IT DOESN'T EAT BREAD.

Chocolate & Zucchini, according to the About page, "is a blog written by Clotilde Dusoulier, a 29-year-old Parisian woman who lives in Montmartre and shares her passion for all things food-related -- thoughts, recipes, musings, cookbook acquisitions, quirky ingredients, nifty tools, restaurant experiences, ideas, and inspirations." It shows up here because of Clotilde's penchant for explaining food-related French idioms; those posts are conveniently listed here. I am unfamiliar with most of them, so it's a good resource for me; I liked, for instance, "Ça ne mange pas de pain":

Literally translated as, "It doesn't eat bread," it is used to say that a thing or an action can't hurt: it may never amount to much or be of much use, but if it costs nothing and entails no risk, why not?

It is a colloquial expression that is usually delivered with a shrug, and when spoken, the ne and the de are often swallowed, so that you will hear it as, "Ça mange pas d'pain."

Example: "Passe un coup de fil à ton médecin, ça ne mange pas de pain !" "Give your doctor a call, it doesn't eat bread!"

And there's a widget that allows you to hear the phrase and sample sentence spoken, a nice touch. (By the way, note the space before the exclamation point in the French sentence; that's an example of French spacing, and that is one of the more thorough and informative Wikipedia articles I've read lately.)

If you're interested in cooking blogs qua cooking blogs, you should of course have Caviar and Codfish bookmarked; it's run by the impressive Robin Damstra, who cooks on a regular basis for LH commenter jamessal, the lucky dog.

(Thanks for the idioms link, Jon!)

TIP OF YOUR TONGUE.

Chirag Mehta has come up with a nifty word-search tool at Tip of My Tongue ("Find that word that you've been thinking about all day but just can't seem to remember"). You can enter letters you think are or aren't part of the missing word, as well as elements of the meaning, and you get a list of words with definitions (some of them hitherto unknown to me: "scrimshank British military language: avoid work," "Bawson A badger"). I'm puzzled, though, by his insistence on spelling blog with an initial apostrophe (see his About page). Yes, it's shortened from weblog; I'm guessing, though, that he doesn't write 'phone, 'plane, or 'flu'. (Via MetaFilter.)

TRACKING LANGUAGE CHANGE.

I just read an interesting post at Anatoly's blog (whose ever-changing name is now "Somehow Keats will survive without you"). He's rereading The Twelve Chairs (something I keep meaning to do) and has realized that the dvornik's "Ходют и ходют" [Khódyut i khódyut, 'They come and they come'] at the end of the novel provides valuable information about the chronology of a change in Russian pronunciation. Until some time after the 1917 Revolution, it was standard (especially in Moscow) to pronounce unstressed -ят (-yat) in third person plural verbs as -ют (-yut) (and, similarly, unstressed -ящий in participles as -ющий—see Comrie et al.). Ushakov in 1935 gives this as the only acceptable pronunciation, but Avanesov in 1947 says it's less widespread, and in 1950 calls it archaic. As Anatoly points out, Ilf and Petrov's use of it as a marker of nonstandard speech shows that it already seemed old-fashioned in Moscow in 1928.

VINEGAR(R)OON.

The Daily Growler's latest post talks about the creatures that inhabit the Southwest: "the coyote, the bobcat, the puma, the Gila monster, the vinegaroon..." Hold on, said I, "vinegaroon"? Not in M-W, so I tried Wordnik, and there it was, cited from the Century Dictionary: "1. A corruption of vinegerone." And vinegerone is "The whip-tailed scorpion, Thelyphonus giganteus: so called on account of the strong vinegar-Iike odor of an acid secretion noticeable when the creature is alarmed. Also called vinaigrier and vinegar-maker."

Now, the interesting thing is that when I checked the physical AHD (since it's not online anymore) I found the following entry:

vinegarroon also vinegarone n. A large whip scorpion (Mastigoproctus giganteus) of the southern United States and Mexico that emits a strong vinegary odor when disturbed. [American Spanish vinagrón, from Spanish vinagre, vinegar, from Old Spanish, from Old French vinaigre. See VINEGAR.]

Even though, when a human looks at a physical dictionary, the entry is obviously what is wanted, the search engine would ignore it because of the extra -r-. (I wonder how the spellings migrated from the century-old Century's vinegaroon/vinegerone to the AHD's vinegarroon/vinegarone?)

SOMEWHAT CALIGINOUS.

A delightful quote, cribbed from Anatoly:

Professor Edgeworth, of All Souls', avoided conversational English, persistently using words and phrases that one expects to meet only in books. One evening, Lawrence returned from a visit to London, and Edgeworth met him at the gate. "Was it very caliginous in the Metropolis?"

"Somewhat caliginous, but not altogether inspissated", Lawrence replied gravely.

—Robert Graves, Good-Bye to All That, p. 372.

