsteward (Erztruchseß) of the Empire and Imperial Vicar (Reichsverweser) of the western half of Germany. From this time forth, the Count Palatine of the Rhine was usually known as the Elector Palatine (Kurfürst von der Pfalz)"—I'm always on the lookout for impressive titles.

But what brought me up short was discovering that the word Yoruba is a recent creation; the page on Oyo linked above says it originated "during the nineteenth century, applied not by the Yoruba themselves but by outsiders to describe a series of city-states where variations of the same language were spoken." Andrew Dalby's Dictionary of Languages agrees: "Yoruba was originally an outsiders' name for the language and people, but it has long been widely accepted." The OED just says "Native name"; does anybody have any further information on the origin of the word?

By the way, if you have any interest in the most famous Yoruba writer, Wole Soyinka, please read the long and thoughtful comment by "St Antonym" in this Cassandra Pages thread.

TWO QUOTES.

Some amusement for your Wednesday.

1) From Anthony Lane's "High and Low: Flying on the Really Cheap" in last week's New Yorker:

At a recent lunch, I ment somebody who swore to the truth of a story from the nineteen-eighties. He was sitting in an Aeroflot plane at an Italian airport. In fact, he had been sitting there for four hours, on a warm day, with nothing to eat or drink. The plane, like many of its brothers and sisters in the Aeroflot fleet, was not in good shape, and any prospect of an imminent takeoff had long since receded. Finally, the man lost patience. He attracted the attention of the cabin staff and asked for a drink of water. Their reaction could not have been swifter. A sturdy Russian female flight attendant strode down the aisle and slapped him in the face.

I've flown Aeroflot, and I can tell you that if that isn't true, it's certainly plausible.

2) From molcha:

Если бы Пьера Менара не существовало, его надо было бы выдумать.
[If Pierre Menard didn't exist, he would have had to be invented.]

(Via Avva.)

CHIN-CHIN.

In the comments to my post on napoo, xiaolongnu mentioned the expression chin-chin, which I would have placed in the same WWI era and soldierly milieu (major raising glass of claret: "Chin-chin, old chap! Drink up, the Boche await!"); it turns out it goes back much farther than that. The Hobson-Jobson entry begins:

CHIN-CHIN. In the "pigeon English" of Chinese ports this signifies 'salutation, compliments,' or 'to salute,' and is much used by Englishmen as slang in such senses. It is a corruption of the Chinese phrase ts'ingts'ing, Pekingese ch'ing-ch'ing, a term of salutation answering to 'thank-you,' 'adieu.' In the same vulgar dialect chin-chin joss means religious worship of any kind (see JOSS). It is curious that the phrase occurs in a quaint story told to William of Rubruck by a Chinese priest whom he met at the Court of the Great Kaan (see below). And it is equally remarkable to find the same story related with singular closeness of correspondence out of "the Chinese books of Geography" by Francesco Carletti, 350 years later (in 1600).

The William of Rubruck citation takes the expression back to the thirteenth century:

1253.— "One day there sate by me a certain priest of Cathay, dressed in a red cloth of exquisite colour, and when I asked him whence they got such a dye, he told me how in the eastern parts of Cathay there were lofty cliffs on which dwelt certain creatures in all things partaking of human form, except that their knees did not bend. . . . The huntsmen go thither, taking very strong beer with them, and make holes in the rocks which they fill with this beer. . . . Then they hide themselves and these creatures come out of their holes and taste the liquor, and call out 'Chin Chin.'"—Itinerarium, in Rec. de Voyages, &c., iv. 328.

The first evidence the OED finds for English is cited from Hobson-Jobson (I believe that's what "Y." means):
1795 M. SYMES Embassy to Ava 295 (Y.) We soon fixed them in their seats, both parties.. repeating Chin Chin, Chin Chin, the Chinese term of salutation.

And these illustrate characteristic twentieth-century use:
1929 J. B. PRIESTLEY Good Compan. II. vii. 439 Chin-chin, Effie my dear, and all the best for Xmas!
1938 HEMINGWAY Fifth Column (1939) I. ii, Downa hatch. Cherio. Chin chin.
1962 ‘M. INNES’ Connoisseur's Case iii. 34 Going on your way, are you? Well, chin-chin!
1967 P. JONES Fifth Defector iv. 36 Two glasses appeared, with ice tinkling in the Scotch. Paul raised his, smiling. ‘Chin chin.’

For etymology, the OED says only "Chinese ts'ing ts'ing"; this is annoyingly vague both as to "dialect" and meaning—they should really add characters to at least the online edition. Does anyone have more detailed information about the Chinese use of this phrase?

MOCHA.

The English word mocha (a kind of coffee) is pronounced "moka" and derives from the port in Yemen (Arabic المخا [al-Mukhā]). Ever since I learned that one of Melville's sources for Moby Dick was a historical whale named Mocha Dick, I had assumed it was the same word, presumably from the sense 'a dark chocolate-brown color,' and pronounced it accordingly, but Chris Patterson at Wordorigins directed me to the Wikipedia article for Mocha Island (in Spanish Isla Mocha) off the coast of Chile, which informs me that "The waters off the island are also noted as the home to a famous 19th century sperm whale, Mocha Dick, the inspiration for the fictional whale Moby Dick"; clearly the name was pronounced just the way it's spelled, with /ch/ rather than /k/. A small thing, but important to us pedants.

NA(R)POO.

Conrad H. Roth, the learned and acerbic proprietor of Varieties of Unreligious Experience (and self-described "unmoored intellectual desperately seeking a thesis-topic"), has a post that brings to my attention an unusual slang term. After a discussion of "the old WW1 satirical journal, The Wipers Times" (Wipers being a jovial deformation of the name of the Belgian town Ypres), and quoting a nice quatrain by Gilbert Frankau, he concludes:

The Wipers texts, both prose and verse, are full of slang still vibrant and uncontained; a famous example is na poo or narpoo, from the French 'il n'y a plus', meaning 'there's none left', or more generally, 'no good'. Hence:

The privit to the sergeant said
"I wants my blooming rum."
"Na poo," the sergeant curtly said,
And sucked his jammy thumb.

