SYRINGA.

A couple of days ago wood s lot quoted Ashbery's "Syringa" in honor of the poet's 82nd birthday; I wasn't familiar with it, though it's from a book I own (Houseboat Days—it was first published in Poetry in April 1977), but the more I read it over the deeper it sank in. It's a long poem, which you can read here; I'll quote the first section to give you a taste:

Orpheus liked the glad personal quality
Of the things beneath the sky. Of course, Eurydice was a part
Of this. Then one day, everything changed. He rends
Rocks into fissures with lament. Gullies, hummocks
Can’t withstand it. The sky shudders from one horizon
To the other, almost ready to give up wholeness.
Then Apollo quietly told him: “Leave it all on earth.
Your lute, what point? Why pick at a dull pavan few care to
Follow, except a few birds of dusty feather,
Not vivid performances of the past.” But why not?
All other things must change too.
The seasons are no longer what they once were,
But it is the nature of things to be seen only once,
As they happen along, bumping into other things, getting along
Somehow. That’s where Orpheus made his mistake.
Of course Eurydice vanished into the shade;
She would have even if he hadn’t turned around.
No use standing there like a gray stone toga as the whole wheel
Of recorded history flashes past, struck dumb, unable to utter an intelligent
Comment on the most thought-provoking element in its train.
Only love stays on the brain, and something these people,
These other ones, call life. Singing accurately
So that the notes mount straight up out of the well of
Dim noon and rival the tiny, sparkling yellow flowers
Growing around the brink of the quarry, encapsulates
The different weights of the things.

Another tasty bit: "Stellification/ Is for the few, and comes about much later." I can understand why people have a hard time with Ashbery—I used to myself—but I've come to value him more and more; he phrases like a jazzman.

"Only love stays on the brain" reminded me of The Growling Wolf's latest post, "Living (and Lovin') in New York City"; the usual warning about the Growler's stream-of-consciousness writing and defiant lack of correctness, political and otherwise, applies, but if you're willing to dive in anyway, you might enjoy his impassioned meditation on love and the role it's played in his life: "...and that was sex wasn't it, but, dammit, I think I really did love this woman. But I'm not for sure. Only in reminiscence am I turning this passion and desire we had for each other into love."

YIDDISH PLANT NAMES.

The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research has put online Dr. Mordkhe Schaechter's Plant Names in Yiddish, which it published in 2005. (Dr. Schaechter died in 2007; I wrote about him here.) You can download it from a link on this page, which says:

Plant Names in Yiddish is a fascinating study not only in botany, but also in the development of the Yiddish language as reflected in botanical vocabulary. For example, Schaechter cites Yiddish terms for willow: sháyne-boym, noted in the writings of Mendele Moykher-Sforim and A. Golomb (from hoysháyne >hesháyne >sháyne - 'willow twigs used ritually on the holiday of Sukkoth'). He also notes that Yiddish terms for the halakhically appropriate vegetable species for a Passover seder have been documented since at least the 12th century, and that 'potato' is regionally known as búlbe, búlve, bílve, kartófl(ye), kartóplye (!), érdepl, ekhpl, ríblekh, barbúlyes, zhémikes, mandebérkes, bánderkes, krumpírn, etc. The Galician town of Sanok, at a crossroads of languages and cultures, boasts five different synonyms for 'potato’; such examples display the richness of the Yiddish language and its regional diversity.

...The Trilingual Latin-English-Yiddish Taxonomic Dictionary section helps those who may know a word in one language to find it in another. An extensive index (including a geographic index) makes searching easier, and there is a detailed source bibliography. There are many cross-referenced variations of plant words in Yiddish, a useful tool given the diversity in spelling, dialect, and region. A special section on orthographical and morphological variations is also included. The online edition now adds a Yiddish-Latin-English index.

In the words of Z. D. Smith's post on the book:

As a reference work it’s indispensable. But as a simple joy—as an impossibly rich and dense body to dive into at immediately satisfying random—it is even dearer. At a random page turn I can tell you that the Yiddish name for Artillery Clearweed, Pilea microphylla, is הארמאטניק.. Harmatnik, that is, ‘cannoneer’—I have never heard of Artillery Clearweed but apparently its offensive associations are not unique to English. Sweetflag, the genus Acorus, goes by the name שאװער, or shaver. Its obvious false-friendship with the English verb aside, I am not nearly well enough versed in any of Yiddish’s many substrates to tell you offhand where the name shaver comes from. But I think it’s funny: indeed, far from being some wasteland of natural terminology, where the urban, mercantile Yid is happy to lump all ferns with ferns, trees with trees, birds with birds, and so on, stemming from a general lack of engagement with nature, Yiddish natural terminology is a happy and well-churned melange of influences, Polish, Hebrew, German, Russian, French, Ukrainian and original coinages, where the language’s syncretic, cosmopolitan nature joyously shines through.

Thanks for the link, Ori!

VAN AND THE PRE-HEAD MODIFIER.

Geoff Pullum has a post at the Log in which he painstakingly analyzes a sentence uttered at a concert by an exasperated Van Morrison. (I forgive Geoff his lack of appreciation of the great Belfast singer; as I wrote in a comment there, "I am a huge fan of his, but I can easily understand why his voice turns some people off.") Warning: People offended by the f-word should not click on the link, which blasts it from both barrels in the very title, but they will be missing a fascinating and very funny discussion. Curse words, among their other interesting features, tend to muddy grammatical analysis.

Related only by the most tenuous of threads are the video linked by Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org and the cartoon I link in the first comment, but I wanted to share them with you. (Thanks for the cartoon, tanahair!)

Addendum. And it turns out Jesse Sheidlower has a new edition of The F-Word coming out in September—read all about it!

SECOND LANGUAGES STORED DIFFERENTLY.

A recent study, "Selective deficit of second language: a case study of a brain-damaged Arabic-Hebrew bilingual patient" by Raphiq Ibrahim (Behavioral and Brain Functions 2009, 5:17), describes something rather remarkable; in the words of Mo at the neurophilosophy blog:

The study, by Raphiq Ibrahim, a neurologist at the University of Haifa, describes a bilingual Arabic-Hebrew speaker who incurred brain damage following a viral infection. Consequently, the patient experienced severe deficits in one language but not the other. The findings support the view that specific components of a first and second language are represented by different substrates in the brain....

The results support a neurolinguistic model in which the brain of bilinguals contains a semantic system (which represents word meanings) which is common to both languages and which is connected to independent lexical systems (which encode the vocabulary of each language). The findings further suggest that the second language (in this case, Hebrew) is represented by an independent subsystem which does not represent the first language (Arabic) and is more susceptible to brain damage.

Thanks for the link, Trevor!

SAVING KIM.

The NY Times has a nice article ("Linguist’s Preservation Kit Has New Digital Tools," by Chris Nicholson) about Tucker Childs and his work in Sierra Leone trying to understand and record the Kim language (which I presume is what Ethnologue calls Krim, "alternate names Kim, Kimi, Kirim, Kittim"—the Kim languages of Chad are entirely different).

For centuries, social and economic incentives have been working against Kim and in favor of Mende, a language used widely in the region, until finally, Dr. Childs speculates, the Kim language has been pushed to the verge of extinction.

