ALGERNON.

This thread quickly wandered into a discussion of the wonderful 1952 film version of The Importance of Being Earnest directed by Anthony Asquith, with Michael Redgrave, Margaret Rutherford, Dorothy Tutin, Joan Greenwood, and of course Edith Evans as the definitive Lady Bracknell. In connection with that, I would like to bring to your attention the surprising etymology of the name Algernon, as presented by the Hanks/Hodges Dictionary of First Names:

English: of Norman French origin. In Norman French it was a byname meaning 'moustached' (from grenon, gernon moustache, of Germanic origin). The Normans were as a rule clean-shaven, and this formed a suitable distinguishing nickname when it was applied to William de Percy, a companion of William the Conqueror. In the 15th century it was revived, with a sense of family tradition, as a byname or second given name for his descendant Henry Percy (1478-1527), and thereafter regularly used in that family. It was subsequently adopted into other families connected by marriage with the Percys, and eventually became common property.

Completely unconnected, but I've been stewing over this for days and have to vent my wrath in public: Harold Bloom's "review" of R. Crumb's Genesis in the latest NYRB starts off by saying "I don't like or care about Crumb" (maddeningly supercilious quote: "Staring at the women and men of Crumb's Genesis, I dimly recall someone showing me an issue of Mad magazine") and from then on talks about himself and Thomas Mann. I can't fathom why the editors of the Review didn't eat the money they'd paid him for his irrelevant maunderings and commission another review, this time from someone with at least a vague acquaintance with Crumb and his tradition. What they published is an insult to their readers and to one of the geniuses of late-20th-century comic art.

IJ, EI, Y.

Nico Muhly is an American composer (the biography section of his blog won me over by announcing "His name is pronounced [ˈni ko] [ˈmju: li]") currently resident in the Netherlands, whose language he is learning, and this post describes his response to it ("what I get is a sort of childlike pornography: hoog, sneeuwt, poesje, standplaats") and mentions the "old school diagraph" IJ/ij, adding that he asked a Dutch woman "if it was one letter or two and she couldn’t really answer. It’s fascinating." So it is; check out that link to the Wikipedia article for the gory details. Thanks for another excellent link, Martin!

THE BOOKSHELF: FOWLER CLASSIC.

I have loved H. W. Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage ever since I snagged a beat-up copy of the 1926 first edition at a library sale almost forty years ago. I was never interested in the successive revisions, first by Ernest Gowers and then (actually a rewriting) by Robert Burchfield; they diluted Fowler's dry wit and vigorously stated opinions without producing a guide I considered truly modern and usable. Now Oxford has come out with A Dictionary of Modern English Usage: The Classic First Edition, of which they were kind enough to send me a copy, and I am happy to report it includes the best of both worlds, keeping Fowler's original text unchanged while adding a superb introduction and a concluding section of notes updating some 300 entries, both by David Crystal. He begins his introduction with a brief description of the origin of the work, then plunges into an analysis of "the climate of the time":

The growth of comparative philology in the early nineteenth century had led to an explosion of interest in the history of language and languages, and one of the consequences was the increased study of English and its regional varieties... It was also a great age of individualists. In 1873 Isaac Pitman founded his Phonetic Institute in Bath, advocating the importance of shorthand and spelling reform... The focus on everyday speech in all its bewildering diversity was in sharp contrast to the educational ethos of the period, with its concentration on written texts... Fowler was thus writing at a time when the prescriptive approach to language was beginning to lose its pedagogical dominance and yet was attracting fresh levels of support from the literary elite. Revising his Dictionary for final publication in the early 1920s, he plainly felt the tension between the traditional focus on a small set of words, pronunciations, and grammatical usages, as indicators of 'correct' linguistic behaviour, and the diverse and changing realities of the way educated people actually used language in their everyday lives. Many of his entries comment upon it, and, as we shall see, he was not entirely sure how to deal with it.

Crystal says that Fowler is often taken as "the apotheosis of the prescriptive approach," but points out that "this is a considerable oversimplification. He turns out to be far more sophisticated in his analysis of language than most people realize. Several of his entries display a concern for descriptive accuracy which would do any modern linguist proud." In the section on pronunciation, for instance, he says "we deserve not praise but censure if we decline to accept the popular pronunciation of popular words." And, as Crystal writes, "he defends the spelling of halyard 'not on etymological grounds, but as established by usage', adding the wry comment, 'tilting against established perversions . . . is vanity in more than one sense'." But:

The problem in reading Fowler is that one never knows which way he is going to vote. Is he going to allow a usage because it is widespread, or is he going to condemn it for the same reason? ... The impression the entries give is that Fowler considers to be idiomatic what he himself uses. Usages he does not like are given such labels as 'ugly' (e.g. at historicity) or even 'evil' (e.g. at respectively).

He continues with a good deal of acute analysis of Fowler's choices, prejudices, and insights, presenting some striking examples of contradictions: Fowler sensibly rejects letting etymology define meaning, then turns around and expresses "strong support for the maintenance of earlier meanings of a word, such as at aggravate, transpire, and meticulous (a 'wicked word')." The introduction ends with a brief summing up of "the status of Fowler." Crystal has written the best discussion of Fowler that I have seen or, really, can imagine.

His end notes are very useful, providing pointers to how things have changed since Fowler's day and, in some cases, when he went astray:

rapport 'will not be missed in English'
    This is an example where Fowler's sense of usefulness let him down. Far from the word being allowed to disappear, it increased in usefulness. Most of the OED citations are from the twentieth century.

In short, this is not the book to get if you simply want a reliable style guide for current use—that would be Merriam-Webster's Concise Dictionary of English Usage—but if you want to explore the ideas of one of the most interesting thinkers about English style in the early twentieth century, guided by a reliable modern linguist, this would be an excellent acquisition.

I have to point out that Crystal himself gets one thing wrong in his introduction: when he says Fowler indulges in the emphatic use of literally that he elsewhere condemns in the negotiate entry, where he writes that a usage "stamps a writer as literarily [sic] a barbarian," his sic is needless and his point nugatory, because Fowler is not using literally at all. Fowler would never have said that the use of negotiate in the disfavored sense "stamps a writer as literally a barbarian"; he wrote "literarily" and he meant "literarily": such usage stamps a writer as a barbarian with regard to literary style.

THE HISTORY OF HELLO.

A pleasantly discursive Cardus post by Nate Barksdale examines the history of "hello" as a telephone greeting:

Hello streamed into the gap created by an unprecedented social scenario, gaining popularity and, little by little, respectability. By the 1920s, Emily Post had given up on banning hello from her version of proper speech and simply tried to tame its former brashness: "On very informal occasions, it is the present fashion to greet an intimate friend with 'Hello!' This seemingly vulgar salutation is made acceptable by the tone in which it is said. To shout 'Hullow!' is vulgar, but 'Hello, Mary' or 'How 'do John,' each spoken in an ordinary tone of voice, sound much the same. But remember that the 'Hello' is spoken, not called out, and never used except between intimate friends who call each other by the first name."

... The fact that the message did not depend on the word itself was probably as key a factor as the device's American pedigree in the internationalization of the telephone hello. This was especially [true] for languages that have an active distinction between the formal and informal you. In Bulgarian, say, the formal greeting is zdravejte, while the informal is a simple zdravej. The phone rings in Sofia: what do you do? Is the caller a friend or a stranger, an official, a salesman, a wrong number? Will it be zdravej or zdravejte? I know, alo!

