Once again, I find what looks like a simple error in the New Yorker—and in a piece that's not very well written anyway, Ariel Levy's "Lesbian Nation" (subscribers only)—but as before, I wonder whether it might be a nonstandard usage that's bubbling up from below. So here's the sentence: "The feminist Ti-Grace Atkinson went so far as to claim that her brand of celibate 'political lesbianism' was morally superior to the sexually active version practiced in her midst."
I think we can take it for granted that most people's reaction will be to wonder what on earth is going on inside that woman, but I'm wondering whether there are English speakers for whom "in (one's) midst" is an even marginally acceptable substitute for "in (one's) milieu" (which is the phrase I would have substituted).
Says kapahel: If Bourbaki did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. But I say: The Bourbaki which can be spoken of is not the true Bourbaki. (Via Бурбаки.)
Zadie Smith has an article in the NYRB (based on a lecture given at the New York Public Library in December 2008) in which she discusses Eliza Doolittle, Barack Obama, Shakespeare, and herself, among other many-voiced people. Here she is on being British:
Voice adaptation is still the original British sin. Monitoring and exposing such citizens is a national pastime, as popular as sex scandals and libel cases. If you lean toward the Atlantic with your high-rising terminals you're a sell-out; if you pronounce borrowed European words in their original style—even if you try something as innocent as parmigiano for "parmesan"—you're a fraud. If you go (metaphorically speaking) down the British class scale, you've gone from Cockney to "mockney," and can expect a public tar and feathering; to go the other way is to perform an unforgivable act of class betrayal. Voices are meant to be unchanging and singular. There's no quicker way to insult an ex-pat Scotsman in London than to tell him he's lost his accent. We feel that our voices are who we are, and that to have more than one, or to use different versions of a voice for different occasions, represents, at best, a Janus-faced duplicity, and at worst, the loss of our very souls.And here she is on Cary Grant and Obama:
What did Pauline Kael call Cary Grant? "The Man from Dream City." When Bristolian Archibald Leach became suave Cary Grant, the transformation happened in his voice, which he subjected to a strange, indefinable manipulation, resulting in that heavenly sui generis accent, neither west country nor posh, American nor English. It came from nowhere, he came from nowhere. Grant seemed the product of a collective dream, dreamed up by moviegoers in hard times, as it sometimes feels voters have dreamed up Obama in hard times. Both men have a strange reflective quality, typical of the self-created man—we see in them whatever we want to see. "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant," said Cary Grant. "Even I want to be Cary Grant." It's not hard to imagine Obama having that same thought, backstage at Grant Park, hearing his own name chanted by the hopeful multitude. Everyone wants to be Barack Obama. Even I want to be Barack Obama.(My father reminded me of Cary Grant, perhaps in part because he had lost his native Ozark accent, retained by my aunts and uncles, and adopted a regionless American speech appropriate to the diplomatic community in which fate placed him.) Every time I read something by Zadie Smith, I think "I should read more Zadie Smith."
(Via MetaFilter.)
A very interesting post by science fiction writer Charles Stross (you can read his account of his background here, and here's the requisite Wikipedia article) about why the length of a typical novel has doubled since the '60s. Here's the heart of the explanation he got from one of his editors:
Until the early 1990s, mass market SF/F paperbacks in the US were primarily sold via grocery store racks, supplied by local distributors (400+ of them). The standard wire rack held books face-out, either against a wall or on a rotating stand. And that's where the short form factor novel became established. Thinner books meant you could shove more of them into a rack that was, say, three inches deep. Go over half an inch thick, and you could no longer fit six paperbacks in a 3" rack. And there was only so much rack space to go around.(Via MetaFilter; there's much more detail, and discussion of why mystery novels haven't similarly ballooned, at Charlie's post.) How I hate that kind of economic pressure that has nothing to do with the quality of the work! And how fondly I remember those wire racks!During the inflationary 1970s and early 1980s, prices of just about everything soared. The publishers needed to increase their cover prices to compensate. But the grocery wholesalers who sold the books insisted "the product's gotta weigh more if you want to charge more". They weren't in the book business, after all, so just as buffalo tomatoes got bigger, so did paperbacks. (Even though this meant there was less room to go round in the wire racks.) You can only get so much milage by using thicker paper and a bigger typeface; so they began looking for longer novels.
The Russian equivalent of the story of the Gingerbread Man is Kolobok (Колобок). Literally, a kolobók is a small, round loaf of bread, but it's indelibly associated with the story in which a fresh-baked kolobok runs away, evades a rabbit, wolf, and bear, but falls prey to a clever fox (you can see an illustrated version here). Mandelstam uses it as a symbol for the poetic word in his remarkable 1922 poem "Как растет хлебов опара." I don't understand the poem well enough to try discussing the whole thing (a literal translation is below the cut), but I wanted to point to the complex imagery of the third stanza, which centers on two bread-related words, припек [pripyok], which I translated "surplus" as a shortcut but which means 'the excess weight of a baked loaf over the weight of the flour used to make it,' and kolobok, the loaf that ran away. I'm not sure why time is a regal herdsboy or who the stale stepson of the ages is, but the image of the word as a baked cathedral with a magical surplus that has to be chased down is pretty amazing.
How the leavened dough of the loaves rises,
good-looking from the start,
and the housewifely soul
raves from the heat!
Like [Hagia] Sophias made of bread,
from the cherubim's table
cupolas rise
filled with round ardor.
