My wife and I were doing an acrostic puzzle in which one of the clues was "penny farthing" and the answer they wanted was "bicycle." I had never heard the term, so I looked it up, and it has a wonderful explanation. OED:
A bicycle with a large front wheel and a small rear one, current from the early 1870s to the mid 1890s; an ordinary. Now hist.The Wikipedia article has a picture showing the two coins together, as well as one of the contraption itself.
[...]1910 Lotinga's Weekly 7 May 64 The old type of machine, known as the ‘Penny-Farthing’ owing to the size of the wheels.
The Fondation Carla Bruni-Sarkozy has an online interview (French) with translator André Markowicz:
Born in Prague in 1960, André Markowicz spent the first four years of his life in Moscow. Brought up in France in a family of Russian intellectuals, he began translating under the guidance of the linguist Efim Etkind. Chekhov offered Markowicz an initial opportunity to translate prose, but it was with his translation of the complete works of Dostoyevsky for Actes Sud in the early 1990s that he first rose to prominence.The interviewer's introduction says: "By the time he finished the mammoth undertaking in 2002 he had proved something: what people had been reading by Dostoyevsky wasn’t Dostoyevsky. It wasn’t his style, there was nothing of his collision of linguistic registers, which had been smoothed out to obtain a language far too literary for an author whose strokes of the pen were like axe blows." This illustrates a major difference between French tradition, which expects translations to read like French literature, and the Anglo-American tradition, which welcomes variety of style, including the kind of "low" register that is resisted in France. Some excerpts:
When you read the original text alongside the first translations (which came out almost immediately), you realize that you’re not looking at the same author. Dostoyevsky writes obsessively, there is a very striking use of repetition. The early translations took out those repetitions. On the other hand, he also makes up sentences which are not proper written Russian. That’s quite normal; in Russian, nobody tells you how to write properly. But the translators would construct sentences in proper written French. All the same, the ideas were still there. The issues which Dostoyevsky addresses are so crucial: responsibility, the relationship between God and the world, humanist values in modern society, good and evil, the nature of obsession. These are questions of philosophy, not style. So you can read a very bad translation of Dostoyevsky and still be gripped by reading him. The fact that Dostoyevsky’s works had already been translated meant that I was in the fortunate position of a writer putting forward his own vision of that output. I was lucky to be able to work on the style, using the ear that I had for the text in my native language. Now, in Dostoyevsky, as in any writer, style is sense. My translation was not so much a new reading as a way of clarifying a number of points, after a century of reading Dostoyevsky…There's much more of interest, including an illuminating discussion of Shakespeare towards the end. And I like his modesty: "People quoted me as saying that I was restoring the true face of Dostoyevsky. I never claimed to be doing so much. The earlier translations were clearly inaccurate in terms of style, but they did give a certain face to Dostoyevsky. Mine gave him a different one." Next up, Pushkin: "'I’ve taken thirty years to translate Eugene Onegin,' he says. 'It’s my whole life'."
[. . .]
I was one of the first translators to become the focus of very personal discussion. What the readers of my generation were arguing about was not so much my translation, in the end, as the ones they’d grown up with. Was my own reading right? At any rate, I can certainly account for it. But the way I translate, not respecting the canonical norms for French literature because the author is Russian, well, that of course upsets those readers who only see foreign literature through the lens of French literature. But it seems to me that we should be able to go beyond this difficulty. For me this is extremely important. It is in this respect that translation is a political act. It is not simply a question of turning what is foreign into French, but of understanding that it should not be the same as we are. Translation should be a process of reception, not of assimilation.
Kyoto Journal is "a non-profit volunteer-based quarterly magazine established in 1986" that "offers interviews, essays, translations, humor, fiction, poetry and reviews." Their current issue, #74, "(latest we have ever been in getting a new one out!) is a long-awaited special, on the Silk Roads, guest-edited by Leanne Ogasawara, with guest designer Kevin Foley providing some spectacular layouts and typography." Leanne's blog, tang dynasty times ("all the peonies of Chang'an"), "was the catalyst for this special themed issue of KJ. In posts that read as dispatches from outposts on a journey of exploration deep into the history of relations between East and West, she reflects on aspects of what a truly global culture might encompass, presenting Tang multiculturalism and Silk Road cosmopolitanism (and much, much more) as reference points for our present times." Check out the KJ material available online (and, of course, Leanne's excellent blog), and if you're sufficiently impressed, you might seek out a physical copy (¥1,500, US/Can$15, Aus$20, €10). I'm getting mine free, because I contributed a review of Beckwith's Empires of the Silk Road (see this LH post from last year, as well as the previous posts linked therein).
Some years ago I posted about Nicaraguan sign language; now a story in Discover magazine discusses "a new study led by Jennie Pyers from Wellesley College":
By studying children who learned NSL at various stages of its development, Pyers has shown that the vocabulary they pick up affects the way they think. Specifically, those who learned NSL before it developed specific gestures for left and right perform more poorly on a spatial awareness test than children who grew up knowing how to sign those terms.[...]It's not the dreaded Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but it's interesting stuff. Check it out. (Thanks, Aidan!)Pyers explains, “The first-cohort signers find these tasks challenging because they do not have the language to encode the relevant aspects of the environment that would help them solve the spatial problem.” She added, “[They] did not have a consistent linguistic means to encode ‘left of’.”
