National Grammar Day, that is; this is a month late, but I thought I'd share with you Z. D. Smith's response to the idiotic celebration of prescriptivism I barked at here:
...people have better things to do with their language than simply convey facts. In the imaginations of the dryest of grammarians, perhaps, language—not speech, though; written language—is simply or reductively the tool that we use to transmit and record factual information. Everybody else, though, and I mean everybody, is answering to a series of more pressing concerns. Even when speaking prose, we are participating in aesthetic creation. Every utterance obeys rules of meter and rhythm as fundamental to language as its grammatical structure....Indeed.Sometimes it makes a body really want to rap these critics on the head; don’t you see that people are speaking here? Do you really imagine that people who say ‘between you and I’ don’t have anything better to do with their words than see that they conform to some superficial notion of grammar? Can you allow in your worldview the possibility that the greengrocer or urban youth has his own sense of language, and is actively wielding it, rather than simply trying and failing to follow all the rules?
Jack Lynch, an Associate Professor of English at Rutgers, gave a talk in 2005 on "How Johnson's Dictionary Became the First Dictionary," going into the amusing and instructive history of the mistaken notion, doggedly repeated for centuries now, that Johnson's was the "first English dictionary." He says "If we adjust our criteria and allow 'the first dictionary' to mean 'the first standard dictionary' — the first one widely perceived as an authoritative standard — then Johnson's does seem to become number one. In fact there are hints that Johnson's was the first authoritative dictionary in writings published even before Johnson was born..." and decides "in this sense it may be true, for Johnson's was the first dictionary about which such grand pronouncements were made."
All this is very interesting, but apparently he kept mulling over the issues, and last year produced an even richer article, "Disgraced by Miscarriage: Four and a Half Centuries of Lexicographical Belligerence" (abstract, pdf, HTML cache). He starts with the same observation about Johnson's elusive primacy, but quickly goes in a different direction:
I suspect the very category of “a good dictionary” means nothing to many people.And he goes on to discuss the kind of copyright traps (sometimes known as "Mountweazels") I discussed here.But it has meant an awful lot to the people who write those dictionaries. One might think lexicographers are a meek and retiring lot, but history shows that they can be surprisingly truculent. Today I would like to describe some of the quarrels that have made the history of English dictionaries so fascinating for almost half a millennium. During that time lexicographers have engaged in countless altercations, and they’ve been known to get nasty—their debates are sometimes little more dignified than knife fights. Johnson himself noted, “Every other authour may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach,” and few even manage that; the usual lot of the dictionary writer is “to be disgraced by miscarriage, or punished for neglect.” ...
It may seem funny today, but seventeenth-century tempers often flared. One of the more bloodthirsty lexicographical rivalries began in 1656, when Thomas Blount published the biggest English dictionary to date, Glossographia. Two years later there appeared A New World of English Words, compiled by Edward Phillips, nephew of the poet John Milton. Phillips’s title picks up on some of the excitement of the discovery of the real New World, which was still a comparatively novel subject in 1658—this is before there was a permanent European settlement in New Jersey, when New Brunswick was still an unsettled region known by the unappealing name of Prigmore’s Swamp. Phillips, however, soon found himself in an ethical swamp of his own making, because his New World of English Words was not as new as he made it out to be—many of the entries were lifted straight out of Blount’s Glossographia. Blount, unamused, responded with a peevish pamphlet, A World of Errors Discovered in the New World of Words. ...
Dictionaries, in other words, have been stealing from one another for a long time, and it continues even now. Today it is considered bad form to lift whole entries out of a rival’s dictionary, but everyone looks to the competition for guidance. This approach does have some risks, though—for one, it tends to perpetuate errors. Sometimes they are intentional, part of a long tradition of clever frauds in reference books.
He mentions the fact that the earliest dictionaries concerned themselves exclusively with "hard words":
Of course, Johnson’s Dictionary contains many of these hard words, and for word lovers they can be delightful. There you’ll find nidification, meaning “the act of building nests,” and gemelliparous, “bearing twins.” Scrabble players will delight in words like ophiophagous (“Serpent-eating”), galericulate (“Covered as with a hat”), or decacuminated (“Having the top cut off”). But Johnson was not entirely comfortable with them: “I am not always certain,” he said, “that they are read in any book but the works of lexicographers” (preface, pp. 87–88). He was right. Consider the word naulage, which appears in nearly a hundred books in the eighteenth century alone. The problem is that every one of those books is a dictionary. They all tell us that naulage means the fee paid to carry freight by sea, but there’s no indication the word was ever used even by those paid to carry freight by sea.(I suspect he's not a Scrabble player, or he'd know those words are too long for the game.) He proceeds to discuss the difficulty of defining "easy" words, the impact of American nationalism on Webster's dictionaries and U.S. spelling, and the "lexicographical firestorm" over Webster’s Third, but I'll let you read all that for yourself. Thanks go to aldiboronti at Wordorigins.org for the link.
A fascinating thread at postumia (Russian LJ, found via Avva) investigates the origin of the Russian fake-Italian phrase Финита ля комедия! [finita la com(m)edia!]; the blogger describes her shock on discovering, upon hearing a classmate corrected in an Italian class, that the actual Italian phrase is "La commedia è finita" (well known from the end of Leoncavallo's Pagliacci). She first suspects it's a misremembering of the line from the opera that somehow got established in Russian culture, but a commenter traces it back to Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (written in 1839, over a half-century before the opera): "-Finita la comedia! - сказал я доктору" ['"Finita la comedia!" I said to the doctor'; note the misspelled "comedia"]. It's not clear whether Lermontov simply mangled the phrase or misunderstood the context it can be used in (as a dependent clause, e.g. "finita la commedia, gli spetattori sono andati dal teatro"). And another commenter makes reference to the supposed dying words of Augustus Caesar, "Plaudite, amici, comedia finita est."
It's all most interesting, but the best thing that came out of it for me was the discovery of the Corpus of the Russian Language. The internet gets better and better.
Still reading Ostler, I've come to a nice quote from Plutarch about Cleopatra:
There was pleasure in the very sound of her voice. Like a many-stringed instrument, she turned her tongue easily to whatever dialect she would, and few indeed were the foreigners with whom she conversed through an interpreter, since she answered most of them in her own words, whether Ethiopian, Trogodyte, Hebrew, Arab, Syriac, Median or Parthian. The kings before her had not even had the patience to acquire Egyptian, and some had even been lacking in their Macedonian.*The footnote reads:
Plutarch, Antony, xxvii.4-5. All these languages must have been heard on the streets of Alexandria in Cleopatra's day. Ethiopian would be the language of Kush, and Syriac is a form of Aramaic. Trogodyte would have been spoken along the Red Sea coast, and is perhaps the ancestor of modern Beja. The Medjay, supposed to be the same, had been an eastern desert people employed in Egypt as police in the fifteenth to thirteenth centuries (Gardiner 1957 [Egyptian Grammar]: 183, n. 2). There is no mention here of Libyan—or of Latin, although Plutarch adds that Cleopatra is said to have spoken many other languages besides the ones he does mention. Most likely her amours with Caesar, and later Antony, were conducted in Greek."Trogodyte" should,
(The quote reminds me of this post about Murray of the OED: "With several I have a more intimate acquaintance as with the Romance tongues, Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, Latin & in a lesser degree Portuguese, Vaudois, Provencal, & various dialects. In the Teutonic branch, I am tolerably familiar with Dutch (having at my place of business correspondence to read in Dutch, German, French & occasionally other languages), Flemish, German, Danish. In Anglo-Saxon and Moeso-Gothic my studies have been much closer...")