I presume this is the Edgeworth in question; this biographical sketch includes a nice quote: "Besides we owe him something, like a good German he knew that the Greek k is not a modern c, and, if any of you at any time wonder where the k in Biometrika comes from, I will frankly confess that I stole it from Edgeworth. Whenever you see that k call to mind dear old Edgeworth."

THE FIRST MS.

Congratulations to Ben Zimmer, who's been hunting the elusive "first known proposal for using the title Ms. to refer to a woman regardless of her marital status"; he's found it on page 4 of the Springfield (Mass.) Sunday Republican of November 10, 1901: "There is a void in the English language, which, with some diffidence, we undertake to fill..." Visit his post for a scan of the article and an account of the search, which was finally resolved because the the Republican "had been digitized by America's Historical Newspapers (Readex/NewsBank), the same database that yielded the 1916 citation for jazz from the New Orleans Times-Picayune." Ain't antedating fun?

CUYAHOGA.

My local public radio station had one of those segments where they respond to messages from listeners, and they acknowledged a flood of complaints from Cleveland about their pronunciation of "Cuyahoga," in a story about the Cuyahoga River, as /ˌkaɪəˈhɒɡə/ "KYE-ə-HOG-ə"; the listeners insisted that the correct pronunciation was /ˌkaɪəˈhoʊɡə/ "KYE-ə-HOE-gə." The announcer defended the station's usage, saying they'd checked with locals; since receiving the complaints, they'd called every official source they could think of and found them pretty much evenly divided: for instance, if I recall correctly, the mayor's office used -HOE- and the post office -HOG-, though I may have it reversed. At any rate, it was obvious that both were in use. One of their contacts suggested there was a preference for -HOE- on the east side of the city and -HOG- on the west side; the Wikipedia article linked above claims that -HOG- is the preferred current pronunciation, -HOE- being "older." Does anybody know of any research on this, or have personal convictions on the matter? (We stipulate in advance that yes, the burning river was funny, but the locals are tired of hearing about it—that was a long time ago, and it's one of the cleanest rivers around these days.)

WORDNIK.

A couple of years ago, lexicographer Erin McKean (a LH favorite, quoted here many times) gave a TED talk about the evolution of language and the shortcomings of traditional dictionaries (an hour long, well worth your while). Since then she has been working on an entirely new sort of online dictionary to address some of those shortcomings, and it's now gone live (in beta) as Wordnik (great name). In the words of Maria Popova at Brain Pickings, "A crowdsourced toolkit for tracking and recording the evolution of language as it occurs, its goal is to gather as much information about a word as possible — not its mere definition, but also in-sentence examples, semantic “neighborhoods” of related words, images, statistics about usage, and more." I gave it a trial run by entering the word sculpin (which came up in this LH thread) and was pleased to find not only the American Heritage Dictionary definition but a couple of sample sentences ("'You sculpin-mouthed hyena, blowing up men's property"; "Go along you old sculpin, and turn out your toes") and a set of Flickr images of the unprepossessing-looking fish. Check it out for yourself. (Disclaimer: I consider Erin and Grant Barrett, the site's editorial director, pals and have helped out in a minor way with the site.)

WILLARD WALKER, RIP.

I recently learned of the death of linguistic anthropologist Willard Walker, who specialized in Native American languages and cultures. Here's his obit in the newsletter of Wesleyan University, where he taught for many years, but I particularly liked Stephen Christomalis's memorial post at his blog Glossographia:

One of the more remarkable facts about literacy in colonial and pre-modern North America is the extreme paucity of independently developed writing systems and numerical notations. In contrast to West Africa, where there are dozens of examples of individuals creating indigenous scripts after being exposed to the Roman or Arabic scripts, there are relatively few indigenous North American scripts, and of these, the Cherokee syllabary (in which each sign encodes a syllable rather than a single phoneme) has been one of the most successful. Walker’s work was an effort to explain the development of Cherokee writing that was respectful to Sequoyah (George Guest), the script’s inventor, while steering clear of ‘great man’ fallacies and attempting to understand the sociocultural context of the script’s invention and acceptance.... A major part of his life’s work was comparative, showing the ways in which Cherokee interest in literacy contrasted with grave ambivalence about the practice of encoding oral traditions in written texts among many other peoples of the Americas.

He has a fascinating discussion of the Cherokee numerals, which were created by Sequoyah but rejected by the Cherokee: "they display a remarkable structural resemblance to the system of numerals used by the Jurchin of northeastern China, who developed a script in the 12th century, and who were later known (famously) as the Manchu when they ruled China.... If I were to make the case for cognitive constraints interacting with cultural and linguistic variability to produce remarkable and unexpected parallels, this would be a good example. Theoretically, then, the Cherokee numerals are extremely important even though no one actually used them, as far as we can tell." (Via Savage Minds.)

ARTICLES NOT INCLUDED.

