LINGUISTIC PURISM STRIKES AGAIN.

This time in Syria, according to a story in The Economist:

In the past few months, across the country, owners have been told to Arabise the names of their shops and cafés and advertisers have been urged to use classical Arabic rather than the local Syrian dialect. “La Noisette restaurant is now called al-Bunduqa,” Arabic for hazelnut, says Ibrahim Hamidi, who has written on the subject for al-Hayat, an Arabic-language newspaper published in London. “It sounds funny to us.”

A law from the 1950s was revived by decree a year ago with the formation of a Committee for Improving the Arabic Language. It may mark a new effort to polish Syria's Arab credentials and end the country's isolation of recent years.

And some people think English is in need of such a Committee! (Thanks for the link, Kobi.)

INTERVIEW.

Remember my curses and insults book? It still hasn't come out in the States, but last month the "international radio news magazine" The World did an interview with me about it that will be broadcast today. The show is created by WGBH in Boston; on my local station it's on at 3 PM. If you're not in the US, or if your local public radio station doesn't carry the show, or if you just don't feel like being glued to the radio for an hour, as of 5 PM Eastern time it will be available on their website (and they are kind enough to link to individual segments, so you don't have to listen to the whole show).

I did not use any English obscenities, but I mentioned some in other languages, one of which was Greek maláka 'jerk, dumbass' (or, more literally, 'wanker,' to use the handy British insult); my wife was listening in the anteroom (I was connected to GBH via the studio of my local station, WFCR, where everyone was exceedingly nice), and she tells me a guy who happened to be in the room smiled when he heard it and said that he once worked in a Greek-run pizza place and that was the first word he learned.

Addendum. On the subject of "bad language," Avva posted the results of a Google search for "enbreasties." Take a look at the results and see how long it takes you to figure out why this non-word occurs so often (e.g., "President Bush identified eight enbreasties operating in North Korea, Iran, and Syria..."). I'll post the answer below the cut.

Some sort of nanny software is automatically replacing "tit" with "breast." Other examples mentioned in the Avva thread: penisroach, peniser spaniel, buttessment, mbuttacred, buttbuttination... and someone found the excellent sentence "I know the difference between a transvesbreaste and a homoloveual"!

Another addendum. Just got to this, on p. 317 of The Book of Ebenezer Le Page:

I was scared he would get onto the subject of the ancient monument; but it was our patois he was interested in now. Its roots. He had discovered it was really the language of the religion of the witches of old, and all the dirty words in it was holy words. He said 'Baise mon tchou!' ['Kiss my ass'] was a royal salute. I had never thought of it that way, me.

WORDMALL.

Another language-related blog has come to my attention: Michael Sheehan's Wordmall. Sheehan is a retired English professor who has a radio show called "Words to the Wise," which "covers the joys and vicissitudes of the English language," and he covers similar material in his blog. His latest post, Bruschetta, not only covers the etymology ("The name comes from an Italian word that meant 'to roast over coals.' In turn, that came from a 13th century verb that meant 'to pass a flame over the keel of a boat in order to melt the pitch and improve waterproofing'"), it has a mouth-watering picture and links to some recipes from Mario Batali. The only thing it doesn't address is the pronunciation; I have had to force myself to get used to the near-universal American broo-SHET-uh, since my awareness of the Italian broo-SKET-tah causes me to cringe when I hear it.

A previous post, That'll Be Three Bucks, Please, discusses the history of buck 'dollar' and adduces the Journal of Conrad Weiser, Esq., whose entry for September 17, 1748, after talking about sending down "Skins by the Traders to buy Rum," says "Whiskey shall be sold to You for 5 Bucks in your Town" and mentions a man who "has been robbed of the value of 300 Bucks." I would want to see a reasonably clear link between this use as 'medium of trade' and the much later 'dollar' sense, but it's certainly suggestive. (By the way, the OED has eleven separate noun entries for buck; I wonder what the record is?)

NATIONAL GRAMMAR DAY.

I wouldn't accord the cockamamie notion of "National Grammar Day" any attention except that it inspired a lively column by Nathan Bierma, who says he is "one of those people who cares about the difference between a gerund and a participle, between a restrictive and non-restrictive relative clause" but has come to realize that "most of the time — when we're among friends, family, or anyone we feel comfortable with — we should simply let our hair down and allow our unpolished emissions of language to burst out of us in all their untidy splendor."

So I can't join the witch hunt of the Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar (which goes by the unappetizing acronym of SPOGG), which is sponsoring National Grammar Day as a chance to flag any violation of standard English usage in any situation.

"If you see a sign with a catastrophic apostrophe, send a kind note to the storekeeper," urges SPOGG at nationalgrammarday.com. "If your local newscaster says 'Between you and I,' set him straight with a friendly e-mail." Such corrections are seldom friendly, welcome or necessary. They are usually self-righteous, irritating and misinformed.

The policewoman behind National Grammar Day and SPOGG is Martha Brockenbrough, who serves as grammar guru for Microsoft's Encarta Web site (encarta.msn.com), where she writes a column called "Grumpy Martha's Guide to Grammar and Usage."

There she urges readers to avoid using an adverb with a word like "unique" (too bad for our founding fathers, who dreamed of "a more perfect union"), and to avoid saying "decimate" unless you mean "reduce by one tenth" (if 10 percent of educated English speakers know and care about that distinction, I'll give Grumpy Martha one tenth of my candy bar).

Brockenbrough reprimands pop stars for grammar gaffes in song lyrics, including Bryan Adams for singing "if she ever found out about you and I" (it should be "you and me," she says) — even though that's the best way to rhyme with the line before it: "She says her love for me could never die." And she takes Elvis to task — is no one sacred? — for singing "I'm all shook up" instead of the proper "all shaken up."

Raise your hand if you prefer this correction. That's what I thought.

He goes easier on the malign stupidity of this kind of thing than I would ("self-righteous, irritating and misinformed" is a mere slap on the wrist), but I heartily applaud his attitude.

