THE PUSHKIN CLUB.

The Pushkin Club is a London institution that gives "lectures, recitals, recitations, covering all aspects of Russian culture... The list of visiting poets is impressive: Andrei Voznesensky, Yevgeny Rein - the mentor of Joseph Brodsky, Irina Ratushinskaya, Dmitry Prigov, Olga Sedakova, Tatiana Voltskaya, the young Azeri poet Negar, to name just a few - all with English translations read by readers in the bilingual tradition of the Pushkin Club." It's been around since 1953 (history), and the BBC did a nice half-hour program (or programme, if you prefer) with interviews and some readings in both languages. If I get to London, I'll definitely drop by. (Thanks, Paul!)

BURMA/MYANMAR.

Via frequent commenter (and recent visitor) Kattullus, this BBC News article: "Should it be Burma or Myanmar?" They point out (as I always find myself doing) that Myanmar is the name imposed by the junta and Burma is preferred by democracy activists like Aung San Suu Kyi, and say:

It's general practice at the BBC to refer to the country as Burma, and the BBC News website says this is because most of its audience is familiar with that name rather than Myanmar. The same goes for Rangoon, people in general are more familiar with this name than Yangon.

Which is eminently sensible, and my practice as well; I will never understand why so many people are so eager to fall in line with the "official" nomenclature. Anyway, there's some interesting background on the two names, with this quote from "anthropologist Gustaaf Houtman, who has written extensively about Burmese politics": "There's a formal term which is Myanmar and the informal, everyday term which is Burma. Myanmar is the literary form, which is ceremonial and official and reeks of government."

Also, I got word from Grant Barrett that A Way With Words is back. Congratulations, Martha and Grant!

BONIN ISLANDS ENGLISH.

I'm in a mad deadline rush, but I wanted to point you towards a fascinating post at Far Outliers quoting English on the Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands, by Daniel Long:

It is a little known linguistic fact that among a group of Western Pacific islands English is maintained as a community language of the indigenous population. These are the Bonin Islands. Today, these islands (also called Ogasawara Islands) are part of Japan and their population, Japanese citizens, but the English language has survived there, as both a tool of communication and a marker of their unique identity...

In the 170-year linguistic history of the Bonin Islands, the dominant language has shifted from English (from 1830) to Japanese (1876), back to English (1946), and back again to Japanese (1968).

Also, MMcM has made another of his much-awaited posts (warding off any complaints about the two-month delay with "Some of the spare time allocated for posting here got used last month for gazpacho and shark over at LH"). This one is Kookoo, the name of a Persian "thick filled omelet, cut into squares, along the lines of Italian frittata or Spanish (not Mexican) tortilla"; much of the post is devoted to an analysis of the history of words for 'spinach' in MMcM's patented style, with extensive quotations from works in various languages and lots of tasty etymology. And as usual after exposure to the Polyglot Vegetarian, I'm hungry, and I'm wishing there was a Persian restaurant in town.

BILLET AND BEDLAM.

I was looking over wood s lot to give myself the strength to dive into another day's furious editing, as deadline approaches, when I was caught by a fragment of what purported to be a translation of Tsvetaeva. It looked like this:

I decline to exist in the crazy house
of the inhuman.
I decline to go on living
in the marketplace of wolves.

I won't howl,
among the sharks of the field.
I won't swim beneath
the waves of squirming backs.
I have no need of holes for hearing
or seeing eyes.
To your crazed world there's
only one answer: No!

(The full translation is here.) It pissed me off. That's not what Tsvetaeva sounds like. She's not my favorite poet, but she has a unique combination of simplicity (here, short lines with hammerlike beats), complexity (Pasternak-like playing with sounds, odd lexical choices, and unexpected rhymes), and a rage and passion all her own. You couldn't mistake a Tsvetaeva poem for anything else.

This translation, though, has no individuality, no rhythm, only as much force as is inherent in the matter (wolves, howling, refusal). Tsvetaeva has been turned into Miss Random Poetry Seminar Poet. Furthermore, a quick investigation revealed that the translators have taken two different poems and jammed them together. And the word choices are sometimes bizarre: why render Бедлам [Bedlam] as "crazy house" when English has Bedlam? And why "grabbed" for взяли [vzyali], the basic Russian word for 'took'? (I note also that they didn't notice, or bother to render, the distinction between imperfective брали [brali] in the first line, representing the ongoing process of taking, and the perfective взяли 'they took' in the rest.) But what really got me was "now's the time to give the billet back to God." The billet? The Russian word билет [bilet] means either 'ticket' or 'identity/membership card' ('Party card' is партийный билет); you have to pick one or the other here, but billet is ridiculous.

I've put the Russian texts below the cut, as well as a quick-and-dirty translation of the first stanza of each just to give an idea of the rhythm (the first poem rhymes AABB, the second ABAB, but I didn't try to match that). I know "Hispania" is cheating—the Russian is just the normal word for Spain—but I needed to fill out the line, I didn't want to use "in its own blood" like those other translators, and I figure Hispania works OK with Chekhia (there's an odd gap in English where that word should be, so let's get it into circulation).

I wish I had the time to do more, but I really have to do some work now!

Their taking was fast and their taking was lavish.
They took the mountains, they took the depths.
They took the coal and they took the steel
And took the lead from us, and the crystal.

* * *

O tears in all our eyes!
Weeping from rage and love!
O Chekhia in tears,
Hispania in blood!

6. ВЗЯЛИ...

Чехи подходили к немцам и плевали.

(См. мартовские газеты 1939 г.)

Брали - скоро и брали - щедро:
Взяли горы и взяли недра,
Взяли уголь и взяли сталь,
И свинец у нас, и хрусталь.

Взяли сахар и взяли клевер,
Взяли Запад и взяли Север,
Взяли улей и взяли стог,
Взяли Юг у нас и Восток.

Вары - взяли и Татры - взяли,
Взяли близи и взяли дали,
Но - больнее, чем рай земной! -
Битву взяли - за край родной.

Взяли пули и взяли ружья,
Взяли руды и взяли дружбы...
Но покамест во рту слюна -
Вся страна вооружена!

9 мая 1939

* * *

8

О слезы на глазах!
Плач гнева и любви!
О Чехия в слезах!
Испания в крови!

О черная гора,
Затмившая - весь свет!
Пора - пора - пора
Творцу вернуть билет.

Отказываюсь - быть.
В Бедламе нелюдей
Отказываюсь - жить.
С волками площадей

Отказываюсь - выть.
С акулами равнин
Отказываюсь плыть -
Вниз - по теченью спин.

Не надо мне ни дыр
Ушных, ни вещих глаз.

На твой безумный мир
Ответ один - отказ.

15 марта - 11 мая 1939

DRUTHERS.

