[Update. I'm giving the update its own post because it considerably changes the situation reported below, and it's only fair to make it prominent considering the hyperbolic outrage of the initial post. I hereby retract the excessive frothing and accusations below, though I continue to regret the low value the Times places on linguistic accuracy as compared to making sure they have the exact words of whatever celebrity they're quoting.]
Every time I think I'm inured to the idiocies of the press, even what are allegedly its finest representatives, something comes along to get me frothing in rage again. The latest comes via Bill Poser at Language Log, who writes:
The New York times contains a brief article entitled One Pot describing the Spanish dish known variously as cocido or olla podrida literally "rotten pot" According to the dictionary of the Real Academia Española, podrida may have an admiring connotation, similar to the use of "filthy rich" in English. Curiously, instead of the correct olla podrida, the article gives the name of the dish as olla poderida, which it explains as a derivative of poder "strength", because it gives you strength."Curiously"? "Taken aback"? I guess I admire Bill's sangfroid and charity, but I'm not going to mince words: I think this is a complete dereliction of the first duty of a newspaper, which is to tell the truth. What's next, not reporting on vote fraud or covering up a slaughter in the Congo because "some readers might be put off"?Reader Jim Gordon wondered about this and emailed the author of the article. Her response: she and her consultants and editors were aware of the correct name and etymology but thought that some readers might be put off by the notion of rotten food, so they changed the name a little and made up a fake etymology. It seems clear that they were not trying to deceive anyone with evil intent, but I am still taken aback that a respectable newspaper would make up a fake name and etymology.
“Olla means pot, and the original name was olla poderida, which comes from poder, which means strength,” said Alexandra Raij, an owner of Tía Pol, the tiny Spanish restaurant on 10th Avenue in Chelsea.
How on earth do you justify making things up and putting them in "the newspaper of record" with such a ridiculous excuse? I think the reporter and every editor who approved this should be fired and a memo sent out to all employees of the Times that conscious deception of the readership will not be tolerated.
And don't tell me "it's only language." Language is how we communicate and how we understand the world. If you're capable of lying to me about words and etymology to spare my supposed feelings, you're capable of lying about anything, because you don't understand the value of truth. Our world is made of words, and the Times is degrading it. Shame on them.
[As I say, the above outrage is inoperative now that more information is available.]
In this post I reported on how I acquired Julie A. Buckler's Mapping St. Petersburg: Imperial Text and Cityshape
Butler's basic approach is to present an alternative both to the abovementioned dichotomies and to what she calls "the myth of Petersburg's uniqueness": "Where the Petersburg mythology asserts remarkable unity, I seek pluralism; where this mythology asserts Petersburg's essential difference, I emphasize the city's more ordinary qualities." She gives a quick précis of the book:
This study attempts to remap the Russian imperial capital, but not simply by providing a reverse image of the literary tradition with Pushkin and Dostoevsky at the margins. Instead, I propose a new integration in terms of architectural and literary eclecticism (chapters 1 and 2); literature that travels around the city (chapter 3); spaces of interchange between oral and print literature (chapter 4); the ambiguous relationship between urban center and margins (chapter 5); shared experience as meeting ground in a city to which so many came from elsewhere (chapter 6); and the city as collective textual and memorial repository (chapter 7).(These quotes are from her introduction, which you can read here; I warn you in advance that it hauls in the usual suspects—Bakhtin, Yuri Lotman, Julia Kristeva, "social materialist Henri Lefebvre," "neo-Kantian sociologist Georg Simmel"—and in a single paragraph refers to cultural paradigms, cognitive patterns, paradigm shift, and "an autonomous determinant of social relations," but she pretty much gets the requisite academic obeisances and jargon clusters out of the way there; the rest of the book is blessedly straightforward.)
The first thing that struck me was the maps (from 1700, 1721, 1830, 1853, 1914, and 1950) and illustrations (many photos of the architecture she discusses); the second was how much research she did—not only has she read all the secondary sources, she seems to have worked her way through every memoir, travel guide, and long-forgotten novella that ever described the imperial capital. I kept putting arrows in the end notes and bibliography, reminding myself of things I wanted to look at myself (fortunately I live within a few minutes of the Amherst Center for Russian Culture).
To give an example of how much fun the book can be, Chapter Four is called "Stories in Common: Urban Legends in St. Petersburg," and she investigates several such legends that are attested in more than one source:
One such cluster exists for a story about dancing chairs that circulated in Petersburg during the 1830s. Pushkin himself recorded the incident in a diary entry for December 17, 1833: "In town people are talking about a strange occurrence. In one of the buildings belonging to the chancellery of the court equerry, the furniture was so bold as to move and jump about; the matter came to the attention of the authorities. Prince Dolgorukii set up an investigation. One of the clerks called a priest, but the chairs and tables did not want to stand submissively during the service. Various rumors are going around about this. N said that it is court furniture and is being requested for the Anichkov Palace."She then cites a letter from Viazemskii about the same incident:
"Here people were talking for a long time about a strange phenomenon in the building of the court equerry: in one of the clerk's rooms, the chairs and tables danced and turned somersaults; glasses filled with wine hurled themselves at the ceiling. Witnesses were summoned, and a priest with holy water, but the 'ball' did not abate. I don't know how the 'ball' did end, but the main thing is, these stories are not empty, and something certainly did happen, but whether it was a diabolical or human delusion is unknown."And she tops them off with the casual mention in Gogol's famous story "The Nose": "And the story of the dancing chairs on Koniushennaia (Stables) Street was still fresh." This is a great example of how her delving into little-known sources can illuminate famous ones.
Later in the same chapter she cites a 1924 article by Petr Stolpianskii that "dispels several false notions about the city: Peter the Great never actually planned to model his city after Venice or Amsterdam, but only created such a plan on paper to impress European dignitaries; the three main radial arteries of Petersburg do not reflect skillful city planning because the Admiralty was never intended to be the city center; Nevsky Prospect became Petersburg's main thoroughfare only by happenstance; the site of the Winter Palace was selected wholly accidentally when Count Apraksin died childless and left his palace to Peter."
In Chapter Seven, "The City's Memory: Public Graveyards and Textual Repositories," she discusses a subject close to my heart, street names:
The 1753 Makhaevskii plan from the Academy of Sciences shows 200 named streets, but many more Petersburg place names simply emerged out of the life of the city. Particularly common during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were names that spoke to a street's function, as in Shestilavochnaia, a street on which there were six shops, or Zverinskaia (from beast, or zver'). the street near the zoo.... During the second half of the nineteenth century, a more official written toponymy established by Senate decrees of the latter 1850s replaced many of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century names that were integrally connected with everyday speech and everyday life.And there's a surprising little footnote: "In fact, Gorbachevich and Khablo claim that there were no street names at all during the period 1710s-1720s, and that residents simply used... descriptive directions." Gorbachevich and Khablo are "authors of the popular Petersburg reference work Why Are They So Named? (Pochemu tak nazvany?)," a work I obviously need to get hold of.
Well, I hope these few bits have given you an idea of the riches to be found in this book; I haven't mentioned the feuilletons, the factories, or the hilariously interchangeable accounts of provincials coming to the big city and being disillusioned, but take my word for it, if you're interested in the history of cities, you won't regret reading this book.
One of the gaps in my knowledge of Russian literature has long been Tyutchev, universally considered one of the three great Russian poets of the Romantic generation (alongside Pushkin and Lermontov). Now that I have a collection of his poetry (thanks, Jim!) I'm trying to remedy that, and to get some background I turned to my favorite source for the nineteenth century, D. S. Mirsky's A History of Russian Literature
From the linguistic point of view Tyutchev is a curious phenomenon. In private and public life he spoke and wrote nothing but French. All his letters, all his political writings, are in that language, as well as all his reported witticisms. Neither his first nor his second wife spoke Russian. He does not seem to have used Russian except for poetical purposes. His few French poems, on the other hand, though interesting, are for the most part trifles and give no hint of the great poet he was in Russian.I know of no other case of a great poet who used the language of his poetry only for that purpose.