Incidentally, I wanted to link to a Greek text of the Plutarch, but I can't find one online. Tsk.
Geoff Pullum, Language Log's resident curmudgeon (no offense meant, I'm one myself), believes there are lots more prepositions in English than most people realize; he recently discovered outwith, which I was familiar with, and today he's happened on furth, which is new to me as well. He found it at a University of Glasgow Faculty of Arts page concerning transfer of credit whose headline reads "Grades received furth of Glasgow." As he says, furth of Glasgow means 'away from or outside of Glasgow'; this Scots usage is paralleled by English forth of (furth and forth are historically the same word), but the latter had its heyday half a millennium ago (Whan your mayster is forth of towne 'when your master is out of town'). Here's the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue entry and here's the Scottish National Dictionary one (first supplement, second supplement). From the fifteenth century (Gilbert of the Haye's Prose Manuscript): "The Romaynes put thame furth of the toune"; from February 2000: "At least 90% of all Presbyterians in Scotland still adhere to the national Kirk, which despite its woes and stumblings has still a bigger part in the nation’s life than the Church of England can claim furth of Hadrian’s Wall."
Oh, and Geoff says: "(Yes, I know, the dictionaries all call it an adverb. All published dictionaries are wrong about where to draw the line between prepositions and adverbs. See Chapter 7 of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.)" And just to head you wits off at the pass, he also says: "The mail server at Language Log Plaza is fighting a losing battle against the tide of incoming mail offering variations on the phrase 'furth of the Firth of Forth'. If people would like to stop mailing these in now, that would be nice."
I have long been a fan of Luc Sante (see PATAPOUFS! ANTHROPOPHAGES! from 2004), and I should long since have alerted you to his blog Pinakothek ("A blog about pictures. All kinds of pictures."):
I won't pretend to specialize or present myself as an expert in anything. Subjectivity is my middle name, a trick memory is my pack mule, and self-contradiction is my trusty old jackknife. Generally I favor humble over great, marginal over central, old over new—but not always, because like a four-sided porch I'm open to all winds.I want to call to your attention his post Unpacking My Library, with its poignant evocation of the lot of us hopeless book accumulators:
But after living in smallish apartments for decades I just spent seven years in a house with a full-size attic, and everything went to hell. Books entered my house under cover of night, from the four winds, smuggled in by woodland creatures, and then they never left. Now that I have moved again—into a house that's not necessarily smaller but that I am determined to keep from being choked with books like kudzu—I have just weeded out no fewer than twenty-five (25) boxes worth: books I won't read and don't need, duplicates, pointless souvenirs. I discovered that I owned no fewer than five copies of André Breton's Nadja, not even all in different editions. I owned two copies of St. Clair McKelway's True Tales from the Annals of Crime & Rascality, identical down to the mylar around the dust jacket. I had books in three languages I don't actually read. Etcetera. It was time to end the madness....I've moved too often and discarded too many books; I hope I never have to triage my burdensome but beloved library again. (Thanks for the link, Kári!)I do have a few hundred books that I reread or refer to fairly regularly, and I have a lot of books pertaining to whatever current or future projects I have on the fire. I have a lot of books that I need for reference, especially now that I live forty minutes away from the nearest really solid library. Primarily, though, books function as a kind of external hard drive for my mind—my brain isn't big enough to do all the things it wants or needs to do without help...
If your reaction to that question is like mine, you will be muttering "There's no such thing as 'Indo-Europeans'—Proto-Indo-European is a reconstructed language with a few clear features and lots of hypotheses, and barring the development of a time machine we'll never know who spoke it." But many people are unhappy with that degree of skepticism, so there will probably always be attempts to pose and answer the question. The latest is The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World
The impact of horses on the reach of language is particularly important to Anthony, and he conveys his excitement at working out whether ancient horses wore bits (and were therefore ridden by Proto-Indo-Europeans) by comparing their teeth to those of modern domesticated and wild horses. He muses on the “deep-rooted, intransigent traditions of opposition” that existed along the Ural River frontier, slowing the spread of herding and the cultural innovations that went with it.If the idea of using primeval horses to illuminate protolanguages excites you, you will probably want to read the book. If you find it (and similar speculation about "a world in which spoken poetry was the only medium") too hypothetical to take seriously, at least it allows the mind to roam freely over the ancient steppes, snorting and whinnying and heading wherever its fancy takes it, trampling underfoot the captious questions of carping quidnuncs.
An interesting NY Times story by Simon Romero describes the complicated linguistic situation in Suriname:
Walk into a government office here and you will be greeted in Dutch, the official language. But in a reflection of the astonishing diversity of this South American nation, Surinamese speak more than 10 other languages, including variants of Chinese, Hindi, Javanese and half a dozen original Creoles.Other languages spoken in the country include Surinamese Hindi, Javanese, the Maroon languages (Saramaka, Paramakan, Ndyuka, Aukan, Kwinti, Matawai), Amerindian languages (Carib, Arawak), Chinese (Hakka, Cantonese, and Mandarin), and the geographically inevitable English, Spanish and Portuguese (according to Wikipedia; Ethnologue has a somewhat outdated list).Making matters more complex, English is also beamed into homes on television and Portuguese is the fastest-growing language since an influx of immigrants from Brazil in recent years. And one language stands above all others as the lingua franca: Sranan Tongo (literally Suriname tongue), a resilient Creole developed by African slaves in the 17th century.
So which language should Suriname’s 470,000 people speak? Therein lies a quandary for this country, which is still fiercely debating its national identity after just three decades of independence from the Netherlands....
The use of Sranan became associated with nationalist politics after Desi Bouterse, a former dictator, began using Sranan in his speeches in the 1980s. The slogan of his National Democratic Party, the biggest in Suriname, remains “Let a faya baka!” Sranan for “Turn the lights back on!” or, figuratively, get things working again.
But even though relations with the Netherlands are tepid, Dutch is taught in schools rather than Sranan. In 2004, Suriname became an associate member of Taalunie, a Dutch language association including the Netherlands and Belgian Flanders.
Incidentally, my problem with the recent switch from the traditional English spelling Surinam to the Dutch Suriname is that it introduces an unnecessary split between spelling and pronunciation (of which English already has more than a sufficiency): to be consistent, the pronunciation should be changed to soo-ri-NAH-muh, but I'm pretty sure nobody says that. What was wrong with Surinam, anyway? I know, I know, I'm a hopeless reactionary when it comes to place names. If it was good enough for granddad, it's good enough for me.
