SIX YEARS OF LANGUAGEHAT.

I am astonished to discover that six years have gone by since the first LH post. I wish I had time to mull that over and produce some wise ruminations, or at least count the new countries I've had visits from (Tonga! Dominica! Lesotho!), but I'm in full deadline-panic mode on the book I'm copyediting, so all I can do is note the fact, murmur about tempus fuguing, and offer my heartfelt thanks to everyone who has commented and sent me e-mails; without the feedback (and suggestions for post ideas) I'd have given up years ago.

Addendum. The Daily Growler, whose proprietor is an old friend and mentor (and the only boss I've ever had who kept my respect and affection), has a flattering post reminiscing about how we met and started working together (along with the usual unstoppable flow of memories and ruminations); I'll excerpt these bits on hats and computers:

And L Hat wore his copyrighted Panama straws in the summer, from Ecuador, where real Panama hats come from, and his copyrighted grey Borsolino felt skypiece in the winter! He also wore a Greek fisherman's hat, too, when he was being a wanderer--standard apparel for wandering individualists in those days--and boy did my staff have fun for several years--several lusty years...

And when computers came along, L Hat and I began discovering the Hog Heaven aspects of them--and then when we got hooked up to the Internet, forget about it! We'd found a library within a teevee set that we could access in nanosecond speeds...

As I said in my comment to his post, "the internet was made for the likes of us. Every day I shake my head in amazement at my luck in living to make use of it."

CUIL.

I had no intention of writing about the new search engine Cuil, pronounced "cool" (a quick visit did not impress me), but the name was taken from Irish, which is catnip to this erstwhile Indo-Europeanist with a deep attachment to the Gaelic. The company says: "Cuil is an old Irish word for knowledge. For knowledge, ask Cuil." I trust no one will be unduly shocked when I say that there is in fact no Irish (either "old" or Old) word cuil meaning 'knowledge'; what is a little surprising is that they're only slightly off. The word is actually coll, with genitive cuill; it means 'hazel,' and hazel trees are associated with wisdom in Celtic myth, so Bob's your uncle. There's a discussion over at Language Log, which led me to the Wikipedia talk page, where there is a sad/funny debate over whether it's "original research" (and thus forbidden) to look words up in the dictionary.

By the way, when I looked up the word in my battered copy of Thurneysen's Grammar of Old Irish, I found my shocked marginal annotation in the index pointing out that the indexer had lumped together coll 'violation' and coll 'hazelwood.' And that was back in 1946, when they were supposed to get things right!

WHO SAID IT?

This week's "On Language" in the NY Times, a guest column by Fred Shapiro, is basically a bit of publicity for Shapiro's Yale Book of Quotations, but that's OK, it's worth plugging. Shapiro takes seriously the need to track down authentic citations and isn't afraid to topple accepted attributions, with results like:

Surely some of our cherished political-quotation stories must be accurate. What about Vice President Thomas R. Marshall’s immortal crack, “What this country really needs is a good 5-cent cigar”? The usual story goes that Marshall, in his capacity as presiding officer of the Senate, was enduring a tedious debate on the needs of the country. He then interjected the one-liner about cigars. Quotation dictionaries typically date this incident precisely to reports in newspapers of Jan. 4, 1920. The Marshall attribution, though, is blown out of the water by another electronically derived newspaper citation. The Hartford Daily Courant, on Sept. 22, 1875, printed “What this country really needs is a good 5-cent cigar” with a notation that the original source was The New York Mail.

The Yale Book of Quotations disproves many other accepted origins. The next time you hear a commentator credit “All politics is local” to Tip O’Neill, impress your friends by mentioning that the line appeared in The Frederick (Md.) News, July 1, 1932, when the future speaker of the House was only a teenage proto-pol. When a candidate refers to Otto von Bismarck’s famous maxim about “laws and sausages,” grin knowingly, point out that the Iron Chancellor was not associated with that quip until the 1930s and cite The Daily Cleveland Herald, Mar. 29, 1869, quoting the lawyer-poet John Godfrey Saxe that “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.

I do love a good debunking.

GEORGE ELIOT, HISTORICAL LINGUIST.

I finally remembered to share this tidbit from Middlemarch (we're over two-thirds of the way through the novel, and will soon have to start thinking about what to follow it with for our nightly readings); it's from Chapter 48:

But Mr Casaubon's theory of the elements which made the seed of all tradition was not likely to bruise itself unawares against discoveries: it floated among flexible conjectures no more solid than those etymologies which seemed strong because of likeness in sound, until it was shown that likeness in sound made them impossible: it was a method of interpretation which was not tested by the necessity of forming anything which had sharper collisions than an elaborate notion of Gog and Magog: it was as free from interruption as a plan for threading the stars together.

The section I have bolded shows a grasp of the (then brand-new, and revolutionary) theory of the regularity of sound change that is still rare today. I am coming more and more to think that if I could have dinner with a novelist from the past, it would be Ms. Evans. (Forget Tolstoy: I can get harangued by overexcited hypocrites in my own time.)

WALTHAM.

I love Daniel Jones' Everyman's English Pronouncing Dictionary for many reasons, foremost among them its scrupulous care in distinguishing the various contexts in which the word might be found ("Note.—Earl Waldegrave is 'wɔ:lgreiv ['wɔl-]. Some others with this name pronounce 'wɔ:ldǝgreiv ['wɔl-], In Waldegrave Hall the pronunciation is 'wɔ:ldǝgreiv ['wɔl-].") and especially its cheerfully verbose guides to local usage. S.v. Waltham:

Note.—The traditional local pronunciation at Great Waltham and Little Waltham in Essex is 'wɔ:ltǝm, and this is the pronunciation used by those who have lived there for a long time. Some new residents pronounce -lθǝm. In telephoning to these places from a distance it is advisable to pronounce -lθǝm; otherwise the caller is liable to be given Walton(-on-the-Naze), which is in the same county.

No mention, of course, of the pronunciation used in the Massachusetts town, which is 'wɔlθæm; in the words of the Wikipedia article, "The second vowel is pronounced properly ("Wall-tham", to rhyme with tall-ham, IPA: /ˈwɔlθæm/), and not elided into a schwa ("Wall-thumb", IPA /ˈwɔlθəm/) as might be expected in American English."

N.b.: I have the 13th edition, 1967 (photo here for the time being); I regret to report that the current edition has brutally cropped the entries, eliminating all the personal tidbits that make mine so delightful.

KAMIKAZE.