Avva (Russian link) just learned the wonderful word druthers, usually heard (as he heard it) in the phrase "If I had my druthers..."; it's a contraction of "would rather," as explained in this Phrases.org entry, and the OED has the following:

U.S. dialectal alteration of (I, you, etc.) would rather. Hence 'druther(s), 'ruther(s), a choice, preference.
1876 [see DERN a.]. 1895 Dialect Notes I. 388 Bein's I caint have my druthers an' set still, I cal'late I'd better pearten up an' go 'long. 1896 ‘MARK TWAIN’ Tom Sawyer, Detective ix. 74 ‘Any way you druther have it, that is the way I druther have it. He—— .’ ‘There ain't any druthers about it, Huck Finn; nobody said anything about druthers.’ 1941 W. A. PERCY Lanterns on Levee (1948) xxii. 292 ‘Your ruthers is my ruthers' (what you would rather is what I would rather). Certainly the most amiable and appeasing phrase in any language, the language used being not English but deep Southern.

As I say in the Avva thread: I can't find what they're trying to point the reader to with that "see DERN a." Dern is an archaic adjective meaning 'secret; dark; dreary,' and there are no citaions later than 1856 ("The awful, twilight dern and dun").

RUSSIAN PROVERB.

I'm reading Yuri (Georges) Annenkov's wonderful (and tragic) Dnevnik moikh vstrech [Diary of my meetings], in which he describes in unforgettable detail his acquaintance with Blok, Gorky, and many others, and I've just gotten to a section where he visits Gorky in Sorrento in 1924 and the latter says of the "Fascist blackshirts": Единственное исключение в человеческой породе: этих я не могу "полюбить черненькими" ['The only exception among the human race: these people I can't "love (when they're) black/dark"']. Googling tells me it's a reference to a Russian saying "Полюбите нас черненькими, а беленькими нас всякий полюбит" ['Love us (when we're) black/dark—anybody can love us white/light'], which is a compact way of expressing a useful sentiment, and I don't think it has an equivalent in English.

But who said the saying? Various online sources attribute it to Dostoevsky and Gogol, specifically Dead Souls (e.g., Russian Wikiquote), and more specifically the unfinished second part of the novel (e.g., here: «Полюбите нас чёрненькими, а беленькими нас всякий полюбит», — говорит один из героев Гоголя во втором томе поэмы «Мёртвые души»). But I've searched the online text, and it ain't there. I'm coming to the conclusion that it's one of those sayings that sound like they should be from a famous author, so people attach them to the usual suspects (in English, Mark Twain and Oscar Wilde are popular for this purpose). But I'd love it if someone knows anything concrete. [My commenters came through again: it is indeed from Gogol.]

BAGATELLING AROUND.

Mark Liberman at Language Log discovers a usage new to him and me:

In the September 6 issue of Nature, a verb caught me up short (Phileppe Claeys and Steven Goderis, "Solar System: Lethal billiards"):

A huge collision in the asteroid belt 160 million years ago sent fragments bagatelling around the inner Solar System. One piece might have caused the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

The only use I ever see for bagatelle is "a mere bagatelle", with the occasional reference to Beethoven's bagatelles. [...] So I looked it up.

The OED gives the first sense of bagatelle as "A trifle, a thing of no value or importance", and sense 1.b. as "A piece of verse or music in a light style". But then comes

2. A game played on a table having a semi-circular end at which are nine holes. The balls used are struck from the opposite end of the board with a cue. The name is sometimes applied to a modified form of billiards known also as semi-billiards.

So apparently for some people, bagatelling is roughly the same as caroming.

Isn't that interesting? To my fellow Americans, that is; I guess my Brit readers are familiar with the 'game' sense. Or are you?

Oh, and while I'm talking about Language Log, I can't resist pointing to their discussion of the crockus (MetaFilter followup here).

SELF-QUOTING AT THE OED.

I was just trying to see what the OED had to say about white in the sense of 'reactionary' (Metternich having talked about "white radicals" in 1834) when I was struck by the subentry for whiter than white 'extremely white' ("In mod. use popularized as an advertising slogan for Persil soap-powder"). After a nod at Shakespeare's 1592 Ven. & Ad. 398 "Teaching the sheets a whiter hew then white," the first citation is the following:

a1924 N.E.D. s.v. White sb. 23, Exceeding or surpassing white, ‘whiter than white’.

So wait, you get to use it yourself in the first edition, then quote that use as a citation in the second? I know, I know, the quotation marks imply the phrase was in current use, but it still makes my head spin.

KOTOBA, HEIDEGGER, AND SHONAGON.

I have a lot of work to get through, so I'm just going to point you in the direction of a most interesting discussion over at Conrad's philosophitorium of Heidegger's (to my mind completely loony: "Koto, then, would be the appropriating occurrence of the lightening message of grace [das Ereignis der lichtenden Botschaft der Anmut]") interpretation of Japanese kotoba ('language; word' in the world inhabited by normal people), with enlightening and informed commentary by the lively and learned Matt and the equally learned literary estheticist Gawain, and Gawain's post in response, In which he is a Japanese scholar, with further analysis of the word and his excited discovery that "the semi-divine authoress of the Pillow Book, my Sei Shonagon, the truest love of my life (see my post on her here) wrote the word kotoba as — 詞." It's all good stuff, and I want to know more about the putative rivalry described by Gawain's commenter Peony:

It is essential to keep in mind that the court was dominated by an intense rivalry between 2 cousin empresses…. It was one of the most lively rivalries in all Japanese literary history and the superstar authoresses of the day were divided along Party Lines: sei shonagon on one side and murasaki shikibu, akazoe emon and my personal love, izumi shikibu on the other…. So any insult to sei shonagon functioned as a disparaging of Empress Akiko.

Gawain says "we don’t know much about the supposed rivalry between SS and Murasaki Shikibu"; Peony responds "We actually know more than that, but…" But what? Tell me more!

PACE.

I have always pronounced the preposition pace ('with due deference to' or 'despite,' from the ablative of Latin pax) in the traditional anglicized way, PAY-see, and assumed that was the universally accepted pronunciation. Now I discover, having seen the casual aside “Pace (that is to say, aloud, pa che)” in this Pepys Diary thread, that the Church Latin version, PAH-chay, is equally acceptable (the OED gives it second place for U.K. usage, first place for U.S.). So it's time for another Languagehat straw poll: if you use this slightly obnoxious Latinism, how do you say it?

Below the cut are the OED citations; I particularly like the last one (and again I find it odd that the OED cites only the journal and not the delightfully disputatious author).

1863 Fraser's Mag. Nov. 662/1 Mendelssohn was an artist passionately devoted to his art, who (pâce Dr. Trench) regarded art as virtù.
1883 Standard 1 Sept. 2/2 Pace the late Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Mr. Scofield is right.
1911 Chambers's Jrnl. Nov. 720/1 The colour [of fruit].. is a tacit invitation (pace the gardener) to the feast.
1955 Times 7 July 9/6 Nor, pace Mr. Smith, was I for one moment defending immorality in the journalist.
1995 Computers & Humanities 29 404/1, I do not believe, pace Peirce and Derrida, that it is signs all the way down, and that, pace Dennett, there is no distinctive human intentionality, and that, pace almost everyone, thinking is fundamentally linguistic.

ORFOGRAFIYA III.

