A post at separated by a common language (a blog focusing on differences between U.S. and U.K. English) points out that stemware, flatware, and silverware seem to be specifically American words, the cousins across the sea using wine glasses for the first and cutlery for the other two. To which my reaction was "I'll be darned." I presume silverware is at least occasionally used in the U.K. for items made of actual silver, but do non-Yanks find it odd that we refer to all the cheap metal stuff we cut our food with that way? (I must admit I myself have a hard time thinking of plastic knives and forks as "silverware," so apparently the prefix does carry residual weight in my Sprachgefühl.)
Addendum. Reading the comments, I realize I should have mentioned that although silverware is a perfectly ordinary word used by everyone, stemware and flatware are specialized words used in the trade but not by most speakers.
I didn't post yesterday because I was too wrapped up in creating a much expanded Wikipedia entry for Fyodor Sologub, a fine writer who is often ignored in literary histories, since he fell between stools: his major work was published after 1900, so he's not in histories of classic Russian literature; he was opposed to the Bolsheviks, so he was ignored by Soviet literary history (and by Western scholars who, shamefully, largely accepted Soviet valuations, though adding "dissident" writers); and he stayed in Russia, thus not benefiting from the recent upsurge in attention paid to the exiles. And for some reason he's ignored even in cultural histories like Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia
To provide a linguistic hook for this post: the name Sollogub is not in Unbegaun's magisterial Russian Surnames
Eugene Onegin, like most long works in the nineteenth century, came out in installments, and the seventh chapter did not get good reviews, even from some of the people who had been excited by the earlier ones. As J. Douglas Clayton writes in the first chapter ("The Repainted Icon: Criticism of Eugene Onegin" [pdf]) of his Ice and Flame: Aleksandr Pushkin's Eugene Onegin:
This wave [of praise] was to crest and break spectacularly with the appearance of Chapter Seven, which was greeted with a chorus of disappointed—or even malicious—criticism... The most severe blow was dealt Pushkin by F.V. Bulgarin in Severnaia pchela [the Northern Bee, a reactionary journal]. Bulgarin, whose 1826 review of Chapter Two had been tentative, but not negative, now launched a vitriolic attack upon Chapter Seven: 'This Chapter... is blotched with such verse, such tomfoolery that in comparison with it even Evgenii Vel'skii [a bad imitation] seems something like a business-like work. Not a single thought, not a single emotion, not a single scene worthy of attention! A complete fall, chute complete!'Pushkin, in his response, quoted Bulgarin's sarcastic verse summary of the chapter:
Ну как рассеять горе Тани?He then said: "Стихи эти очень хороши, но в них заключающаяся критика неосновательна. Самый ничтожный предмет может быть избран стихотворцем; критике нет нужды разбирать, что стихотворец описывает, но как описывает." ['These verses are very good, but the criticism they contain is unfounded. The most insignificant subject can be chosen by a poet; the critic's job is not to analyze what the poet describes, but how he describes it.'] This is of course unimpeachable, and to vindicate him against his impatient critics and what I called in an earlier Pushkin post "the kind of person who reads for plot" (and I warn anyone who agrees with a commenter on that post that "detailed analyses of language and translation that pore over each individual feature seem to excite more interest among the author than the reader" that the rest of this long post will consist of just such analysis), I will analyze a couple of stanzas from Chapter Seven (the linked web page has Russian and English en face). The unhappy Tatyana (Tanya for short) has, as Bulgarin says, been dragged off to Moscow by her family, and after a sardonic description of her older relatives we are introduced to the young cousins:
Вот как: посадят деву в сани
И повезут из милых мест
В Москву на ярманку невест!
Мать плачется, скучает дочка:
Конец седьмой главе — и точка!['Well, how to allay Tania's grief? Here's how: put the girl on a sleigh and ship her from her beloved places to the Moscow bride market. The mother weeps, the daughter is bored; the end of the seventh chapter: period!']
XLVI
Их дочки Таню обнимают.
Младые грации Москвы
Сначала молча озирают
Татьяну с ног до головы;
Ее находят что-то странной,
Провинциальной и жеманной,
И что-то бледной и худой,
А впрочем очень недурной;
Потом, покорствуя природе,
Дружатся с ней, к себе ведут,
Целуют, нежно руки жмут,
Взбивают кудри ей по моде
И поверяют нараспев
Сердечны тайны, тайны дев,
XLVII
Чужие и свои победы,
Надежды, шалости, мечты.
Текут невинные беседы
С прикрасой легкой клеветы.
Потом, в отплату лепетанья,
Ее сердечного признанья
Умильно требуют оне.
Но Таня, точно как во сне,
Их речи слышит без участья,
Не понимает ничего,
И тайну сердца своего,
Заветный клад и слез и счастья,
Хранит безмолвно между тем
И им не делится ни с кем.
XLVI
Their daughters embrace Tanya.
The young Graces of Moscow
at first silently observe
Tatyana from head to foot;
they find her somewhat strange,
provincial and affected,
and somewhat pale and thin,
but really, not bad at all.
Then, submitting to nature,
they make friends with her, lead [her] to their rooms,
kiss [her], tenderly press [her] hands,
fluff up her curls according to the fashion
and confide in singsong voices
their hearts' secrets, the secrets of maidens,
XVII
others' victories and their own,
hopes, mischief, and dreams.
Innocent chats flow,
with a light embellishment of slander.
Then, in repayment for [their] prattling,
her heart's confession
they ingratiatingly demand.
But Tanya, as if she were asleep,
hears their speeches without taking part,
doesn't understand a thing,
and the secret of her own heart,
a cherished/intimate/hidden treasure of tears and happiness,
she mutely preserves (meanwhile)
and shares it with no one.