This is a fascinating result, especially since the first group of adults were older and had been signing for a longer time. It’s clear evidence that our spatial reasoning skills depend, to an extent, on consistent spatial language. If we lack the right words, our mental abilities are limited in a way that extra life experience can’t fully compensate for.
I keep forgetting to mention this, but it's not too late to join The Quarterly Conversation and Open Letters Monthly in their summer-long reading of The Tale of Genji. I'd do it myself, but my schedule is already full.
"Gabby" Street was an old-time catcher, manager, coach, and broadcaster who died the year I was born. I always assumed his nickname came from his talkativeness, but no, it came from his racist behavior. In his own words:
"We used to call the colored boys 'Gabby' down in Alabama, and when I wanted a new baseball thrown into the game I used to call, 'Hey Gabby, where's the baseball?' . . . If you see a black boy and you want him, and you don't know his name, you yell, 'Hey, Gabby.' It works in St. Louis, too, and if you don't believe it, try it. To me all black boys have been 'Gabby,' and I got my nickname from the use of that word and not, as is commonly believed, because I am a chatterbox."I got this telling bit of information from the best book of social history I've read in some time, Martha Ackmann's Curveball: The Remarkable Story of Toni Stone: The First Woman to Play Professional Baseball in the Negro League
. Ackmann is a journalist and scholar who is on the faculty of the Gender Studies Department at Mount Holyoke College, teaching courses in women’s public writing, biography and Emily Dickinson; her previous book was The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight. She's also a lifelong baseball fan (she says in her acknowledgments that she's "attended Boston Red Sox games for three decades"), and it shows; the book is suffused with the same love of the game that was the animating force in the life of its subject, Marcenia "Tomboy" (later "Toni") Stone. But if it were just a well-written biography of a forgotten baseball pioneer, Curveball would be a specialized item for connoisseurs of women's history and/or the Negro League. As it is, I recommend it to anyone interested in America's difficult journey from the open, vicious racism of American before World War II to the subdued and hopefully fading racism of today, and the almost incredible courage and determination it took for a young woman obsessed with baseball but with the bad luck to be born in 1921 to fight not only the racism of society at large but the sexism of the sport she loved. Ackmann has a real gift for inserting background material seamlessly into her story, describing the (long vanished) Rondo neighborhood of Stone's native St. Paul and the Fillmore district of San Francisco where she lived after she left home, explaining the workings of Negro League baseball in clear and affecting terms, and providing concise and illuminating footnotes on just about everything you might want added information on. She has miniessays on the effect of the war on the employment possibilities for blacks and women, the jazz scene of 1940s San Francisco, and much else. And the book is written in such a lively style that I would have devoured it more quickly if I hadn't had to keep putting it down to get over the bitterness of reading about what she, and so many other people who just wanted to play a game and live their lives, had to deal with. I'm just glad Stone was able to enjoy some belated recognition before she died in 1996, and I'm very much looking forward to Ackmann's next book, on Emily Dickinson.
(Thanks for the book, Sven and Leslie!)
The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe is online in full:
The only resource of its kind, this encyclopedia provides the most complete picture of the history and culture of Jews in Eastern Europe from the beginnings of their settlement in the region to the present. This Web site makes accurate, reliable, scholarly information about East European Jewish life accessible to everyone.The first thing I looked up was "Kiev," and I found not only a full article, with history, photos, and bibliography, but a map showing the location of not only the synagogues but the Jewish Theater, the Jewish Market, the Jewish Bathhouse, the Jewish Gate (from the 11th century), the Zionists Club, the houses where Ilya Ehrenburg, Sholem Aleichem, and other well-known Jews lived, the Continental Hotel (where Mandelstam, Ehrenburg, and Babel lived at various times)... well, you get the idea. It's a treasurehouse, and I look forward to exploring it at length. Via Dumneazu ("Ethnomusicological Eating East of Everywhere").
There is a condition (terrifying to the bibliophiles among us) called alexia, "an acquired type of sensory aphasia where damage to the brain causes a patient to lose the ability to read. It is also called word blindness, text blindness or visual aphasia." Oliver Sacks, always a stimulating writer, describes it in the latest New Yorker in "A Man of Letters" (June 28, 2010, pp. 22-28; not online, but here's a summary). Unfortunately, having blown my circuits by finishing the book I was editing, watching (and shouting myself hoarse over) the terminally exciting U.S. win over Algeria at the World Cup, and then subjecting myself to the longest tennis match in history (suspended for the night after almost ten hours, with the score 59-59 in the fifth and final set), I am not in condition to provide a thoughtful analysis; I will just quote a poignant line from the subject of the article, the novelist Howard Engel—"My life had been built on reading everything in sight"—and urge you to find a copy of the magazine. Oh, and here's an NPR story on the subject (with a link to an audio file), and here's "Johnson"'s take on it. Fascinating stuff.
Claire Bowern of Anggarrgoon (and a frequent LH commenter when she isn't as busy as she apparently is these days) has joined Quentin Atkinson and Russell Gray in creating the North American English Dialect Survey:
We are doing research on different accents in American English. We know that Americans and Canadians have a great deal in common in the way they speak, but there are also differences. In order to study the ways that North American accents differ, we have put together a survey of common words, and we’d like you to participate!As Mark Liberman says at the Log post where I learned about it, "All you need is an internet-connected computer with a microphone and a web browser that can run Flash. [...] This is a great idea, and I certainly encourage participation." As do I.