It used to be that field linguists like Dr. Childs, a scattered corps working against time to salvage the world’s endangered tongues — more than 3,000 at last count — scribbled data in smeared notebooks and stored sounds on cassette tapes, destined to rot in boxes. But linguistics has gone digital. Dr. Childs now uses a solid-state recorder, and he has applications that will analyze the elements of a vowel in seconds or compare sounds across languages.

Using Geographic Information Systems, software that translates data into maps, he and his research assistants, Hannah Sarvasy and Ali Turay, pinpoint villages that are not to be found on any official map. “There’s a whole bunch of reasons linguists want these languages preserved,” Dr. Childs said, “but for me it’s more an emotional thing. It’s not noblesse oblige, it’s capitalist oblige. These people are totally peripheralized.”

In its new digital form, this kind of research is more accessible. It allows larger projects to share the world’s linguistic heritage with a wider public of teachers and learners, including, when possible, the original speakers.

The aim is not just to salvage, but to revive. Financed by the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Dr. Childs’s recordings will find their way, once his study ends and he returns to his post as a professor at Portland State University in Oregon, to a huge data bank in the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

Let's have no muttering about how useless it is to try to save languages. If people want to let their languages die, they will, no matter what linguists do, but if they want to save them and linguists can help, it's noble work, and I deeply respect Dr. Childs and his fellow field linguists. (Thanks for the link, Bonnie!)

CRONKITERS.

Those of you who follow U.S. news media are doubtless aware of the recent death of Walter Cronkite, and many of you may have noticed the claim in the obituaries that (in the words of the AP) "In Sweden anchors were sometimes termed Kronkiters; in Holland, they were Cronkiters." This seemed highly implausible to me—I said to my wife, "They don't watch American news shows in those countries, why would they even know about Cronkite?"—and sure enough, it turns out to be a myth; Ben Zimmer has the scoop.

Update. And the NY Times [reprints the AP's] correction: "Olof Hulten, a journalism educator in Sweden, and Radio Netherlands Worldwide's Expert Desk say the term is unknown in their countries."

FORGOTTEN BOOKMARKS.

The person who runs Forgotten Bookmarks says: "I work at a used and rare bookstore, and I buy books from people everyday. These are the personal, funny, heartbreaking and weird things I find in those books." Telegrams, death notices, photos, letters, a coupon for Octagon Soap Chips (buy one get one free—with translations into Italian, Polish, and Yiddish!) found in Lou Gehrig: Boy of the Sand Lots by Guernsey Van Riper, Jr. (Bobbs Merrill, 1949)... This is a great site. And if you leave a comment on this post before tomorrow, you have a chance to win a beautiful 1941 Heritage Press edition of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, complete in one volume. (Via MetaFilter.)

TRANSLATING PINOCCHIO.

Back at the start of the year the LRB ran a review (only a couple of paragraphs online, I'm afraid) by Bee Wilson of Geoffrey Brock's new translation of Pinocchio. Wilson writes:

Until now, the best-known modern translation has been Ann Lawson Lucas's, and in several respects it is still a better buy, thanks to Lucas's detailed explanatory notes and full historical preface, which are more useful than Umberto Eco's thin introduction to the new edition. Judged purely as a translation, however, Brock's version is more natural and engaging, with a better feeling for how to turn colloquial 19th-century Tuscan into colloquial modern English (or rather colloquial American, which is effectively the same thing).

Brock is better at the humour, and unlike Lucas doesn't use quaint idioms ('Poodle' and 'Tuna' rather than 'Poodle-Dog' and 'Tunny-Fish') or over-translate (Lucas turns 'tortellini' into 'steak and kidney pudding', apparently unaware that today most English-speaking children are far more familiar with different pasta shapes than with stodgy meat puddings).

It turns out Lucas also renders Collodi's Geppetto as "Old Joe" (out of a "desire to get away from the awful, denaturing 'cuteness' of the Walt Disney school of thought")—as Wilson says, "You might just as well rechristen the whole book 'Pine Nut'"—but I didn't need any further counts in the indictment; I refuse to read anything that translates "tortellini" as "steak and kidney pudding."

IT FEELS BETTER, DAMMIT.

Richard Stephens, John Atkins, and Andrew Kingston have published a paper called "Swearing as a response to pain" (NeuroReport 20: 1056-1060) demonstrating that cursing actually does increase pain tolerance and decrease perceived pain; unfortunately, only the abstract is online free, but you can read journalistic accounts by Linda Carroll at MSNBC (focusing on "why cursing works better for women") and by Frederik Joelving at Scientific American (focusing on the involvement of the amygdala). I wish I'd known about this when writing the introduction to my book!

OVERCONFIDENCE.

Malcolm Gladwell has an article in the latest New Yorker called "Cocksure: Banks, Battles, and the Psychology of Overconfidence." I'm enjoying it thoroughly, as I always do Gladwell, but I've run across a couple of things that bother me. As usual, he's using one topic to illustrate another, and his illustrative example in this case is the Battle of Gallipoli in World War One. (Incidentally, "Gallipoli" is an odd name; the Greek name is Καλλίπολις [Kallipolis], 'beautiful town,' and the Turkish name derived from it is Gelibolu. Does anybody know the history of the hybrid form?) He writes: "Command of the landing at Sulva Bay—the most critical element of the attack—was given to Frederick Stopford, a retired officer whose experience was largely administrative." I thought "Tsk, another misprint, and the New Yorker used to be so dependable." But the misspelling is consistent: "he rushed to Sulva Bay to intercede"; "they held that ten-to-one advantage at Sulva Bay." Now, I realize the war is almost a century old, and many once-famous place names have sunk beneath the waves, but hasn't anyone at the magazine heard Eric Bogle's "And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda"?

And how well I remember that terrible day,
How our blood stained the sand and the water
And of how in that hell that they called Suvla Bay,
We were butchered like lambs at the slaughter."

(If you're not familiar with it, I particularly recommend the Pogues' version; you can see them perform it live here.) I have no idea whether Gladwell mistyped it once and the magazine's diligent staff made it consistent throughout or whether it was wrong throughout his manuscript, but sheesh, this is what fact-checkers are for. And take a look at this sentence (which begins the last paragraph on page 25 in the physical magazine): "Cohen and Gooch ascribe the disaster at Gallipoli to a failure to adapt—a failure to take into account how reality did not conform to their expectations." As you all know, I am the last person to go hunting through published writings searching for "ungrammatical" nits to pick—look, a dangling participle! ooh, a split infinitive!—but this is truly terrible; there is no referent for "their" except "Cohen and Gooch," which is not the intended one, and I had to reread the sentence to understand it, which is the ultimate sin in edited writing.

And all of this is an inadvertent but perfect illustration of Gladwell's thesis. The New Yorker was so famous for so many years for its impeccable editing and bulletproof fact-checking that it got overconfident and lazy, and now allows mistakes that would embarrass a good local newspaper.

AJAMI.

