PUSHKIN'S LYRIC INTELLIGENCE.

In the TLS, Rachel Polonsky (author of a notoriously vicious review of Orlando Figes's Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia—see this discussion) reviews a new translation of Eugene Onegin and Andrew Kahn's Pushkin's Lyric Intelligence (I hate joint reviews, though I'm sure the authors being reviewed hate them much more—irrelevant comparisons are made, and aspects of each book tend to get neglected). Polonsky calls Stanley Mitchell's Eugene Onegin "masterly," but frankly it sounds as full of translationese as any other: "Tatiana saw with trepidation/ What thought it was or observation/ Had struck Onegin, what they meant,/ To which he’d given mute consent" doesn't impress me. (I was going to complain about "A parody, when said and done," but googling tells me that people do actually say "when said and done"—is this a U.K. thing?)

But the Kahn book sounds well worth reading:

Kahn has read systematically many hundreds of the titles in Pushkin’s own large library (in the same editions) in order to understand the nature of Pushkin’s engagement with current philosophical and aesthetic ideas. Of these titles, over 80 per cent are English and French works, in the original or in translation. Using B. G. Modzalevsky’s annotated catalogue of the library, which records the pages cut and the marginal notes and annotations made in them by Pushkin, Kahn seeks not to identify sources as past critics have done, but to trace the poet’s “thinking through lyric”. Kahn’s Pushkin is a poet of ideas, the intellectual heir of “a long eighteenth century”, but one who “suspends judgement”, using his deceptively simple and transparent poems as opportunities for the indirect dramatization of those ideas, and for “creating a lyric speaker who thinks aloud”. Allusive terms in the poems – “imagination”, “inspiration”, “fancy”, “will”, “strength” and “fame” – open up to the reader (the reader who is willing and able to read with Pushkin) the great conceptual framework that holds up their delicate lyric expressiveness.

Kahn has taken an exhilarating new direction in Pushkin studies. He draws fruitfully on the great mass of previous scholarship, discovering in the familiar lines of Pushkin’s light and exquisite lyric verse an unfamiliar world of weighty ideas. As his book advances, the exploration of these ideas dilates slowly and magnificently, taking in great reaches of history and philosophy, from the fate and image of Byron and Napoleon to the relationship of the body to the soul, as well as attending to (closely imbricated) matters of pressing daily concern to Pushkin, such as censorship, relations with the Tsar, literary celebrity, the gritty world of the growing book trade, professional enmities, and what Kahn aptly calls “the precarious consolation of friendship”.

I suspect that the "exhilarating new direction" is new primarily for English-language scholarship (the more I read Russian literary criticism, the more I realize how much it anticipates what I had read in English—Nabokov's interpretation of Gogol, for instance, is based firmly on those of Bely and Annensky), but it's just the kind of analysis I enjoy reading. At a list price of $110.00, however, it's definitely something I'll look for at my local library. Why must academic books be so expensive? (Thanks for the link, jamessal!)

OHEL ON WEBSTER'S THIRD.

One of the sections I was most anticipating in The Oxford History of English Lexicography (previous posts: 1, 2) was the discussion of Webster's Third New International Dictionary, one of the greatest and most controversial landmarks of American lexicography, and one that came along when I was old enough to be able to use and appreciate dictionaries. I was not disappointed.

The first surprise came right away. I had known the dictionary's main editor, and the recipient of the brickbats, was Philip Babcock Gove; I hadn't known that "the publishers originally sought to [appoint a "distinguished academic person"] for the Third Edition, but, although they received valuable help in planning for the new dictionary from prominent academic people, none was willing to assume the editorship, and in the end the publishers turned to an in-house editor, Philip Babcock Gove... Gove was appointed general editor in 1951; no one was appointed editor-in-chief until ten years later, the year of publication, when Gove was officially given that title. Webster's Third is very much Gove's dictionary... His was the major voice in determining what entries to include and what to omit; the style of definitions; the attention paid to pronunciation; the use of illustrative quotations, usage labels, and subject labels; and many other decisions which would provoke strong criticism in the years following publication." Sidney I. Landau, the author of the chapter, describes the environment in which the book appeared, "just at the time when linguists and humanists in universities were most at odds"; Gove was clearly aware of the discoveries of linguistics (he listed basic principles such as that language changes constantly, change is normal, spoken language is the language, and correctness rests on usage), and his personality was such that he "hated to make exceptions, even when the failure to do so created the occasional absurdity, ambiguity, or obfuscation." With that background, we proceed to the detailed discussion of what were perceived as problems:

For example, Webster's Third most remarkably capitalizes no entries except God. Up until the first New International of 1909, all entries were capitalized in Webster dictionaries. Webster's Third professed to contain no encyclopedic entries, and so theoretically would have no need to capitalize anything, but in fact it contains many entries derived from names (such as new yorker), and many names of materials (african teak), flora and fauna (japanese cedar, russian wolfhound), and other entries having geographical or biographical elements (swedish massage, einstein equation). All of these entries include some italicized usage label signifying that the entry is usually or always capitalized, but it remains a puzzle why the editors did not simply capitalize them. The answer may be in Gove's acceptance of the primacy of the spoken language... The failure to capitalize has been criticized almost universally, even by those with generally positive views of the dictionary....

The colloquial or informal label was dropped completely, and slang is used very sparingly. In America, an informal style of language had become all but universal by the 1950s... There was also the question of the class of people to whom a particular usage was informal. Earlier unabridged dictionaries were addressed to a somewhat restricted, educated class... There is less justification for the sharp reduction in the use of slang label. The Explanatory Notes contain this confusing comment: "No word is invariably slang, and many standard words can be given slang connotations or used so inappropriately as to become slang." [Note the undescriptive "inappropriately"! —LH] The possibility of limitless variation is no warrant for the failure to label words as slang.

Apart from all of these changes, the new defining style of the Third set it apart most dramatically... The style avoids commas except to separate items in a series, proscribes semicolons entirely, and relies on a single unbroken description with embedded phrases and clauses following directly upon each part of the definition they modify (very like the second half of this sentence).... By and large, the new defining style works well, but it takes some getting used to, and sometimes it sacrifices clarity for economy of expression. It is not necessarily more logical than more traditional methods of defining, but Gove evidently admired its straightforward linear drive, like a car in smooth acceleration.

"Like a car in smooth acceleration"! You don't often see comparisons like that in scholarly tomes.

After praising the detailed pronunciations and revamped etymologies, Landau proceeds to a brilliant "assessment of Webster's Third":

Although Gove asserts near the beginning of his preface that the dictionary is not just for the scholar or professional but for the general user without any advanced preparation, the style... does not support such a claim.... In many respects Webster's Third is a great dictionary, but it is not user-friendly.

Gove placed too much reliance on definitions to provide context of subject, and too much reliance on illustrative quotations to provide guidance for level of usage. The virtual absence of subject labels and the begrudgingly rare use of slang are defects, as is the absurd absence of capital letters in words that are invariably capitalized.... [I]t was mainly Gove's lack of empathy with the user—perhaps also his lack of sympathy with the user—that made him so inflexible in applying his sets of criteria governing the presentation of his dictionary. The policies Gove promulgated and saw through seemed designed to improve the art of lexicography rather than to produce a fine commercial dictionary. That they did both, in spite of some of the lapses of Webster's Third, is a testament to the quality of the Merriam staff and to Gove's integrity and assiduity as a lexicographer.