Jeff Koyen has a post about one of the more amazing screw-the-writer gimmicks I've heard of. Koyen got a message from Eastgate Publishing in the Philippines, wanting to reprint a piece of his on travel taboos in their new travel magazine Mango. They offered US$0.15/word, but then followed up with this clarification:

Dear Mr. Koyen,
My sincerest apologies, but I failed to mention that the words “a”, “and”, and “the” are not included in the rate. Would you still be interested in writing this piece for us?

(Thanks, Michael!)

PREFACES TO THE OED FASCICLES.

The OED has put online "the prefatory material that was published with the 125 fascicles, and the cumulated sections, parts, and volumes, in which the OED was originally issued between 1884 and 1928. These were collected in 1987 by Darrell R. Raymond of the University of Waterloo, and republished as Dispatches from the Front." Raymond's own preface says:

The Prefaces contain a wealth of historical and lexicographical information about the OED. Each Preface lists the editors, drafters, proofreaders, contributors, and scholars who participated in the fascicle’s production or the investigation of its sources. The magnitude of their labours is well illustrated by tables of statistical data comparing the fascicle to the corresponding sections of other dictionaries, including Johnson’s, Cassell’s, the Century, and Funk’s. Each Preface recounts the difficult or interesting problems that were solved, and outlines the general etymological character of words in that part of the alphabet. As well, the Prefaces contain a number of additions and corrections to the entries as they appear in the fascicles; these emendations were subsequently incorporated in the Supplement.

As in everything else, Murray’s Prefaces set the standard for the OED. While the other editors followed the general format he established, Murray’s Prefaces are always distinguishable. More than any other editor, Murray indulges in extended discussion of etymological and lexicographical curiosities, as for example with BE-, CROSS, ODD, PENNY and TAKE, and his explanation of why American was included while African was excluded (Vol. I). Too, Murray does not hesitate to remind us of the value of the historical method (H–HOD), the conjectures, errors and spurious words in existing works (CLO–CONSIGNER, PENNAGE–PLAT), or the hours that might be spent on the etymology of a word, with the only result being the notation ‘derivation unknown’ (Vol. I).

When I used to frequent a library that had the original fascicles, I took pleasure in browsing through the prefaces, and I am pleased that everyone can now do so easily online. (Via wood s lot, which today also links to a delightful translation of Ilpo Tiihonen's poem "Kesäillan kevyt käsitteellisyys," which plays with Finnish grammatical endings: "Ah summer evening, and its eveningness,/ its prodigious wonders and their bridgefulness/ when the nightunited seamlessness/ steals into one’s heart with restfulness...")

ONLINE LANGUAGE LEARNING.

John Wesley of Universitiesandcolleges.org sent me their Master List of Free Language Learning Resources, and it looks like something that might be interesting to people out there, so I'm passing it along. It's got podcasts, online courses, iPhone/iPod applications, and general language learning sites, and includes languages from Abenaki to Xhosa. Check it out if it seems up your alley.

Addendum. Michael Farris points us to So you want to learn a language, which he says "is especially useful for lots of lesser studied languages." I see, for instance, that they have Javanese, which isn't on the list at the other site.

MERCER.

My wife and I are now reading Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety in the evenings; I've been a fan of hers ever since reading Eight Months on Ghazzah Street some years ago, and this fat historical novel about the French Revolution and three of the men who made it is every bit as good as I had hoped. And since I can never read a novel without wanting to learn more about the time and place it describes, I am also reading a book the excellent Noetica sent me a while back, The Making of Revolutionary Paris, by David Garrioch, which the author wrote because he looked for a general history of eighteenth-century Paris, found there wasn't one, and thought there should be.

It's an excellent work, tying together all sorts of recent developments in historical research, and I'm devouring it greedily (aided and abetted by my collection of historical maps, and it's a good thing I have them, because the book only has one map of Paris, and that completely illegible—I wag my finger in annoyance at U. of California Press). But I have a minor lexical quibble that I bring to your attention because, hey, it's what I do.

Garrioch has frequent occasion to mention the various tradesmen of the city, and on page 67 he says "At the peak of the pyramid were the great merchant guilds known as the Six Corps: the drapers, grocer-apothecaries, furriers, silk merchants, goldsmiths, and mercers." What, you may ask (if you're American), is a mercer? I think I had run across the word before, and even looked it up, but because it corresponds to nothing in my daily life it went right out of my head. Merriam-Webster says "British: a dealer in usually expensive fabrics"; AHD says "Chiefly British: a dealer in textiles, especially silks." All well and good, except that of course these merchants were not British but French, and they were not mercers but merciers, and that pair happens to be a pair of faux amis. A mercier is what Americans call a "notions dealer" (and Brits, I believe, a "haberdasher," which in America is a dealer in men's clothing), selling needles, thread, buttons, and the like. Garrioch explains the term somewhat obliquely a couple of pages later: "The mercers were the largest of all, their numbers rising to over 3,000 in the 1770s — though that included both the sellers of objets d'art and the humble retailers of ribbons and baubles who trudged the streets with their wares on a tray suspended in front of them." Very far, in other words, from dealers in silk, and however tempting the similar-sounding English word, he should have left mercier in the original French. (I am at least relieved he didn't use "haberdasher," which would have confused American readers no end.)