I found the column via Arnold Zwicky at Language Log; while Zwicky has good things to say about "the assumption that non-standard variants are unclear and therefore impede communication" and "the very odd view of 'communication', in which respecting and honoring 'the rules of English' is what permits people to convey meaning to others," but he finishes up with what to me is a misguided excursus on how English suffers because "there's essentially no one to speak with any authority for rational reform, no one to accord some sort of official status to variants"; he seems to think we need some sort of "official regulatory body" to guide us. The idea that bodies like the Académie française do anything other than try to enforce fading standards of "correctness" is so bizarre I can only suppose it stems from the kind of wishful thinking that made so many people fall for the technocratic ideal back in the 1930s. Freedom is a better guide than any "properly constituted" body of "experts."

GUYS.

I'm pretty sure that as far back as I can remember—certainly in my college days in the late '60s—the plural guys has been used to address groups including women, or even (usually, I think, by women) groups exclusively composed of women. There is an interesting "Dear Abby" column today addressing the issue; it opens with the following letter from "Jacki in Wilbraham":

I had to write regarding the letter from "Disgruntled in Lompoc, Calif." (Dec. 28), whose pet peeve is waitstaff (in particular) referring to her and her lady friends as "guys."

Well, 3,000 miles away, I, too, am sick to death of being called a guy. When it happens to me, I tell my server that "the last time I looked, I was NOT a guy!" Sometimes they get it — sometimes not.

I notice that on some of the TV shows I watch, even women refer to a group of people as "guys." I hate it — and would ask you, with your worldwide influence, to bring the issue forward. We are NOT "guys," we are "people" or "folks" or "ladies and gentlemen"! Or else, Merriam-Webster will have to change its definition of "guys." Thanks for letting me vent.

The interesting thing is that "Abby" (Jeanne Phillips) does not simply agree, though she says she too "would prefer to have my femininity acknowledged rather than to be called a guy"—she actually looks in the dictionary, and lo and behold:

And, as to Merriam-Webster's definition of a "guy," — my 11th Edition says in black and white that "guy" can refer to "any person" when used colloquially. Frankly, I found it so surprising that I looked in the American Heritage College Dictionary to see if there was agreement, and it also states: "Informal (ital.): Persons of either sex."

She then presents a selection of other letters on the topic, one agreeing with the original outrage ("My solution is to smile sweetly and ask, 'Honey, do I LOOK like a guy to you? Because if I do, you need your eyes checked'") but most either neutral or positive ("As I have told my ESL students, 'guys' is acceptable colloquial English"; "It's not meant to be disrespectful. It's a regional colloquialism"). It's nice to see such an open-minded approach to usage on the part of one of the keepers of the flame of mainstream ideas of right and wrong. (Incidentally, my wife agrees that the use in question is perfectly OK.)

IS FRENCH LOSING GENDER?

OK, that may be too apocalyptic a question, but I'm astonished by the results of a study conducted by Dalila Ayoun of the University of Arizona and reported on by Heidi Harley at Language Log: "Fifty-six native French speakers, asked to assign the gender of 93 masculine words, uniformly agreed on only 17 of them. Asked to assign the gender of 50 feminine words, they uniformly agreed [on] only 1 of them. Some of the words had been anecdotally identified as tricky cases, but others were plain old common nouns."

There's an even more interesting twist in Ayoun's native-speaker results. Her native speakers fell into two groups: 14 adult speakers and 42 teenage speakers. On most grammatical tasks, for all intents and purposes, teenagers' native-language abilities are identical to adults' abilities. But when she broke down the gender-assignment task results by age, she found that teenagers showed considerably more variation than the adults. On the 50 feminine nouns, for example, the 14 adults all agreed on 21 of them, while the 42 teenagers agreed on only one: cible, 'target'. Of the 93 masculine nouns, the adults agreed on 51 of them, while all adults and teenagers agreed on only 17 (of 93!!)

Heidi reproduces one of Ayoun's tables "illustrating significant differences in the rates at which adults and teenagers agreed on the gender of 10 feminine nouns"; it's well worth the look. I wouldn't have known that primeur 'early fruits and vegetables' (often used metaphorically: avoir la primeur d'une nouvelle 'to be the first to hear a piece of news') was feminine without looking it up, but that only one of the French teenagers did is amazing. Mme Ruegg (my high school French teacher) would be wielding her ruler vigorously and/or emptying the bottle of booze she kept in the bottom drawer of her file cabinet.

THAI SPELLING REFORM.

Rikker Dockum's blog Thai 101 covers "Thoughts on Thai language, media, and culture," and his latest post is on "Simplifed Thai spelling during World War II." I hadn't known anything about it, and it's not mentioned in the (admittedly short) books I own on the country, but thanks to Rikker—and Matt of No-sword, who sent me the link—now I do:

I understand that it was mandated by Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram [who was known as "Marshal Pibun" when I was living there in the late '50s—LH], and even people's names had to be respelled under this system. One remnant legacy of this is that famous name in dictionaries, So Sethaputra, whose last name is spelled เสถบุตร to this day. The original spelling of his last name is เศรษฐบุตร, but since his name became famous along with his first dictionary under its revised spelling, he was one of the few that didn't revert the spelling after Field Marshal Plaek was ousted.

Rikker reproduces some passages from a 1944 "Thai Language Textbook" with the simplified spellings in red; it should be fascinating to those who can read Thai, an ability which, alas, almost half a century has deprived me of, to the limited extent I ever had it. (I assume the spelling reform wasn't well done, since it was abandoned after the war.)

Incidentally, So Sethaputra sounds like an interesting guy, who started compiling his dictionary while serving time as a political prisoner in the '30s; unfortunately, all I can find online about his life is this review of a biography, which annoyingly doesn't even mention his birth and death dates (though it does say that his wife, the author of the book, died in 2000).

THE ENGLISH PROJECT.

The Times (U.K.) reports on an unusual new museum:

The English language might be abused and misused, as well as celebrated, but it is the means by which two billion people communicate as a first or second language. Now its story is to be told in the world’s first museum dedicated to a language.