Nate's post was sparked off by his happening on Omniglot's Hello in many languages, a page well worth visiting in its own right. Thanks for the link, Martin!

COMMONER, CLEVERER, ET AL.

Arnold Zwicky at the Log has a post about "inflectional (commoner) vs. periphrastic (more common) comparatives and superlatives," a topic on which there is a huge literature; it was sparked off by a correspondent who asked whether commoner shouldn't be more common (adding, winningly, "I ask, fully expecting to be proven incorrect"), and Zwicky quite properly chastises "belief in One Right Way, in this case the assumption that an adjective or adverb takes inflection or periphrasis, but not both as alternatives. If you also judge X to be not what you would say, then it must be wrong and the periphrastic variant must be right." He goes on to provide an astonishing anecdote:

Back in August 2005, Jon Lighter reported on ADS-L about Fox News anchor E. D. Hill, who maintained vehemently, on camera, that cleverer was not a word. Later she stated on air that a colleague had found it in a dictionary, so it was after all a word. But then (as Lighter wrote),

… in a surprising twist that left linguists in the viewing audience reeling, minutes before the show ended, Hill laughed as she said, "We've received an email from a viewer [name unintelligible] who has a doctorate, and she writes as follows : " 'Cleverer' is not a word. It is not a verb and cannot be declined or inflected.' " Hill concluded, "So I was right all along ! It's not a word ! "

As Zwicky says, "It is to weep."

And to my American readers: Happy Thanksgiving! We're eating at my stepson's house this afternoon, which means my wife doesn't have to do a lot of cooking and the cats can doze in peace.

THE LOUSY LINGUIST.

Chris, who writes the blog The Lousy Linguist ("Notes on linguistics and cognition"), describes himself as "a rogue linguist who has worked in academia, government consulting, NLP, and the branding and marketing industry. I used to be a graduate student in linguistics specializing in the syntax-semantics interface and verb classes (can you say 'Ay-Bee-Dee' boys and girls?)." Why, yes I can, being one myself (ABD stands for "All But Dissertation"), and I'm pleased to discover this lively blog via Language Log, which links to Chris's latest post, in which he introduces the excellent phrase the Full Liberman "to refer to Mark Liberman's excellent manner of debunking bad journalism (see here and here for examples)."

FILLERS AROUND THE WORLD.

In this recent thread, Grumbly Stu started grumbling about sloppy public speaking, one element of which (though not the one he was focusing on) was the plethora of filler words like "uh" and "er," and michael farris made a very astute observation: "One of the things I tell students (learning English as a second language) is: 'Don't try to do things in a foreign language that you can't do in your own.' This includes space fillers, don't try to learn to speak without space fillers, learn the right ones and use them appropriately." So I thought "I'll bet Wikipedia has an article on fillers," and sure enough, here it is, with an interesting list of "Filler words in different languages." Some of the contributors don't seem to have grasped the difference between filler words and terms like "whatchamacallit" and "thingamajig" (I doubt Afrikaans watsenaam and Hungarian hogy is hívják are used like "uh"), but those are easy to filter out. If your professor hasn't taught you these valuable if overlooked elements of the language you're learning, now's your chance to start sprinkling them into your sentences.

LUMIERE.

I occasionally run across clippings I tucked into books years ago, and I just found one that had a quote so marvelous I had to share it with you all. A Scott Kraft piece on the Lumière brothers in the Los Angeles Times of Dec. 24, 1995 (on the occasion of the centennial of their first public exhibition of films to a paying audience) included this sentence:

The Lumière brothers have a special place in the hearts of the French, who now use the word lumière to mean "light."

No, this is not The Onion, and as far as can be told from context he was being entirely serious. (In case you were wondering, lumière is from Latin lūminaria, originally 'torches,' derived from lūmen, -inis 'light'; in northern Gaul, lūminaria ousted the classical word lūx, which is retained in other Romance languages.)

MICASE.

The Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English is the product of a research project begun in 1997 to answer these questions:
· What are the characteristics of contemporary academic speech—its grammar, its vocabulary, its functions and purposes, its fluencies and dysfluencies?
· Are these characteristics different for different academic disciplines and for different classes of speakers?
The History page says:

The goal of the first phase of the project was to record and transcribe close to 200 hours (approximately 1.8 million words) of academic speech from across the university. In June 2001, we finished the recording goal, with over 190 total hours recorded. In April 2002, we completed transcribing and proofreading all the transcripts... This search engine is notable for the large number of speaker and speech-event categories that can be selected. The search engine has increased in popularity each year since its launch, approaching as many as 140,000 hits in 2006.

The ELI committed resources to MICASE for a series of interlocking reasons. First, there was originally no database of this kind available. Second, we strongly suspected that once we examined the corpus for recurrent grammatical and phraseological patterns, we would find many divergences from those described in current grammar and vocabulary books, which have largely relied on introspection or on features of written texts. MICASE will thus provide authentic material in sufficient quantity to redefine our concepts of academic speech. Third, we eventually hope to be able to track generalized changes in speech patterns as people gain experience of university culture. (Although we know quite a lot about how academic writing evolves as students progress, our current perceptions of speech changes within academic cultures are largely anecdotal.) Fourth, with all this new information, we—and others elsewhere—will be in a better position to develop more appropriate ESL and English for Academic Purpose teaching and testing materials, and to evaluate how best to incorporate corpus work into EAP programs.

There's discussion, and some more specific links, at the MetaFilter post from which I took these links.

MUSEUM OF CHARACTERS.

Anyang, one of the ancient capitals of China, is now home to the National Museum of Chinese Written Language, as reported in a story by Xing Daiqi:

According to Xinhua, the museum, with an initial investment of 400 million yuan ($58 million), covers an area of 54,000 square meters. A combination of the old and new, the building has drawn inspiration from palaces of the Shang Dynasty (C. 1600-1100BC) and post-modern architecture. The five-story facility has a striking embossed golden roof and grand red columns.[...]

Divided into eight exhibition halls, the museum illustrates the history and evolution of Chinese characters through different dynasties and various ethnic groups in China.

Now, that's my kind of museum. Thanks for the link, Bathrobe!

BROTHER-IN-LAW.

Is the husband of your wife's sister your brother-in-law?

I would have said "no" and been pretty sure I was reflecting standard usage, but it turns out I would have been wrong. Bill Poser at the Log has a post about this, sparked by "a news item in which men in this situation (one of whom is accused of trying to hire an assassin to kill the other) were described as brothers-in-law"; he was surprised to see it, because to him "there is no named relationship" between such men. I agreed with him, but he and I are in a distinct minority; most of the (so far) 74 comments say things like (to take the first two) "I use brother-in-law in that context, as does my wife" and "It never occurred to me not to use 'brother-in-law' to refer to my wife's sister's husband." I thought perhaps it was a generational thing, since Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary has the definition "broadly : the husband of one's spouse's sister," whereas the entry in the newest (eleventh) edition drops the "broadly" and just includes "the husband of one's spouse's sister" as one of the basic senses, but I asked my wife and she has no problem with the broad sense. Furthermore, in the Log thread, Jerry Friedman (November 20, 2009 @ 3:14 am) said, "This has come up on alt.usage.english a few times, and the results are much like those here—everything from people who've never heard the extended sense to people who thought everyone used it. I don't recall any regional pattern ever showing up."