The Wikipedia entry for kamikaze says flatly that it was not the Japanese term:

The Japanese themselves did not use the word Kamikaze to refer to these World War II attacks. The official Japanese term was tokubetsu kōgeki tai (特別攻撃隊 "Special Attack Units"). The word Shinpū (also meaning "divine wind"; just another reading of the same kanji for kamikaze) was also used informally for suicide units. U.S. translators erroneously used the Japanese word Kamikaze, which has a similar original meaning of "divine wind" (see Kamikaze typhoon).

Later it explains that "The word kamikaze originated as the name of major typhoons in 1274 and 1281, which dispersed Mongolian invasion fleets," which I had known. But the business about the two readings (compare hara-kiri/seppuku) intrigued me. Unfortunately, when I investigated further, things got murky; this site says

The two Japanese characters (kanji) for "kamikaze" (meaning "divine wind") can be read in two ways: "kamikaze" or "shinpu." Nagatsuka speculates that nisei (second-generation Japanese-Americans) in the U.S. military were the first to use the pronunciation "kamikaze" to describe the special attack suicide squads because "they did not know how to read Japanese correctly and so pronounced the two Japanese characters for Divine Wind in a more vernacular way [kamikaze]" (p. 142). He cites no support for such an assertion. Although Shinpu was the official name given to the first unit formed in the Philippines in October 1944, people in Japan both during and after the war frequently read the two kanji as "kamikaze."

I added a [citation needed] tag, but being too impatient to wait for some Wikipedian to notice and respond, I thought I'd ask you all: anybody know whether ordinary Japanese used the term kamikaze during the war or whether it was imported from ignorant Yanks afterwards?

THE EVOLUTION OF HATS.

The Yale Alumni Magazine has an article by Angus Trumble in the latest issue called "Old hat: The evolution of your mortarboard," which despite its focus on the mortarboard (a descendant, it turns out, of the pileus quadratus, the hot new fashion item of the early 16th century) has much to say about the history of hats in general; I particularly recommend the family tree, with its fetching portraits of everyone from popes to bellhops wearing the illustrated items. (Depending on your browser window, you may have to scroll a bit to the right to see the vertical line representing the crown, which—like the papal miter on the left—does not interact with the rest of the tree.)

THE HISTORY OF BE AND HAVE.

Mark Liberman at the Log discusses Merja Kytö's "Be/have + past participle: The choice of the auxiliary with intransitives from Late Middle to Modern English," which "explains very clearly how English changed from be to have as the marker of perfect aspect in intransitive verbs. ... Based on tracking the use of be/have + past participle in a corpus of about 2.7 million words spanning the period from 1350 to 1990, Kytö demonstrates that 'in the late Middle English period, the use of have increases gradually, gains in momentum in the late 1700s and supersedes the use of be in the early 1800s'." Mark says:

What puzzles me is why this process seems to have escaped the notice of prescriptive grammarians. Here's a change that '[gained] in momentum in the late 1700s', just when the likes of Robert Lowth and Lindley Murray were in bloom. Did anyone stand up against the rising tide of have for marking the perfect in intransitives? If so, their delaying action was ineffective and quickly forgotten.

Which is a good question, and I hope one of the people who froth about misused apostrophes will take up the cudgels for a return to the good old King James way of "the king of Israel is come out to seek a flea." At any rate, it's nice to have the chronology pinned down; I'm all for more facts and less hand-waving when it comes to talking about language.

IF YOU DON'T HELP, IT'S A SHANDE.

An announcement from the Jewish Institute of Religion:

Yiddish. Ladino. Judeo-Arabic. Jews throughout history have spoken distinctively Jewish languages. What about American Jews? Two researchers from Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion want to find out. Linguist Sarah Bunin Benor and Sociologist Steven M. Cohen are conducting a large-scale survey of Jews and non-Jews in the United States to determine just who uses Hebrew and Yiddish words and other distinctive language.

"This study has been several years in the making," says Dr. Benor, who has published several papers on the Yiddish-influenced English speech of Orthodox Jews. "Some people say that the only American Jews who speak distinctly are Orthodox, but among non-Orthodox Jews I know who are highly engaged in religious life, I've heard sentences that have more Hebrew and Yiddish words than English ones." An example she gives is:

"At my /shul/, /balabatim/ /daven/ /musaf/ on /Yom Kippur/." "We want to know how widespread this phenomenon is."

Benor adds, "Three, four, and even five generations after their Yiddish-speaking ancestors immigrated to the U.S., some Ashkenazic American Jews still use Yiddishisms, like 'I need that like I need a hole in the head' and 'Money, shmoney.' Do Jews use these more than non-Jews? Do they use them only in certain situations? This survey will help us answer questions like these." They are also curious to what extent Americans of Sephardi and Mizrahi background have incorporated Yiddishisms into their speech and how they pronounce Hebrew words. They even include a few words common in Judeo-Arabic and Ladino.

Here's a direct link to the survey; if you give them an e-mail address, they'll send you the results when they have them. (Via MetaFilter, where several commenters pointed out they should have asked about childhood acquaintance with Mad magazine.)

While I'm at it, Clint Schmidt of Livemocha.com is "seeking someone with high-caliber academic credentials and passion for linguistics to work with Livemocha on a summer project to improve our learning experience. There are many variables within our language learning experience that we want to assess and improve, and I think there's value in getting an unbiased expert perspective." This is a paid consulting position; if you're interested, write clint -at- livemocha dot com.

KALALACH AND HIPHOP.

I'm beat from trying to copyedit and spend time with my four-year-old grandson all in the same day, so I'll just toss a couple of links out there to distract you while I catch up on my rest:

A Northwest Pronunciation Guide. I love obscure local pronunciations (see here and here), and this is a treasure trove of them. For some reason the Pacific Northwest has a particular concentration of weird spelling/pronunciation matches like Champoeg sham-POO-ee, Puyallup pyoo-AL-up, and Kalalach CLAY-lock (not to mention geoduck GOO-ey-duck, one of the weirdest in the language). Thanks, mrzarquon!

Hiphop Lx:

Hiphop LX (linguistics) In Hiphop the WORD is the message. Language is a system of sounds and symbols and communication in any language is based on how to use that system. If you know the system, you have power over ideas and imagination. You can build, change, plan, play and destroy. Many words and expressions in hiphop represent regions, neighborhoods and cities. Hiphop Lx is dedicated to representing the words and expressions that represent and serve as a symbol for a region and area. It explores the language system of hiphop and how the word came into being, meanings and the overall development of the word and expression. It challenges everyone to represent their region with true bona fide words and present them to be researched, examined, challenged and celebrated.