I find it hard to imagine a fairer summary than that, doing full justice to the greatness of the dictionary (which I am proud to own, and which of course is a rival to Oxford's many dictionaries) while fully acknowledging the justice of some of the criticisms.

POETRY SEARCH ENGINE.

At the end of the latest entry at wood s lot, Mark says "if you track down a lot of poetry on the net Joseph Mosconi's Google Poetry Search Engine is very useful"; naturally I was intrigued, so I searched on "pigeon" and got (among many other things) the very silly but enjoyable "Ern Malley’s Cat: pigeon 500," by Nick Whittock: "trying to keep my eyes open & dreaming of pigeons the same/ things keep happening in the cricket as in my dreams its/ just pigeon after pigeon/ after pigeon after pigeon/ after pigeon..." Mind you, I put in "incarnadine" and didn't get Shakespeare, so it has a bias towards the current scene, but if that's what you're interested in, or if you just like seeing how words get played with by the poetic mind, give it a whirl.

Addendum. Here's a similar engine that searches a different mix of sites and may be more likely to have what you want (thanks, mollymooly!).

ON WRiTING WELL.

I'm not a big fan of writing manuals in general, having found them (when I've dipped into them) full of obvious tips mingled with personal quirks, but I've always heard William Zinsser's On Writing Well mentioned with respect, and after reading Zinsser's essay on how he came to write and revise it, I find myself wanting to read the book:

My model for On Writing Well was American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900–1950, by the composer Alec Wilder.

Wilder’s book was one I had been waiting for all my life, the bible that every collector hopes someone will write in the field of his addiction. I was a collector of songs—the thousands of Broadway show tunes, Hollywood movie songs, and popular standards written in the 40-year golden age from Show Boat in 1926 to the rise of rock in the mid-1960s. As a part-time club pianist, I thought I knew them well—the oldest of old friends. Wilder showed me that I didn’t.

To write his book, Wilder examined the sheet music of 17,000 songs, selecting 300 in which he felt that the composer had pushed the form into new territory. Along with his text, he provided the pertinent bars of music to illustrate a passage that he found original or somehow touching. But what I loved most about Wilder’s book went beyond his erudition. It was his total commitment to his enthusiasms, as if he were saying: “These are just one man’s opinions—take ’em or leave ’em.” His pleasure was to praise. ...

Thus I saw from Wilder’s American Popular Song that I might write a book about writing that would be just one man’s book. I would write from my own convictions—take ’em or leave ’em—and I would illustrate my points with passages by writers I admired. I would treat the English language spaciously, as a gift waiting for anyone to unwrap, not as a narrow universe of grammar and syntax. Above all, I would try to enjoy the trip and to convey that enjoyment to my readers.

And of course I'm interested in Wilder’s book as well. (Thanks for the link, Paul!)

NIHONGODICT.

To quote the MetaFilter post where I found it, "Nihongodict is an AJAXy online Japanese-English dictionary. The list of matches auto-updates as you type. You can enter (or paste in) romaji, Kanji or kana, and use character maps for hiragana and katakana. Results can be bookmarked. It's huge fun to play with, and a nice front end to EDICT, a freely usable dictionary ... with about 120,000 entries, largely maintained by one person (Jim Breen, Monash University)." The comment thread contains many other useful resources for Japanese as well as informed discussion of the "SKIP method," notably by Matt of No-sword. I fear I'm never going to get around to relearning the Japanese I lost after the age of four, but I present this as a public service to those who can use it.

MORE ON CAVAFY.

A couple more tidbits from Dan Chiasson's Cavafy essay (see here):

1) I hadn't known about this episode:

What we do know is that, in 1924, Cavafy's homosexuality came to public light. It was a dispute about grammar—Greeks feel passionate about many things, but grammar would have to rank near the top of the list—that led Socrates Lagoudakis, a columnist for the local paper with inflammatory, somewhat comic opinions, to condemn Cavafy as "another Oscar Wilde." (Cavafy had spelled the Greek for "New York" with a smooth breathing mark, contra Lagoudakis, who, whenever he mentioned New York, used a rough one. Things escalated from there.)

Now you see why it's for the best that in the new orthography, Νέα Υόρκη is written without any breathing at all.

2) This really pissed me off:

It has often been said that Cavafy is an easy poet to translate. Joseph Brodsky found that Cavafy actually gained in translation. (Brodsky, who was translating his own poems into English, had a stake in believing this.) If translation is the undressing of a poem in one language in order to outfit it in another, Cavafy, by stripping his poems of so much Belle Époque excess, had done half of the translator's work. Brodsky argued that translation was "almost the next logical step in the direction the poet was moving." And, in one of the canonical statements on translation, W.H. Auden, who knew no Greek, found in Cavafy "a tone of voice, a personal speech" that defied every poet's assumption that what essentially distinguished prose and poetry is "that prose can be translated into another tongue but poetry cannot."

After some backing and filling, explaining that his Greek isn't really as simple as the translations might make you think, Chiasson concludes that "Cavafy survives translation relatively unscathed."

This is pernicious nonsense, and Chiasson (who I presume can read Cavafy in the original) should be ashamed of himself, as Auden should have been—how dare someone who "knew no Greek" make idiotic pronouncements about the success of translation from Greek? As for Brodsky, his translations of his own poetry are so bad they exempt him from taking part in the discussion; it is enough, after all, to be a great poet: it would be unfair to expect greatness in other fields as well.

The fact is that Cavafy is as hard to translate as any other great poet. You can read an affecting appreciation of this by Maurice Leiter here ("the curtain of my ignorance/ keeps me from truly knowing him"), and see the record of my struggle with one short poem here (and I wish hippugeek would start hanging around here again). No poem is easy for the translator who wants to do a good job, and anyone with half a brain should realize that the fact that a translated poem looks like it took no effort is as irrelevant as a great actor's lack of sweating and grimacing. Ars est celare artem, and all that.

REINECCIUS AND FEARFUL CRABS.

Geoffrey Hawthorn's review essay "Things Keep Happening" in the LRB discusses various books about the history and practice of writing histories (the title comes from Gregory of Tours' History of the Franks: "A great many things keep happening, some good, some bad") and has many good things in it, including this quote from John Burrow's A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century:

The impulse to write history has nourished much effective narrative, and narrative – above all in Homer – was one of the sources of history as a genre. It would be a strange paradox if narrative and history turned out to be incompatible. But the example of Homer may teach us not to take the paradox too tragically. The Iliad has a climax, the fall of Troy, but it has many perspectives, and it would be a drastically impoverished reading of Homer’s epic that saw as its ‘point’ an explanation of Troy’s fall. The concept of a story is in essence a simple one, but that does not make all narrators either simple-minded or single-minded. Narrative can be capacious as well as directional.