Narpoo indeed. An example of a word dragging meaning into itself like a vortex, the finest moments of a popular vocabulary; compare 'fuck' now, or 'quoz' in the 1840s (for which see Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions, chapter 13).

The Cassell Dictionary of Slang lists it as:
napoo [1910s-40s] finished, ended.

The OED, in a June 2003 draft revision, says it's "colloq. (orig. Army slang). Now rare" and includes two more recent citations:
1973 L. Meynell Thirteen Trumpeters v. 81 Prudence.. fell down dead in the croupier's bag. Fini. Napoo.
1989 V. Scannell Soldiering On 54 Compree mon Kamerad? Jig-jig, parley-voo, Shufti zubrick, quois-kateer San fairy ann, napoo.

"Shufti" (from Arabic) is slang for 'a glance, look' and "San fairy ann" is evidently ça ne fait rien, but I have no idea what "zubrick" and "quois-kateer" might be. [Charles Perry in the comments solves the mystery: "'Quois kateer' is Arabic 'kwayyis katiir,' very good. It shows up in the chorus of an old Army song, 'You're my little Gyppo bint [Egyptian girl], you're quois kateer.' ... 'Zubrick' (zubrak) I fear, means 'your penis.'"]

And here's the online text of Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds (1841), courtesy of MetaFilter; if you've never encountered it, it's well worth your while.

COMPANIONWAY.

Companionway is one of those words I've seen from time to time and never bothered to look up; the general sense 'something you walk along on a ship' sufficed for my purposes. But in reading Jane Stevenson's The Winter Queen (I'm on a 17th-century kick these days) I hit the line "she pointed him speechlessly towards the stairs, steep as a ship's companionway" and realized I had a completely misleading, if vague, image of a companionway, so I looked it up. Turns out it's (in Merriam-Webster's words) 'a ship's stairway from one deck to another'; M-W says it's from companion 'a hood covering at the top of a companionway' and derives that "by folk etymology from Dutch kampanje poop deck." You mean it has nothing to do with the usual word companion? thought I—but it turns out it's not that simple. Here's the OED:

cf. Du. kompanje, now usually kampanje, ‘quarterdeck’ (i.e. above the cabin in the old ships of the line), ... corresp. to OF. compagne ‘chambre du majordome d'une galère’ (Littré), It. compagna, more fully chambre de la compagne, camera della compagna, ... from It. and med.L. compagna, ... ‘vivres, provisions de bouche’ (Jal).
The (camera della) Compagna was thus originally the pantry or store-room of provisions in the mediæval galley, found already in 14th c. Pantero-Pantera, Armata Navale (Rome 1613) iv. 45, describes it as ‘la camera della Campagna, che serve come una dispensa, nella quale sta il vino, il companatico, cioè carne salata, il formaggio, l'oglio, l'aceto, i salumi, e l'altre robbe simili’ (Jal). The name has passed in Du. and Eng. to other structures erected on the deck. In Eng. corrupted by sailors into conformity with COMPANION¹ (to which it is indeed related in origin).

So a Vulgar Latin word meaning 'what one eats with bread' (cum pane) becomes a Romance word for 'provisions' and thus (via a phrase 'room for provisions, ship's storeroom') to a particular cabin and then the deck associated with it, but its Dutch form kompanje sounded enough like the word for 'someone who shares your bread with you' that English sailors pulled it back into that form. Lovely! (But why does M-W ignore this backstory and leave the word's history at the Dutch phase?)

KAMKIN EVICTED, BOOKS JUNKED.

This Feb. 15 story by Jaime Ciavarra depresses me tremendously. It's always sad when a bookstore goes out of business, but when the books are actually destroyed it's horrible:

Thousands of books—torn, tattered, spines broken—were lumped into literary mountains on a Gaithersburg parking lot, men shoveling them into two green, 10-ton Dumpsters...

A Russian bookstore that has long been a haven for immigrants, researchers, and—some say—even spies and CIA agents during the Cold War, unexpectedly closed its doors last week when the owner was evicted.

Thousands of books, all in Russian and some still in plastic packaging, were taken to the trash transfer station at Shady Grove to be recycled.

Victor Kamkin Inc., one of the largest Russian book distributors in the United States, was nearly six months overdue in rent at the brick building at 220 Girard Street in Olde Towne, the property manager said.

Last week, when the store owner had not moved the books from the site, First Potomac Realty Trust began the eviction process, removing nearly 400,000 of the estimated 600,000 Russian books as customers watched, and tried to salvage some titles, in the bitter cold...

The bookstore, which was previously housed in Rockville, came close to meeting a similar fate in 2002 when Kalageorgi fell nearly $200,000 behind in rent.

The store and books were saved when a going out of business sale raised record revenue, and some politicos, including County Executive Douglas M. Duncan, and the Library of Congress, moved to stop the eviction.

Kamkin Books moved to the Gaithersburg site in mid 2002, Dawson said.

The store’s Web site says their books will now be sold exclusively online.

For many in the Russian immigrant community, the closing of the store is a dispirited ending to years of tradition, said some who watched the eviction process Wednesday morning.

The sight of books being destroyed was particularly disheartening to those from Russia, a culture that holds books in high regard, said Gayl Gutman, president of The Friends of Rockville Library, a nonprofit voluntary organization.

I bought many books, including my four-volume set of Dahl's great Russian dictionary, at the Rockville store, and I wish I'd had the opportunity to rummage through that dumpster before the books became landfill. I note that the Kamkin website says "We will no longer be offering books for retail sale through this website." (Via Grant Barrett's The Lexicographer’s Rules.)

SURI THE TOMKITTEN.