So I thought I'd ask you all the question I began with; you might add, for scientific purposes, where you're from (or, if different, what dialect you speak), and (if, of course, you feel like it) your approximate age.

Incidentally, this problem does not arise in Russian, where there is a separate word свояк [svoyák] meaning 'wife's sister's husband.' And Sravana (November 20, 2009 @ 12:18 am) wrote in the Log thread, "In Indian English, Edward and Michael are co-brothers," a term that (like prepone) might usefully be adopted by the standard language.

GABO AND THE DICTIONARY.

Someone at MetaFilter linked to "In the Shadow of the Patriarch," a long, long New Republic article by Enrique Krauze on "Gabriel García Márquez and the demons of his time." I'll confess up front that I've only read the first of its nine pages, and furthermore that I may very well not get any farther; I've enjoyed most of the García Márquez I've read, but I've already read more than I really need about his life, times, and politics. However, the article begins with a reflection on his relations with the dictionary, which seemed like obvious LH material:

Many years later, in the course of writing his memoirs, Gabriel García Márquez was to remember that distant afternoon in Aracataca, in Colombia, when his grandfather set a dictionary in his lap and said, "Not only does this book know everything, it’s the only one that’s never wrong." The boy asked, "How many words are in it?" "All of them," his grandfather replied.

Anywhere in the world, if a grandfather presents his grandson with a dictionary, he is giving him a great instrument of knowledge; but Colombia was not just anywhere. It was a republic of grammarians. During the youth of García Márquez’s grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Márquez Mejía, who was born in 1864 and died in 1936, a number of presidents and government ministers—almost all of them lawyers from the conservative camp—published dictionaries, language textbooks, and treatises (in prose and verse) on orthology, orthography, philology, lexicography, meter, prosody, and Castilian grammar. Malcolm Deas, a scholar of Colombian history who has studied this singular phenomenon, claims that the obsession with language that was expressed by the cultivation of these sciences—their practitioners, Deas notes, insisted on calling them "sciences"—had its origin in the urge for continuity with the cultural heritage of Spain. By claiming "Spain’s eternal presence in the language," Colombians sought to possess its traditions, its history, its classic authors, its Latin roots. This appropriation, preceded by the foundation in 1871 of the Colombian Academy of Language, the first offshoot in America of the Royal Spanish Academy, was one of the keys to the long period of conservative hegemony—it lasted from 1886 to 1930—in Colombian political history.

García Márquez’s grandfather is a prominent figure in the writer’s early novels, and he was no stranger to this politico-grammatical history. Colonel Nicolás Márquez Mejía fought in the ranks of the legendary Liberal general Rafael Uribe Uribe (1859–1914), one of the few caudillos in Colombian history. His story in turn inspired the character of Colonel Aureliano Buendía in One Hundred Years of Solitude. A tireless and hapless combatant in three civil wars, Uribe Uribe was also a diligent grammarian and a soldier in the civic battles between conservatives and liberals. During one of his stays in prison he translated Herbert Spencer, and in 1887 he wrote the Diccionario abreviado de galicismos, provincialismos y correcciones de lenguaje, or Abbreviated Dictionary of Gallicisms, Provincialisms, and Proper Usage, which seems to have been a moderate success.

In 1896 the general stood alone in Parliament against sixty conservative senators. Finally the crushing majority left him no choice but—in his own words—to "give voice to the cannons." Uribe Uribe was the protagonist of the bloody Thousand Days War in 1899–1902, which ended with the signing of the Peace of Neerlandia. The signing was witnessed by Colonel Márquez, who, years later, would receive his former general at the family home in Aracataca, near the scene of the events. Uribe Uribe was assassinated in 1914. Two decades later, his lieutenant presented his eldest grandson not with a sword or a pistol, but with a dictionary. This tome that anywhere else would be an instrument of knowledge was, in Colombia, an instrument of power.

VOLTA.

Volta: A Multilingual Anthology "contains seventy-five poems in seventy-five languages. Seventy-four of these poems are translations of one poem, the seventy-fifth." You can read the English poem (the original) at wood s lot for November 18, 2009, where I got the link; it and all the translations (in, among many others, Maltese, Mongolian, Nepali, Nigerian Pidgin, North Eastern English, and Norwegian) are available in pdf form via the first link. Here's an etymological passage from the long introduction by the poem's author, Richard Berengarten:

The title ‘Volta’ itself comes from Modern Greek. The noun βόλτα is a noun meaning ‘turn’ and also ‘walk’, ‘stroll’. The Greek expression πάμε βόλτα [pame volta] means literally *let’s go a turn,⁶ i.e. ‘let’s take a turn,’ ‘let’s go for a walk/ stroll,’ ‘let’s stretch our legs.’ The word βόλτα is also used to mean, more precisely, ‘evening promenade’, βραδινή βόλτα [vrathini volta]. The custom of the evening promenade is expressed in Italian by the word passeggiata and in Serbian, Czech and Slovak by the common word korzo. During certain hours of the early evening, around dusk, everyone in the town who might feel like going for a walk takes a saunter or stroll up and down the main street. The custom used to exist in widely different cultures, including for example, in Portugal. A version of it exists among Jewish communities on the Sabbath.⁷

The idea of ‘turning’ is embedded in the Modern Greek word and usage: βόλτα is a word of Latin origin (volgere [actually volvere—LH], to turn). So a volta in this sense is a ‘turn’, up and down and back again, in the pleasurable presence of an indeterminate number of other people who, for whatever reasons of their own, happen to be engaged in the same activity. The word volta also exists in Catalan, Galician and Portuguese, and is cognate with Spanish vuelta.⁸ In all these Romance languages the word has the primary idea of ‘turn’, ‘return’, and more or less the same idiomatic meaning of ‘taking a turn’ as in Greek.

Since the words passeggiata and korzo derive from Latin too, I can’t help wondering if the custom of walking up and down for pleasurable relaxation started with the ancient Romans, or whether it was assimilated into Latin from practice among various other cultures. My guess is that it was pre-Roman, possibly even Neolithic, and widespread in the warm climates around the Mediterranean. It certainly has a Mediterranean ‘feel’ to it.

So the setting and take-off point for the poem ‘Volta’ is an evening walk, a promenade, in a Greek seaside town, as the sun is setting on the horizon. That is: a self-turning, as day is turning into night and as light is evening itself out into darkness.

6. The asterisk before the expression denotes that it is not one that is actually used – in this case, in English.

7. The custom is known as the ‘Sabbath Stroll’.

8. Vuelta was the name of the literary magazine edited by Octavio Paz from 1975 until his death in 1998. I am indebted to Anthony Rudolf for reminding me of this.

I well remember those evening strolls from my visit to Greece. At the end, Berengarten adds:

As the time of writing this (October 28, 2009), I intend to go on gathering translations of ‘Volta’ into more languages. I hope that a future expanded version of this anthology will be published at a later date, possibly as a book. I would especially like to include more translations from African languages, Asian languages including the Indian subcontinent, languages indigenous to Australasia and North and South America, languages of transhumant and nomadic cultures, languages of small pockets, valleys and islands of speakers, and, above all, languages that are threatened with extinction.