The English Project — which is due to open in 2012, as part of the Olympics cultural programme, with support from the British Library and the BBC among others — will aim to deepen our knowledge and understanding of the richness of the English language.

It will trace its development from the mixed tongue of three tribes — the Jutes, Saxons and Angles who crossed the North Sea to make their homes in Britannia in the 5th century — to the global lingua franca of today.

The museum will be built in Winchester — the city of King Alfred, who promoted Old English as a language of learning, literature and law. The city was also a unifying factor for the disparate English, or Anglo-Saxons, at a time when they were threatened by the Viking onslaught.

A campaign is planning to raise up to £25 million from public bodies, individual donors, trusts and foundations. The museum will be announced on March 5 by, among others, David Crystal, an expert on the history of the English language, who will analyse the state of English today.

I'm not sure what it has to do with the Olympics, but Crystal is indeed an expert; who knows, maybe it will be worthwhile. Here's the Winchester city website, and here's the university's announcement. Thanks for another interesting link, Paul!

SOUND COMPARISONS.

The University of Edinburgh's School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences has created the website Sound Comparisons "to provide an overview of the variety of the sounds of the English language on various levels: in time, with our transcriptions of historical ancestor forms of English, from present-day back to Late Modern English, Early Modern, Middle and Old English, as far back even as Proto-Germanic; over geographical space; by sociolinguistic context." More details can be found at their Information page; of the historical element, they say:

Obviously, we cannot provide recordings of the various historical stages in the development of English, but linguistic analyses do make it possible to work out what the likely pronunciations were to a reasonable degree of accuracy. With each step further into the past, however, the more and more we ‘reconstruct’, the more linguists’ confidence in the real phonetic accuracy of our transcriptions necessarily reduces. All our transcriptions for historical varieties are therefore always to be taken with this caveat in mind.

An interesting site; thanks, Paul!

CARRICK.

Occasionally I dive into Nabokov's insanely detailed commentary on Eugene Onegin for a bracing refresher, and recently my attention was caught by his perverse insistence (pp. 70-71) that the correct way to translate Russian shinel' 'greatcoat' is "carrick"—he goes so far as to render the title of Gogol's famous story as "The Carrick." It is, of course, absurd to use in translation a word that not more than a handful of readers will understand, but that's the kind of absurdity that makes Vladimir Vladimirovich such a lovable crank, and hey, it was a new word to add to my vocabulary.

So I went to the OED... and it wasn't there! I found it hard to believe that such a word, from the early 19th century, wouldn't have been scooped up by the OED's famed readers, so I considered the possibility (unlikely but not unheard of) that VV was simply mistaken. A little googling, however, convinced me that there was indeed such a word: a fashion timeline (placing it under "Directoire/Empire 1795-1815"), an ad, a Dictionary of Costume ("carrick a gentleman's greatcoat for driving. Of heavy fawn-colored cloth, double-breasted and with deep collar."), and Nomenclature for Museum Cataloging ("Carrick/ use GREATCOAT") were a convincing bunch of sources. So I followed up Nabokov's hint that the word came from France and checked the Dictionnaire de l'Académie francaise, where I found "CARRICK n. m. XIXe siècle. Emploi métonymique de l'anglais carrick, « sorte de cabriolet ». Sorte d'ample redingote qui a plusieurs collets ou un collet très long. Un carrick de cocher."

But now we have a further problem: the Académie claims that the French word is borrowed from English carrick 'sort of cabriolet'—and that isn't in the OED either! I give up.

FARARUD.

A correspondent wrote to ask me about the Farsi term "Farārood" which is given in Wikipedia as the Persian name for Transoxiana. When I saw the odd spelling (it should be transliterated Farārud) and the [citation needed], and especially when I was unable to locate it in any of my dictionaries or in Steingass, I was ready to delete it from the Wikipedia article, until I had the bright idea of checking the Farsi version, which to my astonishment was indeed headed فرارود (Farārud). Investigating further, I found (via Google Books) that it was used for a river in western Afghanistan, the official name of which is Farāh Rud = Farāh River. I don't know what all this adds up to, or why the Iranians now call Transoxania that instead of the traditional name ماوَراء النَّهْر Māvarā-onnahr (from Arabic, literally 'what is beyond the river'), so I'm throwing it out there to see what the Learned Readership might know.

Update. Ian (of Beyond the River) explains in the comments that farā "is an antiquated word meaning 'beyond, behind', and 'rud' is 'river.' So it's just a Persian calque of 'ma wara' an-nahr.' Fara is almost certainly derived from wara'." Thus nothing to do with the Afghan river. He adds that "Tajiks especially like to use the word (there's a news agency named Varorud) prob because of the general tilt away from Arabic during the Soviet period." Thanks, Ian! So is there free variation between f- and v-?

TRADE WIND.

Another interesting etymology: trade winds have nothing to do with trade in the sense of 'commerce,' though as the OED says "the importance of those winds to navigation led 18th c. etymologists (and perhaps even navigators) so to understand the term"; it originates in the phrase to blow trade, meaning 'in a constant course or way; steadily in the same direction.' Now, trade, when it was borrowed from Low German in the 14th century, meant 'course, way, path' (it's historically the same word as the native tread, which originally meant 'footprint'); it developed the sense 'course, way, or manner of life; course of action,' whence 'regular or habitual course of action' and (of winds) 'in a regular or habitual course.' The sense we're familiar with is a later development: 'the practice of some occupation, business, or profession habitually carried on.' The trade winds tread in their habitual paths as we tread in ours.

CRACKPOTTERY AND CREDULITY.

A while back I got M.J. Harper's The Secret History of the English Language in the mail from Melville House, its publisher. I didn't have time to read it, but I flipped through it and noted that it purported to be claiming that Middle English never existed and that English was the ancestor of the Romance languages, among other things so silly I assumed it couldn't be serious. I was cheered by the blurb "The best rewriting of history since 1066 and All That" (from the Fortean Times); I thought "1066 and All That is a damn funny book, and I could use a good laugh," so I looked forward to reading it when I got the chance.