Movie subtitles have been a perennial topic of discussion here at LH (e.g., 1, 2, 3), and Nate Barksdale provides another interesting link with his essay Subtleties. He starts off with a discussion of yellow subtitles (which I'm all in favor of, even if they're occasionally obtrusive) and works his way via a history lesson ("They worked their way into the silent cinema as printed cards explaining or commenting on what was happening in the filmed sequences") to the inevitable "moment[s] in which the subtle subtitle machinery has gone wrong":
The film in question is usually from India; Bollywood movies (and their regional equivalents) present a unique subtitling situation. First of all, the target idiom is generally a variety of Indian English, which of course makes sense given the speech of both translator and average viewer, meaning that even perfect execution will often look odd to American eyes.He says that "the greatest amount of South Asian subtitle strangeness" occurs in the songs, and presents a couple of wondrous examples: "On the tip of the noses love enjoys even the beauty of crows!" and "Thoughts of various spinaches make me yearn." The latter is from from Mullum Malarum (Tamil, 1978), and I have to say, it tempts me to see the movie.Secondly, Indian movies are generally quite long, and I've noticed that the quality of the subtitles generally plummets by the time you enter the third hour of the film: grammar goes slack, dialogue becomes terse, there are long awkward stretches where you hear voices but see no words. I figure the screen translation economics work out such that somewhere around the one hundred twentieth minute, anyone still watching is sufficiently committed to the film that there's no additional return on investment for perfecting the subtitles that remain. I imagine a video editing suite somewhere in the suburbs of Mumbai or Chennai, where the key moment arrives and the lead translator hands off the balance of the film to some sub-subtitler and heads outside for a well-deserved masala dosa.
Months ago, I was following a Google path I no longer remember and Google Books showed me a book that had the "Hail Mary" in Russian. Not a Russian religious book, mind you, but a sort of textbook in English that (as a quick look revealed) had all sorts of odd things in Russian: games, arithmetic, mushrooms... It was The Russian's World: Life and Language
Having finally finished it—even the appendices on Peter the Great's Table of Ranks, how to read chemical formulas, Morse code, Braille, and common Russian birds—I'm here to tell you that it's every bit as good as those reviews made it sound. If it had been around back when I was a Russian major, I might have continued in Russian rather than switching to linguistics; I've never seen a book that so effectively immersed you in a culture and showed you what it was like to live in it. Opening the book at random, the Names section has six pages of a Table of Names, giving full name, patronymic form, regular diminutive, and "endearing forms"; then it describes how different forms are used as one grows up:
Small children hear their endearing name form (from the table's third column) so often that they might think it their official name.[...] The boy will hear Юрочка throughout his life, first from his mother and later, though less frequently, from his wife (who will usually call him Юра). When he is old enough to socialize, his mother will introduce him to new friends as Юра (from the second column). He will address those other children in like manner until he considers them good friends, at which point he and they will often switch to the usually derogatory name: To his friends and siblings he will be Юрка. The derogatory -ка endings are actually used in several ways: they can be used among children to say "You're my pal"; among adult friends who might be saying something like, "You're crazy, but I like you anyway"; and by adults toward particularly offensive children. The neighborhood brat would probably be so referred to by almost everyone. [...] In class, Yuri's teacher will often refer to him by his last name alone, or sometimes as Юрий or Юра. The younger he is, the more familiar the teacher will be. Out of class the teacher might call him Юрий, Юра, or Юрочка depending on the situation — Юрий or Юра if emotion is not involved, and Юрочка if he has been hurt, for instance. He will always address his teacher and adults who are not in his family by their full name and patronymic.There follows a section on names before the Revolution (distinguishing educated from peasant names) and after ("In the 1920s it was not uncommon to name one's child after revolutionary events, leaders, and ideals"). And this is just one section; the book goes into similar detail on clothing (contemporary and folk), housing (apartments both self-contained and communal, peasant houses from various parts of Russia, all with illustrations), food, transportation, education, nature... pretty much any aspect of being Russian is described and analyzed, including mat (Russian cursing), about which Ms. Gerhart is squeamish ("Never, ever use these words. They are not cute or funny, nor will you be if you say them") but of which she gives a good account, including the occasional pungent saying (Хоть сци в глаза, всё Божья роса, "Pee in their eyes and they still say it's God's dew"). She tells you how to talk to animals, she tells you which fish are especially valued, she has illustrations of horse collars and street signs, she explains the rules of gorodki and why bottles of vodka were traditionally drunk by three people ("one could buy half a liter for 2.60 rubles, with 40 kopecks left for a little food to go with it—three people with a ruble each could get together and have a party"). You get the picture. If you're interested in Russian life and have a minimum acquaintance with the language, I really don't know how you can do without this book. (I wonder if similar books are available for other languages and cultures?)At puberty many things change, not the least the boy's name. Now his friends call him Юра or Юрий most of the time; Юрочка and Юрка remain for special rather than normal use. He comes into his own when he starts work; then he will normally be addressed by his full name and patronymic: Юрий Иванович. Only his relatives and good friends have the privilege of using the diminutive forms of his name.