(I've put "meanwhile" in parentheses because, while that's the literal translation of "между тем," the latter phrase is often used so vaguely as not to be worth translating, and this is one of those times.)
In these two stanzas, Pushkin sums up what could be the burden of several chapters of a Jane Austen novel. The novelistic aspect is heightened by running them together, the end of the first and the beginning of the second constituting a single sentence—rare in Onegin, where each stanza is usually a separate entity. The first starts off with a short and simple sentence, taking up a single line. Then comes a single clause running smoothly over three lines, followed by a semicolon and another clause, broken into slightly awkward phrases ("somewhat strange... somewhat pale and thin...") and ending with the emphatic summing-up "А впрочем очень недурной" [A vprochem ochen' nedurnói], which is hard to translate: the first two words are subtle contrastives, the third means "very," the last can mean either "not bad" or "not bad-looking." Then we get the first of the lines that made me sit up and take notice as I read along: "Потом, покорствуя природе" [Potóm, pokórstvuya prirode, 'Then, submitting to nature']. It was not the (perfectly banal) meaning that startled me, but the music, like a horn-call compelling one's attention, with its interplay of p and r and t and o. Pushkin is saying "Listen to this, it's important." This is the start of the eight-line sentence that spans the stanzas, brilliantly varied in its rhythm (Дружатся с ней, к себе ведут,/ Целуют, нежно руки жмут,/ Взбивают кудри ей по моде [Druzhatsya s nei, k sebé vedút,/ Tseluyut, nezhno ruki zhmut,/ Vzbivayut kudri ei po mode]) and ending with one of Pushkin's characteristic cadences, the line made up of three parallel nouns (Надежды, шалости, мечты [nadezhdy, shálosti, mechtý] 'hopes, pranks, dreams'). After a two-line followup, there comes another horn-call, beginning with the same word as the first: "Потом, в отплату лепетанья" [Potóm, v otplatu lepetan'ya, 'Then, in repayment for [their] prattling']. Here we get more play with p and t, but l takes the place of r and a of o (the unstressed o- at the start of otplatu is pronounced a-). We have had the thesis (or, if you prefer musical analogies, the first theme in the tonic key), the babbling of the lighthearted cousins; now we get the antithesis (or contrasting theme in the dominant), Tatyana's resistance and silence. In response to innocent chatting and ingratiating demands, relentless negativity: she "hears their speeches without taking part, understands nothing," and shares her secret "with no one."
The key in this last section is the word заветный [zavetnyi], one of a knot of Russian words that share a root related to Old Church Slavic вѣщати [věshchati] 'to speak' and вѣтъ [větŭ] 'council': ответ [otvét] 'answer,' привет [privét] 'greeting,' совет [sovét] 'council; advice,' обет [obét] 'vow,' and завет [zavét] 'behest, ordinance; precept,' originally also 'will, testament; vow; condition.' Our заветный is the adjective based on the last, and it originally meant 'preserved or transmitted in accordance with a testament or a solemn vow'; the entire range of its current meanings, 'cherished; intimate; hidden, secret,' is involved here, and it's one of those words that can't be satisfactorily translated. But its force, and the force of the powerful last half-stanza, both emotional and poetic (note especially the last line with its five monosyllables, i im ne délitsya ni s kem—very unusual in Russian verse), carries us and Tatyana through the ensuing round of tiresome social events, culminating with her being noticed by the "fat general" (not "old," pace various translators and operatic productions!) who will marry her and (re)introduce her to our antihero in the next (and last) chapter.
But yes, she goes to Moscow, to the bride market. Nothing else happens in the chapter, if you're reading for plot.
The Anglo-Norman Dictionary was announced in the late 1940s and began publishing in 1979, the last fascicle coming out in 1994; Glanville Price in his review for The Modern Language Review said it "is likely to have a major impact on our understanding of the lexical history both of French and of English." Now the whole thing is online; like the OED, they're updating letters as they go, starting with F. "In December 2006 and September 2007, these were joined by the entries for AND2 letters G and H respectively. AND2 letters I to M will follow during the period 2008-12. These AND2 entries from letter F onwards have not been published in print (nor are there at present any plans to do so) and can be consulted only on this site." There's a brief introduction to the language ("Anglo-Norman is the name conventionally given to the variety of French which arrived in England with the Norman conquest in 1066. Possibly it is something of a misnomer..."); the main Introduction has a long and detailed discussion of the history of the language and changing perceptions of it, and describes the impact the availability of the lexical material can have on English lexicography:
In the authoritative dictionaries of English, even in cases where the contribution of French to the lexis of modern English has been recognised, any mention of a French etymology for a word usually refers to the continental variety. The proportion of words said to derive from Anglo-French has up to the present been very small. Now that the new Anglo-Norman Dictionary is becoming not only available, but its contents electronically searchable on-line, many of the current etymologies given in the dictionaries of English will need to be altered to show a derivation from insular French. This is more than merely a change of label: it means that the Anglicist will be able to follow the history of many English words through the French used on both sides of the Channel and note any changes of meaning that came about in the process. It will be possible to show either a semantic continuity or a semantic divergence.A necessary caveat reminds us of an important difference from the OED:
Readers are nevertheless reminded that AND is not a historical or etymological dictionary. No systematic attempt has been made to supply a chronological account of vocabulary or of semantic developments; an attestation which occupies first place in an entry may well not be the chronologically oldest attestation, which will not always be included at all; and words or meanings may in fact have survived in use later than the quotations in the Dictionary could suggest. The Dictionary’s entries are semantically, not historically structured, and whilst the one might in theory coincide with the other, this will not always be so. Moreover, the range of attestations available to the editors does not of course always allow a complete historical account even had it been our intention to supply it. Caveat lector: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.I found this extremely useful resource via Wordorigins.org.