Well, I learn from Sally Thomason at Language Log (and the follow-up by Mark Liberman) that it's not a joke at all: Harper is serious about all that nonsense. The blurb at Amazon.com, presumably written by the author, reads:

In a hugely enjoyable read, not to mention gloriously corrosive prose, M.J. Harper slashes and burns through the whole of accepted academic thought about the history of the English language. According to Harper: The English language does not derive from an Anglo-Saxon language. French, Italian, and Spanish did not descend from Latin. Middle English is a wholly imaginary language created by well-meaning but deluded academics. Most of the entries in the Oxford English Dictionary are wrong. And that's just the beginning. Part revisionist history, part treatise on the origins of the English language, and part impassioned argument against academia, The Secret History of the English Language is essential reading for language lovers, history buffs, Anglophiles, and anyone who has ever thought twice about what they've learned in school.

Now, I have nothing against crackpots; throughout history they've provided harmless amusement for the rest of us. I don't even blame the publishers who put out the stuff without a proper warning label—they're just trying to make a buck, putting it all on the market and seeing if anyone will buy it. No, I blame the professional reviewers who take the nonsense seriously. The New Statesman, for example, says:

Unusual, funny and provocative, Harper wears his learning lightly, but has a serious point to make. While admitting that his own theories about the early Brits "may or may not be acceptable", he warns that historical anomalies are routinely ignored by the academics we rely on to explain our past. Whatever your stance on the Anglo-Saxons (and Harper's suggestions are rather seductive), this fascinating book is a useful investigation into the ways in which history is constructed and the dangers of "unassailable" academic truths.

If the book were claiming that Queen Elizabeth was the illegitimate son of Rasputin, or that mixing salt and sugar provides an inexhaustible source of energy that will replace oil and gas, no one would take it seriously; if it were reviewed at all, it would be as an example of how absolutely anything can get published. But equivalent nonsense about language is reviewed respectfully, and it makes me despair. Sally Thomason takes consolation from the fact that good books are also being published (and I certainly look forward to David Crystal's The Fight for English: How Language Pundits Ate, Shot, and Left), but such books have been published for many years, and they don't seem to make much of a dent. People just don't want to think sensibly about language.

TENDER.

Today's etymology: tender 'a boat for communication or transportation between shore and a larger ship; a car attached to a steam locomotive for carrying a supply of fuel and water' is short for attender: it's a boat or train car that attends another one. (OED citation: 1825 MACLAREN Railways 32 note, A small waggon bearing water and coals follows close behind the engine, and is called the Tender, i.e. the ‘Attender’.) Simple and obvious once you know it, but I hadn't known it.

Another t word: tee (the thing you hit the golf ball off of) was teaz in 17th-century Scotland (1673 Wedderburn's Vocab. 37, 38 (Jam.) Baculus, Pila clavaria, a goulfe-ball. Statumen, the Teaz), so it was presumably reanalyzed like pease > pea, but nobody knows where teaz came from.

PALEOGLOT.

I don't know how I've missed Paleoglot until now, but I'm glad I've found it. Glen Gordon says:

Growing up on gyros, roti and chow mein, I learned to appreciate the beauty of world cultures at an early age. I spend any spare time I have avidly studying comparative linguistics. My current research interests relate specifically to Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Aegean (aka Proto-Tyrrhenian) linguistics involving languages like Etruscan and Lemnian, however I've explored a multitude of other languages and protolanguages, from Sino-Tibetan to Abkhaz-Adyghe as well. My blog "Paleoglot" will largely focus on the reconstruction of Indo-European or ancient Aegean-derived languages but sometimes I will throw in a bone about whatever ancient language, culture or civilization inspires me that day.

Talk of things like "Proto-Aegean" makes me nervous, but this guy is no pushover for sloppy comparisons and hand-waving correspondences; his rant about How NOT to reconstruct a protolanguage warmed my heart with its demolishing of Starostin's Tower of Babel project. He says "In case anyone was confused, my blog isn't a mouthpiece for proto-world rhetoric and I'm an ardent defender of mainstream linguistics despite my moderate interest in long-range linguistics," and that makes me want to hear him out about the long-range stuff he finds plausible.

GOOD STUFF AT WOOD S LOT.

Yesterday's wood s lot is even fuller than usual of excellence; busy working against deadline, I can only point to Forrest Gander on "The Power and Politics of Translation," the announcement that The Atlantic "is dropping its subscriber registration requirement and making the site free to all visitors. Now, in addition to such offerings as blogs, author dispatches, slideshows, interviews, and videos, readers can also browse issues going back to 1995, along with hundreds of articles dating as far back as 1857, the year The Atlantic was founded," and particularly the selections from Rachel Blau DuPlessis, a remarkable poet whose site links to many poems and essays, among which is a long and thoughtful piece on Zukofsky. Thanks for the goodies, Mark, and a belated happy birthday to your mom!

IT'S WHAT A PERSON SAY.

A while back I got a package in the mail that turned out to be a gift from my pal pf (long-time readers may remember his adventures in Siberia): a copy of the NYRB reprint of G. B. Edwards' The Book of Ebenezer Le Page. Edwards was born on Guernsey in 1899 and lived there until 1917, when he joined the army; he lived in England from the 1920s on and never returned to Guernsey, but in his mind he never left, and in his last years he was working on this amazing novel. It has no real plot, it's just an old man rambling on about his life in an English strongly influenced by the Guernésiais (Guernsey Norman French, or "patois") he grew up speaking, but the writing is so effective I find myself reading half the sentences aloud, and the stories he tells about his relatives and neighbors add up to a complex and often moving chronicle of island life in the days before modernization (which the narrator, and presumably the author, dislikes intensely). It actually reminds me quite a bit of Proust, except with fewer aristocrats and more farm animals (and if anybody's wondering, in our bedtime reading—as mentioned in the thread that would not die—my wife and I have gotten to the last volume, and we'll be looking for new reading material next month). It's taken me longer to get around to it than it would have because my wife picked it up, started reading it, and refused to give it up. At first she said it was the strangest book she'd ever read, and then she said she didn't want to finish reading it. But finally she did, and I got my chance at it.