I have added to my blogroll the wonderful Sentence first ("An Irishman's blog about the English language"). It is written by Stan Carey, an occasional LH commenter who says on his About page:
I’m a scientist and writer turned editor and swivel-chair linguist. Sentence first is my blog about the English language: its usage, grammar, styles, literature, history, and quirks. There will also be stories, photos, and miscellany. I live in the west of Ireland, but thanks to modern technology you can read my blog (almost) anywhere. Its title is from a line spoken by the Queen in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll: “Sentence first — verdict afterwards.”He is clearly a man after my own heart (I am always glad to meet fellow descriptivists, but when they are also professional editors it brings an extra burst of joy), and I particularly commend to your attention his latest post, on snuck as the past tense of sneak. He smacks around a hissy fit thrown by someone at some website called The Awl over the Paris Review’s use of the form (which in a comment to Stan's post I called "a wonderful word, short, snappy, and vivid") and provides a detailed account of its history and increasing acceptance, ending with the admirably concise "In conclusion, then, The Awl and Jennifer Garner were wrong, and the Paris Review and Conan O’Brien were right." (Via Mark Liberman at the Log.)I am interested in how people communicate. Words are powerful tools and deserve careful use, but language usage changes constantly. For formal writing and editing I like the plain style, and I am contrarily fascinated by gobbledegook. But because I have had love affairs with various kinds of writing, from science writing and travel writing to fiction and poetry, I am interested in all styles and in the countless ways we express our ideas.
I wrote about the issue of cannot versus can not way back in 2003; as I said there, "The only context in which can not, two words, occurs is as an emphatic alternative: 'You can do it, or you can not do it.'" Today ESPN provided a perfect illustration of why the negative must always (except in that rare circumstance) be spelled as one word, cannot. In a graphic at the top of the screen during the disastrous first half against Slovenia (the 2-0 score looked so bad that my brother turned off the TV and took a nap, having gotten up at 3:30 AM to watch the first game of the day), they ran the following announcement:
U.S. CAN NOT ADVANCE OR BE ELIMINATED TODAYNow, what that unambiguously says, and the way I first read it, is: "The U.S. team can either fail to advance or be eliminated as a result of today's games." That doesn't make any sense, of course, because if they fail to advance, they're eliminated, but that's what it says. A moment's thought showed that what they meant was not CAN NOT but CANNOT: "It is not possible for the U.S. team to either advance or be eliminated as a result of today's games." People make fun of style rules as the hobgoblin of little minds, but this is a good example of why clarity demands them.
Here's the NY Times report on the game, which was a thriller. This is not a sports blog and I do not usually say this kind of thing, but the U.S. was robbed by some of the worst refereeing I have ever seen. There was no reason to call back the goal that would have made it 3-2 in the final minutes except blindness or worse. Fie, I say! Fie!
This Slate article by Rosecrans Baldwin is both the funniest and the most intriguing thing I've read in a while. He starts off by observing that "Novelists can't resist including a dog barking in the distance," and hits you with enough examples, from all levels of literature, that you accept the phenomenon as valid. But what does it mean? He says:
Trains whistle, breezes blow, dogs bark. You're thinking, "So what if novels are full of barking dogs? The world is full of them, too." But I don't find it curious when actual dogs turn up in novels. Dogs that authors bother to describe, or turn into characters, don't pull me out of my reading trance. The thing is, these so-called dogs are nameless and faceless, and frankly I doubt them; it's the curious incident when one actually does come into view. Really, are there so many out-of-sight, noisy dogs in the world? Listen: My bet is you'll hear a highway, an A/C unit, or another human before a dog starts yelping.The ending is hilarious; I won't spoil it for you, but I hope you will visit the link and read it for yourself. (Hat tip to Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org.)
[...]Most authors, however, employ the trope as a narrative rest stop, an innocuous way to fill space and time; since the bark is hollow, a reader can read anything into it, or nothing at all. Charlaine Harris, queen of the vampire authors, in Dead as a Doornail: "The entire parking lot was empty, except for Jan's car. The glare of the security lights made the shadows deeper. I heard a dog bark way off in the distance." The chief of Scandinavian crime writers, Henning Mankell: "She begins to tell him. The curtain in the kitchen window flutters gently, and a dog barks in the distance" (The Eye of the Leopard). And "genre" books aren't the only guilty category. Take 2666, Robert Bolaño's magnum opus: "The window looked out over the garden, which was still lit. A scent of flowers and wet grass drifted into the room. In the distance he heard a dog bark." For all we know, these dogs are off-camera sound machines set to woof.
[...]Martin Amis says, "All writing is a campaign against cliché." Well, what if these dogs aren't just cliché, but something more? What if they're a meme? Perhaps distant dogs are a way for novelists to wink at one another, at their extraordinary luck for being allowed into the publishing club. When an author incorporates a faceless barking dog into his novel, he's like an amateur at Harlem's Apollo Theater rubbing the Tree of Hope—he does it because so many others have done it before him, and it might just bring him some luck.
I ran across the participle stymieing, and it looked wrong, so I looked it up (for that matter, it still does—I just looked it up again to make sure). Of course, while I was at it I checked the etymology, and got quite a surprise: the familiar verb meaning 'stand in the way of, be an obstacle to' was originally a Scottish golf term meaning 'obstruct a golf shot by interposing your ball,' or in the words of the OED "To put (one's opponent or oneself) into the position of having to negotiate a stymie; also intr. (of a ball) to intervene as a stymie." As you can see from this, the verb comes from an earlier noun (of obscure origin): "An opponent's ball which lies on the putting green in a line between the ball of the player and the hole he is playing for, if the distance between the balls is not less than six inches; also, the occurrence of this; often in the phrase to lay a stymie." The first citation is:
1834 Rules of Musselburgh Golf Club in C. B. Clapcott Rules of Golf of 10 Oldest Golf Clubs (1935) 66 With regard to Stimies the ball nearest the hole if within six inches shall be lifted.
