OTHER PEOPLE'S BOOKS.

A charming essay by Jay Parini discusses a vicarious pleasure known to many bibliophiles:

In restaurants I always want to eat whatever someone else at the table has ordered, even if it's not something I would normally consume. Along similar lines, I find myself thoroughly intrigued by other people's books. I want to borrow them and read them. Sometimes I go so far as to mimic other people's collections, adding my own copies of their titles to my shelves at home.

I still remember going to visit a friend in Scotland, long ago. He lived in a tiny house in a back alley in St. Andrews, where I spent many years as a university student. He had a pristine row of novels by Vladimir Nabokov, one of my favorite writers, then and now. I often used to go to his house for afternoon tea, and the conversation was absorbing. But it was hard to keep my eyes off that uniform edition: the colorful spines, the remarkable titles (Ada, Bend Sinister, Lolita, Pnin, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight). I liked the elegant typeface, and the sense of a complex international life captured in a shelf of books. Decades later, when I got my own house, in Vermont, I went to some trouble to acquire from British booksellers that exact row of Nabokov, recreated volume by volume at considerable expense...

Thanks for the link, Paul!

DEVELOPING TAMAZIGHT.

Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat (who has finished his dissertation, hurray!) has a new post about Tamazight (Berber) language activism:

To my mind, this is perhaps the single biggest problem of some branches (certainly not all) of the Tamazight movement: they talk about developing Tamazight, but they talk and write and think in French. Tizi-Ouzou's walls are covered in aza signs (the Tifinagh letter resembling a man that has become a symbol of Amazigh activism), but its shopfronts and signs are covered in French, even though Arabic signs are regularly vandalised. This gives many other Algerians who would otherwise look more favorably on the idea of developing Tamazight the impression that it's simply a cover for maintaining or extending the (frankly negative) role of French in public life - an impression that is not always false. Personally, I favour a coherent policy: more use of Algeria's native languages - Arabic and Tamazight - in all spheres of life, and less use of foreign ones except in dealing with foreigners.

He links to a cartoon showing a guy making a fiery speech about the need to preserve Tamazight; unfortunately, the speech is in French, and the audience can't understand it.

SEPARATED BY A COMMON LANGUAGE.

That's the title of a blog that's been going since May, subtitled "Observations on British and American English by an American linguist in the UK." Plenty of people make such observations, but few are actual linguists, and I'm very happy to find this. Here she discusses acclimate and acclimatize:

Either is acceptable in AmE, but to me, acclimati{s/z}e sounds better with physical rather than figurative climates. A quick look at Google suggests that there's something to that intuition...

Interestingly, most of the acclimatizes were about adjusting to high altitudes, and many of the acclimates were about adjusting to life at an American university. No wonder it leapt into mind today, as I was almost in the word's natural environment. (But haven't acclimated to saying acclimatised.)

Acclimate was originally used in Britain, but, like many other things we've discussed, it faded out of use here while hanging around in the US. The OED records acclimate as slightly older (1792 vs. 1836).

Thanks go, once again, to aldiboronti.

WIKIMOLOGY.

Yet another find from that eternal scavenger of the internet, aldiboronti (at Wordorigins): the full story of the creation of the term wiki, in the form of an exchange of letters between Ward Cunningham, coiner of the word; Patrick Taylor, the etymologist for the American Heritage Dictionary; and Catherine Soanes, a lexicographer for Oxford University Press:

I learned the word wiki on my first visit to Hawai'i when I was directed to the airport shuttle, called the Wiki Wiki Bus. I asked for that direction to be repeated three or four times until the airline representative took the time to define the word wiki for me. The next day I picked up a small book about Hawai'ian and learned more interesting things about the language.

I wanted an unusual word to name for what was an unusual technology. I was not trying to duplicate any existing medium, like mail, so I didn't want a name like electronic mail (email) for my work. The community that formed around my site were willing to explore its capabilities without preconceived notions of how it should work. An example of such a notion is the "timeless now" in which "conversation" takes place.

Apparently he intended the word to be pronounced "weaky" ("My preference would be that the word be pronounced as a Hawai'ian would, and that wick-ey be an acceptable alternative"), but I don't know anyone who says it that way (and to my ears "Weaky-pedia" sounds particularly ridiculous). Once you set the word free, it's out of your control!

MONSIEUR MOTS.

A wonderful Le Monde interview (in French) introduced me to Alain Rey, the chief editor and lexicographer at Dictionnaires Le Robert (considered the populist alternative to the magisterial Larousse). The article says "il y a aussi, et surtout, le fait qu'il n'ait jamais joué au puriste, qu'il a toujours prêté aux mots une vie propre" [there is also, and above all, the fact that he has never played the purist, that he has always let words have their own lives]; clearly a man after my own heart. Thanks for the link, Paul!

(A minor and very tentative quibble: my French is rusty, but shouldn't that be "le fait qu'il n'a jamais joué au puriste," parallel to "qu'il a toujours prêté"? What's the subjunctive doing there?)

THE KINGDOM OF OPONA.

The historian Orlando Figes, in both A People's Tragedy and Natasha's Dance, mentions a mythical land which he describes in the former book thus:

And there were equally fabulous tales of a 'Kingdom of Opona', somewhere on the edge of the flat earth, where the peasants lived happily, undisturbed by gentry or state. Groups of peasants even set out on expeditions in the far north in the hope of finding this arcadia.

He sources this to Gorky, M., 'On the Russian Peasantry', in R.E.F. Smith (ed.), The Russian Peasantry 1920 and 1984, London, 1977, and thanks to the magic of Google Books I can actually see the page where Gorky talks about this; Figes has basically reworded his account in the first sentence, but Gorky says nothing about expeditions. The other source cited is Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, but Amazon's "Search inside" feature allows me to discover that there is no reference to "Opona" in the book. Stites does talk about an expedition to find a similar utopia, "Belovode" [Беловодье] ("the Kingdom of the White Waters") in the late 19th century, and mentions "similar arcadias... the City of Ignat, the Land of the River Darya, Nutland, and Kitezh." So the trail peters out with Gorky's 1922 book on the peasantry, to which I can find no other reference. I've checked the online Russian editions without success; you'd think it would be on this page if it started with О 'about, on' in Russian, and you'd think it would be here or here if it was published in 1922. Anyway, I'm fascinated by mythical places like this, I'd like to know more about "Opona" (there's a word opona 'covering, curtain' in Russian, which may or may not be relevant), and if anyone knows more (about Opona or about Ignat, Darya, or Nutland), please share.