Here's another bit from the Second Act of Bykov's Orfografiya (see this post for an earlier sample); it illustrates the fascination and frustration of reading the book:

Bookseller's Row in the Haymarket was a grotesque sight—like almost all sights then: destitution and wretchedness were carried to such absurd lengths that they ceased to provoke tears but only decrepit, wise laughter such as the last Romans must have aimed at themselves and the Gauls. Somewhere in the hidden, half-legendary Petersburg cellars precious manuscripts were still being exchanged for equally fabulous, apocryphal things—a pound of butter, a ham; but in the Haymarket they dealt mainly in the literature of the Russian Golden Age, naive literary almanacs in which vulgar quarrels were carried on, with opponents caught in misprints and hidden peccadillos hinted at—so-and-so lost everything at gambling, or had informed on someone, or was a kept man... The public was most picturesque and ill-assorted: here was the beginning of the disintegration of the Petersburg School—zaumniks, "ushkuiniks," pustoglots, nothingists, metaphorists, columbines, going-to-the-peoplists, and the completely enigmatic quasists. Here stood the gnomelike graybeard Trufanov with a bundle of "northern antiquities" transcribed in a decorative style and said to have been collected at the time of the Arkhangelsk rites—in fact they had been taken from a collection of byliny and worked up into a state of complete incomprehensibility; he was seen with his group singing the bawdy songs of Nesein [No-sow] ("My name is because we are not simple peasants: we do not sow nor reap, we are peasants not by calling but by willing").

(The Russian is below the cut.)

The "disintegration of the Petersburg School" section drives me nuts: "zaumniks" I know, they were practitioners of Zaum, but what's the status of the rest? Ushkuiniks were medieval Novgorodian pirates, and there was a literary almanac called Ushkuiniki published in Petersburg in 1922 and later a 1927 self-published poetry book of that name by Aleksandr Tufanov, a now-forgotten futurist, zaumist, and "sound poet" (note the apperance of a character called "Trufanov" immediately below in the passage—Bykov consistently renames characters based on real people, so that Shklovsky turns up as "Lgovsky" and Gorky as "Khlamida," an early pseudonym); was there any group of "Ushkuiniki" in 1918, or is it pure invention? "Pustoglots" [pustogloty] has the Russian prefix for 'empty' and the Greek suffix for 'tongue, language' (as in polyglot), and the Russian word gets a few Google hits as an insult; "nothingist" [nichevoshnik] is a rare word defined by Dahl as 'someone for whom everything is nothing'; columbines [akvilegi] is, as far as I can make out, simply the name of a flower; lyudokhod isn't an actual word but has a prefix meaning 'people' and a suffix meaning 'going,' and it's used as a caption for this photo; kvazer seems to sometimes be used for kvazar 'quasar' and sometimes in ways I don't understand [these words are explained in the comments below]. What's a poor translator supposed to do with this farrago? But it sure is fun.

Addendum. A correspondent points out to me that "Nesein" is a "very transparent to a Russian reader allusion to the peasant-poet Sergei Esenin," something that was obvious as soon as she mentioned it but that hadn't occurred to me. Thanks, Evgenia!

Писательский ряд на Сенной являл собою зрелище гротескное — как почти все тогдашние зрелища: нищета и жалкость дошли до такого абсурда, что перестали вызывать слезы, а только дряхлый, мудрый смех, каким, должно быть, последние римляне смеялись над собою и галлами. Где-то в тайных, полулегендарных питерских подвалах еще выменивались драгоценные рукописи на такие же сказочные, недостоверные вещи — фунт масла, окорок; но на Сенном торговали в основном литературой русского золотого века, наивными альманахами, где шла площадная литературная борьба, где ловили оппонентов на опечатках и с витиеватым многословием намекали на их тайные грешки — проигрался, донес, жил на содержании… Публика была самая живописная и разношерстная: тут было начало распада петербургской школы — заумники, «ушкуйники», пустоглоты , ничевошники, метафористы, аквилеги, людоходы и вовсе уж загадочные квазеры. Тут тихо стоял похожий на гнома седобородый Труфанов с пачкой узорчато переписанных «Северных старин», якобы собранных во время радений под Архангельском, — на деле же взятых из сборника былин и обработанных до полной невнятицы; был замечен со своей кодлой распевавший похабщину Несеин («А прозванье-то мое — от того, что крестьяне мы не простые: не сеем, не жнем; крестьяне не по труду, а по нутру»).

WHERE LANGUAGES DISAPPEAR.

The NY Times has an article by John Noble Wilford beginning "Of the estimated 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, linguists say, nearly half are in danger of extinction and likely to disappear in this century." I know what you're thinking: "So what else is new?" But there's a news hook:

New research, reported yesterday, has found the five regions where languages are disappearing most rapidly: northern Australia, central South America, North America’s upper Pacific coastal zone, eastern Siberia, and Oklahoma and the southwestern United States. All have indigenous people speaking diverse languages, in falling numbers.

The study was based on field research and data analysis supported by the National Geographic Society and the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. The findings are described in the October issue of National Geographic and at languagehotspots.org.

Interesting tidbit: "a group known as the Kallawaya use Spanish or Quechua in daily life, but also have a secret tongue mainly for preserving knowledge of medicinal plants, some previously unknown to science. 'How and why this language has survived for more than 400 years, while being spoken by very few, is a mystery,' Dr. Harrison said in a news release." Thanks for the link, Bonnie!

Update. Informed (and unenthusiastic) commentary from Claire Bowern, who actually knows what she's talking about, here.

ENTRY FROM BACKSIDE.

An article by Amrit Dhillon in the Telegraph (which, it suddenly occurs to me, is an odd name for a 21st-century newspaper) brings to my attention (thanks for the link, Marja-Leena!) a new book called Entry from Backside Only: Hazaar Fundas of Indian-English:

Its title, Entry From Backside Only, refers to a phrase commonly used on signposts to indicate the rear entrance of a building. Binoo John, the author, said young Indians had embraced the variant of the language as a charming offspring of the mingling of English and Hindi, rather than an embarrassing mongrel.

"Economic prosperity has changed attitudes towards Indian English," said Mr John. "Having jobs and incomes, and being noticed by the rest of the world, have made Indians confident - and the same confidence has attached itself to their English."...

The columnist Anjali Puri said pride in Indian English also stemmed from the success of writers such as Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth and Salman Rushdie: "These writers have used English to portray Indian reality and it has given people the confidence to try out new words and play around with the language without being scared about whether they are correct."

This is an excellent development, and it sounds like a fun book; you can read piquant examples of local usage in the review. And by googling the title I got to this post, which tells me that Dick & Garlick ("Notes on Indian English, Hinglish, slang & pop culture") is back in business after nine months' hiatus, which is superb news indeed—welcome back, R Devraj!

SOMBRERO.

I saw the mail truck stop at our box and instead of Mo putting something in and driving on down the block, she got out, walked around to the back, opened it, and rummaged around for a while. I watched her with fascination—I've set up my office in the front of the house, what used to be the living room before they built the addition on the back (I've walled it off with bookcases back to back sticking out from the interior wall towards the front wall, but I've got half the books sitting on the floor until I can get around to putting a couple of screwjacks in the cellar to hold up the office floor, which was never built to take that kind of concentrated load), so I see everything that goes on in the street. After a while she walked down the driveway and over to the front door, carrying a catalog and a large package. When she handed it over to me, I realized it was amazingly light and wondered what on earth it could be. I got the boxcutter, opened it up, and found a gorgeous, pristine white hat, something like this but with the crown slanted down sharply towards the front and deeply indented. It was made in Mexico and bore the label D'Avila Hats on one side of the band and "La Providencia" and a phone number on the other. It fit perfectly.