Is anybody familiar with this golf usage? The latest citation in the OED is from 1901.
Lane Greene of The Economist writes to tell me about their new language blog, Johnson. It won my heart in the first entry I looked at, Wild pigs versus cucumber troops, when I saw the following sentence: "The Etymologisches Wö[r]terbuch der deutschen Sprache notes that Gurke is a loan word from Polish (ogurek or ogorek), which in turn comes from the Middle Greek agovros, meaning 'unripe' or 'immature'." That could have come straight out of LH, and any blog that quotes the Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache is jake with me. Furthermore, in their first post, after explaining that the blog is a revival of a monthly column on the English language written in the '90s by Stephen Hugh-Jones (available here), they say "this blog is not to be primarily about peeves—'we simply can't stand it when someone says thus-and-such," which of course was music to my ears (and has proven to be true). In their second post, they mocked the absurd Queen's English Society (also mocked by Mark Liberman at the Log and by John McIntyre at You Don't Say, e.g., here). And they've already taken a couple of whacks at the NY Times for their prudery ("We learn from Jeffrey Goldberg that the Times will not even print the Yiddishism 'tuchus'. Oy."). All in all, I feel confident in giving Johnson the coveted Languagehat Seal of Approval.
And I have to pass on their hilarious post about their name:
Last week A.T., an American colleague, tackled me, a Brit, about the title of this blog. Never has the nostrum about Britain and America being "two countries separated by a common language" seemed truer:
A.T.: I don't like the name Johnson.
G.L.: What would you suggest?
A.T.: Well, for instance, Fowler, who wrote the great guide to English usage.
G.L.: What's the advantage of Fowler over Johnson?
A.T.: Well, it doesn't mean dick.
G.L.: Hold on—are you saying you prefer Fowler, or Johnson?
A.T.: Fowler.
G.L.: But is Fowler well-known in America?
A.T.: No, but nor is Johnson.
G.L.: So if Fowler doesn't mean dick to Americans and nor does Johnson, why is Fowler better?
A.T.: But it does mean dick.
G.L.: Fowler does?
A.T.: No, Johnson.At this point light dawned, and I realised that A.T. was trying to communicate one problem, while I, thinking myself a connoisseur of American slang, had understood another. In fact both were true: the trouble with "Johnson" is that while Brits know the name well, to Americans it both doesn't mean dick and does mean "dick". Fowler, on the other hand, may not mean "dick" to Americans, but to my mind it doesn't really mean dick to anybody. So I proposed that we stop dicking around and simply explain, at the top right of the page, who Johnson was, so that even if it still means "dick", at least it no longer doesn't mean dick. I hope that's now clear to everyone.
I'm back in body (after a more or less sleepless night and a four-and-a-half-hour bus ride), but my spirit is weak, so for the moment I'll just pass along this enjoyable word dug out of the recesses of the OED by aldiboronti at Wordorigins.org:
twiffler, n.It is, of course, related to German Zweifel 'doubt' and has as its root the number
Now Hist.
[ad. Du. twijfelaar something intermediate between two types (also as below), f. twijfelen be unsure, vacillate.]
A plate or shallow dish intermediate in size between a dessert plate and a dinner plate.
And for lagniappe: Referees Brush Up on Curses in 17 Languages (for the World Cup).
I'm off to Rhode Island, the home of the cabinet, for the weekend. I'll be staying with an old friend who delighted me with the explanation she had come up with for the odd name: carbonate, in the odd dialect of Vode Island, sounds pretty much exactly like cabinet. The Wikipedia entry calls this "unsubstantiated," but it works for me. Have a good weekend; I'll be back at my desk Sunday evening.
I was thunderstruck (well, surprised anyway, but I'm feeling a little weak-brained this morning, so it hit me strongly) to discover from this post of Anatoly's that the Russian words "меч" and "шпага" are felt by Russians to be completely different things. Because they are both defined as "sword" in bilingual dictionaries, I assumed they were synonyms. It seems, however, that меч [mech] is the kind of sword you go into battle with, whereas шпага [shpaga] is the kind of sword you fence with. Anatoly can't quite see how a language can mix up two such obviously distinct objects; as I say in his comment thread, I can sort of see the distinction, and I suppose as I read Russian with it in mind it will become clearer, but the two concepts will never be as distinct for me as they are for a Russian-speaker. Without diving into the Swamp of Sapir-Whorf, this is a clear example of the kind of effect language has on thought.
It is interesting, however, that the Wikipedia articles Шпага and Меч have the identical illustration, in the latter labeled "Изображение двенадцати разных мечей" [twelve different meches] and in the former "ново-прусские шпаги" [new-Prussian shpagas].