In this thread, frequent commenter (and infrequent blogger) MMcM linked to an interesting Bostonia article by Art Jahnke called "Lost Language," about the Arabic-based orthographies called "Ajami" (Arabic for 'non-Arabic, foreign') used to write various African languages. I had been aware of the phenomenon but hadn't known much about it, so it was good to get some additional background; it was irritating to see the script referred to as a "language" ("it became, in the twentieth century, the chosen language of anticolonial nationalist resistance"; "the language used to disseminate the teachings of the Koran and other texts was Ajami"), but as journalistic sins go, that's fairly minor. I did wonder what was meant by "Without Ajami ... Africa would be very different; you would probably have a lot more ani­mism and more religions similar to those of Native Americans"; if Ajami is a vehicle for "black African culture," surely it helped preserve animism against the incursions of Islam and Christianity? Anyway, it's well worth a read, and if you want more, PanAfriL10n ("African localisation wiki") has a page on it, from which I gleaned the most surprising thing I've learned today: Afrikaans was written in Ajami! "'From about 1815 Afrikaans started to replace Malay as the language of instruction in Muslim schools in South Africa. At that time it was written with the Arabic alphabet.' (Omniglot)."

SALTYKOV-SHCHEDRIN.

This feels like a dumb question, but I can't come up with an answer, so: does anybody know why Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin is known as Saltykov-Shchedrin? His real name was Saltykov and he wrote under the pseudonym Shchedrin, but we don't talk about "Gorenko-Akhmatova" or "Bugaev-Bely."

NEWPORT NEWS.

Another tidbit from George R. Stewart's Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States (p. 58):

Also two brothers named Newce came there [to Virginia] to make a plantation. Once before, in Ireland, they had founded a town, naming it Newcetown, where it still stands. So now to their second settlement they gave the name New, and since it had an anchorage, they called it Port, and it became New Port Newce. The brothers were unfortunate, and men forgot them soon; but men remembered Captain Newport, who had done much to found Virginia. So they began to think and write Newport's Newce, perhaps even to confuse the second part with Neuse River. Then in trying to make sense they wrote Newport News, and so it remained. Thus with men and names, as with fishes in the sea, the greater often swallow up the smaller.

According to the Wikipedia article, the etymology is disputed, but with what brio Stewart tells the story!

Addendum. A query by AJP in the comment thread prompted me to check the endnotes done for the 1958 edition, where I find an extended discussion which I reproduce below:

Newport News: My account is chiefly based upon Alexander Brown, First Republic in America (1898), p. 459. Work appearing since 1944 throws doubt upon this explanation. See C.W. Evans, "Newport News: What's in a Name?" in Newport News' 325 years, A.C. Brown, ed. (1946), and P.B. Rogers ["Place Names on the Virginia Peninsula," American Speech, 29 (1954):241-56]. Both these writers end in doubt, and Rogers concludes: "It is now time for all to admit freely that . . . nobody today really knows how the city got its name." I certainly agree, as far as absolute knowledge is concerned. I cannot see, however, that these later writers have wholly negated Brown, especially since in his statements that the last word is spelled Newce, Newse, and Nuce he seems to be using documents to which they have not had access. Moreover, their argument that the name cannot be connected with Thomas Newce because he arrived in Virginia only a few days before its first recorded appearance seems to me reversible. May not this almost simultaneous appearance actually indicate a connection with the Newces? In fact, if it were known that they were to make a settlement there, the place might have been named for them even before their arrival.

WHEN RUSSIA LEARNED TO READ.

I just finished When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917, by Jeffrey Brooks, and I recommend it to anyone with an interest in Russian cultural history. It describes the kind of thing people without much education liked to read in the final decades of tsarist Russia and the production and distribution networks that got it to them, and besides resurrecting many long-forgotten writers, publishers, and stories (Brooks must have done a tremendous amount of reading for this project, and clearly enjoyed it judging by the brio with which he summarizes the tales of knights, maidens, ambitious peasants, and wicked foreigners) he brings to light a whole world that's been forgotten in the canonization of High Culture. What I particularly like, besides the information itself, is his democratic take on it; he dislikes as much as I do those nanny types who want to control what the "little people" read and think, and is forthright in his belief that people should be able to have the kind of cultural input they prefer. I'll quote a passage from his Epilogue:

The existence of cheap popular reading material was a prerequisite for the spread of literacy in Russia. Such material had to be of a sort that the newly literate were eager and able to read. In the Russian case, the market proved an effective means for identifying and satisfying the demand of the common reader. Ordinary people showed their preference for commercial popular literature by spending their hard-earned and very few rubles to obtain it. What was extraordinary about Russian popular commercial literature in contrast to Western European and American was its peasant character. Written for peasants and former peasants by people who were close to their world and concerns, it served these often first-generation readers with information and ideas they could readily absorb as they sought to make sense of the changing world around them. To create such a literature, popular writers had to develop a new language for ordinary people, with a shared if limited vocabulary and a common stock of clichés, symbols, and ideas. The establishment of this language of popular communication meant that many ordinary people were able to receive and exchange information through the printed word for the first time. The popular commercial materials in particular contained a fund of shared information that ordinary people could seek out as they needed it. To peasants and former peasants with new expectations and unfamiliar problems to solve, reading about fanciful characters and situations was a crude but simple way of acquiring useful ideas and symbols.

In her 1972 Russian Journalism and Politics, 1861-1881: The Career of Aleksei S. Suvorin, Effie Ambler (who never seems to have written anything else) writes "One must bear in mind that most present-day studies of the mid-19th century press commence from a conceptual framework derived from the views of the radical publicists of the time"; after Brooks's work, one cannot commence from that conceptual framework without ostentatiously putting on blinders.

HIDE YOUR SHAKESPEARE, DON'T YOU KNOW THERE'S A WAR ON?

My wife and I are still reading Hilary Mantel's A Place of Greater Safety, a fat and satisfying novel about the French Revolution, and I thought I'd pass on this paragraph from page 400 of my Penguin paperback (the narrator is Danton):

I looked at his [Robespierre's] books. Jean-Jacques Rousseau by the yard; few other modern authors. Cicero, Tacitus, the usual: all well-thumbed. I wonder — if we go to war with England, will I have to hide my books of Shakespeare, and my Adam Smith? I guess that Robespierre reads no modern language but his own, which seems a pity. Camille, by the way, thinks modern languages beneath his notice; he is studying Hebrew, and looking for someone to teach him Sanskrit.

A few sentences about books and languages say something interesting about three of the main figures of the Revolution (making a dry joke about Desmoulins in the process) and provide a quick meditation on what happens to international cultural relations in time of war. A good writer, Mantel is.

OFF BY A MONTH.

Last year I mentioned Greg Ross's excellent miscellany-blog Futility Closet; now John Cowan points me to a recent post called "Calendar Trouble," presenting five pairs of mismatched Slavic month names, the first two being:

In Macedonian, Listopad means October.
In Polish and Slovenian, Listopad means November.

In Czech, Srpen means August.
In Croatian, Srpanj means July.

Anybody know anything about the history of these names?

Addendum. Thanks to Laura Gibbs in the comment thread, here's a nice comparison chart (annoying horizontal scrolling; explanatory text in French).

ANOTHER VICTIM OF LANGUAGE PARANOIA.

Mark Oppenheimer has a piece in double X in which he discusses flogging his daughters.