By force or kindness
to lure out the wondrous surplus,
time—the regal herdsboy—
tries to catch the word-kolobok.
And the stale stepson of the ages
finds his place—
a drying-out makeweight
for loaves pulled out before.
I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl—
Life's little duties do—precisely—
As the very least
Were infinite—to me—
I put new Blossoms in the Glass—
And throw the old—away—
I push a petal from my Gown
That anchored there—I weigh
The time 'twill be till six o'clock
I have so much to do—
And yet—Existence—some way back—
Stopped—struck—my ticking—through—
We cannot put Ourself away
As a completed Man
Or Woman—When the Errand's done
We came to Flesh—upon—
There may be—Miles on Miles of Nought—
Of Action—sicker far—
To simulate—is stinging work—
To cover what we are
From Science—and from Surgery—
Too Telescopic Eyes
To bear on us unshaded—
For their—sake—not for Ours—
'Twould start them—
We—could tremble—
But since we got a Bomb—
And held it in our Bosom—
Nay—Hold it—it is calm—
Therefore—we do life's labor—
Though life's Reward—be done—
With scrupulous exactness—
To hold our Senses—on—
—Emily Dickinson
Dickinson wrote this poem around 1862, at a time when, as her editor Thomas H. Johnson wrote, she "was undergoing an emotional disturbance of such magnitude that she feared for her reason." It moves from an apparently anodyne celebration of "Life's little duties" to a harrowing expansion of Beckett's "I can't go on, I'll go on." America's greatest nineteenth-century poet (and perhaps its greatest poet without qualification) is too often seen as a quirky versifier who tossed everything into a hymn-quatrain blender; this, like many better-known poems, gives the lie to such condescension. Not needing to tie my hat, I tip it to Mark, from whose indispensable site I took the poem. (Note: The meter would be better served if "precisely" were on the third line rather than the second.)
Back in 2007 I mentioned a movie, The Linguists, which "follows David Harrison and Gregory Anderson, scientists racing to document languages on the verge of extinction." I said then "I certainly hope I get to see it some day," and that day is almost here, because it's going to be on PBS this Thursday. You can read about it at this Language Log post by Eric Bakovic, who just reminded everyone to Set your recorders now! (If, of course, you live in the U.S.)
In the course of my Orphic studies, I had occasion to look up the origin of the word mystery, and on checking the OED discovered to my surprise (though I think I used to be aware of this, many years ago) that there are two words thus spelled, the usual one (from classical Latin mystērium 'secret,' pl. 'secret rites,' in post-classical Latin also 'mystical or religious truth,' pl. 'Christian rites,' from ancient Greek μυστήριον 'mystery, secret,' pl. 'secret rites, implements used in such rites') and a now obsolete one with the following senses (I give the most recent citation for each):
1. Ministry, office; service, occupation. Obs.The etymology says it's from "post-classical Latin misterium duty, office, service (from 11th cent. in British sources), occupation, trade (from 13th cent. in British sources), guild (from 14th cent. in British sources), altered form of classical Latin ministerium MINISTRY n. by confusion with mystērium MYSTERY n." and adds "In senses 2 and 3 the word may well have been influenced by or confused with MASTERY n." I love this sort of confusion, which is so irritating to purists!
a1533 LD. BERNERS tr. A. de Guevara Golden Bk. M. Aurelius K vii b, None should be taken from the misterie and office that he occupied.
2. a. Craft, art; a trade, profession, calling. Now arch. 1957 Listener 25 July 141/1 We usually start with some sort of prejudice against the verse-writer who is better known as a writer of prose: there is a (very proper) feeling that the two are different mysteries.
b. Skill, expert technique. Obs.
1726 SWIFT Gulliver II. IV. vi. 87 Because I had some Skill in the Faculty, I would.. let him know the whole Mystery and Method by which they proceed.
c. art and mystery n. (also science and mystery and variants) the art and craft of a trade; also in extended use.
1934 A. G. STREET Endless Furrow xv. 254 Talk about old Nicholas Crawford's art and mystery in grocerin', why, that's an open book compared to farmin'.
3. A trade guild or company. Now arch. and hist.
1964 Welsh Hist. Rev. 2 307 The shoemakers, who later formed their own mistery, were already numerous enough in the lordship in 1400.
Mandelstam is leading me into uncharted waters; thanks to Victor Terras's "The Black Sun: Orphic Imagery in the Poetry of Osip Mandelstam" (see my Further Addenda to this post for details and quotes), I learn that Orphic imagery was floating around in early-20th-century Russia and used by Mandelstam, so—being utterly ignorant of Orphism (in fact, basically unaware of its existence, although I'm sure I've seen the word)—I went to my standard references on Greek thought, The Presocratic Philosophers
The characteristic appeal to books is indicative of a revolution: with the Orphica literacy takes hold in a field that had previously been dominated by the immediacy of ritual and the spoken word of myth. The new form of transmission introduces a new form of authority to which the individual, provided that he can read, has direct access without collective mediation. The emancipation of the individual and the appearance of books go together in religion as elsewhere.Probably old hat to those who study the historical effects of literacy, but not something I'd thought about.