It turned out to be from my old buddy the Growling Wolf, who'd found a good deal on eBay and gotten one for each of us; in an e-mail responding to my thank-you, he said "the guy told me these hats were made in only certain parts of Mexico--and they are made from a special grass and they are made by women who go into caves and weave these hats so the straw doesn't dry out--they have to keep it soft and evidently the air in these caves is perfect for this... You can smell the straw in these babies." My wife calls me Don Magnifico when I wear it.

As it happens, the Growler is in the midst of a long saga called One Spring Morning Off Spring Street, that starts with being rudely awakened on "a spring morning when I lived on Greenwich Street in a 2nd-floor loft in a building that had been, and I loved the fact, a butter and egg wholesale house" and continues via many a commodious vicus of recirculation to an epic attempt to use a weekend pass to get from Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, to East Lansing, Michigan, and back before Monday morning formation at 6 o'clock. If you had no problem with my mildly discursive first paragraph, you might try riding the bucking bronco of the Growler's wild-eyed, intoxicatory prose style; the saga starts at 1 (with a history of the Ear Inn) and continues with 2 ("being awakened by an earthquake that turned out to be Bobby Fuller's 'I Fought the Law and the Law Won' being played by such a wild uneven unthoughtout racous almost jackhammer-bothersome in its incessant bad drumming whingding POW on the 2 and 4"), 3 (mafficking at the Ear Inn—warning, Not Safe For Work or delicate sensibilities), 4 (the formation of a great blues band, with more raunch), 5 (writing, lusting after Tuesday Weld, getting beat out by Joyce Carol Oates), 6 (the epic journey begins: "The first time I was in Detroit...OK, I start swimming back into some murkier waters of my past times, those times when I was in the U.S. Army and stationed at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, outside the town of Rollo, Missouri..."), 7 ("So the Chicagoans and Big Bad John and I got on the military bus to the post main gate and there we caught the Trailways into Saint Louis, where we were gonna book on the Rock Island or the Burlington or the Illinois Central, one of those railroads and then head up to Chicago a couple'a hundred miles north and then after that--whatever, we had a horrible schedule to beat..."), and 8 (stewardesses and Lake Michigan, plus a joyous yawp about the Yankees—the Growler is a serious Yankee fan). If you like it, there's more to come.

MODULO.

An outcropping of jargon occurred while my back was turned, and frequent commenter Noetica has called my attention to it in this thread:

I have been trying to sort it out for several years, now. All OED has for modulo is this:

With respect to a modulus of. Also attrib., = modular.

What does it mean though, exactly, in the sentence above? From the Wikipedia article, after its mention of the first meaning in mathematics:

Ever since however, "modulo" has gained many meanings, some exact and some imprecise.

Tell me about it!

What he doesn't know is that the OED entry was revised in March 2003, and after the literal definition he quotes there is now the following:

b. In extended use. (a) With respect to an equivalence defined by (some feature), disregarding differences indicated by (some unimportant feature); (b) taking into account (a particular consideration, aspect, assumption, etc.). 1953 W. AMBROSE Let. in S. Nasar Beautiful Mind (1998) xx. 155 [John Nash] proceeded to announce that he had solved it, module [sic] details. 1960 Jrnl. Philos. 59 776 Which we choose is entirely arbitrary, but (modulo the assumption that any run covers a line segment) it determines how we answer the question [etc.]. 1973 C. C. CHANG & H. J. KEISLER Model Theory 7 The language is determined uniquely, modulo the connectives, by the sentence symbols. 1992 Stud. Eng. Lit.: Eng. Number (Tokyo) 161 The Navajo underlying structure is identical, modulo word order, to the one found in all the languages studied in Ch. 3.

Anyone who wants more examples can visit Noetica's comment in the thread I linked above; he cites a passel of 'em. My initial reaction was that I didn't like it: what's wrong with "with respect to" or "taking into account"? Of course modulo is shorter and I can see how it would be convenient, but it still strikes me as one of those bits of verbiage that serve mainly to show that you're one of the gang.

I was curious about the "etc." in the second citation—I wondered how long that sentence ran in its original setting. So I googled it, and thanks to the wonders of JSTOR I found it: "...the question 'Given that he disappeared at 1, did he occupy 1?'" This was a pretty disappointing payoff for the effort of trawling through a 20-page philosophy article that made my eyes glaze over so thoroughly that I missed the quote the first time through and only caught it on the reverse journey (yes, I was an idiot for not thinking of looking on p. 776, where the OED said it would be), but I now have the following burning question: why does the OED cite this as Jrnl. Philos. 1960 when 1) it's from an article with an author and title (Paul Benacerraf, "Tasks, Super-Tasks, and the Modern Eleatics") and 2) Vol. 59, No. 24 of The Journal of Philosophy is from November 1962?

ANTHIMERIA.

Apparently there is a rhetorical term anthimeria meaning the use of a word as a different part of speech than its normal one, as in Calvin's "Verbing weirds language." (Hobbes's response: "Maybe we can eventually make language a complete impediment to understanding.") This came up in a Wordorigin.org thread (which I already posted about here); a commenter (mis)used the term, other people discussed it, and I eventually produced this cranky outburst:

What the devil is this alleged word “anthimeria,” anyway? It’s not in any dictionary, and a website I found by googling it gives this stupid derivation:

from Gk. anti- “instead of” and mereia “a part”

Do you see an -h- in there? I don’t either. If you’re going to combine anti- and mereia, what you’ll get is “antimereia” or (if you want to Latinize it) “antimeria.” And what’s the point? I’m not about to go trawling through the long, long lists of rhetorical terminology, but there’s a category for everything, and I’m sure there’s one that would cover this. And if there’s not, why go to the trouble of creating a fake-classical one that anybody with any classical education will sneer at? [...] I reject this preposterous balderdash!

Then another commenter provided the etymology "(Gk anthos, ‘flower’ + meros, ‘part’)," giving this (A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, by J. A. Cuddon, p. 41) as a reference. I wrote: "I don’t know on what authority Cuddon gives that etymology—it could be his wild-ass guess—but it would explain the -h-. Still a malformed word, though, because now there’s no explanation for the -i- (anthos + mer- should give anthomer-; cf. anthology)."

So I'm convinced the word exists, but I'm puzzled about who created it, why it has the form it does, and why it isn't in the OED (which generally has pretty good coverage of rhetorical terms). Anybody know anything?

MAFFICKING.

I used the verb maffick (OED: "To celebrate uproariously, rejoice extravagantly") last night, and my wife asked where it was from. I said "That's one of my favorite etymologies," and when I told her she agreed it was pretty damn good. So I'm sharing it with you, in case you don't already know it.