I recently had occasion to discuss the Persian names for Transoxiana, the region of Bukhara and Samarkand; now, thanks to this MetaFilter post, I've found the mother lode of papers about the place itself, which has always fascinated me: Transoxiana, "Journal Libre de Estudios Orientales." Just the papers by Shamsiddin Kamoliddin alone are enough to keep me mesmerized for hours; check out To the Question of the Origin of the Samanids and On the Origin of the place-Name Buxārā (i.e., Bukhara). I've said it before and I'll say it again: I love the internet.
The Journal of Language Contact has as its subhead "Evolution of languages, contact and discourse" and as its motto the excellent quote (from Hugo Schuchardt, specialist in mixed languages, pidgins, creoles, and lingua franca) "Es gibt keine völlig ungemischte Sprache" ('There is no completely unmixed language'):
We wish JLC to focus on the study of language use and language change in accordance with a view of language contact whereby both, empirical data (the precise description of languages and how they are used) and the resulting theoretical elaborations (hence the statement and analysis of new problems) become the primary engines for advancing our understanding of the nature of language. This will also involve associating linguistic, anthropological, historical, and cognitive factors. We believe that such an approach would make a major new contribution to understanding language change at a time when there is a notable increase of interest and activity in this field.Hey, maybe they can solve the problem of the newest language!
Linguistically, that is. According to this Linguist List report from Edward Vajda, Johanna Nichols, and James Kari:
A long-sought connection between Siberian and North American language families has been demonstrated by linguists from Washington and Alaska. Professor Edward Vajda of Western Washington University (Bellingham), a specialist on the Ket language isolate spoken by a shrinking number of elders living along the Yenisei River of central Siberia, combining ten years of library and field work on Ket and relying on the earlier work of Heinrich Werner on the now-extinct relatives of Ket, has clarified the dauntingly complex morphology and phonology of Ket and its Yeniseic congeners. At a symposium held Feb. 26-27 at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks and a panel to take place Feb. 29 at the Alaska Anthropological Association annual meeting in Anchorage, Vajda shows that the abstract forms of lexical and grammatical morphemes and the rules of composition of the Ket verb find systematic and numerous parallels in the Na-Dene protolanguage reconstructed to account for the modern Tlingit and Eyak languages and the Athabaskan language family (whose daughters include Gwich'in, Koyukon, Dena’ina and others of Alaska, Hupa of California, and Navajo of the U.S. Southwest). The comparison was made possible by recent advances in the analysis of Tlingit phonology and Tlingit-Athabaskan-Eyak presented at the same symposium by Prof. Jeff Leer of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and by earlier work by Prof. Michael Krauss of UAF on the now-extinct Eyak language and on comparative Athabaskan, and on Athabaskan lexicography and verb stem analysis by symposium organizer Prof. James Kari of UAF. Working independently, Vajda and the Alaska linguists have arrived at abstract stem shapes and ancestral wordforms too numerous and displaying too many idiosyncratic parallels to be explained by anything other than common descent. The comparison also shows conclusively that Haida, sometimes associated with Na-Dene, is not related.As George Bryson says in his (remarkably thorough and accurate—kudos, Mr. Bryson!) Anchorage Daily News story, "Establishing that two such far-distant language groups are closely related is both demanding and rare in the exacting field of historical linguistics." (Thanks for the links, Patrick!)The distance from the Yeniseian range to that the most distant Athabaskan languages is the greatest overland distance covered by any known language spread not using wheeled transport or sails. Archaeologist Prof. Ben Potter of UAF reviewed the postglacial prehistory of Beringia and speculated that the Na-Dene speakers may descend from some of the earliest colonizers of the Americas, who eventually created the successful and long-lived Northern Archaic tool tradition that dominated interior and northern Alaska almost until historical times.
Vajda's work has been well vetted. In addition to Na-Dene specialists Krauss, Leer, and Kari, who have reacted favorably, the symposium was also attended by historical linguists Prof. Eric P. Hamp of the University of Chicago and Prof. Johanna Nichols of the University of California, Berkeley, both of whom announced their support for the proposed relationship, and Bernard Comrie, Director of the Linguistics Department, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig and professor at UC Santa Barbara, endorsed Vajda's method.
One of American's national treasures, the poet and publisher Jonathan Williams, has died:
“His public persona was a real crank, a gadfly, a loose cannon,” said Thomas Meyer, a poet and Williams’ partner for more than 40 years. “But there was this extraordinary generosity.” ...I wrote about him here and quoted a couple of poems, which I urge you to read; Mark at wood s lot has a full set of links and more poems. Here's one for the road:“Jonathan Williams was truly a Renaissance man. He was articulate on topics as various as baseball and music in the same breath. He spent his career combining visual arts with the spoken and written word, integrating all the arts since his days at Black Mountain College,” said Pam Meyer, executive director of the Asheville Art Museum, which has a wide collection of Williams’ photography. ...
Besides his work as a publisher, Williams was a prolific poet, essayist and critic in his own right, with more than 100 books, broadsides, postcards and other published works. His last book “Jubilant Thicket: New and Selected Poems” contained a selection of 1,000 of Williams’ poems. ...
Williams said in a 1995 interview that the world didn’t owe him anything as an artist. He adopted his motto from the French novelist Gustave Flaubert: “I am frankly a bourgeois living in seclusion in the country, busy with literature, and asking nothing of anyone, not consideration, nor honor, nor esteem.... I jump into the water to save a good line of poetry or a good sentence of prose from anyone. But I don’t believe, on that account, that humanity has need of me, any more than I have need of it.”
Gardyloo! (A Salutation for Christopher Murray Grieve
On the Occasion of His 75th Birthday, August 11, 1967)May Glen Fiddich trickle down the burns
and white roses replace heather!May Burns, Dunbar, MacDiarmid
trickle in the minds
and climate replace weather!May your conturbation
rouse the artless Nation!"May your Bottom
never be used
to stretch a Banjo!"—the latter toast
Chris Grieve gave me in Langholm,
presumably a gist
from the Gaelic-Scots, the original, alas,
now lost . . .I salute his zest!
You probably think English has a future tense, don't you? Past, present, future, that's what they teach you in grade school (with some complications involving "present perfect" and "past progressive" and what have you). Well, it doesn't. Don't believe me? Believe Geoff Pullum, who explains that "Instead of a future tense, English makes use of slew of verbs (auxiliary and non-auxiliary, modal and non-modal) such as be, come, go; may, shall, and will, various adjectives such as about, bound, and certain, and various idiomatic combinations involving infinitival complements" and provides a table of uses of will "ranging over volition, inclination, habituation, tendency, inference, and prediction" that should convince anyone that it is not a marker of "future tense."
(Yes, the post title is a nod to the Sex Pistols.)