Thanks, Kári!

AND OTHERS.

I'm going to quote the first sentence of Jenny Turner's review of Lorrie Moore's The Collected Stories: "Once upon a time, as Lorrie Moore begins, 'there was a not terribly prolific American short-story writer who, caught ten years between books with things she called Life and others called Excuses, was asked to write an introduction to her own Collected Stories.'" I want you to mull the sentence over for a moment before continuing to the next paragraph, in which I discuss its possible ambiguity.

When I first read it, I interpreted "things she called Life and others called Excuses" as identifying two different classes of things: things the writer called Life and other things called (by persons unnamed) Excuses. But something bothered me, perhaps the lack of parallelism between the active "she called" and the passive "called," and I read it over, at which point I realized that that wasn't how Moore meant it at all: she was talking about a single class of things, things that she called Life but that others—other people—called Excuses. Which is a good, funny line, but my question is: is my initial reading a possible one, or simply a careless misreading? In other words, is the sentence ambiguous or not?

FEFNICUTE.

Conrad ran across this pleasing item on Google Books and promptly sent it on to me, knowing I'd enjoy it, and I similarly pass it along to you: O full true un pertikler okeawnt o wat me un maw mistris seede un yerd wi' gooin to th' Greyte Eggshibishun e' Lundun, e' eyghtene hundurth un sixty two ... by O Felley from Rachde (Rachde, 1864). It took some googling to discover, via this helpful page [about an earlier and more famous Exhibition], that "Rachde" is Rochdale:

A humorous account of a visit to the Great Exhibition. Ormerod wrote under the pseudonym "O Felley from Rachde" (as on the title-page) or "A Rachde Felley" (in the frontispiece and on the front board), both of them dialect versions of "A Rochdale Fellow." Indeed, the whole book is written in the Rochdale, Lancashire, dialect, which is really much easier to understand than first appears—it is heavily obscured by Ormerod's method of phonetic rendering.

Beyond his intent to amuse, Ormerod is recording a dialect of a specific place and time, and appends a "Dikshunayre" of words like kowd = cold (phonetic spelling for the local pronunciation), brass = money (slang, used widely in the north of England), and feffnecute = hypocrite (feffnecute apparently not existing outside this dialect).

I particularly like the word feffnecute, for which Google suggests the more common spelling fefnicute; I say it's worth putting back into circulation as a good all-purpose insult.

MAHATHIR.

Once more I turn to you, o Varied and Learned Readers, in my perplexity. For years I've been reading about Mahathir bin Mohamad, longtime prime minister of Malaysia. Without giving it any special thought, I mentally pronounced Mahathir something like [maˈha.θir] (ma-HAH-theer, with voiceless th). But when I visited his Wikipedia article, I noticed the pronunciation given was [maˈhɑ.ðe] (ma-HAH-they, with voiced th). Now, the voiced th makes sense, because the Arabic spelling (which I had never looked up) is محضير... but why is there a final r in the romanized version, and is the final r pronounced or not? Googling mahathir pronounced got me "Mahathir (pronounced mah-hot-te, btw -- don't ask me why)," "pronounced ma-hah-TEER," "pronounced Mahat'hir," and the presumably jocular "pronounced as Mad-hat-tail," leaving me no wiser than before. I know, I know, you can't trust Wikipedia, but I can't help but think somebody who went to the trouble of correctly formatting and using the IPA symbols probably knew what they were talking about. But (in the immortal words of The Troggs) I wanna know for sure. So: anybody familiar with how Malaysians actually pronounce this name? (Bonus points for explanations of the phonemics involved.)

Update. In the comments, pavel says [ma'ha.te(r)] is a more accurate transcription, and he seems to know. Thanks for all the thoughtful and informative answers!

BLUNDERINGLY.

Apologies for a second post about lexographical trivia, but sometimes trawling through dictionaries is too much fun not to share. This time the word my eye lit on was lespedeza, "a genus ... of herbaceous or shrubby plants of the legume family," and what struck me was the etymology: "New Latin, irregular from V. M. de Zespedes fl1785 Spanish governor of East Florida." Irregular indeed! So I turned to the OED to see if it could shed any further light, and found:

[mod.L. ..., blunderingly (by a misreading of the surname) f. the name of V. M. de Céspedez (fl. 1785), Spanish governor of East Florida.]

The word "blunderingly" seemed a trifle snide, especially when you consider that the OED seems to have gotten the spelling wrong itself. (Googling tells me that historians use the Z- spelling, e.g. Zéspedes in East Florida, 1784-1790.)

INDAGATE.

I was looking up something else in Webster's when my eye fell on indagate:

Etymology: Latin indagatus, past participle of indagare, from indago ring of hunters encircling game, act of searching, from Old Latin indu in + Latin agere to drive — more at end-, agent
Date: circa 1623

: to search into : investigate

An intriguing word, but it bothered me that I'd never run into it. So I checked the OED, and the first thing I noticed was the second line of the entry: "? Obs." If the OED was suggesting it was obsolete in 1900, why on earth is it not marked as such in the 2004 edition of Webster's? Just to make sure, I googled, and indeed all the hits were from lexicographical sites. To make doubly sure, I googled "indagate the"; at first I thought it was still fitfully in use, because in one of the hits the authors "aim to present and indagate the fundamentals and practice of Plasma Arc Welding," but clicking on the link showed me that it was (badly) translated from Portuguese. Indeed, indagar 'investigate, inquire into' is in current use in Portuguese, Spanish, and Catalan, and I assume essentially all the uses on the internet are from people translating from those languages and assuming, understandably, that since English has the same word, it's a good translation. I suggest that Merriam-Webster either delete it from their next edition or mark it "obs," which it most certainly is.

It doesn't seem ever to have been in wide use; here are the OED citations, a meager crop for three centuries (and note that of the five cites, one is a dictionary definition and two employ a synonym with it):

1623 COCKERAM, Indagate, to search. 1633 J. FOSBROKE Six Serm. Ep. Ded., To indigate and search out the drift and scope of the Spirit of God. 1677 CARY Chronol. II. i, I. xiii. 126 How from them should we indagate the time of his Expulsion? 1829 LANDOR Wks. I. 470/1 We talk of indagating, of investigating. 1867 MUSGRAVE Nooks Old France I. ix. 293 They indagate the history of a hundred and fifty years.

CHOOSE YOUR OWN TRANSLATION.