Adriana V. Lopez has a nice interview with translator Edith Grossman on bookforum.com; I was hooked right away by the photo of her standing in front of several of the "ubiquitous wooden bookshelves, tall and short" that line the rooms of her Upper West Side apartment. Here's how she got started:
[Editor Ronald] Christ asked Grossman to translate Argentine writer Macedonio Fernández’s short story “The Surgery of Psychic Removal,” about erasing memory. Grossman was hesitant. “I said ‘Ronald, I’m not a translator, I’m a critic.’ And he said, ‘Call yourself whatever you want. Try this.’” Grossman recalls loving the work. Other projects followed, including a novel by Peruvian writer Manuel Scorza published by Harper & Row in 1977. Then came the García Márquez offer. She recalls that an agent who lived in her building called her and flat out asked, “Edie, you interested in translating García Márquez?” Grossman rolls her eyes and puffs her mouth out reliving the day and says she replied, “What? Of course I’m interested.” Grossman submitted a twenty-page sample translation of Love in the Time of Cholera to Knopf and was chosen. “I knew this Colombian writer was eccentric when he wrote me saying that he doesn’t use adverbs ending with -mente in Spanish and would like to avoid adverbs ending in -ly in English.” She remembers thinking, what do you say in English except slowly? “Well, I came up with all types of things, like without haste.”I like the ending too:
Grossman is a reader’s reader, happy to have gotten cheap paperbacks from neighborhood stores like the old Shakespeare & Co., Labyrinth Books (now Bookculture), and Papyrus (now Morningside Bookshop). It’s about the content, not covers or first editions. “I like to buy books on the street, too, but I’m wary of it now because of bed bugs.” Her collection has also been fed by the places she traveled to in her youth. She grins large: “My clothes used to fit in an overnight bag. But my books took up trunks and trunks.”Thanks for the link, Paul!
JBooks has an online magazine, Secular Culture and Ideas, which is featuring essays on Sephardic Judaism. Vanessa Hidary writes "My Jewish Grandmother spoke Arabic," Pamela Dorn Sezgin writes about Dario Moreno and Sephardic Cosmopolitanism ("The Turkish Army served as a springboard to Moreno’s career. He became adept as a polyglot singer in Turkish, Greek, French, Italian, and Spanish"), Bernard Horn talks with the great novelist A.B. Yehoshua ("Mr. Mani is saturated with Jerusalem, the real historical and living Jerusalem, not the Jerusalem of nationalist fantasy, nor the Jerusalem of fundamentalist frenzy, but rather a dense, lived-in, fascinating city—like Joyce’s Dublin or Kafka’s Prague"), and Eyal Ginio has an essay on Jews in the Ottoman Empire:
The most striking cultural change for Ottoman Jewry was the absorption of French culture, especially French language, into everyday life. Interestingly, and in the colonial spirit, it was mainly Jews from Western Europe who enthusiastically took upon themselves the mission of "improving" the situation of the Ottoman Jews. The school system of the Alliance Israélite Universelle was chiefly responsible for this. Established in France in 1860, the Alliance aimed at raising the standing of the “Eastern” Jews by means of secular French culture. They assumed that French “progressive” Jewish education would enable Ottoman Jews to modernize and become contributing citizens.Having been introduced to the fascinating subject of Sephardic culture by Ammiel Alcalay (I, II), I'm glad to have this opportunity to explore it further.The intimate knowledge of French language and culture brought about many changes for the Sephardic Jews in the Ottoman state. Rather than totally abandon their traditional Jewish language, Ladino, the Ottoman Jews transformed their language and used it as a vehicle of secularization....
Andrew Malcovsky has started Fables and Understories, in which he's translating Karel Čapek's Bajky a podpovídky (1946), "a posthumous collection of the author's short pieces." He says:
Please feel free to get in touch with me—mercilessly (if politely!) targeting my weaknesses can only, in fact, make me stronger. I may have tossed some stuff up here without a third or fourth pass, and the more eyes the merrier!So if you know Czech, help him out; if you don't, just relax and enjoy the Čapek! (He's the guy who wrote the play, R.U.R., in which the word robot was first used, though he didn't invent it.)
Grant Barrett has a column in The Star (of Malaysia) called "Welcome to Slang City" that features terms originating in New York City, that hotbed of linguistic innovation. Some of them are fairly boring, like (taxi) medallion and gridlock (though I was astonished, on looking them up in the OED, to find that the former is not attested before 1960 and the latter before 1980), but others are wonderful:
A term you will still see occasionally is highbinder, which in the early 1800s meant a violent criminal or thug. The word was taken from the name of the High-binders, an Irish gang.(Via Wordorigins.org.)Highbinder was later used to refer to a member of a secret Chinese criminal gang, especially an assassin. By 1890 it referred to a slimy – disreputable or untrustworthy – politician....
A word that thrived in the late 1800s and early 1900s in New York City but now appears to have completely fallen out of the language is lobbygow.
In a well-known murder trial in 1914, one of the witnesses described a lobbygow as “a pal and a friend willing to do almost anything he is told”. Early police literature describes lobbygows as white men who run errands for the powerful Chinese underworld bosses.
By the 1930s, a lobbygow was a person who would lead tourists on slumming tours of Chinatown. The middle and upper classes could get a first-hand look at how the lower class lived. Lobbygows were believed to be as likely to lead someone to a planned mugging as they were to show them opium dens.
Michael Ryan's review of Stuart Bennett's Trade Bookbinding in the British Isles 1660–1800 passes on this tidbit, which I pass on to you: contrary to what has long been thought, people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not routinely buy books in sheets and have them bound afterwards.
"We" had long assumed that those rows of leather bindings, many humble and unadorned, in our stacks were the results of negotiations between book buyers and bookbinders. The more ornate and embellished the binding, the more assured its bespoke creation. We had long assumed that, for a variety of reasons, books were shipped and sold in sheets, especially books headed from Britain to North America in the eighteenth century. Whether overland or by sea, sending books in sheets seemed a better business plan than sending them bound. But all of these were only assumptions, assumptions that had no real evidence to justify them. Bennett has now set the record straight, and in doing so has opened some new portals for curators and historians of the book alike.I always enjoy having my preconceptions overturned. (Via Pepys Diary.)When we think of publishers’ bindings or trade bindings, we think of large runs of uniformly bound copies of the same book, the model that came into practice in the earlier nineteenth century and persists to the present. However, that is only one model of trade bindings. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had another, more interesting, more variegated model that could fill booksellers’ shops with arrays of bound volumes designed to appeal to the economic and aesthetic range of their client base. British book buyers may well have customized their bindings, but they did so like Samuel Pepys: after they had bought the volume bound from their local merchant. Often books would be bound by publishers or by syndicates of booksellers with copyrights; sometimes they would be bound or customized by the bookseller functioning only as retailer and responding to local tastes and requirements. Either way, British book buyers in the eighteenth century had long since grown accustomed to acquiring their tomes "ready to use" since the sixteenth, if not the fifteenth, century, according to Bennett. The varieties and generic similarities across these bindings reflect both the economics of publishing and the evolving tastes of the times. Binders were at the bottom of the food chain, and the publishers and booksellers who controlled the ebb and flow of their work made sure that wages remained low throughout the period.
OK, I realize this is obscure even for me, but I have to share it anyway: the Comparative Nenets-Nganasan Dictionary "contains ca. 1.000 most frequent Nenets words with Nganasan parallels and Russian and English translations." The introduction shows you where the languages are spoken (in northern Siberia, Nenets in a large area to the west, Nganasan on the Taimyr Peninsula to the east) and explains their histories and relations to the other Samoyedic languages. The great thing is that you can hear a recording of each word, a feature that could theoretically make it possible to have an online dictionary better than any print one could possibly be, since even the most accurate phonetic transcription is a poor substitute for actually hearing how the word sounds. (Via Wordorigins.org.)