Since the year 2000 the OED has been trudging its way through the alphabet (starting from M), revising as they go: "According to that model, the present publication batch would include words from quits to somewhere early in the letter R." The announcement by Chief Editor John Simpson continues:
But after several years of steady alphabetical publication, we have decided to vary the publication mix. The present publication range departs radically from the former model, in that its 2,116 entries consist for the most part of key English words from across the alphabet, along with the other words which make up the alphabetical cluster surrounding them. From now on, we expect to alternate between these two models each quarter, with the next publication range (in June 2008) continuing from quits, and the subsequent one (September 2008) presenting a further range of major words and their associated alphabetical clusters.You can see the complete list of newly revised words here. Yes, I went straight to the entry for fuck, and I am happy to report that the etymology is greatly expanded. The old one is so spare it suggests a desire to sweep the subject under the rug:The main purpose of this change is to revise, much earlier than would otherwise have been the case, important English words whose meanings or application have developed most over the past century. Some of these key words are, as one might expect, among those often looked up by readers of the OED. This change also brings the revision more in line with our policy for publishing new words and senses, which have since June 2001 been taken from across the full alphabetical range.
[Early mod.E fuck, fuk, answering to a ME. type *fuken (wk. vb.) not found; ulterior etym. unknown. Synonymous G. ficken cannot be shown to be related.]
Now see the riches the Mar. 2008 draft revision provides:
[Prob. cognate with Dutch fokken to mock (15th cent.), to strike (1591), to fool, gull (1623), to beget children (1637), to have sexual intercourse with (1657), to grow, cultivate (1772), Norwegian regional fukka to copulate, Swedish regional fokka to copulate (cf. Swedish regional fock penis), further etymology uncertain: perh. < an Indo-European root meaning ‘to strike’ also shown by classical Latin pugnus fist (see PUGNACIOUS adj.). Perh. cf. Old Icelandic fjúka to be driven on, tossed by the wind, feykja to blow, drive away, Middle High German fochen to hiss, to blow. Perh. cf. also Middle High German ficken to rub, early modern German ficken to rub, itch, scratch, German ficken to have sexual intercourse with (1558), German regional ficken to rub, to make short fast movements, to hit with rods, although the exact nature of any relationship is unclear.
On the suggested Indo-European etymology (and for a suggestion that the word was probably a strong verb during its earlier history in English) see especially R. LASS ‘Four letters in search of an etymology’ in Diachronica 12 (1995) 99-111.
It seems certain that the word was current (in transitive use) before the early 16th cent., although the only surviving attestation shows a Latin inflectional ending in a Latin-English macaronic text: see quot. a1500 and note at sense 1b. See discussion at FUCKER n. on various supposed (but very doubtful) earlier occurrences of the word in surnames. However, if the bird name WINDFUCKER n. (also FUCKWIND n.) is ult. related, it is interesting to note an occurrence of the surname Ric' Wyndfuk', Ric' Wyndfuck' de Wodehous' (1287 in documents related to Sherwood Forest) which may show another form of the bird name. For discussion of a possible (although not certain) occurrence of FUCKING n. in a field name fockynggroue recorded in a Bristol charter of c1373 see R. COATES ‘Fockynggroue in Bristol’ in N. & Q. 252 (2007) 373-6.
Many alternative theories have been suggested as to the origin of this word. Explanations as an acronym are often suggested, but are obviously much later rationalizations.
Despite widespread use over a long period and in many sections of society, fuck remains (and has been for centuries) one of the English words most avoided as taboo. Until relatively recently it rarely appeared in print, and there are still a number of euphemistic ways of referring to it (cf. e.g. EFF v., FECK v.2, F-WORD n., F-WORD v.). It is also frequently written with asterisks, dashes, etc., to represent suppressed letters, so as to avoid the charge of obscenity. Modern quotations for the term before the 1960s typically come from private sources or from texts which were privately printed, esp. on the mainland of Europe. Bailey (1721) included the word (defined ‘Foeminam Subagitare’), but not Johnson (1755), Webster (1828), and later 19th- and early 20th-cent. dictionaries. Partridge (1937) included the word as ‘f*ck’, noting that ‘the efforts of James Joyce and D. H. Lawrence have not restored it to its orig. dignified status [in dictionaries]’. A gradual relaxation in the interpretation of obscenity laws in the U.K. followed the unsuccessful prosecution in 1960 of Penguin Books Ltd. (under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959) for the publication in the London edition of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover (see, for example, quot. 1928 at sense 1b). The first modern dictionary of general English to include an entry for the verb fuck was G. N. Garmonsway's Penguin English Dictionary of 1965).]
Here, by contrast, the luxuriance (with gleeful repetition: "ficken ... ficken ... ficken ...ficken") suggests a reveling in previously forbidden four-letter fruit.
I am pleased to see that the earliest citation is still the one I quoted in my curses book (a1500: "Non sunt in cœli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk [= fuccant uuiuys of heli]"), and I am absolutely delighted by the first cite for go fuck yourself, and especially by the source, the New York (State) Legislature, Senate Committee on the Police Department of the City of New York, Report and Proceedings of the Senate Committee Appointed to Investigate the Police Department of the City of New York:
1895 Rep. Senate Comm. Police Dept. N.Y. III. 3158 By Senator Bradley: Q. Repeat what he said to you? A. He said, ‘Go on, fuck yourself, you son-of-a-bitch; I will give you a hundred dollars’; he tried to punch me, and I went out.
And who could fail to love the surname Wyndfuck de Wodehouse, or the place name Fockynggrove?
There's a word tare, meaning "The weight of the wrapping, receptacle, or conveyance containing goods, which is deducted from the gross in order to ascertain the net weight" (OED), that I've looked up any number of times but never remember because it's not part of my mental world. (If you're curious, it's via French from Arabic ṭarḥah 'that which is thrown away,' from ṭaraḥa 'to throw (away),' which is also the root of mattress, from Arabic maṭraḥ 'place where something is thrown, hence carpet, cushion, bed.') Today, reading a fascinating 1986 interview (in Russian; found at Avva) with the manager of a fruits-and-vegetables store that throws a great deal of light on the realities of doing business in the late-Soviet period, I hit the word тара [tara], looked it up, found it meant tare, cursed, looked that up, and got the definition above, which I think may finally stick. But looking through the OED entry I found the following phrase:
tare and tret: the two ordinary deductions in calculating the net weight of goods to be sold by retail: see TRET; also, the rule in arithmetic by which these are calculated.So I saw TRET, and here's what I found:
An allowance of 4 lb. in 104 lb. (= 1/26) on goods sold by weight after the deduction for tare.("Origin and history obscure.") Some of the various explanations:
The reason or ground of the allowance was apparently forgotten already in the 17th c., and has been variously given since: see quots.
1670 BLOUNT Law Dict. s.v. Tare and Tret, The other [Tret] is a consideration allowed in the weight for wast, in emptying and reselling the Goods.
1678 PHILLIPS (ed. 4), Tret, a certain allowance that is made by Merchants, before a Commodity is garbled from its refuse [1706 ed. Kersey adds] as Dust, Moats, &c., which is always 4 in every 104 Pounds.
1882 BITHELL Counting-ho. Dict., Tret, an allowance made for wear, damage, or deterioration in goods during transit from one place to another.
Another citation mentions cloff, which is "An allowance (now of 2 lbs. in 3 cwt., or 1/168), given with certain commodities, in order that the weight may hold good when they are sold by retail," but de minimis non curat Languagehat.