A Wordorigins.org thread started by aldiboronti asked about a line from a book that puzzled him: "I don’t care if school keeps or not." It turns out it's an old Americanism I was unfamiliar with:
keep, v.Another commenter says it seems to exist now mainly "in a set phrase… 'I don’t care if school keeps or not', 'I don’t give a damn if school keeps or not', 'whether school keeps or not' etc. which is used in situations where no actual school is involved to mean something like 'come hell or high water'." Does anyone out there know/use this phrase? If so, where are you from?38. b. Of a school: to be held. U.S.
1845 Knickerbocker XXVI. 277 One afternoon, when 'school didn’t keep', some one got into the house. 1867 'T. LACKLAND' Homespun I. 123 The District School has not 'kept' since the week began. 1908 M. E. FREEMAN Shoulders of Atlas 68 School ain’t going to keep today.
Every once in a while I get an e-mail from a publisher asking if I'm interested in a copy of a book (obviously hoping I'll write about it); I usually say "thanks, but no thanks," because the books are often not that interesting to me and I have plenty to read already. But when a marketing person from Spiegel & Grau asked me if I'd like a copy of One More Year
I'm happy to report that the book is everything I hoped for. Krasikov (she was born in Ukraine and grew up in Georgia) has the essential gift of her calling: she tells compelling stories about people who seem as real as the ones you see on the street. Her prose is efficient and graceful, and—what is much rarer—she sees people with a moral clarity that makes no excuses and passes no judgments. In that she reminds me of Chekhov, and in many ways she fits into the Russian tradition, with its emphasis on the elements in life beyond the daily grind. There's plenty of daily grind here—her characters inhabit unfashionable neighborhoods and have shaky living arrangements, often made shakier by their own bad decisions—but the overriding question they keep implicitly asking, and making us ask, is "What is important in life?" Specifically, how can our need for love be woven into the fabric of the rest of our life without tearing it apart? Whether the stories are set in New York, Moscow, or Tashkent (each vividly realized), these questions create a pressure that impels the narrative and lend a grandeur to even the most regrettable folly.
On a lower level, but still impressive in these slapdash days, the book is impeccably produced (the only error I noticed was "Boystovskaya" Street for Boytsovaya on p. 181, and I don't know if that's a misprint or a mistake that got into the manuscript somehow), and the fact that the author's English is not native is rarely apparent (from the same page: "those absconding the homeland"). Also impressive, in terms of pure synchronicity, is the fact that Krasikov managed to touch on two issues that have recently hit the headlines. From "Maya in Yonkers," in a passage describing a smuggling route from Russia to Georgia: "Another $200 for a driver to take the crate across the mountains to South Ossetia, where Luisa's husband would pick it up and bring it to Dusheti." And from "The Repatriates" (which appeared in The New Yorker earlier this year), this passage on the activities of one of the titular characters gave me a chill:
He was staying in Moscow to look for financiers for a business idea that would do for the Russian market what mortgage traders had done on Wall Street since the eighties: pool and repackage loans for investors in one massive turbine of debt and capital. He would build not only wealth for himself but a better life for the doctors and schoolteachers in distant provinces, still living in run-down, vermin-infested apartments and dreaming of raising their kids in solid houses, if only Russia could grow a robust mortgage industry.That's what I call having your finger on the Zeitgeist.
This is a blatant publicity stunt, but what the hell, it's the kind of publicity stunt I can get behind. Jack Malvern, in The Times, reports:
Dictionary compilers at Collins have decided that the word list for the forthcoming edition of its largest volume is embrangled with words so obscure that they are linguistic recrement. Such words, they say, must be exuviated abstergently to make room for modern additions that will act as a roborant for the book.Needless to say, the bolded words are among the candidates for deletion; the full list, with definitions, is at the bottom of the linked article. As I said on MetaFilter, where I found the link, "I'm really surprised apodeictic and mansuetude are on the list; I've seen both of them used often enough I would have thought they'd be uncontroversial inclusions." But, as I also said, it's all in the OED anyway, so who cares whether Collins includes it?Readers who vilipend the compilers’ decision and vaticinate that society will be poorer without little-used words have been offered a chance to save them from the endangered list. Collins, which is owned by News Corporation, parent company of The Times, has agreed that words will be granted a reprieve if evidence of their popularity emerges before February, when the word list is finalised.
Australian poet Peter Nicholson sent me a link to Blesok, a bilingual online literary magazine from Macedonia (I assume the title is the Macedonian equivalent of Serbo-Croatian bl(ij)esak 'flash of light'); if you click on the македонски link at the upper right, you get the journal in Macedonian. And among the many writings on his site I found a reference to Gwen Harwood, of whom, despite the fact that (according to Wikipedia) she "is regarded as one of Australia's finest poets" and "her work is commonly studied in schools and university courses," with typical Yank ignorance of the Australian poetic scene I knew nothing. There doesn't seem to be much by her online, but I found "Barn Owl," which I like a lot:
Daybreak: the household slept.Its music reminds me of Theodore Roethke, a poet I've never lost my fondness for. (Compare the start of Roethke's "The Voice": "One feather is a bird,/ I claim, one tree, a wood;/ In her low voice I heard/ More than a mortal should;/ And so I stood apart,/ Hidden in my own heart.")
I rose, blessed by the sun.
A horny fiend, I crept
out with my father's gun.
Let him dream of a child
obedient, angel-mind-old no-sayer, robbed of power
by sleep. I knew my prize
who swooped home at this hour
with day-light riddled eyes
to his place on a high beam
in our old stables, to dreamlight's useless time away...
