I wanted to like this book
It does in fact "grapple with post-Soviet colonial 'otherness'" in a convincing and often enjoyable way; the desire to find out more about life in odd corners of the ex-USSR was largely what kept me going. Because the fact is that this isn't a very good novel. The narrator is more of an abstract of Suffering Womanhood than she is an actual woman (the fact that they feel compelled to translate her name in the blurb is a bad sign), the plot is basically one damn thing after another, and the translation is... serviceable, with the proviso that it occasionally slips below the level of acceptable English ("Suddenly I flushed as if I hadn't refreshed at all"; "I believed immediately him") and doesn't do a very good job with idiomatic usage ("How dare you say that, you hen!"). There's a section of notes, and God knows I'm a sucker for notes, but these are often odd or pointless (the text has "a jenny is grazing," and there's a note pointing out not only that a jenny is a female donkey but that "a male is referred to as a 'jack,'" as if the reader did not have access to an English dictionary; the city of Kurgan-Tyube is mentioned and footnoted "now called Qurghonteppa," although other cities go without similar updates; the translator for some reason points out, in a note on the Abkhazian city of Pitsunda, that "Abkhazia, a northern separatist region in Georgia, has been recognized as an independent state by Russia and Nicaragua," and at one point feels compelled to give the narrator a slap on the wrist: "The narrator is romanticizing—white markings have nothing to do with a horse's pedigree"). And there are some bizarre renderings of foreign terms; the Muslim greeting is given as "Salam Aleichem" (to which I guess the appropriate response would be "Aleikum Shalom"), and a truck used to transport donkeys "to be turned into soap" is said to be called by locals "Oswiencim" (which a dutiful footnote explains is Polish for Auschwitz, except that the Polish name is actually Oświęcim, and why are you translating the Russian into bad Polish instead of using the name English readers know?). Oh, and not only is the narrator nicknamed "Fish" but a mention of fish gets slipped into just about every chapter, to increasingly irritating effect.
I could go on, but I think I've gotten off my chest what needed to be gotten off. I wouldn't discourage anyone from reading this translation; it gives a valuable look at a slice of post-Soviet life, and others may have more tolerance for the heavily symbolic than I. (For a different, though not much more favorable, view of the book, with more plot description, see Lisa's review at Lizok's Bookshelf from back in April.) And I certainly don't want to discourage Russian Life from doing similar translations, which are much needed.
Addendum. I should add that my review is based on uncorrected proofs; I have not seen the final published version.
Stan Carey has another fine post at Sentence first ("An Irishman's blog about the English language") discussing John Honey's 1989 book Does Accent Matter? The Pygmalion Factor. He has some excellent quotes and anecdotes (one of which shows that Evelyn Waugh was horrible even as a teenager); I'll pass on this excerpt about how people were pressured to talk "properly":
There is little evidence that, in boys’ public schools at least, [RP] was systematically taught. New boys with local accents were simply shamed out of them by the pressure of the school’s ‘public opinion’. The prep schools, having pupils at an earlier, more formative age, were very important in this respect. In the decades immediately following 1870 there was a time-lag before non-standard accents died out among masters (and indeed headmasters) in the leading public schools. New appointees could be, and were, screened for accent. The boys’ reaction to that minority with ‘suspect’ accents who got through this screening depended upon their general effectiveness as teachers: a weak disciplinarian would find that his accent became another stick with which they would beat or bait him. In a popular man, respected for his teaching or sporting gifts, mildly non-standard speech forms were tolerated — even humoured — as part of the idiosyncrasies of a ‘character’.Apparently an RP accent was "among the main criteria for being a British army officer in the world wars of last century." Sheesh.
Jessie Little Doe Fermino Baird, whom I mentioned here five years ago and is the subject of the article linked here, has been working for almost twenty years to revive the Wampanoag (or, more correctly, Wôpanâak) language, and I am pleased to learn from a Boston Globe story by Laura Collins-Hughes that she has won a MacArthur Fellows "genius grant" of $500,000:
Baird, one of the principal authors of a developing 10,000-word Wampanoag-English dictionary, does not view her personal role in reviving the language as critical. Instead, she talks about the benefits of being able to speak the language of her ancestors. "The opportunity to hear what my fifth great-grandfather had to say, even though he’s gone, because he wrote it down, really is a powerful motivation," she said.In related news, Zvjezdana Vrzic is trying to revive Vlashki, the language of Istrian Vlachs: New York City Linguist Gives Dying Language In Croatia A Fighting Chance.She hopes to spend some of the money to hire an artist to illustrate some of the children’s books she has written in Wampanoag.