I realize it's been too long (as usual) since I've posted anything to justify the "hat" portion of the blog's title, but this should make up for it: Diana Crane's The Social Meanings of Hats and T-shirts (excerpted from her book Fashion and Its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing
The top hat, which appeared in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was worn first by the middle and upper classes. During the century, it spread downward, possibly because it was adopted by coachmen in the 1820s and for policemen's uniforms in the same period.... In the 1840s and 1850s, unskilled laborers and fishermen were photographed wearing these hats .... At mid-century, they were being worn by all social classes...I love this stuff, and there's much more of it at the link (including comparisons between France and the U.S.). Oh, and there's a section on T-shirts, too.The bowler was invented in England in 1850 as an occupational hat for gamekeepers and hunters but was rapidly adopted by the upper class for sports.... Within a decade it had spread to the city, where it was widely adopted by the middle and lower-middle classes ... and by members of the working class, particularly in cities. ... The working-class man's attempt to blur class boundaries by wearing the bowler was satirized in the early films of Charlie Chaplin. Eventually, the bowler became an icon of the bourgeoisie, as immortalized in Magritte's famous painting of a middle-class man wearing a bowler ... and, after the Second World War, was worn mainly by middle-class businessmen.
The cap with visor, which, like the top hat, appeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was first worn by military officers .... By mid-century, the peaked cap was identified with the working class; it was "the most usual head covering for the working man" .... At the beginning of the twentieth century, cloth caps, without visors, were mainly worn by the working class and particularly by younger workers ..., while members of the middle and upper classes wore peaked or cloth caps only for sports or in the countryside .... When worn by politicians, cloth caps were thought to indicate "radical tendencies"....
Addendum. The Growling Wolf was inspired by this post to put up a whole gallery of photos of people lookin' good in hats. Don't miss it.
Beijing Sounds - 北京的声儿 has been going since last October, but I just found out about it via an e-mail from occasional commenter Xiaolongnu (thanks!). It's syz's blog about learning the Beijing dialect of Chinese, and it won my heart immediately with its sidebarred "WARNING: Contains explicit use of singular they, gratuitous passive voice, and shamelessly split infinitives." A recent post asks "Does the Beijing-R mean anything?" and presents a discussion of the famous -r that gets tacked on to just about everything in the dialect:
The general perception among outsiders is that it's just a way of speaking. It doesn't really mean anything. HOWEVER, my two experts for today's post, one six and one sixty-ish, say it ain't so. There are words you can say with or without the Beijing-R (commonly called érhuàyīn 儿化音 or érhuàyùn 儿化韵), but often the different pronunciations really mean something different.His best example is: "tāng 汤 and tāngr 汤儿 simply refer to two different liquids. The former means broth/soup, while the latter is the liquid that comes with your non-soup dishes, something cooked out of the meat or vegetables that you might spoon onto your rice." This is backed up by a quoted talk with the two "experts," and best of all, like all material presented on the blog, it's got an audio link so you can hear for yourself. Excellent idea and presentation!
This Slate article by Ron Rosenbaum has started a fierce debate on MetaFilter and doubtless many other places: "It's the question of whether the last unpublished work of Vladimir Nabokov, which is now reposing unread in a Swiss bank vault, should be destroyed—as Nabokov explicitly requested before he died." My own take is that if he felt that strongly about it he should have destroyed it himself, and that once you're dead you lose the right to determine the fate of your work, but I can sympathize with those who believe Nabokov's wishes should be respected. Mind you, we're talking about "fifty hand-written index cards, equivalent to about thirty conventional paper manuscript pages," so The Original of Laura can hardly be called a novel, and it certainly shouldn't be published as if it were (much less "completed" by someone else), but I think it should be available at least to scholars. VV would be furious, but he was furious about a lot of things, including nonliteral translations and using the feminine forms of Russian names, so this would just be one more hypothetical annoyance.
Nizo is "a mostly secular Palestinian raised in the Melkite faith"; in his blog he writes about many topics, but the one of interest here is Aramaic, about which he has a couple of posts. He says that although he doesn't speak the language, he "worshipped at a Maronite church while growing up and the service was in Syriac and Arabic... Learning Hebrew opened the door to understanding even more of this stale old tongue that has been relegated to the bearded priests with funny hats." In the second post he divides Aramaic speakers in the region into "Ethnic Assyrians in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon who speak Assyrian at home as a first language and Arabic as a second language" ("These people are the main speakers of the language and make the contemporary contributions in music, literature and WWW") and "NON-Assyrian Maronites In Lebanon whose clergymen are fluent in Syriac and whose church services are partially conducted in that language" ("The general population however does not speak the language except for a handful of individuals who are either uber-religious or interested in reviving the language"). Nizo is refreshingly unsentimental about the language: "I don't care to listen to some sad song about an Assyrian shepherd in Mosul whose goats were devoured by Kurdish wolves. It doesn't speak to my daily reality." I hope he continues his investigations.
I also hope he writes more posts like this one (warning: Not Safe For Work!), which will be of great use to me should I ever do a follow-up to my curses-and-insults book. (Speaking of which, I'm going to be interviewed about it by PRI's "The World" program Thursday morning; it will be archived on their site.)
Thanks for the link, Kobi!
I was listening to "Says You" (described here), and in the "guess the real definition" part the word was fion, which they pronounced FYE-on. The fake definitions involved subatomic particles, the real one was "A piece cut from a fish and used for bait." After the show I looked it up in the OED, and sure enough, there it was, with that definition, but with no pronunciation or etymology and only a single citation: 1875 WILCOCKS Sea-Fisherm. 137 "This [mackerel] bait is termed a last, lask, float, or fion." Naturally I turned to Google Books, and sure enough, there it was, except that it's on page 126 of the 1884 fourth edition of The Sea-fisherman: Comprising the Chief Methods of Hook and Line Fishing in the British and Other Seas, and Remarks on Nets, Boats, and Boating, by James C. Wilcocks. The only other use Google turns up is on page 65 of The Rail and the Rod; Or, Tourist Angler's Guide to Waters and Quarters Thirty Miles Around London, by John Greville Fennell, or (as the title page has it) Greville F. (Barnes): "This bait is known as a float, lask, last, fion, or mackerel bait in different localities." Since the latter book is from 1867, I presume it's Wilcocks's source, since he lists the same four synonyms.
Now, that's about as fringe as a piece of vocabulary can get. It's even conceivable that it's a misprint in The Rail and the Rod and was picked up trustingly by Greville F.; certainly without a hint of what locality it was from or how it was pronounced, it's hard to take it very seriously. It seems to me a poor choice for the radio show, since there's no way anyone could possibly have encountered it except by reading the OED (it's not even in Webster's Third), but I guess that depends on your philosophy of the game. Oddly, the alternate term last is not recorded in the OED, though lask is (but not from either of these books). Lexical items like this make you realize how amorphous the borders of both languages and dictionaries are; the OED's apparent original ambition of including everything that ever occurred in print in English is surely now impossible, and I wonder if the current editors would choose to include fion now if it hadn't been in the first edition.
Robert F. Worth has a nice essay about learning Arabic in this week's NY Times Sunday Book Review. It starts:
One dark afternoon last winter, after too many hours spent studying Arabic verbs, I found myself staring uncomprehendingly at a video on my computer screen. An Arab man was holding forth tediously, his words half drowned by the rain outside. At first all I could make out was the usual farrago of angry consonants and strangled vowels. No progress there. Then, at last, the letters lighted up at the back of my brain.Via the wonderful Helen DeWitt, who knows that "Aha!" moment.“I understand what he’s saying!” I shrieked to the empty apartment, spinning backward in my desk chair. “I understand every word!”