To quote the MetaFilter post from which I got the link, "56 years ago today, Rabbit Seasoning hit movie theaters for the first time. This cartoon classic is the work of Mike Maltese (whose centennial birthday was celebrated earlier this year) a cartoon writer whose work is arguably far more well known than his name..." The MeFi post links other great Maltese collaborations with Chuck Jones; I'm posting this one because of its linguistic interest, exemplified by the quote I've used as a post title.
Oh hell, who am I kidding, I'm posting it because it's a hilarious cartoon classic I wanted to share, but at least the pronoun angle gives me cover when the Relevance Police come to call.
In googling around to try to satisfy Christopher Culver's curiosity about the "two antiquated dictionaries" that are all you can usually find for sale in Russia ("The first is by one V. K. Müller, the second by one M.A. O’Bri[e]n. I’ve had the darndest time finding out when either of these was first published, since the reprintings themselves never tell."), I ran across this interesting page by a Russian listing his favorite dictionaries; he starts off with a hearty recommendation (which I heartily second) for Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, and after discussing a few other English dictionaries he moves on to Russian ones (both mono- and bilingual), including some I wasn't aware of.
Incidentally, the earliest edition I can find of the Müller is from 1930 (it's mentioned in the linked Russian page), and of the O'Brien from 1931, though I can't tell if either is the first edition. And, as I said in my comment at Culver's site, nobody seems to know who O'Brien was: "they just give initials and 'fl. 1930-' (no birth date). Another lexicographical mystery!"
Everyone knows about Anne Boleyn, one of Henry VIII's unfortunate wives, and the more persnickety among us know that her surname is properly pronounced Bullen, but I did not know until today that it is from the name of the French city Boulogne. As the Surname Database puts it:
Boulogne has long been a major trading port between England and France, and has supplied many of its citizens to Britain, although in so doing the name spelling has received some considerable transposition in most cases. ... There are estimated to be literally hundreds of 'English' spellings of this famous name and these include Bullen, Bulleyn, Bullion, Bullon, Bullin, Boleyn, Bollen, Boullin, Boullen, Bullan, Bullant, Bullene and Bullent. Early examples of recordings include the marriage of Thomas Bullen and Hanna Prince on February 2nd 1626, at St. Dunstan's, Stepney, and that of John Boleyn who appears in the Hearth Tax rolls of Suffolk in 1524. The first recorded spelling of the family name is shown to be that of Helias de Bolonia, which was dated 1121 - 1148, in "Feudal Documents from the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds", Suffolk.I like the traditional English pronunciations of foreign places, LYE-unz for Lyon and MYE-lun for Milan and Callus for Calais, but nowadays they survive only in the names of backwater American towns; I suppose one day people will feel obliged to say pah-REE for Paris, and I will grumble and shake my cane. (Via aldiboronti at Wordorigins.org.)
Like Ben Zimmer, I've complained more than once (e.g., here) about the glaring deficiencies of Google Books; now I learn from his latest post at the Log that
...the Hathi Trust has been established by the thirteen university libraries that make up the Committee on Institutional Cooperation. This includes the University of Michigan, which has contributed a major portion of Google's scanned material thus far. The Hathi Trust is not nearly as wary as Google in providing page images and fully searchable text for public domain materials. What this means is that if you find something on GBS that only gives you "snippet view," "limited preview," or "no preview available," you may be able to find the full page images by going to a CIC library site. The University of Michigan has already implemented this as part of its Mirlyn Library Catalog, with links to public domain material provided under the name "HathiTrust Digital Library." (Roy Tennant of Library Journal has also mocked up a prototype search service, but it still needs some work.)Go to his post for an example of how he used Hathi to antedate "an old bit of British comedy"; frankly, I'm very disappointed that Google has shown so little interest in remedying the problems with its book search, but it's great that the Hathi Trust is doing so.
I imagine many of you have heard of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, the glories of medieval Welsh prose; they've been famous in English since Lady Charlotte Guest's translation (1838-1849). I read the first branch, Pwyll Pendeuic Dyuet ('Pwyll Prince of Dyfed'), in my Middle Welsh class in grad school, and the first line ("Pwyll Pendeuic Dyuet a oed yn arglwyd ar seith cantref Dyuet" [PPD was the lord of the seven cantrefs of Dyfed]) is embedded almost as deep in my brain as "asid raja Nalo nama" ('there was a king named Nala,' the opening of the Nala and Damayanti story from the Mahabharata, the first thing Sanskrit students read in my day).
Well, it turns out there's a fifth branch! The discovery of a medieval Welsh manuscript might not mean much to the man on the Clapham omnibus, but it's pretty damned surprising to me, and in this wonderful era of the internet it's online. I quote from its editor, Mark Williams:
The Four Branches of the Mabinogi – Pwyll, Branwen, Manawydan and Math - are the greatest works of medieval Welsh prose. They are based on a rich vein of orally-transmitted folklore and mythological material, but were synthesised in the early 12th century by a redactor of genius. They take the form of four roughly chronological and interlinked short-stories, termed ‘branches’, which are set in a pre-Christian, pre-Roman Britain which resembles an idealised version of the redactor’s own high medieval era. His humane, sober style contrasts fascinatingly with the violence and shape-shifting which loom so large in the four tales...I can't tell you how much I'd love to read a Welsh account of Boudica's sack of Rome; in its absence, this will do nicely, and the first line of the text gave me a thrill of recognition: "Amathaon uab Don a oed arglwyd ar y seith cantref Dyuet..." Thanks for the link, Trevor!But the existence of the ‘fifth branch of the Mabinogi’, Amaethon uab Don, was unsuspected until very recently, when a hitherto-unknown medieval Welsh manuscript was discovered in the library of Judas College, Oxford... It seems very likely that the tale is the work of the same redactor or author who penned the familiar Four Branches of the Mabinogi, or at least of a close associate. The language does not seem to be any earlier or later than the PKM, and the existence of numerous verbal echoes and parallels of incident suggests that Amaethon uab Don is the final part of the Mabinogi as a consciously-composed and unitary work dating to the end of the 11th or early 12th century...
