EDWARD RONDTHALER, RIP.

A very nice NY Times obit by Margalit Fox of a remarkable man who lived to a remarkable age:

Edward Rondthaler, Foenetic Speler, Dies at 104

Edward Rondthaler was one of the 20th century’s foremost men of letters — actual, physical, audible letters. As an outspoken advocate of spelling reform, he spent decades trying to impose order on his 26 lawless charges. As a noted typographer who first plied his trade 99 years ago, he helped bring the art of typesetting from the age of hot metal into the modern era.

From the early 1960s on, Mr. Rondthaler was known publicly for his energetic campaign to respell English, a cause that over the centuries has been the quixotic mission of an impassioned few. To spell the language as it sounds, he argued, would vanquish orthographic hobgoblins, promote literacy and make accessible to foreign readers English classics like Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” — or, more properly, “Oed to a Nietingael” — whose opening lines appear on this page....

Read the rest of the obit for an explanation of his contributions to phototypesetting and his involvement with simplified spelling; while I think the latter is a pretty silly cause, I admire his willingness to stand up for his views against inevitable derision. Warning: the end of the obit may choke you up a bit if you have a sentimental streak. (Thanks, Eric and Anne!)

MUSEE DES PEEVOLOGIES.

John McIntyre of You Don't Say wants to start a collection of the historical representations of peevology. He provides some samples:

In 1962 — 1962, one of the last of the Good Years, which the echoes of the Fifties sounded in all ears — Dwight Macdonald published Against the American Grain: Essays on the Effects of Mass Culture. My crumbling paperback copy includes “Updating the Bible,” a jeremiad about the Revised Standard Version of the English Bible of 1952; “The String Untuned,” an examination of the descriptivist wickedness of the third edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary (Unabridged); and “The Decline and Fall of English,” a fusillade at the wanton perversity of linguists and pedagogues.

Not on the shelves but in the garage with the other books from my former office at The Sun, is The State of the Language, an anthology edited thirty or so years ago by Christopher Ricks. You may recall some of the menaces of the Seventies — hopefully used as a sentence adverb, and the Episcopal Church’s carelessness in revising the Book of Common Prayer into texts comprehensible to worshipers.

All of these works grow increasingly quaint with the passage of time. More to the point, all illustrate components of the peevologist personality, a subject to which I plan to return in a future post. For now, as it occurs to you what exhibits you would like to see displayed in the museé, by all means suggest them.

I remember that Ricks book, which at the time (so young and foolish was I) I actually wanted to own. And I look forward to the future post.

THE BOOKSHELF: INDIAN SUMMER.

The publisher kindly (thanks, Jason!) sent me a copy of Alex Von Tunzelmann's Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire, and I have finally gotten around to reading it (taking a break from Russian history). It's a very enjoyable read, and anyone who's interested in the subject (which I have been since reading Midnight's Children many years ago) should get hold of it—the author has read a great many sources from every point of view (and this is a topic that inspires fiery partisanship) and produced an impartial and engaging account. She hooked me from the opening paragraph:

In the beginning, there were two nations. One was a vast, mighty and magnificent empire, brilliantly organized and culturally unified, which dominated a massive swath of the earth. The other was an undeveloped, semifeudal realm, riven by religious factionalism and barely able to feed its illiterate, diseased and stinking masses. The first nation was India. The second was England.

And there are linguistically interesting sidelights; when she mentions Indira Nehru's marriage to Feroze Gandhy, for example, she provides a footnote on his change of spelling to Gandhi: "Gandhi with an i means 'grocer' and is commonly found in Gujarati Hindus of the Modh Bania caste, such as MKG. The Parsi surname has a different root and is usually spelled Gandhy or Ghandy. Feroze's sister, Tehmina Gandhy, continued to use the original spelling."

But it's certainly not the only book you'd want to read on the subject. The author's focus is divided between the historical events and the personalities involved, in the first place Lord and Lady Mountbatten and just behind them Gandhi, Nehru, and Jinnah. (The only one who comes out of it well is Edwina Mountbatten, who exhibited what can only be called heroism under the stress of tragic events; the others all leave a very bad impression, especially Gandhi.) This makes sense not only from a marketing perspective but from a historical one, since this is one of those historical turning points heavily determined by the personalities involved, but the all-important balance is tilted more heavily toward the personalities than I would prefer, and the attention given to frivolities like fancy dress and the details of people's weddings means that far more important matters are occasionally swept under the rug. The most serious problem, in my view, is the downplaying of the mass violence that occurred before the famous horrors of Partition. There is not a word, for instance, about the massacres in Bihar in the first week of November 1946, in which thousands of Muslims were killed. For the view from below, the level on which the millions of people whose lives were disrupted by the machinations and follies of the powerful, you will need to consult other books. (I haven't seen them, but it looks like the books reviewed by Siddhartha Deb in the January 1 LRB would be excellent reading along those lines; unfortunately, only a teaser paragraph is available at that link, but at least the titles and authors are there and can be investigated elsewhere.)

I HAVE DINED TODAY.

For dinner tonight, my wife made a delicious beef stew (served over noodles) and followed it up with a peach tart so sublime I murmured the last line of this poem by Sydney Smith; since I'm not sure it's as well known as it used to be and as it should be, I'll quote it in full here, and wish you all bon appétit:

Recipe for a Salad

To make this condiment, your poet begs
The pounded yellow of two hard-boil'd eggs;
Two boiled potatoes, passed through kitchen sieve,
Smoothness and softness to the salad give.
Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl,
And, half-suspected, animate the whole.
Of mordant mustard add a single spoon,
Distrust the condiment that bites so soon;
But deem it not, thou man of herbs, a fault
To add a double quantity of salt;
Four times the spoon with oil of Lucca crown,
And twice with vinegar procur'd from town;
And lastly, o'er the flavour'd compound toss
A magic soupçon of anchovy sauce.
Oh, green and glorious! Oh, herbaceous treat!
'Twould tempt the dying anchorite to eat:
Back to the world he'd turn his fleeting soul,
And plunge his fingers in the salad-bowl!
Serenely full, the epicure would say,
"Fate cannot harm me, I have dined today."

ASHBERY BRIDGE.

