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Via Laudator Temporis Acti:

Letter of Edward Lear to Evelyn Baring:

Thrippsy pillivinx,

Inky tinky pobblebockle abblesquabs? — Flosky! beebul trimble flosky! — Okul scratchabibblebongibo, viddle squibble tog-a-tog, ferrymoyassity amsky flamsky ramsky damsky crocklefether squiggs.

Flinkywisty pomm,
Slushypipp.

Beebul trimble flosky indeed! You can see the autograph letter at the link. It must have been fun to be a friend of Lear’s.

Another word that keeps popping up in our reading of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet (see this post) is gymkhana, and eventually I thought to investigate it, since I was fuzzy about both meaning and etymology. Wiktionary says:

From Hindustani گیند خانہ (gendxānā) / गेंदख़ाना (gendxānā, “racquet court”), from گیند / गेंद (gend, “ball”) + خانہ / ख़ाना (xānā, “court”). Influenced by gymnastics and gymnasium.

I’ve probably learned that before, but the fake gymnastics connection makes it hard to remember the true origin! And I think the Raj-related meaning is better explained in the OED entry (from 1900):

Originally Anglo-Indian.

‘A place of public resort at a station, where the needful facilities for athletics and games of sorts are provided’ (Y.). Hence (esp. in European use), an athletic sports display. Now spec. a meeting at which horses and their riders take part in games and contests; also a competition designed to test driving skill. Also attributive, as gymkhana club, gymkhana meeting.

1861 [‘The first use of it that we can trace is (on the authority of Major John Trotter) at Rurki in 1861, when a gymkhana was instituted there’.—Y.]

1877 Their proposals are that the Cricket Club should include in their programme the games, etc., proposed by the promoters of a gymkhana Club.
Pioneer Mail 3 November
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I was surprised the first citation was so late; I’ve antedated it to 1854 (“The Gymkhana opens to-morrow, and a goodly meet is expected to take place, weather permitting”), but I got discouraged from trying to take it further back because the metadata on the alleged pre-1860 hits at Google Books is so terrible.

Back in 2020 I posted about the etymology of pedant; now I offer a very interesting review by Clare Bucknell (NYRB, May 14, 2026; archived) of On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-It-All by Arnoud S. Q. Visser. (You can see the book discussed at this Overthink YouTube video, hosted by Ellie Anderson and David Peña-Guzmán; Visser shows up at the 20:14 mark.) Herewith, as usual, some excerpts to whet your appetite:

In 1930 the poet and classicist A.E. Housman published the final volume of his edition of an obscure astrological poem by the Roman author Manilius. He had labored on the project for almost thirty years. All five of its volumes, he wrote, “were produced at my own expense and offered to the public at much less than cost price; but this unscrupulous artifice did not overcome the natural disrelish of mankind for the combination of a tedious author with an odious editor.” Housman did not mind being thought a pedant, out of touch with what “mankind” tended to relish. In fact he played up to it. His introduction to the last volume is full of needling corrections and unpleasantries, aimed both at rival Manilius scholars (“The corrections of Ellis were rather more numerous, and one or two of them were very pretty, but his readers were in perpetual contact with the intellect of an idiot child”) and, more unfairly, at the ancient author himself, for having been an incompetent astrologer. At the end he describes spotting a misprint (“rustling” for “rusting”) in a poem by Walter de la Mare that he declined to correct:

If I had been so ill-advised as to publish my emendation, I should have been told that rustling was exquisitely apt and poetical, because hedgerows do rustle, especially in autumn…and I should have been recommended to quit my dusty (or musty) books and make a belated acquaintance with the sights and sounds of the English countryside. And the only possible answer would have been ugh!

It’s hard to think of anyone who better answers to our contemporary notion of the pedant than Housman at his classical labors. But our understanding of pedantry, denoting the sticklerishness of academic specialists and grammar obsessives, is a relatively narrow one. […] In his lively cultural history, the Dutch scholar Arnoud Visser gathers a wide range of objectionable intellectual behaviors under the pedantry umbrella: debating aggressively in public, teaching in an obnoxious manner, neglecting one’s wife, dressing badly, quoting poetry at parties. The only constant across different time periods and milieus is that no one has wanted to be accused of it. Visser describes pedantry as “the excessive use or display of learning” (“excessive” according to shifting historical criteria) and potential pedants as those “who pursue learning and cultivate the mind”: professionals and amateurs, specialists and dilettantes, men and women. Medieval schoolmen worrying over Aristotle could be pedants; so could cultivated female salonnières in seventeenth-century Paris.

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I offer you a 25-second clip of a man telling a story. (I used TinyURL because the original URL would provide too much of a hint.) This is from an old LH post, so if you’ve been here longer than two decades you might have encountered it before! But probably not.

Addendum. I’m told that when you open the link you can see the URL. Rats. Don’t look!