A teacher writes to say that in a recent class discussion, a student named Kolette asked what the world's newest language might be. "We decided to discount computer languages and manufactured languages, such as Esperanto and, yes, Klingon, even ASL. Would there be an answer to this question or a way to answer this question?" Interesting, thought I, so I'm turning the assembled multitudes loose on it. If you rule out artificial languages, I suppose the answer has to be a creole of recent origin; any suggestions?
I've been reading Sergei Aksakov's Years of Childhood
D.S. Mirsky's A History of Russian Literature
The principal characteristic of Aksákov's work is its objectivity. His art is purely receptive. Even when be is introspective, as he is in the greater part of Years of Childhood, he is objectively introspective. He remains unmoved by any active desire except to find once again the time that has been lost — "retrouver le temps perdu." The Proustian phrase is not out of place, for Aksákov's sensibility is curiously and strikingly akin to that of the French novelist... Like Proust, Aksákov is all senses. His style is transparent. One does not notice it, for it is entirely adequate to what it expresses. It possesses, moreover, a beautiful Russian purity and an air of distinction and unaffected grace that gives it a fair chance of being recognized as the best, the standard, Russian prose. If it has a defect, it is the defect of its merit — a certain placidity, a certain excessive "creaminess," a lack of the thin, "daimonic," mountain air of poetry...I myself thought of Proust while reading Aksakov, as well as the opening pages of Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; few writers give so clear a picture of what it's like to be a child.The most characteristic and Aksakovian of Aksákov's works is unquestionably Years of Childhood of Bagróv-Grandson. It is the story of a peaceful and uneventful childhood, exceptional only for the exceptional sensibility of a child encouraged by an exceptionally sympathetic education. The most memorable passages in it are perhaps those which refer to nature, for instance the wonderful account of the coming of spring in the steppe. ... [I]f ordinary life, unruffled by unusual incident, is a legitimate subject of literature, Aksákov, in Years of Childhood, wrote a masterpiece of realistic narrative. In it he came nearer than any other Russian writer, even than Tolstóy in War and Peace, to a modern evolutionary, continuous presentation of human life, as distinct from the dramatic and incidental presentation customary to the older novelists.
On the topic of fish, I managed to solve an amusing little lexical problem. In Chapter 9 of Duff's translation (which I'm reading, while frequently checking against the Russian text) the family makes its first visit to the new land his father has bought from the local Bashkirs, "over 19,000 acres of excellent land on the river Belaya, thirty versts from Ufa, with a number of lakes, of which one was about three versts in length," and little Sergei is getting his long-awaited chance to fish in the lake just mentioned. He says, "Our sport began instantly: fair-sized perch and pollen, a fish I had not seen before, took constantly." I didn't recognize "pollen" as a fish name, but that doesn't mean anything—I don't know much about fish, and English has far more fish names than any one person could know. But "pollen" wasn't in the OED, except of course as a "fine granular or powdery substance," and it wasn't in Webster's Third New International, and I was starting to despair when I looked up this old LH post, purely to refer to my complaint about the messiness of fish-related vocabulary, and found a mention of the name "pollan." I slapped my forehead, went to the OED again, and discovered it is indeed an old alternate spelling of pollan: 1807 R. C. HOARE Tour Ireland 224 "The pollen, which is the same as the ferra of the lake of Geneva." The Russian word, by the way, is подлещик [podleshchik], which is not in my trusty Oxford but which the massive New Great Russian-English Dictionary defines as "1. zool white bream, silver bream (Gustera blicca bjoerkna, Blicca bjoerkna); 2 small bream." For the pronunciation of bream, see here; as for "white bream," "silver bream," and "small bream," I don't even want to think about it.
Serge Schmemann has an amusing column in the NY Times on the subject of American attempts to pronounce Russian names:
I saw it coming as soon as Tim Russert cornered Hillary Clinton into naming Vladimir Putin’s heir. She dodged, ducked and plunged into the now famous: “Med, vay, deva, whatever.” Nobody thought the worse of her. In fact, it drew one of the few sympathetic murmurs in the debate. Russian names are just not something most Americans can do. And if the blogs and online pronunciation guides I’ve checked are any indication, they never will.That "dz" sounds more Polish than Russian to me, but... wev.One expert on National Public Radio thought that “Medvedev,” the way Russians pronounce it, is simply alien to the American tongue. But admitting that is alien to the American spirit, so there are many places to seek guidance. The Voice of America offers this phonetic spelling: “mehd-V(y)EHD-yehf.” They also provided a voice recording by a man who tried that — in all fairness, he does a pretty good “yehf.” But it’s not a sound likely to make President Dmitri Medvedev turn around....
One of the ways we compensate for the difficulty of foreign names is by adopting our own way of saying them. I once worked with an editor who spoke pretty good French, but used only the feminine article “la,” never “le.” Why, I finally asked? “Oh, it sounds SO much more French that way,” he drawled....
With time, we will learn to cope with Medvedev. We overcame Khrushchev, adopted Rostropovich and cheer hockey players, ballerinas and tennis stars. Medvedev is as elemental as “medved,” Russian for bear. So: Launch with “med” as in “he’s off his med”; put the accent on the “VEH” as in “venomous,” and trail off with a lazy “dev” with just a hint of “z” and “i”: “dziev.” Altogether now: “Med-VEH-dziev.” Whatever.
Marina Warner has a fine essay in the TLS called "Babble with Beckett: How foreign languages can provide writers with a way out of the familiar." Her main subject, obviously, is Beckett, but I want to highlight the material on Mallarmé, which I found surprising and hilarious:
It is interesting to think of Beckett’s precursors in relation to foreign languages: one of these, the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, like Beckett a supreme artist of linguistic, syntactical music, translated and taught English, and was so involved in aesthetics and semantics that he composed three rare and eccentric works on the language. It is in one of these, Thèmes anglais (English Lessons) that Mallarmé offers, as a phrase that falls from the lips of any English speaker born and bred: “Who can shave an egg?”. I had never heard this before (but that is true of most of the sayings in Mallarmé’s weird and wonderful English phrase book), but it struck me as clownish, a little alarming, and a minimalist’s maxim. Mallarmé’s love of English was not rooted in fluency or familiarity, but rather in something literally other or alien in the language used by the writers he admired – William Beckford, Edgar Allan Poe, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Robert Louis Stevenson, and some rather lesser-known authors, such as Mrs Elphinstone Hope, whose forgotten story, “The Star of the Fairies”, Mallarmé translated in 1880. (He also left unfinished a mammoth anthology of English Literature.)...Mallarmé shows an analogous desire for this erotics of language, a sense of language as sound, as music, as havoc, as nonsense, an understanding of modes of communication that defy semantics. He tried various approaches to overcoming his difficulties in teaching English. Hoping to capture the attention of his pupils, he turned to English’s near-unique richness of nursery rhymes and made versions of them in French prose – with extended, mock-earnest commentary and scrupulous grammatical notes, solemnly expanding on each rhyme’s possible significance. But his efforts did not meet with approval. In 1880, a government inspector, making the rounds of the classrooms, happened to enter M Mallarmé’s when the pupils were chanting a variation on “Tell Tale Tit”: “Liar liar lick spit / Your tongue shall be slit / And all the dogs in the town / Shall have a little bit”. The inspector was scandalized: “Since M. Mallarmé remains a professor of English”, he wrote, “Let him learn English . . . . It’s tempting to ask oneself if one is not in the presence of a sick man”.