Ben Zimmer of Language Log has a detailed discussion of the name of a newborn:

When Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes announced the birth of their daughter on Tuesday, celebrity-watchers were eager to find out what to call TomKat's offspring (besides TomKitten, of course). The couple's publicist revealed that the baby's name is Suri, further explaining that the name means 'princess' in Hebrew and 'red rose' in Persian. Given the immense scrutiny the couple has gotten, it was no surprise that even this offhand comment stirred up some controversy...

I'll let you read Ben's analysis of the Hebrew-princess issue (to which I can only add that Suri looks to me like a dialect variant of the name Sarah, which I believe is Sore in standard Yiddish, rather than a product of Kabbalah); personally, I'm more interested in the (uncontroversial) Persian word سوری, short for گل سوری gol-e suri 'red rose,' where suri is an adjectival derivative of sur 'red color.' This is apparently a cousin of the normal Persian word for 'red,' sorkh, which is related to Avestan sukhra; if anybody knows the details of the phonological developments involved, I'd love to hear them. (Incidentally, Ben might want to fix his quote from the Encyclopedia Iranica, which—due presumably to his not having downloaded the necessary font—gives the word as "sorkò" rather than sorkh.)

Ben says "That hasn't stopped journalists and bloggers from finding alternate meanings for the word in various languages: 'pickpocket' in Japanese (Times of London), 'pointy nose' in the southern Indian language of Todas (AP), an epithet for Lord Krishna (Gawker), a breed of alpaca (Tabloidbaby), and so on and so forth"; to add to the fun, I'll contribute Hausa 'anthill,' Pushtu 'large sack,' and (more attractively) Hindi (from Sanskrit) 'wise, learned.' When she gets old enough, she can take her pick.

GHOST CHARACTERS.

Chris Kern has an entry on "ghost characters":

Proving once again that the Japanese writing system is supremely screwed up, there are apparently certain characters called 幽霊文字 ("ghost characters") that have no readings, meanings, or examples of use. Even if you look them up in a dictionary you get definitions like 意義未詳 (reading and meaning unknown). Examples of these ghost characters are 暃 and 碵.

They all come from the JIS set, which is a set of characters that are standard for computer terminals to display. Apparently during the compliation of the JIS set, some characters that weren't actually characters got onto the list accidentally—either because they were miswritten versions of actual characters or the compilers misread certain kanji.

Matt of No-sword, in his post on the subject, shows that some of the characters are real, if obscure, but adds "even the JIS bigwigs admit that 妛 and 椦 are indeed just mistakes." Something of a parallel to ghost words in English.

VARIA.

Lots of reading coming in over the transom and not enough time, so I'm just going to throw some stuff into the pot and call it burgoo:

1) An Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language, by Alexander MacBain, via the indefatigable aldiboronti; it's outdated (a reprint of the 1911 edition) but still useful if taken with a grain of salt.

2) I'm a big fan of Charles Reznikoff and quoted a brief description of his Testimony here; there's a longer discussion by Edmund Hardy in the October issue of Jacket. (Via wood s lot, which also links to a nice review by Jenny Diski of Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost and Where Did It Go? by Michael Bywater, with plangent reflections on what it means to get older; I must, however, take issue with the title, "Who wears hats now?" The answer is, I do.)

3) A new blog, The Daily Growler, takes a break from its usual fare of over-the-top political commentary for a striking post called "From dust to dust" that begins with a hot Texas day suddenly turning cold ("The wind is now just flat-dab cold. And now the wind throws grains of what's coming in my face and I breathe in and taste the first of what's coming in my face and what's coming in my face tastes like earth...") and goes on to "one morning not so many years ago in New York City." Yes, that's what it was like.

WHAT'S COOL THESE DAYS?

A great AskMetaFilter question asks "What's the new word for 'cool'?"

As a Gen-Xer, I usually find myself pseudo-ironically using "rad" or "awesome" whenever I think something is totally killer. When a friend asked what word college students use now-a-days (he's going to be teaching undergrads), I had to admit that I'm officially an out of touch old fogey. I know "cool" has spanned decades of continued usage, but what are the real generation-defining phrases of today's 18-year-olds, in the same way that "cat's pajamas" or "solid" are tied to an era?

There are plenty of answers from actual college and high-school students; executive summary (by the original poster; I've added italics for clarity):

● Sweet, awesome, nice, hot, and to a lesser degree sick, through the miraculous preservative powers of irony, have managed to maintain their coolness from 80's surf/skate culture. Bitchin', gnarly and rad? Totally bogus.
● Tight and dope have survived from 80's hip-hop culture, while def, phat and fresh are not-so-fresh anymore.
● Shiny, official, pimp as an adjective, and possibly clutch have definite potential, and I hope to see more of these brash newcomers.

Sweet!

IMPROVED MLA LANGUAGE MAP.

A couple of years ago I reported on the MLA's interactive language map of the US; Ben Zimmer of Language Log now informs us that the site has added new features, including actual density of speakers (which means you can see the counties where, say, Spanish-speakers are a large proportion of the population, even if there aren't a lot of them—see Ben's post for a nice graphic demonstration of the difference it makes in Texas). "Not only does the new improved site generate percentage-based maps for different languages, it has a whole host of enhancements, including a Data Center with statistics for more than 300 languages searchable all the way down to the municipal level." Day by day, in every way, the internet gets better and better...

SPEAKING GERMAN IN MOSCOW, 1941.