TO SPITE THE POLES.

I'm back to reading Orlando Figes' A People's Tragedy, and on page 73 he says "in Lithuania, which for so long had been dominated by the Poles, a national language was also developed during the latter half of the nineteenth century (just to spite the Poles it was based on the Czech alphabet) and a native literature began to appear." On first glance this Pole-spiting business looks like one of those wacky linguistic legends—for one thing, the Lithuanian alphabet has ogoneks beneath its nasal vowels, just like Polish (though they call them nosinė)—but it's true they use hacheks on their consonants like Czech. Anybody know if there's any truth to this rumor?

ORAL TRADITION.

Via Varieties of Unreligious Experience, I learn that the journal Oral Tradition is now online, or as they put it:

On September 15, 2006, Oral Tradition enters a new chapter in its existence as an international and interdisciplinary forum for the discussion of worldwide oral traditions and related forms. As of this date the journal will become available

   ■ electronically at http://journal.oraltradition.org
   ■ free of charge to all readers
   ■ as a series of pdf (Adobe Acrobat) files
   ■ with key-word searching of all online texts
   ■ with multimedia eCompanions embedded

The latest issue covers a wide range of topics; I'm not so interested in the current oral-poetry scene, but there are articles on Homer, medieval Japan, the influence of French Carolingian lore on the Italian chivalric-epic tradition, and Carneades of Cyrene, among others. Well worth your bookmark.

A MIGHTY LANGUAGE MELTS AWAY.

A long article by Vera Ryklina in Русский Newsweek (in Russian, obviously) describes the rapid and probably irreversible decline in the use of the Russian language. Since the collapse of the USSR, it is studied and spoken less and less in the countries that have won their independence; even within the Russian Federation, there are regions where it is less used. Ryklina says Russian is needed by only half of those who now know it, and still less will it be needed by their children. She quotes a number of academics who compare it to the languages of other vanished empires; English, obviously, has been a tremendous success, French less so. I was particularly struck by the comparison to Dutch. Historian Ivan Belenkii is quoted as saying:

But Russia's situation is more or less like Holland's. A century later, there will remain not a trace of our presence over half the globe, just as happened with the many colonies of that great maritime empire. People without much education aren't even aware that Holland had those colonies; the language has remained only in Suriname. And yet only 60 years ago Holland ruled Indonesia, a country with a population greater than that of Russia. Today absolutely nobody there wants to study Dutch.

There is much discussion of causes; the article suggests that Russian might have had a longer shelf life if the USSR had promoted it as an attractive cultural language rather than an administrative tool (the way France has promoted French abroad), but frankly I doubt anything would have changed the desire of the ex-colonials to reject everything having to do with the Soviet regime. Anyway, it's a good read if you know Russian, and I thank bulbul for the link. (His latest two posts are an interesting discussion of "blue blood," in which he laments the lack of an etymological dictionary of the Slovak language, and an annotated list of Books He Hasn't Read, inspired by this.)

OOPS.

All Russian-language publicity materials (like the official website) for the film Trust the Man carry the tagline:
Любовь — это слово из четырех букв. [Lyubov' — eto slovo iz chetyryokh bukv.]

Which is to say: Любовь is a four-letter word.

(Yes, Lyubov' means 'love,' but something got lost in translation.)

Via Avva.

HOW ARMANDO LEARNED HEBREW.

An article by Stephen Krashen describes the unusual case of a Mexican-American who speaks Hebrew better than English:

A front-page article in the Los Angeles Times (Silverstein, 1999) described the case of Armando, a 29-year-old immigrant from Mexico who has lived in the United States for 12 years. Armando, who attended school in Mexico up to grade nine, has worked in an Israeli restaurant in Los Angeles nearly the entire time he has lived in the United States. While Armando speaks English quite well, he says he speaks Hebrew better...

Thanks to Silverstein, I was able to meet Armando and get more details. First, it must be pointed out that acquisition of Hebrew took time: Armando told me that it was two or three years until he was comfortable in conversation even though he heard Hebrew all day on the job. He said that he never forced or pushed himself with Hebrew, that his approach was relaxed... Armando told me that he had never learned to read Hebrew, never studied Hebrew grammar, had no idea of what the rules of Hebrew grammar were, and certainly did not think about grammar when speaking. He said that he received about five corrections a day, but none of these were aimed at grammar; it was all vocabulary.

This just confirms what we all (I hope) know, that immersion is far and away the best way to learn if what you want is the ability to use the spoken language. It should also give pause to those who think formal study of grammar is necessary to fluency.

I discovered this story via Lingual Bee, the excellent blog of a Chinese guy who came to the U.S. as a grad student who had studied English in China for ten years and could barely speak it. He describes the problem with his education here:

All of my teachers followed the same philosophy that's as old as the Confucianism: the only way to instill something in student is to drill the same rule over and over until his brain spins.

My English teacher was fond of this in particular, and she did it with an immense zeal. Man, let me tell you, solving a thousand algebra equations was one thing; working on subject and verb agreement a thousand times was totally insane. Yet, she was never tired of it.

Even if I survived the teacher, I had no chance to stay sane with the textbook. Half of the texts were mad repetitions like “This is a sheep. That is a sheep. These are all sheep”, substituting sheep with other animals and starting all over again; another half were filled with such a masterpiece like “How Karl Marx Learns Foreign Languages”.

(He has more to say about more about Dr. Krashen's theories here.) I admire the hell out of anyone who blogs in a second language; I don't think I would have the nerve.

DEED POLL.

I'd never really thought about the oddness of the term deed poll, 'British: a deed (as to change one's name) made and executed by only one party,' until a Wordorigins contributor brought it up. Dave Wilton's answer provides one of those surprising and enjoyable bits of linguistic history that got me interested in linguistics in the first place:

Poll originally meant head, and is commonly used in reference to the counting of heads. It's either from or cognate with the Dutch pol meaning top or summit.

In the case of deed poll, it comes from the verb meaning to shave (the head). Since this type of change to a deed affects only one party—unlike a transfer of ownership—the document edges would be cut straight. For two-party documents, the cut would be jagged so the two halves could be matched. Deed poll dates to the 16th century and is contrasted with deed indented.