But I'm here to pass on to my clever and polymathic readers a couple of questions that have imposed themselves on me as a result of reading Hawthorn:

1) He mentions an obscure late-16th-century historian named Reiner Reineck, also known (in the Latinizing style of the day) as Reineccius; in an effort to find out more about him I googled the latter form, and imagine my surprise when I got tens of thousands of hits, almost all for modern bearers of that surname: Gary Reineccius, Kelsea Reineccius, Stefanie Reineccius... It's not by any means a common name (this site says it "had 156 occurences in the 2000 Census"), but I want to know how it's pronounced by those who use it today—rye-NESH-us? rye-NEESH-us? Anybody know? (In German it would be rye-NECK-see-oos, I think.)

2) In a passage on Reineck's better-known contemporary Jean Bodin (who "recommended torture, even in cases of the disabled and children, to try to confirm guilt of witchcraft" and "asserted that not even one witch could be erroneously condemned if the correct procedures were followed, suspicion being enough to torment the accused because rumours concerning witches were almost always true"), Hawthorn says: "But his exuberantly penetrating reflections on the ars historica were to stir all but the most fearful crabs. Like Patrizi's dialectics and Reineck's researches, they can in retrospect be seen to have contributed to the end of what they purported to extend." I think of myself as a pretty decent reader, but I have not the faintest idea what he means by "stir all but the most fearful crabs"; can anybody elucidate?

FAREWELL, ETUI.

Lively lexicographess Erin McKean (a long-time LH favorite) writes in the Boston Globe about "the changing language of crosswords":

Last year, during the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, host and puzzlemaster Will Shortz held aloft a tiny object. It was barely visible from the back of the cavernous hotel ballroom, but the whole room of more than 700 contestants promptly burst into applause. What was it? A little needlecase, better known to puzzlers as an etui - one of the mainstays of the curious language of crosswordese.

The vocabulary of crosswords is like the dialect of an alternate and highly specific universe, populated by Ednas and Enids and Ians; where the food is Oreos and oleo and the drinks ales and tea. It embraces particular bits of French (ami, ete), Latin (esse, ave), Spanish (este, oro), and even a little Hindi (Sri). It wields an epee with elan; is on familiar terms with tsars and emirs; enjoys music, especially the oboe and altos, and likes to travel: Iran, Oslo, Reno, Etna. And it's interested in science, exploring ions and the atom, as well as the erne and the orca....

Today, however, many of these classic puzzle words are fading slowly, yielding to newer, fresher entries. Elater (click beetle), istle (carpet fiber), and Omri (Ahab's father, or the first name of the actor Omri Katz, and no, I hadn't heard of him either) are giving way to slang (phat, mondo, bling), trademarks (Lycra, Freon), and modern pop-culture figures (J. Lo, A-Rod).

My wife and I regularly do the NY Times Sunday puzzle, so we're aware of this trend; while I regret the loss of the old standbys, change is a good thing and keeps us on our toes. And if you've never seen an etui (I hadn't), here's a nice picture. (Thanks, Trevor!)

IN DREAMS.

I've just gotten to Dan Chiasson's Cavafy review essay, "Man with a Past," in the March 23 New Yorker, and as a huge Cavafy fan I was reading along happily until I got to this: "By 1902, his mother, his three brothers, his grandfather, and two of his closest friends had died. Perhaps in response to all that loss, he turned away from the somnambulism of his early work. (Yeats, distancing himself from his own early work, got it right: 'In dreams begin responsibilities.')" And then I was unhappy.

"In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" is one of the most famous American short stories, and it's by Delmore Schwartz. I presume he modeled the title on Yeats, who preceded his collection Responsibilities with the epigraph "In dreams begins responsibility," with the source given as "Old play." Very similar, yes, and it's easy to confuse them, but back in the glory days of the New Yorker they would not have allowed the mistake to get into print.

But James Longenbach, in his Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (Oxford UP, 1988), says the quote "is in fact from Nietzsche." Anybody know any more about that?

FLAUBERT AS SUFI SAINT AND WRITERS' IDOL.

Orhan Pamuk was recently given an honorary doctorate by the University of Rouen; his acceptance speech is devoted to Flaubert, whom he (like many modernist authors) idolized as a young man: "And he addresses to his mother the sentences I whispered to myself before I had turned thirty, just like Flaubert, sentences in which I tried to believe: 'I care nothing for the world, for the future, for what people will say, for any kind of establishment, or even for literary renown, which in the past I used to lie awake so many nights dreaming about.' And after conveying to her these arrogant words, Flaubert adds one final line whose simplicity belies his self-confidence and earnestness: 'That is what I am like; such is my character.'" Pamuk discusses the reasons for this idolization (and the variant form it took in Turkey, where it "in many respects resembled traditional feelings of devotion and resignation toward late great Sufi masters and cloistered dervish sheikhs") and ends by analyzing "two basic tendencies among those who wanted to be Flaubert," a "distinction, which points out two fundamental characteristics of the art of the novel":

The first variety of Flaubert enthusiast admires the author’s characteristic venom and voice. I refer to Flaubert’s angry, mocking, and intelligent voice rising against the ordinary, against average bourgeois life, superficiality, and stupidity. In October 1850, at the end of the letter he writes to his mother, we immediately recognize this tone: Flaubert explains with ridicule that his soon-to-be wed friend will fast become a perfect bourgeois gentleman. Ernest will from now on be the defender of the established order, the family, and private ownership; he will most certainly declare war against the socialist thinking of his youth!... We all regard eminent authors’ derision of human foolishness and mediocrity as appealing; we read their books and novels in some respects to hear these voices and live among them. However, should this voice of ridicule become a novel’s sole strength, wit and cynicism can in no time become an arrogant voice representing a look from above belittling middle class life, the uneducated, different cultures, people whose customs vary from our own and are deemed inadequate. In particular, the process of European modernism’s settling outside of the West must be understood in tandem with this ethical problem.

On the other hand, despite all of Flaubert’s anger and derision, he was not an arrogant writer. And he had discovered a language that allowed him, through the frame of the novel, to analyse up-close his protagonists and those who were different than him. After reading in the letter to his mother how he grew angry at his childhood friend’s marriage and entry into mundane bourgeois life, we are reminded of the essential strength of the novelist Flaubert through the affection with which he described the same childhood friends in A Sentimental Education and the deep compassion with which he approached their “tomfoolery” and mental confusion. Here was a writer who could identify so thoroughly with his protagonists that he could feel in his own heart the misery and predicament of a struggling, married woman, Madame Bovary, and convey that dilemma to readers in a clear idiom.

He says "I have always wanted to identify with this author, who on one hand felt boundless anger and resentment toward humanity, and on the other hand, nurtured a profound compassion for the same and understood men and women better than others." You can read the speech in English here and in French here. (Via MetaFilter.)

DARE NEARS COMPLETION.

That's the Dictionary of American Regional English (Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3, Vol. 4), and after decades of work, it's almost finished, according to an AP story by Ryan J. Foley:

The dictionary team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison is nearing completion of the final volume, covering "S" to "Z." A new federal grant will help the volume get published next year, joining the first four volumes already in print.

"It will be a huge milestone," said editor Joan Houston Hall.

The dictionary chronicles words and phrases used in distinct regions. Maps show where a subway sandwich might be called a hero or grinder, or where a potluck — as in a potluck dinner or supper — might be called a pitch-in (Indiana) or a scramble (northern Illinois).