As with the other branches, fragments of lore and onomastic tales are woven into the texture of the narrative. Indeed Amaethon furnishes us with two hitherto-unknown triads – the ‘Three Unfrequented Graves’ and the ‘Three Chief Warrior-Women of the Island of Britain’. The last of these is a remarkable piece of evidence that Buddug/Byddug (Boudica) was the subject of a body of Welsh narrative tradition, in which she sacked Rome (!) in revenge for Julius Caesar’s abduction of Fflur from Caswallawn fab Beli. Similarly unexpected is the occurrence of a teichoscopia, a topos of heroic narratives throughout the Indo-European world, in which the heroes of an opposing army are pointed out one by one from the walls or ramparts of a besieged city. Examples occur in the Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge, the Iliad, and the Ramayana, and with our text a further Celtic instance of the topos can be added to this distinguished list of epic comparanda.
Addendum. As Daniel Nolan says in the comments:
"Judas College" is a famous, but entirely fictional, Oxford college - made famous by Beerbohm's comic masterpiece Zuleika Dobson. This "fifth branch" is presumably then not a medieval survival - it's an apparently very entertaining piece written in the style of the Mabinogi, probably by its "editor" Mark Williams. So lots of kudos to Williams for a fun document, but let's not rewrite our understanding of medieval Welsh prose just yet.
Most language-related internet fads I'm not crazy about. I can't stand smileys and their relations; some of the abbreviations (e.g., WTF) are efficient and useful, even if they don't inspire enthusiasm; catchphrases (All Your Base) quickly wear out their welcome. But there's one recent innovation (at least, I think it's recent—see below) that I absolutely love. For, oh, the past year or so I've been noticing, and when appropriate using, a delightful... what to call it? It's not an exclamation, because it's determinedly low-key; it's not really an interjection, because it's not interjected, it's a standalone response. And I wasn't sure how to find an example, because it's impossible to search for (see below). But I trusted to serendipity, which rarely fails me, and sure enough fate provided one. My wife and I were listening to This American Life, and the second part of the episode involved the insufficient response of the chairman of the SEC to the current financial meltdown (which is an odd subject for TAL, but never mind that). The host, Ira Glass, started out by explaining the recondite (to most of us) concept of the naked short. Short selling is a familiar enough concept if you know anything about the stock market; you think a stock is going to go down, so you borrow a bunch of shares, sell them, then buy them back (at a lower price, if you've guessed correctly) just before you have to return them, having made a bundle. Naked short selling, Ira said, is just the same, except you don't borrow the stocks first. To which I could think of only one response:
what
This is not a "What!" of outrage, or a "What?" of inquiry. Unlike those standard forms, it does not represent a spoken version; it is a purely written (and, so far as I know, online) phenomenon. It uses and distorts the conventions of writing to produce the equivalent of a slack-jawed stare of bafflement; it is always written just as it is above, lower-case, no punctuation, on a line of its own. It is a response to something so out of left field, so incomprehensible, that nothing coherent can be said about it. I find it hilarious and addictive, and I am not the only one. I would love to know where it came from and when it was created and by whom.
But how can you investigate it? It's one of the commonest words in English, there's no distinctive context, and there's no way to search for its features (as far as I know). If lexical invention were against the law, this would be the perfect crime; like an ice dagger that melts in the victim's body, it leaves nothing for the detective to work with. I leave it as a challenge for the clever folks at the Log; if anyone can figure out a way to get a handle on it, they can.
A correspondent reminded me of a site I keep running across but for some reason have never blogged about: the Medieval Names Archive. The first line on the main page is "This collection of articles on medieval and renaissance names is intended to help historical re-creators to choose authentic names," and if you think that portends some sort of amateurish silliness on a par with "what to name your baby" sites, you don't know historical re-creators. These people take accuracy with a seriousness that would shame a nineteenth-century German philologist, and the essays collected on the site have a level of detail that will sate all but the thirstiest seeker after onomastic information. Under the rubric "What's New" we find, inter alia: Place-Names in Landnámabók, Basque Onomastics of the Eighth to Sixteenth Centuries, Jewish Names in Ottoman Court Records, and Greek Names with Scytho-Sarmatian Roots. Then comes a little essay on "Choosing a Medieval Name":
...Few history books reproduce names in the exact forms that were recorded in period documents. Most of the names are modernized and anglicized, both in spelling and form. Depending on just how authentic you want your name to be, you may or may not decide to worry about these details; this collection of articles assumes that you want your name to be as authentic as possible.And below that is the meat of the site, Personal Names in Specific Cultures. You can find out more than you ever thought you'd want to know about English, Old English, and Anglo-Norman Names; Scandinavian Names; Names from the Low Countries; Frankish and French Names; Welsh, Cornish, and Breton Names; Classical and Byzantine Greek Names; Slavic and Baltic Names; and many more. Just to give a sample from the Slavic section, there are essays on "Grammar of Period Russian Names" (followed by "A Dictionary of Period Russian Names"), "A Chicken Is Not A Bird: Feminine Personal Names in Medieval Russia," "Locative Bynames in Medieval Russia," "Occupational Bynames in Medieval Russia," and "Russian Personal Names: Name Frequency in the Novgorod Birch-Bark Letters," among others. You see the wide coverage, and if you visit the essays you'll see the depth. It's a mind-boggling resource. Thanks for the reminder, Trevor!It's also easy to get led astray by bad sources. There are a lot of books and lists of names that are useless, misleading, or erroneous. We've put together some guidelines to help you identify good sources...