Readers who would like to be involved in further developing, helping and advising in any way and with any aspects of this multilingual project are invited to send an email to berengarten@cantab.net.

DELL HYMES, RIP.

I just read in Sally Thomason's post at Language Log that Dell Hymes died in his sleep last Friday. I do not have a particular interest in his area of specialization, the languages of the Pacific Northwest, but his work in linguistic anthropology combined brilliance in both elements of that term with a remarkable sensitivity to literary and artistic qualities in oral texts, and I am extremely fond of his book "In Vain I Tried to Tell You": Essays in Native American Ethnopoetics. A brief passage from its opening essay, "Some North Pacific Coast Poems: A Problem in Anthropological Philology," will give an idea of what he thought needed to be corrected in his chosen field:

On the one hand, some of those who concern themselves with the materials of verbal art assert or assume the irrelevance of linguistic control and analysis to their interpretive interest. Contrary to the experience and standards of scholarship in other fields, the style, content, structure, and functioning of texts seem to be declared "translated" (in the theological sense of the metaphor as well as the linguistic) bodily from their original verbal integument, and available for interpretation without it. Original texts are even declared in a scholarly review in the pages of the American Anthropologist to be of concern only to linguists — as if only linguists would mourn the loss of the original texts of Homer or the Bible! On the other hand, those who undertake linguistic description too often pursue it without effective concern for other students of the American Indian, or such fields as comparative poetics, to which American Indian studies should contribute.

The next essay, winningly titled "How to Talk Like a Bear in Takelma" (first page available here, or the whole thing if you have JSTOR access) is a gentle and meticulous takedown of a hasty statement by Edward Sapir that had more influence than it deserved; it ends "...this study shows in a small way that even genius and native speaker intuition together cannot always substitute for attention to the details of actual texts." My condolences to his wife Virginia, and may his influence continue to spread.

TY AND VY, THEN AND NOW.

Anatoly makes a very interesting point about change in Russian usage since the nineteenth century (Russian below the cut):

On of the things that strikes me in Anna Karenina (which I'm rereading) is how ty [intimate 'you'] and vy [polite 'you'] work in comparison to now. Naturally, there's a different sense of distance, and naturally, there's intimacy[1], but what sticks in my memory is something else—that you can return from ty to vy, as Dolly and Oblonsky do when they quarrel. It's as if the passage from vy to ty is like a peg pressed on a stretched-out piece of rubber; all you have to do is let go of it, and immediately you return to the realm of vy. But in the Russian that is native to me, that doesn't happen; once you pass over to the intimate ty with someone, you never return, whatever happens: quarrel, divorce, burning hatred, it doesn't matter.

[1]"Forgive my having come, but I could not pass the day without seeing you [using vy forms]," he continued in French, as he always did, avoiding the vy that was impossibly cold between them and the ty that was dangerous in Russian.

This is the kind of insight you can only get from a native speaker (although I hasten to add that some of his commenters disagree that you can't go back to vy again).

Одна из вещей, которые поражают в "Анне Карениной" (перечитываю) - то, как работают ты и вы по сравнению с сейчас. Понятно, есть другое ощущение дистанции, и понятно, есть интимность [1]; но мне особенно запоминается другое - то, что от "ты" можно вернуться к "вы", как Долли с Облонским во время ссоры. Словно переход от "вы" к "ты" - как колышек на натянутой резинке: стоит выпустить его из рук, и тут же вернется в область "вы". А в том русском языке, который мне родной, так не бывает: перейдя с кем-то на интимное ты, уже на вы никогда не вернешься, что бы там ни случилось, ссора, развод, жгучая ненависть, неважно.

[1] "Простите меня, что я приехал, но я не мог провести дня, не видав вас, - продолжал он по-французски, как он всегда говорил, избегая невозможно-холодного между ними вы и опасного ты по-русски".

QUADRIVIAL QUANDARY.

Rudi Seitz is a software engineer by profession but a logophile at heart, and he's started a website, Quadrivial Quandary, for fellow word aficionados: "Each day we present four words from our favorite dictionary sites. Your challenge is to use them all in a sentence that illustrates their meanings." On his Origins page, he expands:

Quandary is a site for logophiles but it is contraindicated for the prim variety. What characterizes this site is exuberance, the joy of using esoteric and sometimes questionable words...

The challenge is intensified by our occasional inclusion of slang words alongside archaic Latinate constructions. How to use words that would never be uttered by the same speaker? ... I like to think of each Quandary as rare mix of flammable substances, combusting in the minds of us who behold it, the shared memory connecting us.

If it sounds like your kind of thing, check it out.

THE HAT GENE.

Mark Liberman has a Log post taking the hapless NY Times science writer Nicholas Wade out behind the woodshed for a well-deserved thrashing in regard to his credulous reporting of the "language gene" (a real thing even if the popular name is misleading) and the "god gene" (not a real thing); I was pushed over the edge into blogging it by his conclusion:

The beauty part is the universality of this argument. My current favorite application leads us to postulate the Hat Gene. [...] Think of the manifold advantages of head-coverings to paleolithic hunter-gatherers, and the near-universality of head coverings among human groups at all subsequent stages of development — the Hat Gene hypothesis is a winner all around.

It sure is, and now, when anyone asks me why I always wear headgear when I'm outside, I can just say "It's genetic."

VERA KOKOSHKINA.

Because of my diverse set of interests, plus my dogged insistence on looking up references to even the most minor names I run across in a text, I sometimes happen on striking coincidences that bring together utterly different realms, and I am about to recount one such happenstance. (A warning for those who dislike literary gossip: this post involves literary gossip.)

I'm reading an extremely interesting book, Time of Troubles: The Diary of Iurii Vladimirovich Got'e: Moscow, July 8, 1917 to July 23, 1922 . Very few diaries exist from the period of the Russian Revolution and Civil War (those foolish enough to set down their views of current events during that time of violence and starvation tended to sensibly destroy them once the all-encompassing vigilance of the Bolshevik rulers became apparent), and this one survived only because an American, Frank Golder, was in Russia in 1922 and persuaded Got'e to let him smuggle it out of the country (Got'e [Готье], by the way, is a Russianized form of Gautier—his great-grandfather, "Jean Dufayet dit Gautier," was a French immigrant during the reign of Catherine the Great, and the family had owned the main French bookstore in Moscow for over a century). It's fascinating to see this grumpy forty-something historian reacting to events as they happen; on Oct. 13, 1917, he writes "Moscow is full of rumors about a citywide strike and bolshevik manifestations—either on the 15th or the 20th. Is this the frightened fantasy of the terrorized townsman or is something really being prepared?" It turned out, of course, that the latter was the case, and within a couple of weeks he is writing about gunfire within earshot of his apartment at No. 4 Bol'shoi Znamenskii pereulok (a few blocks west of the Kremlin). On November 6 he mentions a visit by "V. E. Kokoshkina," and a footnote tells us that she was married to Vladimir Kokoshkin, the brother of Fedor Fedorovich Kokoshkin, a name well known to students of the Russian Revolution—he and his fellow Kadet and member of the Provisional Government Andrei Shingarev were murdered in their hospital beds in January 1918 by Bolsheviks, one of the first clear signs of the brutality that was about to descend on Russia.