Lameen Souag, of Jabal al-Lughat, doesn't post often, but when he does it's always worth reading. His latest post is about the "Kouriya" language spoken near Timimoun, Algeria, described in Rachid Bouchemit's 1951 article "Le Kouriya du Gourara":
"Kouriya", it turns out, was the general-purpose name given locally to any Black African language - "L'unité du terme cache la pluralité des idiomes: Haoussa, Bambra, Foullan, Mouchi, Songhai, Bornou, Boubou, Gouroungou, Minka, Sarnou, Nourma, Kanembou, Karkawi, etc...", in particular as spoken by ex-slaves in the region. Following the abolition of slavery, these languages, no longer reinforced by the arrival of new slaves, rapidly fell into disuse; the new generation learned Arabic and Taznatit instead. By 1951, the author could find only seven or eight speakers of a "Kouriya" in Timimoun, and only two of them spoke the same language, namely Bambara.John A. Holm's Pidgins and Creoles: Volume 2, Reference Survey (Cambridge University Press, 1989) has a brief mention on p. 554: "Hancock (1977b: 387-389) points out some mixed African languages about which little is known except for their (former) existence and location. These include Kouriya, 'a variety of mongrel Sudanese dialects . . . spoken by slaves and their descendants at Gourara near Touat.'" Lameen suggests it might derive from Songhay koyra 'town, village'; other possibilities are mentioned in the comments.
According to an AP story, the British Library is making more than a quarter of its collection of handwritten Greek texts available online free of charge:
Although the manuscripts — highlights of which include a famous collection of Aesopic fables discovered on Mount Athos in 1842 — have long been available to scholars who made the trip to the British Library's reading rooms, curator Scot McKendrick said their posting to the web was opening antiquity to the entire world.Ancient texts "have to be carefully cracked open and photographed one page at a time, a process the British Library said typically costs about 1 pound ($1.50) per page." (Thanks, Bonnie!)
My pal Ken Robbins wrote to say he was "looking for a word to describe the psychological (semantic?) process whereby a word is drained of its meaning by mere repetition. Everyone (I think) knows the phenomenon. Say any word often enough and it begins to sound like...well, mere sound." I'm pretty sure everyone does know the phenomenon; at any rate I certainly do, and I had vaguely wondered if there was a name for it, but Ken's query prompted me to investigate, and it turns out it's called semantic satiation, a term coined, according to that Wikipedia article, by Leon Jakobovits James in his 1962 doctoral dissertation at McGill University. So now you know.
Addendum. I've had to close this because of persistent spammers. I don't know why a particular entry attracts persistent spam, but such is life. If you have a comment to make, e-mail me and I'll reopen it.
August von Haxthausen's Studien über die innern Zustände, das Volksleben und insbesondere die ländlichen Einrichtungen Russlands (1847-1852; Google Books), an account of his 1843 journey to Russia from the point of view of agricultural economics, is famous for its impact on the Russian intelligentsia—it jump-started the debate on the origin of the mir (commune), which so obsessed late-nineteenth-century Russia—so when I saw a used copy of an abridged English translation, Studies on the Interior of Russia
Now that we have settled down for the first time in a hostel in the Russian interior, I want to make some general remarks on the subject. The European inn was formerly unknown in Russia. Instead, Asiatic caravansaries were customary. These are large, empty, unfurnished buildings, where for a modest price the traveler can find shelter for himself and his animals but nothing more. There is no innkeeper in the real sense; beds are not to be had, and one has to provide one's own food. It is impossible to speak of a friendly reception by the innkeeper or of the service. There are still such caravansaries in the southern part of the Russian Empire, in Astrakhan and the Caucasian provinces. Throughout these areas there are inns without lodging, where one can get prepared meals and tea or, in the regions around the Black Sea, Turkish coffee. Formerly, when Russians traveled in the interior they had everything they needed with them — beds, provisions, etc. With the spread of European civilization in Russia, European-style inns are being introduced, but only very gradually. Even in Petersburg there is no hotel which one could compare in terms of comfort with an inn in a moderate-sized German city on the Rhine. Hotel Demuth and Hotel Coulon in Petersburg can hardly be ranked with a third-class inn in Germany in respect to elegance and comfort, even though they look like huge palaces from the outside. The beds and furniture are poor, I would say almost shabby. Very seldom is there a table d'hôte. If one wants to eat something in the hotel, it has to be specially prepared. Occasionally the owner leases the restaurant rights. One can hardly speak of service. Moreover, it is scarcely worth the effort to furnish an inn elegantly, since it would be appreciated only by foreigners and consequently would not be very profitable. The modern hotels in Petersburg and Moscow are, moreover, run exclusively by Germans, French, and Englishmen. The Russian merchant still prefers the Russian inns resembling caravansaries; as in former times the Russian aristocrat continues to take along his beds, etc. The very wealthy aristocrat takes with him even his cook and everything he needs. He makes himself at home in the inn and has his servants buy all the provisions.(I also created a Wikipedia article for Haxthausen, since, shockingly, he didn't have even a stub.)