It is a clue, however, to Mallarmé’s other pedagogical masterpieces that “Liar liar lick spit” is not the opening of the version that most English children know, which opens more usually, “Tell tale tit . . .”. Mallarmé’s failures in the classroom did not stem from lack of effort: Thèmes anglais contains a gathering of a thousand English phrases, proverbs, adages and saws, all conscientiously marshalled in order to illustrate a rule of English grammar: first the definite article, then the indefinite, first the possessive pronoun, then the relative pronoun, etc. The contrast between the austerely dry objective of the examples and their fantastical oddity, the disjunction between the scrupulous lexical and grammatical rigour and the free-association lexical chain of words, achieve an exhilarating absurdity. A native speaker of English would know precious few of these locutions at the very most, and use them – never. The ones that you might know you would find stale; and you would have done so then, in the late nineteenth century – since some of the proverbs Mallarmé cites were already archaic by the seventeenth. He was using an anthology he had come upon in Truchy’s bookshop to glean a myriad equivalents to “My postilion has been struck by lightning”, regardless of current usage.She goes on to discuss his love of alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, and other forms of "semantic synaesthesia," and the whole essay is full of good things, but I couldn't resist Mallarmé's notion of how to illustrate English usage. (Via wood s lot.)What is entirely seductive about his lists is their irreducibly foreign character. But this strangeness turns his collection into a kind of prose poem, sometimes beautiful, sometimes weirdly comic: “Under water, famine; under snow, bread. / Prettiness makes no pottage”. These enigmas are offered to illustrate how, where French uses a definite article, English does without. Besides “Who can shave an egg?”, phrases such as “You can’t hide an eel in a sack” are included in order to illustrate the use of the indefinite article. The quirkiness of these rules inspires a riddling sequence:
It is hard for an empty bag to sit upright.
To cut down an oak and set up a strawberry.
Undone, as a man would undo an oyster.
You ask an elm tree for pears.
You shall ride an inch behind the tail.
These adages – proverbs or whatever – teeter on the verge of incomprehensibility. But their cumulative effect is melancholy: failure stalks them, regardless of syntactical exactitude.
Anyone who loves old book illustrations should have BibliOdyssey ("Books~~Illustrations~~Science~~History~~Visual Materia Obscura~~Eclectic Bookart") among their bookmarks, and anyone who loves the site will be glad to know that FUEL has published a book by its pseudonymous creator, who has changed his moniker from peacay to PK for the occasion. Since they were kind enough to send me a copy, I can report that it is well worth having even if you read the website assiduously, because about half of it has never appeared there, and the text is almost entirely new—not to mention, of course, that it's great to have these gorgeous images in permanent form, well reproduced in a beautifully made book. PK himself says:
Ultimately, I envisage a threefold purpose in compiling a book of diverse illustrations — the simple pleasure of eye candy; the evocation of a deeper interest in an historical, artistic or scientific subject; and for use as a projectile, to be thrown at those who would say there is nothing worthwhile to be found on the internet, or who question why anybody would want to spend so much time in front of a computer screen.To which I say, Amen.
Here's a sample of the value added by the text; the images The Idol of Vistnum in his third Transformation and The Removal of the Mount Meeperwat (1672) are available at his site, but the book gives the background:
Early modern travel writing was unquestionably the most diverse genre of literature. Newly discovered ethnographic, navigational, commercial, biological, military and cartographic information from far flung places like Asia was presented to an enthralled European audience. Collections of Jesuit missionary letters and reports gradually gave way to more formal histories and secular accounts from traders, explorers and scholars. These works were often illustrated with engravings, both factual and fanciful, and many of the accounts and drawings were recirculated through translation, borrowing and reinterpretation. By the late 17th century, travel anthologies became an attractive printing venture for those hoping to profit from the widening interest in exotic cultures during the early days of The Enlightenment. In 1704, the Churchill brothers published the very successful four volume compilation, A Collection of Voyages and Travels, which included original and translated travel works. The engravings of Hindu mythology here are believed to be by Jacob van Meurs and they accompanied Olfert Dapper's record of interviews with Dutch sea captains and merchants who had visited India.And he gives the URL (http://www.wsulibs.wsu.edu/holland/masc/xworldciv.html) of the website from which he got the images, where you can find many more of equal interest. Who could resist?
This Wikipedia article has an extensive list of "Informal names for unknown or unspecified persons in various countries/regions"; as I said in the MetaFilter thread where I found it, it's annoying that all the names are lumped together with only occasional attempts to distinguish legal terms (John Doe) from colloquial ones (Joe Blow), but it's still a lot of fun. Where else are you going to learn that the term in the Faroe Islands is Miðalhampamaður?
Via dirk at Pepys Diary, this delightful excerpt from George Borrow's Lavengro:
The very first person to whose care I was intrusted for the acquisition of Latin was an old friend of my fathers, a clergyman who kept a seminary at a town the very next we visited after our departure from ‘the Cross.’ Under his instruction, however, I continued only a few weeks, as we speedily left the place. ‘Captain,’ said this divine, when my father came to take leave of him on the eve of our departure, ‘I have a friendship for you, and therefore wish to give you a piece of advice concerning this son of yours. You are now removing him from my care; you do wrong, but we will let that pass. Listen to me: there is but one good school-book in the world - the one I use in my seminary - Lilly’s Latin grammar, in which your son has already made some progress. If you are anxious for the success of your son in life, for the correctness of his conduct and the soundness of his principles, keep him to Lilly’s grammar. If you can by any means, either fair or foul, induce him to get by heart Lilly’s Latin grammar, you may set your heart at rest with respect to him; I, myself, will be his warrant. I never yet knew a boy that was induced, either by fair means or foul, to learn Lilly’s Latin grammar by heart, who did not turn out a man, provided he lived long enough.’If you wish to perfect your own education by memorizing Lily (the more usual spelling), here's an edition on Google Books.My father, who did not understand the classical languages, received with respect the advice of his old friend, and from that moment conceived the highest opinion of Lilly’s Latin grammar. During three years I studied Lilly’s Latin grammar under the tuition of various schoolmasters, for I travelled with the regiment, and in every town in which we were stationary I was invariably (God bless my father!) sent to the classical academy of the place. It chanced, by good fortune, that in the generality of these schools the grammar of Lilly was in use; when, however, that was not the case, it made no difference in my educational course, my father always stipulating with the masters that I should be daily examined in Lilly. At the end of the three years I had the whole by heart; you had only to repeat the first two or three words of any sentence in any part of the book, and forthwith I would open cry, commencing without blundering and hesitation, and continue till you were glad to beg me to leave off, with many expressions of admiration at my proficiency in the Latin language. Sometimes, however, to convince you how well I merited these encomiums, I would follow you to the bottom of the stair, and even into the street, repeating in a kind of sing-song measure the sonorous lines of the golden schoolmaster. If I am here asked whether I understood anything of what I had got by heart, I reply - ‘Never mind, I understand it all now, and believe that no one ever yet got Lilly’s Latin grammar by heart when young, who repented of the feat at a mature age.’