Margaret Jull Costa. a translator from Portuguese and Spanish, has an essay on translating Pessoa that includes an exercise with a short text in Portuguese followed by a translation with pull-down menus offering choices of various English words and phrases at various points. An ingenious method that seems like a natural for the internet. Thanks, Jeremy!

DSL IN TROUBLE.

I learn from Arnold Zwicky's Language Log post that the online Dictionary of the Scots Language (which I wrote about here) is facing a crisis:

DSL consists of the Dictionary of the Older Scots Tongue and the Scottish National Dictionary, together making 22 volumes in print (plus a 2005 supplement). These amazing resources are now available on-line, providing searchable electronic versions of the fruits of scholarship on the Scots language. For free, no strings, available to anyone with web access....

Now, the bad news. I reproduce here (with slight revisions) a posting of 12 July by Grant Barrett to ADS-L:

The Scottish Language Dictionaries program has had its funding withdrawn by the Scottish Arts Council.

SLD, a charity, is responsible for the Dictionary of the Scots Language online, the Concise Scots Dictionary, the Essential Scots Dictionary, and other reference works.

As a regular user of DSL, I write this email in order to encourage my colleagues to support SLD in any way they can.

To ensure that they stay in operation, SLD is holding a fundraiser by auctioning celebrity-related items on eBay...

The auction is described here, and there's a story in the Scotsman about the funding and fundraiser here.

I know things are tough all over, but I find it appalling that the Scottish Arts Council has so little appreciation of the importance of a language to the people who use it, and the importance of lexicography to keeping a language flourishing. If anyone is in a position to help, I hope they will do so.

KONOSTAULOS.

I've been reading one of my birthday gifts, Heath W. Lowry's The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (thanks, Jim!), a brilliant reanalysis of the early Ottomans that proves (to my satisfaction, anyway) that far from being fearsome warriors for Islam who presented conquered people with the famous "convert or die" choice, they were highly pragmatic rulers who allowed those they conquered to keep both their faith and in many cases their arms and former positions, which makes it easy to see why their rule spread so quickly among people crushed by late Byzantine taxes and misgovernment.

But on page 100 I hit one of those linguistic misjudgments that make me grind my teeth and reach for the Languagehat soapbox. Lowry is talking about a study he did of "a series of surviving Tahrir Defters, or Ottoman tax registers, from the Aegean island of Lemnos (Limnos), dating from the years 1490-1520":

That members of the island's late-Byzantine aristocracy were likewise performing military duties on Limnos is inferable from the fact that the peasant auxiliaries were serving under the command of their own officers, some of whom even appear in the 1490 tahrir with their former Byzantine military titles, for example, Kondostavlo, or, the "Count of the Stables." From the Latin comes stabuli, or "count of the stable," this was adopted by the Byzantines as the military title Konostaulos in the late thirteenth century.

Now, this is confused in more than one way; to take one obvious point, which was the title, Konostaulos or Kondostavlo? Apparently the former; compare The Late Byzantine Army: Arms and Society, 1204-1453 by Mark C. Bartusis, p. 28:

The increasing importance of Latin mercenaries during the reign of John Vatatzes [1221-1254] was symbolized by the creation of the office of megas konostaulos ("grand constable"), the "chief of the Frankish mercenaries." The fact that the first megas konostaulos, Michael Palaiologos, became emperor is not without a certain significance.

Note that Bartusis translates konostaulos as "constable," and this is correct, because the late medieval Byzantines obviously got the word from those Latin mercenaries; compare Old French conestable, which gives both the English word and modern French connétable. The OED says: "The early development of the sense, whereby the comes stabuli, from being the head groom of the stable, became the principal officer of the household of the Frankish kings, and of the great feudatories, and the field-marshal or commander-general of the army, had taken place before the word came into English; the development was parallel to that of marshal." It's just silly to suppose that comes stabuli would have been borrowed, with its original sense 'officer of the stable,' by Byzantines who hadn't used Latin for centuries. (I suppose it's possible that the phrase had been preserved in moth-eaten official registers since the fifth century, when Latin was still used in Constantinople, and readopted in its Frenchified form when the barbarians from the West showed up, but I'm not sure how far one could talk about continuity in such a case. I am not a Byzantinist, however, and will gladly defer to those who know more about such things.)

If you're curious, the borrowed word turns up in one of my favorite Byzantine historians, the loyal, resentful, and vivid Anna Comnena towards the end of her Alexiad, describing a dilemma confronted by Bohemond at the Battle of Dyrrachium (1081): "He was debating what ought to be done, turning over in his mind numerous possible courses: should the constables appear before him [εί χρή παραστήναι τους κονοσταύλους]?" These, of course, are Frankish constables, not Byzantine officials.

Another curious linguistic sidelight: Speros Vryonis, Jr., in his The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh Through the Fifteenth Century (heretofore my vade mecum for the early Ottoman period), says on p. 234 "Michael Paleologus served as kondistabl in charge of Christian troops of the sultan after he had fled the kingdom of the Lascarids." What the heck kind of word is kondistabl? The footnote refers us to Acropolites, a Greek historian; why would he be using a form like kondistabl? More mysteries.

NO BASTARDS IN EARLY RUSSIA?

Ah, coincidence! First it was the name-days; in my ongoing reading of Eugene Onegin and War and Peace, the other night I hit both the name-day celebration of Tatyana in the first and that of Natasha in the second, with parallel descriptions of long tables, the seating of guests, wines drunk, and lively conversation (though only one leads to a duel). Then it was the bastardy. I had just gotten to the discussion of Pierre's illegitimacy and how it would affect his inheritance from his father, Count Bezukhov, when I got an e-mail from historian Cherie Woodworth, with whom I've been corresponding, mentioning an interesting question she's been investigating for a paper: why is bastardy a nonexistent concept in pre-Petrine Russia? As she puts it:

...[B]astards do not play the prominent political and social role in medieval and early modern Russia that they do in Europe at the same time. In fact, they seem to play no role at all; they are invisible. They are not mentioned in the chronicles; they are not noted in the genealogies; the nickname or epithet "bastard" (vybliadok) does not appear in any variant among the princes' names. ...[T]hey do appear in the law code, though not until the Sudebnik of 1589, and it referred to the common people, not the princes or boyars.

She says "I am trying to pin down the first use of the word 'bastard' in Russia, in the literal meaning of a child (usually male) who has no legal rights as an heir because his parents were not legally married." Anybody know?

AN ARABIAN MASTER.