Some names that many people think of as common to the Middle Ages or Renaissance are either purely modern or otherwise problematic. For example, some names which were used in one medieval culture are now mistakenly believed to have been used in others. Other medieval names are mispronounced, or thought to be feminine names when they were only masculine...
I just heard Maurice Sendak interviewed on Fresh Air (the occasion being a celebration of his 80th birthday); everything he said was interesting, but one thing that particularly got my attention was a poem he was talking about. I had missed the lead-in, so I assumed it was a contemporary riff on the nursery-rhyme form, because it sounded so strange and morbid:
We are all in the dumpsBut no, it turns out it's a genuine nursery rhyme (I'm sure some of my readers are shaking their heads and saying "What, you don't know it?!"), and Sendak combined it with an equally strange one ("Jack and Guy/ Went out in the rye/ And they found a little boy/ With one black eye...") to produce what is apparently his least popular book, We're All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy, described (with an illustration) in this post by Max Sparber, who makes it sound so strange and nightmarish I really want to see the whole thing.
For diamonds are trumps
The kittens have gone to St. Paul's!
The baby is bit
The moon's in a fit
And the houses are built
Without walls.
A reader who apparently felt my blood pressure needed raising sent me a link to this egregious piece of idiocy by The Washington Post's reviewer Jonathan Yardley, who has apparently carried around a battered first edition of The Elements of Style since 1959 and uses it to attack writers for what he calls "sloppy habits" but what the rest of us consider normal use of the English language. A devotion to Strunk & White is a sure sign of proud ignorance; I lambasted it a few years ago, quoting the wonderful Jan Freeman in extenso (take that, Yardley and your Strunkian "Avoid foreign languages"!), and I am pleased to be able to refer to her again on this occasion, since she has written a response called "Return of the living dead" that explains a few of the problems with both the "little book" and Yardley's misunderstandings, ending up by saying, quite correctly, that "treating Elements as a bible of good usage is literally laughable." And since laughter is the best medicine, I will try to laugh rather than rend my hair the next time I encounter a paean to the malign little compendium of bad advice.
Thanks to a question at AskMetaFilter, I learned something I should have known years ago: the ISO country code for South Africa is .za because it's from the Dutch Zuid-Afrika. The Wikipedia entry explains:
This is a legacy of when Dutch was an official language in South Africa, before being replaced by Afrikaans, in which the name of the country is Suid-Afrika. Afrikaans joined English and Dutch as an official language of the South Africa in 1925, and in the South African Constitution of 1961 Dutch was removed as an official language altogether, decades before .za was introduced. However, the .sa domain is used by Saudi Arabia and ZAR is also the ISO 4217 currency code for the South African Rand.I had vaguely assumed it was based on some name comparable to Zaire and Zambia.
This is probably one of those things I once knew but then forgot: porter "A dark-brown or black bitter beer, brewed from malt partly charred or browned by drying at a high temperature" is (according to the OED) "App[arently] short for porter's ale ... The beer was app. orig. either made for or chiefly drunk by porters and the lower class of labourers: compare the early quots. It probably arose as a popular descriptive term." The first cite for porter's ale is from Pope, A Further Account of the most Deplorable Condition of Mr. Edmund Curll (1716): "Nurs'd upon Grey Peas, Bullocks Liver, and Porter's Ale"; that for porter just five years later, from Nicholas Amherst's Terræ filius: or the secret history of the university of Oxford 1721–22 (27-30 May 1721): "We had rather dine at a Cook's Shop upon Beef, Cabbage and Porter, than tug at an Oar, or rot in a dark, stinking Dungeon."
I decided to see if I could find Pope's A Further Account online, and sure enough, Google Books has it, so I am able to provide a fuller context for the citation. Pope is mocking the unfortunate Mr. Curll, to whom he has administered an emetic in revenge for behavior that displeased him, and he imagines Curll as saying:
Now G―d damn all folios, quartos, octavos, and duodecimos! ungrateful varlets that you are, who have so long taken up my house without paying for your lodging! Are you not the beggarly brood of fumbling journeymen! born in garrets among lice and cobwebs, nursed up on grey peas, bullocks liver, and porters ale?――Was not the first light you saw, the farthing candle I paid for? Did you not come before your time into dirty sheets of brown paper?――And have not I clothed you in double royal, lodged you handsomely on decent shelves, laced your backs with gold, equipped you with splendid titles, and sent you into the world with the names of persons of quality? Must I be always plagued with you? Why flutter ye your leaves and flap your covers at me? Damn ye all, ye wolves in sheep's clothing; rags ye were, and to rags ye shall return.Pope had an impressive facility with invective, and you didn't want to get on his bad side if you could help it.
A half-minute snippet of Samuel Beckett talking about the German television production of What Where is a precious document, since he never wanted to be recorded. Trevor, who sent it to me (many thanks!), says what surprised him is Beckett's rural Irish accent. How I'd love to have a recording of him reading one of his monodramas!
I am a great collector of something for which English, very oddly, does not seem to have a name: the Spanish word gentilicio is defined in my Oxford Spanish Dictionary as "name given to the people from a particular region or country," and English has as wide a variety as any other language, distributed with an illogic and inconsistency that delight me. Thanks to Mark Liberman's latest post at the Log, citing John Wells’s phonetic blog (which looks quite interesting), I've discovered one of the best ones ever: Kittitian, a person from St. Kitts. Wells asks himself why the name, and answers "I don’t know, and I suspect the OED doesn’t really know either, though it suggests that Kittitian is modelled on Haitian. (But Kitts : Kittitian is not really like Haiti : Haitian.)" The superb Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage
In case you were under the delusion that the world of literary publishing was infinitely better back in the day, here's a mortifying reminiscence by the legendary editor Robert Giroux, who died Friday. Giroux has promised J.D. Salinger he (that is to say his employer at the time, Harcourt, Brace) would publish Salinger's first novel:
A year later a messenger came to the office with a package from Dorothy Olding, Salinger’s agent. ... There on the top page I read the title: “The Catcher in the Rye.” ...The book was published by Little, Brown in 1951 and went on to have a certain success.I gave [my boss at Harcourt, Eugene Reynal] the book to read. He didn’t like it, didn’t understand it. He asked me, “Is this kid in the book supposed to be crazy?” ...“Gene,” I said, “I’ve shaken hands with this author. I agreed to publish this book.”