I discovered (via wood s lot, as I discover so many things) that the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge in Minneapolis has a poem by John Ashbery inscribed across the upper lintel. Here's Edward Byrne's post about it at One Poet's Notes; he links to a very nice slide show of photos of the successive bits of the (untitled) poem on the bridge and quotes the whole thing:

And now I cannot remember how I would
have had it. It is not a conduit (confluence?) but a place.
The place, of movement and an order.
The place of old order.
But the tail end of the movement is new.
Driving us to say what we are thinking.
It is so much like a beach after all, where you stand
and think of going no further.
And it is good when you get to no further.
It is like a reason that picks you up and
places you where you always wanted to be.
This far, it is fair to be crossing, to have crossed.
Then there is no promise in the other.
Here it is. Steel and air, a mottled presence,
small panacea
and lucky for us.
And then it got very cool.

It's not a great poem, but it must be a wonderful thing to experience as you walk across the bridge—something that at one point, according to a comment at Byrne's post, Siah Armajani, the designer of the bridge, didn't want people to be able to do: "I remember reading once that Siah had originally conceived of the bridge as only the span portion, with no stairs or ramp to ascend and cross it. He was interested, as the article I read quoted him, in 'the concept of a bridge,' rather than an actual functional bridge. According to the account, the local neighborhood association pressed the city to require that the bridge be crossable, not merely ornamental." I hope it's not true; I hate that kind of pseudo-artistic arrogance, the "Tilted Arc" controversy being the locus classicus of this sort of thing: "Art is not democratic. It is not for the people," eh? It better be when you're blocking people's way to work with it, bucko.

MANX: NOT EXTINCT!

A BBC News story from last week alerts us to the fact that, contrary to popular opinion, Manx is not extinct:

The global cultural body UNESCO has agreed to change its classification of the Manx Gaelic language as "extinct" following protests from the island....

Chief Minister Tony Brown wrote to UNESCO claiming the language was still flourishing on the island.

The classification will now be changed to 'critically endangered'.

Government minister Phil Gawne, who is a fluent Manx speaker, added that as well as Mr Brown's letter there were many others sent by Manx speakers.

Several letters were sent from children who attend the Bunscoill (Manx language school) in St Johns.

The children asked: "If our language is extinct then what language are we writing in?"

What indeed? I know there are those who pooh-pooh the significance of the revival of "minor" languages, but it warms the cockles of my retrograde heart. (Thanx for the Manx, Maureen!)

ANACHRONISM OF THE YEAR.

My wife and I don't get AMC (and hardly use the TV anyway), so we don't watch Mad Men, but if we did I'm sure I would have caught the goof Ben Zimmer writes about in this Word Routes post. As Ben says, they should have used the Shorter.

THE BOOKSHELF: HODGSON AND O'CONNER.

A couple of books that have been sitting around patiently waiting for me to write about them:

Charles Hodgson, who runs the etymology site podictionary, sent me his new book History of Wine Words: An Intoxicating Dictionary of Etymology and Word Histories of Wine, Vine, and Grape from the Vineyard, Glass, and Bottle, whose title and subtitle tell you just what's in the bottle. Hodgson did a good job on this; he doesn't settle for folk etymologies or vintners' myths, he gets the facts if they're available, and discusses the possibilities if there's no clear answer. He says, for instance, that the most likely origin of Beaune is "Latin Belena Castro, meaning 'fortress of Belenos'" (adding that "Belenos was a Gaulish-Celtic god who has been likened to Apollo"), and traces grenache back to the same origin as Vernaccia (probably from Latin vernaculus 'native, indigenous'). I had at one time thought of doing a book like this myself, but lazy as I am, I much prefer to have someone else do it for me.

Patricia O'Conner, a frequent perpetrator of pop grammar books and proprietor of Grammarphobia.com, has come out with Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language (cowritten with Stewart Kellerman and sent me by the publisher, Random House). The good news is that she's learned that (as she says in her introduction) "English is all about change," and she's much more flexible than your standard fuddy-duddy maven. She has an admirable discussion of ain't (complete with a lively account of the verbal delights of Dizzy Dean) and explains that the much-maligned "nucular" for nuclear "will one day be considered just another standard pronunciation." If she retains a whiff of disapproval, that may help her get past the defenses of the disapproving masses. And I learned a good deal of lexical history from her discussion of call a spade a spade—did you know that the "spade" got in there via Erasmus's mistranslation of Greek skaphē 'trough'? That's my idea of fun.

BIERCE'S BUGBEARS.

The wonderful Boston Globe language columnist, Jan Freeman, is filling in for Safire this week at the NY Times, and her column, "Bierce’s Bugbears," is a very enjoyable list of odd prohibitions plucked from Bierce's 1909 book Write It Right: A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults. A sample:

“I am afraid it will rain.” Wrong, said Bierce: the proper expression was, “I fear it will rain.” He gave no reason, but the rule appeared at least half a century earlier, in Walton Burgess’s “Five Hundred Mistakes of Daily Occurrence in Speaking, Pronouncing and Writing the English Language, Corrected.” And Burgess did have a reason: he explained that fear was the correct verb, because “afraid expresses terror; fear may mean only anxiety.” Unfortunately, that was simply false. Afraid did not imply terror for Shakespeare, Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens or Jane Austen: “When you have seen more of this country, I am afraid you will think you have overrated Hartfield,” Austen’s Emma tells Mrs. Elton. Though several other usage mavens repeated Burgess’s and Bierce’s advice, there’s no sign that it ever made an impression on the wider public.

She's doing an update of Bierce subtitled "The Celebrated Cynic’s Language Peeves Deciphered, Appraised and Annotated for 21st-Century Readers"—look for it at your bookstore in a few months!

Totally unrelated, but does anybody know the history of Clarice Lispector's family name? She came from a Yiddish-speaking Jewish family in Podolia (now in Ukraine), but "Lispector" certainly doesn't sound Yiddish, or indeed anything but odd and beautiful (like the writer herself, who I got interested in thanks to this review by Fernanda Eberstadt of a new biography).

UNICODE BROWSING.

Paul Ford at ftrain has created (for his first post since February!) a very enjoyable Unicode table "for people who like looking at characters; you can click on the number below each character to visit its Wikipedia page. Surprisingly many symbols have their own pages." Just move the sliders (x100 x1,000 x10,000) at the top to access whatever part of the system you want. Enjoy!

SAPIR-WHORF UPDATE.