Steven Mithen (/maɪðən/), a British archaeologist seen in these parts a couple of years ago, published a book called The Language Puzzle: How we Talked Our Way Out of the Stone Age that was recently reviewed in the LRB by Francis Gooding (Vol. 48 No. 7 · 23 April 2026; archived), and even though you won’t learn anything new and exciting, it’s a useful roundup of ideas on the topic. Some excerpts:

Saussure steered linguistics away from questions about the beginnings of language: for him it was a red herring, since words take meaning only in relation to one another, within the boundaries of their histories. The study of words can’t illuminate what came before words: there is no thread to be found in language which would help us trace human speech back to the moment of its emergence. ‘No society … knows or has ever known language other than as a product inherited from preceding generations, and one to be accepted as such,’ Saussure says in Cours de linguistique générale (1916). ‘That is why the question of the origin of speech is not so important as it is generally assumed to be. The question is not even worth asking; the only real object of linguistics is the normal, regular life of an existing idiom.’

Yet whether it is worth asking or not, the question of the origin of language never goes away. It remains one of the most fundamental mysteries of human evolution. So far as we know, true symbolic language is unique to the human species. (On the most generous reading it may go a bit further back in the human lineage. And there is an open question about cetaceans – it was recently discovered that the structure of humpback whale vocalisations is remarkably similar to the organisation of human speech.) And it continually recurs as the most probable explanation for the differences between human behaviour and that of all other living things. If you ask why we have been able to make pyramids and spaceships and musical instruments, while no other animal has managed anything of the sort in three billion years, the answer will always cite language as a decisive factor. So the question of how we alone came to be blessed – or cursed – with words is not to be lightly dismissed. But it does come with a serious difficulty: language is an evolved feature of the human organism, but words don’t fossilise like bones. How then to find the missing links?

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Shaun Brady’s NY Times story “She’s Blazing a Trail for a Traditional Korean Zither in Jazz” (archived), about “Seoul-born gayageum player DoYeon Kim,” of course interested me as a jazz fan, but I was also (more Hattically) intrigued by the word gayageum. Wikipedia says:

The gayageum or kayagum (Korean: 가야금; Hanja: 伽倻琴) is a traditional Korean musical instrument. It is a plucked zither with 12 strings, though some more recent variants have 18, 21 or 25 strings. It is probably the best known traditional Korean musical instrument. It is based on the Chinese guzheng and is similar to the Japanese koto, Mongolian yatga, Vietnamese đàn tranh, Sundanese kacapi and Kazakh jetigen.

Ah, I thought, the koto is familiar (and indeed it’s the only one of those terms that’s in the OED, dating from 1795: “The koto bears a strong resemblance to our dulcimers, having the number of strings, which are struck with sticks”). Wiktionary says:

Literally “zither of Gaya,” referring to the legendary origin of the instrument in the kingdom of Daegaya.

Sino-Korean word from 伽倻琴, from 伽倻 (“Gaya confederacy”) + 琴 (“zither”).

The 琴 link tells us the same character is used for Mandarin qín/Cantonese kam and for the Japanese word with the Go-on (Chinese-based) reading ごん (gon) and the Kun (native) reading こと (koto) as well, thus tying the East Asian zithers together.
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Another Japanese question! My Mizoguchi retrospective reached 1954 and Sansho the Bailiff, which I’d somehow managed never to see, and I was as impressed as I’d expected to be — Kinuyo Tanaka is as resplendent as ever, and the ending is powerfully moving. But I’m here to ask about the title, the original of which, 山椒大夫, is universally transliterated Sanshō Dayū (and in fact the movie is so known in many languages, and according to Wikipedia in the United Kingdom and Ireland). Imagine my surprise, when I went to look up the word translated as ‘bailiff,’ to find that it’s actually /tajuː/! What’s going on here?

A separate question is why it’s rendered ‘bailiff,’ which doesn’t seem to equate very well to any of the meanings listed at Wiktionary, like “high ranked courtier, particularly officers in the 5th rank (五位)” and “head of shoku(職) or bō(坊), administrative departments of the imperial court,” but since we’re talking about positions that have long ago fallen into desuetude (and for which, unlike “active privy councillor” for действительный тайный советник, there is no time-honored English rendering), there’s no point trying to be too exact. And I see from the OED (1885 entry) that there’s a sense “Used as the English form of the title of various foreign magistrates; e.g. the French bailli, and German Landvogt,” so maybe it’s a good rendering after all.

Update. It turns out that in the title of 祇園囃子/Gion Bayashi/A Geisha, the “bayashi” is actually hayashi, which proves DM’s suggestion that what’s going on is rendaku across word boundaries, which I didn’t know was a thing. So Gion Bayashi is just like Nihonbashi = Nihon + hashi, except that it’s written as two words, just for the sake of confusion. They could at least put a hyphen in there…

I just watched the film Ugetsu for the first time in many years, as part of my Mizoguchi retrospective, and found it just as great as I remembered (starring both Machiko Kyō and Kinuyo Tanaka — the only such film, as far as I know, although Tanaka later directed Kyō in The Wandering Princess). As every schoolboy knows, it’s based on Ugetsu Monogatari, “a collection of nine supernatural tales first published in 1776”; Wikipedia explains the title thus:

The word Ugetsu is a compound word; u (雨) means “rain”, while getsu (月) translates to “moon”. It derives from a passage in the book’s preface describing “a night with a misty moon after the rains”, and references a Noh play, also called Ugetsu, which also employs the common contemporary symbols of rain and moon. These images evoked the supernatural and mysterious in East Asian literature; Qu You’s Mudan Deng Ji (Chinese: 牡丹燈記; a story from Jiandeng Xinhua, one of Ueda’s major sources), indicates that a rainy night or a morning moon may presage the coming of supernatural beings. […] Tales of Moonlight and Rain is the most common English translation; other translations include Tales of a Clouded Moon and Tales of Rain and the Moon.