Lameen of Jabal al-Lughat has an eloquent post on why the painstaking work of "unraveling the details of a given language family's history" is worth it:
Well, for one thing, you end up showing interesting things about the history of the relevant part of the world, often things it would be hard or impossible to show any other way - that Madagascar was settled by people from Borneo, for example, or that Ijo slaves from Nigeria ended up on the Berbice River in Guyana, or that Persians and Swedes (along with a lot of other people!) ultimately both got their language from a common source. But that depends on your being interested in a particular region; why would a person working on the historical linguistics of (say) the Sahara care about the historical linguistics of New Guinea, or Alaska, or even Europe?Of course, as bulbul points out in the comment thread, the real reason is "Because it's there and it's fun"!It's because people are pretty similar everywhere - we all have roughly the same mouths and the same brains, and as a result we all tend to make roughly the same kinds of changes. Looking at changes in the languages of Europe, and at which direction they went, turns out to give you a pretty good idea of what kind of changes to expect in New Guinea - and vice versa... That means that all these individual small-scale studies are so many pieces fitting together to form a map of how language works.
(While you're over at the Mountain of Languages, check out Lameen's latest post, on the idea that in the Arabic-speaking world "Fusha acts to insulate the majority of the population from the debates of intellectuals, keeping the powers that be safer from ideologically-inspired opposition and the intellectuals themselves safer (in the short term!) from popular reactions to their speculations.")
From BBC News:
He had been wanted from counties Cork to Cavan after racking up scores of speeding tickets and parking fines.You can see a picture of such a license at the BBC link; as Roger Shuy points out at the Log post where I found the story, it shows the value of knowing foreign languages.However, each time the serial offender was stopped he managed to evade justice by giving a different address.
But then his cover was blown.
It was discovered that the man every member of the Irish police's rank and file had been looking for - a Mr Prawo Jazdy - wasn't exactly the sort of prized villain whose apprehension leads to an officer winning an award.
In fact he wasn't even human.
"Prawo Jazdy is actually the Polish for driving licence and not the first and surname on the licence," read a letter from June 2007 from an officer working within the Garda's traffic division.
In the comment thread for this post, Grumbly Stu wrote: "I just discovered that for my entire life I have mistaken the meaning of 'scatty'. I meant disorganized / disheveled." (Scatty is British slang for 'crazy.') I just ran across a remarkable example of this common phenomenon; in her diary entry for Jan. 27, 1941, Marina Tsvetaeva wrote:
I'm 48 years old, and I've been writing for 40 years, even 41, if not forty-two (honestly), and of course I am by nature an outstanding philologist, and just now, in a tiny little dictionary, in fact in three of them, I find that ПАЖИТЬ [pázhit'] is pacage [French for 'pasture'], пастбище [pástbishche, Russian for 'pasture'], and not at all 'field' [...] So all my life I have thought (and, oh horror, perhaps written) пажить when I meant 'field,' and it's really луг, луговина ['meadow']. But in spite of three dictionaries (unrelated: one French and old, another Soviet, the third German), I still don't believe it. Пажить sounds like жать [zhat', 'to reap, cut, mow'], жатва [zhátva, 'reaping, harvest(ing)'; in fact, пажить is related not to жать 'reap' but to жить 'live.'].(The original Russian is below the cut.)
So the next time we discover we have been mistaken about a word, we should remind ourselves that one of the great poets of the twentieth century, who considered herself philologically inclined, went through the same thing. And I love the fact that she grumpily refuses to entirely believe the fact she's just discovered, because it just doesn't sound right to her.
Мне 48 лет, а пишу я — 40 лет и даже 41, если не сорок два (честное слово) и я, конечно, по природе своей — выдающийся филолог, и — нынче, в крохотном словарчике, и даже в трех, узнаю, что ПАЖИТЬ — pacage — пастбище, а вовсе не поле, нива: сжатое: отдыхающее — поле. Итак, я всю жизнь считала (и, о ужас м‹ожет› б‹ыть› писала) пажить — полем, а это луг, луговина. Но — вопреки трем словарям (несговорившимся: один французский — старый, другой — советский, третий — немецкий) все еще не верю. Пажить — звучит: жать, жатва.
Who wrote the first American dictionary? No, it wasn't Noah Webster, though if you google "first American dictionary" you'll get a lot of hits claiming otherwise. It was—and this is one of those useless but delightful historical tidbits—Samuel Johnson Jr. (no relation to the great English lexicographer!) in 1798, beating Webster by eight years. The New York Times wrote a centennial article in 1898, beginning: "The first dictionary by an American author published in this country was Samuel Johnson, Jr.'s, 'School Dictionary; Being a Compendium of the Latest and Most Improved Dictionaries,' printed in New Haven in 1798 by Edward O'Brien. The British Museum has a copy presumably perfect; Yale College Library has the Brinley copy, which lacks pages 157-168 out of 198, the total number. No other copies seem to be known." (Google Books has it, but, infuriatingly, will not let you see even a snippet view.) There's a nice OUPblog entry about it by Ammon Shea (author of Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages, which I wrote about here) that ends:
I’m not trying to sound a clarion call about how poor Samuel Johnson Jr. has been cheated of his just rewards and fame, nor am I interested in seeing Noah Webster’s memory excoriated any more than it already has been. But I do find it fascinating to observe the different ways that an error may be grown.You and me both, Ammon.Many of the authors who make the claim that Noah Webster wrote the first American dictionary were likely aware of the fact that there may have been earlier ones, but for some reason choose to believe that Webster’s was the first one that was a ‘real’ American work, either because it appeared to have more patriotic orthography, or a greater deal of piety. Some others appear to have just relied on some sort of common knowledge which informed them that Webster must have been the first American lexicographer – why else would we hear so much about him?