I've written about Sapir-Whorf (e.g., here and here) and about the Pirahã (e.g., here and here, and good lord, has it really been five years?), and there's nothing particularly new in Joshua Hartshorne's "Does Language Shape What We Think?" in Scientific American, but it's a nice short roundup of recent developments, and this is a thought-provoking paragraph:

This suggests a different way of thinking about the influence of language on thought: words are very handy mnemonics. We may not be able to remember what seventeen spools looks like, but we can remember the word seventeen. In his landmark The Language of Thought, philosopher Jerry Fodor argued that many words work like acronyms. French students use the acronym ban[g]s to remember which adjectives go before nouns ("Beauty, Age, Number, Goodneess [sic], and Size"). Similarly, sometimes its [sic] easier to remember a word (calculus, Estonia) than what the word stands for. We use the word, knowing that should it becomes [sic] necessary, we can search through our minds — or an encyclopedia — and pull up the relevant information (how to calculate an integral; Estonia's population, capital and location on a map). Numbers, it seems, work the same way.

As a side note, Scientific American could use some proofreading. (Thanks, Sarah!)

WELSH TEXTSPEAK.

Welsh Text Message Abbreviations is a brief "English-Welsh 'txt spk' guide of the top 10 most popular text message abbreviations"; LOL (Laugh Out Loud), for instance, is CYU (Chwerthin yn uchel), and BrB (Be Right Back) is YOYYM (Yn ôl yn y man). A fun bit of trivia—thanks, Joe!

HEAVENLY FLOWERS.

If you like detailed explanations of odd linguistic usages (and if you don't, what are you doing around these parts?), Victor Mair has a fine post at Language Log in which he goes into the history of the Chinese expression tian¹hua¹ 天花 ("heaven flower[s]"), meaning 'smallpox' (he also explains tian¹hua¹ban³ 天花板, "heaven flower board," for 'ceiling,' "a reasonable enough term since proper ceilings were decorated and 'heaven' signifies 'above,' hence, 'a decorated board above'"). A snippet to whet your appetite:

Smallpox became endemic in China around the 10th century, well after the Buddhist terminology in the Lotus sutra had become established and people were thoroughly familiar with the notion of TIAN1HUA1 天花 ("heaven flower[s]"). Once smallpox was endemic, it became a disease of children, almost a rite of passage. If they survived smallpox, they were safe and had a good chance of growing up to adulthood. People began to assume that some component of smallpox was inborn, a "fetal poison" (TAI1DU2 胎毒) that everybody carried around — the toxic residue of conception, some said — and that under the influence of seasonal energy (SHI2QI4 時氣), it would erupt into a case of smallpox. In this sense, smallpox was "innate" ("inborn," "natural" — in Chinese, TIAN1 天 can imply all of these things as well as "heaven"). This theory of the "fetal (i.e., innate) poison" that could potentially cause smallpox was already prevalent from the Tang period (618-907).

This is all in the service of explaining why the left-hand switch in this photo is labeled "smallpox."

LAGOGEROS.

Nick Nicholas over at Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος (it's in English, honest!) has a post on a great piece of detective work he did to track down the meaning of λαγόγηρως, a Greek word used in Suda and in a gloss to Lucian; it literally means 'old man hare' and apparently refers to some kind of rodent, but Nick, using the mighty powers of the internet, finds not only the word, still in use, but a photo of the creature itself, taken near Edessa in Greek Macedonia. Furthermore, it turns out that the Bulgarian word for it is лалугер (laluɡer), which looks like it's borrowed from Greek but (as gbaloglou points out in the comment thread) could be the source of the Greek word, which would then be a hypercorrection based on folk etymology. Fascinating stuff!

SWEARING IN AUSTRALIA.

Caroline Marcus has an entertaining report on Aussie cussing in the Sydney Morning Herald:

The University of Queensland's Roly Sussex, a professor of applied language studies, said that in terms of attitudes to swearing, the US and Australia were on opposite ends of the spectrum, with Britain in the middle.

He pointed to the Prime Minister's dropping of the word "shitstorm" on national television in March as a reflection of Australian mores. "The sort of words that Mr Rudd has been using in the media are completely unacceptable for President Barack Obama to be using," Professor Sussex said. "Some people even thought the Prime Minister's use of the S-word in the media made him sound more like an everyday person."

So, too, Tourism Australia's 2006 campaign, "Where the Bloody Hell Are You?" "That had trouble in England because of the word 'bloody' and it had trouble in Canada because of the word 'hell'," Professor Sussex said. "Neither caused the slightest trouble in Australia."

Now, that's what I call a healthy attitude.

MISSIONARY LINGUISTICS.

Michael Erard, the Official Language Journalist of Languagehat (see, for instance, here), has written an excellent piece for the (now defunct) magazine Search called "Holy Grammar, Inc.," about the increasingly controversial mix of religion and linguistics practiced by SIL International, a partner of Wycliffe Bible Translators. Erard describes the origin of the institute in this passage:

SIL was founded in 1934 by Cameron Townshend, an Oklahoma missionary who wanted to offer linguistics training to Bible translators during summer-long sessions (SIL stands for “Summer Institute of Linguistics”). On trips to Mexico, Townshend had realized the ludicrousness of giving Spanish Bibles to Indians who didn’t speak or read Spanish. Early on, he was joined by some serious linguistic scholars, Kenneth Pike and Eugene Nida, who had credentials and ties to a world of academic respectability.

“Early on, this fledgling program was greeted with a lot of respect from the linguistics world,” says William Svelmoe, a historian at St. Mary’s College in Indiana and Cameron Townshend’s biographer. “Pike was getting connected with all these big names in linguistics, who were fascinated by the project and just interested in the fact that here we had a bunch of people who were actually going to get out and do the grunt work.”

And for a long time linguists were happy to let these guys "do the grunt work" so they could have material to analyze. But "a younger generation of linguists are beginning to feel uncomfortable.... They’re noting how much SIL’s faith-based science has gotten woven into the DNA of their discipline." Among them is Lise Dobrin, who "began to consider how much the presence of SIL saturated her years in Papua New Guinea":

An epiphany came at a 2005 conference on language documentation and values that she attended. She recalls that the linguistic records of Spanish priests in New Spain (the collective historical name for Spanish colonies in the Americas) were being praised, which was a notable departure from the usual anti-colonial critique of Spanish destruction of indigenous cultures. Dobrin says she noticed SIL members in the audience, which went unremarked upon. “It’s this weird dissonance,” she says. “If we’re talking about values, why can’t we talk about how SIL is doing all these things?” In Papua New Guinea, she had seen how Christian beliefs infused everything that SIL linguists did. “Before they would do anything, they would have to stop and pray. It’s their world, and it suffuses everything they do, so the idea that you could be SIL and not be wearing your Christianity and your hopes for other people on your sleeve—I don’t believe that, given what I’ve seen.”