By the way, I would like to extend my deepest thanks to the anonymous LH readers who were kind enough to send me the copies of Stalin's Children
Update. I hit "Post" just before the mail truck came; when I went out to get the mail, I found a couple of surprises in the mailbox, Viktor Shklovsky's Third Factory
The name of Tokyo until 1868 was Edo (江戸), pronounced /edo/. (Once upon a time, it was pronounced /yedo/, but we won't get into Japanese historical phonology just now.) That's not one of the more difficult foreign names; you'd think pretty much any English speaker with the slightest exposure to foreign languages would pronounce it correctly. And yet in Magic Tree House #37: Dragon of the Red Dawn
Now, I like the Magic Tree House series a great deal. It concerns two children, Jack and Annie, who get sent on adventures from a magical tree house that appears near their home whenever Morgan le Fay needs their help. They go back to times and places ranging from the Late Cretaceous period to Ancient Egypt to New York City in 1938 to... well, you get the idea. The books are well researched and written in a lively and engaging style, and my six-year-old grandson (who is reading them himself, but still, thankfully, enjoys being read to) is learning a lot from them that he probably wouldn't get from today's history-averse schools. But when I hit that "pronounced EE-doh," I got annoyed. I ignored it, of course, and read Edo with the correct pronunciation, but my grandson (who doesn't miss a thing) said "I think it's EE-doh." I said "I know that's what it says here, but it's wrong." He said "But that's how they say it on the CD!" I said "But it's still wrong. I lived in Japan, and I know." He, bless his heart, knows his Grandpa Steve is the next best thing to omniscient and took my word for it, but I would like very much for the publisher to correct the error for the benefit of all those young readers who do not have access to Grandpa Steve. So I decided to send the publisher an e-mail about it and suggest they change it to EH-doh.
Guess what? The children's department at Random House does not have an e-mail address, at least not one they're willing to make public. The publisher's contact page has e-mail addresses for most of their departments, but for kid's books they want you to send an actual letter to Children's Publishing, 1745 Broadway, 10th Floor, New York, NY 10019. As charmingly quaint as that is, I'm too lazy and impatient to do it. So I'll use my bully pulpit and holler at them from here: Yo, Random House! You're spreading falsehood! Do something about it! Sincerely, Grandpa Steve.
Oxford UP has published Jonathon Green's magnum opus:
The three volumes of Green's Dictionary of Slang demonstrate the sheer scope of a lifetime of research by Jonathon Green, the leading slang lexicographer of our time. A remarkable collection of this often reviled but endlessly fascinating area of the English language, it covers slang from the past five centuries right up to the present day, from all the different English-speaking countries and regions. Totaling 10.3 million words and over 53,000 entries, the collection provides the definitions of 100,000 words and over 413,000 citations. Every word and phrase is authenticated by genuine and fully-referenced citations of its use, giving the work a level of authority and scholarship unmatched by any other publication in this field.I want one. But the damn thing costs $450.00.
I'm reading a long story by Andrei Platonov (see my post on his novel Kotlovan); the story is called "Впрок" (Vprok, 'for future use/benefit'), and as far as I know has never been translated into English. Although it's very much of a piece with Kotlovan, featuring a naive narrator who wanders among villages and collective farms describing people and stories who horrify us but not him (a fanatic named Upoev let his wife and children starve because "he directed all his forces and desires toward care for the poor masses"), it actually managed to get published in 1931 in Krasnaya nov' [Red virgin soil], causing trouble for both Platonov and the journal (which was forced to print a "craven retraction," as Thomas Seifrid calls it): "Stalin is reputed to have written 'scum' in the margin of the story ... and to have said to Aleksandr Fadeev (later secretary of the Writers' Union), 'Give him a good beating—for future use.'" (From here.) I assume Robert Chandler and Olga Meerson will get around to translating it eventually, now that Platonov is in vogue.
But what I'm here to discuss is one word that isn't in even my largest Russian-English dictionaries. Our hero has wandered into a village that has not yet been collectivized and is asking an old man why he is sitting outside his hut grieving; the old man responds:
Да как же не горевать, когда у всех есть, а у нас нету! Все уж давно организованы, а мы живем как анчутки! Нам так убыточно!Dahl has anchutki (oddly, only in the plural), defining it as 'little devils'; fortunately, I found a mention in that marvelous repository of old Russian superstitions, The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in RussiaWell, how are you supposed to not grieve, when everybody has something, and we don't! Everybody else got organized a long time ago, but we live like anchutki! That way it's a loss for us!
:
Various groups of Old Believers were sufficiently convinced that they were living in the reign of the Antichrist, and thus in the last days of the world, that they were given to mass suicide by burning. The last case of this was in the late nineteenth century. 'Antichrist' even became a taboo word and was replaced by 'Antii' or 'Anchutka', which by a popular association of ideas also came to mean the Devil or a leshii (wood demon), or other demons of folk belief, in particular the bathhouse demon.On the other hand, Boris Uspensky says (in a Google Books snippet) it's derived from the given name Онисифор (Onisifor), which is from Greek Onesiphoros and has the popular form Анцифер (Antsifer). I guess there's no way to know for sure. Anyway, you can see a handsome picture of one at the Russian Wikipedia article (which does not discuss the etymology).