It's how Americans do talk, not how they should talk....

After the final volume is published, the next phase of the project will be to put the dictionary online. Hall envisions an online edition that will be updated constantly.

Hall said her all-time favorite word is bobbasheely, used in Gulf Coast states as a noun meaning a good friend or a verb to hang around with a friend. It comes from the language of the Choctaw tribes.

Two people interviewed in Texas and Alabama in the 1960s used the word. Further digging revealed that Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner had once used it in a novel, and it was used in the early 19th century by a colleague of former vice president and duelist Aaron Burr.

I have to say, bobbasheely is indeed a great word. It's from Choctaw itibapishili 'sibling' [literally 'one who was nursed together with (someone)']; the first noun cite is from 1829, the first verb cite from 1932, and the Faulkner quote is from his last novel, The Reivers (1962): "You and Sweet Thing bobbasheely on back to the hotel now, and me and Uncle Remus and Lord Fauntleroy will mosey along." (Via MetaFilter.)

A READING AT SCHOEN BOOKS.

After an early dinner I'll be heading off to South Deerfield for a reading at Schoen Books; as their page about it says, it's "A series of short readings, featuring Polina Barskova, The Corresponding Society, and the first ever Four Poets in Four Minutes." Barskova (here's her Russian Wikipedia page) "is widely considered one of the best Russian poets under the age of 40"; she came to the US in 1999 and now teaches at Hampshire College, just a spit and a holler from here. I don't know her work except for this poem I googled up, but I like it a lot and look forward to hearing her read. As for The Corresponding Society, one of its members is Greg Afinogenov, who "will be presenting a selection of translated Russian poems from the early twentieth century, including work never before published in English"; he is the proprietor of the always thought-provoking blog Slawkenbergius's Tales and posts comments here under the monicker slawkenbergius, and it is he who invited me, so how could I refuse? I will report further when I get back.

Update. I'm glad I went; my wife and I had a great time, and it was fun to finally meet Greg—we yakked about Blok (overrated?), Trotsky (a bad man but a good writer), and all sorts of other things, including the exhausting tour The Corresponding Society has been on (hopefully they're back home in Brooklyn by now). As for the poetry, it was a mixed bag; some of the readers had a lamentable lack of confidence in their own words, but Greg's translations were as good as I expected, and the woman who read before him, Adrian Shirk, was very impressive: she knew what a poem was and how to read it, and I kept getting bits of her lines lodged in my memory, always a good sign. I predict we'll hear more about her.

As for the headliner, Polina Barskova, she lived up to her billing. Not only did she have an effective stage presentation (jokey but earnest) and a strong reading manner, her poems were damn good. I especially liked the first one, which she read in Russian as well as English (she distributed a handout with the texts of four poems in both languages, but read the others only in English); it's online here for those of you who read Russian (and there are a bunch more of hers at that site). Unfortunately, I didn't think the translations were very good (standard-issue free verse that conveyed nothing of the formal power of her Russian), and I'm thinking of trying to do better myself.

Oh, and the bookstore (specializing in Judaica) is quirky and charming (as is the owner); if you're in the area you should visit their site to find out about talks and readings or just drop by and check out the stock.

OHEL ON AMERICAN DICTIONARIES.

Continuing my exhilarated exploration of The Oxford History of English Lexicography, I would like to report on chapter 9, "Major American Dictionaries" by Sidney I. Landau. I thought I had a fairly good grasp of the subject, but I had barely heard of Joseph Worcester (1784–1865), Webster's chief competitor and one of Landau's heroes:

Worcester has included [in his Universal and Critical Dictionary of the English Language (1846)] a number of lengthy usage notes of considerable interest. For example, under rather he includes an extended discussion of rather and sooner, and discusses alternative pronunciations of the former in a most sensitive way, linking a given pronunciation or stress pattern with a particular meaning in a particular social situation. Again, he observes that in Southern states, to raise is to bring up, as 'The place in which he was raised', citing Jefferson. Thus Worcester demonstrates a high degree of sophistication in discussing regionally restricted usages as well as usages dependent on social contexts at a time when such information was hardly provided in American dictionaries....

[In his Dictionary of the English Language (1860)] Worcester disputes Horne Tooke's argument that each word has but one meaning and cites a number of common verbs such as get and turn to show the impracticability of such an argument. 'The original or etymological meaning of many words has become obsolete, and they have assumed a new or more modern meaning; many which retain their etymological meaning have other meanings annexed to them; many have both a literal and a metaphorical meaning, and many both a common and a technical meaning,—all which need explanation' (pp. iv-v). Such an analysis of how meanings change could hardly be improved on today....

Worcester never produced another dictionary and died in 1865. Like Webster, he was extraordinarily productive, not only editing the dictionaries described here but compiling many other valuable reference works in geography and biography, most of them for students. He is a major figure in American lexicography and in any just appraisal of lexicographical quality must be reckoned Webster's equal. The only arena in which he proved deficient was in commercial success.

There is an extended discussion of the Century Dictionary, a famous landmark in lexicography, beginning "In the history of American lexicography, The Century Dictionary is a dictionary sui generis. There had been nothing like it before and there has been nothing like it since." Landau identifies its outstanding features as "the extraordinary care taken to produce a well-crafted, handsome set of books," "the lavish attention and space given over to etymologies, which were the responsibility of Charles P.G. Scott," and "the coverage given to encyclopedic material, particularly in the sciences and technology." (The Century Dictionary is available online, I am happy to say.) On the second count, he says:

Some of the etymologies in the Century are immensely long. For example, the etymology for man is fifty-eight column lines long. After the proximate etyma (comparatively recent forms from which the current word was derived) are given, the note speculates about the ultimate origin of the word as relating to the meaning of 'thinker', but then dismisses the idea of primitive men as thinkers as 'quite incredible'. I then goes on to consider other theories. Even relatively uncommon words receive detailed and lengthy etymologies. The etymology for akimbo runs to thirty-three column lines, whereas the rest of the entry devotes about half as much space (seventeen lines) to its definitions and illustrative quotations.

Landau sums up as follows:

The critical reception given the Century was overwhelmingly positive, and it was even compared favorably with the Oxford dictionary then in progress [i.e., the OED]. Yet the high cost of the Century kept it from being accessible to a wider public... [It] failed to sustain a continuing programme of research and revision..., and it could not compete effectively against the new series of unabridged dictionaries of Funk & Wagnalls and G. & C. Merriam.... Yet its comparative neglect is regrettable, as it is a superb dictionary in many respects and still has much to offer to those interested in the vocabulary of its period. It was from the beginning a quixotic venture (as many new dictionaries are), and it occupies a singular place in American lexicography... But as a dictionary that would endure to make a lasting mark on American intellectual life, it cannot be said to have succeeded. The unforgiving demands of the commercial marketplace led dictionary publishers in another direction: towards the creation of ever-larger, single-volume or two-volume unabridged dictionaries that could be sold at an affordable price.

Isaac Funk of Funk & Wagnalls (Adam Wagnalls "was involved purely as the principal investor and never played an editorial role") broke with "the English tradition begun by Johnson and continued with various modifications by Webster and Worcester":

First, Funk decreed that the commonest meaning, not the earliest in historical terms, should come first in the sequence of definitions... Next, and at the opposite pole from Whitney, Funk deemed etymology of lesser importance and placed it after the definition at the end of the dictionary entry rather than before the definition... The etymology for man, which occupied fifty-eight lines in the Century, cconsists of '< AS. man' in the Standard.