I think it was wise to keep Ugetsu as the title in English-speaking lands — it’s mysterious and memorable. (Other languages seem to mostly translate it; in Russian, for example, it’s Сказки туманной луны после дождя, ‘Tales of a misty moon after rain.’) My question is, what do Japanese speakers understand by the title? Wiktionary has two definitions for 雨月 [úꜜgètsù], ‘the moon unseen due to the rain’ and ‘the fifth month in the lunar calendar,’ neither of which corresponds to the versions in the Wikipedia article. I guess the ‘rain-moon’ collocation could be used in a variety of ways, but I’m curious what it normally means to the bearers of the language.

Also, I looked up that Noh play, and it sounds right up my alley; not only do the old couple ask the traveler Saigyō to compose the first lines of a poem for which they provide the continuation, but this is the finale:

The old shrine guard possessed by Sumiyoshi Myōjin (nochi-shite) appears, praises the virtues of waka poetry, and dances. Stating that a vast range of phenomena in the world is the source of waka poetry, the deity ascends to heaven, and the shrine guard returns to his normal self.

That’s what I call theater!

This week’s NYT T Magazine has a surprisingly interesting How to Be Cultured section that has personal picks in various categories like film, art, food, and so on. In the literature pages is The Poems You Should Know by Heart; the first, “Prayer” by Galway Kinnell, chosen by Major Jackson, was new to me, and I liked it enough to bring it here:

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.

Jackson says:

I typically say Kinnell’s words at the start of my day, as I’m pedaling a traffic-laden path to my office. The poem encourages a calm acceptance of the day’s events but also wants us to embrace the misapprehension and oblivion of life, to avoid probing too deeply for answers to inscrutable questions. I admire what Kinnell does with only 14 words; the repetition of ‘what,’ ‘that’ and ‘is’ would seem to limit the poem’s sentiment but, paradoxically, the poem opens widely to contain all manner of human experience. The three ‘is’es in the middle line give it a symmetry that makes its message feel part of a natural order, and even more convincing. Thanks to the skillful punctuation, pauses and staccato rhythm, a tonal quality of interior reflection emerges. Much like a haiku, it continues after its last words, lingering like the last note played on a piano that slowly fades.

The three successive ises are indeed impressive.

Decades ago I got a copy of the old Penguin edition of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by Danilo Kiš for $2.95, probably at the Strand (the currently available edition is selling for $61.54 at Amazon); the other day my eye lit on it and, in the mysterious way these things happen, I thought “Why don’t I finally read that?” So I did, and while I enjoyed it, I wish I’d read it back in the ’90s, when I was deeply interested in the Balkans and reading people like Ivo Andrić and would probably have appreciated it more.

The problem… well, let me quote the first paragraph of Dubravka Juraga and M. Keith Booker’s “Literature, Power, and Oppression in Stalinist Russia and Catholic Ireland: Danilo Kiš’s Use of Joyce in A Tomb for Boris Davidovich” (South Atlantic Review 58.4 [Nov. 1993]: 39-58):

Danilo Kiš belongs to a group of modern innovative writers who emerged in Yugoslavia during the sixties and seventies after a long period during which socialist realism had been the dominant mode of writing. His book A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, published in 1976, is a good example of the changes, both thematic and stylistic, produced by the new wave of literary experimentation in Yugoslavia at that time. A Tomb consists of seven stories so closely related that the book is rightly considered a novel-and indeed the Serbo-Croatian original bears a subtitle that translates as “Seven Chapters of the Same Narrative.” These “chapters” feature a variety of characters, most of whom are linked by their involvement with the Russian Revolution and its Stalinist aftermath, an involvement which, for most of them, leads to dire consequences. Indeed, A Tomb is largely an attack on Stalinism. However, it is also a technically innovative work that explores a number of fundamental aesthetic issues. For example, the book is highly allusive, with frequent references to a variety of literary sources, including James Joyce, the brothers Medvedev, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, medieval French texts, and many others.

The thing is that back when I bought the book I didn’t know much about that stuff; now, after many years of immersion in the history and literature of the Russian and Soviet 20th century, I’m more familiar with Stalinism than I’d really like to be, and Kiš’s lively and ironized fictitious biographies seem a bit artificial and stale to me after reading Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, and other direct witnesses, not to mention a novel that is quite comparable in many ways but (to me) considerably more powerful, Victor Serge’s The Case of Comrade Tulayev (see this 2011 post).

That said, his writing is quite lively, and I’ll close with an excerpt I particularly enjoyed, from the title (and longest) chapter:
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