OK, not really. What he says is that "parents can still insist on a certain vernacular in the household, which we’re free to enforce with, you know, repeated floggings with copies of Strunk & White." He's, you know, joking. Except that he really does want to insist on "a certain vernacular," and by "vernacular" he means the opposite of a vernacular, which (per Merriam-Webster) is "a language or dialect native to a region or country rather than a literary, cultured, or foreign language," "the normal spoken form of a language." He wants to enforce a form of the language that nobody actually speaks but that he thinks it vital to pretend to his daughters is the real thing. He starts off by saying "when Rebekah, who is now 2 and a half, started parroting our language back to us, we discovered a concern that had never before occurred to us: our grammar":

I started to worry that if I didn’t get my “whom”s and my “who”s lined up right, Rebekah would spend a lifetime running afoul of her English teachers, or at least of the ghost of my late grandmother Rebekah, her namesake, who never forgave her home state of Pennsylvania for the ungrammatical legend on its license plate, you’ve got a friend in pennsylvania. “It should be you have a friend in pennsylvania,” she wrote to her state senator.... What if I bequeathed to my daughter the habit of saying “a whole nother topic of conversation,” instead of saying, simply, “a whole other”?

Worst of all, what if she inherited my generation’s habit of saying “like” all the time? I long ago made peace with my own inability to de-like-ify my speech, but I have always taken some comfort in the existence of older people, parents and grandparents and aging teachers, who do not speak that way. They uphold the dignity of the language so that I don’t have to. But my grandparents are dead and gone, and here I am, raising two impressionable girls (Rebekah has a baby sister), and teaching the occasional college class. I was not, I had to admit, being the role model I ought to be. I said to myself, ”I’d better start speaking like a grown-up.”

He goes on to admit that it's a faulty assumption that "how grown-ups speak determines how their children speak" and that "there is nothing moral about 'good' grammar for its own sake, just as there is nothing morally repugnant about trendy vernacular habits, like the rising inflection, common among adolescent girls, called up-speak.... English usage is a matter of convention, and it changes with time; it was not ordained by God, nor by language prisses who think they are God.... To demand that my children adhere to particular linguistic rules, on the supposition that rules I was taught are fixed like the stars, would be nonsensical, and a bit tyrannical."

So it would, so it would. End of story, one might think; but no, he continues thus:

Still, anything does not go. My maternal grandparents, who were born soon after the turn of the 20th century, modeled certain principles of correct English usage for a few reasons (only one of which was snobbery). For starters, as the children of immigrants who never learned English well, they understood that life was not fair, that there were precincts in America where one was judged according to how far one deviated from some uncodified, but widely recognized, Standard English. They wanted to equip their children to use it. They also loved the tongue and believed that treating spoken as well as written English with care equaled respect for education. These are things I’d like my daughters to understand. Language is not, ultimately, something about which to be slovenly.

My grandparents also took a certain pleasure in using grammar and habits of speech to create a distinct culture of the home. At 819 Carpenter Lane, one said “between you and me,” not “between you and I.” I have inherited that preference. I’ll also correct my children’s inevitable “Tessa and me are going to the park.” Also, if God forbid I ever have to, “irregardless.” My children will no doubt find this annoying, especially if I do it in front of their friends. They may think my “It is she” sounds ridiculous—reasonable enough, since that usage is antiquated and arguably inferior to the more natural “It’s her.” But maybe 10 years later they’ll remember it as one of my silly rules, and 10 years after that hear themselves insisting on it to my grandchildren.

He doesn't seem to grasp how contradictory this is, how (not to put too fine a point on it) nuts. If English usage is a matter of convention and to demand that children adhere to particular linguistic rules "would be nonsensical, and a bit tyrannical," why on earth is he demanding that his daughter adhere to these particular linguistic rules? Explicitly, so that she can in turn insist on his "silly rules" to her own children. This is how this craziness gets passed on, and I want it ended. If you're smart enough to see that the linguistic forms that were forced on you are arbitrary and silly, you're smart enough to stop the madness. Do I have to quote Philip Larkin to you? (And hey, I just found a YouTube clip of Larkin reading "This Be The Verse" [link corrected: thanks, Ben and rootlesscosmo]—what a wonderful world! And thanks for the double X link, Margaret.)

KOVERNAYA.

Apologies in advance: this is one of those posts of interest only to those as obsessed as I am by the obscurer byways of Russian lexicography, and in particular by Tolstoy's vocabulary. I'm still working my way through War and Peace, but I'm on Book Four and the home stretch is in sight. I'm actually well into Part III, but I've just gotten around to investigating a question I had back in Part I, Chapter 4, in which Nikolai has been sent off to get horses in Voronezh and is visiting a landowner who has a stud farm. The landowner is described as "старый кавалерист, холостяк, лошадиный знаток, владетель коверной, столетней запеканки, старого венгерского и чудных лошадей": 'an old cavalryman, a bachelor, a connoisseur of horses, the owner of a kovyornaya, of hundred-year-old spiced brandy, old Hungarian wine, and wonderful horses." So what's a kovyornaya (or, depending on your preferences in transliteration, kovernaya)? Well, it's the feminine form of kovyorny, an adjective from kovyor 'rug, carpet,' but that doesn't help much. Feminine adjectives used as nouns often have komnata 'room' understood, e.g. stolovaya 'dining room' (from stol 'table'), so it's probably a room having something to do with rugs, but that's not much better. Translators picture a room strewn with rugs: Ann Dunnigan has "den," Aylmer and Louise Maude "smoking-room," and Pevear and Volokhonsky "carpet room" (with a footnote explaining that this is "a room in a manor house decorated with carpets in the Oriental style"). But my finely honed googling has turned up Nataliya Grot's memoir Изъ семейной хроники ('From a family chronicle'), whose first chapter describes her father's estate as having "кухня, баня, кладовая, столярная, коверная (гдѣ ткали ковры)...": 'a cookhouse, a bathhouse, a pantry, a joinery, a kovyornaya (where carpets were woven)...' (my emphasis). So it is not a room with carpets in it (which would be utterly unremarkable in a country estate) but a place where carpets are made, a valuable addition worth mentioning alongside fine horses and wine. I note this for the benefit of future translators as well as readers.

I am particularly curious about the Pevear/Volokhonsky annotation. Maybe they found a different source that explains the word thus; maybe there were two different sorts of kovyornayas to be found on such estates. But maybe they were just guessing like everyone else, and decided to ornament their guess with a footnote to make it look more official. If I knew that to be the case, I would have harsh words for it, but I don't, so I merely note the possibility.

MUFFIN.

I am not referring to this kind of muffin (for a time I had apple-oat-bran muffins for breakfast every day, but that was another life) but to the nineteenth-century term meaning a poor baseball player, one who frequently muffs (misplays) the ball. I had been familiar with it for many years (being an aficionado of baseball history), but had not realized that the spread of professionalism in the late 1860s (culminating in the all-pro Cincinnati Red Stockings, who played the entire 1869 season without being defeated) was accompanied by a reaction in the form of "muffin teams" made up of people who just wanted to have fun and disliked the emphasis on skill and winning that had taken over the game. I learned about them from the best book I've read on baseball in years, Peter Morris's But Didn't We Have Fun?: An Informal History of Baseball's Pioneer Era, 1843-1870. It doesn't have much to say about the prehistory of baseball—for that, you'll want David Block's magisterial Baseball before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game (Amazon, book website)—and it doesn't focus on the details of games, leagues, and competitions (for which you should try to dig up a copy of Preston D. Orem's 1961 self-published labor of love, Baseball 1845-1881 From the Newspaper Accounts); what it does, better than anything else I've read, is give a sense of how the game developed from the early days of the Knickerbockers (he makes a convincing case for which of their famous rules were truly "revolutionary") to the coming of professionalism, seeing the points of view of all parties and not (as do most historians) siding implicitly with those that won out in the end. He makes you feel what it was like to be a young man getting involved with the game in the 1840s, or a middle-aged one resenting the changes twenty years later, and he ties the history of the game in with what was happening in the country at large (demolishing the usual simplistic assertions about the effect of the Civil War on the game). I heartily recommend it to anyone with any interest in the period.