The reason I'm impelled to write about it today is that I just hit a passage that I'm going to incorporate into my anthology of Good Attitudes to Language:

There was one thing [Raymond] was ashamed of his mother for, and that was the way she spoke English. He was everlastingly teasing her for saying 'tree' for 'three' and 'true' for 'through' and for not sounding her aitches and all the rest of it. I didn't like him for that. It was partly Hetty's own fault, because she had never let him speak in patois, from the days he went to the Misses Cohu's School. She wanted him to grow up to speak English like the gentry. Well, he did speak good English; but he had a gift for words and I think would have spoken well in any language he set his mind to learn. I didn't mind him being particular about the words he used himself, but he was fussy about the way other people spoke. I said, 'It's what a person say that matter. It isn't how he say it.'

Of course, it is how he say it as well, but being well said isn't the same thing as being said "correctly."

TRUCK.

One reason I love words and their histories is that there are too many of them to ever master; no matter how much I know, there's always plenty more I don't. You know the phrase truck farming? I always assumed it had something to do with carrying produce in trucks. Not so! There are two different nouns truck, one from French troc 'barter' which came to mean "'Traffic', intercourse, communication, dealings. Now usu. in negative contexts: to have no truck with (a person or thing), etc." and "Commodities for barter" (1688 CLAYTON in Phil. Trans. XVII. 792 They must carry all sort of Truck that trade thither, having one Commodity to pass off another), whence U.S. "Market-garden produce; hence as a general term for culinary vegetables" (1784 Maryland Jrnl. 14 Dec., Advt. (Thornton), A large Room.. for his Customers to lodge in, and deposit their Market-truck) and truck farm (1866 N. & Q. 3rd Ser. IX. 323/1 A truck garden, a truck farm, is a market-garden or farm).

Truck "A wheeled vehicle for carrying heavy weights," on the other hand, first meant "A small solid wooden wheel or roller" and comes either from Latin trochus = Greek τροχός 'hoop' or from truckle 'small wheel,' ultimately from the same root.

RATIONALISTS, WEARING SQUARE HATS.

The last of the Six Significant Landscapes by Wallace Stevens:

          VI
Rationalists, wearing square hats,
Think, in square rooms,
Looking at the floor,
Looking at the ceiling.
They confine themselves
To right-angled triangles.
If they tried rhomboids,
Cones, waving lines, ellipses—
As for example, the ellipse of the half-moon—
Rationalists would wear sombreros.

Early Stevens is irresistible.

ELSÄSSISCH.

Joel at Far Outliers has a post about the German dialect he encountered on his recent visit to Alsace:

My first introduction to Elsässisch (Alsatian German) came in the form of bilingual street signs in Strasbourg, where the main street through Grand Île in the heart of the old city is named both Grand'Rue and Lang Stross. (A street of the same name in Pfalzgrafenweiler on the German side of the border was labeled only in High German, Lange Strasse, even though the locals speak an Alemannic dialect similar to Alsatian.)

Later I found a useful little Werterbüechel Elsässisch–Hochditsch / Wörterbüchlein Hochdeutsch–Elsässisch, by Serge Kornmann (Yoran Embanner, 2005). So I thought I'd share a few gleanings from that tiny source, focusing on how to get from High German to Alsatian, since the former is likely to be more familiar to most readers.

For some reason I tend to like German dialects more than the official language, and this is no exception. How can you not love a word like Schnuffelrutsch (lit. 'sniff-slide') 'mouth organ'?

MOSAICS.

Antoine Cassar calls these poems "mosaics" (adding a clarifying "multilingual sonnets"). I've seen plenty of poems that incorporate material from a second language, but I've never seen any with material from five woven together in this fashion:

C’est la vie

Run, rabbit, run, run, run, from the womb to the tomb,
de cuatro a dos a tres, del río a la mar,
play the fool, suffer school, żunżana ddur iddur,
engage-toi, perds ta foi, le regole imparar,

kul u sum, aħra u bul, chase the moon, meet your doom,
walk on ice, roll your dice, col destino danzar,
métro, boulot, dodo, titla’ x-xemx, terġa’ tqum,
decir siempre mañana y nunca mañanar,

try to fly, touch the sky, hit the stone, break a bone,
sell your soul for a loan to call those bricks your home,
fall in love, rise above, fall apart, stitch your heart,

che sarà? ça ira! plus rien de nous sera,
minn sodda għal sodda niġru tiġrija kontra l-baħħ,
sakemm tinbela’ ruħna mill-ġuf mudlam ta’ l-art.

Cassar explains:

Mużajk is an experiment in multilingual verse, an attempt to combine the sounds of different languages into a single rhythm and a single thought.

Written in a blend of English, French, Italian, Maltese and Spanish (in no particular order or proportion), but occasionally also peppered with phrases from other languages, the mużajki or mosaics endeavour to explore the possibilities of braiding together the sounds and cadences, literary memories and motifs of different tongues. The successful interaction of the various elements will depend on how well the seemingly multiple voices are gelled into one by the rhythm and logic of the poem....

When Dave Bonta sent me the link, he said he wanted "to share the page with the only two people I know who might be able to understand almost all the lines as written (except, I suppose, for the Maltese)," and my ability to read all the languages (except, of course, for the Maltese) was certainly a factor in my enjoyment—I don't know if a monolingual reader would enjoy them at all. At any rate, it's a fascinating experiment; thanks, Dave!

Below is Cassar's English translation of the poem I quoted (he helpfully supplies them for all his poems):

Run, rabbit, run, run, run, from the womb to the tomb, from four to two to three, from the river to the sea, play the fool, suffer school, the wasp goes round and round*, get involved, lose your faith, learn the rules,

eat and fast, shit and piss, chase the moon, meet your doom, walk on ice, roll your dice, with destiny dance, metro, work, sleep, the sun rises, you get up again, to say always tomorrow and never tomorrow reach,

try to fly, touch the sky, hit the stone, break a bone, sell your soul for a loan to call those bricks your home, fall in love, rise above, fall apart, stitch your heart,

what will be? it will go well, nothing more of us will be, from bed to bed we run a race against the void, until our soul is swallowed by the dark womb of the land.