I used to allow myself a great deal of umbrage when I found errors like this. Why I felt the need to do so is not quite clear to me – after all, I hadn’t made any great discovery myself; I’ve just managed to read one author who has a better grip on the facts than some others. Now I always find it interesting to discover commonly held beliefs that are just wrong – and it helps remind me that I have my own cherished and muddle-headed collection of things that I ‘just know’. And the more that time passes, the more I am convinced that ‘things that I just know’ is nothing more than a euphemism for ‘mistakes’.
Trey of Speculative Grammarian, in a comment on this post, linked to this wonderful piece from Volume CLII, Number γ (December 2006) of SpecGram. In it, Sir Edmund C. Gladstone-Chamberlain, Professor Emeritus of Linguistic Science, Department of Lexicology and Glottometrics,Devonshire-upon-Glencullen University, Southampton, describes his youthful encounter with a very strange language spoken by a remote tribe deep in the Amazon Basin and his discovery of how the language worked and, eventually, of the unfortunate history behind it. I won't spoil the reader's enjoyment, but I will say how much I loved the footnotes; a selection:
3 By “very preliminary”, I mean, of course, stupidly, foolishly premature. But I wasn’t much of a linguist then, and I wasn’t yet taking the whole matter very seriously.
4 By “concision”, I mean, of course, the ability to say anything of interest in, say, a number of words, syllables, or morphemes less than or equal to the equivalent in English or Spanish.
5 By “I don’t really know”, I mean, of course, that I have never been bothered to look it up.
7 By “mastered Spanish”, I mean, of course, that his mastery of Spanish had overtaken my own, which had grown even rustier.
8 By “merit a study of its own”, I mean, of course, that now that I am retired I do not have the energy to pursue such a study, but would love to see someone else take up the cause.
In reading Life: A User's Manual
As for their language, it was quite close to the coastal tongues, and Appenzzell could understand it without major difficulty. What struck him especially was that they used a very restricted vocabulary, no larger than a few dozen words, and he wondered if the Kubus, in the image of their distant neighbours the Papuans, didn't voluntarily impoverish their vocabulary, deleting words each time a death occurred in the village. One consequence of this demise was that the same word came to refer to an ever-increasing number of objects. Thus the Malay word for "hunting", Pekee, meant indifferently to hunt, to walk, to carry, spear, gazelle, antelope, peccary, my'am — a type of very hot spice used lavishly in meat dishes — as well as forest, tomorrow, dawn, etc. Similarly Sinuya, a word which Appenzzell put alongside the Malay usi, "banana", and nuya, "coconut", meant to eat, meal, soup, gourd, spatula, plait, evening, house, pot, fire, silex (the Kubus made fire by rubbing two flints), fibula, comb, hair, hoja' (a hair-dye made from coconut milk mixed with various soils and plants), etc. Of all the characteristics of the Kubus, these linguistic habits are the best known, because Appenzzell described them in detail in a long letter to the Swedish philologist Hambo Taskerson, whom he'd known in Vienna, and who was working at that time in Copenhagen, with Hjelmslev and Brøndal. He pointed out in an aside that these characteristics could perfectly well apply to a Western carpenter using tools with precise names — gauge, tonguing plane, moulding plane, jointer, mortise, jack plane, rabbet, etc. — but asking his apprentice to pass them to him by saying just: "Gimme the thingummy"."Hjelmslev and Brøndal" are the well-known linguists Louis Hjelmslev (1899-1965) and Viggo Brøndal (1887-1942), but Hambo Taskerson seems to be an invention. There is a Kubu people, but I have no idea to what extent Perec's description matches what they were like 70 years ago. I'm not going to go to the trouble of transcribing the original French of the passage, but you can see it here (the blockquoted paragraph at the bottom of p. 112); the final "Gimme the thingummy" is "passe-moi le machin."
This satisfyingly consonant-laden word has been in my vocabulary for years—it refers to a fowl prepared by splitting and grilling—and it was a surprise to me, when I was asked where it came from, not to find it in my Merriam-Webster's Collegiate. Alan Davidson's wonderful Penguin Companion to Food
My wife was reading John McPhee's New Yorker article about fact checking (not online, but here's the abstract) when she asked me what I thought about this sentence: "One technician who slipped up and used the 'R' word was called to an office and chewed." "Chewed?" I said. "Not 'chewed out'?" She confirmed the reading. I said it must be a typo. But aside from the irony of having a flagrant typo in an article about fact checking, it occurs to me that I can no longer depend on my intuitions about English, since it has been changing faster than I can adapt or even notice, so I turn to the Varied Reader: if your native language is English, have you ever said, or heard anyone else say, "chew" rather than "chew out" for "reprimand"?
(If you're curious about "the 'R' word," it was "radiation"; the context was the word-substitution enjoined by the extreme secrecy enforced at the Hanford Engineer Works during WWII. You were supposed to say "activity" instead.)