So deed poll has the same structure as battle royal or linguist manqué. Who knew?

MAN FINED FOR SNIGGERING.

Anatoly (whose Russian LJ has long been a favorite of mine) has recently begun an English-language blog, Lovest Well (named for the one bit of Pound's Cantos that just about everybody likes, the end of Canto LXXXI); a few days ago he linked to Eric Korn's TLS review of the new edition of The Chambers Dictionary and highlighted the following delightful passage:

Chambers never forgets its origins, and Scotticisms are pleasingly many: […] and “snigger”, which last is to do with catching salmon with a weighted hook, apparently an illegality, which caused me once the wildest of surmises, when a newspaper (the Kirkintilloch Bugle, if I’m not mistaken) ran the headline MAN FINED FOR SNIGGERING AT LOCH NESS: I thought it was my first real case of political correctness run mad.

This Scottish sniggering, by the way, is a variant of standard English sniggling; there does not appear to be a Kirkintilloch Bugle (though there is a Kirkintilloch Herald), and if this is some sort of obscure Scottish joke I wish somebody would explain it to me.

(Anatoly's latest post includes a couple of dreadful examples of Soviet children's poems in English: "There is a well-known portrait/ Upon the classroom wall:/ We see the face of Lenin,/ So dearly loved by all....")

FANGLES, OLD AND NEW.

A correspondent asked: "Why is it that there is an 'oldfangled' and a 'newfangled', but no 'fangled'?" I did a little research and responded:

Excellent question! Newfangled was originally newfangle, which goes back to the thirteenth century and is based on the archaic verb fang, meaning 'grasp, seize; take, receive.' (The original form is still occasionally used: 1993 Vancouver Sun (Nexis) 12 June D14 "Updating 'Helena' to a 1925 setting—new signs, fewer horses, more of those newfangle automobiles.") It originally meant 'fond of novelty or new things; keen to take up new fashions or ideas; easily carried away by whatever is new' but came to simply mean 'Newly or recently invented or existent, novel; gratuitously or objectionably modern or different from what one is used to.' Oldfangled is much later (first citation: 1797 in Catal. Prints: Polit. & Personal Satires (Brit. Mus.) VII. 354 "We'll stitch up these old fangled Garments for our beloved brats") and is simply a play on newfangled.

There is actually a verb (and noun) fangle, though not often used (e.g. 1755 CARTE Hist. Eng. IV. 136 "Such was their zeal for a new religion of their own fangling"); the OED says they "arose from a mistaken analysis of NEWFANGLED, later form of newfangle 'eager for novelty'. As newfangled was said both of persons and of their actions or productions, it came to be diversely interpreted to mean either 'characterized by new fashions or crotchets' or 'newly fashioned or fabricated'."

I thought that was interesting enough to share with the assembled multitudes.

THE LAND OF NOD.

Conrad of Varieties of Unreligious Experience has outdone himself with a tripartite History of the Nod (Part I, Part II, Part III) that begins with the story of Cain and Abel and God's stern judgment on the fratricidal former:

ki ta'avod et-ha'adamah lo-tosef tet-kocha lach na vanad tihyeh va'arets

'When you work the ground, it will no longer give you of its strength. You will live as fugitive and wanderer on the earth.' The underlined syllable, nad, denotes wandering. Strong's Hebrew Bible dictionary gives the following list of senses for the basic root: 'to nod, i.e. waver; figuratively, to wander, flee, disappear; also (from shaking the head in sympathy), to console, deplore, or (from tossing the head in scorn) taunt:—bemoan, flee, get, mourn, make to move, take pity, remove, shake, skip for joy, be sorry, vagabond, way, wandering.' The word is echoed again in 4:16:

vayetse kayin milifney yahweh vayeshev be'erets-nod kid'mat-eden

'Kayin went out from the presence of the Lord, from the east of Eden, and dwelt as a wanderer on the earth'. Here nod is a cognate of nad. (See here for a recent post on the topic by the young Jewish scholar, Simon Holloway.) Jerome (405 AD) renders 4:16 as 'Egressusque Cain a facie Domini, habitavit profugus in terra ad orientalem plagam Eden.' The 1370s Vulgate translation supervised by the heretic John Wycliffe offers 'And Caym, passid out fro the face of the Lord, dwellide fer fugitif in the erthe, at the eest plage of Eden.' Likewise, the standard Vulgate in English, translated as Catholic propaganda by Gregory Martin in 1609 and now known as the Douai-Rheims Bible, reads 'And Cain went forth from the face of our Lord, and dwelt as a fugitiue on the earth at the east side of Eden.'

But a different tradition had arisen even before Jerome...

He goes on to explain how "a wanderer on the earth" became "the land of Nod" and the subsequent attempts to derive that factitious name from the English word; in Part II he goes into the history of the English word, the puns made possible by the homophony, and the Eugene Field poem that begins, irresistibly,

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe,—

and in Part III he discusses the anthropological and cultural significance of the gesture of nodding ("Since ancient times, the nod has been more than simply yes—it has been a powerful political instrument"). It's all done with his patented mix of scholarship and wit, and he throws in some gorgeous illustrations for free. Go have a look.

PUBLICIST.

I'm reading In War's Dark Shadow by W. Bruce Lincoln (having been prompted by my Unread books post), and a particular usage is bothering me. Here's an example: "Among Russian writers and publicists, ignorance about the lives lived by such men and women bred contempt..." Elsewhere he quotes a "French publicist." Now, to me, this is a completely un-English usage (to me a publicist is exclusively a press agent or other PR type); I'm familiar with it from Russian публицист [publitsist] 'commentator on current affairs,' but I always regarded its use in English as a flagrant example of translationese (like "echelon"). Now that I check the OED, I find that it is in fact good English:

2. loosely. A writer on current public topics; a journalist who makes political matters his speciality.
1833 Westm. Rev. Jan. 195 We hear of editors, reporters, writers in newspapers, and sometimes ‘publicists’, a neological term; but the world.. does not assign the definite meanings to these terms. 1863 S. EDWARDS Polish Captivity I. 78 Certain German publicists point with an air of triumph to the fact that Prussia has constructed a railroad from Posen to Breslau. 1874 GREEN Short Hist. x. §2. 752 The hacks of Grub Street were superseded by publicists of a high moral temper and literary excellence.