During the first third of the 20th century,

the Funk & Wagnalls dictionaries were widely considered on a par with the Webster dictionaries, and the competition between the two companies was just as fierce as the rivalry of an earlier time had been between Noah Webster and Joseph Worcester and their supporters... Gradually, after the publication of the Webster Second Edition in 1934, when there was no response from Funk & Wagnalls in the form of a new edition of its unabridged, the Webster dictionary began to have the field to itself, and, in spite of the publication of a number of new smaller dictionaries in the 1950s and 1960s, the Funk & Wagnalls Company never recovered and indeed struggled to survive as a dictionary publisher.

Look that up in your Funk and Wagnalls!

HOLDING OUR TONGUES.

Australian ABC Radio has an excellent site, called "Holding our tongues," about "the long and painful task of reviving Aboriginal languages... There are many different places on the net where people can find out about language revival and maintenance. The Holding our tongues site will be an ongoing project, aiming to bring as many of these resources as possible together in one place." There's a map you can click on, a page of links to websites and "Other publications," and a radio show of about 23 minutes you can download or listen to via this page (which also has a transcript)—you can hear a lot of Aboriginal speech and some fairly in-depth discussion of languages like Kaurna (name sounds like GAH-na), Dharug, and Awabakal. There's even some detailed morphological analysis, with examples. Thanks, Bathrobe!

THE JEWS OF OLD KIEV.

It has come to my attention that there were Jews in Kiev before there were Slavs. Kiev was either founded by the Khazars or started flourishing under them around the eighth century, and as Herman Rosenthal writes in his JewishEncyclopedia.com article Kiev, "it is likely that Jews from the Byzantine empire, the Crimea, Persia, and the Caucasus settled there with the Chazars about the same time…. Malishevski… says that Jews from the Orient (776) and from the Caucasus emigrated to Chazaria, and thence to Kiev, where they found a community of Crimean Jews…. In the eleventh century Jews from Germany settled in Kiev." My question is: what language did they speak? Anybody know if there has been scholarly speculation on this? (After the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century, of course, that Jewish population would have been dispersed.)

BIRD DICTIONARY.

A few years ago I posted a link to Denis Lepage's Avibase, an amazingly comprehensive bird site ("containing over 4.5 million records about 10,000 species and 22,000 subspecies of birds, including distribution information, taxonomy, synonyms in several languages and more"), but Arthur Smith's Bird Dictionary, an idiosyncratic potpourri of information dumped onto a single huge page (and for some reason hosted on the site of an antibiotics lab), is well worth bookmarking as well (if, of course, you're into bird names):

English names for birds are many and varied due to this language being widely spoken throughout many countries of the world and names have differed even from region to region within those countries. This not only provides a wealth of names but also confusion. This author has attempted to collect and identify these names with the relevant scientific names together with some of the legends, collective nouns, etymology, classification and interesting facts for certain species where these are unusual. No attempt has been made to the record the distribution of the various species, and for this the reader is referred to the work of Sibley & Munroe.

Linnaeus started to bring order to the naming of flora and fauna with his scientific naming of the plant and animal kingdoms, but the impact on the layman is negligible; vernacular names are (or were) created spontaneously, sometimes in isolated communities. Currently there is a movement to bring rationality to the English names. When this is achieved the abundant variety will be lost and in time, inevitably, forgotten. It therefore appeared desirable that there be a record made. This is this work’s raison d`etre.

I like the spunky attitude and linguistic focus, and although it doesn't have equivalents in other languages, it does have etymologies, which Avibase lacks. (Thanks, Greg!)

FIFTY-MILE RADIUS.

A correspondent wrote: "One of my friends asked me why we say something has a 'fifty mile' radius instead of saying it has a 'fifty miles' radius. Do you know why we drop the 's' in that situation?" I responded:

The example you give is an adjective formation, and in that context the singular is always used in English, whether it's a unit of measure or not: a three-country pact, a ten-gallon hat, a six-man crew, etc. I'm not sure what the accepted historical analysis is, but it occurs to me that it might be a generalization from the situation with units of measure, in which people used to use what looked like a singular in all contexts: "It's five mile to the next town," "The water level is eight foot down," etc. Now, in that context it's a remnant of the Old English genitive plural. For instance, the plural of fōt 'foot' was fēt, which became feet, but the genitive plural ('of feet') was fōta, which became foot just like the singular. My guess is that in adjectival constructions, the apparent singular was generalized to all nouns, perhaps partly because it's easier to say without the plural -s, but otherwise the plural was generalized (though there are still people who say "eight foot down" and so on).

Rather than actually do some research to try to find out what the accepted explanation is, I had the bright idea of tossing the question out there for you knowledgeable readers to deal with. Anybody know?

VARIA.

1) Joel of Far Outliers usually posts extended excerpts from his reading (usually historical/cultural, and always interesting), but occasionally he favors us with glimpses into the Austronesian languages of his academic studies, and he's now doing a three-part series (the first two are up already) [3/20/09: Part 3 is up] about "Causative Makeovers in New Guinea Oceanic Languages":

In contrast to Austronesian languages almost everywhere else, the Oceanic languages on the north coast of the Papua New Guinea mainland show an unusual disinclination to make use of the morphological causative inherited from Proto-Oceanic and Proto-Austronesian. Innovative causatives derived from causative serial constructions appear to have supplanted to varying degrees the inherited prefix *pa(ka)-. Part 1 summarizes the dethroning of the inherited prefix. Part 2 outlines the replacement pattern of serial causatives. Part 3 suggests reasons for preferring the serial causatives.

If this is the sort of thing you like, you will like it!

2) Eric Jager has a nice piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education called "Lost in the Archives," a response to those who ask "why anyone needs to go to the archives at all, since everything is now on the Internet":

Actually there's a lot that isn't on the Internet. ...

As you wait for your documents to arrive at the desk, or to be delivered to your table from a metal cart rolled noisily through the room, you hope and pray that the precious records are available and that the curatorial staff can find them. If so, you have been liberated — or doomed — to spend days or even weeks copying faded, nearly illegible texts and deciphering them from medieval Latin, French, or the like. Many archives forbid photography, and you often have only ambient light, so a magnifying glass comes in handy. It's time-consuming, eye-straining detective work, punctuated by the occasional thrill of an unanticipated revelation.

3) If you've run across the Russian term картавить, defined in the Oxford dictionary as "to burr," and you're curious to hear what it sounds like, Anatoly Vorobey has put up a podcast in which you can hear him doing it. In a followup thread he asks readers to report on any accent they might hear, and one said that he pronounced his r's in a French way (I myself had thought it was the effect of living in Israel for many years, since many Israelis have a French-style "r grasseyé"), but he responded "Просто картавлю с детства."

4) And for heaven's sake, don't miss Teju Cole (see here and here) over at Beth's Cassandra Pages; his Angels in Winter (with his own photos) inspires a desire to visit Rome, a city I've never had much interest in, and makes me glad the internet affords me the ability to experience what I called in my comment there "the sensibility of one who sees, thinks, and feels so well."