But I'm getting carried away. I came here to bring you the following pseudo-etymology of the word muffin, from an undated committee report presented before a muffin game in Connecticut, found in the Chadwick Scrapbooks:

Your committee to whom was referred the inquiry as to the origin and definition of the word "muffin" beg leave to report: That from a careful examination I find the origin somewhat obscure, but am satisfied that it had a very early origin, from the fact that I find it compounded with the word "rag" as far back as the Crusades, when the appellation was esteemed highly honorable, indicating valor, virtue and perseverance; indeed, virtue has often been found clothed in rags. The definition of the word is less obscure, though some lexicographers have given it a very simple definition as "a spongy cake"; but it is evident that the error has arisen from a lack of knowledge of our illustrious order. The word Muffin is derived from the Latin Muggins, the French Mufti (high priest), and the German Bumm, and is a clear compound of Muff and fin. These words are then conjointly conjoined from their close proximity, indicating, among other things, comfort and grace, two conditions clearly assigned to our order. There are several other words I find belonging to the same family, e.g. puffing and bumming, and into the latter of these the Muffin generally merges. The definition of the word Muffin I have given in my earlier writings, where it can be found elaborately elaborated...

Well, it's nineteenth-century Yankee humor, a little heavy, perhaps, but still tasty if you have a taste for it.

PHIN.

Philologie im Netz (PhiN) "is a journal for linguistics, literary, and cultural studies. It publishes articles and reviews within an interdisciplinary framework." The articles are in various languages, but they have abstracts in English; this one, for instance, is in Spanish but the abstract explains that it "examines the distinctive importance of the grammatical feature 'colloquiality' when comparing Spanish and German verbal tense."

Via wood s lot, which linked to Paul A. Harris's "Fictions of Globalization: Narrative in the Age of Electronic Media."

UIGHUR NAMES PRONOUNCED.

Victor Mair has provided an invaluable post over at the Log, giving audio clips of "how the most important Xinjiang names are actually pronounced in Uyghur and in Mandarin." I never would have guessed that Taklamakan (or, as he prefers, Täklimakan) sounded like that, or that there was a strong initial stress on Tarim.

Mair quotes NY Times correspondent Ed Wong as saying that the Times had "received an email from a reader saying the NYT should change its 'pronouncer' on Uighurs. Right now, in our articles, the editors insert (WEE-gurs) as the pronouncer. One reader said this is not the correct pronunciation, and sounds strange to the Turkic speaker’s ear." As I wrote in a comment there:

I will issue my standard disclaimer that English spellings and pronunciations are for the use and convenience of English speakers, and it is foolish and presumptuous to expect them to sound correct to speakers of other languages. I seriously doubt that a Uyghur speaker's rendition of, say, "New York" would pass muster to an English speaker, and that's as it should be. Different languages are different.

EXPEDIENCY.

It's been a while since I complained about a Safire column, but this week's On Language has me scratching my head. Here are the last three paragraphs (he's talking about Iran's Expediency Discernment Council):

Nobody knows for sure if the head of the Expediency Council, an old revolutionary named Rafsanjani, is a potential dealmaker or a Supreme Has-Been, but language mavens know that his council has a problem with the English translation of the key word in its name: in Farsi it is maslehat (does not rhyme with mazel tov) as “expediency.”

Expedient started out as meaning “suitable, fit”; Shakespeare wrote that “expedient manage must be made” and “with all expedient duty.” Thomas Jefferson wrote of George Washington in 1793 that “the president thought it expedient to remind our fellow citizens that we were in a state of peace.” It had speedy-managerial cousins in expedite and expedition.

But then the worm of meaning turned. A sense of shiftiness set in the central sense of expediency, and instead of “suitable,” it became “politic,” more concerned with utility than with morality, setting ends ahead of means, too willing to compromise principles in a lust for power and pelf. Tehran’s official propagandists need a new translator. On the other hand, should the kakistocrats in Iran stick with the name of expediency to describe their power brokers? Some of us think it’s eminently suitable.

Now (setting aside the utterly bizarre "does not rhyme with mazel tov"—huh?) there is an obvious problem here. He talks at length about the English word expediency, but says not a word about the meaning of the Persian maslehat. How can he claim that the translation is a "problem" without discussing the actual meaning of the original? As it happens, Language Log had a whole post about this, and it turns out that maslehat, or more accurately maslahat, means 'interest' (or, to quote the full entry from my Haim's Persian-English Dictionary, "1) Policy. 2) Best thing to do. 3) Interest [usu. in the pl.]. 4) Good intentions. 5) Affair. [Used as an adj.] Advisable; expedient"). Opinions may differ on how good a translation "expediency" is, but it's useless to try to decide without knowing the meaning of the original.

Speaking of expediency, I was first flabbergasted, then furious, when I did a Google search on the late-nineteenth-century writer of popular potboilers N. I. Pastukhov, clicked on the first result—a biography from the always helpful Hronos site—and got a message "Данный сайт закрыт по указанию МВД РФ": "This site has been closed by order of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation." A little googling got me this page from the Russian Law blog:

The St. Petersburg police ordered the hoster to shut down history web site hrono.info because of finding there the text of Adolph Hitler’s books “Mein Kampf.” Notably, the police did not care to obtain a court order or even institute formal criminal or administrative proceedings; they simply directed the hoster to close the site referring to possible license suspension and criminal liability for complicity in “extremist activity.” The hoster complied.

They call Hronos "the most popular history web site in Russia (10,000 visitors per day)"; I've used it countless times myself. It's not exactly surprising that the police can just shut it down because they feel like it, and it's certainly far from the worst thing that's happened lately in Russia, but it brings home the difficulty of trying to carry on civilized life in a place where the powerful can get away with anything because they're powerful.

NARDY.

I've been reading a wonderful book called Odessa Memories (thanks, Bill!) that has hundreds of reproductions of old photographs, postcards, advertisements, and the like, accompanied by a brief memoir by Bel Kaufman (who spent her childhood there) and historical essays by Patricia Herlihy (author of a history of the city) and Oleg Gubar and Alexander Rozenboim (two current residents), as well as a splendid reproduction of the 1914 Baedeker map on the endpapers. I love city histories like this, and I'm having a great time looking things up and reading related stories (Babel, of course, but also Kuprin's "Гамбринус"); as usual, I'm also enjoying finding minor errors and typos (the best of the latter being a picture caption on page 71 that reads "Cantor Minkovsky and boys' choir in the Broadway Synagogue, early 1910s"—"Broadway" being an error for Brodsky, the synagogue having been built by Jews from Brody).