Update. As the excellent MMcM points out, the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, Vol. 1
Teju Cole has produced, under various noms de guerre, some of the finest writing on the internet for a number of years now (and some of it was turned into the novel Every Day is for the Thief, which I praised here); he is writing newspaper columns under the rubric "Words Follow Me" (today's column), and they are collected here. I was particularly taken with "an english of our own," in which he makes the case for Nigerian English (for which I provided a couple of online resources here):
What then of Nigerian English? The stage has surely been set for it, from the deceptively simple sentences of Things Fall Apart, to the compressed ritual rhetoric of Death and the King’s Horseman. A specifically Nigerian cadence and rhythm has been brought to the world’s ears. That early labour has found new strength in books like Everything Good Will Come, Half of a Yellow Sun and Waiting for an Angel.To which I say: Correct correct!These are not merely Nigerian stories; they are told in the Nigerian language of English...
Some examples: the word “sorry” in Nigeria is not restricted to apology, since it is also frequently used to express commiseration. You lose your house in a fire, and a Nigerian says sorry—don’t take it as an admission of guilt. When we say, “how is your side?” we are not making an anatomical inquiry. “At all!” actually means “no.” “Okada” and “danfo” can’t be more pithily described other than with those words, and “madam,” as an honorific, is far broader in its Nigerian use than elsewhere.
To our ears, “trafficator” doesn’t sound archaic (as it would to a Brit) or incomprehensible (as it would to an American): it is simply a signalling device in a car. This English bears many traces of the vernaculars around it, absorbing structural elements and modes of thought from them. Without a grasp of Nigerian English, Nollywood films would be mystifying.
Now I can already hear those who will say that the English language in Nigeria is an unstable thing, that it is all the time being transmuted and is changing before our very eyes: how can we know what is correct? But all languages in all places are being transmuted. Language never sits still. This is why I am a descriptivist and not a prescriptivist: how a language is used in the present is much more interesting than how it should be “properly” used.
Or, in this case, not translating them. Matt of No-sword has a typically irresistible essay in Néojaponisme, discussing the bizarre haiku translations of Harold J. Isaacson, who rather than trying to render the kireji (meaningless words that "supply structural support to the verse") in English simply leaves them there, little lumps of undigested material, to baffle and alienate the reader. Sure, he explains them in his introduction and provides footnotes for other undigested words ("water is poured out to/ the fukujusō*"), but as Matt puts it, "This style of translating is almost passive-aggressive in its demands on the reader. Shiki is serious business, it says. If you want to read him, there will be homework." I'm all in favor of a little ostranenie, but this is ridiculous.
I'm usually pretty good at parsing headlines, but this one (via Geoff Pullum at the Log; it's from a U.K. free paper called the Metro) completely baffled me:
In Geoff's words:
The solution is that dentist fear is a compound noun (meaning "fear of dentists") that is being used as an attributive modifier to another noun, girl. The only ungrammaticality (and it's fine in the context of a headline) is the lack of a determiner on the resultant singular noun phrase. The verb of the clause is starved. The story is about a young girl who developed a pathological fear of dentists (hence she could be referred to in headlinese as the dentist fear girl) and refused to open her mouth at all after an operation to remove her milk teeth. She wouldn't eat; the parents' entreaties for medical help or advice went unheeded; and she died of malnutrition.As he says, a sad story.
As I said here, my wife and I are reading Life: A User's Manual
[< French marigot watercourse, body of water (in Africa), of unknown origin.And for a pronunciation it offers "Brit. /ˈmarɪgɒt/, /ˈmarɪgəʊ/, U.S. /ˈmɛrəgɑt/, /ˈmɛrəgoʊ/"—basically, the stress is on the first syllable and you can pronounce the final one with the t (anglicized) or without (french-fried).
According to Trésor de la Langue Française the French word was first used in the Antilles (1654 in a place name, 1688 as noun). The Inventaire des Particularités Lexicales du Français en Afrique Noire (1983) shows that the word is used in all francophone countries of West Africa, which perhaps suggests origin in an African language.]
The problem with that is that I don't believe them. Who exactly is using this anglicized pronunciation? All their citations treat it as a foreign word, italicizing it or (in one case) putting it between quotes. It's clearly a French word used only by those who have occasion to talk about waterways in West Africa, and presumably those people pronounce it à la française, at least to the extent of making the final syllable "go" rather than "got." I'm guessing the OED has a system that automatically provides both forms for all borrowings that haven't been fully absorbed, and they didn't check with actual speakers. But then, how could they? If you stop a hundred English-speakers on the street and ask them how they pronounce "marigot," ninety of them will shrug their shoulders, nine of them will change the subject to politics or hit you up for a loan, and one will turn and run. This is an English word only by courtesy.
Which brings me to the problem with the translation. Yes, the French text has marigot, but in French it's an actual word, even if an exotic one; in fact, it is in my Collins Robert French Dictionary, defined as "backwater, creek." And there's a French Wikipedia article that describes them (and shows a picture of the Marigot du Djoudj, with pelicans), adding "Le terme 'marigot' est parfois employé métaphoriquement pour suggérer des activités plus ou moins occultes, en eaux troubles." In short, however tempting it may have been to keep the French term because it does exist in English, in practice it's a faux ami, since nobody but West Africa specialists knows of its existence, and it should have been rendered by "creek" or the like (especially since the scene described is not in Africa).