I didn't think there would be much if anything available on Fedor's unknown brother, but I googled anyway, and was rewarded with this Russian page containing basic information on both him (1874 - 1926, Brussels) and his wife, Vera Egnatevna (1879 - 1968, France). Armed with this, I googled some more and got a hit on Vera's name from Brian Boyd's Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years, a book I own. What was she doing in a Nabokov biography? It turns out that twenty years after her visit to Got'e, she was living in Paris with her daughter Irina Guadanini. Now, Irina Guadanini is a name well known to Nabokov aficionados; she was his last serious lover, for whom he nearly left his devoted wife Véra in 1937. Brian Boyd describes their meeting thus:

The reading [in Paris, on January 24, 1937] was not just a literary event. In the crowd were a woman called Vera Kokoshkin and her thirty-one-year-old daughter, Irina Guadanini. Knowing that Irina was strongly attracted to Sirin, her mother had approached him after his February 1936 reading in Paris, complimented him assiduously, and invited him back for tea. He had accepted and had been amused by Mme Kokoshkin's acting the procuress for her daughter. Now once again she took matters in hand, and invited Nabokov for dinner with [Ilya] Fondaminsky and [Vladimir] Zenzinov [editors of the emigré journal Sovremennye zapiski, where Nabokov/Sirin's great Russian works appeared].

Her plans worked. Irina was an attractive blond with the strikingly regular features of classical statuary, a cultured woman, observant, playfully derisive, with a fine memory for verse. She was soon frequenting cafes and cinemas with Nabokov. By February an affair was under way.

By summer's end, Nabokov (whose wife had found out about the affair) was determined to break it off, but Irina came down to Cannes to try to change his mind: "Though Nabokov had asked her not to come, her mother had persuaded her to try." He told her he still loved her but would not leave his wife; it was the last time they met. (You can read more gossip about this and other aspects of Nabokov's love life here.)

Two snapshots from what must have been an interesting life; I wonder if Vera ever wrote her memoirs?

(Incidentally, googling Irina's name in Russian gets two different patronymics, Fedorovna and Yurevna, neither of which fits with Vladimir Kokoshkin; was she the daughter of a previous husband of Vera's? Still more mysteries to be solved...)

THE TATARMAN OF VAMBERY.

Don't miss the Poemas del río Wang post about one of those astonishing 19th-century wanderers long forgotten in the rush to delineate the world and its history in nationalist terms, with neat little boxes in which Persians live in Persia and speak Persian, French persons live in France and speak French, etc. etc. The post is about Mollah Sadik, given name Ishak/Izsák (1836-1892), brought to Hungary by the orientalist Ármin Vámbéry:

Izsák remained in Hungary and within a short time he perfectly mastered Hungarian. He was Vámbéry’s servant, librarian of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and even the "Tatar teacher" of Vámbéry’s friends József Budenz and Áron Szilády. For at that time he was the only one in Europe to speak Turkic languages, including his Uzbek mother tongue as well as Chagatay, the literary language of Central Asian Turks, and the Turkic scholars of Hungary were enthusiastic to draw on this never-hoped-for source.

Contemporary science of languages still professed the Turkic origin of Hungarian language. One had to wait some twenty years until the outbreak of the so-called "Ugrian-Turkic war", the passionate scholarly debate in which Vámbéry was opposed by his former friend Budenz, and which made the theory of the exclusive Finno-Ugrian origin official for a century. Only recent scholarship has rehabilitated Vámbéry to a certain extent by saying that the Finno-Ugrian substratum of Hungarian language was enriched during the centuries of nomadic life in the steppe by such a great amount of Turkic elements both in its vocabulary and its grammar that it brought fundamental changes to the language.

"Vámbéry’s Tatarman was a great sensation", writes Iván Sándor Kovács. "As if the young Veinemöinen came to visit Professor Elias Lönrot and his colleagues while compiling the Kalevala, or as if one of Ulysses’ sailors held a presentation of knotting at the Dutch Naval Academy."

There's too much in the post to try and summarize; go and enjoy. (And while you're there, check out the latest post on the many names of Venice and the putative etymology of the Hungarian town of Velence, where the Tatarman is buried.)

HUNGARIANS EVERYWHERE YOU LOOK.

István Deák has a NYRB review of a couple of books about Hungarian exiles in the U.S. that starts with a few jokes ("Another story was about a meeting of top US atomic scientists at which, when Enrico Fermi has stepped out of the room, the others sigh with relief: 'Now, at last, we can speak Hungarian'") and goes on to an astonishing list of people:

Marton's nine [Hungarian] Jews include four nuclear scientists, two photographers, two film directors, and a writer. What both Marton and Frank demonstrate is that such Hungarians as the scientists Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, John von Neumann, and Edward Teller, the biochemist and sociologist Michael Polanyi, the photographer Robert Capa, the writer Arthur Koestler, and others have together altered the ways we think, act, and work. And unlike many of their predecessors, the two authors do not shy away from admitting that, with very few exceptions, the world-famous Hungarians they discuss [...] were Jews by religion, or at least converts of Jewish origin.

[...] Indeed, the ethnic and national identity of Theodore von Kármán, Karl Polanyi, Karl Mannheim, Nicholas Lord Kaldor of Newnham, Eugene Ormandy, Sir Georg Solti, Joseph Szigeti, Antal Dorati, George Szell, Fritz Reiner, Ferenc Molnár, Joe Pasternak, Sir Alexander Korda, Michael Curtiz, Brassaï, André Kertész, Marcel Breuer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and hundreds of other illustrious expatriates presented a dilemma to anti-Semitic and rightist Hungarians before and during World War II and, to a lesser extent, to Hungarian Communists after the war.

Wow. I knew some of those people were Hungarians (mainly those with obviously Hungarian names, like Solti, Szigeti, and Dorati), but many of them I would never have guessed, and when you put them all together it's a hell of an impressive list.

In a footnote, Deák mentions an interesting fact about names: "...late in the eighteenth century, the Habsburg authorities gave the Jews of Hungary German-sounding names, many were later converted to Hungarian-sounding family names, and then again, when abroad, to German-, French-, or English/American-sounding names. Thus Manó Kaminer became Mihály Kertész while still in Hungary and Michael Curtiz when in the US."

THE BOOKSHELF: HTOED.

The excellent folk at OUP sent me their latest magnum opus, the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, and I've been marveling at it for the last month. Well, to be more specific, I spent some time circling warily around it, admiring its two dark blue volumes in their classy slipcase (the whole thing weighing almost 15 pounds); after a while I opened it at random and stared in awe at the many columns of small type (not small enough to require a magnifying glass, I hasten to add); finally I started actually figuring out how to use it, looking up words in Volume II, the index, and finding them in various sections of Volume I, the thesaurus proper. Eventually I got the hang of it, and I'm here to tell you about it.

Let's say you look up squirrel in the OED and discover it entered English in the 14th century (Chaucer: "And of squyrels ful great plente"); it's from Old French esquireul, from a diminutive form of a Latin borrowing of Greek skiouros 'shadowtail.' All very well, but then it occurs to you to wonder what they called the creature before they borrowed the French word. Until now, you would have had to ask a medievalist; now you look up squirrel and are directed to 01.02.06.20.05.08 (n.), Order Rodentia/rodent, where under subentry 03, family Sciuridae/squirrel, you discover that what they used to say was aquerne, from Old English acweorna.