* the name of a Maltese children’s game

BOOKS FROM THE PAST.

Llyfrau O'r Gorffennol/Books from the Past is "an on-line collection of books of [Welsh] national cultural interest which have long been out of print." (You can read much more about it here.) So far it has ten books in Welsh and eight in English; an example of the former is Caniadau by John Morris Jones (1907), "A volume of poetry, including original poems and translations from various languages into Welsh. Includes the famous translation of the verses of Omar Khayyâm," and one of the latter is The Adventures and Vagaries of Twm Shon Catti by T. J. Llewelyn Prichard (1828), "A historical novel about Twm Siôn Cati, a legendary Welsh folk-hero from the sixteenth century." A nicely done site. (Via MetaFilter.)

LET STALK STRINE.

Almost five years ago, in this post, I mentioned Alistair Morrison's 1965 book Let Stalk Strine, written under the pseudonym Afferbeck Lauder ("alphabetical order"); now it's online, courtesy of textfiles.com. A sample should give the idea:

Dingo: A word with two separate, unrelated meanings. When intoned with equal emphasis on the syllables it is the negative response to the question 'Jeggoda?' As in:
Q: Jeggoda the tennis?
A: Nar, dingo. Sorten TV.
When, however, the emphasis is on the first syllable, dingo becomes a parliamentary term of mild reproof.

Thanks, Dinesh!

A QUOTE ON BIBLIOMANIA.

In cleaning off my desk just now I found a quote I'd copied down back in 2002, which went as follows:

Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity… we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance.

It seemed to be attributed to the bibliophile A. E. Newton (1863-1940), but I thought I'd better google it to be sure. What I found was confusion.

In the first place, many sources had, after the word "acquired," the phrase "(by passionate devotion to them)"—with or without parentheses—which certainly reads better. But to find what the correct form was, an accurate citation was needed, and there was none to be had. Eventually I turned up page 78 of Newton's A Magnificent Farce: And Other Diversions of a Book-collector (1921), which has: "...it is my pleasure to buy more books than I can read. Who was it who said, 'I hold the buying of more books than one can peradventure read, as nothing less than the soul's reaching towards infinity; which is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish'? Whoever it was, I agree with him..." So there we have a portion of the original quote (in slightly different form), but attributed to the mysterious "Who was it." This could, of course, be a coy way of quoting oneself. But what about the rest?

Next the quest brought me to The Anatomy of Bibliomania by Holbrook Jackson (1874-1948), which seems to be a collection of quotes on the pleasures of books and book-collecting, italicized and footnoted (good man!), stitched together with Jackson's own commentary in roman type. On page 183 (continuing onto page 184) we find:

Even when reading is impossible, the presence of books acquired by passionate devotion to them produces such an ecstasy that the buying of more books than one can peradventure read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity, and that this passion is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish,¹ an argument which some have used in defence of the giddy raptures invoked by wine.

The footnote refers us to "A.E. Newton, A Magnificent Farce, 78," which we have already visited. So far, so good; the italicized bits are from Newton, the rest is from Jackson, and the whole thing at some point got attributed to the former.

But what about the last part, "we cherish books even if unread, their mere presence exudes comfort, their ready access, reassurance"? The internet holds hundreds of instances of it, always attached to the previous quote by ellipses, but Google Books can't find it at all. Is it from some work of Newton's not yet digitized? Was it tacked on by some anonymous compiler of Meaningful Quotations who thought it would suit the context? Alas, it is not in The Yale Book of Quotations, nor The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, nor Bartlett's, so I can only speculate, and ponder for the thousandth time the difficulty of pinning down "famous quotations."

TRANSLATIONS ON THE MARKET.

The translation theorist Lawrence Venuti (whom I've quoted before) has a new essay in Words Without Borders called "Translations on the Market." Overall it's a rather bizarre effort that seems almost a parody of academic lack of interest in what the rest of us call the real world; Venuti thinks publishers are doing a cultural disservice by publishing occasional translations and insisting on their making money before taking on more books by the same author, and suggests they "must take an approach that is much more critically detached, more theoretically astute as well as aesthetically sensitive. They must publish not only translations of foreign texts and authors that conform to their own tastes, but more than one foreign text and more than one foreign author, and they must make strategic choices so as to sketch the cultural situations and traditions that enable a particular text to be significant in its own culture." I guess they must also go bankrupt for the greater good, eh? But he does address the issue: "The initiative I am recommending cannot be pursued by one publisher alone without a significant outlay of capital and probably not without the funding and advice of a cultural ministry or institute in a foreign country. But publishers can coordinate their efforts, banding together to select a range of texts from a foreign culture and to publish translations of them. This sort of investment cannot insure critical and commercial success. But in the long run chances are that it will pay off..." Uh-huh. You do the theorizing, professor, and let the publishers take care of the publishing.

However, he does have an intriguing paragraph full of actual facts:

The exceptional cases are remarkable because they involve the great works of modern literature. In translation these works were commercial failures initially, according to the standards in place then and now, and it is only because some of the publishers involved were willing to add the titles to their backlists or to sell off reprint rights that the translations achieved canonical status in the US and the UK. In 1922 Chatto and Windus published C.K. Scott Moncrieff’s version of Proust’s Swann’s Way in two volumes, and within a year 3000 copies were in print. Yet five years later volume one had sold only 1773 copies and volume two only 1663. In 1928 Martin Secker published his first translation of a novel by Thomas Mann, Helen Lowe-Porter’s version of The Magic Mountain, but it took seven years to sell 4,641 copies, helped no doubt by the translations of seven other books by Mann that Secker had issued in the interval. In 1929 the Hogarth Press published Beryl de Zoete’s version of Italo Svevo’s novella The Hoax, but after selling 500 copies in the first year the book showed a loss, and publisher Leonard Woolf was soon looking to remainder 300 copies. In 1930 Woolf also published Svevo’s collection of stories, The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl, which met the same fate. He attempted to sell the translation of the stories to Alfred Knopf, who had published Svevo’s Confessions of Zeno in 1930. But the editor at Knopf declined. “I am afraid there is no question,” he replied, “but that he has been a failure, although we made immense efforts to put him across.”