An excerpt from The Mystery of Olga Chekhova: The true story of a family torn apart by revolution and war, by Antony Beevor, quoted today by Joel of Far Outliers (there's a very interesting profile of him here):

Vova must have been frightened, bearing a German name [Knipper] at this moment of pitiless struggle [as the Wehrmacht closed in on Moscow]. Daily bulletins from Informburo were attached to trees and walls. On one of them he was shaken to see an excerpt from a letter taken off the body of a German soldier called Hans Knipper. And a schoolfriend of his, a Volga German about to be transported to Siberia, came to see them in despair. Vova's father, Vladimir, advised him to volunteer for the army to save himself from an exile of forced labour which would be as bad as the Gulag, but Vova's friend replied that the description 'German' was stamped on his papers and they would not accept him in the army. Those of German origin were implicitly categorized as potential enemies of the state. The NKVD had not wasted time assembling records on every Soviet citizen of German descent, some 1.5 million people. Local NKVD departments 'from Leningrad to the Far East' began a programme of arrests immediately after the Wehrmacht invasion. Yet no member of the Knipper family was touched [presumably because Vova's cousin Lev Knipper worked for the NKVD].

Other Germans in Moscow were also in a strange position, but for different reasons. In the same building as the Knippers lived the family of Friedrich Wolf, the famous German Communist playwright, who had left Germany soon after Hitler came to power in 1933. They were part of the so-called 'Moscow emigration' of foreign Communists seeking sanctuary and would have faced instant execution at Nazi hands if the city fell. Vova used to act a roof-top fire-watcher, ready to deal with incendiary bombs, along with Wolf's two sons, Markus and Koni. Markus later became the chief of East German intelligence and the original of Karla in John Le Carré's novels, and his younger brother, Koni, became a film-maker, writer and the president of East Germany's academy of arts. During air raids, Vladimir Knipper and Friedrich Wolf sat in the cellar, chatting together in German. 'People sitting around us,' wrote Vova, 'turned to look at the two of them with anger and fear. There they were in the centre of Moscow arguing about something in the enemy's language.'

One of the things that depresses me about humanity is the automatic lumping-together of people who speak different languages or have different physical features or share some other superficial category, so that if "we" are at war with Germany we must be nasty to those among us with German names or backgrounds (as happened in the U.S. during World War One as well).

MORE FREE OED.

Back at the start of the year, the OED temporarily allowed free access to the site (see here); now they're doing it again in conjunction with a follow-up to the TV series Balderdash and Piffle. Look 'em up while they're there! (Thanks for the tip, Pat.)

COURTNOLL.

I recently ran across an excellent old insult, the word courtnoll: "A contemptuous or familiar name for a courtier" (OED). We don't have much occasion to insult courtiers these days, but courtnoll is based on noll "The top or crown of the head; the head itself. In later use freq. with the epithet drunken." A sample of citations with the freq. epithet:
1577 W. HARRISON Descr. Eng. II. vi. I. 161 He carrieth off a drie dronken noll to bed with him.
1600 P. HOLLAND tr. Livy Rom. Hist. XXXIII. xlviii. 851 When.. they awoke and roused themselues, with their drunken and drousie nols.
1626 N. BRETON Fantasticks in Wks. II. 14/2 The nappy Ale makes many a drunken Noll.

And a fine one without it:
1825 Blackwood's Mag. Jan. 113 I'll split thy pruriginious nowl.

I'll leave the construction of suitable imprecations to the inventive reader.

SOURCES FOR SCOTS PRONUNCIATION.

A specialized subject to be sure, but if you're interested in sources for Scots pronunciation in the eighteenth century you'll definitely want to read Charles Jones's "Sources for Scots pronunciation in the Eighteenth Century"—and even if the reconstruction of historical pronunciation isn't your thing, you might be interested in the copious quotes from schoolbooks of the period:

Leonora was a little girl of quick parts and vivacity. At only six years old, she could both work and handle her scissars [sic] with much dexterity, and her mamma’s pincushions and huswifes were all of her making. She could read, with ease and readiness, any book that was put into her hand; She could also write very prettily, and she never put large letters in the middle of a word, nor scrawled all awry, from corner to corner of her paper. Neither were her strokes so sprawling, that five or six words would fill a whole sheet from the top to the bottom; as I have known to be the case with some other little girls of the same age.

And here's a recommendation to cure nonstandard pronunciation at the earliest possible age:

It ought to be, indispensably, the care of every Teacher of English, not to suffer children to pronounce according to the dialect of that place of the country where they were born or reside, if it happens to be vicious. For, if they are suffered to proceed in it, and be habituated to an uncouth pronunciation in their youth, it will most likely remain with them all their days. And those gentlemen who are so captivated with the prejudice of inveterate custom, as not to teach to read by the powers of the sounds, ought in duty, at least, to make their scholars masters of the various formation of the vowels and diphthongs, and of the natural sounds, or simple contacts of the consonants both single and double, whereby they may form the various configurations of the parts of the mouth, and properly apply the several organs of speech in order to speak with ease and propriety. And as children do not commence scholars so soon as their capacities admit, or often on account of their speaking but badly, if they were taught the mute sounds or simple contacts of the consonants, it would immediately enable them to pronounce with a peculiar distinctness. I had a child lately under my care, of about nine years of age, whose speech from the beginning was unintelligible to all, but those who were acquainted with her manner of expression. After I had taught her the sounds of the consonants, and the proper motions that were formed by these contacts both in her own, and by looking at my mouth, I brought her by a few lessons to pronounce any word whatsoever. And by a short practice, she spoke with perfect elocution. This method effectually cuts stammering or hesitation in speech, either in young or old; especially if a grown person be taught to speak for some time with great deliberation. [Buchanan, Linguae Britannicae (1757), p. xii nt.]

Via aldiboronti at Wordorigins.

THE WORD STORE.

One of Languagehat's favorite lexicographers, Erin McKean, has a delightful post at the PowellsBooks blog explaining how words get into dictionaries and what that means:

Lots of people (and by "lots" I mean roughly 99% of everyone I've ever spoken to) believe that the dictionary is a Who's Who of words. That it's like Ivy League college admissions. That only the really good words, the ones that have eaten all their spinach and who play the oboe and who get high scores on the SAT, make it into the dictionary. That the words that make it into the dictionary are somehow "realler" than the words that don't.