And what if you want to know in general what words were available in a given period? OUPblog has a cute piece by Ammon Shea called "Rewriting The Gettysburg Address" in which he chooses four words from Lincoln's speech and asks "What options would you have to replace these words with synonyms if you were using the HTOED, as opposed to if you were using an online thesaurus?" But aside from a stunt like that, any historical novelist who cares about linguistic accuracy must have struggled with this; if your novel is set in the 1820s, how can you be sure you're using vocabulary appropriate to the time and not introducing anachronisms? Now you can find out.

And you never know what you're going to find just browsing through it. Flipping through Volume II, my eye was caught by Loucheux. "What on earth is that?" I asked myself, and turned to Volume I to find out. It turned out to be under 01.02.07.07.48.08 (n.), Peoples of British Columbia/Alberta/Alaska, along with Carrier 1793-, Beaver 1891-, Slave/Slavey/Slavi 1801-, Takulli 1820-, and over a dozen other ethnonyms, ending with Snohomish 1910-. (The Loucheux were first mentioned in 1828.) And glancing around, I realized that the 01.02.07.07 section, "People," was a thorough cataloguing, by region, of every ethnic group that had occurred in English texts, from "Nomads" and "Person of mythical race" (pygmy, Cimmerian, Yahoo, etc.) through general terms for persons of specified races (under "White person" are long knife, Pakeha, whitefellow, leucoderm, and jumble, among many others), to specific groups (the only other words ever used for Basques are Baskle 1330 and Euskarian 1864-1883). And that's followed by 01.02.07.07 "Nation/nations," which starts with general terms ("National of a country," "Compatriot," etc.) and proceeds to specific nations, from "British" and "English" (Angelcynn OE to Percy 1932 [US derog.]) to "South American." And after that comes 01.02.08.01 "Food"...

I've only scratched the surface (there are more tidbits here—the word immediately has 265 synonyms!), and I'm sure I'll be discovering more and quoting from it many times in the years to come, but I hope I've given some idea of what a valuable and enjoyable work this is. Yes, it costs $400 (though Amazon has it for a mere $316.00!), so most people will probably consult it at the library, but hey, it's a lot less than the OED itself, and it did take 44 years to complete. Once again, Oxford UP has proved itself the leader in English lexicography, and it will be a long time before speakers of other languages have anything remotely similar to this arweorþlic/reverend/canonizable work of scholarship.

PHONETIC ALPHABETS WORLDWIDE.

Dan Meyers has collected and put online phonetic alphabets [more properly, as Bathrobe points out, "spelling alphabets", "radio alphabets", or "telephone alphabets"] from around the world. There are dozens of English ones (starting with good old "Able, Baker, Charlie..."), but of course what particularly interest me are the foreign ones, from Afrikaans (Andries, Boetie, Christo) to Ukrainian (Andriy, Bogdan, Vasil). For the benefit of our Norwegian correspondent AJP, here's Telephone Dictionary, Oslo (1965): Anna, Åase, Ærlig, Bernhard, Caesar, David, Edith, Fredrik, Gustav, Harald, Ivar, Johan, Karin, Ludvig, Martin, Nils, Olivia, Østen, Petter, Quintus, Rikard, Sigrid, Teodor, Ulrik, Enkelt-V, Dobbelt-V, Xerxes, Yngling, Zakarias. (Thanks for the link, Michael!)

MEXICAN SWEARING.

A NY Times story by Marc Lacey looks into the prevalence of cursing south of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo:

Mexicans, despite their reputation in Latin America for ultrapoliteness and formality, curse like sailors, a recent survey found. They use profanity when speaking with their friends, with their co-workers, with their spouses and even with their bosses and parents. On Independence Day, the thing to shout above all else is “Viva Mexico, Cabrones!” a patriotic exhortation directed at either bastards or buddies, depending on the tone employed.

Consulta Mitofsky, a Mexican polling firm, asked 1,000 Mexicans 18 and older about their use of “groserías,” as curse words are known in Spanish, and found that respondents estimated they used an average of 20 bad words a day. Those swearing the most, not surprisingly, were young people. “The generation younger than 30 sees the use of bad words as more natural and they use them not only in front of friends but, many of them say, in front of their parents or bosses,” the survey found.

Geographically, the worst offenders were in the north, near the border with the United States, and in the center of the country. Men were generally more foulmouthed than women, though not by much...

There's an over-the-top quote from Octavio Paz ("The forbidden words boil up in us, just as our emotions boil up... When they finally burst out, they do so harshly, brutally, in the form of a shout, a challenge, an offense. They are projectiles or knives. They cause wounds") and some boilerplate on the condition the country's condition is in ("there is plenty to curse about in Mexico these days"); what particularly caught my attention, though, was the fact that the Times, so prudish in English, has no problem printing bad words in Spanish. (Thanks for the link, Eric!)

FOUR-ERS AND CLIPPY BITS.

Giles Turnbull has a funny Morning News piece about "a unique quirk of language: Lego nomenclature":

Every family, it seems, has its own set of words for describing particular Lego pieces. No one uses the official names. “Dad, please could you pass me that Brick 2x2?” No. In our house, it’ll always be: “Dad, please could you pass me that four-er?”

And I’ll pass it, because I know exactly which piece he means. Lego nomenclature is essential for family Lego building. ...

Then, when another seven-year-old came round for tea after school one day, I overheard the two of them, busy in the spaceship construction yard that used to be our living room, get into a linguistic thicket.

“Can you see any clippy bits?” my son asked his friend. The friend was flummoxed. “Do you mean handy bits?” he asked, pointing.

“Yes,” replied my boy. “Clippy bits.”

Of course! This language of Lego isn’t just something our family has invented; every Lego-building family must have its own vocabulary. And the words they use (mostly invented by the children, not the adults) are likely to be different every time. But how different? And what sort of words?

So he takes a mini-survey ("So that’s how we discovered that a 'cylinder one-er' can also be known as 'Coke bottles' or a 'golden wiper'") and provides a chart of the results. It's fun, and as Geoff Pullum says in his Log post (where I found the link), "It's about the deep-seatedness of children's need to have names for all the things they deal with — and the lack of any necessity for there to be pre-existing names in the language they happen to have learned."

WAMBLY WORDS.

A Times (London) story by Jack Malvern, "Linguists all a-muckwash and fratching over lost words," begins:

Sceptics from Norfolk may blar at the idea, while Devon folk may dismiss it as zamzoden, but linguists have begun an investigation into whether regional dialect words are dead or, as they used to say in Lancashire, merely wambly.

Seven local dialect societies have each provided dictionary compilers at Collins with a list of three words that they believe to be endangered or out of use except by language enthusiasts. None has appeared in the database of written and broadcast media that compilers use to monitor the English language, but linguists are prepared to consider a word for publication in future dictionaries if there is evidence that it is in common use.

I always enjoy these lists of obscure words, even if I doubt any of them will wind up in Collins. Thanks for the link, Paul!

Addendum. BBC News has a different take on the same survey, concluding: "However the word 'boyo', meaning friend, is out of fashion. It was submitted by one single person in all of Wales."