MAINTAINING YOUR LANGUAGE.

Mbristow has been doing research on minority language communities and started to wonder how people maintain their language, so she's collecting personal stories of language learning, loss and use at a new site she's started, languageaccount. If you have stories you'd like to share, you might pay it a visit.

(Sorry about the lack of posting lately; it was a triple whammy of editing deadline, heavy dose of grandson-sitting, and then the access problems, which apparently had to do with something called "php" and which were resolved by the excellent songdog, without whom this blog would never have existed in the first place and who has guided it through too many minicrises of this sort. Thanks, songdog!)

WU WEI.

Over at the Log, Victor Mair's post WU2WEI2: Do Nothing opens with a gorgeous photo of the throne room of the Forbidden City (n.b.: "wu" is on the right, "wei" on the left) and proceeds to a description of the Chinese phrase and related terms:

The grammarians argue over whether this is an injunction ("do nothing") or a negative declarative sentence ("there is no action"). It is normally rendered in English as a noun. Regardless of the part of speech, WU2WEI2 has had an enormous impact on Chinese thought for the past two millennia and more.

In the Afterword to my Bantam translation of the Tao Te Ching / Dao De Jing, I pointed out a number of Sanskrit terms (e.g., AKRTA [non-action], AKARMA [inaction], NAISKARMYA [freedom from action or actionlessness], KARMANAM ANARAMBHAN [noncommencement of action] — diacriticals omitted here), especially numerous in the Bhagavad Gita, that mean essentially the same thing as WU2WEI2. The Indian notions, while equally subtle and elusive, are quite different in their moral implications. Whereas the Taoist concept is both ethical and socio-political, the Hindu complex of ideas is metaphysical and existential.

The comment thread has quotes from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and much discussion. Highly recommended.

BARID.

Lameen Souag, in his Jabal al-Lughat post No, Berber isn't descended from Arabic, rebuts some "unscientific jingoistic claptrap" that claims what the title denies. But the comment thread turns into a discussion of one of his examples, a Berber word that is borrowed from Arabic: "abrid 'road' < Ar. barīd بريد (confirmed by the Tuareg pronunciation of this word, abărid)." Lameen explains that "barīd (primary meaning in modern standard Arabic: post) comes from Greek beredos 'post-horse', which is from Latin veredus 'post-horse'," but then it turns out that "barīd might be a borrowing into Arabic from Persian, rather than Greek - in which case the word for this key tool of government has been passed on from one empire to the next ever since the Akkadians." It's well worth a read by anyone interested in these things.

A PASSION FOR DICTIONARIES.

In this thread, AJP directed my attention to Just the Right Word by Nicholas A. Basbanes ("Well known for writing about books, bibliophiles, and various aspects of book culture, Nicholas Basbanes has worked as an award-winning investigative reporter, a literary editor, a lecturer, and a nationally syndicated columnist"; the name is apparently pronounced /'bæsbeynz/). Here, Basbanes reports on "Breon Mitchell’s 2,000 dictionaries of exotic languages."

His interest in lexicons grew out of his interest in linguistics and translation and his work as a professor of Germanic studies and comparative literature at Indiana, a position he still holds in addition to his duties at the Lilly.

“I started out to collect one dictionary for every language in the world, but then it became much more interesting to get the first dictionaries published,” he explained of his purpose. “Then I decided to limit myself to non-European languages and living languages. A further limitation was that I wasn’t going to collect any of the major languages of the world either, regardless of geography, and I would be the one to decide which are the major languages, based on the number of people who are speaking them.” ...

“There are some other collections of dictionaries, but they generally focus on a particular language or two. I know of no institution that is specifically building a dictionary collection at all like this one, so there is a definite utility to it.”

Mitchell said that there are more than 6,000 active languages in the world, most of which have no dictionary at all. “The number of languages for which a dictionary exists is probably around 1,000, though it could be as many as 1,500.” ...

“I was interested at first in what we might call the exotic languages or rare languages spoken by very few people. But some of these languages we might think of as rare are in fact spoken by millions,” he said, citing the languages of the Indian subcontinent, of native or indigenous populations of the Western hemisphere, and of African regions as examples. “There are more than 800 different languages in Papua New Guinea alone, which is the only country in the world, by the way, in which pidgin English is an official language.”Thus, Mitchell admits another category to his shelves: pidgin and Creole languages. ...

Mitchell’s copy of an 1861 Zulu–English dictionary of 10,000 entries contains numerous annotations and corrections inserted by the book’s former owner, A. N. Montgomery, an author of books related to South African history. Mitchell’s copy of the 1878 revised edition of the dictionary is annotated and signed by the black African printer.

“I also collect gypsy languages and Inuit languages,” Mitchell said. “I have a very early Eskimo dictionary—a Latin–Greenlandic–Eskimo dictionary, printed in 1804 in Copenhagen.” He has Australian aboriginal dictionaries and a dictionary of Tokelauan, the language used by native peoples in New Zealand, American Samoa, and other Pacific islands. Another dictionary, of Rapa Nui, is the “first two-way dictionary of the language of Easter Island.” Yet another: a copy of the “first and only dictionary” of Nyoro, a Bantu language spoken by more than 500,000 people living east of Lake Albert in Uganda.

Mitchell estimates his holdings of Native American dictionaries at more than 125 languages, including one, of the Otchipwe language, acquired at Sotheby’s in the Frank T. Seibert sale in 1999 for $4,312.50, the most he has spent for any book in the collection. “With the help of the Internet, I was able to collect broadly around the world and assemble a really fine collection within about two years for very little money,” he said. He also noted that he has used all other conventional methods as well, including the development of good relationships with booksellers and the prowling of junk shops and antique stores.

I would love to spend some time exploring his collection, but I'm happy just knowing it exists.

OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LEXICOGRAPHY.

The good people at Oxford UP sent me a review copy of The Oxford History of English Lexicography; they must have been pretty confident I'd like it, because it's an expensive two-volume set, and their confidence was not misplaced. This is the best reference history I've read in a long time, and I feel confident in saying that if you love dictionaries, you need to set some time aside for reading it (assuming you can convince your library to spring for a copy).

OUP's description says:

Part one of Volume I explores the early development of glosses and bilingual and multilingual dictionaries and examines their influence on lexicographical methods and ideas. Part two presents a systematic history of monolingual dictionaries of English and includes extensive chapters on Johnson, Webster and his successors in the USA, and the OED. It also contains descriptions of the development of dictionaries of national and regional varieties, and of Old and Middle English, and concludes with an account of the computerization of the OED.

The specialized dictionaries described in Volume II include dictionaries of science, dialects, synonyms, etymology, pronunciation, slang and cant, quotations, phraseology, and personal and place names. This volume also includes an account of the inception and development of dictionaries developed for particular users, especially foreign learners of English.

That gives you an idea of the contents, but the only way to show you its excellences is to quote extensively, which I shall do. (I will doubtless be posting further about the book, because I haven't even finished the first volume yet.)