The Boer War ended with the absorption of the independent Boer republics into the British Empire, but it began with the British on the receiving end of a terrible shock: their invincible troops were unable to prevent the insurgent Boers from invading Cape Colony and Natal Colony in late 1899 and successfully besieging the towns of Mafeking (now Mafikeng) and Kimberley. Food became very scarce, and attempted relief expeditions were wiped out in a series of terrible British defeats. It wasn't until May 17 of the following year that Mafeking (defended, incidentally, by troops under the command of Colonel Robert Baden-Powell—yes, the same Baden-Powell, pronounced BAY-d'n POE-'l, who later founded the Boy Scouts) was successfully relieved, and when the news reached London the next evening the city erupted in wild celebration which went on for days. The similarity in sound between the name of the town and an English present participle was irresistible, and soon the celebration was called "mafficking" (the first citation in the OED is from the Pall Mall Gazette of 21 May: "We trust Cape Town.. will ‘maffick’ to-day, if we may coin a word, as we at home did on Friday and Saturday"). The earlier edition of the OED said "The words appear to be confined to journalistic use," but they've withdrawn that statement in the March 2000 draft revision of the entry, and with good reason: the word is so much fun that people have kept using it long after the siege has faded into the farther reaches of historical memory.

ORFOGRAFIYA II.

A few years ago I reported on my purchase of Dmitrii Bykov's novel Orfografiya [Orthography], and exactly a year ago I promised to get around to reading it; now I'm over halfway through it and enjoying it immensely (I'd love to translate it if I had the time and a publisher had the interest). This self-contained snippet from the Second Act represents a basic divide in humanity. The protagonist, Yat, is remembering an amusing episode from a few years back:

...when was it? Oh yes, that's right, in '13: "Birzhevka" [Birzhevye vedomosti, the Stock-Exchange Gazette] suddenly started publishing on the last page—framed by a dotted line, so interested parties could clip it out—a list about which nobody could say anything for sure. It was simply called "List," without any further clarification. There were thirty-nine family names, fairly neutral, some of which he knew—Mizerov, Foskin—but with different initials. What if he found his own there? Whether it was the list of members of some secret organization (doubtless for terrorists of a certain stripe it would be especially stylish to publish it under the nose of the government, on the principle of "hiding a leaf in the forest") or an innocent register of founders of a joint-stock corporation which didn't have enough money to publish its excessively lengthy company name in full, Yat never could figure out. Once he discussed the story with [his imaginative friend] Grem.

"That was a list of actioners [д е й с т в о в а т е л е й]," said Grem with his usual emphasis, not wasting even three seconds in coming up with a new story.

"Go on, go on," Yat encouraged him.

"Actioners are people destined to change the world. In that configuration [в этом составе: 'with that makeup'?] they are capable of acting with maximum results, like a bullet sent to its goal at the proper angle."

"But who determines that maximum?"

"Not the Birzhevka, of course. Once a week a secretive man in a red-brown overcoat—definitely red-brown—shows up. He hands over the list, and an envelope with money in it. The compositor sets it in type, but each time he changes one name, thinking that that way he's disrupting the devilish plot. One fine day they find the compositor dead. But it's too late—everything's gone wrong, and as a result we're living in this very world we're living in. That would be good, you know, to burn it at both ends [жечь с двух концов: can anybody explain how this idiom works here?]: first the secret list, then the murder of the compositor."

"But you don't want to help me figure out what the list is all about?"

"No, of course not!" Grem stared at Yat with horror. "Why would I want to know how it is if I know how it must be?"

That last line (Зачем мне знать, как е с т ь, если я знаю, как н а д о?) expresses perfectly the mind of the storyteller. I envy such people and their unstoppable flights of fancy, but I have an equally powerful drive to know how it is.

OED UPDATES.

One of the highlights of each season for me is the quarterly unveiling of a new range of updated entries in the OED. As of tomorrow they are putting online The curious vocabulary of English between proter and purposive; the essay I just linked begins with the antedating of psychosomatic with a Coleridge citation (1830 S. T. Coleridge Shorter Wks. & Fragm. (1995) II. ii. 1444 Hope and Fear.. have slipt out their collars, and no longer run in couples.. from the Kennel of my Psycho-somatic Ology) and a fascinating excursus on Coleridge ("credited with the first use of over 600 words, often of a rather scholarly or rarefied character") and Beckett, who "is still credited by the OED with the first recorded use of several other words (athambia, nucleant, panpygoptosis, plutolater, plutomanic, prostisciutto, pugnozzle, vermigrade, wantum, wardee, and zeep)." Also, there's the exciting news (which I apparently overlooked last time around) that they're now incorporating changes suggested by users into already updated entries; I've never understood their approach of treating online entries as set in stone (which seems to contradict the very nature of the internet), and I'm glad they're changing their approach. Forward... into the past!

READING AND EATING.

Dwight Garner has a NY Times blog entry on the joys of reading while you eat. Here's the best part:

Eating and reading is almost (if not more) enjoyable in restaurants than it is at home – thank god for restaurant bars, and tables for one. Who hasn’t, on occasion, while stuck at a table with someone you had nothing to say to, gazed with envy at the guy sitting alone at a restaurant bar, happily stuffing his face and getting sauce on his new issue of The Economist?

Some restaurants are better - in terms of reading and the solo eater - than others. I’ll never forget the time, back in the mid-90s, when I was traveling for a story and ate dinner alone at a good, small restaurant in Savannah, Ga.

I don’t remember what I ordered. But I do recall that the headwaiter, when he saw I was by myself, brought over a tray of magazines - The New Yorker, Business Week, The Atlantic Monthly - and asked if I’d like to read one while I ate.

Yes, I said. Yes, I would.

I’ve never seen this act of grace and kindness repeated in any other restaurant - although these days I’m not foolish enough to enter one alone without something to read.

That's my kind of restaurant. (Thanks for the link, Bonnie!)

UPSTATE PRONUNCIATIONS.

I was googling for something else when I ran across "Pronunciation of Upstate New York Place-Names" in a 1944 issue of American Speech (which I was able to access thanks to the wonders of JSTOR and the Boston Public Library card); this struck me not only because (as regular readers know) I love local pronunciations, but because it was by L. Sprague De Camp, who I knew as a wonderful science fiction writer. Apparently he'd spent a long time making "a collection of the local pronunciations of names of places in the state north of Westchester and Rockland counties. I have obtained my information directly from local inhabitants where possible..."; he includes "(a) names of non-English (Iroquois, Dutch, etc.) origin, and (b) names of English origin whose pronunciation does not follow unequivocally from the spelling." He uses phonetic transcription, but in my presentation of some of the more striking examples, I will respell them in a way that's (a) easier on me than cutting-and-pasting special symbols (apart from schwa), and (b) easier on the reader not accustomed to phonetic transcription. (Incidentally, does anyone know if the lovely word "upstate" is used elsewhere than in NY?)

First off, a couple of general observations: foreign names are universally anglicized in what now seems an old-fashioned way (Java = JAY-və, Rheims = REEMZ, Valois = və-LOISS, Versailles = vər-SAYLZ, Medina = me-DYE-nə, Riga = RYE-gə, Borodino = boro-DYE-no, Cairo = KAY-roh, Athens = AY-thənz, Delhi = DELL-high, Faust = FAWST), and British names are Americanized (i.e., pronounced as spelled: Greenwich = GREEN-wich—but Worcester = WOOS-tər).