At the end of the conference, she talked to a colleague, Jeff Good, who admitted to the same misgivings. He pointed out that linguistics was the only scientific discipline that relies on missionaries for data and infrastructure. “And I said, oh my god, we have to do something about that,” Dobrin says. “We have to actually say it out loud, and not just to each other in a whisper.”

The result was a panel discussion at the Linguistic Society of America’s annual conference, titled “Missionaries and scholars: The overlapping agendas of linguists in the field.” Speakers had a variety of perspectives on SIL, including historian Svelmoe and linguists Patience Epps, Courtney Handman, Ken Olson (who is a member of SIL), Dan Everett (a former member of SIL, now a critic), Good, and Dobrin. A collection of essays from the panel will be published in the field’s flagship journal, Language, in September of 2009.

I urge anyone interested in the topic to read the whole article, and I look forward to the special issue of Language.

DOSTOEVSKY: FROM THE DEAD HOUSE.

Having finished War and Peace, I wanted to follow up Tolstoy with Dostoevsky, but on the other hand, after a 1,200-page novel I really wasn't up for The Brothers Karamazov just yet. Fortunately, Lisa at Lizok's Bookshelf gave me a great idea in her post "Favorite Russian Writers A to Я: Dostoevsky (+Dovlatov and Dal’)": why not read Записки из мёртвого дома (Notes from the House of the Dead or Notes from the Dead House), his 1862 novel based on his time in a Siberian prison? It's a compact 300 pages, and Lisa says it's one of her favorites, so I pulled it off the shelf.

From the start you're plunged into a completely different world. Tolstoy, like Nabokov, was born into a rich and aristocratic family, and whatever trouble he got into, by gambling away all his money for instance, he could get out of by selling one of his estates, and when he decided it was sinful to profit off literature, he simply gave up his copyrights without a qualm. Despite all his spiritual torments and compassion for humanity, he viewed life from above, and it shows. Dostoevsky grew up in a lousy neighborhood, the son of a drunken and violent military surgeon, and always had to worry about money; when he lost at gambling, he was in the same kind of trouble any ordinary person would be, and had to write desperately to get out of it. He writes from ground level, and thrusts you into the midst of the mess to be found there. Tolstoy is by turns a genial storyteller and tedious professor; Dostoevsky is the Ancient Mariner, grasping you by the lapels and refusing to let you go while he tells you about things that are more likely to upset than edify you. His sentences have the kind of urgency that compels you to keep reading.

I'm still on the first chapter, but I've already hit one good language-related passage and one lexical mystery. Here's the passage, on cursing (I wish I'd read it when I was putting the book together; the Russian is below the cut):

I doubt even one of [the narrator's fellow prisoners] confessed his lawbreaking to himself. Let somebody who wasn't a prisoner try to reproach a convict with his crime, to abuse him for it (although it is not to the Russian taste to reproach convicts) — there will be no end to the cursing. And what masters they all were at cursing! They cursed elaborately, artistically. Cursing, with them, was raised to the level of a science; they were not trying to select an offensive word so much as an offensive thought, spirit, idea — and that is more elaborate and more venomous. Their endless quarrels developed this science even further among them.

The mystery is this: a couple of pages earlier, talking about the various kinds of criminals incarcerated there, he mentions "мазурики и бродяги-промышленники по находным деньгам или по столевской части": "pickpockets and wandering promyshlenniks trying to come by nakhodny money or in the stolevskii part/section/field." I was puzzled by three words here, that came at me in increasing order of difficulty. Promyshlennik now means 'industrialist' but etymologically simply means someone who promyshlyaet, who uses his wits to acquire something—in earlier times it was used of Siberian hunter/trappers and Black Sea fishermen, and here it would seem to mean those who try to get nakhodny money. Nakhodny is a rare (obsolete?) adjective based on nakhodit' 'to come upon; to find,' and Dahl says it means 'having come to someone by happenstance' or 'coming up to,' so the combination could mean "wandering thieves who take whatever money they come upon'... except that we then get или по столевской части "or in the stolevskii part/section/field," and stolevskii is not in the dictionary. Well, it's in Dahl, the closest thing Russian has had to the OED, but all he does is enter it with a question mark, quote this line, and refer to a guess by one Paul Boyer that it might be from Yiddish and related to German stehlen 'steal,' which sounds like a desperate stab in the dark. Now, it occurs one other time in the novel, in Part 2, Chapter 3: "И указали тут они нам одно дело, по столевской, то есть по нашей, части": "And here they showed us one business/affair, in the stolevskii, that is to say in our, part/section/field." The phrase that I have bolded is obviously important... but it's still not at all clear what the adjective might mean. Any suggestions, or references to recent scholarship, will be gratefully received.

The Russian of the cursing passage:

Вряд ли хоть один из них сознавался внутренно в своей беззаконности. Попробуй кто не из каторжных упрекнуть арестанта его преступлением, выбранить его (хотя, впрочем, не в русском духе попрекать преступника) — ругательствам не будет конца. А какие были они все мастера ругаться! Ругались они утонченно, художественно. Ругательство возведено было у них в науку; старались взять не столько обидным словом, сколько обидным смыслом, духом, идеей — а это утонченнее, ядовитее. Беспрерывные ссоры еще более развивали между ними эту науку.

COLD IRONING.

Anybody here know what the post title means? You're wondering how you can iron a shirt with a cold iron, right? Boy, are you barking up the wrong tree. Here's a representative quote: "The Brooklyn Paper has an article on a setback in a Red Hook blogger's quest to reduce port emissions through cold ironing." Here's another: "The Juneau cold ironing system provides both electric power and steam." (I know, steam from a cold iron?? How does that work?) I'll let you think about it for a minute and try guessing.

...OK, time's up. The Wikipedia article, which is where I cured my own ignorance after running into the phrase and experiencing utter befuddlement, explains it well: it is "the process of providing shore-side electrical power to a ship at berth while its main and auxiliary engines are turned off. Cold ironing permits emergency equipment, refrigeration, cooling, heating, lighting, etc. to receive continuous electrical power while the ship loads or unloads its cargo." And why is it called that? That's the beauty part: "Cold ironing is a shipping industry term that first came into use when all ships had coal fired iron clad engines. When a ship would tie up at port there was no need to continue to feed the fire and the iron engines would literally cool down eventually going completely cold, hence the term 'cold ironing'." Most enjoyable etymology I've seen in a while.

THE WALL IN MY HEAD.