Well, that's not exactly true. It does take a bit of work to get a word into the dictionary, but inclusion in the dictionary is not an honor. The dictionary words are not more real than the words not in the dictionary. What they are is more USEFUL.

Think of the dictionary as less of a Social Register for words and more like a word general store. I am the manager of the word general store. Do I stock only words in my size? Only in the flavors I like? Only the words I wish people would use? No — I provide a wide selection of words for the use of all my customers. And because my customers are such a wide group (basically, all adult readers and writers) I have to make sure to include the words that will serve their needs.

As I said in the Wordorigins.org thread where I found the link, she has a real gift for explaining lexicography in ways that the ordinary person can understand. And she ends with some good advice:

So, if you want to get a word into the dictionary..., show me that people are using it. Lots of people, in lots of different places (not just online, not just in one narrow field of reference). Send me examples in context. Show me that it's important, that people need to know it to live their lives...

Of course, a commenter has already asked "Can the creator of a word grease some palms to get it in?" (Slip me a few bucks, pal, and I'll see what I can do.)

PEACE JACKET.

Bonnie Franz has created a knitted jacket "in blue and white cotton with bands of stranded knitting with the word for 'peace' in as many languages as I could fit. (There are 98 to be exact!)" It's a handsome garment, and needless to say I like the multilingual idea (scroll down on the page for the list of words); I hope Ms. Franz will take the following caveats in the helpful spirit that inspired them—they are meant not as complaints but as suggestions for a revised, more accurate product.

The first and most glaring problem is the alleged Romanian "piersica" (which should really be piersică, but diacritics are ignored throughout, presumably for easier knitting). This word does not mean 'peace' but 'peach.' The word for 'peace' is pace, just as in Italian (so the correct form is already on the sweater). I would suggest that the word be replaced on the sweater with (Mandarin) Chinese heping; the language with the greatest number of speakers should surely be represented.

Other problems: rahat is Turkish for 'comfort, ease,' not 'peace' (oddly, the correct word, barış, is also represented, though without the hook on the s which lets you know it's pronounced /sh/ rather than /s/); the Icelandic should be friður, not fridur (it's a different letter, pronounced like th in the); the Cambodian (Khmer) word is sante'phiap, (or santeqphiap, though using q for the glottal stop is misleading), not santekphep (which shows exactly how misleading that q can be); the Slovak word is mier, not miers; the Filipino/Tagalog word pasensiya (stress on the last syllable, by the way) means 'patience, willingness to forgive' (the correct word kapayapaan is also on the list); the Basque word is bake, not bakea. I'd quibble about Kurdish "ashti"—my dictionary gives hashiti and ashiti, among others, but no forms without the first i—but there's no official form of Kurdish and the listed form probably represents one of the dialects, so I'll let it go. Also, shulam represents some sort of dialect version a common pronunciation of the Yiddish word normally rendered sholem; since the latter is far more widespread, I don't see why the variant is used even though the -u- version is widespread, I'd think the "official" form would be preferable—though Hebrew lettering would be best of all (see below)!

A totally different quibble is the fact that everything but Greek and Hebrew is given in transcription; if you're going to take the trouble to give those in the original alphabet (instead of irini and shalom), why not others? For instance, 和平would represent both Chinese and Japanese, and 평화 looks much nicer than pyoung-hwa. The Arabic سلام would represent other languages that use the Arabic alphabet. And of course Yiddish is normally written in Hebrew letters, so I'm not sure why the transliterated form is even there; the Hebrew could stand for both.

Incidentally, for longer 'peace' lists (though words are displayed without diacritics) see here and here.

Thanks, Leslie!

THE SLAIN KING'S SON.

Angelo of Sauvage Noble has translated Hamlet's soliloquy into Proto-Indo-European, as "H₃regs suhnus gʷʰn̥ntosyo" (The Slain King's Son). It begins:

eg̑oh₂ h₁esoh₂? way! ne h₁esoh₂? h₁r̥h₁yoh₂er:
upo de melyos teh₂ smereses bʰeroh₂
mn̥teyi Hih₁tleh₂ dusmeneses smr̥tos,
kʷoynoybʰos wē toybʰos tl̥neh₂oh₂ h₁r̥meh₂,
h₂enti yeh₂ stisth₂ents peh₂woyh₁m̥?

Or, in what he aptly calls Old High Translationese:

Should I be? Alas! Should I not? I ask myself:
shall I, having been allotted, better suffer in (my) mind
those missiles of ill-disposed fate?
or should I raise arms to those troubles
which, standing against them, I might stop?

Very enjoyable for this Indo-Europeanist manqué!

Tip for easier reading: just ignore the various hs, which represent the laryngeals (nobody knows how to pronounce them anyway): "Eg̑o eso? way! ne eso? r̥yoer..."

CLASSIFYING LANGUAGES.

Bill Poser at Language Log has an extremely useful post in which he goes "beyond the Ethnologue" (the best quick reference for language families) and cites books that give reliable information about language relationships for Africa, the Americas, Australia (I'm delighted to see Claire Bowern namechecked!), and New Guinea. This is the sort of service the Log should be providing (alongside its vigilant search for snowclones); who better than linguists to point people to accurate information about languages? Perhaps someone will weigh in here on similarly reliable books that cover other areas, for instance East Asia.

Addendum. See now Bill's follow-up on exactly why Merrit Ruhlen's approach to classifying languages is worthless.

INTERNECINE.

Safire's latest "On Language" column is a fairly pointless trudge through various phrases used to describe the current conflict in Iraq; what caught my attention was the end of the first paragraph: "...others who see it as more political than religious call it an insurgency or an internecine (in-ter-NEE-sin) struggle." (I have added the italics from the printed article, and it strikes me as bizarre in the extreme that the Times doesn't bother to carry over the italics in the online version, since they are necessary in separating words presented as words from words used in the normal way as referents; if I were Safire, I would force them to remedy this. I note that the Houston Chronicle manages to preserve the italics when they reprint the column.)