One such minor error is on page 86, in the sentence "Unlike Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other northern cities, Odessa had Greek and Turkish coffeehouses, German bakeries, and Italian casinos, and people played nardy (dice) on the street." Now, nardy is not "dice" but backgammon, as you will quickly discover by doing an image search on нарды. And the reason I'm writing about it here is that online searching is the only way you'd find out what it means, because it's not in a single dictionary as far as I can see.

How can that be? Even the largest dictionaries I have, Makurov and Dahl, omit it, as does Vasmer. And yet it appears to be the standard word for 'backgammon'; all my English-Russian dictionaries give триктрак (trictrac) as the sole Russian equivalent, but нарды beats триктрак in a Google competition by almost ten to one, and it is the heading for the Russian Wikipedia article. It must be an old word, because it's borrowed from Persian nard 'backgammon.' Does anybody have any idea what's going on here?

Update. Anatoly picks up the question, and his readers so far can't answer it either (though some of them claim it somehow isn't really a Russian word, which is ridiculous—Dima Rubinstein writes "Всю жизнь только так и называли, и никак иначе" [All my life I've called it that, and nothing else]).

LOST FOR WORDS: II.

Here are a few more quotes from Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary (see my first post). On a notorious omission (p. 82):

'I am afraid it is quite true that the word bondmaid has been omitted from the Dictionary, a most regrettable fact', [James Murray] was forced to admit in 1901, fourteen years after the publication of the fascicle (Batter-Boz) in which it should have appeared. The admission was prompted by a letter from a perplexed user of the dictionary whose search had in this instance been a fruitless one. Murray's reply was deeply apologetic. He could offer no 'rational account', he wrote. The word was indeed 'lost': 'One can only surmise that the "copy" for it was in some unaccountable way lost either here or at the press'. Either way it was inexplicable and, he added, 'absolutely unparalleled'.

On affinities with the new theory of evolution (p. 114):

'We cannot doubt that language is an altering element', as Darwin himself wrote, musing on the apparent flux of verbal form; 'we see words invented — we see their origin in names of People — Sound of words ... often show traces of origin.' [...] Words in 'everyday use', Darwin reflected, 'have been worn, until, like pebbles on the beach, they have lost every corner and distinctive mark, & hardly a vestige remains to indicate their original form.'

On page 147 Mugglestone quotes some idiot named Robert Heald who insists that there is no such word as twin: "This is erroneous [...] 'Twins' is a plural noun like scissors, tongs, tweezers ... the fact that the word terminates with an 's' is an accident, which in no way warrants its transformation into a bastard singular noun." This is a perfect example of the kind of ignorant assertions resorted to by proud upholders of invented traditions everywhere. And on page 145, a passage showing Murray's admirable refusal to judge:

Variability, as in the four different pronunciations which the OED provided for words such as vase or hegemony, had to be seen as a salient part of language, even if its presence disconcerted those who searched in vain for categoric proclamations on 'good' or 'bad' in usage. The same was true, as Murray assured another anxious correspondent, of the ongoing variation in the pronunciation of either. This 'picturesque variety' was discernible even in his own family. 'I say eether, my children all say īther', Murray confirmed — yet this was not an issue of concern. 'It is a matter of taste', he asserted. 'No wise person would wish to impose his or her taste on others'. A normative response was inappropriate. After all, Murray added, variation 'gives life and variety of language', proving its vitality and its status as a living and mobile tongue.

U.S. EDITION OF MONKEY'S ARMPIT.

Remember my book of international curses and insults? Yes, it's taken a while, but it's finally out in the U.S.: Uglier Than a Monkey's Armpit: Untranslatable Insults, Put-Downs, and Curses from Around the World. If you've been looking for a birthday gift for that cantankerous relative, this handsome little paperback could be just the ticket, and remember, Christmas will be here before you know it! (The Penguin PR person is getting interviews lined up, including one on Sirius radio; I'll provide details when I have them.)

Addendum. My wife reminds me that I should mention that due to a mixup at the "book packager" (not Penguin), this edition does not have my introduction. I have been promised that it will be added for the next printing.

VASILY AKSYONOV, RIP.

I just learned (via Lizok's Bookshelf) of the death on Monday of Vasily Aksyonov (Василий Аксёнов) in Moscow at the age of 76. He was one of the leading writers of the shestidesyatniki, the generation of the '60s that rejected official Soviet culture. He came to prominence with his 1961 novel Звёздный билет ("A ticket to the stars" or "A starry ticket"), "which seems to have been read by almost everyone and was bitterly attacked and vigorously defended in the Sovet press of the sixties"; it "deals with adolescent characters who think and talk in an idiom that instinctively rejects established formulas" (Edward J. Brown, Russian Literature since the Revolution, p. 359).

Among the young writers Aksyonov was probably the most resourceful in the use of language, no doubt the most fertile in stylistic innovation, and certainly the most original in his manipulation of plot and narrative viewpoint. He moved with each work farther away from realistic narrative in the direction of experimentation with the novel form.... The concept of "carnivalization" as developed by Bakhtin ... clearly applies to what Aksyonov is doing, carnivalization of language especially. In the course of a linguistic bouleversement, nonstandard language overwhelms the standard and proper language.... Aksyonov's language and that of his characters is as a rule an invented idiom, studded with what are known in Russia as "barbarisms," that is, foreign words, usually American, along with scientific terminology, racy colloquial dialogue, and parodies of orthodox narrative idiom. Svirsky has pointed out that Aksyonov's books are indispensable, moreover, to any linguist concerned with the rich vagaries of contemporary Soviet slang. (Brown, pp. 361-63.)

I have his Затоваренная бочкотара (Surplussed Barrelware) and Ожог (The Burn) in Russian, and the latter and The Island of Crimea in English, and I'm annoyed at myself for not having gotten around to any of them. I'll try to remedy that shortly. (NY Times obituary by Sophia Kishkovsky here.)

A Pause

Languagehat asked me to post this brief notice to let his readers know that he's temporarily without an internet connection. If all goes according to plan he'll return to his appointed rounds tomorrow.

Update. Modem replaced, LH back online!

LOST FOR WORDS: I.

I've started reading Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary (from my pile of loot) and I swear, for an OED fan it's like a combination of thriller and revisionist history. Who knew there was so much angst behind the magisterial columns of type? Lynda Mugglestone has gone through the heavily marked-up proofs, the correspondence, everything that might cast light on the history of the first edition (which was supposed to be finished in ten years and took almost half a century). I'll pass along a couple of tidbits (and will doubtless have more as I read).

To set the scene for the first excerpt, she's been discussing the untimely death of the first editor, Herbert Coleridge, in 1861, after only a single specimen page had been printed, and his replacement by Frederick Furnivall, a brilliant man under whose leadership the dictionary made no obvious progress because his "redoubtable zeal and energy went into the establishment of authoritative sources on which a future dictionary might depend, as well as into the extension of the reading programme for such sources.... Furnivall established (among others) the Early English Text Society in 1864, the Ballad Society and the Chaucer Society in 1868, the New Shakspere [sic] Society in 1873, and the Wyclif Society in 1886." Now comes the part that made me want to stand up and cheer:

His socialist beliefs moreover continued to establish a firm foundation for the linguistic democracy which the dictionary was intended to enact. As Furnivall emphasized in his circulars to the readers for the dictionary, the work in the making was by no means merely to be a 'National Portrait Gallery' of the great and the good. Instead it was to be a realm in which 'all the members, of the race of English words' would find equal representation.