A few pages later, at the start of Chapter 21 ("In the Boiler Room, 1"), there's a similar problem. A man is described as wearing "a sky-blue tergal shirt," and once again the word was unknown to me and to Merriam-Webster. The OED capitalizes it and defines it as "A proprietary name for polyester fibre and fabrics," and apparently it's known in the U.K., since there are citations like "The airflow is ducted to ten individual neoprene-coated tergal skirts (1968) and "My dark blue Tergal trousers" (1973), so I can't fault David Bellos for using it, but I wish he'd been more considerate of his transatlantic readers and rendered it "polyester" or "Dacron." French Wikipedia provides this historical information: "En France, la fibre polyester est apparue en 1954 sous la marque Tergal (équivalent du Dacron de Dupont de Nemours), créée par la firme Rhodiaceta. Pour la petite histoire Tergal est formé de « Ter » (pour polyester) et « gal » (pour gallicus), c'est en somme le polyester gaulois."
I am, of course, curious as to whether my readers know these words, especially "marigot"—I assume many non-Yanks are familiar with "tergal."
I discover from Anatoly that the Словарь русских народных говоров (Dictionary of Russian dialects) is online, thanks to the Institute for Linguistic Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences. This immense project has been under way since 1965 (it's reached the letter С [S]); the Resources for Russian linguistics page created by the Slavic and East European Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign describes it as follows:
Entries supply grammatical information relevant to the part of speech of a word, a definition in standard Russian, stress, and citations for sources and dialects. Some entries excerpt passages to show usage. A list of geographical abbreviations is provided to help interpret in which dialectal area a particular term is found. An extensive bibliography of sources consulted for the compilation of the dictionary is included in the first volume with bibliographies of additional sources appearing at the beginning of various subsequent volumes. Sources include published materials and manuscripts.(The Resources page shows an image from a page of the dictionary, as it does for all the works it describes—a very nice feature.) Anatoly says, "This is an unbelievably wonderful book—just download any installment and start reading at random. Just now I spent half an hour reading; I couldn't tear myself away. What riches, what diversity, what beauty!" I agree; I downloaded "2. Ба-Блазниться" (pdf file) and was immediately hooked by the first entries:
Ба-ба-ба, междом. Слово, которым подзывают лошадь. Буин. Симб., 1897.In the Simbirsk region in the 1890s, they said "Ba-ba-ba" to call horses; baba, alongside its standard sense of 'married peasant woman' and its colloquial sense of 'woman (in general),' was used in the Orenburg and Kazan regions in the mid-nineteenth century to mean 'a woman whose first child is a girl' (one whose first child was a boy was a molodukha), and it had a mythological sense 'cloud-woman who brings live, healing water, i.e. rain'; in some regions baba was used for a kind of fish (Cottus gobio), in others for a kind of bird (Pelecanus crispus). And Anatoly gives the example of the unusual word щщи [shchshchi] 'face': it turns out there's a dialect word сочь [soch'] 'face,' whose plural, счи [schi], is pronounced exactly like щщи. Mystery solved (though now one wants to know the origin of сочь).1. Баба, ы, ж. 1. Женщина, у которой первый ребенок девочка (в отличие от женщины, родившей первым сына и называемой молодухой). Оренб., 1849—1851. Казан. Казан.
2. «Мифическая облачная жена (ср. чешек, baby — облака), приносящая живую, целебную воду, т. е. дождь». Шла баба из-за моря, несла кузов здоровья (=живую воду), —· стар, погов., входящая и в состав народного причитания, произносимого в бане над ребенком, когда его моют». Слов. Акад. 1895. ...2. Баба, ы, ж. 1. Рыба Cottus gobio Linne; подкаменщик. Валд. Новг., Костром., Сабанеев, Берг. ... 2. Птица Pelicanus crispus, Pelicanus onocrotalus; пеликан, кудрявый пеликан, розовый пеликан. Астрах., 1870. Толкуй баклан с бабой...
Leafing through Dahl's dictionary has always given me (like everyone else who uses that masterpiece) a sense of the riches of the language, but Dahl is just a pond compared to this ocean. Language is so vast and various—how can people want to corral it and reduce it to a relatively few "approved" forms and usages? Don't dig a cave and hide in it, embrace the universe!
An interesting bit from Chapter 6 of Gregory Freidin's A Coat of Many Colors:
The years immediately preceding and following the Revolution of 1917 were not only some of the most productive in the development of Russian literature, and especially poetry, but they also constituted a period of extraordinary verbal intensity, which permeated every aspect of Russian life. The relaxation of censorship after the Revolution of 1905 and the growing professionalism and education of urban Russia created an enormous and highly diversified market whose demands, thanks to modern means of communication, were well catered to. Originally a rather esoteric group with a minor circle of readers, Russian modernist poets profited immensely from this development. Whether they sought it or not, by 1910 they had become a highly visible and, where public sensibility was concerned, influential group. Indeed, it was during this period that the literary culture of the Russian intelligentsia, without losing its frame of reference in the elite educational tradition, began to acquire features we associate with the popular culture of our own time: the institution of the celebrity, emphasis on performing arts, and the attendant large-scale public exposure. Tolstoy was perhaps the first man of letters to be processed into an international star by the most modern forms of mass media, including the phonograph and film. Among the earlier modernists, Aleksandr Blok, the exemplar for the postSymbolist generation, was to benefit from this duality the most. He was the "tragic tenor of the epoch," as Akhmatova called him, combining in a concise formula a reference to the atemporal high mimetic genre, a popular idol's acute sensitivity to the mood of the present, and the celebrity status of the stage star. It should come as no surprise, then, that Blok's appearance was replicated in the dandified lover protagonist in a whole series of films produced around 1910.