I was taught in school, half a century or so ago, that you had to use a possessive with a gerund (or "verbal noun"): I resented his saying that, not I resented him saying that. I never gave it much thought, but Mark Liberman has, and he posted about it a few days ago. He quotes the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage to the effect that both forms have been used for quite some time, occasionally by the same person in the same document (Ian Ballantine, in a letter dated Aug. 5, 1939, wrote both "in spite of the book being out of print for many years" and "in spite of the company's not having any intention of issuing a new edition"). In typically pithy fashion, MWDEU says:
From the middle of the 18th century to the present time, […] grammarians and other commentators have been baffled by the construction. They cannot parse it, they cannot explain it, they cannot decide whether the possessive is correct or not.So Mark did one of his Breakfast Experiments, checking several corpuses and presenting the results in a striking graph. His conclusions:
* The difference between writing and speech is very large.He has continued the investigation here, and I look forward to reading more about it; in any event, I'm glad to have been able to shed yet another unconsidered shibboleth from grammar-school days. Use the possessive or not; it's all good!
* Since about 1950, writing has apparently been moving in the direction of speech.
* There's some indication that spoken norms may also be changing, in the same anti-genitive direction.
* It's possible that there was a change in the anti-genitive direction in the late 19th century, perhaps held up by prescriptive forces (?).
Via a John Cowan comment to this post at Stæfcræft & Vyākaraṇa, I found this essay, "Don't Proliferate; Transliterate!" by Nick Nicholas, aka opoudjis (of Ἡλληνιστεύκοντος). It's a fascinating look at what Unicode takes account of and what it doesn't, what kinds of script will probably never be included (Akkadian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphic) and why ("standardisation for such scripts is hard, and the people who would do the standardisation don't need it"), how Greek epichoric scripts have been handled traditionally in various contexts ("Epichoric is Greek for 'local' (ἐπιχώριος), and the fact that epigraphers call local alphabets epichoric instead of local is the kind of turf practice you might expect from the industry"), and finally the issue of target transliteration script:
The choice of script to transliterate-not-proliferate into for Western scholarship was dictated by two principles: patrimony and accessibility. If you were a Slavonicist writing for other Slavonicists, or an Arabists writing for other Arabists, you would be expected to leave your Cyrillic and Arabic (or Syriac or Hebrew) untransliterated: that was the patrimony you were discussing, after all. Your target audience would be sure to already know Cyrillic and Arabic....It's fascinating stuff, and I urge anyone intrigued by the excerpts to go read the whole thing.If on the other hand you were discussing material in a script which did not make it to print, but was present only in the original sources (accessible to the scholarly republic only with difficulty), then it was your business to transliterate it out of the original script, into a script you deemed accessible—and which corresponded to your notion of the script's patrimony. Gothic was deemed part of the Germanic patrimony; so it was transliterated out of the long extinct and unfamiliar, Greek-like Gothic script, into the same alphabet used for Old English and Old Norse (with an addition or two). Slavicists rejected Glagolitic in favor of Cyrillic, as Glagolitic was not regarded as accessible enough, being restricted in printed use to a corner of Dalmatia....
In the late 20th century, the abandonment of Classical education means that you cannot expect a general linguist to have any fluency in reading Greek, and Greek is universally transliterated in generalist contexts (outside of traditional historical linguistics).
Fred R. Shapiro's regular "You Can Quote Them" feature for the Yale Alumni Magazine is always a pleasure, and this month's column has a spectacularly unexpected explanation for a familiar phrase:
Searchable collections of historical texts can lead to discoveries that transform our understanding of the provenance of certain words, phrases, and quotations. So it is with the term lunatic fringe.And so a clever pun became a boring cliché of political discourse.In the Yale Book of Quotations
[Of an international exhibition of modern art:] The lunatic fringe was fully in evidence, especially in the rooms devoted to the Cubists and Futurists, or Near-Impressionists.More recently, I searched for lunatic fringe in historical databases. To my surprise, I found many uses from before 1913—all in a very different sense from Roosevelt's. Here are a few:—Theodore Roosevelt, Outlook, March 29, 1913
"The girls!" exclaimed Miss Lizzie, lifting her eyebrows till they met the "lunatic fringe" of hair which straggled uncurled down her forehead.It appears, then, that Teddy Roosevelt was playing on an existing phrase. His usage was a metaphorical extension of an expression previously applied to bangs—evidently, bangs that were considered outré. Fringe is still used in Britain for bangs, but the usage has been abandoned for so long in the United States that lexicographers were completely unaware of the coiffure-related prehistory of lunatic fringe.—Oliver Optic's Magazine, February 1874
"LUNATIC Fringe" is the name given to the fashion of cropping the hair and letting the ends hang down over the forehead.
—Wheeling Daily Register, July 24, 1875
The "lunatic fringe" is still the mode in New York hair-dressing.
—Chicago Inter Ocean, May 24, 1876
The Russian word белок [belók] means a number of things, including 'egg white' and 'white of the eye' (it's based on the adjective белый [bélyi] 'white'), but the sense that concerns us here is 'albumen; protein.' The Russian Academy of Sciences has an institute devoted to studying protein, called, reasonably enough, Институт белка [institút belká], with белок in the genitive case: 'Institute of protein.' Now, it so happens that there is another word белка in Russian, though this one has the stress on the first syllable, and it is the nominative of the word for 'squirrel.' The Institute has unwisely allowed the English version of their web page to be done by automatic translation, and you can see the result here. (Via Anatoly.)
Update. It's been fixed now, but you can see a screenshot here.