I felt a warm rush of gratitude to the speaker, a bespectacled doctor. It made no difference that he was Ayman al-Zawahri, Al Qaeda’s No. 2 man, or that he was threatening to slaughter large numbers of Americans. He spoke a slow, clear fusha, the formal version of Arabic I had been struggling to decipher on the page for 10 hours a day. Even better, his words matched my limited vocabulary: arsala, “to send”; jaish, “army”; raees, “president.” I was almost drunk with exhilaration.
Here's the second paragraph of a NY Times Magazine article by Rob Hoerburger about singer Shelby Lynne:
“Do you know the difference between the words ‘bringing’ and ‘taking’?” she practically whispered into my sleeve, as if not to embarrass me. “Because you just used one of them incorrectly.” I do know the difference, and though I couldn’t remember what I said, I agreed with her anyway, dizzied by the sudden altitude of the conversation. Lynne then proceeded to conduct a sobering mini-symposium on grammar: subjective and objective cases; “begging” versus “raising” the question; parts of speech. “It’s all about using the proper pronouns,” she asserted with the calm authority of a linguistics maven promoting her latest book on NPR.Needless to say, I rolled my eyes at the alleged "grammar," but hey, Ms. Lynne is just parroting what she's learned from people she respects, and I have no beef with her. No, it was the "linguistics maven" that got my goat. Listen up, Rob Hoerburger: those people are "grammar mavens." The main NPR linguistics maven is Geoff Nunberg, and he doesn't go around babbling about "'begging' versus 'raising' the question" and "using the proper pronouns," because that's not what linguistics is about. Why is this so hard to understand?
A couple of sites I found that gave me a chuckle:
Родословная русской эпиграммы [Rodoslovnaya russkoi epigrammy, 'the genealogy of the Russian epigram'] starts with an amazing anecdote about a young guy named Nikolai Glazkov who in 1941 had just gotten a medical exemption from the draft and wrote an epigram predicting the suicide of Adolf Hitler:
Может быть, он того и не хочет,
Может быть, он к тому не готов,
Но мне кажется,
что обязательно кончит
Самоубийством Гитлер Адольф.
A quarter of a century later, he played the guy who took the balloon ride at the start of Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev!
The other site is Гусарская азбука [Gusarskaya azbuka, 'Hussar's alphabet'], which has obscene little distichs for each letter of the Cyrillic alphabet:
Жизнь на радость нам дана.
Жопа - фабрика говна.
[Life is given us for joy;
The ass is a factory for shit.]
Last year I posted about finding an online reproduction of the first issue of Современные записки [Sovremennye zapiski, the Parisian journal that published Nabokov's Russian work in the '30s]; now I've found the corresponding nineteenth-century journal, Отечественные записки [Otechestvennye zapiski], thanks to the infuriating (insert "Snippet view" rant) but invaluable Google Books. I was looking for something else and discovered one of the hits was to Sovremennik, a famous radical journal founded by Pushkin and shut down by the censors in 1866. The link was to the 1859 volume (which includes Dobrolyubov's famous article "Chto takoe oblomovshchina?"), but in the "Other editions" section there were links to other issues. It immediately occurred to me that there must be scanned volumes of Otechestvennye zapiski (closed in 1884 for similar reasons) as well, and so there are (1830, 1882, etc.). The second one I investigated is from 1848; on the flyleaf it bears the inscription (in a careful, slightly awkward hand, presumably that of a Crimean War soldier) "this book i found in the Great redan Sebastopol," and below that is the stamp of the Taylor Institution, with the notation "Confined to library." The physical (and doubtless crumbling) volume may be so confined, but the words are now available to all, thanks to the internet, Google, and Oxford University.
I was intrigued by a passing reference to an obscure mid-19th-century Russian writer called Yakov Butkov, did a little investigating, and found a chapter on him in the reminiscences of Aleksandr Milyukov (Literaturnyya vstrechi i znakomstva [1890], pp. 105-131). It was a sad and moving story of a young writer who got in trouble with the authorities and disappeared from view, his promise wasted, and I wanted my wife to read it, so I started translating it. (It took me all weekend and ran to over 4,500 words, so it would be nice if I could get it published somewhere; if anyone has any ideas, let me know!) At one point I ran into the kind of pun that's completely untranslatable; it seems to me that you either footnote it (in an academic version) or omit it (in a popular one). Butkov has been summoned to the censorship committee and is very nervous about it, and he says: "Right at the University a stock exchange hare [birzhevoi zayats] I know ran across my path, he just nodded at me. And you don’t believe in omens, sir!" This made no sense to me, but I correctly presumed "hare" was a slang term. First I went to Dahl, where I discovered that to Russians a hare crossing your path is a sign of bad luck, like a black cat in English; then I googled "биржевой заяц" and found that it was slang for an unofficial broker, one of those middlemen who scurries around making deals for people. Now all was clear, and I could see what a clever pun it was, but I also realized there was absolutely no way to render it in English. (If only unofficial brokers were called "black cats"!)
I was just pointed to a 1963 paper by anthropologist Jack Goody and literary historian Ian Watt, "The Consequences of Literacy" (pt 1) (pt 2), that's well worth reading if you're interested in such things. A sample:
Early British administrators among the Tiv of Nigeria were aware of the great importance attached to these genealogies [which "stretch some twelve generations in depth back to an eponymous founding ancestor"], which were continually discussed in court cases where the rights and duties of one man towards another were in dispute. Consequently they took the trouble to write down the long lists of names and preserve them for posterity, so that future administrators might refer to them in giving judgement. Forty years later, when the Bohannans carried out anthropological field work in the area, their successors were still using the same genealogies. However, these written pedigrees now gave rise to many disagreements; the Tiv maintained that they were incorrect, while the officials regarded them as statements of fact, as records of what had actually happened, and could not agree that the unlettered indigenes could be better informed about the past than their own literate predecessors. What neither party realized was that in any society of this kind changes take place which require a constant readjustment in the genealogies if they are to continue to carry out their function as mnemonics of social relationships...On the other hand, Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole in The Psychology of LiteracyIt is obvious that the process of generation leads in itself to a constant lengthening of the genealogy; on the other hand, the population to which it is linked may in fact be growing at quite a different rate, perhaps simply replacing itself. So despite its increasing length the genealogy may have to refer to just as many people at the present time as it did fifty, a hundred, or perhaps two hundred years ago. Consequently the added depth of lineages caused by new births needs to be accompanied by a process of genealogical shrinkage; the occurrence of this telescoping process, a common example of the general social phenomenon which J.A. Barnes has felicitously termed 'structural amnesia', has been attested in many societies, including all those mentioned above...
(1981) claimed that schooling is far more important than literacy. Geoff Nunberg's review describes their findings:
Among the Vai people of western Liberia, Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole found the ideal situation to test the effects of literacy. In the 19th century, the Vai invented a wholly original writing system for their language, a syllabic script like the one used for modern Japanese. ... But since then, Vai writing has been used only for keeping commercial records and for personal letters; schools in Liberia are conducted in English, the official language, and the Moslem Vai use Arabic for religious purposes. So there is no public writing in Vai — no books or newspapers. Nor is there any formal schooling in the language; literacy is passed on from one individual to another. If there are psychological differences between Vai literates and illiterates, then, they can only be the result of literacy itself, rather than the factors that usually accompany literacy in other cultures.If anyone knows of good recent work on this topic, I'd love to hear about it.In ''The Psychology of Literacy,'' Miss Scribner and Mr. Cole report the results of four years of research among the Vai. ... Miss Scribner and Mr. Cole subjected the Vai to a battery of psychological tests of memory and of abstract and logical thinking — asking them, for example, to sort common objects into categories and then re-sort them according to other principles, or to work out simple logical puzzles. Their surprising finding was that literacy in itself had very little effect on performance in these tests, though formal schooling did. Only when they turned to testing skills that were closely connected to literacy and letter writing, like the ability to work out rebus puzzles or to give road directions to someone who was not present, did unschooled literates do better than illiterates. Miss Scribner and Mr. Cole conclude that the mere fact of learning to read and write doesn't bring with it any important psychological development. What matters, rather, is the uses that people make of their literacy.