Russian has two words that are defined as 'ash(es)': зола [zolá] and пепел [pepel]. It recently occurred to me that I didn't really know what the difference was, so I turned to Anatoly, saying in an e-mail: "I thought the difference might be that зола was in larger clumps, perhaps preserving a bit of the wood structure, but no, as far as I can tell through googling they're both the gray, dustlike substance left after complete burning. Is зола used more for wood and пепел for cigarettes? Is there some other contextual difference in usage?" He wrote back that he had consulted with his wife and they had decided that "the meanings definitely overlap, but in most situations there is a clear choice of a term to use, thanks to idiomatic phrases"; he agreed that зола was "possibly (but, I would say, not necessarily) the more complex object of the two, retaining some structure, color or flakiness." But he too felt uncertain, and said he'd ask the readers of his blog. Well, he's done so, and the results are most interesting. It looks to me like there are basically two schools of thought among those who think there is a difference. One was expressed by dmpogo, who wrote "зола - это не совсем до конца прогоревшая древесина ... А пепел - уже совсем до конца" ['зола is wood that hasn't completely burned, while пепел is burned to the end']; this was backed up by someone who agreed and added "зола еще 'хранит' огонь, а пепел уже нет; золу можно раздуть до огня, а пепел - нельзя" ['зола still 'holds' the fire, but пепел doesn't; you can blow зола into flame, but not пепел']. The other popular view was very different; in the words of cartesius, "пепел - то что сохраняет частично форму сгоревшего предмета: сигареты или бумаги, а зола -пылеобразная, тот же пепел от бумаги, если его растолочь в бесформеную массу" ['пепел is that which keeps in part the form of the burned substance: cigarettes or papers, while зола is like dust, that same пепел from paper, if you crush it into a formless mass'].
It's very interesting to me that native speakers can disagree so completely about the meaning and use of such common words, and of course it was pleasing to learn that my own confusion was not due to my being a foreigner!
(Incidentally, зола is not a homonym of the name of the writer Emile Zola, because in Russian that gets palatalized to Эмиль Золя [emíl' zolyá].
I finally added Slawkenbergius's Tales to the sidebar because there's just too much interesting stuff and I get tired of looking through my bookmarks for it. Greg Afinogenov thinks and writes about all sorts of things, many of which intersect with my own interests, to the point that I'm willing to overlook his addiction to postmodernism. But, as he explains in this typically thought-provoking post, "Image without substance has been the defining feature of Russian life: we have 'democracy' without democracy, 'communism' without communism, 'progress' without progress. ... The uncertain relationship between [reality and image] was the very prima materia of Soviet social existence." And he links to a long and fascinating essay by Mikhail Epstein on "The Origins and Meaning of Russian Postmodernism"; in brief, his thesis is: "The development of Russian modernism was artificially halted in the thirties, while in the West it continued smoothly up to the sixties. This accounts for the existence of a single postmodernism in the West, while two separate postmodernisms arose in Soviet culture, one in the thirties and another in the seventies." But the fun is in the details.
Lameen has an interesting post about adjectives at Jabal al-Lughat. He points out that "often, a concept expressed using an adjective in one language is expressed only by a verb or a noun in another"; for instance, "there is no adjective 'happy' in Kwarandzyəy; instead, you use a verb, yəfṛəħ 'be happy, rejoice'. And to say 'the happy people', you say 'the people who are happy/have rejoiced': bạ γ i-ba-yəfṛəħ person who they-PF-happy." And yet there are few if any languages without adjectives. He ends up:
So clearly people can do without some adjectives, and clearly the behaviour of adjectives tends to be very similar to the behaviour of some other word class. Why not do without them altogether? It would be easy enough to construct a language where no morphological or syntactic tests could distinguish adjectives from verbs, or from nouns. So if practically every language does take the trouble to distinguish them, there must be some pretty powerful cognitive motivation for it - and some pretty powerful historical tendencies acting to separate adjectives from verbs and/or nouns.Interesting, no?
Poet and translator Pierre Joris has a blog, Nomadics, which he calls "A place for tracings, translations, meanderings, notings, explorations, etc. of a mainly writerly nature." A recent post, "Celan, Kafka & the Glottal Stop," discusses an essay by Matthew Landis "on the connection of certain themes in Paul Celan’s poetry & Jacques Derrida’s writings," a subject that I fear does not interest me. I was, however, interested in Joris's criticism of Landis for relying solely on the (apparently dreadful) Popov/McHugh translation of Celan and its mendacious introduction, which claims that as a boy Celan "was sent to a work camp and his family (Romanian Jews living in Germany) were sent to Auschwitz. While in Auschwitz, Celan’s mother died from a wound to the throat." Joris follows the quote with "Note: Celan and his parents did not live in Germany, but in Czernowitz, then part of Rumania, today part of the Ukraine. They were not sent to Auschwitz, but to work camps along the Bug river, on the Romanian/Ukrainian border"; about the "wound in the throat" he says "in 40 years of reading Celan and the vast Sekundärliteratur on his work, I have never come across this bit of information."