A couple of minor word issues:
1) My wife made a delicious peach cobbler and asked me why such things were called "cobblers." Once I'd finished off my portion, I dashed to the OED and discovered that it cravenly included it as sense 4 under "One whose business it is to mend shoes" and didn't even try to justify the semantic development. The AHD sensibly separated the words, but had "Origin unknown" for the etymology. Even Wikipedia didn't venture a guess. The only attempt I've found is here: "Cobbler is made with fruit and chunks of dough, sort of a lazy-man's pie, and those chunks of dough, forming the top crust of the dessert, might be see[n] to resemble the rounded surface of a cobbled road." Well, OK, that makes sense. I guess it'll do for now.
2) Reading Anthony Lane's review of Neil Marshall’s new movie Centurion, I hit the sentence "Marshall offers his characters no such room for conversation, requiring them, instead, to gouge, behead, and hack anything remotely Pictish that hoves into view" and stopped dead. This from a writer who obviously prides himself on his style and a magazine that once gloried in its impeccancy! Hove is an archaic past tense, maintained in nautical usage, of the verb heave; we say "he heaved it up," but "the ship hove into view." As a staunch descriptivist, I shouldn't allow myself to say such things, but hoves strikes me as completely illiterate. As always, though, I am willing to be corrected; if any readers say it sounds fine to them, I will sigh and chalk my reaction up to old-fartism.
I am absolutely delighted to learn that Geoff Pullum's coinage eggcorn (which I wrote about back in 2004) has made it to the official word-hoard of the English language. There is now a draft entry (Sept. 2010) for eggcorn, n., 1. = ACORN n., 2. An alteration of a word or phrase through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements as a similar-sounding word. In allusion to sense 1, which is an example of such an alteration. Here are the citations:
2003 M. LIBERMAN Egg Corns: Folk Etymol., Malapropism, Mondegreen? (Update) in languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu (Weblog) 30 Sept. (O.E.D. Archive), Geoff Pullum suggests that if no suitable term already exists for cases like this, we should call them ‘egg corns’, in the metonymic tradition of ‘mondegreen’. 2004 Boston Globe (Nexis) 12 Dec. K5 Shakespeare's Hamlet said he was ‘to the manner born’, but the eggcorn ‘to the manor born’ has wide currency. 2006 New Scientist 26 Aug. 52/2 Eggcorns often involve replacing an unfamiliar or archaic word with a more common one, such as ‘old-timer's’ disease for Alzheimer's. 2010 K. DENHAM & A. LOBECK Linguistics for Everyone i. 13 Crucially, eggcorns make sense, often more than the original words.I got the good news from Ben Zimmer's post at the Log.
I quoted a brief poem by Charles Reznikoff back in 2003; I thought I'd provide a larger sampling, a couple of sections from his 1969 poem "Jews in Babylonia":
1
Plough, sow and reap,
thresh and winnow
in the season of the wind;
a woman is grinding wheat
or baking bread.
In the third watch of the night
the child sucks from the breast of its mother
and the woman talks with her husband.Plough, sow and reap,
bind the sheaves, thresh and winnow;
shear the sheep,
wash the wool,
comb it and weave it.Wheat and barley,
straw and stubble;
the cock crows, the horse neighs, and the ass brays;
an ox is grazing in a meadow or straying on the road
or rubbing itself against a wall
(a black ox for its hide,
a red one for its flesh,
and a white one for ploughing);plough, sow, cut, bind, thresh, winnow, and set up a stack.
4 The bread has become moldy
and the dates blown down by the wind;
the iron has slipped from the helve.
The wool was to be dyed red
but the dyer dyed it black.The dead woman has forgotten her comb
and tube of eye-paint;
the dead cobbler has forgotten his knife,
the dead butcher his chopper,
and the dead carpenter his adze.A goat can be driven off with a shout.
But where is the man to shout?
The bricks pile up, the laths are trimmed,
and the beams are ready. Where is the builder?To be buried in a linen shroud
or in a matting of reeds—
but where are the dead of the Flood
and where the dead of Nebuchadnezzar?
"The Rohonc Codex (pronounced [ˈrohont͡s] in Hungarian) is a set of writings in an unknown writing system." I take that description from the start of the linked Wikipedia article, which goes on to provide a thorough discussion of the history and features of the codex and attempts to translate it (pretty fruitless, since no one knows what language, if any, it's written in). I ran across this gem of obscure mystery in Shii's Best of Wikipedia page, where you will find many other interesting things in his Almanac of Wonders.
The fearsomely learned Conrad has sent me an excellent OED find, the long-forgotten word bridelope:
[late OE. brýdlóp, either:—*brýdhléap, or ad. ON. brúðhlaup, brullaup (Sw. bröllopp, Da. bryllup) wedding; cf. OHG. brûthlauft, -louft, MHG. brûtlouf, Ger. (arch.) brautlauf; f. OTeut. brûđi- BRIDE + hlaup- run, LEAP.]Unfortunately, Robin, the bride at the wedding I just got back from, was in too much back pain to do any running or galloping, but she was a real trouper, and I suspect the joy of the occasion more than made up for the discomfort. And Jim, known around these parts as jamessal, had a goofy smile on his face the entire time I was there and was clearly thrilled to be marrying her, as well he might be. The two of them are now off on their honeymoon, and I'm sure they carry the best wishes of the entire LH crowd with them.The oldest known Teutonic name for ‘Wedding’: lit. ‘the bridal run’, or ‘gallop’, in conducting the bride to her new home. See Grimm, Brautlauf: and cf. BROOSE ["A race on horseback, or on foot, by the young men present at country weddings in the north"]. ? Only in OE.