KNAB.

Greg, who sent me Geonames, followed up with another discovery: KNAB, the Place Names Database of EKI. What is EKI, you ask? Why, Eesti Keele Instituut, of course: the Institute of the Estonian Language. With this knowledge, you will understand that the coverage of the database is especially strong for Estonia and some other regions of the former Soviet Union; you can read about the database here and search it (for non-Estonian placenames) here, and there's a convenient page of links to other geographical names databases (one of my favorites being Luistxo Fernandez's GeoNative, a Basque/English website). Enjoy!

ABSTRUSE TIMES WORDS.

The Nieman Journalism Lab has an interesting report by Zachary M. Seward on the words that NY Times readers look up:

As you may know, highlighting a word or passage on the Times website calls up a question mark that users can click for a definition and other reference material. (Though the feature was recently improved, it remains a mild annoyance for myself and many others who nervously click and highlight text on webpages.) Anyway, it turns out the Times tracks usage of that feature, and yesterday, deputy news editor Philip Corbett, who oversees the Times style manual, offered reporters a fascinating glimpse into the 50 most frequently looked-up words on nytimes.com in 2009. We obtained the memo and accompanying chart, which offer a nice lesson in how news sites can improve their journalism by studying user behavior...

The most confusing to readers, with 7,645 look-ups through May 26, is sui generis, the Latin term roughly meaning “unique” that’s frequently used in legal contexts. The most ironic word is laconic (#4), which means “concise.” The most curious is louche (#3), which means “dubious” or “shady” and, as Corbett observes in his memo, inexplicably found its way into the paper 27 times over 5 months.

Not so inexplicable: Maureen Dowd loves the word. Anyway, a nice glimpse into the world of journalistic lexicography, and you can see the entire list at the link. (Via MetaFilter.)

GEONAMES.

Another site I can't believe I haven't discovered and posted about before: Geonames. The front page is pretty badly designed; the image of the earth at night is pleasant, but gives no indication of what the site is, and you have to scroll down past an endless series of translations of a brief description (English: "The countries of the world in their own languages and scripts; with official names, capitals, flags, coats of arms, administrative divisions, national anthems, and translations of the countries and capitals into many languages") to get to the meat of the site, a collection of links to various pages: Days, Months, Planets, Mountains, etc.; a huge list of languages with each name given in the original (with transliteration where appropriate); various other random items (including a small set of famous people: it's fun to see the varying forms of Charlemagne); an Alphabets section; and finally a set of Glossaries, with a few hundred English words translated into, well, everything (divided into manageable sets: Albanian|Greek|Armenian, American|Polynesian, Asian, Balto-Slavic, Basque|Caucasus, Celtic, Constructed, etc.). Greg says "A lot of work has gone into something that is interesting but only marginally useful"; I say: Useful? What is this "useful" you speak of? I could spend hours and hours splashing around in there! A random fact of the sort I love: Cairo in Lao is ເລີແກ (Lœ̄kǣ), obviously from le Caire. (Thanks, mission civilisatrice!) And I learned about a language new to me; I saw the abbreviation "kap" was for the language Bezhta, and looking that up I discovered Bezhta (or Bezheta) is a North Caucasian language also known as Kapucha. (Wikipedia says it is "spoken by about 10,000 people in southern Dagestan"; the Ethnologue page they link to says 3,000. The discrepancy may have something to do with the fact that since the 1926 census, the Bezhtas have been counted as Avars for official purposes.) Thanks, Greg!

POETRY ARCHIVE.

The Poetry Archive is an online collection of recordings of poets reading their work. From their About us page:

The Poetry Archive exists to help make poetry accessible, relevant and enjoyable to a wide audience. It came into being as a result of a meeting, in a recording studio, between Andrew Motion, soon after he became U.K. Poet Laureate in 1999, and the recording producer, Richard Carrington. They agreed about how enjoyable and illuminating it is to hear poets reading their work and about how regrettable it was that, even in the recent past, many important poets had not been properly recorded.

Poetry was an oral art form before it became textual. Homer's work lived through the spoken word long before any markings were made on a page. Hearing a poet reading his or her work remains uniquely illuminating. It helps us to understand the work as well as helping us to enjoy it. When a poet dies without making a recording, a precious resource is lost for ever and as time goes by that loss is felt more and more keenly. What would we not give to be able to hear Keats and Byron reading their work? And, if recording had been possible in the early nineteenth century, how inexplicable it would seem now if no-one had recorded their voices. Yet in the twentieth century, when recording technology became universal, there was no systematic attempt to record all significant poets for posterity and even some major poets - Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman (as far as we know. Please tell us if you have a recording of Hardy or Housman reading his poetry!), for example - died without having been recorded at all. The Poetry Archive has, therefore, been created to make sure that such omissions never happen again and that everyone has a chance to hear major poets reading their work.