But the last citation is from 1874, so it's possible the sense is obsolete. Is it? Or have I simply missed it in my wide reading? As always, I await the multifarious verdict of my Varied Readers.

Incidentally, my apologies if you were unable to comment yesterday (as at least one reader who sent me an e-mail was); the site was having problems, which have since been corrected. (That's also why there was no post for yesterday.) Thanks much to the good folks at Insider Hosting for their response to my anguished outcry!)

POKOT/SUK.

So I was scrolling through the latest OED update, looking up (as is my wont) any words that strike me, and one of them was Pokot. It rang a faint bell, and when I saw "A member of an East African Nilotic people inhabiting parts of western Kenya and eastern central Uganda" I remembered that I had seen the name in language books (sometimes spelled Pökoot). But the etymology (origin unknown, in case you were wondering) included the line "The former name SUK n. and adj. is considered to be derogatory." So of course I looked up Suk ("a. An East African people who inhabit an area on the Uganda-Kenya border; a member of this people. b. The Nilotic language spoken by the Suk") and found no etymology at all; I presume they'll add one, along with a "derogatory" note, when they get around to the su- words in a few years. At any rate, I plan to add this to my arsenal of examples of "correct" and "bad" ethnic names that people cannot reasonably be expected to be aware of (Oromo/Galla being another); I like to bring them up when people get too smug and snippy about correcting other people's usage ("Surely you're aware that the people you're calling X prefer to be called Y, you hegemonic imperialist pig"). I'm all for spreading the word about such things, but it should be done in an 'umble and kindly manner, with full awareness that one is likely an unwitting sinner oneself.

(Incidentally, the stress in Pokot is on the second syllable: puh-KOHT.)

UNREAD BOOKS.

Margaret at Transblawg says in her latest post:

Frau Kohlehydrat has sent me a meme, or as the Germans call it ein Stöckchen, or as the Austrians including Frau Kohlehydrat call it, ein Steckerl: to list the ten books that are gathering dust on my shelves because I bought them but haven’t read them.

I don’t usually do these, but this one seems highly suitable as I have even more than ten unread books. And for years, when I was teaching, I used to buy all sorts of books just to imagine how nice it would be to have time to read them.

She lists her ten books, then says: "I am now supposed to pass this Steckerl on... If they wish then, to: languagehat (but I’m sure Steve has read all his books)..."

Ah ha ha ha ha! I am closing in on 5,000 books (though to be fair the list includes a couple of hundred maps and some other non-book items), and I'm quite sure I haven't read anywhere near half of them. I long ago came to terms with the fact that I'll never manage to read all my books, but I love having them anyway, and I never know which one I'll suddenly decided I have to read. Anyway, I like the idea of listing a few, so below the fold are ten books that I'm really glad I own and I will definitely get around to reading... really!

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (1945)
My brother was deaccessioning this book and I grabbed it. It's a classic work on early-19th-century U.S. history, and even though I know going in that Schlesinger is far too favorable to that murderous bastard Jackson, I'm looking forward to reading it.

Otis Cary, From a Ruined Empire: Letters—Japan, China, Korea 1945-46 (1975)
I gave this to my father for Christmas over 20 years ago, and now that he's no longer with us I've retrieved it for my own reading. My father went to Japan as part of the occupation not long after the period covered by this book and I was born there, so I have a personal interest in the impressions of such men as Wm. Theodore de Bary and Donald Keene back when they were young servicemen who had studied Japanese language and culture and saw the ruined empire with knowing eyes.

W. Bruce Lincoln, In war's dark shadow: the Russians before the Great War (1983)
Lincoln is one of my favorite historians, both a good scholar and a good writer, and I recently acquired his trilogy of books on the history of Russia before and after WWI and the revolutions of 1917. This will probably be the first of these books that I get to, and after I read it I'll go on to Passage Through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution 1914-1918 and Red victory: a history of the Russian Civil War.

Elias Canetti, Crowds and power (1962)
I found this in a bookstore in Providence, RI (I can always remember where I bought books); it's a book I've known about for many years, and it's one of the ones I'm sure I'll actually read. One of these days.

William Gaddis, J.R. (1975)
A daunting modern classic, but if I can handle Joyce I'm sure I can handle Gaddis.

Dmitrii Bykov, Orfografiya [Orthography] (2003)
I wrote about it here.

Leonid Girshovich, Subbota Navsegda [Saturday Forever] (2001)
Another difficult modernist work of the kind that intrigues me. This review (in Russian) says it's "built on allusions to world culture, with a remarkable interweaving of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish works and symbols. The pages of the book are rich in quotes from various works of world literature, at times in the original languages. Girshovich aids the reader by scattering the complicated text with a multitude of footnotes." Laugh if you will, but that sounds good to me!

Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon (1999)
Songdog not only highly recommended this book to me, he lent me his personal copy. What's another 900+ pages to an omnivore like me?

Seth Lerer, Error and the academic self : the scholarly imagination, medieval to modern (2002)
Discussed here (with table of contents).

Halldor Laxness, Independent people (1946)
This book got Laxness a Nobel Prize, and ever since I read Brad Leithauser's proselytizing rave in NYRB over a decade ago I've wanted to read it. (That review is what got this guy started on Laxness; go there for help finding his books.) I found a copy (ex-libarary, but in good shape) of the original U.S. edition at The Odyssey Bookshop recently and snatched it up.

I'm not going to "pass on the meme," but if anyone feels like doing a similar list, please link to it in the comments; I always like a peek into other people's book collections!

KARATEKATRIX WITH AN ACCENT.

The karatekatrix in question is broadcastrix Lynne Russell, and the accent in question is American, as in "ostentatiously from the U.S. rather than Canada." That's a spin we don't often see here in Americacentricland, and Torontonian Joe Clark of fawny.blog has an entertaining post about it, "Lynne Russell Dialect Watch." He says of Canada "We put people on TV who speak in accents. Yes, of course everybody has an accent, but I mean detectable accents," and goes on to dissect Russell's:

♦ Most disturbing is Russell’s mispronunciation of the title of an elected head of a province (and some territories), premier. It’s pronounced exactly one way, “preemyer,” a lesson only some recent U.S. ambassadors to Canada have bothered to learn. It is not pronounced in the various hodgepodges Americans use for that word and the related premiere (“premeer,” “premyare”). Russell pronounces it “primyeer” [ˌprɪmˈjiːr] or “premeer”

♦ Back vowels (chiefly [aː] → [ɑː]), sort of like a Buffalonian...