I have written before about Abdelrahman Munif and his untranslated masterpiece Ard Al-Sawad, about early nineteenth-century Iraq, and I recently came across an entire issue (pdf) of the MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies devoted to Munif. It includes, among many other pieces, an extensive article by Sabry Hafez called "An Arabian Master" that discusses in detail his life and works and one by Ferial Ghazoul specifically on Ard Al-Sawad. It's annoying that it's only available as a 217-page pdf—you'd think they could at least provide each article separately—but hey, it's free, and anyone interested in Munif will find it worth the minor trouble involved.

ONE WORD, TWO MASTERS?

Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat discusses an interesting phenomenon in this post:

In Qur'anic Arabic (this is hardly ever applied in Modern Standard), at least in presentative contexts, the word "that" agrees in number and gender not only with the noun it refers to, but also with the addressee. (A YouTube video lecture on this by some shaykh is available for Arabic-speakers.) "That" is morphologically composed of two elements. The first bit agrees with the referent [examples]... The second bit agrees with the addressee [more examples]...

He finishes up with the question "do you know of any other language that does something like this?" So I thought I'd pass it along.

LUCKY OYF YIDISH.

Mendele (Forum for Yiddish Literature and Yiddish Language) publishes a magazine, The Mendele Review, which recently devoted an issue to Waiting for Godot in Yiddish. "There are two known Yiddish translations of the play – Gizela Shkilnik's posthumously published version from German issued by the Y.-L. Perets Farlag in Tel-Aviv in 1980 and a relatively recent unpublished version from English by Rina Yosifon of Haifa. The translators are briefly introduced and their translations of the Lucky monologue summarily compared – readers will wish to make their own comparisons." My Yiddish is minimal and certainly not up to making comparisons (you can see both versions by scrolling down at the last link; direct links: Shkilnik, Yosifon), but I did very much enjoy listening to Rina Yosifon's version (mp3 file); one thing that made made me laugh out loud was the rendering of "Seine Seine-et-Oise Seine-et-Marne Marne-et-Oise" by טראָצקי, װיסאָצקי און פּלאָצקי [Trotsky, Vysotsky, and Brodsky]. Thanks, John!

(The monologue in French is below; I realize the translations are from German and English, which is a shame, but French is what I have, and it is after all the original original.)

LUCKY (débit monotone). - Etant donné l'existence telle qu'elle jaillit des récents travaux publics de Poinçon et Wattmann d'un Dieu personnel quaquaquaqua à barbe blanche quaqua hors du temps de l'étendue qui du haut de sa divine apathie sa divine athambie sa divine aphasie nous aime bien à quelques exceptions près on ne sait pourquoi mais ça viendra et souffre à l'instar de la divine Miranda avec ceux qui sont on ne sait pourquoi mais on a le temps dans le tourment dans les feux dont les feux les flammes pour peu que ça dure encore un peu et qui peut en douter mettront à la fin le feu au poutres assavoir porteront l'enfer aux nues si bleues par moments encore aujourd'hui et calmes si calmes d'un calme qui pour être intermittent n'en est pas moins le bienvenu mais n'anticipons pas et attendu d'autre part qu'à la suite des recherches inachevées n'anticipons pas des recherches inachevées mais néanmoins couronnées par l'Acacacacadémie d'Anthropopopométrie de Berne-en-Bresse de Testu et Conard il est établi sans autre possibilité d'erreur que celle afférente aux calculs humains qu'à la suite des recherches inachevées inachevées de Testu et Conard il est établi tabli tabli ce qui suit qui suit qui suit assavoir mais n'anticipons pas on ne sait pourquoi à la suite des travaux de Poinçon et Wattmann il apparaît aussi clairement si clairement qu'en vue des labeurs de Fartov et Belcher inachevés inachevés on ne sait pourquoi de Testu et Conard inachevés inachevés il apparaît que l'homme contrairement à l'opinion contraire que l'homme en Bresse de Testu et Conard que l'homme enfin bref que l'homme en bref enfin malgré les progrès de l'alimentation et de l'élimination des déchets et en train de maigrir et en même temps parallèlement on ne sait pourquoi malgré l'essor de la culture physique de la pratique des sports tels tels tels le tennis le football la course et à pied et à bicyclette la natation l'équitation l'aviation la conation le tennis le camogie le patinage et sur glace et sur asphalte le tennis l'aviation les sports le sports d'hiver d'été d'automne d'automne le tennis sur gazon sur sapin et sur terre battue l'aviation le tennis le hockey sur terre sur mer et dans les airs la pénicilline et succédanés bref je reprends en même temps parallèlement de rapetisser on ne sait pourquoi malgré le tennis je reprends l'aviation le golf tant à neuf qu'à dix-huit trous le tennis sur glace bref on ne sait pourquoi en Seine Seine-et-Oise Seine-et-Marne Marne-et-Oise assavoir en même temps parallèlement on ne sait pourquoi de maigrir rétrécir je reprends Oise Marne bref la perte sèche par tête de pipe depuis la mort de Voltaire étant de l'ordre de deux doigts cent grammes par tête de pipe environ en moyenne à peu près chiffres ronds bon poids déshabillé en Normandie on ne sait pourquoi bref enfin peu importe les faits sont là et considérant d'autre part ce qui est encore plus grave qu'il ressort ce qui est encore plus grave qu'à la lumière la lumière des expériences en cours de Steinweg et Petermann il ressort ce qui est encore plus grave qu'il ressort ce qui est encore plus grave à la lumière la lumière des expériences abandonnées de Steinweg et Petermann qu'à la campagne à la montagne et au bord de la mer et des cours et d'eau et de feu l'air est le même et la terre assavoir l'air et la terre par grands froids l'air et la terre faits pour les pierres par les grands froids hélas au septième de leur ère l'éther la terre la mer pour les pierres par les grands fonds les grands froids sur mer sur terre et dans les airs peuchère je reprends on ne sait pourquoi malgré le tennis les faits sont là on ne sait pourquoi je reprends au suivant bref enfin hélas au suivant pour les pierres qui peut en douter je reprends mais n'anticipons pas je reprends la tête en même temps parallèlement on ne sait pourquoi malgré le tennis au suivant la barbe les flammes les pleurs les pierres si bleues si calmes hélas la tête la tête la tête la tête en Normandie malgré le tennis les labeurs abandonnés inachevés plus grave les pierres bref je reprends hélas hélas abandonnés inachevés la tête la tête en Normandie malgré le tennis la tête hélas les pierres Conard Conard… (Mêlée. Lucky pousse encore quelques vociférations.) Tennis !… Les pierres !… Si calmes !… Conard !… Inachevés!…

ON (NOT) THINKING IN ENGLISH.