What's amazing is not that publishers don't put out more translations, but that they do any at all.

POETOSPHERE.

In looking for maps of Saint Petersburg, I found the mother lode at Atlas "Sankt-Peterburg 300". There are all sorts of goodies, but the one of most LH relevance is the map of locations where poets, writers, and other literaturnye deyateli (basically untranslatable, but "littérateurs" comes close) lived; the numbers refer to the "Poetosfera" list of addresses, arranged alphabetically by author and chronologically within each author listing, so you can see at a glance all 18 addresses Dostoevsky lived at, with dates. If you read Russian, that is.

HISTORY OF THE BBC PRONUNCIATION UNIT.

The excellent blog Linguism presents an interesting reminiscence about the BBC Pronunciation Unit, which started out in 1926 as the Advisory Committee on Spoken English (with Robert Bridges as Chairman and George Bernard Shaw as Deputy Chairman!); the whole thing is interesting, but this passage particularly struck me:

The Committee was suspended at the outbreak of the Second World War, and replaced (originally 'for the duration', but so far the War has apparently not ended!) by the Pronunciation Unit, staffed by two Scottish maiden ladies: G.M.('Elizabeth') Miller, and Elspeth Anderson ('Andy'), and a clerk. Despite an increasing workload - more radio and TV networks, more daily hours of broadcasting - this remained the entire staff until 1957, when a third linguist was appointed. I never met either Elizabeth or Andy, but their influence was still felt when I joined the Unit in 1979, when I succeeded yet another Scot, Mrs Hazel Wright, as head of the Unit, with the title Pronunciation Adviser. One of Elizabeth’s last successes was the publication by OUP of the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names (1971), and I was the editor of the second edition which came out in 1983 (paperback 1990). This is now out of print, and neither the BBC nor OUP seems interested in a third edition, which I feel is a shame, as there is no equivalent available.

The 1971 edition of the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names is one of my treasured and much-consulted reference works, and I am both delighted to know that "G.M. Miller" was known as Elizabeth and saddened to learn that there will be no new edition.

BOOKSTORE PHOTOS.

A Flickr set by Nigel Beale. I love bookstores. (Via wood s lot.)

TIMES NOT LYING, JUST CARELESS.

In response to this post, I received an e-mail from Pete Wells, Dining Editor of The New York Times, in which he quoted what he'd written to Bill Poser:

Several readers have written us about this passage in a recent post of yours on Language Log:

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.

Now I haven't seen the letter Mr. Gordon received, but I can tell you that the author of the article did not "make up a fake etymology." The chef in the article gave us the etymology herself and we quickly double-checked it on deadline and found it in the Wikipedia entry on "olla podrida."

Granted, Wikipedia is not what I'd consider a completely reliable source, but it does at least suggest that the "poderida" etymology is out there somewhere and did not spring to life in Wednesday's New York Times.

We're doing some more research into the question to see if we can find an early document referring to "olla poderida" but in the meantime I wanted to let you know that the state of journalism is not quite as far gone as you might have imagined.

As I told Pete Wells, next time they should consult a dictionary rather than Wikipedia, but reliance on unreliable sources is a hell of a lot better than simply making stuff up, so I withdraw my call for tarring and feathering and resume my previous attitude of generalized suspicion. And a tip of the Languagehat hat to Mr. Wells for taking the issue seriously enough to respond.

BENJAMIN ON STORYTELLING.

Walter Benjamin, in an essay on Leskov (pdf, Google cache), makes a point that rings true for me and provides a rationale for my lack of interest in much "psychological" fiction:

When the Egyptian king Psammenitus had been beaten and captured by the Persian king Cambyses, Cambyses was bent on humbling his prisoner. He gave orders to place Psammenitus on the road along which the Persian triumphal procession was to pass. And he further arranged that the prisoner should see his daughter pass by as a maid going to the well with her pitcher. While all the Egyptians were lamenting and bewailing this spectacle, Psammenitus stood alone, mute and motionless, his eyes fixed on the ground; and when presently he saw his son, who was being taken along in the procession to be executed, he likewise remained unmoved. But when afterwords he recognized one of his servants, an old, impoverished man, in the ranks of the prisoners, he beat his fists against his head and gave all the signs of deepest mourning.

From this story it may be seen what the nature of true storytelling is. The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time. Thus Montaigne referred to this Egyptian king and asked himself why he mourned only when he caught sight of his servant. Montaigne answers: “Since he was already overfull of grief, it took only the smallest increase for it to burst through its dams.” Thus Montaigne. But one could also say: The king is not moved by the fate of those of royal blood, for it is his own fate. Or: We are moved by much on the stage that does not move us in real life; to the king, this servant is only an actor. Or: Great grief is pent up and breaks forth only with relaxation. Seeing this servant was the relaxation. Herodotus offers no explanations. His report is the driest. That is why this story from ancient Egypt is still capable after thousands of years of arousing astonishment and thoughtfulness. It resembles the seeds of grain which have lain for centuries in the chambers of the pyramids shut up airtight and have retained their germinative power to this day.

There is nothing that commends a story to memory more effectively than that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis. And the more natural the process by which the storyteller forgoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the story’s claim to a place in the memory of the listener, the more completely is it integrated into his own experience, the greater will be his inclination to repeat it to someone else someday, sooner or later....

A nice sentence from later in the essay: "A proverb, one might say, is a ruin which stands on the site of an old story and in which a moral twines about a happening like ivy around a wall." (Via wood s lot.)