Oh, and there's a related editorial with an impressively sensible conclusion:

Language evolves regardless of the prescriptions of lexicographers and even The Times. The dialect for cowshed (byre, shippen...) may be fading away with mechanised mass dairies. But we are creating new occupational jargons, for curry, for computers, for games. For language is the (only) exact democracy. It is formed by all its users. Words are lost only when they cease to be used. To try to revive dead men’s words is work for resurrection men.

THE BOOKSHELF: THE F-WORD.

Oxford University Press sent me a copy of the new third edition of Jesse Sheidlower's magnum opus, The F-Word. Before I continue, I should point out that the book, and therefore this post, is chock-full of examples of the most notorious curse word in the English language. You have been warned.

As I say, this is the third edition. Some of you who have acquired one of the earlier editions may be wondering "Do I need the third?" The answer is: Yes, yes you do. If you care enough about the history and use of the word fuck to own the book, you owe it to yourself to get this edition. This is not one of those pro forma "revisions" that correct a few errors, toss in a few added items, and add a new preface; no, the text of the dictionary is twice as large as the second edition, over a hundred new words and senses have been added, and coverage is far wider. The first edition included only American uses; the second added some U.K. and Australian examples, but more as flavoring. This one aims to cover the entire English-speaking world, a project greatly aided by Sheidlower's having gone to work for Oxford UP and thus getting access to the files of the OED: "uses that are specifically British, Australian, or Irish are included in their own right, and a very large number of quotations have been added from non-American sources to illustrate all entries, not just those associated with a particular national variety. The reader will thus find vastly more British examples (including Welsh and especially Scottish in addition to English), and also quotations from Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada, South Africa, and elsewhere." A word that has circled the globe deserves no less.

The introduction is worth the price of admission all by itself. Beginning with the etymology (which continues to be unknown, and my one criticism of Sheidlower is that he starts off by spending two paragraphs debunking the silly explanation that makes it an acronym for various fanciful phrases—the debunking, while necessary, should have come later, preferably in a footnote, because people's psychology is such that they are likely to remember the prominently displayed fake etymology and forget the debunking), he goes on to discuss the word's taboo status, its earliest uses in print and movies, its appearance in dictionaries (first in John Florio's Worlde of Words, a 1598 Italian-English dictionary, and first as a main entry in Stephen Skinner's 1671 Etymologicon Linguae Anglicanae), and the general phenomenon of taboo avoidance (citing David L. Gold's comparison to Marcus Terentius Varro's dicite labdeae 'tell him/them to lambda,' lambda being the first letter of laecasin—a Latin equivalent of 'tell [someone] to go to hell' was laecasin dicere, literally 'tell [someone] to suck'); in this last section, he discusses the trick of spelling out F-U-C-K as "if you see Kay" (used by Joyce in Ulysses!) or, in Britney Spears' 2009 version, "If U Seek Amy" (not, as Sheidlower has it, "If You Seek Amy").

But the meat of the book, of course, is in the collection of entries with their wealth of citations. From absofuckinglutely (adverb, absolutely... 1921 Notes & Queries (Nov 19) 415 [refers to WWI]: The soldier’s actual speech…was absolutely impregnated with one word which [...] the fastidious frown at as "filthy"…. Words were split up to admit it: "absolutely" became "abso – lutely") to zipless fuck (noun, an act of intercourse without an emotional connection... 1971 E. Jong Fear of Flying 11: My fantasy of the zipless fuck… Zipless because when you came together zippers fell away like petals), there are 270 pages of exhaustive documentation of every well-attested expression using the f-word, including 35 pages of the star word itself, as noun, adjective, verb, and interjection (in this last section alone we get citations from Ian Fleming, Robert Stone, Peter Benchley, Elmore Leonard, Michael Crichton, Norman Mailer, Armistead Maupin, and Stephen King, inter alios). I say "well-attested" because it doesn't even attempt to include all existing uses:

Even a quick look at, say, www.urbandictionary.com will show that there are very many words or phrases with fuck that are not included in this dictionary. Opening the book up to every word or compound for which examples can be found on the Internet would make it very much longer than it is now, with uncertain benefits. The editor has thus done his best to try to determine which of these is most likely to be in truly broad circulation... The editor encourages readers to write in with suggestions for words that are omitted, especially if there is solid evidence for their genuine use, for possible inclusion in future editions.

A few random things I enjoyed: the first use of the verb fubar (derived from the adjective, an acronym for "fucked up beyond all recognition") is 1946 "J. MacDougal" in Astounding Science Fiction (Oct.) 55/1: "Well, there are a lot of minor ones, which must have fubared things in all directions once Co-ordination accepted them"; it delights me almost as much as it must have delighted James Blish and Robert Lowndes (the writers hidden behind the pseudonym) that they managed to slip this past the notoriously prudish John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding. An acronym I'll have to add to my own vocabulary is DILLIGAF ("do I look like I give a fuck?"). The first cite for go fuck yourself is from an 1895 police report ("He said, 'Go on, fuck yourself, you son-of-a-bitch; I will give you a hundred dollars'; he tried to punch me, and I went out"); the last is Dick Cheney's famous 2004 use (in the perhaps unprofessionally snarky words of the Washington Post: "'Fuck yourself,' said the man who is a heartbeat from the presidency"). And there are nine citations, ranging from ca. 1950 to 2006, for the expressive hotter than a fresh-fucked fox in a forest fire (immediately followed by frak, the euphemism coined for Battlestar Galactica, also with nine citations, ranging from 1978 to 2009).

So far, I've only found one typo (on page 261, under tarfu ["things are really fucked up"], the 1944 quote from Ernie Pyle should have "mystic" instead of "mytic"), which is pretty darn good these days. This book is a gem, and it makes me proud to be a part of a civilization that could produce such a thing. Fuckin' A!

RED HERRING.

I have just run across Michael Quinion's post at World Wide Words about the phrase "red herring"; I have seen the implausible explanation that herrings were dragged across trails to confuse hounds (who would do that, and why?), and Quinion (with the help of Gerald Cohen, Robert Scott Ross, and the Oxford English Dictionary) clears the matter up. A seventeenth-century treatise by Gerland Langbaine on horsemanship "suggested a dead cat or fox should be dragged as a training-scent for the hounds, so that the horses could follow them":

If you had no acceptably ripe dead animals handy, he added, you could as a last resort use a red herring...

Robert Scott Ross and the OED now trace the figurative sense to the radical journalist William Cobbett, whose Weekly Political Register thundered in the years 1803-35 against the English political system he denigrated as the Old Corruption. He wrote a story, presumably fictional, in the issue of 14 February 1807 about how as a boy he had used a red herring as a decoy to deflect hounds chasing after a hare. He used the story as a metaphor to decry the press, which had allowed itself to be misled by false information about a supposed defeat of Napoleon; this caused them to take their attention off important domestic matters: “It was a mere transitory effect of the political red-herring; for, on the Saturday, the scent became as cold as a stone.”

This story, and his extended repetition of it in 1833, was enough to get the figurative sense of red herring into the minds of his readers, unfortunately also with the false idea that it came from some real practice of huntsmen.

So now you know. (There is considerably more at Quinion's post, including a discussion of the phrase "neither fish, nor flesh, nor good red herring" and of what a red herring actually is.)

STRANGE DATIVES.

Here's the start of Mark Liberman's latest post at the Log:

Yesterday, Daniel Mahaffey wrote to ask about his friend's "unusual indirect object sentences". Thus after backing into a dog in a crowded kitchen, she said "I nearly stepped on me a dog".