The always interesting eudæmonist has a post about working to pass a language proficiency interview in Armenian that includes the following reflection:

Another thing: so at the end of the interview, when the examiner was reviewing my errors, she said to me, ‘I understand that you’re thinking in English and then translating…’ and that got me thinking, because I didn’t think it was quite accurate. I wasn’t thinking in English so much as I had a mess of meaning (apart from language) that I wanted to communicate; the thought itself (or the meaning) was not in any particular language, and when Armenian failed, my brain supplied German,³ and when German failed, only then did my brain revert to English. It felt like I was dipping into my pool of language knowledge to find the means of communication, and due to the limits of what I have been able to learn, was coming back dry, in Armenian at least. Thus if I were asked, ‘what do want to say,’ I would have an English response, not because the original thought was in English but because English was the means by which I was able to express it.⁴

Footnote 3 says "The situation requiring a ‘foreign’ language, that is the one my brain rather stintingly supplies. Greek and Latin remain in the passive understanding, sadly," and footnote 4 "I feel as though I have unwittingly fallen on one side of a theoretical debate I know nothing about and which frankly doesn’t interest me at present." Whichever side it is, I think I'm on the same one.

TEXTING: NOT THE END OF THE WORLD.

Frequent commenter Kári Tulinius sent me the most sensible thing I've yet read about texting (a form of communication with which I, fossil that I am, have had zero experience), a Guardian piece, 2b or not 2b?, by that eminently sensible man, David Crystal. Some nuggets:

People think that the written language seen on mobile phone screens is new and alien, but all the popular beliefs about texting are wrong. Its graphic distinctiveness is not a new phenomenon, nor is its use restricted to the young. There is increasing evidence that it helps rather than hinders literacy. And only a very tiny part of it uses a distinctive orthography. A trillion text messages might seem a lot, but when we set these alongside the multi-trillion instances of standard orthography in everyday life, they appear as no more than a few ripples on the surface of the sea of language. Texting has added a new dimension to language use, but its long-term impact is negligible. It is not a disaster.

Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood. There is no point in paying to send a message if it breaks so many rules that it ceases to be intelligible. When messages are longer, containing more information, the amount of standard orthography increases. Many texters alter just the grammatical words (such as "you" and "be"). As older and more conservative language users have begun to text, an even more standardised style has appeared. Some texters refuse to depart at all from traditional orthography. And conventional spelling and punctuation is the norm when institutions send out information messages, as in this university text to students: "Weather Alert! No classes today due to snow storm", or in the texts which radio listeners are invited to send in to programmes. These institutional messages now form the majority of texts in cyberspace - and several organisations forbid the use of abbreviations, knowing that many readers will not understand them. Bad textiquette.

Research has made it clear that the early media hysteria about the novelty (and thus the dangers) of text messaging was misplaced. In one American study, less than 20% of the text messages looked at showed abbreviated forms of any kind - about three per message. And in a Norwegian study, the proportion was even lower, with just 6% using abbreviations. In my own text collection, the figure is about 10%...

English has had abbreviated words ever since it began to be written down. Words such as exam, vet, fridge, cox and bus are so familiar that they have effectively become new words. When some of these abbreviated forms first came into use, they also attracted criticism. In 1711, for example, Joseph Addison complained about the way words were being "miserably curtailed" - he mentioned pos (itive) and incog (nito). And Jonathan Swift thought that abbreviating words was a "barbarous custom".

What novelty there is in texting lies chiefly in the way it takes further some of the processes used in the past...

There are an extraordinary number of ways in which people play with language - creating riddles, solving crosswords, playing Scrabble, inventing new words. Professional writers do the same - providing catchy copy for advertising slogans, thinking up puns in newspaper headlines, and writing poems, novels and plays. Children quickly learn that one of the most enjoyable things you can do with language is to play with its sounds, words, grammar - and spelling.

The drive to be playful is there when we text, and it is hugely powerful. Within two or three years of the arrival of texting, it developed a ludic dimension. In short, it's fun.

Crystal goes on to discuss "text-poetry," which I confess does not interest me, but he finishes up by making an important point about children:

An extraordinary number of doom-laden prophecies have been made about the supposed linguistic evils unleashed by texting. Sadly, its creative potential has been virtually ignored. But five years of research has at last begun to dispel the myths. The most important finding is that texting does not erode children's ability to read and write. On the contrary, literacy improves. The latest studies (from a team at Coventry University) have found strong positive links between the use of text language and the skills underlying success in standard English in pre-teenage children. The more abbreviations in their messages, the higher they scored on tests of reading and vocabulary. The children who were better at spelling and writing used the most textisms. And the younger they received their first phone, the higher their scores.

Children could not be good at texting if they had not already developed considerable literacy awareness. Before you can write and play with abbreviated forms, you need to have a sense of how the sounds of your language relate to the letters. You need to know that there are such things as alternative spellings. If you are aware that your texting behaviour is different, you must have already intuited that there is such a thing as a standard...

I wasn't panicked about the evils of texting anyway, but having read the essay I'm even less so. Let there be text!

PARROTOLOGY.

John Kinsella had an essay a couple of years ago in Australian Book Review called "Parrotology: On the Necessity of Parrots in Poetry." I had not even realized that parrots were considered a tired trope of Australian poetry, but Kinsella explains both that and the necessity (as he sees it) of retaining the parrot as "an addictively necessary part of a poetics." It's an enjoyable read:

Despising nation and patriotism and jingoism as I do, I baulk when I hear that ‘parrots’ are clichés or overused symbols of Australia, particularly the outback. I have a personal history of parrotology, a deep respect for all their varieties, and a fascination for their manifestations in literature, particularly poetry. For me, a parrot isn’t simply a parrot. In the thrust forward to make of Australian poetry some-thing more cosmopolitan, internationalist and sophisticated, there’s been some throwing of the baby out with the bathwater. Arguments of literary maturity are the old cultural cringe stuff reformed as residue, a bit like the cherishing of remnant bushland when all else is reduced to salinity. The parrot becomes a transitional object in this child-nation’s shift from linguistic acquisition to linguistic confidence and exploration.