I can't resist another quote, this time from "Unverhofftes Wiedersehen," by the writer Benjamin calls "the incomparable Johann Peter Hebel"; Benjamin says "When Hebel, in the course of this story, was confronted with the necessity of making this long period of years graphic, he did so in the following sentences:"

In the meantime the city of Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake, and the Seven Years’ War came and went, and Emperor Francis I died, and the Jesuit Order was abolished, and Poland was partitioned, and Empress Maria Theresa died, and Struensee was executed. America became independent, and the united French and Spanish forces were unable to capture Gibraltar. The Turks locked up General Stein in the Veteraner Cave in Hungary, and Emperor Joseph died also. King Gustavus of Sweden conquered Russian Finland, and the French Revolution and the long war began, and Emperor Leopold II went to his grave too. Napoleon captured Prussia, and the English bombarded Copenhagen, and the peasants sowed and harvested. The millers ground, the smiths hammered, and the miners dug for veins of ore in their underground workshops. But when in 180[9] the miners at Falun . . .

[Unterdessen wurde die Stadt Lissabon in Portugal durch ein Erdbeben zerstört, und der Siebenjährige Krieg ging vorüber, und Kaiser Franz der Erste starb, und der Jesuitenorden wurde aufgehoben und Polen geteilt, und die Kaiserin Maria Theresia starb, und der Struensee wurde hingerichtet, Amerika wurde frei, und die vereinigte französische und spanische Macht konnte Gibraltar nicht erobern. Die Türken schlossen den General Stein in der Veteraner Höhle in Ungarn ein, und der Kaiser Joseph starb auch. Der König Gustav von Schweden eroberte russisch Finnland, und die französische Revolution und der lange Krieg fing an, und der Kaiser Leopold der Zweite ging auch ins Grab. Napoleon eroberte Preussen, und die Engländer bombardierten Kopenhagen, und die Ackerleute säeten und schnitten. Der Müller mahlte, und die Schmiede hämmerten, und die Bergleute gruben nach den Metalladern in ihrer unterirdischen Werkstatt. Als aber die Bergleute in Falun im Jahr 1809 etwas vor oder nach Johannis zwischen zwei Schachten eine Öffnung durchgraben wollten...]

As Benjamin says, "Never has a storyteller embedded his report deeper in natural history than Hebel manages to do in this chronology. Read it carefully. Death appears in it with the same regularity as the Reaper does in the processions that pass around the cathedral clock at noon."

(The translator had 1806 in the last sentence, but from the German it's clearly 1809. Also, for anyone as persnickety about pronunciations as I am, the name of the unfortunate Struensee is three syllables, /'štru-ən-ze/; "ue" is not always equivalent to ü.)

BAD LANGUAGE.

In the course of this contentious MetaTalk thread, I was asked "languagehat, I would love to hear your take on how certain words such as 'cripple' or 'midget' (that were, at one time, acceptable) become offensive." I wrote a longish answer which I will quote the bulk of here in the hope that LH readers will find it interesting and have their own points of view on the topic:

People "on top" in whatever way (ruling class, bigger and stronger, of a preferred race or religion, etc.) tend to treat the people "beneath" them badly. This can include everything from denial of privileges to physical violence, but it always includes verbal contempt. Since language is very important to people—it's how we understand the world—the latter weighs far more heavily on its recipients than you might think if you don't have to deal with it yourself. (Amusingly, the people on top always counter complains with variants on "Hey, I get called an asshole every day, and it doesn't bother me," as if that were remotely comparable.) One of the first and most insistent demands of the soldiers who made the February Revolution in 1917 was that their officers not be allowed to curse at them.

Now, obvious insults are an obvious problem. Where it gets interesting is the use of words intended as objective names or descriptions. Because the general attitude of those on top is one of contempt, the language they use becomes tainted with that contempt, and is eventually rejected by those it's directed at (when and if they are able to protest effectively). Thus (to simplify a complicated story, and ignoring "the n word," which was never anything but an insult) the people forcibly brought from Africa and their descendants were called "black" in the nineteenth century; they resented this and many preferred "colored," which was used by well-meaning white folks in the early twentieth century until it too became tainted and "Negro" became preferred, itself giving way (in one of those ironies of history) to "black" in the late '60s, which was partly superseded by "African American"—current usage seems to be a mix of the last two. Whites who enjoy their privileged status and have no conception of what it's like to be treated as an Untermensch also enjoy mocking the parade of "political correctness" and ask "What are we going to have to call them next?" as though it were a clever and incisive point. But in fact using PC language is a cheap substitute for actually treating people equally, so they usually go ahead and do it.

The same principle applies to "cripple" and "midget." There's nothing inherently offensive about these terms, but the contempt that goes with them taints them and makes the people so described insist on replacements, imagining (because we ascribe such importance to language) that "better" words will mean better treatment. But the new words get tainted too. The only permanent solution is to treat everyone as decently as we would like to be treated ourselves. Sadly, this in unlikely to occur in the foreseeable feature, so as long as we have a society in which equal treatment is an ideal and the people treated badly have the right to make their feelings known, the cycle of nomenclature will continue.

True fact: in the 19th century "secretary" was an honored term, because secretaries were men. In the latter part of the century, as such positions became the province of women, the term itself took on a patronizing feel, and with the later rise of feminism it was replaced by "administrative assistant." Does anyone think this actually produces more respect for the jobs and the people who hold them? But the desire for at least formal respect is deep-rooted and should be acknowledged even if, realistically, a change in nomenclature won't change anything that actually makes a difference. (For similar reasons, although I roll my eyes at the misunderstanding that underlies the attacks on the word "niggardly," I accept the necessity of not using the word, because the minor value of having an extra term for "stingy" is far outweighed by the value of not giving offense to people who have to take far more shit than I do on a daily basis.)

All that said, words are only words, and the best attitude remains "sticks and stones can break my bones," if you can manage it. I resolutely oppose hate-speech legislation and think that if people could get themselves to not let "bad language" distract them from the fight for better treatment in general, the world would be a better place.

I emphasize again that while I don't think it makes sense from a rational/logical point of view to attack words rather than the social facts that underlie their perceived offensiveness, I completely understand the fact that people do take offense at them and support their right to object to them (if not their desire to have such words banned outright).