“Yes,” he said, “but, Bob, you’ve got to remember, we have a textbook department.” And I said, “What’s that got to do with it?” He said, “This is a book about a kid going to prep school.” So he sent it to the textbook people, who read it and said, “It’s not for us.” ...
I remember apologizing to Salinger. He said, “Ah, it’s O.K. I expect things like that. It happens.” Well, I never thought it would happen to me.
A fun fact I learned today from the radio show Says You!: the word bugle originally meant 'buffalo' (and is from Latin būculus, dim. of bos 'ox'); the name of the musical instrument is shortened from bugle-horn "A hunting-horn, originally made of the horn of a ‘bugle’ or wild ox." (Oddly, both the original and the transferred sense are first attested in the same work, the circa-1300 King Alisaunder: line 5112 has "A thousand bugles of Ynde" and line 5282 "Tweye bugle hornes, and a bowe also." The shortened form shows up not much later: c1340 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight 1136 "With bugle to bent felde he buskez.")
An amusing little YouTube video of a 9-year-old Japanese kid imitating English. Thanks, Nick!
John McWhorter in The New Republic has a typically thoughtful and interesting discussion of "Why political oratory sounds so weird." He starts off:
If Abraham Lincoln were brought back to life, one thing that would throw him, other than electric power and the Internet, would be that audiences disrupted his speeches by clapping after every three or four lines. As ordinary as this seems now, this kind of applause is actually a custom of our times: Wesleyan political scientist Elvin Lim has documented that, in records of presidential addresses since Franklin D. Roosevelt, 97 percent of the applause lines appear in speeches by Richard Nixon and his successors. To speakers in Lincoln's day, a public address was typically a lecture. In our time, it is more often a love-in, more about the speaker "connecting" with the audience than teaching it anything new; hence the constant interruptions for clapping.Not that surprising, but not something that would necessarily occur to us if it weren't pointed out. And McWhorter being the old-fashioned kind of linguist who actually studies other languages, he makes his point with nice exotic examples:
Oratorical drama is a cultural universal. Even in indigenous tribes, the kind of language used when speaking before large groups is different from casual speech. Among the Cuna of Panama, when a chief gives an address, he deliberately uses archaic grammar full of sounds and suffixes long obsolete in everyday speech. "God left behind wild boar strongholds" is Pap yannu kalukan urpis if you are saying it to a friend, but in a speech comes out festooned with antique bric-a-brac: Pap-a yannu kalukan-a urpis-aye—rather like Americans giving speeches in the English of Chaucer.He goes on to Woodrow Wilson, Aristotle, Barbara Jordan, Charles Eaton ("Yesterday, against the roar of Japanese cannon in Hawaii, our American people heard a trumpet call; a call to unity; a call to courage; a call to determination..."), and of course the current sound-bite masters of the political arena (who, if you ask me, should talk more about wild boar strongholds). Thanks, Kári!One purpose of this kind of artifice is holding the audience's attention. Human speech is fundamentally a social activity that occurs in the form of conversation. Sitting in silence listening to others talk at length is a secondary and learned activity—think of the noisy Elizabethan audiences at the Globe Theatre. The Cuna even assign a custodial figure to say "Don't sleep!" (Kapita marye!) at regular intervals during public addresses. In addition to using such blunt instruments, orators worldwide hold the floor through the novelty of vocabulary and grammar that is conspicuously formal.
I keep forgetting to post the NY Times obit (by Bruce Weber) of lexicographer Laurence Urdang. He was the managing editor of the first edition of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, which is the first dictionary I remember being awestruck by (I had not yet experienced the glory that is the OED): it was huge and readable and had great etymologies. He was also the founding editor of Verbatim, a quarterly newsletter on language that I had the pleasure of copyediting for a while. And he was a man after my own heart:
Mr. Urdang graduated from Columbia and did graduate work there in linguistics, studying Russian, German, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and Polish. He was a lecturer in linguistics at New York University from 1956 to 1961, and his first job in publishing was as an associate editor in the dictionary department at Funk & Wagnalls. He never did complete a graduate degree, however, stopping short of his dissertation.I hereby proclaim Languagehat my dissertation. (You can read Ben Zimmer's remembrance of Urdang here.)“He always said he considered the Random House dictionary his dissertation,” Nicole Urdang said.
The obit ends with this quote from his introduction to one of his books, which makes for a nice impromptu vocabulary test: "This is not a succedaneum for satisfying the nympholepsy of nullifidians. Rather it is hoped that the haecceity of this enchiridion of arcane and recondite sesquipedalian items will appeal to the oniomania of an eximious Gemeinschaft whose legerity and sophrosyne, whose Sprachgefühl and orexis will find more than fugacious fulfillment among its felicific pages."