If you think the forces of linguistic conservatism are strong now, they were far more so then, when there was no example of a truly inclusive dictionary in English, and the editors had to fight the resistance of the Delegates who held the purse-strings every inch of the way. Furnivall, despite the lack of progress in the decade of his editorship (the 1860s), was not the least of the heroes responsible for the all-embracing nature of the dictionary as we have it.

The second excerpt had quite the reverse effect, horrifying me to the extent that I probably looked briefly like this:

[Sir Frederick] Pollock [this one?] was particularly adept at spotting potential anomalies of this kind [words used in citations that were not found as entries], his emphatic 'Not in NED' or 'What is this? Not in Dict' regularly alerting editors and dictionary staff to the fact that some difficulty had once again surfaced in the proofs. Aplaintife was another unrecorded form spotted by Pollock at an early stage of the dictionary. 'The defendant by his false plea maketh himself chargeable both to the aplaintife & to the garnishee', Sir Henry Finch had stated in his Law, or, a discourse thereof of 1613, providing, for the purposes of the OED, a quotation which aptly illustrated the first recorded use of garnishee in English. This was a legal term which Bradley had painstakingly defined. Nevertheless, if the utility of the quotation was incontestable in this respect, in terms of aplaintife it proved deeply disturbing. Aplaintife, as the dictionary staff found when checking the material in this case, was anything but a ghost. This was a real word which had inadvertently been missed during the earlier reading programmes. Bradley found himself in a real dilemma. Were he to include the quotation in the form in which it had appeared in his first proof, then it would necessarily foreground the absence of aplaintife from Murray's earlier work on Ant–Batten, and this, from a number of points of view, would be unacceptable. Moreover, because of the serial publication of the OED, it was impossible to insert aplaintife where it should rightly have appeared — in spite of its undoubted legitimacy. After all, this section of the dictionary had been published thirteen years previously, in 1885. Another solution must be found. It was for these reasons that Bradley evidently decided to delete the quotation, together with all evidence for the existence and use of aplaintife in English. [At this point I penciled two large exclamation marks in the margin.—LH] Another example of garnishee from the same year and the same text was located ('If they were deliuered vpon other condition then the defendant alledgeth, the garnishee is at no mischiefe but the defendant') and it was this which Bradley inserted in the fascicle as finally published. His action preserved the integrity of the entry and also managed to resolve the anomaly that Pollock's ever vigilant eye had spotted. But it was undeniably at the expense of a word which was — and still is — entirely unregistered in lexicographical terms.

I am truly shocked at the choice to avoid recording an English word rather than risk embarrassing the editor-in-chief.

Update. It appears I was horrified for no good reason. I have heard from a reliable source that the word appears, as far as can be told, only in that sentence in that edition of that book, and is almost certainly a typo; the author seems to have hyped it to add drama to her book at the expense of Bradley, to whose ghost I apologize for taking her at her word.

PRESCOTT.

From George R. Stewart's wonderful Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States (he has been discussing the dislike of the stern Protestants who founded Plymouth and Massachusetts colonies for towns named after saints and other elements that smacked of Catholicism):

Also the [Massachusetts General] Court would not have liked Prescott if it had known the word to mean "priest's cottage." But though they were learned in Latin and Greek and Hebrew, the rulers of Massachusetts knew little of the roots of their own language, and the names of most English towns were to them merely counters without meaning.

THE LORD AND THE LAUNDRESS'S SON.

The Russian blogger natabelu has a post reproducing a correspondence carried on in the last years of his life by the wonderful children's poet, critic, and essayist Korney Chukovsky (whose amazingly sensible book on language I celebrated here and here). I translate here the exchanges concerning Nabokov, which highlight the latter's least appealing side (the supercilious aristocrat) as well as Chukovsky's admirable tolerance (the original Russian is below the cut):

Sonya to Chukovsky:

A few days ago Vladimir Vladimirovich [Nabokov] sent me the new, revised edition of his autobiographical reminiscences [Speak, Memory]. As usual, before reading—or rather, rereading—them, I looked in the index for the names of people I knew. Against your name—Chukovsky—the author indicates page 254, see: Korneichuk, and there I read an interesting story about your visit to England in 1916 as one of the members of a special group. He writes the following: "There had been an official banquet presided over by Sir Edward Grey, and a funny interview with George V whom Chukovski, the enfant terrible of the group, insisted on asking if he liked the works of Oscar Wilde—'dze ooarks of OOald.' The king, who was baffled by the interrogator's accent, and who, anyway, had never been a voracious reader, neatly countered by inquiring how his guests liked the London fog. Chukovsky used to cite this triumphantly as an example of British cant—tabooing a writer because of his morals." How interesting! I didn't know that your interest in literature was so great that you were capable of breaking the rules of court etiquette. I sincerely congratulate you for it. [...]

Chukovsky to Sonya:

I received the excerpt from the memoirs of your friend, and I cannot imagine why and what he is mocking. Really, I didn't have governors as he did, and I learned English on my own. He was a lord [barin], I was a house painter, the son of a laundrywoman, and if in my youth I read Swinburne, Carlyle, Macaulay, Sam Johnson, Henry James, this happiness was a thousand times more difficult for me than for him. What is there here to laugh at? The idea of my having turned to King George at Buckingham Palace with a question about Wilde I consider witty enough, but it's a complete lie, pure slander. Naturally, it doesn't keep me from feeling love for many of his works and rejoicing in his literary success; 65 years of literary work have taught me not to bring personal relations into my judgments of works of art, but I am sure that no one who knows me would believe the malicious invention of the famous author. [...]

Sonya to Chukovsky:

Dear Kornei Ivanovich,
I find Nabokov's lie repulsive and am going to write him about it, quoting your words in my letter. Really, to invent, as the French say, complete untruth about a living person—what lack of taste! And it's not the first time this has happened with him; I'm glad that he wrote to me, because I can't imagine that anyone [else] would be in a position to check up on his story.

Chukovsky to Sonya:

[...] Concerning Vladimir Vladimirovich: people who have read his memoirs (I have not read them) write to me with amazement and indignation concerning his lines about me: they see them as nearly libelous. But I quickly cooled down, and I think that at that time, in 1915-16, there was something in me that provided fodder for his anecdote. The anecdote itself is an invention, but it is possible that he accurately reflected the disrespectful feeling I had toward those around me. I was very awkward: in gloves with holes, not knowing how to behave in high society—and then I was ignorant, like all newspapermen—an ignoramus despite myself, self-taught, who had to feed a large family with my clumsy writings. Vladimir Vladimirovich's father, on the other hand, was a man of very high culture. He had a particular game: enumerating all of Dickens' heroes, almost three hundred names. He engaged in a competition with me. I ran out of steam after the first hundred. We jokingly competed in our knowledge of the novels of Arnold Bennett. Here too he took first place: he named around twenty titles, whereas I had read only eight. I always treated him with respect and lovingly preserve his few letters and friendly notes in Chukokkala [Chukovsky's album].

Sonya to Chukovsky:

[...]Regarding Nabokov: after I wrote to him about his invention concerning your visit to London with his father, he asked me to tell you that his son grew up on your "Krokodil" and "Moidodyr." It seems to me that he felt very awkward at having his guilt revealed.