It truly surprises me that Safire passed up a chance to expatiate upon the word internecine; he could have written an entire column on that alone. I'll start by quoting Fowler's entry (first edition, of course; there's no point reading diluted Fowler):

internecine has suffered an odd fate; being mainly a literary or educated man's word, it is yet neither pronounced in the scholarly way nor allowed its Latin meaning. It should be called ĭnter'nĭsĭn, & is called ĭnternē'sīn; see False quantity. And the sense has had the Kilkenny-cat notion imported into it because mutuality is the idea conveyed by inter- in English; the Latin word meant merely of or to extermination (cf. intereo perish, intercido slay, interimo destroy) without implying that of both parties. The imported notion, however, is what gives the word its only value, since there are plenty of substitutes for it in its true sense—destructive, slaughterous, murderous, bloody, sanguinary, mortal, & so forth. The scholar may therefore use or abstain from the word as he chooses, but it will be vain for him to attempt correcting other people's conception of the meaning.

The American Heritage Dictionary shares his sensible approach and adds some interesting detail about where exactly the change in meaning came from:

When is a mistake not a mistake? In language at least, the answer to this question is “When everyone adopts it,” and on rare occasions, “When it's in the dictionary.” The word internecine presents a case in point. Today, it usually has the meaning “relating to internal struggle,” but in its first recorded use in English, in 1663, it meant “fought to the death.” How it got from one sense to another is an interesting story in the history of English. The Latin source of the word, spelled both internecīnus and internecīvus, meant “fought to the death, murderous.” It is a derivative of the verb necāre, “to kill.” The prefix inter– was here used not in the usual sense “between, mutual” but rather as an intensifier meaning “all the way, to the death.” This piece of knowledge was unknown to Samuel Johnson, however, when he was working on his great dictionary in the 18th century. He included internecine in his dictionary but misunderstood the prefix and defined the word as “endeavoring mutual destruction.” Johnson was not taken to task for this error. On the contrary, his dictionary was so popular and considered so authoritative that this error became widely adopted as correct usage. The error was further compounded when internecine acquired the sense “relating to internal struggle.” This story thus illustrates how dictionaries are often viewed as providing norms and how the ultimate arbiter in language, even for the dictionary itself, is popular usage.

I have to quarrel, though, with the sentence about "the Latin source of the word"; surely internecīnus and internecīvus are two different words, not two spellings of the same word.

And the OED explains the source of the "false quantity":

[App. first used as a rendering of L. internecīnum bellum, in Butler's Hudibras (to which also is due the unetymological pronunciation, instead of in'ternecine). On this authority entered by Johnson in his Dictionary, with an incorrect explanation, due to association with words like interchange, intercommunion, etc. in which inter- has the force of ‘mutual’, ‘each other’. From J. the word has come into later dictionaries and 19th c. use, generally in the Johnsonian sense.]

Butler's line is:
1663 BUTLER Hud. I. i. 774 Th' Ægyptians worshipp'd Dogs, and for Their Faith made internecine war.

In the 1674 edition he changed it, for whatever reason, to "fierce and zealous war." Too late, though, for the pronunciation of the word.

I feel compelled to add that Garner gets it completely wrong in his Modern American Usage, starting his entry "As originally used in English, and as recorded by Samuel Johnson in 1755, internecine means 'mutually deadly; destructive of both parties.'" I'll mention also that Safire oddly chooses the OED's pronunciation over the one preferred in American dictionaries (inter-NESS-een).

IBN HAZM (AND NAXI IN QATAR).

Last year I posted about an early statement of comparative linguistics by Ibn Quraysh quoted in Lameen Souag's Jabal al-Lughat; now Lameen cites an even better one in this entry:

Ibn Hazm (994-1064) was a polymathic intellectual of Cordoba, equally well-known for his poetry and his religious commentary. Less well-known are his opinions on Semitic linguistics, which turn out to have been rather impressive. In the quote below, he demonstrates a clearer understanding of the process of historical change than Ibn Quraysh, who seems to have seen the mutual similarities as as resulting as much or more from intermixture than from common ancestry, although both ultimately succumb to the temptation of explaining linguistic family trees in terms of religiously given genealogies. As near as I can translate it off the cuff, he said:

...What we have settled on and determined to be certain is that Syriac and Hebrew and Arabic - that is the language of Mudar and Rabia (ie Arabic as we know it), not the language of Himyar (ie Old South Arabian) - are one language that changed with the migrations of its people, so that it was ground up... For, when a town's people live near another people, their language changes in a manner clear to anyone who considers the issue, and we find that the masses have changed the pronunciation of Arabic significantly, to the point that it is so distant from the original as to be like a different language, so we find them saying `iinab for `inab (grape), and 'asTuuT for sawT (whip), and thalathdaa for thalaathatu danaaniir (three dinars), and when a Berber becomes Arabized and wants to say shajarah (tree) he says sajarah, and when a Galician becomes Arabized he replaces `ayn and Haa with haa, so he says muhammad when he means to say muHammad, and such things are frequent. So whoever ponders on Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriac will become certain that their difference is of the type we have described, through changes in people's pronunciation through the passage of time and the difference of countries and the bordering of other nations, and that they are in origin a single language. Having established that, Syriac is the ancestor of both Arabic and Hebrew, and to be more precise, the first to speak this Arabic was Ishmael, upon him be peace, for it is the language of his sons, and Hebrew is the language of Isaac and his sons, and Syriac is without doubt the language of Abraham, blessings upon him peace and upon our prophet and peace.

(Ihkam Ibn Hazm; see Wikisource for original text, beginning الذي وقفنا عليه وعلمناه يقينا أن السريانية والعبرانية والعربية...)

Lameen has been vacationing in Qatar, where he reported on the subject (which I never would have thought would come up) of Naxi in Qatar.