He finishes up with a striking slip Russell came out with even as he was writing the post: "How’s it gonna play with the American – ‘with the American.’ How’s it gonna play with the Canadian public?"

And now I know how to say "premier." Thanks, Joe!

AT BRIGGFLATTS MEETINGHOUSE.

Boasts time mocks cumber Rome. Wren
set up his own monument.
Others watch fells dwindle, think
the sun's fires sink.

Stones indeed sift to sand, oak
blends with saints' bones.
Yet for a little longer here
stone and oak shelter

silence while we ask nothing
but silence. Look how clouds dance
under the wind's wing, and leaves
delight in transience.

    —Basil Bunting, 1975

From Jacket, where you will find an explication of the compressed first line and a link to a RealAudio file of Bunting reading the poem.

Transience. Five years is a long time and no time at all.

BLOCK THAT METAPHOR!

I hate to trespass on the New Yorker's territory, but I can't resist passing along the headline to this story from the Berkshire Eagle:

Few saw rookie weave mound gem

(In case the story gets taken offline or that fastsearch link doesn't work, the story is about a young Florida Marlins pitcher who threw a no-hitter—the first in the major leagues for two and a half years—before a few thousand people, Florida having pretty much given up on their underachieving team. Oh, and for those who don't know from baseball: "mound" refers to the pitcher's mound, the slight elevation from which the pitcher throws the ball to the batter, sixty feet and six inches away. As to how you're supposed to weave a gem, you're on your own with that. Ask the headline writer.)

LYRIKLINE.

The wonderful German site Lyrikline showcases poets reading their own poetry in many languages: currently Albanian, Arabic, Basque, Belarusian, Breton, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Farsi (Persian), Finnish, French, Gaelic/Scottish Gaelic, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Rhaeto-romanic, Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish (Castilian), Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Wayuunaiki, and Welsh. I'm afraid the translations offered are mostly in German and French, which won't help many Anglophones, but even if you don't understand the words, it's great to hear the varied voices of the poets. (Via MetaFilter.)

TWO MYSTERIES.

1) A correspondent writes that she was at a Farmers' Market, where

a Turkish woman in powder-blue hijab came up to my booth and lovingly fingered the tarragon while asking me if I had any "merzhe." She explained to me that this herb was commonly used in conjunction with rosemary in meat-based dishes in both Turkey and Iraq... I know nothing about it, other than the fact that it looks rather like tarragon... As near as I can tell, it sounded like "merzhe" (MARE-zhe; stress on the first syllable, and the schwa of the second falling off so as to be nearly unheard)... She said that this was the word for the herb in Iraq.

In trying to investigate this I did google up a nice Turkish herb page, but no luck on the merje (which is how it would be written in Turkish if it's a Turkish word). Can any herbologists out there provide an identification, preferably with Latin binomial?

2) As I approach the end of In Parenthesis, the allusions and difficulties come thick and fast. Here's one that's bothering me. On page 161 Jones is describing the motley crew that marched forward with him (or rather his stand-in Pvt. Ball) into German machine-gun fire at the Battle of the Somme, in the insanely slow and formal manner insisted on by the commanding officers:

and two lovers from Ebury Bridge,
Bates and Coldpepper
that men called the Lily-white boys.
Fowler from Harrow and the House who'd lost his way into
this crush who was gotten in a parsonage on a maye.
Dynamite Dawes the old 'un
and Diamond Phelps his batty,
from Santiago del Estero
and Bulawayo respectively,
both learned in ballistics
      and wasted on a line-mob.

Now, I know Ebury Bridge (that's EE-bery) is a street in Westminster and the Lily-white boys are from Green Grow the Rushes, O and Santiago del Estero is in Argentina (I've been there) and Bulawayo is in Zimbabwe (then, of course, Southern Rhodesia and part of the Empire)... but what is batty? Jones has this note: "Interchangeable with 'china' [Cockney rhyming slang for mate]... but more definitely used of a most intimate companion. Jonathan was certainly David's 'batty'." Well, that's intriguing, but none of my dictionaries, slang or otherwise, sheds light on this. It is, of course, strikingly similar to batty 'a person's buttocks; the backside' and battyman '(derogatory and offensive) a homosexual man' (OED), but those are not only attested significantly later than WWI but of Afro-Caribbean origin—the first citation for batty is:
1935 H. P. JACOBS Coll. Notes Jamaican Lang. (MS) in F. G. Cassidy & R. B. Le Page Dict. Jamaican Eng. (1967) s.v., Wen breeze blow, fowl batty show.
I don't think this can be the word Jones is using, but I don't have any other clues. Anybody know? Oh, and while I'm at it, what's the "House" Fowler's from?

A nice tidbit I did solve: Jones refers to "rooty and bully," and while I knew bully was canned (usually corned) beef, I had no idea what "rooty" might be. This time the OED came through; it's military slang for 'bread,' and it's from (duh!) Hindi-Urdu rōtī 'bread,' a word very familiar from Indian restaurants.

1883 SALA in Illustr. Lond. News 7 July 3/3 At least eight years ago I heard of a private soldier complaining.. that he had not had his ‘proper section of rooty’. 1900 KIPLING in J. Ralph War's Brighter Side (1901) xv. 253 And the 'umble loaf of ‘rootey’ Costs a tanner, or a bob. 1900 ‘M. THYME’ in Ibid. xx. 316 Bully beef and rooty, and Something's give me a pain. 1957 M. K. JOSEPH I'll soldier no More (1960) 14 Hey, Antonio, where's me rooty? And make it juldy, see? 1959 Listener 5 Mar. 406/1 Eight ounces of ‘rooty’—that is bread.

SWEARING WORKERS: WHAT IS TO BE DONE?