Another fun etymology (via wordorigins.org): pettifogger ("a lawyer who engages in petty quibbling and cavilling, or who employs dubious or underhanded legal practices") is explained by the OED as simply petty plus the earlier fogger, and the OED says of the latter:
[Of somewhat obscure history; but prob. derived from Fugger, the surname of a renowned family of merchants and financiers of Augsburg in the 15th and 16th c.Yes, the jokes write themselves.
The name passed as an appellative into several European langs. In German fugger, fucker, focker (see Grimm) has had the senses ‘monopolist, engrosser’, ‘usurer’, ‘man of great wealth’, ‘great merchant’, and, in certain dialects (doubtless originally through ironical use), ‘huckster, pedlar.’ Kilian 1598 has Flem. focker ‘monopolist, universal dealer’ (monopola, pantopola), giving fuggerus and fuccardus as popular mod.L. equivalents; and in mod.Du. rijke fokker is an avaricious rich man. Walloon foukeur and Sp. fúcar are contemptuous designations for a man of great wealth. A ‘petty Fugger’ would mean one who on a small scale practises the dishonourable devices for gain poularly attributed to great financiers; it seems possible that the phrase ‘petty fogger of the law’, applied in this sense to some notorious person, may have caught the popular fancy, and so have given rise to the specialized use in sense 1. ...]1. A person given to underhand practices for the sake of gain; chiefly, a contemptuous designation for a lawyer of a low class. Usually preceded by petty (see PETTIFOGGER). Obs.
1576 FLEMING Panopl. Epist. 320 As for this pettie fogger, this false fellowe that is in no credite or countenance. [...]
Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat has a thoughtful post pointing out that "Not everyone welcomes language revitalisation efforts":
Apart from anything else, it often implies that a major decision taken by you or your parents - to speak to the children in a different language - was wrong, and, by increasing your exposure to the endangered language in question, puts you in a position where you can't help but notice that this decision's implications are nearly irreversible. (I have speculated that this might be one reason for the less than enthusiastic reaction of some of the first speakers to have brought up their kids as Arabic monolinguals to my arrival in Tabelbala.)He goes on to quote a moving post by the Scottish writer Ken MacLeod that moves from Gaelic-English bilingual roadsigns to a meditation on "forgetting the language, leaving it to dwindle in the Sunday-morning sermon and the ceilidh and the old folks' private talk." Well worth the read, as are Lameen's recent posts on Kwarandzie.
Continuing to read Ostler (see this post), I just hit this passage I have to share with you. He's been discussing the spread of Aramaic, which replaced the earlier lingua franca Akkadian thanks to the Stalinesque Assyrian policy of deporting entire conquered populations (many of which were from the west and spoke Aramaic) and relocating them elsewhere in the empire, and the repercussions of the new ink-and-papyrus writing system it brought in its wake:
The short-term practical advantages of the new media (less bulk, greater capacity) must soon have made an impression. A new word for 'scribe' came into use in Akkadian, sēpiru. as opposed to the old ṭupsarru, 'tablet writer', which went right back to the Sumerian word dubsar. Pictures of scribes at work from the mid-eighth century show them in pairs, one with a stylus and a tablet, the other with a pen and a sheet of papyrus or parchment. As with the onset of computers, good bureaucrats must have ensured that the old and the new coexisted for a long time: the 'clay-free office' did not happen in Assyria till the destruction of the empire by the Medes in 610 BC. ([footnote]In Babylon some diehards were still writing Akkadian on clay six centuries later.)
Twenty years ago I bought and read The Hill of Kronos
In the first chapter, after saying "it was not difficult to meet poets in Athens, since they all went to the same three or four cafes and bars," Levi introduces one of the heroes of the book, who recurs throughout as a touchstone of Greekness:
When I arrived I walked straight to Flocca and left a message with a waiter for Nikos Gatsos. He was in the cafe and he came over. He was the most enchanting and unexpected friend I had ever made. His appearance is that of an elephant of brilliant intelligence and extraordinary kindness. In forty years he has moved cafes once, when the old one was pulled down, and tables twice. His smile is seductive, his shoulders hunch, his eyes are hooded but distinctly mischievous. His conversation, which ranges widely, is humourous and subtle, pausing like a river to take in any strange object that presents itself. He knows more about poetry than anyone else I have ever met. He is admirably mysterious.He makes his living as a song-writer, which means that over many years the Greeks have had better-written songs than anyone else, and by translations. As a poet he claims to have been on strike for forty years, but his long early poem, Amorgos, named after an island he has never seen, is one of the master works of the century; and if ever I knew a poet, and a great poet, he still is one. He was the son of an innkeeper in what was then a remote village in Arkadia. George Seferis once said to me that the only person alive he envied for his grasp of the Greek language was Gatsos. There is an element of surrealism in Amorgos, like cold water so refreshing it makes one gasp. But his language, the form of his speech, has a continuity with folk-songs. In his childhood that was still a living language:
And because of this I would have you, young men, to go down naked into the riversThe translation I quote is by Sally Purcell.
With wine and kisses and leaves in your mouth
To sing of Barbary as the carpenter follows the track of the wood's grain
As the viper moves out from the garden of the barley
With her proud eyes furious
And as the strokes of lightning thresh the young
Needless to say, when I got to Greece I set about looking for a copy of Amorgos, and I found one in Iraklion (a city to be recommended mainly for its proximity to Knossos—if you want a Cretan city to hang out in, I highly recommend Khania), a slender and beautiful Ikaros reprint. But my Greek, while decent, is not really up to long semi-surrealist poems, and the book languished on my shelves until today, when I discovered an online translation by Vasili Stavropoulos (from the Australian "literary arts magazine" Masthead). The translation is decent and the notes are useful; I would expand on the final one to say that Golfo, an 1893 play by Spiridon Peresiadis that was wildly popular in the first half of the last century (you can read a summary of the plot here), is the play the traveling troupe kept performing in O Thiasos, the four-hour epic of Greek history by director Theodoros Angelopoulos, and the villain who lures the heroic shepherd Tasos away from his beloved Golfo is named Kitsos, which can be confusing if you're thinking of it when you run across the mention of that name in the poem—fortunately, Stavropoulos is there to point out that this is another Kitsos, a Greek chieftain who fought the Turks and whose mother threw stones at the river so it would allow her to cross and save him.
If you're interested in the original Greek text, it's online here.