AFRICAN HATS.

Every once in a while someone complains that I don't have enough hat posts around here, which is the sad truth, so I'm glad that plep has provided me with the opportunity to share with you the National Museum of African Art's "Hats Off!" page.

Modifying or adorning the body is a means through which African peoples express their collective and individual pride, ideals, aesthetics and identity. Many African cultures throughout the continent have long considered the head the center of one's being—a source of individual and collective identity, power, intelligence and ability. Adorning the head as part of everyday attire or as a statement, therefore, is especially significant.

You can find more hats by going to The Diversity of African Art and clicking on Costume Accessories and then picking Hats out of the first drop-down menu. And I like the fact that they give local names, e.g. "Cap (shüötu)," though I wish they'd indicate the actual language.

THAWS.

The snowflow
nearly-April releases   melting bright.

Then a darkdown
               needles and shells the pools.

Swepth of suncoursing sky
steeps us in
             salmon-stream
                     crop-green
                         rhubarb-coloured shrub-tips:

everything waits for the
lilacs, heaped tumbling — and their warm
licorice perfume.

      —Margaret Avison

My Avison volumes came today (isn't the internet wonderful?), and to celebrate I'm quoting the first poem in Always Now, Volume Two (from her 1978 book sunblue, reviewed here). It's quite timely: we too are waiting for the lilacs.

In case you're wondering, suncoursing is a hapax as far as Google knows, snowflow and darkdown get a fair number of hits although they are not actual words, and swepth is such a frequent typo Google isn't much help. But Heather Pyrcz, in a brief discussion of Avison here, calls it a "neologism," which sounds right to me. (Pyrcz also mentions that Avison studied with the Black Mountain poets, which helps explain why she uses words so strikingly.)

THE LANGUAGE OF GESTURE.

Mark Liberman at Language Log has been investigating the "chin flick" gesture that Antonin Scalia recently used (and explained as meaning "I could not care less"). His latest post quotes an e-mail from Adam Kendon, "one of the world's foremost authorities on the topic of gesture"; Kendon, in turn, quotes "Andrea de Jorio, whose La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano from 1832 is rather comprehensive regarding Neapolitan gesture" (I saw a reprint of this book, which is fascinating and enlightening—there should be such books for all cultures) as saying the gesture is a simple negative. This is backed up by "two local Procidanians" (Kendon is on Procida at the moment), but "if you ask someone from the more northerly parts of Italy about this gesture they are likely to say that it means 'I don't care' or 'It does not bother me'—and they do tend to suggest that it is a rather rude gesture." In southern Italy and Sicily, the gesture frequently accompanies a backward toss of the head, and Kendon adds the following parenthetical remark:

As to the gesture of negation in which you push the head back, this is still used even today in Southern Italy and Sicily, and is almost certainly very old. It is distributed in those parts of the Mediterranean that were, in antiquity, occupied by Greeks [see Gerhard Rohlfs "Influence des élements autochones sur les langues romanes (Problèmes de gógraphie linguistique). Actes du Colloque International de Civilisations, Littératures et Langues Romanes. Bucherest: Comission nationale roumaine pour l'Unesco, Actes du Colloque international de civilisations. 1959/1960. 240-247 and see also Peter Collett and Alberta Contarello "Gesti di assenso e di dissenso" in Pio Enrico Ricci Bitti, ed. Comunicazione e gestualità. Milan: Franco Agneli, 1987, pp. 69-85]

I myself saw the head-toss used routinely not only in Greece but in Turkey (which of course was Greek before the Battle of Manzikert in 1071) and I believe also in Syria. It's amazing how persistent such nonverbal signifiers can be.

SAAREMAA/OESEL.

I finished Fearful Majesty (see this post) on the flight back from California yesterday, and I was thinking of writing about Livonia—the prize for which Ivan fought, and lost, a 25-year war, leaving his country a wreck—but you know what? Livonia isn't a particularly interesting word; it's just 'the land of the Livonians' (a Finnic people now largely absorbed into the Latvian population), and the word is of obscure origin. (I might say, though, that the OED's present first citation of Livonian, from 1652, will surely be antedated, since there was much discussion of Baltic trade routes in Elizabeth's time. And did you know that Elizabeth the Great and Ivan the Terrible exchanged a number of quite revealing letters? Ivan offered her refuge in case she was overthrown, which in the 1560s must have looked like a serious possibility, considering that, as Bobrick puts it, "in a mere five years two monarchs had gone to the scaffold, England had officially changed its religion twice, had been horribly torn by civil war, and had crowned four heads of state.")

No, I think I'll write instead about the name of an island off the Livonian (now Estonian) coast. It's now called Saaremaa, but the traditional German (and international) name was Oesel (Ösel). The two names would seem to have nothing to do with each other, but Oesel is from Old Norse Ey-sýsla 'island district' and Saaremaa is Estonian saar 'island' + maa 'land,' so they mean exactly the same thing. (The island to the north is Hiiumaa 'land of giants' in Estonian and Dagö 'day island' in Swedish, the latter supposedly because it's a day's sail from Stockholm.)

SMOKING YOUR OWN.

This is a terrible story with a spark of black humor in it. Mikhail Bakhtin spent the late 1930s working on what some say was his masterwork, a study of the German novel in the 18th century (specifically, the Bildungsroman). I'll quote the rest of the story from two published books, since there's a lot of inaccurate material floating around on the internet (for instance, some people set the scene during the Siege of Leningrad, but as far as I can determine Bakhtin was living in the outskirts of Moscow during the war). The first is p. xiii of Michael Holquist's introduction to the Bakhtin collection Speech Genres and Other Late Essays:

The essay on the Bildungsroman is actually a fragment from one of Bakhtin's several lost books. In this case, nonpublication cannot be blamed on insensitive censors. Its nonappearance resulted, rather, from effects that grew out of the Second World War, one of the three great historical moments Bakhtin lived through (the other two being the Bolshevik Revolution and the Stalinist purges). Sovetsky pisatel (Soviet Writer), the publishing house that was to bring out Bakhtin's book The Novel of Education and Its Significance in the History of Realism, was blown up in the early months of the German invasion, with the loss of the manuscript on which he had worked for at least two years (1936-38). Bakhtin retained only certain preparatory materials and a prospectus of the book; due to the paper shortage, he had torn them up page by page during the war to make wrappers for his endless chain of cigarettes. He began smoking pages from the conclusion of the manuscript, so what we have is a small portion of its opening section, primarily about Goethe.