Regular readers of LH will know that I have a particular interest in Russian swearing, or mat (1, 2), and through a comment by tellurian in a thread at AskMetaFilter I was pointed to a long article by S.A. Smith called "The social meanings of swearing: workers and bad language in late imperial and early Soviet Russia" (originally in Past & Present, August 1998). For those who don't want to work through all 20 pages (some of which are quite short), here's the conclusion:

Mat was a key element in the shifting discourse of kul'turnost' through which educated Russians reflected on the state of society. Though its particular connotations changed, as Russia changed its rulers—from moral degradation of the common people, to sedition, to hooliganism, to political backwardness—neither the late imperial nor the Bolshevik authorities looked on mat as politically neutral. Moreover, those who fought to overthrow the tsarist order, including the 'conscious' workers, viewed mat in the same negative way as the educated elites in general. Although peasants and workers might utilize mat to insult their social superiors, revolutionaries showed no inclination to vindicate it as a 'weapon of the weak'. Towards the end of the Soviet regime, mat did acquire a politically subversive function, as obscene chastushki or anekdoty, puncturing the pretensions of the party-state, grew in popularity. One writer has recently described the use of mat in the post-Stalin era as a 'rebellion against the semantically ruined, mendacious language of official propaganda' and a 'little island of freedom in the kingdom of totalitarianism'. Pointing to the explosion of anecdotes about Lenin, Radio Armenia and the Civil War hero, Chapaev, in the 1960s, V. Gershuni has argued that that decade marked the 'triumphal march of language that had been in disgrace' (opal'noi slovesnosti) when the (male) intelligentsia for the first time 'armed itself' with mat as weapon of social satire. But that is another story.

But half the fun is in the details. From page 18:

While many cogent reasons were adduced to justify Bolshevik objections to swearing—the need for young people to acquire 'cultured speech', the need to combat hooliganism, the unacceptability of male chauvinism, and so forth—at the deepest level much of the distaste may have sprung from a revulsion at the intimate association of mat with what Bakhtin called the 'grotesque body'. Mat celebrated gross corporeality, the lower physical faculties, fecundity and decay, nature and excess, things that sat uneasily with Bolshevik asceticism and horror of being engulfed by nature. Eric Naiman has drawn attention to a dread of the female body that haunted Bolshevik ideology during NEP, which, he suggests, was a projection of wider fears of loss of political and ideological control. If he is correct, it is possible to see in the efforts to discourage mat a defence mechanism against the disorderly excess of popular speech, the libidinal energies of the body and the elemental forces of nature, which threatened to overwhelm the orderly, rational and controlling will of the party-state.

And from page 8, this odd Dostoevsky quote (from a newspaper article of 1873):

My intention was to prove the chastity of the Russian people, to show that even if the people use foul language when they are in a drunken state (for they swear incomparably less when they are sober), they do this not out love of bad language, not out of the pleasure of swearing, but simply out of nasty habit so that even thoughts and feelings that are quite distant from obscenity become expressed in obscene words. I further argued that to find the principal reason for this habit of foul language one must look to drunkenness. When drunk, one's tongue moves with difficulty yet one has a powerful desire to speak, and I surmised that one resorts to short, conventional, expressive words. You may make what you will of this conjecture. But that our people is chaste, even when it is swearing, is worth pointing out.

Incidentally, anyone interested in the relations between the workers and the intellectuals who have presumed to lead them should read Jan Waclaw Machajski: A Radical Critic Of The Russian Intelligensia And Socialism (review), by Marshall S. Shatz. Machajski (1866-1926) was a Polish revolutionary who has long been forgotten (except by Leszek Kolakowski) and who never achieved much in his lifetime aside from annoying tsarists, anarchists, and Bolsheviks alike (though he managed to eke out a living as a copyeditor in Moscow for the last eight years of his life), but the theory he developed in Siberian exile in the late 1890s, known as "Makhaevism" after a Russianized form of his name, is the earliest and perhaps still the most thoroughgoing analysis of the inherent gulf between the intelligentsia (which he defined in practice as anyone with a diploma) and the working class. He had no positive goal in view (except a vague idea that workers should educate themselves so the gap could be eliminated), but his stubborn insistence that knowledge is power and that those with such power can never be trusted to wield it in anyone's interests but their own is still bracing and retains its ability to discomfit the bien-pensant intellectual.

FOOD FOR LANGUAGE.

What is Food for Language? (言語にとって食とはなにか) is a new blog (by Brian of New Haven) that focuses on things Japanese, including Tanizaki on Japanese Orthography, a Tokyo cafe tthat's a "conceptual mess" but has a great breakfast special, and Japanese approaches to Chinese poetry. The last displays Brian's nicely judged rhetorical style:

As is well known, Ernest Fenollosa’s “The Chinese written character as a medium for poetry” is the single most fantastic, least accurate thing that has been written on the subject...

Of course, the best part about the Japanese school, as others before me have noted, is that Fenollosa’s essay (or at least Pound’s recension of it) contains only one complete poem, and it is Japanese. The poem (which begins 月耀如晴雪) is the first item in the collection of Sugawara no Michizane, who records that he wrote it for a class assignment when he was eleven.

A quick hook to the jaw, and it's all over. I'd be glad to share a pizza (at Pepe's, of course) with this guy next time I'm in New Haven, and I thank No-sword for bringing the blog to my attention.

NOTATION AND THE ART OF READING.

An essay by Karl Young (originally published in Open Letter, Spring, 1984) discusses "how poetry was read in three cultural contexts removed from ours in culture and time" (Mexico, 1500; China, 810; and England, 1620) and goes on to "describe some forms of notation in contemporary poetry and how they can be read." I'm sure scholars specializing in each of those cultures would shoot down some of his details, but I like this kind of wide-ranging essay, bringing together things one wouldn't have thought to connect and drawing interesting conclusions. Here's a portion of what he has to say about Jacobean England:

For Shakespeare and Donne and most of their contemporaries a written word was not confined to a single orthographic form: it could change according to the writer's intuitive sense of how it should look or sound, showing shades of emphasis, intonation, color, perhaps even pitch in his own pronunciation. Written language maintained the fluidity, even volatility, of speech: a phrase or line was something a poet created with his mouth, not an arrangement of fixed parts that could be precisely interchanged. A written poem was essentially a record of spoken verse and a score that could enable a reader to recreate it. The elaborate and inconsistent abbreviations and symbols current in script and print also underscore the oral orientation of writing. When a text is just a form of notation, "&" (a symbol that is still with us) could easily stand for "and," and "ye" could be an acceptable abbreviation for "the" (the "y" stood for "th" as in "thorn," not "y" as in "year" as some people now pronounce it in an attempt to sound old fashioned). Punctuation of this period often seems illogical to us for the same reason: we punctuate according to fixed notions of sentence construction, whereas the Jacobean poet punctuated by ear: his punctuation was a form of notation, often indicating a pause where the normal construction of a sentence would not suggest one. A number of conventions, create ambiguities somewhat similar to those in Chinese verse. The use of the apostrophe in possessives had not come into standard usage, and when Donne used a word like "worlds" he may have primarily meant "world's," but wished to leave a sense of secondary meaning: multiple worlds (he was probably familiar with Giordano Bruno's notion of infinite worlds). Letters like "I" and "J" or "U" and "V" were at that time more or less interchangeable, creating further ambiguities and keeping the reader at a speed approximating serious speech.