Arguably, this exploration of linguistic possibilities in poetry — searching for new ways of expressing confidence in identity — is parallel to, or maybe even an extension of, the narratives of exploration that ‘opened up’ land for ‘settler’ use, and sought to reset the co-ordinates (namings, markings, topography and explication) of place, with the aim of creating ‘guilt-free’ occupation. It might well be, disturbingly, a new form of colonisation...

For example, how many anthologised Australian poems are about parrots, or even include parrots? How and when did they become figurative currency? Why the joy at not encountering them? First, we’d have to consider the demographics and cultural values of the judges. Are they urban people, for whom the parrot is a bland representation of the rural other — an expected trope that denies variety in all its guises? Is the parrot the Anglo-Celtic displacement of indigeneity, a kind of legitimising or reterritorialising of the sign? The rendering of the Derridean monster into something acceptable? The event defanged, or debeaked? By way of distraction, let’s think of Australian parrots as our version of the hippogriff.

We might ask of the cultural density and liberality of the city — real or desired — is everything therein not parrot? Interestingly, 'pissed as a parrot' applies as much to parrots in the north of Queensland consuming fermented fruit as to rainbow lorikeets dining on the fermented nectar of schotia brachypetala in the Sydney Botanical Gardens, so drunk they featured in the Sydney Morning Herald (2004) and wire pick-ups in newspapers around the world. In the gardens, beneath the drunken parrots, families of diverse spiritual beliefs, politics, social attitudes, ethnicities and cultural practices look up and take note. Some might be embarrassed, some make jokes at the expense of the parrots, some feel pity, even empathy. The parrot as symbol of nation falls off its perch.

Incidentally, the next line contained a word that confused me: "Chris Mansell’s 'Definition Poem: Pissed as a Parrot' is a poem of word slippage: 'If the sheep’s fly-blown it’s a rosella.'" So far so good, but later he says "The parrot (oh, a rosella is a type of parrot)..." Well, which is it? A quick trip to the OED revealed that a rosella is both a parrot (or, to be exact, "A brightly coloured seed-eating Australian parakeet belonging to the genus Platycercus") and "A sheep whose wool is beginning to fall off naturally, and which is therefore easy to shear." And the word does not, as you might expect, come from Latin; it's "App. for Rose-hiller, f. Rose-hill, Paramatta near Sydney." Australia is full of surprises.

WE'RE ON PLACE DE WHAT?

Mark Liberman at the Log has a great post on the history of the Place des États-Unis in Paris. It was called the place de Bitche, after a town in Moselle "which had valiantly resisted the Prussian invasion during the war of 1870," until 1881, when the U.S. embassy moved there. The name was so offensive to American sensibilities that the Mayor of Paris changed it to its present name, which it has kept even though the embassy moved to the Place de la Concorde some decades later. One odd sidelight is that the French apparently think bitch means 'prostitute,' probably because (as Laurent C says in the comments) English "son of a bitch" is equivalent to French "fils de pute."

LINGUISTIC TOLSTOY.

I've started reading War and Peace in Russian (something I've been wanting to do for many years), prompted by reaching that point in Henri Troyat's biography, and in the very first section I've noticed several items of linguistic interest. The first thing, of course, is the fact that the first paragraph of the Great Russian Novel is almost entirely in French; Tolstoy goes on to talk about "том изысканном французском языке, на котором не только говорили, но и думали наши деды" ['that recherché/distingué/refined/exquisite French in which our grandfathers not only spoke but thought']. The second paragraph includes this bit of language history: "у нее был грипп, как она говорила (грипп был тогда новое слово, употреблявшееся только редкими)" ['she had the grippe, as she said (grippe was then [July 1805] a new word, used only by the few)'].

But it's at the end of the section that the linguistic interest intensifies to the point that it grippes me by the throat and won't let go. Prince Vasilii has arrived early at Anna Scherer's soirée in order to propose his son as first secretary in Vienna (at the Russian embassy, I presume), Anna having influence at court, but she shoots the idea down (with "an expression of devotion and respect, joined with sadness"). She then makes a counterproposal: he should marry off his "prodigal son" Anatolii to the daughter of the "rich and miserly" Prince Bolkonskii (modeled on Tolstoy's own maternal grandfather, Prince Volkonskii). The prince perks up immediately and says:

Ecoutez, chère Annette. Arrangez-moi cette affaire et je suis votre вернейший раб à tout jamais (рап — comme mon староста m'écrit des донесенья: покой-ер-п).

The first part of this, before the parenthesis, is unproblematic: "Listen, dear Annette, arrange this affair for me and I am your most faithful slave forever." The parenthesis, though, involves some kind of wordplay I can only partially penetrate: "rap, as my starosta [village headman] writes in his reports: pokoi-yer-p." Evidently the starosta was not strong on spelling and wrote раб [rab]—in prerevolutionary spelling рабъ, with a silent hard sign ("yer") at the end—the way it sounds, /rap/ (with final devoicing), i.e., рапъ (with Cyrillic p instead of b). Now, pokoi is the archaic name for the Cyrillic letter п (=Latin p) and yer is the hard sign ъ, but I can't make out what the collocation pokoi-yer-p is supposed to mean. (Of the translators I have at hand, Ann Dunnigan says "'slafe,' as my village elder writes," and Constance Garnett simply omits the parenthesis.) If anybody can explicate this, je suis votre вернейший раб à tout jamais.

Update. Commenter Ransom very kindly sent me scans of the relevant pages of B. A. Uspenskii's "Старинная система чтения по складам," which explains the old system of reading Russian by syllables, and all is now clear. The practice was to "spell" a word by breaking it up into syllables and reading each with the old names of the Cyrillic letters, so that, e.g., великъ [velikъ] would be read "веди езь, ве; люди иже, ли, вели; како еркъ, великъ" [vedi + ez' = ve; lyudi + izhe = li > veli; kako + yerkъ > velikъ], where vedi, ez', lyudi, izhe, kako are the names of the Cyrillic letters v, e, l, i, and k, but the hard sign, called yer, is read with the preceding consonant following it: yerkъ, pronounced "yerk." Now we can see what's going on in the Tolstoy passage: the Prince is giving only the end of the word рабъ, spelled рапъ by the starosta, because that's the part that's different; thus pokoi-yer-p is exactly parallel to kako-yer-k above. Furthermore, this also explains the peculiar word slovo-er-s, which I wrote about here; I'll have to emend that entry after I've had some sleep.

NABOKOV ALOUD.