I felt a little trepidation setting out on a journey that required essentially sitting on buses for two complete days and spending the intervening days as an outsider in a vortex of family wedding preparation (I was staying with Jim's parents, Nathan and Lydia), but everyone was so genuinely welcoming I never felt a moment's awkwardness and was able to fully enjoy the food, drink, and good company. The food was amazing, especially the rehearsal dinner at Elements (an extensive tasting menu that left some diners defeated and asking for doggie bags, but of which I ate every bite); the drink was provided by Mattias Hagglund, the bartender at Elements and a friend of Jim's, who created concoctions for the wedding reception called Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, and Something Blue (I had the last-named, a mixture of Blue Goose vodka, curacao, and peach liqueur served in a martini glass, and it was so delicious it was only with the sternest self-discipline, and the memory of the effects of the previous night's alcoholic consumption, that I denied myself a second glass); and the company was so exhilarating I wish I could have spent much more time in it: Jim's uncle Ken Robbins (who was also staying in the house, and who turned out to be one of the few people I can enjoy talking with when hung over), Jim Haba and his wife Erica (an artist who works in tiles so vivid they made me wish for much more color in the built world around us), Kathryn Levy (whose excitement at finding a fellow Lorine Niedecker fan was such that she dropped her glass)... I know I'm forgetting other names, but the point is, it was a wonderful crowd well worth staying up till 2 AM for. Don't worry, I'm not about to turn LH into a social calendar, but it's not often I get to do things like this, and I wanted to record it. Oh, and there's even a language book involved: Ken gave me a copy of Wordly Wise
Totally not LH-related, but wedding-related and a lot of fun: Vanessa's Wedding Surprise. Warning: schmaltz!
But I wound up taking a later bus than expected and will have to defer a real post until tomorrow. I just wanted to reassure everyone that the wedding went off splendidly and I enjoyed myself thoroughly, I met interesting people and had a number of good conversations about poetry, language, and other exciting topics, and I was sent back home with new books and a bottle of scotch. And so to bed.
I keep waiting for Language Log to debunk this BBC News story by Katie Alcock—I mean, BBC News is notorious for bad science reporting, and the Loggers take delight in bashing them for it (see here and here for two of many examples)—but so far nothing, so I'll just toss it out here and see what people have to say. The story begins "The University of Haifa team say people use both sides of their brain when they begin reading a language - but when learning Arabic this is wasting effort. The detail of Arabic characters means students should use only the left side of their brain because that side is better at distinguishing detail." That sounds like classic overstatement/oversimplification to me, but I'll let somebody else sort it out; I have to get ready to go to New Jersey tomorrow, because frequent commenter jamessal is getting married to his lovely fiancée this weekend, and I'm heading down early to spend a few days before the ceremony sampling the ice cream they're producing for sale. Wish them well, and try to ignore whatever spammers infest LH during the next few days—I don't know whether I'll get a chance to clean them out before Sunday, when I return.
Oh, and if you like jazz and other forms of American roots music, check out The Daddy O'Daily, a brand new blog by my old pal Mike Greene, a fine musician, writer, and raconteur.
Update. See now Lameen's informed post on the subject.
I've been having an exchange elsewhere about the word gyp 'cheat, swindle,' and I am (with some trepidation) bringing it here in the hopes of having a productive discussion and perhaps learning a few things. I will lay out the facts as I know them and my attitude toward the word based on those facts; as always, I welcome correction from those who know more than I. What I do not welcome is moral posturing, so please keep it to a minimum. I think we can make the good-faith assumption that both I, your jovial host, and the commenters who have the good taste to frequent this establishment deplore bigotry in general and the persecution of Gypsies/Romá in particular. It's fine to suggest that the word is offensive for one reason or another, but please do not suggest that those who use it are therefore bigots and should feel bad. Reasonable people can have different understandings of the offensiveness of a given term. It is possible I may change my understanding based on what is said in this thread, but it will not be because of unsupported assertions, however vigorously stated. With that out of the way, here are the facts as I understand them.
1) Gypsies/Romá have been treated terribly ever since they first appeared in Europe in the fourteenth century. They were enslaved, expelled, branded, mutilated; their children were taken away; the Nazis tried to exterminate them (to quote the Wikipedia article, "Ian Hancock has estimated that almost the entire Romani population was killed in Croatia, Estonia, Lithuania, Luxembourg and the Netherlands"). Their sufferings have historically been reported less and taken less seriously than those of any other ethnic group of similar prominence; only recently has this begun changing (and one result of the change is the current disfavoring of gyp, as well as of Gypsy itself). It should go without saying that I would avoid doing anything that would cause pain to actual members of the group.