And here he applies those thoughts to the present (well, the early '80s):

One of the most positive things contemporary poets have going for them is the total lack of standardization at all levels of notation. In writing about Donne, I pointed out that standardized spelling reduced the sense of fluidity and magic in language. Many poets of the last two centuries have reacted to this on a gut level by simply not learning to spell "correctly"—William Morris, W.B. Yeats, and Ezra Pound have been among their company. More recently, poets like bill bissett have completely rejected standardized orthography and have spelled by intuition and their sense of how the words sound, look, and feel. When bissett writes "seek / sum priva see its wintr fr reel now sins ystrday," notions of correct spelling are completely irrelevant. Though people inured to inflexible orthography cringe at this sort of thing, feeling that some immutable law of the universe has been violated, intuitive spelling returns poetry to its oral base: readers must work out the sounds of words to be able to read the poem at all.

I love it when poets meditate on history. (Via wood s lot.)

FLUENCE.

David Jones (discussed here and elsewhere) uses both archaic words gleaned from writers like Malory and modern slang he heard in the trenches of World War One, and sometimes it's hard to tell the difference. A short way into Part 4 of In Parenthesis (page 68 in my edition) occurs the line "Put the fluence on," and fluence had the air of one of those Renaissance obscurities he loved so. Indeed, the first entry in the OED under that rubric is "A flowing, a stream" (c1611 CHAPMAN Iliad XVI. 224 That he first did cleanse With sulphur, then with fluences of sweetest water rense). But that didn't quite seem to fit. The second entry cleared things right up:

aphæretic form of INFLUENCE n., occurring esp. in phr. to put the fluence on (a person), to apply mysterious, magical, or hypnotic power to (a person).

1909 J. R. WARE Passing Eng. 203/2 Put on the flooence, attract, subdue, overcome by mental force. 1923 WODEHOUSE Inimitable Jeeves iii. 31 She was always able to turn me inside out with a single glance, and I haven't come out from under the 'fluence yet. 1937 D. JONES In Parenthesis IV. 68 Put the fluence on.. drownd the bastards on Christmass Day in the Morning. 1957 A. E. COPPARD It's Me, O Lord! ii. 21 It was avouched.. that if you rubbed the juice of a lemon on the palm of your hand you were armoured against suffering.. and as long as the ‘fluence’ lasted other canes broke too. 1958 M. PROCTER Man in Ambush vii. 82 If ever I saw a girl trying to put the 'fluence on a fellow it was Tess. 1965 E. BRUTON Wicked Saint viii. 105 Put the 'fluence on him and we'll be away.

Judging by Google hits, it's still in use; the Cassell Dictionary of Slang qualifies it as "Aus./N.Z.," which is presumably why I haven't run into it before, but if Jones and Wodehouse used it, it clearly used to have wider circulation.

Addendum. In reading G. B. Edwards' The Book of Ebenezer Le Page (see this post), I have come across the following passage on page 191 (he's discussing the highly sexual wife of a friend): "I don't say she would have done anything, if it had come to the point; but the fluence was on, and she got me hot. I was glad to get out of that house."

DENIM.

A letter in Sunday's NY Times Book Review section made me wince, smile ruefully, and then wince again:

To the Editor:

Caroline Weber’s interesting review of “Jeans: A Cultural History of an American Icon,” by James Sullivan (Aug. 20), fails to mention the foreign origin of one name for bluejeans.

History tells us that Mr. and Mrs. Levi Strauss spent their summers in Provence, France — specifically at Nîmes, where the heavy blue fabric was made. Because the dye was famous and was found nowhere else, the French called it “bleu de Nîmes.” Strauss anglicized the name to “blue denim.” The rest is history.

Ita Aber

New York

The first wince was at the completely false assertion about the Levi Strausses inventing the word, which has been around since the 17th century (1695 E. HATTON Merchant's Mag. 159, 18 Serge Denims that cost 6l. each). The rueful smile was an acknowledgment of the irrepressible human need to connect stories with famous people (mixed with gratitude that the basic etymological fact, that denim comes from the phrase de Nîmes, is correct). The second wince was at the thought that the Times, once again, didn't bother to check up on an assertion about language.

By the way, another letter in the same section added a sad detail to the story of the death of the great science fiction writer known to the field as James Tiptree, Jr. (her "real" name was Alice B. Sheldon): "Sheldon revealed that she had struggled against suicidal urges since her childhood. The handwritten suicide note found beside her corpse in 1987 had been written years earlier; she had carefully saved it until she was ready to use it."

STANDARDIZING IGBO.

Some languages acquire a standardized literary language more easily than others. I had not realized that Igbo (sometimes called Ibo, which is how you should say it unless you're a whiz at coarticulated labial-velar stops) had such a long and contentious history of attempts at standardization; Achebe and the Problematics of Writing in Indigenous Languages, by Ernest N. Emenyonu, lays out the whole sorry history:

The Igbo language has a multiplicity of dialects some of which are mutually unintelligible. The first dilemma of the European Christian Missionaries who introduced writing in Igbo land in mid-19th century was to decide on an orthography acceptable to all the competing dialects. There was the urgent need to have in native tongue essential instruments of proselytization, namely the Bible, hymn books, prayer books, etc. The ramifications of this dilemma have been widening over the centuries in complexity.