In November, Open Letter Books will publish an interesting anthology called The Wall in My Head (publisher's book site):

On the night of November 9, 1989, after months of unrest in Europe and East Germany, the checkpoints between East and West Berlin were suddenly, almost accidentally, opened, starting a process that would bring together a Europe that had been divided for thirty years. THE WALL IN MY HEAD, an anthology that features fiction, essays, images, and historical documents, marks the twentieth anniversary of this momentous collapse and sheds light on how it came to pass. Combining work from the generation of writers and artists who witnessed the fall of the Iron Curtain first-hand with the impressions and reflections of those who grew up in its wake, THE WALL IN MY HEAD provides a unique view into the change, optimism, and confusion that came with 1989 and examines how each of these has weathered the twenty years since that fateful year. Highlights within include seminal excerpts from the work of Milan Kundera, Peter Schneider, Ryszard Kapuściński, Vladimir Sorokin, and Victor Pelevin, and new work from Péter Esterházy, Andrzej Stasiuk, Muharem Bazdulj, Maxim Trudolubov, Dorota Masłowska, Uwe Tellkamp, Dan Sociu, David Zábranský, Christhard Läpple, and a host of others.

The reason I'm telling you about it is that in an admirable combination of PR and generosity, Open Letter is making the pre-publication galleys available online for a limited time. Go here and click on "View Item" on the left, and you can read as much of the book as you like. (Via Lizok's Bookshelf.)

MONKEY'S ARMPIT: INTRODUCTION.

As promised, Ben Zimmer has posted the introduction to my book—enjoy! (Ben had to bleep a couple of words, but I'm sure you sophisticated decoders can figure them out. They're spelled out in the actual intro, of course. Fortunately, he didn't feel the need to expurgate ebyona mat'.)

TO WILFRED CANTWELL SMITH.

When asked, What is an intellectual? he said: 'An intellectual is a participant in his own society, listening to people. That kind of truth cannot be put anywhere by us, not in words, never put in its place. The human mind can apprehend, not comprehend.'

Our native language shapes us, does it not
even as it shapes itself upon the page?
The languages you've learned, in life and college,
carve and emboss characters in your thought?

      Hebrew's ornate iron, its quirks around the line
      (vocal or consonant) in you have wrought
      the odd intransigent openness — and untaught
      much we grew up to mimic — or disdain.

Myopic, skeptical, sometimes distraught,
slowly your readers see themselves as foreign,
trotting for safety through our little warren
of walled ways. Now, perilously, we're out

in a big world of foreigners, finding that they are not!
Ink on white paper keeps informing those
who learn, to listen long, until there glows
within the friendly signs of being understood.

      Urdu's visual/inner shapes I've not
      seen on the page to see in you. I know
      Persian and Arabic's fluid music though
      (to the eye); which to your nature also brought

a spare poetry. Such surprises dot
and wink away through universal
(meticulously measurable)
spaces, and what's been sought
within shines there, articulate, through the night.

  Margaret Avison

From Always Now: Volume Three.

Wilfred Cantwell Smith (1916 – 2000) was a professor of comparative religion whom Avison knew in his last years.

MONKEY'S ARMPIT: INTERVIEW WITH BEN ZIMMER.

Ben Zimmer, linguist, lexicographer, and executive producer of Visual Thesaurus, has posted his interview with me, which I think came out pretty well. On Thursday he'll be posting my introduction to the U.S. edition, which was omitted from the first printing, so anyone who bought the book will be able to enjoy it then!

Oh, and while I'm on a self-promotion binge, here's a nice write-up by Diana Page Jordan. Everybody has their own favorite insult from the book; hers is "an affectionate term Icelandic moms have for their children — rassgat (RAHS-gat) — litla rassgati mitt. It means my little asshole."

THE TOPONYMY OF BURMA.

The Permanent Committee on Geographical Names of the British government has a number of documents listed on its website, many of which are available online as pdf files; I'm looking forward to delving into "Algeria: Language and Toponymy. How politically driven language policies have impeded toponymic progress" (November 2003), "Language Evolution in Bosnia" (August 2006), and "Iran: Religion, Nationalism and Toponymy: The complex ongoing interconnections between Persian and Arabic" (June 2003), among others. But the one I want to focus on now is "An Introduction to the Toponymy of Burma" (October 2007; pdf, Google cache). It starts with an "Outline of Post-Independence History" and a description of the various ethnic groups, then continues to the languages:

The situation is in fact greatly complex, as is suggested by a linguistic survey begun in 1917, which identified 242 languages and dialects before it was abandoned as being beyond the capacity and resources of the administration to accomplish. About three-quarters of the population of Burma, that is to say some 40 million people, speak one of the Tibeto-Burman languages. These are mostly Burmans who speak Burmese, almost the only language spoken in much of the central plains. Native Burmans seldom speak any indigenous language other than Burmese, but many educated non-Burmans do speak Burmese as a second language, so Burmese can serve as a medium of communication away from the central plains also. Burmese exists in both a literary/ceremonial and in a colloquial form, the language itself being known as myanma (h)batha in the former but generally as bama (h)batha in the latter. This important distinction between myanma and bama is encountered again in the debate over the country name itself...

[The ruling SLORC in May 1989 established the Commission of Inquiry into the True Naming of Myanmar:] The effect of this committee’s work on toponyms within Burma is dealt with elsewhere in this paper (Section E). But the most internationally visible result of their work concerned the country name itself [changing "Burma" to "Myanmar"]. The claim behind this move was that words deriving from the noun “Burma” could only properly relate to the Burman ethnic group. In order properly to encompass the entire spectrum of ethnic groups within the country, the word “Myanmar” should be used. This argument is still used today by the SPDC authorities. However, the crucial element of this clause is to be found in the words "laws enacted in the English language". Law 15/89 was openly directed at the English language specifically. It had no effect whatsoever on the Burmese language where, as has been noted at the end of paragraph 9 above, the word employed continued to be myanma in literary/ceremonial form and bama in colloquial form. And the law effectively disadvantaged non-Burman ethnic groups, who had become accustomed to forms of “Burma” denoting the whole country, but to whom myanma and its derivatives were totally alien words which were redolent only of the language of the dominant ethnic group.

Nice to see a government committee put things so plainly and straightforwardly. After that come sections on Toponyms within Burma, Population and Related Information, First- and Second-Order Administrative Divisions, and Name and Spelling Changes in Burma. And at the end is a nice map showing the major rivers and cities (including the new capital, Nay Pyi Taw). Well done, PCGN!

WAR AND PEACE: THE SUMMING UP.