Arey = AY-v(e)ri
Athol = AY-thawl
Horicon = HOR-i-kən [Footnote: "The inhabitants recently changed the name of this village to the banal one of Brant Lake."]
Shawangunk Mts = SHONG-(g)um
Plattekill = PLAT-ə-kil [LH: I always thought this was two syllables.]
Ganahgote = ganə-GOAT
Roosagap = ROSE-gap
Mileses = mə-LEE-seez
Chichester = CHY-chester [LH: first syllable rhymes with shy]
Lava = LAY-və
Lochada L. = lo-KAH-də
Kinaquariones H. = kinəkə-ROHN
Gansevoort = GANZ-vərt [LH: I thought this was three syllables.]
Batchelleville = BATCH-(ə)lərvil
Dishaws = DEE-shawz
Sunkauissia = SUN-kən-sə [sic]
Reichard = RYE-kət
Schunemunk Mt. = SHOO-munk
Godeffroy = GOD-free
Skaneateles = skinny-AT-ləs [LH: I already knew this one]
Onativia = ah-nə-TAY-vee-ə
Echota = i-KOH-tə
Stone Arabia = STUN-rah-bee
Chili = CHYE-lye [LH: i.e., rhymes with jai alai]
Schroeppel = SKROO-pəl
Lowville = LOW-vil [LH: first syllable rhymes with cow]
Grieg = GREG
Theresa = thə-REE-sə [LH: voiceless th]
Moulin = moh-LIN
L. Kanacto = kə-NAK-to [Footnote: "Like most of the Iroquois names in this [Herkimer] county, this one was given within recent decades for real-estate purposes]
Towaloondah = too-lə-WAHN-də (sic) [Fn: "This was the only pronunciation my informant knew, but he could not state that some such form as [tow-ə-LOON-də] does not also occur."]
Coxsackie = cook-SAH-kee, -SACK-ee
Ginseng = JEN-sing (sic)
Basom = BAS-kəm (sic)
Whallonsberg = HWAY-lənz-bərg
Trembleau Pt. = TRAHM [sic]
Stoneco = sto-NECK-oh
Eighmyville = AY-mee-vil
Taghkanick = tə-KAH-nik
Suydam = SIGH-dəm
Chazy = shay-ZEE
Lincklaen = LINK-layn
Arnot = AHR-noh
Kiantone = KIN-tone
Busti = BUS-tie
Degroff = di-GRAFF, -GRAHF (sic)
Aquetuck = ACK-wi-duk [Fn: "Of Iroquoian origin despite its resemblance to 'aqueduct'."]
Tioughnioga R. = tie-ə-NOH-gə, tie-nye-OH-gə, tie-off-ni-OH-gə, tee-aff-ni-OH-gə, -AHF-ni-, 'AWF-ni- [Fn: "Apparently there is no well-established pronunciation for this name."]

LINGUISTIC MUSIC.

I just picked up the December 15, 2005 issue of the NYRB, which is so fat (it's a Holiday Issue) that I still haven't finished it, and continued with Daniel Mendelsohn's The Last Minstrel, a review of a biography of the novelist Henry Roth, whose famous Call It Sleep I own but have not read. I just reached the following passage, which discusses what I think a brilliant decision about representing immigrant speech:

With even bolder ingenuity, in order to confound further any facile assumptions about which culture is the "mainstream" for the novel's troubled people, the young Roth had the original idea of representing the Schearls' Yiddish speech not as it sounds to the American reader (awkward, halting, foreign), but as it sounds to the speaker: natural, even idealized—a pure English that is often poetic ("The sweet chill has dulled," the mother tells her son. "Lips for me... must always be cool as the water that wet them"), and never less than beautifully proper ("Love, marriage, whatever one calls it, does that to one, makes one uncertain, wary. One wants to appear better than one is"). Even the awful father speaks in the cadences of one of the Prophets: "She's jesting with the angel of death!" he snarls at one point, threatening his wife's rebellious sister...

It is only when Roth's characters speak English that we're made brutally aware of how awkwardly "foreign" they still in fact are, how helpless they are in this new world. Confronted with an Irish policeman after her son has got lost, this same eloquent mother is reduced to a stiff, mechanical stutter: "Herr—Mister. Ve—er—ve go?"

Listening to these different registers of speech, it is hard for readers not to feel that Roth's Yiddish-speakers are also the "last minstrels" of their particular linguistic music, and it is only too clear that a profound emotion moved Roth as a young writer to commemorate them.

And now, of course, I want to read the book.

BEAUTIFUL LIBRARIES.

Curious Expeditions has a post that makes me want to drop everything else and spend the rest of my life visiting as many of these wonderful places as possible: Librophiliac Love Letter: A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries:

For us here at Curious Expeditions, there has always been something about libraries. Row after row, shelf after shelf, there is nothing more magical than a beautiful old library. We had a chance to see just such a library on our recent visit to Prague. Tucked away on the top of a hill in Prague is the Strahov Monestary, the second oldest monastery in Prague. Inside, divided into two major halls, is a breathtaking library. The amazing Theological Hall contains 18,000 religious texts, and the grand Philosophical Hall has over 42,000 ancient philosophical texts. Both are stunningly gorgeous.

I've been to Strahov, and to a number of others on the long page of photographs (I held my breath until I got to the Main Reading Room of the NYPL); now I want to visit them all. As I said here, "To me, too, great libraries are the closest thing to cathedrals." Thanks for the link, Maus!

JATROPHA.

A story by Lydia Polgreen in today's NY Times discusses a plant used in Mali as a form of fencing that turns out to be "a potentially ideal source of biofuel, a plant that can grow in marginal soil or beside food crops, that does not require a lot of fertilizer and yields many times as much biofuel per acre planted as corn and many other potential biofuels." It will be great if it turns out to save the world, but as you will understand, my main concern is with its peculiar name, of whose pronunciation and origin the story gives no clue, except to say that it "originated in Central America and is believed to have been spread around the world by Portuguese explorers." Some sort of Indian language, then? It wasn't in the OED (tsk), but I found it in Webster's Third New International: it's pronounced JAT-ruh-fuh. And the etymology? That's so surprising (and yet obvious, once you know) I'm placing it below the cut, so you can speculate unhindered before checking.

Meanwhile, I'll entertain you with an odd entry I found in the OED while looking fruitlessly for this word:

jau dewin
[Origin obscure.]
A term of reproach.
1340-70 Alex. & Dind. 659 Þ^e iaudewin iubiter ioiful ȝe holde, For he was wraþful i-wrouht & wried in angur. c1362 Durham Acc. Rolls (Surtees) 565 Cuidam Istrioni Jestour Jawdewyne in festo Natalis D'ni, 3s. 4d. 1401 Pol. Poems (Rolls) II. 86 Thou jawdewine, thow jangeler, how stande this togider.

"Thou jawdewin" has a ring to it, doesn't it? I may have to adopt it. (But why do they show it as two words when all the citations have it as one?)

OK, give up? Here's the etymology:

Greek iatros 'physician' + trophē 'nourishment.' It's originally a New Latin genus name, so Webster's wants you to capitalize it: Jatropha. But I think we're past that, now that it's a world-saving wonder weed.

SAYS YOU!