Since 1841 three proposed solutions have failed woefully. The first was an experiment to forge a synthesis of some selected representative dialects. This Igbo Esperanto 'christened' Isuama Igbo lasted from 1841 to 1872 and was riddled with uncompromising controversies all through its existence. A second experiment, Union Igbo, 1905-1939, succeeded through the determined energies of the missionaries in having the English Bible, hymn books and prayer books translated into it for effective evangelism. But it too, fell to the unrelenting onslaughts of sectional conflicts.

The third experiment was the Central Igbo, a kind of standard arrived at by a combination of a core of dialects. It lasted from 1939 to 1972 and although it appeared to have reduced significantly the most thorny issues in the controversy, its opposition and resistance among some Igbo groups remained persistent and unrelenting.

After the Nigerian independence in 1960, and following the exit of European Christian missionaries, the endemic controversy was inherited by the Society for the Promotion of Igbo Language and Culture (SPILC) founded by F.C. Ogbalu, a concerned pan-Igbo nationalist educator who also established a press devoted to the production and publication of educational materials in Igbo language.

Through his unflinching efforts a fourth experiment and seemingly the ultimate solution, Standard Igbo was evolved in 1973...

But some are not happy with Standard Igbo either, notably Chinua Achebe, who delivered a furious denunciation at a pan-Igbo annual lecture in 1999.

Perhaps what was most revolutionary in Achebe's Odenigbo Lecture was not what he said but rather what he did. Two decades after his initial condemnation of Union as well as Standard Igbo, Achebe had not shifted from his position that Igbo writers should be free to write in their various community dialects unencumbered by any standardization theories or practices. Then as now, he resented attempts to force writers into any strait jackets maintaining unequivocally that literature has the mission "to give full and unfettered play to the creative genius of Igbo speech in all its splendid variety, not to damn it up into the sluggish pond of sterile pedantry." In keeping with this principle, therefore, Achebe wrote and delivered his Odenigbo lecture in a brand of dialect peculiar only to Onitsha speakers of the language and almost unintelligible to more than half the audience.

I fully support the right of every writer (or other user of a language) to use whatever dialect they choose, but there should surely be a standard language available for public purposes that is intelligible to all, and I hope the problems involved can be overcome.

DA MI BASIA MILLE.

Anyone interested in Latin kisses (and come on, you know you are) should hurry over to Varieties of Unreligious Experience, where you will find a thorough literary/philological investigation into the words osculum, basium, and suavium, sometimes said to mean 'a friendship kiss on the cheek,' 'a kiss of affection on the lips,' and 'a lovers' deep kiss' respectively. Turns out "the distinction between these words cannot be primarily one of meaning (whether social or anatomical), but must rather be one of register." And the reason basium has had far too prominent a place in my image of Latin and suavium none at all is that I've read too much Catullus and too little Plautus. You know what they say: it's all who you know.

DEFAULTERS.

On the second page of In Parenthesis, the following passage occurs:

From where he stood heavily, irksomely at ease, he could see, half-left between 7 and 8 of the front rank, the profile of Jenkins and the elegant cut of his war-time rig and his flax head held front; like San Romano's foreground squire, unhelmeted; but we don't have lances now nor banners nor trumpets. It pains the lips to think of bugles—and did they blow Defaulters on the Uccello horns.

When I first read this, many years ago, it must have been quite frustrating. Sure, there's a footnote to tell me "San Romano" refers to "painting, 'Rout of San Romano'. Paolo Uccello (Nat. Gal.)," but not being in London, I couldn't trot down to the National Gallery to have a look. Of course I could have scoured the art section of the library for a reproduction, but you can't really go to that kind of trouble for every passing reference. The OED would have told me that defaulter (in military use) is "A soldier guilty of a military crime or offence," but that doesn't go very far in explaining the reference. Now, with the wonders of the internet, I can google "San Romano, Uccello" and find any number of reproductions—this page provides a nice large image, if somewhat dark, while this one is considerably brighter—as well as the start of an article explaining who the "foreground squire" is (the Florentine Captain-General, Niccolo Mauruzzi da Tolentino, who, Wikipedia informs us, was in his 80s when he led his troops at the Battle of San Romano in April of 1432!).

As for Defaulters, this page tells us that the tune was probably "A Man's A Man For A' That," which

is traditionally played when an accused soldier is brought before a summary trial, court martial or other hearing. By tradition, the accused removes his hat and is escorted in by two soldiers of equal rank - his peers - and is permitted to have a piper play him in. The tune is played to bring to mind Burns' words - and remind the presiding officer that the soldier is still a man, and should be treated fairly and without prejudice no matter what the accusation against him might be. The tune is played by a solo piper.

And this page has a link to a midi file of the tune (not to mention Reveille, Dinner Call, Lights Out, and Lament). So a few seconds with Google gave me a basic understanding of the realia Jones had in mind when composing the passage; without Google, I have no idea how long it would have taken me to amass the knowledge, but it wouldn't have been worth the effort involved. All hail the internet!

LA COTE MAL TAILLEE.

In David Jones's hybrid masterpiece In Parenthesis, there's a soldier with the unlikely name of Dai de la Cote male taile; a footnote tells us to "Cf. Malory, book ix, ch. 1." Book IX, Chapter 1 of Le Morte d'Arthur begins:

At the court of King Arthur there came a young man and bigly made, and he was richly beseen: and he desired to be made knight of the king, but his over-garment sat over-thwartly, howbeit it was rich cloth of gold. What is your name? said King Arthur. Sir, said he, my name is Breunor le Noire, and within short space ye shall know that I am of good kin. It may well be, said Sir Kay, the Seneschal, but in mockage ye shall be called La Cote Male Taile, that is as much to say, the evil-shapen coat.

So far, so good, but it happens that in French the phrase cote mal taillée means something quite different; this cote is from Latin quota and means 'quoted value; rating; assessment," so that faire une cote mal taillée means to make a rough-and-ready assessment, or in general to "split the difference," to compromise. (Léon Daudet, son of Alphonse, in Vers le roi, says "C'est [le Palais de Justice] le pays de la cote mal taillée, du « Monsieur a raison, mais vous n'avez pas tort », des accommodements entre le vrai et le faux": '[The Law Courts] are the land of the cote mal taillée, of "This gentleman is right, but you, sir, are not wrong," of compromises between the true and the false.')

Must create a minor stumbling-block for French-speaking readers attempting Malory. I wonder how it gets translated into French?