I started reading War and Peace in Russian a little over a year ago, and Saturday I finally finished it. (I took quite a bit of time off between the four parts, or I would have finished sooner.) Like Proust, the man needed an iron-willed editor. Actually, an apter comparison would be with Beckwith, since in each case the book is damaged at the end by a long, largely irrelevant, amateurish section that should have been omitted. But let me start with the good stuff.

I've read it twice in English (in college and in the mid-'90s) and now in Russian, and each time the characters come to life in the same mysterious way. How does Tolstoy do it? From the protagonists to the minor walk-ons, they have the unruly undeniability of actual people, and the reader gets sucked into their messy lives no matter how many postmodern deconstructions of narrative he or she may have absorbed. I get mad at Prince Andrei with the same sort of exasperated affection I direct at my own brothers, not with the distanced feeling of irritation I experience with, say, Proust's Marcel. I want good things to happen for Pierre and Natasha much more than I do for any characters in Hemingway. It's a great gift, that ability to infuse life.

And he certainly doesn't do it with fancy prose. There's nothing in Tolstoy as gorgeous as, say, this bit from Goncharov's 1849 «Сон Обломова» ("Oblomov's Dream," which became the ninth chapter of the novel when it was published a decade later): "Но лето, лето особенно упоительно в том краю. Там надо искать свежего, сухого воздуха, напоенного — не лимоном и не лавром, а просто запахом полыни, сосны и черемухи; там искать ясных дней, слегка жгучих, но не палящих лучей солнца и почти в течение трех месяцев безоблачного неба. Как пойдут ясные дни, то и длятся недели три-четыре; и вечер тепел там, и ночь душна." ('But summer, summer is especially intoxicating in those parts. It is there that you must seek fresh, dry air, filled — not with lemon or laurel, but simply with the smell of polýn' [I'm not sure if it means 'wormwood' or 'mugwort' here], pine, and bird cherry; there seek clear days, lightly burning but not scorching rays of the sun, and almost three months of cloudless sky. When the clear days come, they last for three or four weeks; and the evening is warm there, and the night sultry.') To read that in Russian is to want to read it aloud, and to read it aloud is to want to memorize it. Tolstoy doesn't work that way; his prose can be very effective (see my discussion here), but basically it's workmanlike and often clunky. No, he's not a prosateur but a storyteller, and storytelling is a gift, perhaps an unanalyzable one.

I'll go on to talk about the end of the novel, so if you want to avoid spoilers (who will die and who will live? and who will turn out to be a false embodiment of the motive force of history?), don't proceed below the cut.

It's always somehow a surprise when Natasha and Pierre get together (though not at all a surprise that Sonya gets dumped), and the ending of the novel proper (before the Epilogue) is perfect: "— Только для чего же в Петербург! — вдруг сказала Наташа, и сама же поспешно ответила себе: — Нет, нет, это так надо... Да, Мари? Так надо." ("Only why does he have to go to Petersburg?" said Natasha suddenly, and quickly answered herself: "No, no, it has to be that way... Doesn't it, Marie? It has to be that way.") It has the satisfying feeling of a Faulkner climax, and frankly, I think the novel should have ended there, with "Так надо" summing up Tolstoy's approach to history and life.

But of course it doesn't end there. The First Part of the Epilogue carries the survivors' story another seven years forward; Nikolai marries Princess Marya (saving the Rostov fortunes) and the two keep poor Sonya around the house as a sort of familial hanger-on while Nikolai turns into a stern but wise gentry landowner (how his serfs love him!), and Pierre and Natasha have kids as she turns into a dumpy housewife (but with occasional flashes of the old girlish fire) and he learns to bow to her preferences. All of this is preceded by four chapters of historical theorizing about Napoleon (for it is he who turns out to be a false embodiment of the motive force of history!) and the movement of peoples from west to east and from east to west (a cheap symmetry with which Tolstoy is inexplicably obsessed), and by the time I'd waded through that (of which there was plenty in the latter part of the novel proper) I was pretty impatient and wishing he'd quit while he was ahead. The superficial way in which he zipped through the exposition of Nikolai's development as a landowner didn't change my mind, but eventually, when Pierre and Natasha came to visit and long-developed strands wound together, I warmed to it, and by the time of the brilliant ending, in which orphaned Nikolenka (the son of Prince Andrei, who dies so memorably in the presence of his beloved but rejected Natasha after the retreat from Moscow), inspired by Pierre's tales of the young men trying to oppose the reactionary government of the day (later to become the ill-fated Decembrists whose attempted revolt would sputter out five years later, and about whom Tolstoy originally wanted to write the novel), cries out while lying down to go to bed: "А дядя Пьер! О, какой чудный человек! А отец? Отец! Отец! Да, я сделаю то, чем бы даже он был доволен..." ('And Uncle Pierre! Oh, what a wonderful person! And my father? My father! My father! Yes, I will do something that even he would be satisfied with')... by that time, I was reconciled to the First Appendix, even with its longueurs and unsatisfying character development.

But nothing will reconcile me to the Second Appendix (or, to give it its proper title, the Second Part of the Epilogue). To tell you the truth, I almost skipped it, as I had the last time I read the novel in English. I vividly remembered how it had bored me as a college student. But how could I say I'd read the book in Russian if I skipped the end? And maybe I had been too callow then, not ready to appreciate Tolstoy's subtle grasp of history.... No, I was right the first time. I didn't read every word; once he's lumbered into a line of argument and you can see how the next few paragraphs are going to go, it's hard to make yourself sit still for the dogged exposition. I read and skimmed, read and skimmed. And let me tell you, it's like being bludgeoned with the same words and phrases repeated and repeated and repeated like the raven's "Nevermore!" until you want to shout "It's OK, Lev Nikolaevich! I get it: history is not directed by great men, that is merely how it seems to us! Spare me the analogies to ships and wakes and to the latest scientific discoveries, and tell me some more about those wonderful people you created!" But in vain: he's done with the people, and utterly determined to refute the errors of the historians of his day. Alas, no one has cared about those historians and their theories, erroneous or not, for over a century (Buckle, anyone?), and anyway Tolstoy was a novelist, not a historian, no more equipped to refute professionals than I am to refute string theory. The Second Appendix is the literary equivalent of an extremely long-winded Hyde Park orator, haranguing passers-by about how the so-called experts don't know what they're talking about. Or, to bring the analogy up to date, like a blogger spewing thousands of words about how things are going to hell in a handbasket, sure that with enough repetition and sarcasm he can bring you around to his point of view. I guess what I'm saying is, if you get all the way through the First Appendix, you can put the book down with a light heart. You've done your duty by literature; just ignore the grumpy ghost of Tolstoy glaring from the corner, muttering dustily.