I can't believe I haven't linked to it before, but now I've remedied that omission. Thanks, Grumbly!

TSUNDERE.

I have no particular interest in manga and related phenomena—I don't dislike them or disapprove of them, and I've seen some interesting examples, but life is too short to delve into everything—so I hadn't been familiar with the term tsundere until I read a MetaFilter comment by Marisa Stole the Precious Thing (the username is a reference to a Japanese song whose original title is 魔理沙は大変なものを盗んでいきました Marisa wa taihen na mono o nusunde ikimashita); the comment explains:

In the older sense, "tsundere" was a character who appeared to be cold, aloof even arrogant, but over time developed a softer, more caring side. In the newer sense, it's been used to mean a character who appears to be cold, aloof and arrogant on the outside but is actually, on the inside, filled with feelings of love and affection, usually for the character they're coldest with.

You can learn more at the Wikipedia entry (which explains that the word "is a combination of the two words tsuntsun (ツンツン), and deredere (デレデレ)"); at any rate, the reason I bring it up is that MSTPT also linked to a video in which "Minoru from Lucky Star explains it quite well," and it's one of the best examples of word rage I've seen—at about the 1:20 mark, after discussing the change in meaning, he loses it: "I declare here, this is plainly a mistake! We must bring back the true meaning of tsundere and restore this depraved nation! Rise up, citizens!" Prescriptivism knows no national or generational bounds.

EVERYBODY READS MALAYALAM.

Well, not me, and probably not you. But just about everybody in the Indian state of Kerala reads the state's official language, Malayalam, and Mridula Koshy's article "Kerala: mad about books" in Le Monde diplomatique is a fascinating look at the consequences:

Malayalam writers are in the enviable position of writing for Adiga’s rickshaw puller and not just about him.

Paul Zacharia, one of the best-known contemporary writers in Malayalam, says: “In the Indian picture, Kerala’s book readers are a record. They are the product both of the literacy movement and the earlier library movement spearheaded by a one-man army called PN Paniker [the founding father of the literacy movement in Kerala]. A whole world of grassroots readers keep emerging from the villages.”...

According to Paul Zacharia, the Malayalam reader is well read in every sense, including in world literature. DC Books’ website offers the reader translations of Carlos Fuentes’ Aura and his The Death of Artemio Cruz. There is Alex Haley’s Malcolm X and Amoz Oz’s Fima. Che Guevara, Charles Darwin and Charles Dickens are all available, as are Junichiro Tanizaki and George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, JM Coetzee and JMG Le Clézio – all of them in Malayalam. (Paul Coelho for some reason is available only in English.) And among the million books on display at the week-long DC book fair, the bestsellers included not only examples of contemporary Malayalam literature, like V Vijayan’s Khasakkinte Ithihasam and MT Vasudevan Nair’s Randamoozham, but also popular English titles such as Adiga’s The White Tiger.

Writers in Kerala locate themselves in the great confluence of world literature. They are powerfully influenced by both Malayalam and world literature. Zacharia, for instance, says of himself: “I have been bilingual in my formative reading”. But he adds that once they write, “authors are almost entirely focused on the Malayali audience and not on the world”. In the author’s note prefacing his book The Reflections of a Hen in Her Last Hour, Zacharia thanks these readers “who keep a stern eye on writers’ performance and put the fear of God into them”.

I'm heartened to know about this, and I hope other languages that are not thought of as "major" can somehow reach a similar level of achievement. (Thanks for the link, Kári!)

AH, BARTLEBY! AH, HUMANITY!

I just got quite a shock. I went to the American Heritage Dictionary link in my sidebar and got the generic Bartleby.com front page. Thinking there must be some mistake, I went to the IE roots link: same thing. I googled to see if anyone was talking about this, but there's nothing I can find, so I'm guessing it's very recent. Does anybody know what's going on? I'm hoping it's some temporary glitch, so I'm not deleting the links from the sidebar yet, but I fear that is more of a fantasy than a hope, and if the superb AHD and its IE and Semitic appendices are no longer online, I want to know who to curse!

EMATHIO.

So the Lane Fox book sent me to my copy of Roberto Calasso's The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, which has been patiently waiting on my shelf for years; I'm almost finished with it, and while it's too long and I could do without the navel-gazing sessions in which the author cogitates on the Meaning of It All ("Zeus has no character, he is the support beneath every character"), I have enjoyed his fresh take on the hoary old stories (particularly welcome after Graves's slanted scholarship). The lack of an index is annoying, but thanks to the magic of the internet one can search in the Google Books text if need be.