I'm slowly working my way through Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World
Two generations later, in 522 BC, Darius (Dārayavauš), the Persian heir to Anshan, took control of the whole Persian empire, which by now extended from Egypt and Anatolia to the borders of India. Despite two abortive Elamite rebellions shortly after his accession, he chose Elam as the hub of this empire, with Susa itself (known to him as Šušan) as the administrative capital, and Parša, i.e. Anshan, as the site for a new ceremonial capital, to be better known in the West by its Greek name of Persepolis.He goes on to make the following interesting observation:
The Persians had never prized literacy very highly. Famously, their leaders were educated in three things only: to ride a horse, to shoot a straight arrow, and to tell the truth. So their Elamite neighbours, with two thousand years of cuneiform education behind them, were well placed to be extremely useful in the more humdrum side of empire-building.Which means the Elamites played the same role with respect to the Old Persians as the Persians played with respect to the Turks a millennium and a half later.
An amusing sidelight: "Nevertheless, Elamite must have continued to be spoken in Elam [after a long period of Akkadian domination], since in 1300 BC it springs back to life as the official language, replacing Akkadian for all written purposes, except curses." (Emphasis added.)
Richard Polt, a philosophy professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati specializing in Heidegger, has a serious obsession with typewriters, and he has written a very philosophical article (with great illustrations) called Typology: A Phenomenology of Early Typewriters ("The metaphysical significance of writing machines"):
The typewriter is in the process of becoming a thing of the past, along with dial phones and vinyl records. "Things of the past" are still present, of course — it's their world that is absent (as Heidegger says somewhere about museum pieces). The context in which these things once fit, which gave them their appropriateness and integrated them into human lives, has slipped away — disappearing, piece by imperceptible piece, until one day we recognize that the Gestalt has already changed, that we live in a new world. ...If that's too metaphysical for you, check out his Classic Typewriter Page; if you have even the slightest interest in typewriters, I guarantee you there's something for you there, from the Brief History of Typewriters to the Typewriter Parts page ("What to call the whatchamacallits") to ETCetera, the journal of the Early Typewriter Collectors Association (edited, of course, by Polk).... My own interest in early typewriters — writing machines of the 1870s through the 1930s — is primarily imaginative: these survivors draw me, both as conduits for written signs and as signs themselves of a lost world. In this talk I will try to use my imaginative interest as a basis for phenomenological reflection. I am going to focus especially on the question of "typing": that is, both our acts of identifying types or forms of things, and the process by which types are themselves generated. What I think I see in typewriters is the finitude of typing.
Previous LH typewriter posts: History of the Russian Typewriter and Polyglot Typewriting; I see that in the latter I linked to Polk's list of typewriter repair shops worldwide. You can't escape the guy! (Typology link via wood s lot.)
Another etymological adventure: I saw a reference to the fact that ajar was originally on char 'on the turn' (i.e., of a door, 'slightly opened'), and I thought I'd investigate this mysterious char. The OED lists it as "chare, char," saying the original but now obsolete sense 'turn' (whence either 'occasion, time' or 'turning back, return') is usually cher or char. An extension of this sense is 'turn or stroke of work; an action, deed; a piece of work or business,' and this develops the specialized meaning 'an occasional turn of work, an odd job, esp. of household work; hence in pl. the household work of a domestic servant' (1606 SHAKES. Ant. & Cl. IV. xv. 75 The Maid that Milkes, And doe's the meanest chares; 1881 HUXLEY Sc. & Cult. ii. 34 Mere handicrafts and chares). But this, the "extant sense," is "now usually CHORE." Cue lightbulb over head.
What's the etymology, you ask? Tangled:
OE. cerr, cierr, cyrr, masc. i- stem:—O.Teut. type *karri-z or *karzi-z... Often identified with OHG. chêr, MHG. kêr, Ger. kehr, MDu. kêr, Du. keer, masc.; besides which there is OHG. chêra, MHG. kêre, Ger. kehre, MDu. and MLG. kêre, LG. kêr str. fem.; but these represent OTeut. types *kairi-z-oz or kaizi-z, oz, and *kairâ or *kaizâ, the vowel of which has no connexion with that of the OE. word. No forms cognate to either are known outside Teutonic.
A few years ago I did a post on Chinese braille; now Matt of No-sword has done a couple of posts about the Japanese versions (kana, kanji), and Joel of Far Outliers has responded with Braille Family Resemblances and Mutations:
All varieties of Braille render the characters of their respective languages in a six-dot matrix (or did until until recently); all are read from left to right, even in Hebrew; all use word-spacing, even in Chinese and Japanese; and all tend to place diacritic characters before the characters they modify.Fascinating stuff.
From a letter by Ian Mackenzie in the latest NY Times Book Review, complaining about Liesl Schillinger’s Feb. 3 review of Charles Bock’s Beautiful Children:
Schillinger approvingly quotes a sentence of Bock’s: “Electricity lit up Ponyboy’s skeletal structure as if it were a pinball machine on a multi-ball extravaganza, and the mingling odors of brimstone and sulfur and sweat and burning skin filled Ponyboy’s nostrils.” This describes, we are told, the administration of Ponyboy’s newest tattoo. It is easy to see why, in the current literary climate, this sentence attracts admiration: it loudly conflates the human body and the book’s setting, Las Vegas; it declares the obsolescence of the comma as it pounds out a list of nouns; its zeal for gaudy metaphor nearly splits it at the seams; and it turns up the biblical volume with the sinister “brimstone.”Ouch.But the sentence suffers from several conspicuous flaws. For one, it lurks at the edge of tenability when it describes the electricity illuminating Ponyboy’s “skeletal structure.” It then attempts to shoehorn in the metaphor of a pinball machine, whose vividness further divorces the sentence’s central idea from a credible reality, and then finally, in order, I imagine, to deploy four nouns rather than three, it falls irritatingly into redundancy: brimstone and sulfur, as a quick trip to the dictionary will confirm, are synonyms.
Incidentally, brimstone, late Old English brynstán , is literally 'burn-stone'; the OED adds "An identical formation in other Teut. langs. (MDu. and MLG. bernsteen, Du. barnsteen, Ger. bernstein) is used with the sense 'amber'. The transposition in bern-, bren- was inherited from the vb.; the subsequent change to brim- may have been due to association with the adj. brim, BREME 'fierce.'" (Odd that the OED writes German nouns lowercase.)
A reader wrote to call my attention to Barbara Partee's Language Log post about the wonderful Russian nonword "lytdybr" and to point out that I had used it in the title of one of the earliest LH posts without bothering to explain it, which was quite cheeky of me. But in my defense, I'd been immersing myself in Russian blogs and didn't really think of it as being completely obscure to whoever might be reading (not that there were more than three people reading at that point). So here, belatedly, is the explanation, in Barbara's words: "it's how the Russian word дневник, dnevnik 'diary', comes out if you're typing on a QWERTY keyboard with the keystrokes you would use on a Cyrillic keyboard." And as one of her students says, "It is often ... used to tag posts in blogs that are nothing more than boring retelling of author's life." (I'm amazed to see that my original post is the #3 hit for it on Google! My apologies to anyone who may have clicked on it over the years hoping for clarification.)
Addendum. The reader who wrote me about it comments to say "Given that this could happen in any language with a non-roman keyboard layout, there is great potential for more examples of this as-of-yet nameless phenomenon." An excellent point. So: Anybody have other examples?