From the first chapter, Hans Sauer on medieval glosses and glossaries, we learn that "The first author who named his (Latin) compilation Dictionarius was apparently John of Garland (c.1195-c.1272), but this title was slow to catch on. The large and popular Latin dictionaries from the Middle Ages have titles such as Elementarium (i.e. for beginners), Derivationes (i.e. assembling word-families), Catholicon (i.e. a comprehensive collection), Medulla (i.e. the quintessence), etc. ... The term 'dictionary' came to be used more frequently in the course of the seventeenth century." Later he tells us that Johannes Balbus of Genoa was "the first lexicographer to achieve complete alphabetization (from the first to the last letter of each word)." Among the delightful trivia Sauer mentions are the "rare Latin lemma... bradigabo (badrigabo) in Épinal-Erfurt 131, the meaning of which is unknown; it was glossed as felduuop (Ép) / felduus (Erf), the meaning of which is also unknown," and "the so-called 'Tremulous Hand of Worcester'":

In the first half of the thirteenth century, a monk at Worcester with shaky handwriting entered about 50,000 glosses in about twenty OE manuscripts, partly in early Middle English, but mostly in Latin. Apparently, even in the early thirteenth century, English had changed so much that Old English could no lonager be readily understood and had to be explained. Why the Tremulous Hand took such pains to do this is, however, not quite clear.

From Donna M.T.Cr. Farina and George Durman's chapter on bilingual dictionaries of English and Russian (yes, there's an entire chapter on bilingual dictionaries of English and Russian!), we find that "The first English translations from Russian began to appear in the sixteenth century. By contrast, the first Russian translation from English, a geometry textbook, did not appear until 1625... The first English grammar to appear in Russian (1766) was published seventy years after the first Russian grammar was printed in England." The first Russian lexicographer of English was Prokhor Zhdanov (Прохор Жданов), who in 1772 published a bilingual dictionary as an appendix to an English grammar he translated into Russian, and in 1784 published A New Dictionary English and Russian: Novoĭ slovarʹ Angliskoĭ i Rossīĭskoĭ—which can be perused at Google Books! In discussing the late 18th and early 19th centuries, Farina and Durman say:

The number of English teachers, governesses, and nannies increased; this is recorded in memoirs and travelogues published in Russian and in England, as well as in Russian literature. English merchants in Russia were numerous as well. Nikolai Karamzin (1792) tells how in London he encountered a group of English merchants who had gathered to speak Russian in the coffee house of the stock morket; it turned out that they had lived and done business in Saint Petersburg.

They provide detailed comparisons of the entries on particular words in a number of dictionaries ("A comparison of related entries in Grammatin, Banks, and Alexandrov (Table 6.3.3) demonstrates how the Alexandrov dictionary indicates a word's 'shades of meaning'").

In N.E. Osselton's chapter on "The Early Development of the English Monoligual Dictionary," we find that Thomas Blount was "the first English compiler to provide etymologies for all (or nearly all) of the words entered," and JK's A New English Dictionary (1702) "established once and for all the practice of including the everyday vocabulary of English alongside 'harder' words: his letter D begins with a dab, a dab-chick, a dab-fish, to dabble, a dace, and a daffodell, and at the word girl he starts with the common meaning ('A Girl, or wench')." Nathan Bailey, in his Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721), "devotes much attention to etymology, but he recognizes that this might put off readers with no knowledge of languages, and explains that the etymological information on each word has been put within square brackets 'that they may pass it over without any manner of Trouble or Inconvenience'." Benjamin Martin in 1749 developed the "useful new lexicographical device... of putting unassimilated foreign words such as legerdemain and pronto into italics." It's fascinating to me to watch the features of dictionaries that we take for granted come into existence over the centuries. Having taken us through the early 18th century, Osselton ends on this cliffhanger:

In one way or another, the works of the early lexicographers thus came to incorporate much of what we should expect to find in monolingual English dictionaries today. But pronunciation (beyond mere word-stress), the meaning of compound nouns, set collocations, phrasal verbs, particles, abbreviations, idiomatic expressions (other than proverbs), irregular plurals, all kinds of grammatical information—anything like a systematic coverage of these was to be for future generations of dictionary-makers.

I've barely scratched the surface, but further tidbits will have to await future entries. I think I've given enough material to suggest why I love this book so much that I've had to force myself to set it aside to do the editing by which I earn my bread. The book even smells good—not a minor consideration for me! This is a true triumph of scholarship and another feather in the cap for Oxford (I'm very much looking forward to the chapters on the OED).

PEREGRUZKA.

I wasn't planning to write about the minor contretemps caused by Secretary of State Clinton's gag gift to Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, of a red plastic button with the English word reset and an alleged Russian translation that turned out to be wrong; I figure everyone's heard about it by now, and really, what is there to say other than "oops"? As Geoff Pullum says in his Language Log post, "peregruzka doesn't mean 'reset'... The word they were supposed to have printed on the device was 'perezagruzka'."

What prompted me to write was seeing the actual button at Anatoly's post about it. It doesn't say ПЕРЕГРУЗКА on the button, it says PEREGRUZKA. I wasn't outraged about the mistranslation, since perezagruzka is a new term and isn't in the dictionaries and I could understand how the mistake might have come about, but using Roman letters instead of Cyrillic? What the hell, people? Didn't anyone realize they use a different alphabet over there?

SERGEI KRUGLOV.

Zipping through wood s lot, trying to get through my blogroll so I can set to work on my editing job, I was stopped in my tracks by this:

Bruno Schulz
Sergei Kruglov
Tr. Vitaly Chernetsky

The sun outside the window, a redhead lilith
Laughing, devoured the names of the three angels.
But I’m but a child, and I won’t get scared,
Father! I’ll draw her,
An incantation: pencil, paper.
On a metallic branch outside the window sits that Stymphalian bird
The spring of 1942
Filled with melancholy yearning, begging for flesh

You know, father, if God really is
A rabbi from Drohobycz — then we are done for!
But if He is just G-d,
With the bleeding meaty emptiness of “o” (as if
They tore out, clinging tightly with crooked fingers
Eight pages right from the very middle
Of the dense, piquant, quivering moist-rose-like
Book) — then
It’s all right, perhaps we’ll somehow come back to life.

Sometimes I get a strong sense from a translation that I'll like the poet in the original, so I googled around and found the original, which I did indeed like (it's below the cut if you read Russian—I got it from here). There's more of Kates's Kruglov here; it's part of a section of Jacket devoted to "New Russian Poetry." It's always good to discover a new poet.

БРУНО ШУЛЬЦ

Солнце за окном — рыжая лилита,
Смеясь, имена трёх ангелов сожрала.
А я-то — ребёнок, а я не испугаюсь,
Отец! я её нарисую,
Заклятие: карандаш, бумага.
На металлической ветке за окном тоскует, просит плоти
Стимфалийская птица весна
Сорок второго года.

Знаешь, отец, ведь если Бог — и в самом деле
Раввин из Дрогобыча, то мы пропали!
Но если Он — просто Б-г,
С кровоточащей мясной пустотой «о» (словно
Вырвали, плотно скрюченными пальцами уцепившись,
Восемь страниц с рисунками из самой середины
Плотной, пряной, трепещущей, как влажная роза,
Книги) — то
Ничего, может, ещё оживём.

SEMICOLON QUESTION.