But I'm not here to praise Calasso, I'm here to get off my chest one of those incredibly petty gripes nobody cares about but me. Tim Parks has done, as best I can tell without having read the original, a good job of translating a text full of recondite material, but he blew it in one case that cost me a good bit of googling to remedy. On page 382 of my paperback copy he says "Haematius, king of the city, welcomed Cadmus as a guest." I looked up Haematius in Wikipedia, as is my wont (I often wind up adding the Greek name to articles, and sometimes doing more revising), but there was nothing there. I googled the name: nothing except a few false hits from A Dictionary of Christian Biography, Literature, Sects and Doctrines (the book has HARMATIUS, which was mis-scanned). Luckily, Google Books has the Italian edition; it's only Snippet View, but I was able to determine that the original talks about "Ematio sovrano," and some more detective work convinced me that the Greek name was Ἠμαθίων or Emathio(n), a name associated with the Macedonian region of Emathia: Pape-Benseler tells me that Nonnus mentions a king of Samothrace of that name, and the scene here is Samothrace. So in the unlikely event anyone else runs into the false name, the explanation is here to enlighten them.

One of Aeneas's companions also bears that name, and Gawin Douglas in his The Æneid of Virgil Translated into Scottish Verse has "Nane mar expert than this Emathio."

JAZZ.

Ben Zimmer over at Word Routes has a post on one of the most disputed word histories ever, that of jazz. Was it first used for baseball, music, or something else? In San Francisco, New Orleans, or elsewhere? The earliest known use of the word supports the baseball/Bay Area theory: "Ben Henderson, a pitcher for the Portland Beavers (another Pacific Coast League team), dubbed a lively pitch his 'jazz ball,' according to the Los Angeles Times of April 2, 1912." It was popularized by San Francisco Bulletin sportswriter E.T. "Scoop" Gleeson, who explained the term in a March 6, 1913 report from the spring training camp of the San Francisco Seals:

What is the "jazz"? Why, it's a little of that "old life," the "gin-i-ker," the "pep," otherwise known as enthusiasalum. A grain of "jazz" and you feel like going out and eating your way through Twin Peaks. It's that spirit which makes ordinary ball players step around like Lajoies and Cobbs.

The earliest known New Orleans reference had been from the June 20, 1918 Times-Picayune, but Ben has turned up an earlier one, from Nov. 14, 1916: "The writer takes the opportunity to give New Orleans the proper credit for the origination of 'jas bands': 'Any one ever having frequented the "tango belt" of New Orleans knows that the real home of the "jas bands" is right here.'" (You can see a reproduction of the article at Ben's post.) So for now, the credit for the term rests with "the peppy baseball players of San Francisco," but who knows what further archival research will turn up? Stay tuned!

Incidentally, "Lajoie" is Nap Lajoie, whose French-Canadian name is properly pronounced LAZH-away (i.e., that's how he himself and those who knew him said it); I don't understand why Wikipedia gives the pronunciation as "[la-ZHWAH, or often la-ZHWAY, per the Canadian French pronunciation; or, as he himself usually pronounced it, LAJ-a-way]." Surely the order should be reversed; people who say "la-ZHWAH" know French better than baseball history.

CANNOT (HELP) BUT.

Andrej Bjelakovic asked (in this thread) "what's the deal with the 'I can't help but' + bare infinitive? Is it frowned upon only by some fuddy-duddy prescriptivist or is it generally considered non-standard?" The short answer is that it's fine but it has been frowned upon. The long answer follows.

As always in such matters, I turn to Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage (or its equally reliable, cheaper, and more available twin, Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage; in this case, the former was closer to hand). The entry begins as follows:

cannot help, cannot but, cannot help but A lot has been written about these phrases. To put as charitable a light on the matter as possible, most of what you may read is out of date. We have hundreds of citations for these phrases, and we can tell you two things for certain: these phrases all mean the same thing — "to be unable to do otherwise than" — and they are all standard. To the usual three we can add can but and cannot choose but, which also have the same meaning but are less frequently met with. We will take up each of the five in turn.

They say can but was called "pompous" by Bernstein but give examples where it sounds "natural enough"; they point out that cannot choose but is often used with a conscious echo of Coleridge's "The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:/ He cannot choose but hear." Cannot help "is grammatically the odd one of the five. It is followed by a present participle, whereas the others are followed by the bare infinitive." Their first citation is from Swift (1712): "yet I cannot help thinking, that . . . our Conversation hath very much degenerated." Cannot but "is an old established idiom. It has even been a favorite of some of our old warhorses of usage — Henry Alford, Richard Grant White, Fitzedward Hall..." They give citations starting with George Farquhar's 1698 Love and a Bottle: "I can't but laugh to think how they'll spunge the sheet before the errata be blotted out." Finally we come to the usage Andrej asked about:

Cannot help but, which may have been formed as a syntactic blend of cannot but and cannot help, is the most recent of the phrases. It appears to have arisen just before the turn of the 20th century. Three sources — the OED, Curme 1931, and Poutsma 1904-26— all give the English novelist Hall Caine as the earliest source. Two of his novels, The Manxman (1894) and The Christian (1897) are cited. We began to acquire citations in the 1920s, and a great many from 1940 on. [They give a dozen citations.]