Daniel reasons that this is analogous to the benefactive pronouns in standard written English phrases like "I wrote him a song", or in widespread vernacular examples like "I wrote me a song" (where the standard version would be "wrote myself a song").

But, as Daniel observes, a couple of things are different in this case. First, analogous examples in (what we might call) the standard vernacular would put the pronoun before rather than after an intransitive preposition: "I stacked me up some firewood", not "I stacked up me some firewood". Second, in "… stepped on me a dog", the pronoun me has a looser semantic connection to the verb than typical benefactives — it doesn't refer to a beneficiary, recipient, or purpose of the action, instead apparently adding just a vague sense of interest or involvement. This may be why "…stepped me on a dog" seems (if anything) even odder to me than "…stepped on me a dog".

But wait, there's more. Daniel notes that his friend (who is from SE Georgia) also says things like "I need to go look for me a dress" or "I'm going to the mall to shop for me a dress".. In these examples, the placement of the pronoun seems even more surprising, since for is a transitive preposition expressing an argument of look or shop — here "a dress" — and me is thus inside a prepositional phrase, not just on the wrong side of a particle.

The post continues with further analysis and parallels from Latin, and the comment thread adds Greek, Romance, and Slavic; I urge you to go there and investigate further. What I want to stress here is the value of the descriptive as opposed to the prescriptive approach in terms of enrichment of one's mental life; the prescriptivist looks at sentences like that and simply says "That's wrong, here's how you should say it," whereas the descriptivist says "That's very interesting, I wonder what it can tell me about language and how people use it?" An open mind is a good thing.

Update. See now the guest post by Larry Horn (author of "'I love me some him': The landscape of non-argument datives") at the Log.

HILDA MORLEY.

Today's post at wood s lot begins with a nice snippet of Ern Malley (and anyone not familiar with the Ern Malley hoax should read this excellent introduction, with a nice Herbert Read quote that it is "possible to arrive at genuine art by spurious means") and moves on to quote a longish poem ("The Ships Move On") by a poet I was completely unfamiliar with, Hilda Morley (1919 - 1998). It's a shame such a fine poet was treated so badly by the boy's club at Black Mountain College, where she taught at the height of its influence but is ignored in histories of the place, and even more of a shame she is still unknown to the poetry-reading public. I'll put a short poem by her below the cut; here's a moving preface to her work by Robert Creeley (written shortly before her death), and here's a discussion at digital emunction sparked off by Kent Johnson's nomination of her as "the most unjustly and bizarrely forgotten U.S. poet of the 20th century."

O where I lay
half-buried at the bottom
of the stream,
          barely able
to move I am shifted
now by the current
of the inmost heart,
        I am turning
slowly
    My furrow
is broken across
      & I am set moving
gently (as nature does it, he always said)
turning inside my furrow
        slowly
as one turns before waking,
        the eyes half-closed,
half-sleeping,
      then swifter
        (with the movement
        of the inmost heart)
as the dolphin turns in the sea

—Hilda Morley

HOW KEATS SPOKE.

As fond as I was of William Safire, I must admit I prefer the new, unpredictable "On Language" column in the NY Times. This week, Caleb Crain writes about how John Keats talks in the recent movie Bright Star (which I still haven't seen) and how he might have talked in reality. While Crain appreciated the "playful, delicate, precise" dialogue of the movie, he thinks Keats may have talked quite differently, saying "Keats was self-conscious about his everyday speech":

In August 1818, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine accused him of “Cockney rhymes,” pointing out that he matched thorns with fawns and higher with Thalia. In poems that he inserted in his letters, he rhymed shorter with water and parsons with fastens. The pattern suggests that he suffered from nonrhoticity — the tendency to drop “R” sounds from the ends of syllables and words. As well he should have, the scholar Lynda Mugglestone wrote in 1991, noting that nonrhoticity was part of “then-current educated usage.” In fact, Mugglestone observed, Blake had rhymed lawn with morn, and Tennyson was to rhyme thorns and yawns.

Mugglestone notwithstanding, some of the spelling mistakes in Keats’s letters look incriminating. He wrote “ax” for ask, “ave” for have and “milidi” for milady. It’s impossible to know, however, whether Keats had the lower-class accent that these spellings evoke or was merely pretending to have it in order to amuse his readers. He underlined to show he was kidding when he wrote to his friend Reynolds that “from want of regular rest, I have been rather narvus” and when he wrote to his sister that “I have been werry romantic indeed, among these Mountains and Lakes.” Even when he didn’t underline, he may have been axing his readers to understand that he was aving a joke all the sime. His ear for dialect seems to have been acute. From Scotland he reported to his brother Tom that whiskey was called whuskey, and when Reynolds went to Devonshire with his family, Keats wrote to him that “your sisters by this time must have got the Devonshire ees — short ees — you know ’em; they are the prettiest ees in the Language.” He was probably too gifted a linguist to have been saddled long with an accent that embarrassed him.

Of course, Crain is a journalist and critic, not a scholar; I'm wondering if anyone might have anything to add about this.

WHOSE IS THIS SONG?

A wonderful post at the wonderful (and multilingual) Poemas del río Wang. I have nothing to add but: enjoy! (Thanks for the link, Paul.)

THE BOOKSHELF: OUR MAGNIFICENT BASTARD TONGUE.

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English, by John McWhorter, is an enjoyable but odd book. It's basically a combination of two items, each of which would ideally be very slim: a primer on descriptivist views of language (no, English isn't going to hell in a handbasket), and a popularization of McWhorter's work on creolization and the history of English. The latter takes up most of the book, and it is, to my mind, overwritten and unnecessarily repetitive. For instance, here's a précis of the first chapter: English "meaningless do" (as in "Do you think so?") and the progressive tense ("he is going") are hard to explain in terms of the other Germanic languages. Interestingly, both are present in Welsh and Cornish, descendants of the Celtic languages spoken in England when the Germanic speakers arrived. It seems likely that English picked it up from the version of the language spoken by Celtic speakers.

Makes sense, right? And it's presented in a lively fashion (sometimes too lively for this old fogey—McWhorter has a fondness for formulations like "shitte happens"). The problem is that the first chapter goes on for sixty pages, and doesn't really say much more than I put in those three sentences. The chapter draws to a close with a labored parallel about "people we will call the Robinsons and the Joneses"; the former "have developed an unusual deftness in playing the piano with their feet," and it happens that the Joneses "have the same skill." Why, the Robinsons must have gotten it from the Joneses! The thing is, though, that if you haven't bought his argument based on the actual facts of the case, you're not likely to buy it because of this bizarre fable of podalic pianists.

I don't mean to say there's nothing worth reading besides the basic argument; for instance, he makes the interesting point (borrowed from Andrew Dalby) that "if Welsh were, say, for some reason regularly taught in schools across Western Europe and in America, as French and Spanish are, then to linguists, raised with 'schoolboy' Welsh, the parallels between Celtic and English would seem glaringly obvious and would long ago have been accepted as having a causal rather than correlative relationship." I personally would have welcomed more of this sort of insight and less hammering on a few ideas (some of which aren't as convincing to me as the Celtic-influence one), but of course I'm not the target market. This would be a good book to give anyone interested in the history of English who enjoys this kind of popular writing.