Having finished the first major section of War and Peace, ending with the Battle of Austerlitz in November/December 1805 (the novel was originally going to be called The Year 1805), I am once more struck with what a good writer Tolstoy was. (I know, who'd have thought?) Before I read his account of the battle, I worked my way through Robert Goetz's 1805: Austerlitz: Napoleon and the Destruction of the Third Coalition, and having done so, I wondered how Tolstoy was going to handle it. The battle was a complicated one; the French and Allied forces were drawn up facing each other in roughly north-south lines between Brünn (Brno) and Austerlitz, the initial strategies didn't work out (the Allies planned to turn the French right and cut them off from Vienna, Napoleon intended to turn the Allied right and drive them into the lakes and swamps to the south), and the fighting went back and forth over widely separated patches of territory before the Allies were definitively routed. Goetz took hundreds of pages to describe it, and a novelist could easily do the same, but Tolstoy disposed of it in a little over twenty pages in my Russian edition. Furthermore, a good bit of that is preparation and aftermath; the battle proper takes up only ten pages, a little over two chapters. Here's how he does it.
Chapter XVI describes the first, shocking view of the French, appearing out of the morning fog within a few hundred paces of the Allied troops near the village of Pratzen; the panicked flight of the troops, followed by Kutuzov's anguished plea for someone to stop them; and Prince Andrei's heroic attempt to do so, seizing the fallen regimental standard and advancing with it, only to be shot. The chapter ends with one of the most famous passages in the novel, Andrei's thoughts as he lies on his back looking up at the "quiet, peaceful, and solemn" sky and rejoicing in having seen it at last: "Everything is empty, everything is deception, except that infinite sky." Chapter XVII opens with young Rostov, on the right (northern) flank commanded by the unenthusiastic Bagration, being given a message for either Emperor Alexander or General Kutuzov asking for instructions: "Bagration knew that because of the distance of almost ten versts between the two flanks, even if they didn't kill the messenger (which was very likely), and even if he found the commander in chief, which would be very difficult, he would not be able to get back before evening." Rostov rides off with his heart "full of joy and happiness"; in a few brilliant paragraphs, Tolstoy shows him—and us—clouds of cannon smoke covering incomprehensible movements of indistinguishable troops, some uhlans returning from the action, some Horse Guards galloping towards it (Rostov has to brandish his whip at one of them to keep from being ridden down), and some excited friends of his who detain him and want to tell him about their experiences, before he hears "musket fire quite close in front of him and behind our troops, where he could never have expected the enemy to be," and realizes things are going very wrong; the chapter ends: "The idea of defeat and flight could not enter Rostov's head. Though he saw French cannon and troops right on the Pratzen Heights, on the very spot where he had been ordered to look for the commander in chief, he could not and did not want to believe it." At the start of the next chapter, he rides endlessly through the crowds, unable to find anyone who can tell him what's going on; he grabs a soldier and asks "Where is the Emperor? Where is Kutuzov?": "'Eh, brother! They've all bolted long ago!' said the soldier, laughing for some reason and shaking himself free." And that's basically that; he eventually finds his beloved emperor sitting alone in an empty field and is unable even to approach and deliver his message, which he realizes is now useless—the battle is lost.
The key sentence comes in Chapter XVII, after Rostov decides reluctantly he'd better continue trying to deliver the message rather than join the dashing Horse Guards in their assault on the French: Ростову страшно было слышать потом, что из всей этой массы огромных красавцев людей, из всех этих блестящих, на тысячных лошадях, богачей, юношей, офицеров и юнкеров, проскакавших мимо его, после атаки осталось только осьмнадцать человек. ['It was terrible for Rostov to hear later that of all that mass of huge and handsome people, of all those brilliant, rich men on their thousand-ruble horses, youths, officers and cadets, who had galloped past him, after the attack only eighteen were left.'] It's a similar effect to the one I discussed here, but more compressed and brutal. Once we've seen the sudden appearance of the French where they were least expected and experienced the shock produced, and assimilated that brief foretelling of massacre, we know all we need to know about the battle.
Incidentally, I have to thank commenter "Gosaca Menacle" (a nice Jimmy Cliff reference) in this thread for calling my attention to "the cries of the soldier being punished for stealing in [Book II] chapter XV, as witnessed by Prince Andrei," which are described as "desperate but feigned"; as a result I paid attention to this sentence in III:XVIII, while a despairing Rostov is still searching for his emperor: Раненые сползались по два, по три вместе, и слышались неприятные, иногда притворные, как казалось Ростову, их крики и стоны. ['The wounded crawled together in twos and threes, and you could hear their unpleasant, and sometimes (as it seemed to Rostov) feigned, cries and groans.'] Since these soldiers are not being beaten, all I can think is that while Tolstoy was serving in the Caucasus and hearing men suffer, he was struck by the fact that their outcries sometimes sounded притворные ('affected, feigned'). I'm quite willing to take his word for it.
My wife asked me out of the blue where the phrase do a number on 'have a bad effect on' ("That really did a number on me") came from; I had no idea, and it seems the OED doesn't either:
U.S. colloq. (orig. in African-American usage). to do a number (occas. to lay a number): to act with destructive force or impact; to criticize or humiliate; (hence) to have a strong, usually adverse effect. Freq. with on.Looking around, I discovered another interesting idiom, this one thoroughly obsolete: to lose the number of one's mess 'to die, to be killed' (1807 in A. Paget Paget Papers II. 314 If we are going against Copenhagen many of us will lose the number of our mess). Idioms: can't live without 'em, can't explain 'em.
1967 H. LIT Unbelievable Dict. Hip Words 12 Do a number, to get mad; make a scene; to tell somebody off; blow your cool. ... 1991 N. BAKER U & I vii. 119 When Ada finally did arrive, Updike did such a number on it in his review that he felt compelled to explain.. that he writes faster than he reads. 2002 Star Tribune (Minneapolis) (Electronic ed.) 6 Dec., Navigating bumpy dirt tracks and completing hairpin turns often does a number on shocks, tires, belts and other parts.