I've always vaguely wondered about the phrase past master—was there or wasn't there also a passed master, and did the one come from the other?—and I've finally looked it up in the OED. The earliest form is
pass, v. 40. b. intr. To reach the required standard in an examination, course, etc. Formerly freq. with complement (esp. in to pass master): to graduate as, to become qualified as; (occas.) trans., to approve (a person) as. First cite: ?1566-7 G. BUCHANAN Opinion Reformation Univ. St. Andros in Vernacular Writings 13 Ane of profession of medicine passit maister, and ane regent in humanite.
From there we get passed master as a noun phrase meaning "A person who is especially adept or expert in a specified subject or activity"; first cite: 1882 H. C. MERIVALE Faucit of Balliol I. vi. 96 Faucit was a passed master as a guide to the classics.
But then there's the more familiar past master, which (it turns out) is originally from the Freemasons:
1. Usu. with capital initial. A person who has previously filled the office of master in a Freemasons' lodge, civic guild, etc.
1762 Jachin & Boaz 50 The past Master raises him up, and takes off the Jewel and Ribbon from his own Neck, and puts it on the new Master. 1786 Laws Soc. Royal Arch Masons 15 That the three Principals, and all Past-masters are stiled, most excellent. c1826 W. MORGAN Illustr. Masonry (?1851) 80 The second part of this work, which will comprise the following degrees, viz: Mark-Master, Present or Past-Master, Most Excellent Master, and the Royal Arch. [...] 2002 Bristol Evening Post (Nexis) 30 Aug., A Circle compromises the past masters of all Masonic Lodges within the Province of Bristol in any calendar year.
2. A person who is especially adept or expert in a specified subject or activity. With in, of, at.
This use may have arisen partly in allusion to the expertise which results from having passed through such an office as master of a Freemasons' lodge, etc. Sometimes it simply alludes to the expertise resulting from having passed the necessary training to qualify as ‘master’ in any art, science, or occupation. Cf. PASSED MASTER n.
1840 Southern Lit. Messenger 6 391/1 In our attentions, Mr. Editor, to the Past Masters in Poetry, we are apt to neglect the claims of the entered apprentices of the sublime order. 1872 M. E. BRADDON R. Ainsleigh xv, The man was past-master of all dissimulative arts. 1890 Spectator 13 Sept. 334 A past-master of electioneering tactics. 1936 M. R. ANAND Coolie iii. 164 Munoo had become a past master in the art of slipping by the irregular pedestrians of the city of Daulatpur. 1963 S. BEDFORD Favourite of Gods (1984) 55 Even the prince, himself past-master at leaving well alone, found himself outdone. 1992 Independent 10 Mar. 21/6 Harold Macmillan was a past master at the art of manipulating the economy to produce an election boom.
Just another of those unnecessary bits of confusion in which languages abound.
The NY Times has introduced a promising new feature at Schott’s Vocab, their vocabulary blog: Schott’s Daily Lexeme. "Schott’s Vocab is honored and delighted to have joined forces with the inestimable Oxford English Dictionary to offer each day a word of note. Naturally, being a Daily Lexeme – rather than a 'word of the day' – these offerings will tend toward the curious, humorous, sesquipedalian and archaic." The first post brought to our attention the word petrichor (PET-rikor), "A pleasant, distinctive smell frequently accompanying the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather in certain regions." It's great that there's a word for that; it's perhaps not the most euphonious word, but it's not bad, and my wife and I intend to use it whenever the occasion presents itself. The second post showcases facinorous "Extremely wicked or immoral; grossly criminal; vile, atrocious, heinous; infamous," which is not as much fun (because there are already plenty of perfectly good words for it) but is still worth knowing about. The best part: each entry links to the OED entry for the word (petrichor, coined in 1964; facinorous, first recorded in 1548), so you can see it even if you don't have a subscription. Thanks for the heads-up, Bonnie!
Charles King, in his TLS review, "Among the Circassians" (April 23, 2010, p. 11), of a couple of books about the Caucasus, writes that the North Caucasus is a region "that many Russians would just as well forget they owned." This use of "just as well" took me aback—for me, it would have to be "just as soon"—but I suspect it's a dialect difference, so I turn to the Varied Reader: are you familiar with this use of the phrase?
And speaking of just-based phrases, Noetica writes to tell me he has found an omission in the OED, of which he has informed them; to quote from his e-mail:
The meaning of "just in case" is given only at "case, n.1", as a special application of "in case":I agree both that it is baffling when you first encounter it and that it should be in the OED, which I am sure it will. When Noetica speaks, lexicographers listen![10] b. as conjunction (with sentence): in the event or contingency that, if it should prove or happen that, if. in case, esp. in just in case, orig. with aposiopesis, in case––, to indicate an unspecified apprehension of accident.
...Most importantly, nothing at "case, n.1" covers the sense of "just in case" at the entries with an asterisk, above. For example, this citation at "symmetric, a.":
1979 K. J. DEVLIN Fund. Contemp. Set Theory i. 14 A binary relation on a set is an equivalence relation just in case it is reflective, symmetric, and transitive.
Here it means "if and only if", or "iff" (see OED entry). The usage is common in philosophy (especially logic, and philosophy of language), linguistics, and mathematics. But it is utterly baffling to beginners.
Anatoly quoted my post from yesterday, singling out the quote beginning "It is possible to take too many notes; the task of sorting, filing and assimilating them can take for ever, so that nothing gets written. The awful warning is Lord Acton..."; he finished his post by linking to this poem (in Russian), which the story reminded him of. I liked the poem so well I thought I'd try my hand at translating it, but I was stymied at the very beginning because I wasn't sure how to render the title, Ментелли. It transliterates as Mentelli, but the problem was that the name in question was that of a Hungarian, and of course I wanted to know the original Hungarian spelling, so I started googling.