For your salad course, if your taste buds are awakened by the thought of historical analysis and you want to read a good one, here are the two latest posts at future historian Greg Afinogenov's Slawkenbergius's Tales: Beards and Beckers I: The Cultural and the Social and Beards and Beckers II: The Highest Stage of Historiography.

And for dessert: The Daily Growler takes on the Rooshans: "Dostoevsky and Tolstoy! They are a different matter. I live in these two dudes's books when I start reading them." Ain't it the truth.

NAVIN = NUN.

I'm on the very last chapter of War and Peace, almost finished marching through the (extremely tedious and annoying) Second Appendix, and I've been held up (or, if you will, have seized the opportunity to take a break) as a result of running into the name Иисус Навин [Iisús Návin], which is how Russians refer to Joshua. I've known his Russian name for a long time, and I've known that they have to use his patronymic to distinguish him from Jesus Christ because in Russian, unlike in Western European languages, there is no differentiation between Joshua (Yehoshua) and Jesus (Yeshua, a shortened form of Yehoshua)—they're both Iisús. What I had not given much thought to was why his patronymic is Навин rather than Нун [Nun], which according to tradition is the name of his father. I decided to investigate, and was coming up empty when I happened on a page called "Имя Иисуса Навина в традиционной экзегетике" (Word doc, Google cache), which says in a parenthetical aside that "Наве" [Nave] and "Навин" [Navin] are used instead of "Нун" [Nun] "благодаря ошибке переписчиков первых манускриптов" ['thanks to a mistake by copyists of the first manuscripts']. Does anybody know the background of this mistake and why it persisted in the Orthodox tradition? While I wait for enlightenment, I'll go finish the book.

(N.b.: My next post, either later today or tomorrow, will be a summing up of my reaction to War and Peace, so if you could hold off on your responses to my irritation with the appendix—which I will go into in detail—until then and focus for the moment on Navin/Nun, plus of course the usual derails, I will be grateful.)

TRANSLATION PARTY.

Some things are silly and useless, and yet irresistible. Such is the case with Translation Party. There's a good description at TechCrunch:

The site is incredibly simple: you enter any English phrase you can think of, and it uses Google’s automated translator to convert it into Japanese. And then it translates it back into English. And back into Japanese. At each step along the way, the words you began with gradually take shape to form something entirely different and (hopefully) awesome. The retranslations continue until you reach what the site calls ‘equilibrium’, when the English and Japanese words translate back and forth into exactly the same thing. Fortunately, it usually takes at least a few steps for your words to reach equilibrium, and the resulting sentences are often hilarious.

TechCrunch gives the example of "May the Force be with you," which reaches equilibrium with "October 5 power, to please"; you can find many more examples at MetaFilter, whose snarky and obsessive denizens are a perfect audience for this.

INDONESIAN HANGUL.

Exciting news for writing-system aficionados: the Yonhap News Agency reports that "A minority tribe in Indonesia has chosen to use Hangeul as its official writing system, in the first case of the Korean alphabet being used by a foreign society." The tribe in question is on the island of Buton, in or around the city of Bau-Bau (which the Yonhap story gives as "Bauer and Bauer"); a Korea Herald story specifies the language as "Jjia jjia," which would suggest that it's Ethnologue's Cia-Cia (population 79,000, alternate names Boetoneezen, Buton, Butonese, Butung, South Buton, Southern Butung). As Victor Mair at the Log says, "That's one small step for [an] alphabet, one giant leap for the Korean people [and their economy]."

HAT-ISMS.

On their website, the Village Hat Shop of San Diego has a nice page of hat-related idioms, from "talking through your hat" to "go s**t in your hat" (as they decorously spell it). The write-ups are enjoyable (for "at the drop of a hat" they say "Fast. [Dropping a hat, can be a way in which a race can start (instead of a starting gun for example). Also, a hat is an apparel item that can easily become dislodged from its wearer. Anyone who wears hats regularly has experienced the quickness by which a hat can fly off your head.]"), and they include a couple of translations of foreign idioms ("my hat instead of myself" is "an expression from Ecuador, home of the 'Panama' hat. It means what is says; it is preferable to give up your hat than your life"), but you shouldn't pay much attention to the attempts to provide origin stories: "as tight as Dick's hatband" has always been dear to my heart, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't have anything to do with Richard Cromwell. ("Dick's hatband" is an 18th-century phrase for "anything makeshift," in the words of the Cassell Dictionary of Slang, which adds "The identity of Dick is not known — 'some local character or half-wit' [OED] — but his hatband was presumably an improvised and absurd object.")

Thanks for the link, Robin!

AZYGOS.

I just discovered that there is an adjective azygos, meaning "not being one of a pair : single <an azygos vein>" (per M-W). No, not "azygous" (which is an alternate spelling), azygos. Very weird; does anybody know how such a perverse word came to be? I mean, English adjectives just don't end in -os.

I found this word via Memidex, an interesting "free online dictionary/thesaurus"; the About page says "The original Memidex database was derived from the high-quality WordNet database developed by Princeton University, and used by Google and others. Several features have been added or exposed, and tens of thousands of additions and corrections have been applied to the initial database." It's published by Serge Bohdjalian, who was good enough to send me the link to his site.

DO NOT LEAVE IF YOU CAN HELP.

Mark Liberman at the Log has a post on Ben Schott's NY Times op-ed piece "Twittergraphy," which features telegraphic code books and has an image from the third edition of The Anglo-American Telegraphic Code (1891); Mark links to the Google Books version of the book and looks for the words "language" and "hat," which turn out to be code for "Do not leave" and "If you can help" respectively. In the comment thread, Nick Lamb says that if someone does the requisite ASCII formatting, he will be "quite happy to knock together a web site where visitors can enter words or sequences thereof and get them translated."

Incidentally, I seem to have forgotten my own blogiversary the other day. Languagehat opened its doors for business on July 31, 2002; it's hard to believe it's been so long, but I figure if I can last seven years, I can keep going indefinitely, as long as you folks keep providing feedback. Some valued contributors have fallen away over the years, so don't leave if you can help!

LE TIRET D'EDGAR POE.