2) The word gyp is of unknown etymology. Most sources now say (with or without qualification) that it is derived from a colloquial shortening of Gypsy, and this is certainly a likely possibility, but nobody knows for sure. The OED (in a still unrevised entry) derives the verb from the noun, and says the noun is "perh[aps] short for GIPSY or for GIPPO ['A scullion, varlet,' from Old French *gipel, jupel (later jupeau), 'A short tunic worn under the hauberk']." American Heritage says "Probably short for Gypsy," which is a reasonable summary.
3) The word gyp is now widely considered offensive and avoided by those who try to avoid all forms of verbal offense. The exchange I mentioned at the start of this post came about because one person wrote that something seemed like "a jip," questioned his own spelling, and was told the spelling was gyp but that it was "not the preferred nomenclature," whereupon the first person looked it up, found it given as "American, back formation from Gypsy," and said "Well, there goes another word from my vocabulary." When someone said "the association with gypsies is so far removed from anyone's real life in the US that we're not actually doing anybody favors by getting rid of it," the person who had talked about "preferred nomenclature" responded that similar explanations had been given for condoning the use of the words "gay" and "Jew" in pejorative ways, and therefore "I couldn't really feel comfortable" using it. When I said that I didn't see it as in any way like "gay" and "Jew," he responded "even though I don't know anybody who identifies as a Gypsy or anyone with Roma ancestry (that I'm aware of), now that I know the derivation of the word it still feels like about the same thing to me. It's still maligning a group of people based on a stereotype of their culture/genetics, whether or not they're around to hear it."
And there's the rub: is it maligning a group of people? Even if it is derived from Gypsy (which is only a hypothesis), if the people who use it make no connection with the ethnic group and if members of the ethnic group are not offended or hurt by it, how can it possibly be considered harmful or offensive? I deplore the use of "gay" as a general term of disparagement ("That's so gay") and of phrases like "jew down" (for 'bargain down a price,' if anyone is unfamiliar with the usage), but that is because I know gay people who are personally hurt by the first and Jews who are hurt by the second, and I don't like people being unnecessarily hurt. But I do not know anyone who is personally hurt (as opposed to theoretically offended on behalf of theoretical others) by the use of gyp, and (as I put it in the original discussion, when persecution was brought up) "None of the people who persecute the Roma use the word, and none of the people who use the word persecute Roma." I dislike theoretical offense, something that is more and more common these days; I realize that history does not provide equilibrium but rather swings from one extreme to the other, and an era of complacent insensitivity (such as that preceding World War II, when even the most vile ethnic epithets were tossed around casually by otherwise decent people) was bound to be followed by one of exaggerated sensitivity, when people eagerly took offense on behalf of any possible victims, but I still don't like being told that some word is out of bounds not because any actual person is hurt by it but because someone has decided it might be hurtful to someone else.
A couple of points. Although I do not personally know any Gypsies/Roma, I had a friend in New York who was married to one and spoke Romanes herself (a rare accomplishment for a gadjo); she found the use of "Roma" by outsiders bizarre, and always spoke of "Gypsies" and said those she knew did the same in English. While we're on the subject, it amuses me that few of those sensitive outsiders who insist on the "authentic" term "Roma" have any idea of either its pronunciation (the stress should be on the last syllable, which is why I often write it Romá) or its status as a plural (the singular is Rom, or Rrom if you're really being authentic). And in the authentic ethnonym sweepstakes, I probably know more minimal pairs than any but a few specialists, thanks to my interest in languages and ethnicity; if you want to throw down, I'll see your Gypsy/Roma and raise you a Galla/Oromo, and I'll trump your Lapp/Saami with an Ostyak/Khanty. My point being that we are sinners all, in these matters, and it ill behooves anyone who isn't positive that they know every proper ethnonym in existence (and thus is almost certainly referring to some group or other "wrongly") to sneer at those who use a term they happen to know is disfavored.
So. 1) (If you are yourself a Gypsy/Rom) are you personally hurt by this term, or (in the more likely event you are not) do you know someone who is? 2) If you use the word gyp, do you think of it as a disparaging ethnic term? I welcome all discussion, as long as it is carried on in a civilized fashion; any flaming or trolling will be deleted, though I trust that won't be necessary.
Update. Based on the convincing comments of respondents below, I have decided I was wrong and gyp is genuinely offensive. I thank everyone who took part in the discussion and helped me come to that conclusion.
An Ask MetaFilter question led to an amazing result. The question was:
Is there a pun in Hamlet's first line in the movie Hamlet liikemaailmassa? The scene takes place in a kitchen where someone is slicing ham; Hamlet comes up, takes over, and cuts a large piece off for himself. As he does so he says something which is rendered in the English subtitles thus: "Ham … let me!". The actual dialogue is given in Finnish, though. Is there a pun in the Finnish as well? What is it?I responded "I am having no luck finding the quote in Finnish online, but I think the answer to your question is certainly 'yes.' It just doesn't make sense that the translator would wantonly introduce an obvious pun." But I was wrong, because (thanks to the detective work of Finnish MeFite keijo) it turns out that the Finnish text is "Kinkkua, anna minä," which simply means 'Ham, let me' and (as keijo says) "is not funny in any way in Finnish without the context. However, it is a brilliant pun introduced by Kaurismäki and not the translator, since most of the viewers will be familiar with the English translation." So Kaurismäki deliberately wrote an unfunny line in Finnish because of the effect it would produce in translation! I wonder if other writers have done this?