That sent me down one of those endless rabbit holes the internet is so full of, and I have just come up for air. When I googled Ментелли, I got his Russian Wikipedia article. Excellent! (I thought): it will link to a Hungarian Wikipedia article, and my problems will be over. Alas for premature rejoicing—there was no link to any other Wikipedia articles on him. Further, the next-to-last sentence of the article said that he was "described in the story 'The Hungarian Diogenes from Paris' by the Hungarian lawyer and writer István Ráth-Végh." I immediately began to suspect that Ráth-Végh had invented him. I found the story in Russian translation (here; scroll down to ВЕНГЕРСКИЙ ДИОГЕН ИЗ ПАРИЖА, the last section), which did nothing to dispel my suspicion that it was an elaborate hoax (nor, of course, did it help me with the spelling issue). After much googling, I managed to find the original Hungarian in Google Books (A könyv komédiája, p. 83: "A párizsi magyar Diogenes"); unfortunately, not only was it the thrice-damned snippet view, but OCR rendered the crucial name as "Menteili." More googling made it clear it was actually Mentelli, however, and I found what seems at the moment to be the original source of the story, Descuret's La Médecine des passions, ou les passions considérées dans leurs rapports avec les maladies, les lois et la religion (Paris, [1841] 2nd ed. 1844). The story begins on page 717; by clicking on this clipped bit, you will be taken to the book, where you can read the whole thing, if you read French:
And if you don't read French, there is a brief retelling in English in Théodule Ribot, The psychology of the emotions (New York, 1897), beginning:
and ending "Mentelli left no work behind him, in fact there remains no trace of his long researches." There is also "Mentelli, the Hungarian Diogenes," Notes and Queries (1913) s11-VIII: 350 (available here if you have a subscription, which I don't). And Victor Hugo wrote this in his notebooks:
Mentelli était un grand savant. Il mourut.I don't know if I'll ever get around to translating the poem, but now you know about Mentelli. If he existed at all, with his hundred languages and his ill-paid library work, he died in 1836; I still harbor a faint suspicion that Descuret made him up.
On me demanda une épitaphe pour lui.
J'écrivis sur sa tombe cette ligne:
- Il est allé savoir le reste.
The historian Keith Thomas has an essay in the LRB that exemplifies the working method an "anonymous reader" describes as involving "a great many references to and citations of a generous selection of (mostly printed) texts and documents, which account for a high percentage of the text." I could follow the same path, quoting (for instance) Thomas quoting C.G. Crump of the Public Record Office ("‘Never make a note for future use in such a form … that even you yourself will not know what it means, when you come across it some months later.’") or Thomas quoting G.M. Young ("my aim is to go on reading until I can hear the people talking") or Thomas quoting a Scottish friend of David Hume's ("‘Why, mon, David read a vast deal before he set about a piece of his book; but his usual seat was the sofa, and he often wrote with his legs up; and it would have been unco’ fashious to have moved across the room when any little doubt occurred.’"), but I'll content myself with quoting a terrifying passage quoted by Helen DeWitt, from whose paperpools post I was sent to the LRB:
It is possible to take too many notes; the task of sorting, filing and assimilating them can take for ever, so that nothing gets written. The awful warning is Lord Acton, whose enormous learning never resulted in the great work the world expected of him. An unforgettable description of Acton’s Shropshire study after his death in 1902 was given by Sir Charles Oman. There were shelves and shelves of books, many of them with pencilled notes in the margin. ‘There were pigeonholed desks and cabinets with literally thousands of compartments into each of which were sorted little white slips with references to some particular topic, so drawn up (so far as I could see) that no one but the compiler could easily make out the drift.’ And there were piles of unopened parcels of books, which kept arriving, even after his death. ‘For years apparently he had been endeavouring to keep up with everything that had been written, and to work their results into his vast thesis.’ ‘I never saw a sight,’ Oman writes, ‘that more impressed on me the vanity of human life and learning.’For the rest (including the "omnium gatherum of materials culled from more or less everywhere"), I refer you to Thomas's well-larded and thought-provoking essay.
The other day my wife asked me about the history of brook in phrases like "brook no opposition." What an excellent question, said I, and repaired to the OED, where I found the following story. The Old English strong verb brúcan (past tense bréac, brucon, past participle ȝebrocen) is historically the same as the German brauchen (which, however, has become a weak verb) and has the same meaning: 'to make use of, have the enjoyment of, enjoy' (as does their Latin cognate frui). How do we get from there to 'put up with'? Easy as pie: a specialized usage was the OED's sense 2, "To make use of (food); in later usage, to digest, retain, or bear on the stomach." And from citations like 1540 Thomas Raynalde, Roesslin's Byrth of mankynde II. ix. 142 "If she refuse or cannot brooke meat" and 1598 William Phillip, Iohn Huighen van Linschoten his discours of voyages into ye Easte and West Indies in Arber's 'Garner,' III. 26 "So fat that men can hardly brook them," we can clearly see the development to the modern sense (for which the first OED cite is 1530 Palsgrave, Lesclarcissement de la langue françoyse 471/2 "He can nat brooke me of all men").