From Edgar Allan Poe's Marginalia (Part XI, Graham's Magazine, February 1848; the reader should be warned that he is using, and punning on, the now obsolete point 'punctuation mark'):

That punctuation is important all agree; but how few comprehend the extent of its importance! The writer who neglects punctuation, or mis-punctuates, is liable to be misunderstood — this, according to the popular idea, is the sum of the evils arising from heedlessness or ignorance. It does not seem to be known that, even where the sense is perfectly clear, a sentence may be deprived of half its force — its spirit — its point — by improper punctuations. For the want of merely a comma, it often occurs that an axiom appears a paradox, or that a sarcasm is converted into a sermonoid.

There is no treatise on the topic — and there is no topic on which a treatise is more needed. There seems to exist a vulgar notion that the subject is one of pure conventionality, and cannot be brought within the limits of intelligible and consistent rule. And yet, if fairly looked in the face, the whole matter is so plain that its rationale may be read as we run. If not anticipated, I shall, hereafter, make an attempt at a magazine paper on "The Philosophy of Point."

In the meantime let me say a word or two of the dash. Every writer for the press, who has any sense of the accurate, must have been frequently mortified and vexed at the distortion of his sentences by the printer's now general substitution of a semicolon, or comma, for the dash of the MS. The total or nearly total disuse of the latter point, has been brought about by the revulsion consequent upon its excessive employment about twenty years ago. The Byronic poets were all dash. John Neal, in his earlier novels, exaggerated its use into the grossest abuse — although his very error arose from the philosophical and self-dependent spirit which has always distinguished him, and which will even yet lead him, if I am not greatly mistaken in the man, to do something for the literature of the country which the country "will not willingly," and cannot possibly, "let die."

Without entering now into the why, let me observe that the printer may always ascertain when the dash of the MS. is properly and when improperly employed, by bearing in mind that this point represents a second thought — an emendation. In using it just above I have exemplified its use. The words "an emendation" are, speaking with reference to grammatical construction, put in apposition with the words "a second thought." Having written these latter words, I reflected whether it would not be possible to render their meaning more distinct by certain other words. Now, instead of erasing the phrase "a second thought," which is of some use — which partially conveys the idea intended — which advances me a step toward my full purpose — I suffer it to remain, and merely put a dash between it and the phrase "an emendation." The dash gives the reader a choice between two, or among three or more expressions, one of which may be more forcible than another, but all of which help out the idea. It stands, in general, for these words — "or, to make my meaning more distinct." This force it has — and this force no other point can have; since all other points have well-understood uses quite different from this. Therefore, the dash cannot be dispensed with.

It has its phases — its variation of the force described; but the one principle — that of second thought or emendation — will be found at the bottom of all.

(Via The Daily Growler.)

A few points: Presumably he pronounced rationale the old-fashioned four-syllable way (rash-ə-NAIL-ee), reflecting its status as the neuter form of the Latin adjective rationalis; this is the pronunciation given in the first edition of the OED, and Fowler, writing in the early 1920s, still gives it as preferable, saying "confusion with such French words as morale & locale (there is no French rationale) leads to its being sometimes mispronounced." (I love that "sometimes"! Surely by then he was constantly assaulted by the vile new pronunciation, which of course all the defenders of proper English now accept without cavil.)

Also, note the ital quote in "or, to make my meaning more distinct"; a French equivalent was just remarked on in this post.

Finally, I'm curious about the quotation he's alluding to in "which the country 'will not willingly,' and cannot possibly, 'let die.'" If you google "will not willingly let die," you get a whole bunch of hits referring to the meteorologist Cleveland Abbe's statement, in an 1869 letter to his father discussing his creation of the scientific weather forecast, "I have started that which the country will not willingly let die" (or, in some accounts, "We have begun work that the country will not willingly let die"). The problem is that Poe's piece appeared in early 1848, when Abbe was nine years old. Poe must be referring to some earlier piece of rhetoric; does anyone have any idea what it might be?

Oh, and my title is a pun on Mallarmé's sonnet "Le tombeau d'Edgar Poe" (with its famous line "Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu"); tiret is the French word for 'dash' (the punctuation mark).

FRENCH TOBACCO BARS.

An interesting Olivier Razemon piece (in French) in Le Monde solves the mystery of bar-tabacs with semi-exotic names like Maryland, Celtic, and Brazza:

For Jean-Louis Vaxelaire, author of a number of writings on proper names, the only plausible explanation was "the link with the sea, as for Jean-Bart or Maryland. Such names are probably linked with the business of the tobacco store and the café."

The answer was provided by Jean Biron [who was in the industry]: "It has to do with the tobacco brands formerly marketed by SEITA [the former French state tobacco monopoly]," he explains. During the '50s and '60s, the monopoly offered retailers a substantial incentive to choose for their sign the name of a brand of cigarettes or cigars.

Among the most popular products at the time were Gauloises and Gitanes with dark Maryland tobacco, light Balto, and Week-End cigarettes "with English flavor"... The monopoly's tobaccos inspired hundreds of bars called Royale, Marigny, Chiquito, and Diplomate as well, the last two designating brands of cigars.

(The French is below the cut. Incidentally, does anybody know the rationale for italicizing quotes? It seems superfluous.) I love getting a precise answer to this kind of odd question. Thanks, Paul!

Pour l'universitaire Jean-Louis Vaxelaire, auteur de plusieurs écrits sur les noms propres, la seule explication vraisemblable repose sur "le lien avec la marine, comme pour Jean-Bart ou Maryland. Ces noms sont probablement liés au commerce du tabac et du café".

La réponse est fournie par Jean Biron, ancien président de la chambre des cafetiers à l'Union des métiers de l'industrie de l'hôtellerie (UMIH). "Il s'agit des marques des tabacs autrefois commercialisés par la Seita", explique-t-il. Dans les années 1950 à 1970, la régie, en situation de monopole, offrait aux débitants une aide substantielle pour peu qu'ils choisissent, comme enseigne, le nom d'une marque de cigarettes ou de cigares.

Parmi les produits les plus populaires figurent alors les Gauloises et Gitanes brunes Maryland, les blondes Balto ou les cigarettes Week-End "au goût anglais", créées par la Seita à l'époque du Front populaire. Les tabacs de la régie ont aussi inspiré les centaines de bars Royale, Marigny, Chiquito ou Diplomates, ces deux derniers désignant des marques de cigares.

SIMON KARLINSKY RIP.

A nice LA Times obit (by Elaine Woo) for the Berkeley Slavicist Simon Karlinsky; I have his excellent book The Bitter Air of Exile: Russian Writers in the West, 1922-1972 and should really get his classic work on Gogol. I love the picture of him with his husband Peter Carleton: they look like a wonderful couple. Thanks, Eric!