Only cannot but and cannot help but have been the subject of much criticism. Vizetelly 1906 warned readers to distinguish between can but and cannot but — as if they meant something different; Bierce 1909 condemned cannot help but; Utter 1916 — the only one with foresight — recommended simply accepting can but, cannot but, and cannot help but as idioms. A great many other commentators have had their say, many of them finding fault with one or the other by resorting to logic — their own brand — but of course logic cannot measure idioms. Degree of formality appears to be determined not by the phrase but by the choice of cannot or can't in the phrase. You can use whichever one seems most natural to you; all are standard.

So there you have it. People will complain about anything, but that doesn't mean they're worth listening to; and logic cannot measure idioms.

MALAY COOTIES.

Jordan at Macvaysia has been wondering whether the English word cooties, which he defines as "an imaginary affliction, used by kids in the west as an excuse for shunning and/or teasing other kids," might come from Malay kudis 'scabies' (Indonesian Wikipedia) rather than, as dictionary etymologies suggest, Malay kutu 'louse.' I have no idea whether this is plausible, but I figure someone out there might.

Update (July 2009). It looks as if the true etymology is less exotic; it's simply an extension of coot (there was a proverbial phrase "as lousy as a coot"). See these American Dialect Society listserv postings: 1, 2, 3, 4; Jonathan Lighter's summary from the last:

What I think happened:

"lousy as a coot" > "cooty" (adj.) = "lousy, as is a coot" > "coot"
(back-formation) and "cootie" (through mishearing and in other cases as a
diminutive).

FOUR-LETTER MEASUREMENTS.

While googling one of the Andrew Boyds I was trying to disentangle at the LibraryThing author page, I ran across this delightful quote from The Pursuit of Reason: The Economist 1843-1993 (page 863), by Ruth Dudley Edwards; she is quoting a review by the Andrew Boyd who wrote for The Economist for many years:

Four-letter men were our forefathers. Never more so than when measuring things. With a bind and a bing, a fatt and a flyk, a shid and a swod and an unch. Meaning 250 eels, 8 cwt of lead, 4 bales of unbound books, a side of bacon, 4 feet of firewood, and either an ounce or an inch. They poured their wine by the aume or the fust, and cut their cloth by the goad - not to be confused with the gawd, which was a measure of steel. Their nook was not cosy; it covered 20 acres. Their idea of a glen, on the other hand, was either a bunch of teasels (in Essex and Gloucestershire) or 25 herrings. Take 15 glens and you had a rees. Take two pokes, and what you got was a gybe. Not that they ever agreed how much wool should go into a poke, or whether it should not rightly be a pook, a poik, a powk or a pock. But 240 dishes of lead were undoubtedly a boot, 28 lb of wood were a toad, a pint was of course a mugg, and a kade was a thousand sprats, though this could also be a gag.

One would not want to make any serious use of these terms without checking the OED, of course, but they make a fine gag.

GREEK TO ME, JAVANESE TO YOU.

An e-mail from a reader reminds me of something I meant to blog ages ago: back in January, Mark Liberman at the Log posted a nice chart of the ways different languages have of expressing what we English-speakers term "Greek to me." That has links to other sources, and you can get commentary on Mark's post at Strange Maps: "When a Hellenophone has trouble understanding something, his or her preferred languages of reference, as far as incomprehension is concerned, are Arabic and Chinese. And while for Arabs the proverbial unintelligible language is Hindi, for Chinese it’s… the language of Heaven. For Romanians, the ultimate in incomprehensibility is Turkish, for the Turks its French and the French consider Javanese the acme in huh?" (Thanks, Andrew!)

POLIS IS THIS.

Anyone at all interested in Charles Olson (whom I quoted in the early days of LH) will want to watch the documentary Polis Is This by Henry Ferrini (linked page has six YouTube segments); you can see a review here, from which I excerpt a bit:

Lasting only an hour, Polis is This manages a compact introduction to Olson’s history, poetics, and landscape. In addition to primary footage of the man reading, lecturing, and ambling, are commentators ranging from Gloucester locals to family, scholars, and poets. A delivery man, on being asked if he’d heard of Olson, responds, “The poet? The big guy?” and goes on to say he appeared, as a child, in one of Olson’s poems....

Polis is This reinvigorated my interest and provided footholds into the substance of Olson’s work that have enhanced my subsequent reading. I was particularly helped by the passages where Olson’s recitations are given follow-the-bouncing-ball treatment: the poem, on screen, is filled in as it’s read, giving a sense of how it is intended to sound.