Via this MetaFilter thread on the Scots Gaelic origins of gospel music, which I highly recommend—there are some very knowledgeable people in the discussion.
New York Magazine's "Vulture" column recently ran a very funny piece on a scene in the TV show "The Wire":
The go-getting young reporter played by Michelle Paress gets chastised for writing that (paraphrasing) “the Fire Department evacuated 120 people” during a fire. “You evacuate a building. You don’t evacuate people,” Old Curmudgeon Editor grunts. Cut to Paress’s character looking in some sort of reference book, then admiringly muttering, “He’s right, you know,” to a fellow reporter. But is he really right?I had never heard this particular Silly Shibboleth before, but I immediately realized the etymological principle involved: the verb is from a Latin word meaning 'to make empty [vacuus]' and thus should be used only of emptying a building. David Simon (who wrote the dialog) explains in his response:
At the Baltimore Sun in my day, I was chastised by the great Jay Spry, rewrite man to the world, for evacuating people in my report of a downtown gas leak. I plead guilty to an anachronism if indeed that is what it now is. [...]The comments contain other such dictates ("Technically you can't perform an autopsy on a different species, so if a racehorse died mysteriously and some reporter wrote that veterinarians hoped to learn more after an autopsy, it would be changed to 'necropsy' or 'post-mortem examination.' Every reporter has a million stories like this, and they're all different"); the whole thing is lots of fun. Thanks for the tip, Doug!I could not resist having the fake Jay Spry deliver the real Jay Spry's admonition to Alma, much as he delivered it to me. Plain and simple, it was homage to a wonderful newspaper character and one of my earliest memories of my time at the Sun.
Also of note: The Baltimore Sun would never allow you to refer to a funeral home in an obit. No one lives at a funeral home, we were told. Funeral establishment was the required phrase.
I've recently become aware of these language-oriented blogs:
Cognition and Language Lab focuses on "experiments through the Web testing human reasoning, particularly in the domain of language": "Long-time readers know that the major focus of my research is on how people resolve ambiguity in language." This post has a nice quote from Van Berkum, Koornneef, Otten, Nieuwland (2007):
However, the flexibility of language allows us to go far beyond this. For example, as revealed by a brief Internet search, speakers can use “girl” for their dog (“This is my little girl Cassie…she's much bigger and has those cute protruding bulldog teeth”), their favorite boat (“This girl can do 24 mph if she has to”), or a recently restored World War II Sherman tank (“The museum felt that the old girl was historically unique”). Such examples reveal that for nouns, it is often not enough to just retrieve their sense, i.e., some definitional meaning, from our mental dictionaries.The Ideophone, by Mark Dingemanse, PhD student in the Language and Cognition group at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, bills itself as "Notes on expressivity, African languages, and more"; there are all sorts of interesting posts on things like Expressivity in Berber and Mawu folk etymologies, but what I want to highlight here is the latest post, On the history of the term ‘ideophone’, which LH readers may be able to help with. Mark writes:
A common term for expressive vocabulary in African linguistics is 'ideophone'... According to the OED, the term ideophone can be traced back to an 1881 work by philologist/ethnomusicologist Alexander J. Ellis. ... Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to track down the citation provided by the OED, which runs thus: '1881 A. J. ELLIS Synops. Lect. Lond. Dialectical Soc. 2 Nov., Mimetics, ideographics, and ideophonetics. Fixed ideograph, variable ideophone, and their connection.' (Suggestions welcome.)As I wrote him, "I thought I was good at digging up the OED's sources, but this one defeats me; I've googled everything that seemed relevant and come up empty. The London Dialectical Society (as you've doubtless discovered) did a lot of paranormal investigations (Logie Barrow calls it 'the semi-respectable London Dialectical Society'), and Ellis gave a talk 'On Discussion as a Means of Eliciting Truth' that was published in 1879, but I can't find anything combining him, the Society, and the year 1881." So can any of you clever folk do better?
Update. Lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower provides the answer in the comments:
"The OED is citing a printed card announcing two of the London Dialectical Society's November meetings, mailed by Ellis to James Murray (they were friends), and subsequently deposited by Murray in the OED archives."
Thanks, Jesse!
The publisher, Walker & Company, was kind enough to send me a review copy of Nicholas Ostler's new "biography of Latin," Ad Infinitum
Ostler's basic approach is to move from the language's origin as just one of the twigs on the Italic branch of Indo-European through its heyday as common language of first the Roman Empire and then Catholic Europe to its current fallen status, which he describes at the beginning by saying it "seems a comical language" and at the end by quoting the last of his many Latin tags, Sic transit gloria mundi, in the process tying its fate to the historical tides that swept Europe during that stretch of time (the last 2,500 years or so). It's a sensible strategy, somewhat compromised by the fact that he's not a historian and of necessity has to present a simplified and out-of-date picture of what historians have to say. On the second page of Chapter 1, for example, he writes "ROMANITAS—the Roman way as such—was never something voluntarily adopted by non-Roman communities." (N.b.: When quoting Latin in the early chapters he uses small capitals; after the fall of the Empire, he uses italics.) He qualifies this in a footnote by mentioning the bequest of Pergamum to Rome in 133 B.C., which is hardly relevant; much more so is the insistence of Germanic tribes on joining the Empire a half-millennium later, which he himself describes in Chapter 9 ("First the Goths... applied to enter the Empire"). His general picture of Rome facing the barbarian hordes seems to ignore the recent trend in frontier studies to see permeable zones of trade and cultural contact where traditional historians saw hard and fast borders. Also (to get a minor nitpick out of the way), he doesn't seem to understand the concept of irony. On p. 57, talking about the Romans' advantage in having a single dominating city, he says "Ironically, this single urban core turned out to be much more effective than the multiple urban cores that the Etruscans had developed for themselves"; on p. 318, he says "[Latin] was largely propagated through violence, even if ... that violence was nominally being deployed on behalf of the Christian God of love, and (just as ironically) knowledge of Latin was until recently passed on to each new generation with ample use of the ferula, that painful instrument of educational discipline."
But that's by the by; any book that takes in so much is going to have minor errors and infelicities. The real test is whether there is plenty of good, interesting material that makes you glad to have read it, and the answer here is unamiguously positive. I'll go through and pick out some bits that struck me.
In Chapter 5, on the relations between Latin and Greek, he talks about "hermēneumata 'translations', parallel school texts, apparently dating from the third century AD or earlier, filled with everyday language showing how to say the same things in good Latin and Greek, and (like modern phrase books) sometimes illustrating the right words for a crisis"—and presents two pages of examples, in three columns, Greek, Latin, and English. One example translates as "Isn't this the Lucius who owes me money? It is. I go up to him then and greet him. 'Good morning, good sir! Can I still not have back what you have owed me all this time?' 'What? You're mad.' 'I lent you money and you say, "You're mad"? You cheat, don't you know me?' 'Go away, ask the person you lent it to. I don't have anything of yours.' ... 'Okay then, it's not right for a free man and a householder to have an argument.'" I found four collections of Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana at the Bibliotheca Augustana, a useful collection of Latin texts; it only has the Greek and Latin in parallel, but if you know those languages, it's a lot of fun. If only I'd known about these dialogues in college!