Mark Liberman at the Log has a post about a (re)coinage found in this Candace Buckner sports story for the Kansas City Star in a quote from high school lineman Shane Ray: "As a team, we don’t like that feeling of being underlooked..." The guy who sent Mark the link speculated that "underlooked" is a blend of "overlooked" and "underestimated," and Mark agreed—but pointed out that the OED has it with a figurative sense, "To miss seeing by looking too low," with a citation from over 200 years ago:
1802 BEDDOES Hygëia II. 56 Do they not underlook that sole essential condition to happiness, the inward state?
(I tried to check this with Google Books, but Google has apparently only digitized Volume I—could it be they don't realize there's a second volume?)
Mark asks "Is there a name for a coinage that re-discovers an old and rare word?" Commenters suggest "neo-con," "paleologism," "reologism," and "neopaleologism."
On page 167 of Terry Martin's The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939
And as an unrelated public service, I will mention that SAGE Journals Online is offering free online access back to 1999 until October 15, 2010. Enjoy!
Ben Zimmer of Visual Thesaurus has a post on some very early examples of what we think of as text-speak. He says that Allen Walker Read, in the course of his investigation of the origin of "OK," proved that it "had emerged out of a kind of 'abbreviation play' that was popular in the U.S. in the 1830s — OK originally stood for 'all correct' intentionally misspelled as 'oll korrect'":
Even before KTJ of UTK (Katie Jay of Utica, or Uticay) came on the scene in the United States, England had LNG of Q (Ellen Gee of Kew) and MLE K of UL (Emily Kay of Ewell), who starred in two tragicomic verses published in 1828 in the London-based New Monthly Magazine. You can read "Dirge, to the Memory of Miss Ellen Gee of Kew" here, and "Elegy to the Memory of Miss Emily Kay (Cousin to Miss Ellen Gee of Kew)" here. These verses (the second one in particular) traveled far and wide, appearing in newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. They very well may have played a role in the American fad for silly abbreviations that gave rise to OK.Zimmer reprints "Elegy to the Memory of Miss Emily Kay," with a "decrypted and annotated rendering" which can be very useful (it's not immediately obvious that "How soon so DR a creature may DK,/ And only leave behind XUVE!" means "How soon so dear a creature may decay,/ And only leave behind exuviae!"). And at the end he has a surprise:
But wait! Could this verse style have been an American invention after all? On the American Dialect Society mailing list, Joel S. Berson provides an example that uses many of the same types of abbreviation play, published in U.S. newspapers in 1813 — a full fifteen years before Miss LNG and Miss MLE K. The hunt continues...The 1813 example begins "Come listen to my DT, all those that lovers B;/ Attune your hearts to PT, and read my LEG."
Occasionally in my reading I come across mentions of people who seem significant beyond the sparse traces they've left in the historical record, and when they have a connection with literature I sometimes try to memorialize them here. Such a case is the couple Valentin Osipovich (or Iosifovich) Stenich (a pseudonym—his birth name was Smetanich) and his wife Lyubov Davydovna (née Faynberg or Feinberg). Valentin was born in 1897 and was probably shot in 1938; Lyuba is given the dates 1908-1983 here, but (according to the Russian Wikipedia linked to her husband's name) the KGB said she was 33 in 1937, which probably is more realistic. They were both translators, as were so many writers not in favor with the Bolsheviks; he (after writing poetry praised by Blok) translated both Dos Passos's The 42nd Parallel and parts of Joyce's Ulysses (according to Geert Lernout's The Reception of James Joyce in Europe, "There are rumours that he had translated the whole novel, but his archive was confiscated when he was arrested"), and she translated Maeterlinck, Sartre, and Brecht, among others. But more important is their humanity. In her second book of memoirs (translated as Hope Abandoned
(eyes' eyes open,understanding; she laughs softly)"drôle homme!"(then with a,to myself,completely new part of herself;a secret a luminous — and scarcely which might dare to recognize its own existence — tenderness unadventured,lonely;not with ideas not through ideals nor by comrades by a million or a billion or innumerable or humanity explored)"comme mon mari"After Stenich's death she married the screenwriter and director Manuel Vladimirovich Bolshintsov (1902-1954). She was also a friend of Anna Akhmatova, who often stayed with her when visiting Moscow.
It enrages me that good people like this, utterly harmless to any state, were ground casually underfoot by the Soviet regime, simply because it needed an endless supply of enemies and victims and the name Stenich wound up on their list. It's easy to talk about "millions of victims" and feel an abstract horror, but it's important as well to remind oneself of the lived reality of that victimization for all those real people, people much like you or me. And this is why I urge you all to read Nadezhda Mandelstam's memoirs if you haven't already.