One result of this reliance is that Landis uses Popov/McHugh's "The glottal stop is breaking/ into song" as a springboard for this meditation: "The glottal stop is the breaking off of sound by the pressing of the laryngeal folds (the glottis) together. In addition to this breach in voice, we have a breach in space. The break after 'breaking' again leaves a space into which the song emerges." A nice point, except that Celan's own words were "Der Kehlkopfverschlußlaut/ singt." The glottal breach before "into" occurs only in translation. As Joris says, "when thinking through Celan (or any other foreign-language poet) via his poems it is essential to rely not only on one translation & its accompanying introduction, but to go to the original and quote it too."
(Incidentally, Joris writes: "In the manuscripts of the Celan poem, the title was given as “Frankfurt, ע, September” and alternatively as “Frankfurt, Ayin, September” — i.e. it included the glottal stop in the title..." The letter ayin does not represent a glottal stop but a voiced pharyngeal fricative, although many Israelis now pronounce it as a glottal stop in some contexts.)
I took the title of this post from Joris's lively essay "A Glottal Choice" (from his book A Nomad Poetics
I was born between languages, I first spoke Lëtzebuergesch, a dialect of the western Rhineland and the Moselle river valley, from Middle-High-German with Frankish roots. Not a dialect, a language, a langue, a tongue, a mother tongue I was never taught how to write — and whose passage from spoken dialect into codified, standard written form happened, unknown to me, during my passage through the scholastic institutions, to flower into an irredentist yet useful tool for a local literature when I had already turned my back & gone West to write in my fourth...He talks about first learning English through falling in love with an English woman, about the hip quality of English in post-WWII Germany, about finding On the Road on a beach in Spain and Naked Lunch in the erotica section of a Luxembourg bookstore—"All of which stood me in good stead when, at nineteen, in Paris, I discovered Eliot and through him most quickly came to Ezra Pound's Cantos in Shakespeare & Company, where I sat nightly reading and wondering if I should quit medical school... Reading Pound made me understand that poetry was a full-time, lifelong occupation, not a genteel activity for rainy weekends."At any rate, one always writes in a foreign language. Be it mother tongue or
foreign language, language is always foreign, other, second — & only therefore can one find a home therein. All writing, all poetry is a trek toward language, our other, the station, the staying on the passage through time, I am a space traveler trying to write myself into an oasis corner, an amen corner as I circumambulate the polis of my life span, stopping here and there. Yet even that station, that mawqif is never a given, but always a wrestling so as to expulse the slag, to burn the dead wood and rearrange the stones in the ruins of the old camp. For all poetry rewrites language against itself.
If you're wondering about "mawqif," it's Arabic; the root w-q-f means 'stop,' the verbal form being waqqaf in Levantine Arabic and the noun mawqef (laazem tǝnzel bǝl-mawqef ǝž-žaaye 'you have to get off at the next stop') or waqfe (fii عanna waqfe عasǝr daqaayeq b-ḥama 'we have a ten-minute stop in Hama'). Wehr/Cowan defines mawqif as 'stopping place; station; (cab, etc.) stand; (bus, train, etc.) stop; parking lot; parking place; stopover, stop; place, site; scene, scenery; position, posture; situation; attitude; stand, position, opinion' (it seems Arabic words are as multivalent as Irish ones); I don't know from what context Joris got the word and how exactly he is using it, but the general sense is clear.
Geoff Pullum has an odd post at the Log in which he claims that "a completely uneducated monolingual Finnish speaker" knows better how to say Sibelius's name than the composer himself. Judging by the end of his post, he's trying to make a point about prescriptivism; at any rate, it inspired a very interesting comment by Roger:
A Finnish friend of mine said that she would pronounce it as Si.bé.li.us. in the nominative with stress on the second syllable and a /b/, but as Sí.pe.li.uk.sen with stress on the first syllable and /p/ in the genitive (and all other cases), presumably because once you use any non-nominative case the word is Finnicized to a greater extent. She also said that she only learned how to pronounce /b/ as an adult, even though she had always thought she could. Only after hearing herself on tape could she be convinced that her b was in fact identical to her p.That difference in pronunciation between the nominative and the other cases makes sense but is not something I would ever have guessed in advance.
Matt of No-sword has another essay up at Néojaponisme, this one about the old-fashioned Japanese word haikara, from "high-collar," meaning 'fashionably European'—with whatever emotional freight that carried for the user:
Originally, then, Ishikawa intended the word to be derisive. He used it, Ishii says, to describe people whose “adoption of the especially high collars fashionable in the West and smug-faced manner seemed a gratuitous implication of their recent return from abroad — the utmost limit of affectation.” ...I love this sort of word history, and I hope Matt keeps it up.Ishii claims that haikara’s big break came in 1900, by way of a speech given by Komatsu Midori (小松緑) at a farewell party for Takekoshi Saburō (竹越与三郎) held in Tsukiji’s Metropole Hotel.
In our world to-day, Komatsu said, the word haikara is generally used with derisive intent — but this is mistaken. Haikara evokes a civilized person of pure and noble character. Indeed, has not even our good Ishikawa, who spends so much of his life attacking haikara, honored us this evening with an exceedingly haikara ensemble?Komatsu’s speech brought down the house, made all the papers, and gave haikara a decisive positive spin on its way to nationwide fame. Before long, Ishii writes, it came to mean “fashionable”, and then just “new”, until even schoolchildren were running around pronouncing baseball mitts and overcoats haikara.(Naturally, not everyone went along with this positivity. One of the charms of the word is that two people could agree that a third was haikara based on diametrically opposed opinions of their taste, intelligence, and character.)