And for the musty word bartizan "A battlemented parapet at the top of a castle or church," the OED offers this censorious etymology:
[In no dictionary before 1800; not in Todd 1818, nor Craig 1847. Apparently first used by Sir Walter Scott, and due to a misconception of a 17th c. illiterate Sc. spelling, bertisene, for bertising, i.e. bretising, BRATTICING, f. bretasce (BRATTICE), a. OF. bretesche, ‘battlemented parapet, originally of wood and temporary.’ Bartizan is thus merely a spurious ‘modern antique,’ which had no existence in the times to which it is attributed.]
The irreplaceable AJP sent me a link to Joanna Biggs's LRB blog post about the live translation event coming up in a couple of weeks at the British Museum. I'm sorry I won't be able to attend; it sounds like a lot of fun:
The translation, of a short story in French, is done in advance by two translators: the ‘live’ bit comes into play when each of them reveals their version sentence by sentence to the audience, the other translator and the novelist, for discussion and disagreement. The idea is that the sort of close reading you need to do to translate well will bring out aspects of the text that are rarely paid attention to.I don't suppose anyone has any context for "Walaïïï"?The challenge has been set by Alain Mabanckou – born in the Republic of Congo, educated in Paris, now based in LA – who has offered up a very short story about someone getting conned into buying an ill-fitting suit. He’s not much known here, but in France Mabanckou’s style, which loosens corseted French sentences with jokes, puns, slang and references to Albert Cohen’s Belle du Seigneur as well as Tati, the thrift shop in Barbès (‘les plus bas prix!’), has made him one of the most interesting, unpredictable and prize-laden contemporary French novelists. Sarah Ardizzone and Frank Wynne will be the ones perched on the sofa on 19 June, offering sentences that will be new to everyone apart from the chair, Daniel Hahn. The audience will have hand-outs of the French version and the two English versions as well as the panel to talk about ways of getting ‘Walaïïï, camarade!’ or the slightly baffling idiom ‘se mettre sur son trente-et-un’ into English. And there won’t be an exam at the end of it.
I knew little about Clarence Barnhart beyond his name (and that primarily as part of the collocation Thorndike-Barnhart), so I was considerably enlightened by Rulon-Miller Books' sales catalog page for the Barnhart Dictionary Archive, with its full biography and history of his lexicographical work. My attention was grabbed by the first two paragraphs:
Clarence L. Barnhart was arguably the most talented of all American lexicographers working in the 20th century. Like many brilliant men, he was a figure of contrasts. He could be formidably charming; he could also be arrogant, opinionated, self-interested, a perfectionist, and difficult to work with. That the Barnhart dictionaries did not attain the name recognition granted by the general public to the likes of a Merriam-Webster or a Random House dictionary was due in part to Barnhart’s personality, but even more importantly to his desire to remain independent of corporate structures. Throughout his career he chose to make dictionaries as he conceived them rather than be dictated to, a choice which changed the face of American lexicography, but which denied him, perhaps, the wealth and fame he might otherwise have achieved. Due to the changed nature of dictionary-making in the 21st century (with the new focus on corpus work, and the technologies which allow for that focus), Clarence Barnhart is likely to have been the last independent lexicographer working with the English language as a whole. Interestingly, it was his work, his innovation and foresight, which paved the way for the changes which are now rendering the old ways obsolete.I'm sure it's overstated (it is, after all, part of a marketing pitch), but the relationship with Bloomfield by itself would be worth an article—he was, after all, the Great American Linguist before Chomsky came along and usurped the title. The page is well worth the read; thanks for the link, Michael!Barnhart’s enduring friendship with the noted linguist Leonard Bloomfield must be recognized as one of the most important relationships in American education, as it was Barnhart who introduced Bloomfield’s theories to the dictionary world, and who subsequently merged modern linguistic theory with lexicography. The rise of modern linguistics fostered a scientific approach to the study of language in general, which resulted in better observation of both the oral and written language. Consequently, and largely due to Barnhart’s dogged pursuits, lexicography is now recognized as a subject field within linguistics itself.
I was shocked to look at the NY Times this morning and learn that Andrei Voznesensky has died. I now think of Voznesensky as an enjoyable minor poet, but when I was in college and studying Russian in the late '60s, he was the first modern Russian poet I came to love, and I retain the affection inspired by that discovery. I still have the copy of Ахиллесово Сердце (1966; cover) I bought at Foyles and carried with me on my trip to the USSR (inspiring envy in young Russians who had no way of getting a copy themselves) and the collection he graciously signed for me when he was in New York in the '80s, and I will never forget the shock and delight of first reading poems like Гойя, Баллада-диссертация ("Вчера мой доктор произнес..."), Параболическая баллада ("Судьба, как ракета, летит по параболе/ Обычно—во мраке и реже—по радуге"), and Антимиры. Now that I've read his major influences (notably Mayakovsky and Pasternak), not to mention a truly great modern poet like Brodsky, I can put my enthusiasm in perspective, but I'm still thrilled by the sonic delight packed into a line like "Смола, шмели" [Smolá, shmelí] ('resin, bumblebees') from Велосипеды. You can see a few seconds of him in his prime in 1964 in this clip; if anyone has better links, please share them. Вечная ему память.
Update. The Fortnightly Review has published my obit of Voznesensky, based on this post but longer, with more polish and less Russian.