Frequent commenter Jim Salant sent me a link a while back to a reading by Mary Gaitskill of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Symbols and Signs” (as they call it) and a discussion with The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Treisman (pronounced TREECE-man). Here's a direct link to the mp3 file, in case you want to download it rather than playing it from the linked page, and here's the story itself, one of the best Nabokov (or anyone) ever wrote (if you don't mind a little metaphysical mystery in your fiction). You will notice that the story is called "Signs and Symbols" at that last link, as it is in all available collections and in The Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov (a superb collection of essays discussing every aspect of his writing); I was all set to be grumpy about the sloppy mistitling, but then in the discussion after the reading Treisman explains that Katherine White, who edited it for The New Yorker, insisted on changing the title over Nabokov's objections, so that it appeared in the magazine as “Symbols and Signs.” I find it odd that they keep that title now, but I guess it's one of those New Yorker quirks.

At any rate, Gaitskell reads well, barring a couple of mispronunciations that momentarily bothered me: Bori-SOV-na for Bo-RIS-ovna (daughter of Boris, feminine equivalent of Borisovich) is understandable, but the spelling pronunciation of "victuals" makes me unreasonably annoyed (it's vittles, dammit!). And in the discussion they point out some interesting things, for instance that "beech plum" (as Nabokov writes it) is actually "beach" (OED cite: 1877 BARTLETT Dict. Amer. 550 Sand-Plum,.. a beach-plum. A plum growing on plum-trees whose habitat is sandy beaches)—although I find the suggestion that this has something to do with Buchenwald implausible (and that goes double for the suggestion that the "picture in a book" the son is afraid of is Breughel's "Triumph of Death"—one look at it makes it impossible to imagine its being called "an idyllic landscape").

While we're on the subject of Nabokov: as I've mentioned before, I'm rereading Evgenii Onegin and following along in his commentary, and concerning V:XVI:4 he writes "big funeral: Perhaps a recollection of the burial of Onegin's uncle... The allusion is to the noisy arval, the feast following the actual interment." I wrote Anatoly, to whom I frequently turn for help with Russian (and who has temporarily taken down his Live Journal, which I keep clicking on in hopes it's returned), "I can't find arval (I also tried orval) in any of my dictionaries, even Dahl, so I'm assuming it's a misprint, but I can't think for what. I know the word trizna for funeral feast, but that's not even close." Anatoly didn't know any Russian words that seemed relevant, but suggested I check my Webster's Third New International, saying "N. got a lot of his more obscure words out of his trusty M-W 2nd edition." It hadn't even occurred to me that it might be English, but sure enough, there it was:
arval also arvel n. [ME arvell, of Scand. origin; akin to ON. erfiöl, fr. erfi inheritance, funeral feast + öl ale, drinking bout, banquet; akin to ON. arfi inheritance] dial. Brit: a funeral feast
As I said in my response, "Damn that guy and his terminally obscure terms!"

WE GADARENES.

Tuesday was my birthday (I have as many years behind me now as Heinz has varieties), and my wife gave me, along with a gorgeous bluish-gray linen shirt, the Collected Poems of Richard Wilbur, one of my favorite living poets. I've only begun to explore it; I could quote what is still perhaps the poem of his I love best, "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World" ("Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry"), but I think instead I'll go with "Matthew VIII, 28 ff." (q.v.):

Rabbi, we Gadarenes
Are not ascetics; we are fond of wealth and possessions.
Love, as you call it, we obviate by means
Of the planned release of aggressions.

We have deep faith in prosperity.
Soon, it is hoped, we will reach our full potential.
In the light of our gross product, the practice of charity
Is palpably inessential.

It is true that we go insane;
That for no good reason we are possessed by devils;
That we suffer, despite the amenities which obtain
At all but the lowest levels.

We shall not, however, resign
Our trust in the high-heaped table and the full trough.
If you cannot cure us without destroying our swine,
We had rather you shoved off.

SHODDY.

An interesting post over at Derryl Murphy's blog asking about a Prince Georgian usage he's started hearing:

When the boys, or for that matter any kid here in town, wants to lay claim to something, they quickly shout out "I shoddy the last ginger ale!" or whatever it is they want to get.

Of course, a search of definitions comes up with the usual, and nothing else. ... And so I find myself wondering, is this a spontaneous creation, or has it arisen from somewhere else and are others seeing it as well?

So: anybody know anything? Derryl adds that "as best as I recall, this only came up over the past 6-12 months."

ANEGRE.

A wonderful NY Times story by Caroline H. Dworin describes the Putnam Rolling Ladder Company, its 80-year history and charmingly antiquated practices ("the hanging sign outside is now completely black, its letters faded off. It used to be attached to Putnam’s horse-drawn buggy, but having gotten rid of the actual buggy, Gregg says, the Monseeses used its sign for their store"). For a newspaper story, it's damn well written:

The silent third floor hides a deep forest of ladders, ladders leaning against one another, stacked 10 feet deep along each wall and stretching high in the air. There are dozens upon dozens of ladders, so many that there should be a collective noun for such things: a timber of ladders, a bosque.

By the fourth floor, a stillness begins to settle, a cold, uncanny hush. A hand dragged across the stairwell’s plaster here comes up dirt-black. The floor is a sea of cardboard barrels filled with fixtures, some a half-century old: nuts, bolts, braces, casters. When struck by the little light that makes it through the filthy windows, the contents of the newest barrels shine gold, and mountains of brass-plated ladder bolts twinkle like the treasure of some mechanically bent pirate king.

The fifth floor remains most desolate. For a person left alone here, the stone-cold quiet becomes vaguely terrifying. An employee once confided that by the time he reaches the fifth floor, he sometimes feels he must stop at the top of the stairs and call out. He has never heard anyone answer; it’s really just the comfort of his own voice.

And (I know you were waiting for me to get around to this) it uses a word that presents some linguistic interest: "A ladder usually costs $1,000 to $2,000, and it takes 8 to 10 weeks to make. But to accommodate patrons’ rarer requests for African mahogany, anegre or zebrawood, the Monseeses have a different time scale. Anegre, for instance, is a 'no time limit' wood." Naturally, I tried looking up anegre, but it wasn't in any of my dictionaries. So I turned to Google, and got a lot of hits from wood sites on the order of "Anegre hardwoods, Anegre wood supplier, wholesale Anegre, importers, distributors, buyers." But the fourth hit had the precious addition Aningeria superba, so I googled that and discovered common names are aningre and anigre, both of which get significantly more Google hits than anegre. My initial guess is that those are the earlier forms, and that anegre was created to avoid the possible unpleasantness associated with the -nig- form. But I'd love to hear from anyone who knows the history of this ligneous lexeme.