In Chapter 8, he has a discussion of Christian Latin with some great quotes:
A general feature of Latin as used by Christians was its aggressively vulgar, plebeian, tone, quite happy to commit what traditionalists would call solecisms or barbarisms. This is unsurprising, since it was the converse of their worries about excessive eloquence. As Arnobius had put it, writing in 303, "When the point is something serious, beyond showing off, we need to consider what is being said, not how elegantly; not what soothes the ears, but what brings benefits to the hearers." But the fact that it seemed easier to write ungrammatically also shows that maintaining the full traditional grammar of Latin was becoming a burden even to native speakers, within the fourth century AD. Augustine observed:Good for Augustine! (This might be a good time to point out that all translations from Latin are referenced to the original texts in the footnotes.)For what is called a solecism is nothing other than putting words together on a different rule from that followed by our authoritative predecessors. Whether we say inter homines ['among men'—accusative case] or inter hominibus [ditto—ablative case] does not concern a man who only wishes to know the facts. And likewise, what is a barbarism but pronouncing a word differently from those who spoke Latin before us? For whether the word ignoscere ['pardon'] should be pronounced with the third syllable long or short is indifferent to the man who is praying to God, with whatever words he can, to pardon his sins. What is correctness of diction beyond sustaining images that happen to be hallowed by the authority of former speakers?He even explicitly enjoined breaking the grammatical rules on occasion:Feneratur [a deponent verb, with passive form but active sense] is the Latin for giving a loan, and receiving one: but it would be clearer to say fenerat [i.e., the corresponding active form]. What do we care what the grammarians prefer? Better you understand through our barbarism, than get left behind [deserti] through our elevated finesse [disertitudine].
In Chapter 11, he talks about the beginnings of the Romance languages; this passage presents an interesting theory about how and why Latin became a "foreign language":
Alcuin enjoined a new, universal style of pronunciation for Latin, deliberately reconstructed to be close to its original sound. Rather than allow each local community to pronounce its Latin as came naturally, he proposed that all should follow a single norm....Compare the results of the Renaissance humanists' insistence on following classical models, especially Cicero (Chapter 15):This would perhaps give scholars closer access to the true sound of Latin poetry and rhetoric; importantly, it would certainly make it easier for them to communicate orally in Latin, wherever in Europe they might hail from. As a reform, it did not in itself tend toward vernacular literacy: indeed, quite the reverse, for the immediate effect of the new pronunciation was to make priests reading out their sermons or their church offices more or less incomprehensible to their illiterate parishioners. In the favorite—somewhat extreme—example, the word viridiarium 'orchard' cold no longer be pronounced in northern France as verdzer, by then its natural rendering in the local variety of Romance. With each priest following his home pronunciation, it was possible—at least in Romance-speaking countries—for the Latin text to have been read pretty much in line with the local language.... The newly antiquated, universal Latin, by contrast, was a foreign language everywhere, accessible only to those who had studied it.
By insisting on ancient models, the humanists tore Latin away from its old, massive root structure, pruned it, and replanted it in well-weeded display beds, in admirable but alien splendor. Latin remained a privilege of the educated: Renaissance humanism did nothing, for example, to bring Latin closer to the growing multitudes who were learning to read in the vernacular. But even for those who were brought up with it, Latin was now that little bit harder to learn, as its links were cut with modern discourse, however ponderous that discourse might have been. Appreciating Latin neat, in its supposedly purer, pristine form, was an aesthetic achievement; but paradoxically it made the language harder to master, and to use as a living medium of day-to-day expression, let alone as a vehicle for original thought.And there are all sorts of incidental tidbits, like his reference to Maffeo Vegio, "an epic poet who dared to complete Virgil's Aeneid with a Book XIII of his own devising, carried off with pure Virgilian panache" (online here), and this splendid quote from John Colet's preface to Lily's 1511 grammar: "In the beginning men spake not Latin because such rules were made, but, contrariwise, because men spake such Latin the rules were made. That is to say, Latin speech was before the rules, and not the rules before the Latin speech." If all this appeals to you, you will like the book, which is well written, comprehensive, and delightfully discursive.
One thing I found hard to understand, though, was his gloomy sic transit gloria conclusion. Sure, Latin is no longer the world language it was, but there's been a revival of interest in recent years; there are Latin blogs, you can get the news in Latin, and there's a whole movement to promote spoken use (read Rebecca Mead's New Yorker article on Luigi Miraglia). Lingua latina vivit!
I was looking up something else in the OED when I happened on sense 6.b. of the entry buff, n.2 'A buffalo, or other large species of wild ox':
‘An enthusiast about going to fires’ (Webster 1934); so called from the buff uniforms worn by volunteer firemen in New York City in former times. Hence gen., an enthusiast or specialist. Chiefly N. Amer. colloq.The first cite for the fire-enthusiast meaning is 1903, the first non-fireman-related one 1931 (Lavine Third Degree vi. 62 "A dentist, known to many cops as a police buff (a person who likes to associate with members of the department and in exchange for having the run of the station house does various courtesies for the police)"). Who knew that the buff of "sports buff" goes back to buffalo, via the buff(alo)-colored uniforms worn by volunteer firemen in New York City? The actual facts of etymology are so much fun I don't see why people have to resort to imaginary acronyms and the like.
LH reader kattullus sent me a link to this post at strange maps: it reproduces an amazing 18th-century map by Gottfried Hensel (the post says 1730, but other sources say 1741) that shows Europe divided into linguistic areas, with the beginning of the Lord's Prayer in each. It doesn't reflect the situation at any one period, but in general it's antiquarian (England is shown with Anglo-Saxon and the south of Spain with Arabic); "Russica" is actually a variant of the Church Slavic version (which you can see correctly written here), and above it is one of the strangest features of the map, an area labeled "Nova Zemblicæ" ('Nova Zemblan') with a different variant of Church Slavic. If anyone knows what's going on there, I'd love to hear about it.
The map is one of a set of four, the other three showing Asia, the Americas, and Africa; you can see them all at this page (in Ukrainian), but the first two aren't available in quite as much detail (and Africa isn't enlarged at all)—enough, though, to see that the ugly Chinese characters were written by someone with no idea of how to do it! (Also, what the heck are those squiggles in Japan?) I would love to see a thorough analysis of all four maps, and I find it hard to believe there's never been one. The comments at strange maps discuss the differences between the texts on the map and those in use today, which is handy.
While I'm sending you to strange maps, check out the previous post on a map that "render[s] each country in a size corresponding to the number of languages spoken in it."
Everyone is familiar by now with the use of yo as an attention-focusing device (Yo, be careful!). Apparently in Baltimore it has evolved into a gender-neutral pronoun; as a Baltimore Sun story says:
Elaine Stotko, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins, began hearing of kids here who say "yo" to indicate another person of whatever gender, and after pursuing survey work over two years has nailed that usage down. Now she has a paper in American Speech, the journal of the American Dialect Society.There's much more, including news links, at Mark Liberman's Language Log post; new pronouns don't come along very often, and it will be very interesting to see if this spreads.Some examples: "Yo handin' out papers." "Yo threw a thumbtack at me." "She ain't really go with yo."
A little further study showed her (showed yo - it can stand in for "her" and "him," too) that this use of the word doesn't show up in other cities; kids in Washington say "youngin'" in a general sense, but typically that's reserved for boys.
When I saw the subhead of a review in the Book Review section of today's NY Times (this week devoted entirely to Islam)—"The 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey' of medieval Persia is presented in a hefty new English translation"—I was sure I knew what it referred to. But it wasn't the Shahnama, it was something I'd never heard of, the Hamzanama, translated by Musharraf Ali Farooqi as The Adventures of Amir Hamza. The website has links to a bunch of reviews, and it sounds like a lot of fun—the Times review says:
Born as early as the ninth century, it grew through oral transmission to include material gathered from the wider culture-compost of the pre-Islamic Middle East. So popular was the story that it soon spread across the Muslim world, absorbing folk tales as it went; before long it was translated into Arabic, Turkish, Georgian, Malay and even Indonesian languages...The translation is from an Urdu version. If you're curious about the illustrations commissioned by Akbar, you can see a nice selection of them at La boite à images.“The Adventures of Amir Hamza” collected a great miscellany of fireside yarns and shaggy-dog stories that over time had gathered around the travels of its protagonist, the historical uncle of the Prophet Muhammad. Any factual backbone the story might once have had was through the centuries overtaken by innumerable subplots and a cast of dragons, giants, jinns, simurgh, sorcerers, princesses and, if not flying carpets, then at least flying urns, the preferred mode of travel for the tale’s magicians.