I wish more poets were given this kind of treatment; it really makes both the work and the person come alive.

TRAVELLING HEROES.

So I've finished Robin Lane Fox's Travelling Heroes: In the Epic Age of Homer, and I feel compelled to warn others about it. The author is highly regarded, and it comes highly recommended; Mary Beard, for instance, contributes this blurb: "Lane Fox argues his case with tremendous style and verve. The book is full of wit and suspense... Detailed, learned, and always lively." And the Guardian review by Oliver Taplin calls it a "seemingly effortless yet stupendously erudite book" and ends "This is someone who lives his history." You will note, however, that Beard does not say that he proves his case or that she believes it, and Taplin, in between encomia, says "For all their seductive ingenuity, the criss-crossing, zig-zagging voyages of Travelling Heroes add up, in the end, to an intricate web of specialist speculation.... the whole is held together by a sticky tangle of 'may's, 'might's and 'surely's, stiffened by a passionate desire for them to be true." And that, in what is supposed to be a history book, is far more important than the wit and suspense and verve.

But I'm going to go further than that, since I'm not a classicist and do not have to be nice to Mr. Lane Fox, who is doubtless both admired and feared in his field. I'm going to say that this is a bad book, plain and simple, and should not have been published in its present form. This pains me, because I am fascinated by Archaic Greece and love books that present history from a different perspective (like Beckwith). But facts are facts.

In the first place, he's cramming two entirely different subjects into one book. One is a hypothesis about what Homer meant by "ειν 'Αρίμοις" ['in/at/on Arima'] at Iliad 2.783; he structures the whole thing as a detective story and doesn't tell you until page 300 that he thinks it's the island of Ischia. Of course, this isn't a new idea; in the sixteenth century Ortelius, in the caption to his map of Ischia, wrote: "That this Island was formerly called Aenaria, Arima, Inarima and Pithecusa has been sufficiently witnessed by Homerus, Aristoteles, Strabo, Plinius, Virgilius, Ovidius and other good writers." But he provides his own grandiose way of revealing this idea:

The first settlers called Ischia Pithecussae, the enigmatic "Monkey Island," on which, though now lost to us, monkeys had lived and caught their attention. The island was not named at random. Here too the Greek settlers had asked for the local name, and from nearby Etruscans they learned it. Etruscans had a name for the island which meant, according to Greek sources, "monkey": the Greeks, therefore, called it "Monkey Island" too. Our understanding of the Etruscan language is still slight, but its experts accept the word in question, transmitted hy Strabo's sources and later Greek lexicographers, though not as yet found in an original Etruscan text. The word could hardly have been more significant: Arima.

It was not just a coincidence; it seemed an omen from the gods...

This wordy piece of hugger-mugger can stand in for the book as a whole. Every bit of speculation is foreshadowed, built up, presented with a flourish, and then treated as a solid fact that more inferences can be built on. Nothing in this book is "just a coincidence" (unless, of course, it contradicts his theories). And his evidence is often shaky; my worries about his "Betyllion" were well founded.

So that's the first topic; it could perfectly well have been presented in a shortish paper called "Was Homer's Arima in Fact Ischia? A Fresh Perspective." But how many people would have read it ensconced in a classical journal? The second topic, a genuinely interesting one, is the putative peregrinations of the Euboeans in the eighth century B.C. He has a great deal to say about it, but again, it's spoiled by his insistence on treating all of his clever ideas as incontrovertible truths and using them as building blocks. He genuinely seems to think that he's revealed a hitherto unacknowledged and vitally important facet of the history of the period rather than presenting some intriguing suggestions. Again, the proper presentation would have been a series of articles, eventually collected in a book that would be ordered by specialist libraries and reviewed respectfully in The Classical Quarterly. But that's not good enough, because he's not just a classicist, he's a best-selling author with a public that is not much interested in the details of evidence but loves broadly drawn generalizations with which they can impress people ("Did you know that Euboea was important way before Athens? They discovered just about everything!").

Oh, and one big problem, as Taplin points out in his review, is that our two contemporary sources for the period he's writing about, Hesiod and Homer, say respectively little and nothing about all this stuff he's presenting as the truth about their time. I will pass over in silence what I find a grating style, because it may not strike everyone that way, noting only that he uses the word "brilliant" to modify every scholar, publication, and idea he agrees with. I will conclude by saying that it's a great pity he chose to write this way, because he's clearly (to use his favorite word) a brilliant man, and he loves the material. The place where it comes suddenly alive is in the very last chapter, when he recaps all his ideas by presenting them as elements in the life of an imagined character: "A Hipposthenes could have been born then, around 750 BC, to a Euboean father and a non-Greek mother..." He spends several pages on this fantasy, and it's far more enjoyable than anything else in the book. If only he'd used his research, travels, and ideas to write a historical novel! He could have had a best seller without compromising the good name of history.