My wife and I are still getting used to the program schedule of our new public radio station, WFCR (FCR for Five College Radio, and I much prefer it, because they play classical and jazz music for most of the day in place of the earnest public-interest talkfests I used to skip on WAMC in Pittsfield); for instance, WAMC had Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! on from 11 AM to noon on Saturdays, and here it's on from noon to one. Well, today (after remembering to listen to "Wait, Wait") we kept the radio on and found ourselves listening to a hilarious, entertaining, and by-god educational word show called Says You!. Part of the show (my favorite part) is a version of the old Dictionary game, where panelists have to choose between the real definition of an obscure word and fakes dreamed up for the occasion; today one of the words was opisthenar (oh-PISTH-uh-nahr), for which the proffered definitions were "the Pharaoh's symbol of authority," "the proclamation of an Ancient Greek oracle," and "the back of the hand." I knew enough Greek to know which was correct (I'll put it below the cut in case you want to guess), but it fooled the panelists. In between rounds of that, they play other games; today they had a joined-authors theme. If Dumas, Poe, and Thomas Mann had collaborated on a book, what would it have been? The Man in the Iron Masque of the Red Death in Venice, of course. Hey, it's not Apostrophes, but it's a lot of fun, and I'm glad I found it.

Answer: It's the back (opisth-) of the hand (thenar being the palm).

COMPASS.

The discussion of pair of stairs got onto the subject of compass(es), and after discovering there were three words in Russian (компас [kómpas] for 'instrument for determining direction,' буссоль [bussól'] for 'surveyor's compass,' and циркуль [tsírkul'] for 'instrument for describing circles,' the last ultimately from Latin circulus—and why "describing" rather than "drawing," now that I think of it?), I checked the OED and found the following extraordinarily messy etymology:

[a. F. compas (12th c. in Littré) ‘measure, pair of compasses, circle’; in mod.F. also ‘mariner's compass’; = Pr. compas, Sp. compas ‘pair of compasses, measure, rule of life, pattern’, Pg. compasso ‘pair of compasses’, It. compasso ‘a compasse, a round, also a paire of compasses’ (Florio); med.L. compassus = circinus pair of compasses (Du Cange). Cf. also Ger. compass, kompass, mariner's compass, formerly also gnomon, sun-dial, portable dial, Du. kompas, Sw. compass, kompass, Da. compas, Norw. kompas, (all) mariner's compass. (This is the exclusive sense in the Teutonic langs., as ‘pair of compasses’ is predominant in the Romanic.)
  The history of this word and its associated verb in the Romanic langs. has not yet been determined, and it presents many points of uncertainty. It is doubtful whether the n. is Common Romanic (the Sp. being app. from Fr. or Pr.), and as yet uncertain whether the n. is derived from the vb., or the vb. from the n. If the n. was the origin, it would predicate a L. type *compassus, f. com- together or intensive + ? passus step, pace; if the vb. was the earlier, compassare would be ‘to pass or step together’ or ‘completely’ (see Diez passare), and *compassus, compasso, the action of doing so. The early history of the senses of the n. is equally obscure: in OF., ‘measure’, primarily perhaps ‘measure kept in walking together’, ‘artifice, subtilty’, and ‘pair of compasses’, appear all to be early senses; it is at present impossible to say whether the instrument took its name from ‘measuring’ or from ‘equal stepping’. It is probable that the sense ‘circumference, circle, round’ which is slightly exemplified in OF., but has received so great a development in Eng., is derived from the name of the instrument; but the converse is also possible; cf. L. circinus compasses, from circa round, etc.; also Ger. zirkel, (1) circle, (2) compasses. The later application to the Mariner's Compass, recognized in modern French, but chiefly developed in English and the Teut. langs., is also of obscure origin; it may easily have arisen out of the sense ‘circle’ or ‘circuit’, as showing the circle of the winds; but in German this sense appears to have been preceded by those of ‘gnomon’ and ‘sun-dial’, which may point in another direction. The Greek name of the circinus or compasses was διαβήτης, from διαβαίνειν to stride or walk with the legs apart, to stride, step, or pass over: it is not impossible that compassus and compassare may have been employed to render these words, and as διαβήτης also meant the gnomon of a sun-dial, it is conceivable that this indicates the way in which compassus came to be used for dial, and mariner's compass.
  The OF. senses all appear early in ME. In the uncertainty as to the relations between these, it is impossible to arrange them in any certain order in Eng., and that adopted is merely provisional, and subject to alteration when Romanic scholars shall have ascertained the previous history of the word in their own domain.]

If somebody had asked me the etymology of compass, I would have said confidently "Oh, it's from Latin compassus" and thought no more about it. This is a good example of why etymology involves a lot more than giving the earlier form of a word. (And I expect the etymology will get even longer and more complicated when they get around to revising this entry for the third edition.)

DINO.

I was just looking up dinosaur in the AHD when my eye was caught by a photo of a graceful protozoan, Ceratium sp., illustrating the dinoflagellate entry. "Dinoflagellate?" I thought. "What's so scary about that little creature?" I looked at the etymology, and it turns out the dino- isn't from Greek δεινός 'terrifying,' as in dinosaur, but from δῖνος 'whirling,' which pleased me (though I had to then correct the Wikipedia article, which had given an incorrect etymology).

BASQUE-ICELANDIC.

File under "weird coincidences": last week I posted about my new copy of Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe, and the first comment said "Any encyclopaedia that gives due coverage to Basque-Icelandic pidgin must be respected as comprehensive." Then my online pal (and occasional commenter) kattullus came to visit Friday and told me about a Basque-Icelandic dictionary from hundreds of years ago; just now he e-mailed me some links, and I am duly passing them on to you.

Here is a brief description, with examples (at Luistxo Fernandez's wonderful GeoNative site, which focuses on "minorities, little nations and native cultures" and specializes in toponymy—here's the main list of tables); here are "summaries of the lectures at a conference on the slaying of Spaniards in the West fjords in 1615," one of which is on the bilingual vocabularies; and here is the meatiest of them as far as I'm concerned, a detailed discussion by Henrike Knörr of the vocabularies and what I gather was their initial publication:

In 1937 Nicolaas Gerardus Hendricus Deen, a linguist from De Hague, presented his doctoral thesis, entitled Glossaria duo Vasco-Islandica, to the University of Leiden. The thesis, under the direction of F. Muller, was written in Latin and was edited in the same language later that same year. It was a relatively small work of just 135 pages in length. The recognition that the book enjoyed was negatively affected by two wars: the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), which was being fought bitterly at the time, and the Second World War, which was soon to erupt. However, Deen’s thesis would almost certainly have been more widely acknowledged had the author published it in a modern language.

The subject of Deen’s work was two vocabularies taken from manuscripts written in Iceland at the end of the 17th century and beginning of the XVIIIth, accompanied by a commentary and a translation. The manuscripts had been made known to Deen by Christianus Cornelius Uhlenbeck (1866-1951), a well-known expert in Basque studies and lecturer at the University of Leiden. [...] Deen travelled to the Basque Country in 1927 [...] and studied the manuscripts [...] At the end of the prologue, having expressed his thanks to Urquijo, Deen wrote these moving words: “Let us hope that the Basque Country comes back to life, stronger and more beautiful than before, and let us hope that Spain can soon live in peace!” ("Utinam renascatur pulchrius ac fortius Vasconia et bona cum pace iamiam vivat Hispania"). I would add that I, at least, know nothing about the life and works of Deen after 1937.