Of all the brilliant writers who flourished during the brief period of relative freedom between the Revolution and the time Stalin brought the hammer down, Boris Pilnyak is probably the least-known outside Russia (and maybe inside as well). There are reasons for this; he was not much interested in plot and character development, and his Russian is so full of dialectal expressions and recondite allusions that it's hard to blame his translators for stumbling occasionally. His idiosyncratic emphasis on nature, instinct, and biology—his plots are interspersed with apparently irrelevant descriptions of wolves, forests, and clouds—combined with his indifference to historical accuracy and verisimilitude can cause problems for even a favorably disposed reader (Solzhenitsyn, in an otherwise admiring discussion of his most famous work, the novel Golyi god [The Naked Year], keeps pointing out irritatedly that the kombedy were dissolved before the novel's 1919 setting, that there were no anarchists active in that part of Russia at the time, etc.). But his devotion to literature was total, and his courage in defending its rights against those who would subject it to politics was breathtaking (and virtually suicidal). His response to demands in the early '20s that he declare support for Communism:
This is what I am against: that I must pant breathlessly when I write about the Communist Party like very many do, especially the quasi-communists, who thereby give our revolution a tone of unpleasant boasting and of self-congratulation. I am against a writer having to live "willingly not seeing", or, simply, lying. And a lie results when some sort of statistical proportion is not observed. ... I am not a communist, and for that reason I do not agree that I should have to... write in a communist manner. ... To the degree that the communists are with Russia, I am with them (so now, at this time, more than ever before, for I do not agree with the philistines.) I admit that the fate of the communist paty is less interesting to me than the fate of Russia. The CP for me is only a link in the history of Russia.And even in 1936, when it was apparent to all that Stalin would not allow even the slightest independence, he was defiant; from the first link above:
A writers conference was held in March 1936 to consider how to battle against formalism and naturalism. Pilnyak, Pasternak, Leonov, Fedin, and Lidin were all blasted. Then in August 1936 came the trial of the "Trotskyite Center". A meeting of writers, critics, and publishers was held in September, giving everyone a chance to bare their souls of any Trotskyite or other deviant sympathies. Leonov, Fedin, Olesha, and others were sufficiently abject and apologetic. Pilnyak, however, while admitting that he gave financial help to Karl Radek, didn't present himself as politically culpable in any way.I wonder if Pasternak remembered this later on, when he was the one in disgrace?Pilnyak's recalcitrance led to a meeting of the presidium of the Writers Union in October 1936 to examine his position. Again Pilnyak failed to display any repentance. He labeled the attacks on him as "malicious criticism" and stressed the importance of independence for himself as a writer. Many writers, including friends such as Aseev, Pogodin, and Pasternak, rose to criticize Pilnyak for his excessive calmness, self-assurance, and political blunders.
But it wasn't just his political recalcitrance and personal stubbornness that got him in trouble, it was his language. I knew from my reading that many of the writers of the period, from Bely to Zoshchenko, delighted in the dialectal, "ungrammatical" speech of the peasants, the vast majority of the population, but I didn't realize the political implications until I read "Mastering the Perverse: State Building and Language 'Purification' in Early Soviet Russia," by Michael S. Gorham (Slavic Review 59 (2000): 133-153; JSTOR link). Gorham explains that Lenin and the rest of the Bolshevik leadership were concerned about the "spoiling" of the Russian language and draws out the implications:
Language "purism," as it is commonly termed, more often than not indicates an underlying struggle for power and authority on the part of social and cultural representatives who see themselves as "guardians" of an established language tradition, defending it against forces whom they perceive to be alien, detrimental, and threatening to the integrity of the national tongue, and, by extension, the nation itself... The underlying power play is built into the notions themselves: a language norm or standard is declared such (not always overtly) by those in positions of linguistic authority (writers, linguists, grammarians, and pedagogues, among others). The standards, in turn, are most often recognized precisely when "violated." Examining a broad range of attitudes toward the multiple voices vying for linguistic authority and recognition during the 1920s and early 1930s, the following discussion will trace the emergence of a dominant discourse of language purism and its role in both the homogenization of the Soviet-Russian literary language and the symbolic legitimation of the Soviet party-state. It will demonstrate, moreover, that the purification campaign targeted the voice of the peasantry most directly, generating a form of symbolic cultural cleansing that accompanied more direct methods of social extermination and control...Gorky himself, the arbiter of literature for the young regime, "repeatedly implored beginning writers to read the 'classics' for the best models of the Russian literary language.... Young writers could either follow the 'secrets' of mastery already provided by Pushkin, Tolstoi, and others, or they could wallow in... 'verbal chaos' and 'anarchical motion.'" His approach "defused once and for all the hopes of those who advocated that the spoken language of the people be raised to the status of a language of power. It framed the discussion over language in terms of state authority, party and class membership, and taste and located the speech practice of rural populations clearly outside that frame." In Gorham's conclusion, he sums up the close relation between language, literature, and politics:As for representations of the voice of "the people," it was the regionally and socially marked language of the peasantry that dominated fiction, overshadowing the halting and largely unsuccessful attempts by the Proletkul't and other groups to forge a "proletarian" literature." Stories and even pseudo-ethnographic works by writers such as Isaak Babel', Sof'ia Fedorchenko, Vsevolod Ivanov, Lidiia Seifullina, Artem Veselyi, and Mikhail Zoshchenko dominated the prose of the leading "thick journals" and prominently featured the voices of often poorly educated, nonreading, and politically unenlightened village dwellers, or recent migrants from countryside to city. The dominance of the rural voice in the prose of the so-called fellow travelers—by common recognition the best and most productive group of writers of the day—led even sympathetic critics such as Lev Trotskii and Aleksandr Voronskii to associate them as a group with the Russian muzhik, using phrases such as muzhikoustvuiushchie poputchik (peasantifying fellow travelers) and muzhitskii uklon (muzhik tendency) to characterize them and their work.
But there can be no question that the purification—on the level of both style and rhetoric—was of a specifically Soviet sort, an amalgam of some faint notion of the Russian literary classic and a heavy dose of socialist ideas and terminology. To a large extent, the calls (after Gor'kii) for reconstituting the national literary language were little more than a means of legitimating the new official state discourse by linking it to these authoritative and well-established standards. It was a style in which the voice of the narrator transmitted more transparently and "masterfully" the language and symbols of the party. The voices of the cultural peripheries, meanwhile, were purged of their regional and dialectal identities and were linguistically "collectivized" into a reinvented and safely controlled image of a Soviet-Russian people, a rural proletariat. Those unable or unwilling to adapt to the new standards found their voices quickly and literally muted from the various spheres of public discourse.
I was going to talk about The Naked Year, which I recently finished, but this post is quite long enough already, so I'll do that another time.
I had been planning to write about Pilnyak, but chastened by Conrad's remark in his farewell post—yes, remorseless time has eaten away the Varieties until there is not a single one left—that I am "adrift in Nova Zembla," I will honor the memory of the sometimes anfractuous but always amene Vunex by posting on the kind of historico-cultural-linguistic nexus to which Conrad is drawn as a wasp is drawn to sunlight: the history and divers uses of the word normal.