An interesting side note: "Sonya" was not the young woman Chukovsky supposed (and toward whom he developed romantic feelings) but the emigré editor Roman Grinberg (Роман Гринберг), who was afraid that Chukovsky would get in trouble if he were known to be corresponding with a well-known anti-Soviet and so invented Sonya as a safe alter ego.

(Via Anatoly.)

Соня - Чуковскому:
На днях Владимир Владимирович прислал мне новое, исправленное издание своих автобиографических воспоминаний. Как обычно, перед тем как прочесть, вернее – перечесть их, я просмотрела в индексе знакомые мне имена. Против Вашего имени – Чуковский – автор указывает на стр. 254, смотреть: Корнейчук, и там я прочла интересную историю о Вашей поездке в Англию в 1916 году в качестве члена специальной группы. Он сообщает следующее: «Там был официальный банкет под председательством сэра Эдварда Грея и забавное интервью с королем Георгом V, у которого Чуковский, enfant terrible группы, добивался узнать, нравятся ли ему произведения Оскара Уайльда – «дзи ооаркс оф Ооалд». Король, не отличавшийся любовью к чтению и сбитый с толку акцентом спрашивавшего, ответил в свою очередь вопросом, нравится ли гостю лондонский туман (позже Чуковский торжественно цитировал это как пример английского ханжеского замалчивания писателя из-за аморальности его личной жизни)». Как это занимательно! Я не знала, что Ваш интерес к литературе так велик, что Вы были способны взрывать правила дворцового этикета. Искренние мои поздравления по этому поводу.
...

Чуковский - Соне:
Выдержку из воспоминаний Вашего друга я получил, и никак не могу представить себе, зачем и над чем он глумится. Действительно, у меня не было гувернеров, какие были у него, и английский язык я знаю самоучкой. Он был барин, я был маляр, сын прачки, и если я в юности читал Суинберна, Карлейла, Маколея, Сэм. Джонсона, Хенри Джеймса, мне это счастье далось в тысячу раз труднее, чем ему. Над чем же здесь смеяться? Выдумку о том, будто я в Букингэмском дворце обратился к королю Георгу с вопросом об Уайльде – я считаю довольно остроумной, но ведь это явная ложь, клевета. Конечно, это не мешает мне относиться ко многим его произведениям с любовью, радоваться его литературным успехам, – 65 лет литературной работы приучили меня не вносить личных отношений в оценку произведений искусства, но я уверен, что никто из знающих меня не поверит злому вымыслу знаменитого автора.
...

Соня - Чуковскому:
Дорогой Корней Иванович,
Я нахожу набоковскую ложь отвратительной и собираюсь написать ему об этом, процитировав в своем письме Ваши слова. В самом деле, выдумать, как французы говорят, сплошную неправду о живом человеке – какая безвкусица! И это не первый раз случается с ним; я рада, что он написал это мне, потому что не могу представить, что кто-то в состоянии проверить его историю.

Чуковский - Соне:
...
Относительно Владимира Владимировича: люди, прочитавшие его мемуары (я не читал их), пишут мне с удивлением, с возмущением по поводу его строк обо мне: видят здесь чуть не пасквиль. Но я вскоре поостыл и думаю, что в то время – в 1915-16 гг. – во мне было очевидно что-то, что дало пищу его анекдоту. Самый анекдот – выдумка, но возможно, что он верно отразил то неуважительное чувство, которое я внушал окружающим. Я был очень нескладен: в дырявых перчатках, неумеющий держаться в высшем обществе – и притом невежда, как все газетные работники, – невежда-поневоле, самоучка, вынужденный кормить огромную семью своим неумелым писанием. Отец же Владимира Владимировича был человек очень высокой культуры. У него была особая игра: перечислять все имена героев Диккенса – чуть ли не триста имен. Он соревновался со мною. Я изнемогал после первой же сотни. Мы в шутку состязались в знании всех романов А. Беннета. Он и здесь оказывался первым: назвал около двух десятков заглавий, я же читал всего восемь. Я всегда относился к нему с уважением и любовно храню его немногие письма и дружеские записи в «Чукоккала».

Соня - Чуковскому:
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Относительно Набокова: после того, как я написала ему насчет его выдумки относительно Вашей поездки в Лондон вместе с его отцом, он в ответ просил меня передать Вам, что его сын вырос на Вашем «Крокодиле» и «Мойдодыре». Мне кажется, что он чувствует себя очень неловко, будучи уличенным.

FANCY THE IRKISHNESS.

Just a few bits of George Herriman's unique brand of linguistic revelry from Krazy & Ignatz 1939-1940: "A Brick Stuffed with Moom-bins"; all these are taken from the strip of January 15, 1939:

[Ignatz:] I'm sure in delight that I'm not a "door mouse" — fancy the irkishness of packing a "door" around.

[Offissa Pupp:] Whistling, evil is awing. [I.e., "a-wing," on the wing —LH]

[Ignatz's wife, making a rare appearance:] A door — a door of all things — me and the children hungry and ragged, and you buying a door — y-y-you pilgarlic!

BOOKS AND THE LOST PAST.

Luan Starova (Луан Старова) is a Macedonian author and diplomat whose best-known work is "the autobiographical cycle Balkan Saga, of which ten volumes have been published so far. My Father's Books is the first work in the cycle. His books have appeared in more than fifteen languages, but the segment featured in Words without Borders is the first to be featured in English." The excerpt tells a sad story (which I hope is at least to some extent fictionalized) and contains a passage that reminds me of the role of books in my own peripatetic life:

Of all that materially remained in the world at the end of my father's life, it is possibly his books that most clearly reveal the lost past. It is also possible that one of the secrets of my parents' durable and harmonious marriage was my mother's good-natured encouragement and support of my father's love for his books, and her transformation into a kind of holy patron of his library. It is, in fact, from the pages of my father's movable library that one can most clearly read and understand the history of my family that my parents constructed. Wherever the path of migrations and the instinct for family survival drove us, my father's books accompanied us.

A new book was like a newborn in the family, with its own place in our family's life, or like a new footpath that allowed one to walk yet farther along the long road of life.

During the family's frequent migrations, during the frequent changes of Balkan borders, which often fatally and tragically split the destinies of individuals, families, and nations, we left everything behind except the books.

The books also befriended us in those moments when there was only enough time for life itself to be saved, as if hidden on one of their pages was the riddle to the family's salvation.

(Via wood s lot.)

BIRTHDAY LOOT.

It's been a long day, starting with the roofers showing up at 7 AM and banging away and ending with a delicious birthday dinner followed by lemon meringue pie and the opening of presents, so before I toddle off to bed I will just list books I was given and trust that the LH readership can guess why each of them is particularly appropriate to the recipient. I will doubtless be posting about most of them individually as I make my way through them.

Lost for Words: The Hidden History of the Oxford English Dictionary, by Dr. Lynda Mugglestone

Krazy & Ignatz 1939-1940: "A Brick Stuffed with Moom-bins", by George Herriman (see this impassioned post)

The Stalin Epigram: A Novel, by Robert Littell

Unforgiving Years, by Victor Serge

When Russia Learned to Read : Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861-1917, by Jeffrey Brooks

The Venture of Islam, Volume 3: The Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times, by Marshall G. S. Hodgson (see the third paragraph of this post)

Good thing I'm a fast reader.