Deen published these vocabularies in four columns: Basque / Icelandic / German / Spanish. [...] It is surprising that the thesis is not in the rich library and archive of Urquijo: because of the incommunicaton in war times or because of a theft?...

Moral: do not publish your scholarship in a dead language, especially when the world is convulsed with war (I'm reminded of the saga of the Persian-Russian dictionary I recounted here). Also, people who steal books from libraries should be publicly flogged.

PAIR OF STAIRS.

I just discovered, via aldiboronti at Wordorigins, the expression a pair of stairs, used to mean (in the OED's words) 'A set or flight of stairs or steps; (also) a portable set of steps.' It strikes me as deeply counterintuitive, and I'm pretty sure I've never heard or seen it, but it clearly used to be in common use; here are the OED citations:

c1450 J. CAPGRAVE Solace of Pilgrims (Bodl. 423) 77 Thann go we down on a peyr greces in to a chapel thei clepe ierlm. 1530 J. PALSGRAVE Lesclarcissement 182 Vngz degrez, a payre of stayres. 1602 H. PLATT Delightes for Ladies sig. H3v, A maide that fell downe a paire of staires. 1628 J. EARLE Micro-cosmogr. xiii. sig. C10v, A Tauerne Is a degree, or (if you will) a paire of stayres aboue an Alehouse. 1684 Philos. Trans. (Royal Soc.) 14 443 Being.. not able.. to have past through a Gallery down a pair of Stairs into the Court. 1730 Inventory R. Woolley's Goods 11 A Pair of wooden Steps. 1755 in J. A. Picton City of Liverpool: Select. Munic. Rec. II. 155 A breast wall and pair of steps from the shore or road up to the Ladies' Walk. 1761 G. COLMAN in St. James's Chron. 18 June 1/2, I could as easily have scaled the Monument, as have come at the Tip of her Chin without the Help of a Pair of Steps. 1839 DICKENS Nicholas Nickleby xli. 402 An old black velvet cap, which, by slow degrees, as if its wearer were ascending a ladder or pair of steps, rose above the wall. 1884 J. EASTWOOD & W. A. WRIGHT Bible Word-bk. (ed. 2) s.v., We still speak of a ‘pair’ of steps or stairs. 1903 W. D. HOWELLS Lett. Home v. 33 It all ended.. in our finding these two rooms, five pair up, in an apartment with respectable people who are glad to let them. 1923 Times 4 Dec. 16 (caption) Mr. Lloyd George is standing on a pair of steps steadied by porters. 1928 A. E. PEASE Dict. Dial. N. Riding Yorks. 92/2 Pair of stairs, the usual term for a ‘flight’ of stairs or a staircase. 1991 B. ALDISS Frankenstein Unbound (BNC) xx. 172, I.. seized a pair of steps, used to reach the higher shelves; I dragged the steps to the middle of the room. 1995 Daily News (N.Y.) (Nexis) 16 Oct. 20 The lines snaked around the block and down a pair of stairs, into a large exhibition hall.

I'm quite sure they've misunderstood the last quote, which must refer to two parallel staircases. I presume some of you have seen the expression used (e.g., in Dickens), but do any of you use it yourselves, or know someone who does?

(Oddly, a pair of arrows means three of them, or did traditionally: "Now chiefly... with reference to the ceremonial obligations of the Royal Company of Archers.")

CRY THE BELOVED FORUM.

Weird etymology of the week: today I saw a reference to the verb cry being derived from an ancient Roman exclamation "Quirites!" '[Help,] citizens!' Outmoded folk etymology, thought I, but no, the OED agreed:
[a. F. crie-r ...:—L. quiritare to raise a plaintive cry, to wail, scream, shriek out, cry aloud, bewail, lament, orig. (according to Varro) to implore the aid of the Quirites or Roman citizens: ‘quiritare dicitur is qui Quiritum fidem clamans implorat’.]
And the AHD agrees:
Middle English crien, from Old French crier, from Vulgar Latin *critare, from Latin quiritare, to cry out, perhaps from Quirites, public officers to whom one would cry out in times of need.

So remember, every time you cry, you're calling on the Quirites.

CHARISMA.

This New Testament Greek word for 'gift of grace' led a quiet theological existence until Max Weber decided it would make a great term for "gift or power of leadership or authority" (as the OED puts it), so using it in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (postumously published in 1922), in the chapter Merkmale der charismatischen Herrschaft—I'll post the first two paragraphs in the extended entry (you can read a translation here). Since then, of course, it's been used promiscuously for just about any special quality a prominent person is perceived to have. My concern at the moment is with this bit from Weber's second paragraph: "man hielt sich in Byzanz im Mittelalter eine Anzahl dieser mit dem Charisma der Kriegs-Tobsucht Begabten als eine Art von Kriegswerkzeugen)" ['in Medieval Byzantium a group of people endowed with the charisma of war-frenzy were maintained as a kind of weapon']. My impression is that "Charisma der Kriegs-Tobsucht" is Weber's own extension of the term, but it could be taken to mean that the word kharisma was used by the Byzantines themselves to refer to such warriors. Does anybody happen to know, or know where to find out?

§ 10. »Charisma« soll eine als außeralltäglich (ursprünglich, sowohl bei Propheten wie bei therapeutischen wie bei Rechts-Weisen wie bei Jagdführern wie bei Kriegshelden: als magisch bedingt) geltende Qualität einer Persönlichkeit heißen, um derentwillen sie als mit übernatürlichen oder übermenschlichen oder mindestens spezifisch außeralltäglichen, nicht jedem andern zugänglichen Kräften oder Eigenschaften oder als gottgesandt oder als vorbildlich und deshalb als »Führer« gewertet wird. Wie die betreffende Qualität von irgendeinem ethischen, ästhetischen oder sonstigen Standpunkt aus »objektiv« richtig zu bewerten sein würde, ist natürlich dabei begrifflich völlig gleichgültig: darauf allein, wie sie tatsächlich von den charismatisch Beherrschten, den »Anhängern«, bewertet wird, kommt es an.

Das Charisma eines »Berserkers« (dessen manische Anfälle man, anscheinend mit Unrecht, der Benutzung bestimmter Gifte zugeschrieben hat: man hielt sich in Byzanz im Mittelalter eine Anzahl dieser mit dem Charisma der Kriegs-Tobsucht Begabten als eine Art von Kriegswerkzeugen), eines »Schamanen« (Magiers, für dessen Ekstasen im reinen Typus die Möglichkeit epileptoider Anfälle als eine Vorbedingung gilt), oder etwa des (vielleicht, aber nicht ganz sicher, wirklich einen raffinierten Schwindlertyp darstellenden) Mormonenstifters, oder eines den eigenen demagogischen Erfolgen preisgegebenen Literaten wie Kurt Eisner werden von der wertfreien Soziologie mit dem Charisma der nach der üblichen Wertung »größten« Helden, Propheten, Heilande durchaus gleichartig behandelt.