A shorter version is on p. 56 of The First Hundred Years of Mikhail Bakhtin by Caryl Emerson:

The page proofs for this massive volume perished when a bomb hit the Moscow publishing house where it was in production during World War II—after which Bakhtin, in a story that has become so famous it was repeated, somewhat garbled, in the mid-1990s by the chain-smoking hero of the American film Smoke, “smoked away” four-fifths of his back-up copy, that is, used it for cigarette papers during the lean war years.

(Incidentally, on the previous page Emerson says, "To the despair of archivists and present-day transcribers, till the end of his life Bakhtin wrote exclusively with a sharpened lead pencil on soft paper.")

I googled around looking for a Russian discussion of the story and didn't find much; an article by A. B. Bocharov turned out to be quoting a translation of an English-language article (Charles I. Schuster, “Mikhail Bakhtin as rhetorical theorist,” College English 47 (1985): 594-607). But I did discover a tidbit about Paul Auster, who loves this story so much he's used it several times; Arkadii Dragomoshchenko's piece on Auster quotes his wife Siri Hustvedt: Однажды я ему рассказала историю о М. Бахтине, который в блокадном Ленинграде пустил на самокрутки свой труд о немецком романе, и Пол использовал его в своем фильме "Дым" [Once I told him the story of how during the siege of Leningrad Bakhtin used his work on the German novel to roll cigarettes, and Paul used it in his film Smoke]. So it's his wife who's responsible for the garbled version Emerson mentions.

You can read an excitable web page dedicated to this anecdote here; I learned about the story from this AskMetaFilter question.

MARGARET AVISON.

Once again I must thank Mark Woods of wood s lot for introducing me to wonderful poetry, in this case that of Margaret Avison. If I were Canadian I would presumably have known her work long ago, but it's all too true that things Canadian don't get their due south of the border; I'm just glad I finally caught on. The first poem Mark quoted was "This Day," short and unassuming but full of hidden pleasures; then he linked to Eight poems (from Jacket magazine, which I should read on a regular basis), and I was hooked. I read all eight, with increasing excitement and deep pleasure: here was a poet who used the past without imitating it, who felt deeply but let her feelings enrich her poems from within rather than pouring them over it like a sauce, who loved words so much she dared to use them in unfamiliar ways and even make them up, which might put a reader off if the context weren't so convincing. But enough babbling from me; here's "Christmas Approaches, Highway 401":

Seed of snow
  on cement, ditch-rut, rink-steel, salted where
  grass straws thinly scrape against lowering
  daydark in the rise of the earth-crust there
  (and beyond, the scavenging birds
          flitter and skim)
is particle
  unto earth’s thirsting,
  spring rain,
  wellspring.
  Roadwork, earthwork, pits in hillsides,
  desolation, abandoned roadside shacks
  and dwelt in,
  unkilned pottery broken and strawed about,
  minibrick people-palaces,
  coming and going always
  by day all lump and ache
is sown tonight with the beauty
  of light and moving lights, light travelling, light
  shining from beyond farthestness.

Farthestness! But before I could even begin to balk, I heard the word repeated in my ear and realized it was shapely, with a nice Old English feel, and worked perfectly here. And note the way she uses the noun straw in the third line, and then slips in the much rarer verb (a variant of strew) in "unkilned pottery broken and strawed about." I went on to "The Hid, Here":

Big birds fly past the window
trailing strings or vines
out in the big blue.

Big trees become designs
of delicate floral tracery
in golden green.

The Milky Way
end over end like a football
lobs, towards that still
unreachable elsewhere
that is hid within bud and nest-stuff and bright air
where the big birds flew
past the now waiting window.

Listen to those rhymes, feel the subtle rhythms and the perfect flow of "that is hid within bud and nest-stuff and bright air" (and the way it makes sense of the initially opaque title): this is the kind of poetry that is not only attractive at first sight but carries within it the promise of further riches on each rereading. I was so smitten I immediately ordered the second and third volumes of Always Now, her collected poems, and I suspect I'll wind up getting the first as well.

Oh, and I don't want to finish without quoting that first little poem, "This Day"; Songdog, this one's for you and James:

This morning was all
iced sunshine after a
grey and gusty week.

So blue a sky!

A two-year-old
walking with a patient
parent, on the shadow-
tracings of a winter tree, a young
tree and so graceful,
danced into its design
on the dazzling sidewalk.

His father
paused, curbing impatience with
stirrings of memory.

DICTIONARY COIN.

I had meant to post this when I saw it at Wordorigins.org, but now a correspondent has reminded me, so here it is: last year's 50 pence coin celebrating the 250th anniversary of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language. I particularly like the fact that it includes the etymology of fifty; surely this is the only coin that features an etymology! (You can see another view of the coin here and read about it at the Wikipedia entry for the 50-pence coin.) Thanks, Glyn!

ANNOUNCEMENT.

Having painstakingly correlated the many laments over the imminent demise of the English language, from the 18th century right down to today, I have discovered that there are recurring patterns with ever shorter wavelengths (so to speak) that enable me, after complicated calculations, to say with certainty that English will cease to exist as of March 31, 2058. After that date, those of you who are still around will have to communicate in some language that has been less profligate with its inherited store of meaning. I just thought you'd want to know.