An acquaintance asked me whether a form of semicolon deployment that occurs throughout an academic work from the UK, using semicolons where an American text would use em-dashes, is a UK publishing standard or just bad punctuation. Here's a sample sentence (rewritten to remove identifiers):

His achievement in the book is to make the issue relevant; to bring the debate through a variety of discourses and transform the texts available to him into a poem whose scope encompasses every aspect of governance.

I responded that, as someone used to US standards, I didn't like it, but I had no idea whether it was OK in the UK. Then it occurred to me that I probably have readers who know, so I thought I'd ask: if you're used to reading British academic prose, does that semicolon work for you?

MEAN.

Archibald MacLeish famously ended his 1926 "Ars Poetica" with "A poem should not mean/ But be." I learn from Peter Howarth in the LRB that Robert Frost put a nasty spin on this in a notebook entry: "A poem shouldn't mean, it should be mean." So much for the grandfatherly figure maundering about roads not taken, so beloved of careless skimmers of anthologies.

UNREMARKABLE POETS.

Jeffrey H. Gray's essay "Poets' Puffery" is a standard-issue grouse about the hyping of everything that gets published as "one of the most original voices in contemporary American poetry" and the like (hey, no man cries "stinking fish"), but it has a nice excursus on disparaging references to earlier poets, irrelevant to his point but entertaining:

Nathaniel Evans (18th century) is "noted by most historians as a 'fledgling versifier' whose occasional verses were wholly 'unremarkable.'" Elizabeth Akers Allen (19th century) "was considered a minor Victorian poet even by her contemporaries." Her sentiments were "expressed competently, but with no attempt at innovation in style or content." William Byrd's (18th-century) "contribution to poetry is not at all significant." Indeed, "he published merely a few short, uninteresting poems."

In our present-day culture of inflation, such humble assessments are appealing. Faint praise is sometimes appropriate. Charles Henry Phelps's "Love-Song" (1892), a political overture to Canada, makes a poor bid for immortality:

Why should we longer thus be vexed?
Consent, coy one, to be annexed.

But even William Cullen Bryant, surely a bright star of 19th-century poetry — the prodigy who, at 17, wrote "Thanatopsis" — is treated with disdain: "By the end of the 20th century, most critics pronounced him 'minor' when they took note of him at all."

My own favorite entry, on Gertrude Bloede (19th century), sums up a poet's bad dream of posterity: "Interest in her work, always limited, declined after her death."

You can actually see a portrait of poor Gertrude here, along with a brief biographical sketch; she looks like she wouldn't be a bit surprised by her posthumous reputation, or lack thereof. (Thanks, Paul!)

Incidentally, I had to read "Thanatopsis" in grade school; I'll bet few of my readers can say that, and those who can are of my graying generation.

IMITERE.

I was scanning wood s lot when I hit on a link headlined "Inde tibi tuaeque rei publicae quod imitere capias..." It was the work of a moment to discover that this was from Livy's preface to his history of Rome and that it meant (as translated in this essay on the value of Latin) "From it [i.e., history] you can find examples for yourself and your country to follow," but the word imitere threw me. It looks like an infinitive of the second or third conjugation, but the verb is a first-conjugation deponent: imitor, imitārī. My days as a Latin student are far, far behind me, and I became increasingly confused and hopeless as I pored over tables of conjugations. Fortunately I found William L. Carey's Livy site for his Latin students, where each assigned passage has a pdf file, with a separate one for grammatical commentary. And his commentary is aimed at my level of neediness, because the one for this passage (pdf) says:

imitere = imiteris, present subjunctive of imitor, -ari, -atus sum, to imitate, copy. All verbs in -ris (i.e., the 2nd person singular of the present, imperfect, and future tenses of deponents and the passive voice of other verbs) are often syncopated to -re.

So it's not an infinitive 'to imitate,' it's second person singular subjunctive 'that you should imitate' (actually imitēre/imitēris, with long e). Thank you, Mr. Carey, and thank you, O great internet!

THE FATE OF DUTCH IN AMERICA.

Martin Langeveld, an occasional LH commenter, has started a blog for papers presented at the Monday Evening Club of Pittsfield, Massachusetts (where I lived for a couple of years before moving east to Hadley), and his essay "Why we don't all speak Dutch: Language extinction and language survival" has now been posted. He starts off talking about the Dutch of New Amsterdam and the odd persistence of their language:

The Dutch lost control of their colony in 1664, when the English took over, without firing a shot, during one of the periodic Anglo-Dutch wars of that century. However, the Dutch did not go away after the English takeover, nor did their culture fade away. In fact, despite the fact that only a tiny minority of immigrants to the New York region after 1664 came from the Netherlands, the Dutch language continued to be widely spoken in the New York region for over 200 years. Not until 1764 was English used to preach in New York’s Dutch Reformed churches. President Martin Van Buren (born in 1782 not far from here in Kinderhook and elected in 1836) spoke Dutch at home with his wife. The first 20th century president, Theodore Roosevelt, grew up hearing his grandparents speak Dutch at the dinner table in New York City in the 1860s. Sojourner Truth, the anti-slavery orator and associate of Frederick Douglass, was born as a slave in Ulster County, New York about 1797, and grew up speaking nothing but Dutch until she was eleven years old. Dutch was spoken in parts of Brooklyn into the mid 1800s and is quite likely the origin of the so-called Brooklyn accent.

Closer to the present, the Jackson Whites, a clan of mixed black, Indian and Dutch heritage still live in the Ramapo Hills of New Jersey. They spoke a bastardized form of Dutch, which still had some 200 speakers in 1910. This Jersey Dutch died out sometime between the 1920s and 1950s, although some Dutch-derived expressions apparently survive among their elders. Researchers in 1910 as well as in recent years found that some of them still knew a nursery rhyme called Trippe Trappe Troontjes, which was also mentioned by Teddy Roosevelt as the one piece of Dutch he remembered learnning from his grandmother; and on one of his African trips Roosevelt discovered that it was also known by the South African boers who had carried it there from Holland 300 years before.

In the early 20th century, Dutch researchers found other surviving pockets of Dutch descended directly from that of the colonial settlers of New Amsterdam, in the Hudson Valley as far north as Schenectady. I have found at least anecdotal evidence of families in the Catskills who spoke Dutch on a daily basis into the 1940s or 50s. So the language survived nearly three full centuries after the end of Dutch influence in North America. And who knows, it seems quite likely that somewhere in New York or New Jersey, there still lives a geezer or two who learned, on their mother’s knee, a smattering of that colonial Dutch.

Although it eventually died out, the survival of Dutch over such long time against all odds raises some interesting questions. Why did Dutch hang on, when the languages of other immigrants, like the Germans, Italians and Poles, typically disappear within a generation or two?

He discusses the issue in the light of the linguistic situation of Papua New Guinea; in the process he remarks that "as a child I also learned a Dutch dialect that is virtually extinct today. Official Dutch is really an artificial amalgam, codified in the 19th century, that bridges most of the dialects spoken in the Netherlands and Flemish Belgium. The dialect I learned is virtually useless outside the old-age homes on the island of Texel, and Dutch itself is a language that’s pretty useless outside of the Netherlands." Much food for thought there.