As every schoolboy knows, normal is derived from Latin normalis, in the classical language meaning 'right-angled' but in later use also 'conforming to or governed by a rule' (norma meaning 'square used for obtaining right angles, a right angle, a standard or pattern of practice or behavior'). Now, when it was first sucked up through the proboscides of the hungry languages of Europe from the sweet nectar of the Latin lexicon, the word had the humble original sense of 'right-angled,' but it gradually took on the later ones as well, and then underwent an efflorescence that varied by region and is tied in with the distasteful but inescapable realm of politics. Frankly, to delve into that realm myself would be both time-consuming and depressing; fortunately, Alexander Kiossev (Bulgarian Александър Кьосев) has done the spadework for me in his Eurozine article "The oxymoron of normality" (found via wood s lot). Kiossev starts with philology:
It is remarkable, that, despite the various waves of linguistic patriotism and purist filtering of foreign words, the Latin words "norm" and "normal" are present in all three major European language groups: Germanic, Roman, and Slavic. "Normal" is used even in Hungarian and Finnish, which belong to Finno-Ugric, a rare, non-European language family. ... According to dictionaries, these words penetrated European languages at around the same time – roughly speaking, between 1810 (the first rare usages) and 1850 (common usage)....Then he gets into a more sociological kind of history:Yet the semantic stability of the term's meaning is no less remarkable. Along with its specialized meanings, old lexicons display four major meanings of "normal" in everyday speech:
- obeying the norm, following a rule, regular;
- habitual, frequent, usual, ordinary, moderate;
- standard, not deviating from;
- sane, healthy....Despite this stability, one can notice a slow semantic shift in the meaning of "normal". In contemporary lexicons, the normative meaning of "normal" ("obeying a norm", "following a rule") makes way for dominant descriptive meanings such as "usual", "ordinary", "typical", "customary", "common", and "average". Moreover, in meanings such as "standard" and "regular", normative nuances are weak: these definitions imply technical procedures for measuring and ordering rather than moral or religious norms. It is as if the "norm" in the "normal" is gradually disappearing.
Did the words "normal" and "normality" alter the "conceptual limits" (Koselleck) of European populations between 1810 and 1850? I believe it is highly probable that the word "normal" and its derivates contributed to a longue durée process – the ascendance of the new moral order. "God-given" virtues, laws, and decrees were gradually replaced by a dominant sociological imagination operating with overall trends and "statistical" norms. This meant replacing the Christian moral notion of a pious life with conformity to "typical", "normal", mass behaviour; divine normative guidelines were replaced with worldly, descriptive ones....
Given these lexicographical, pragmatic, semantic, and contextual details, one can argue that between 1810 and 1850, a kind of conceptual colonization took place in Europe. The words "normal" and "normality"... conquered the specialist fields of science and technology as well as everyday life: the aggressive, "self-evident" word family penetrated language barriers, fighting purisms, professional jargons, and common habits, and changing the horizon of expectations and the conceptual limits of mass behaviour. It introduced a major principle of modernity: the conceptual binary "normal/deviation". "Normal" becomes a designation for the internalized, routine, self-evident modern order, a designation that conceals its disciplinary and technological character....He then turns to his primary subject, the contrast between Eastern and Western European conceptions of what is "normal": in very brief summary, the East started out equating "normal" with "European," treating their (decades old and often brief) experiences as independent and more or less democratic countries, part of the European community, as their historical norm and the recent decades under the oppression of Communism as an aberration. As he says, "In the slogan 'revolution back to normality', 'normality' occupied the place left empty by the 'bright future' of communism." But when they ran into the reality of the "all-encompassing standardization and regulation policies" imposed by the EU, there was a backlash:
Confronted with the real bureaucratic Europe, the "longing for European normality" became a disappointed utopia and produced the opposite reaction: a new longing for difference, "authenticity", and communality. This is one explanation for the recent wave of nationalist and isolationist movements in eastern Europe. These movements also regard themselves as returning to "normal", only now, "normal" and "natural" are interpreted as "native soil and roots".Words like normal are much slipperier and harder to investigate than less charged words; some of Kiossev's discussion strikes me as tendentious (especially when he gets onto the subject of "consumption"), but his separation of the strands of interpretation of what at first seems a relatively straightforward concept is valuable and thought-provoking. What is "normal"? Each of us has our own norm, which we tend to take for granted until it collides with somebody else's.
As they say in Zemblan, Все нормально [vsyo normal'no]: 'everything's normal.'
So says Robin J. Sowards in "Why Everyone Should Study Linguistics" (The Minnesota Review, Spring 2007); he's specifically thinking of literary critics. And he's absolutely right, of course; that's the good news. The bad news is that he thinks structuralism "has been stone dead for nearly half a century in linguistics departments" (he means, of course, MIT) and "the kind of linguistics that [everyone should be studying] (and that is presently the dominant model in linguistics) is what is sometimes known as 'theoretical linguistics' or 'generative linguistics.'" Sigh. Will no one rid us of this wretched albatross? Marxism and Freudianism are relics of the past century; Chomskyism needs to join them on the dustheap ASAP, so linguists can get back to what they do best, studying actual languages instead of their theoretical constructs. (Via Mark Liberman at the Log, who of course is not implicated in my rants against the Dark Lord of Linguistics.)
Unrelated: Anyone interested in my book should go read bulbul's essay on Slovak cursing, most of which, inevitably, got cut from the book. A small excerpt to whet your appetite:
Imagine you are a Slovak hockey fan watching your beloved national team score in an Ice Hockey World Cup semifinal, but the referee declares the goal invalid. In a situation like this, exclamations like Sviňa! or Kus vola! are simply insufficient to express one’s feelings for the idiot with the whistle. The only word that will do is Kokot! („dick, prick”). That is because unlike in Czech, the most and most frequent terms of abuse and insults employed in Slovak are derived from terminology associated with sexual organs and sexual behavior.He broke his "regularly scheduled radio silence" to bring us the essay, and I for one am touched (and hope that the experience will remind him of how much fun blogging is and how much he wants to get back to it).
Michael Hendry of Curculio is selling off a bunch of books, many of which look like they might be of interest to LH readers. I hope the sale is not compelled by circumstances (ferrea sed nulli vincere fata datur; des Schicksals Zwang ist bitter), but if it is, I hope the proceeds make it worthwhile. How can I not like a guy who writes posts like this?
The index of Albrecht Dihle’s Greek and Latin Literature of the Roman Empire from Augustus to Justinian (Routledge, 1994) includes one entry for Lucilius and one for Lukillios. Too bad they are actually three different people: five of the six page references under ‘Lucilius’ refer to the founder of Roman satire, while the sixth (page 93) refers to the addressee of Seneca’s letters, who lived (if he is not a fiction of Seneca) two centuries later. And shouldn’t the name of the Greek epigrammatist be spelled ‘Loukillios’ if it’s not Latinized as Lucillius? ‘Lukillios’ seems to fall between two stools.Why, yes, it should, and yes, it does.
Edge.org has published their Annual Question (which they ask a bunch of smart people), and this year it's "What have you changed your mind about? Why?" Answers involving language come from Daniel Everett ("I believed at one time that culture and language were largely independent. Yet there is a growing body of research that suggests the opposite - deep reflexes from culture are to be found in grammar."), Gary Marcus ("Instead, I have now come to believe, language must be, largely, a recombination of spare parts, a kind of jury-rigged kluge built largely out of cognitive machinery that evolved for other purposes, long before there was such a thing as language. If there's something special about language, it is not the parts from which it is composed, but the way in which they are put together."), Marti Hearst ("simple statistics computed over very large text collections can do better at difficult language processing tasks than more complex, elaborate algorithms"), and Lera Boroditsky ("I set out to show that language didn't affect perception, but I found exactly the opposite. It turns out that languages meddle in very low-level aspects of perception, and without our knowledge or consent shape the very nuts and bolts of how we see the world.") Lots of thought-provoking stuff there.
Via MetaFilter, where you will find links to previous Annual Questions.