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Yosef Treller has a very interesting Facebook post (in Russian) that starts:

Я – то, что называлось в советское время “книголюб”, 60 лет покупаю, собираю, меняю, а в последние годы – продаю книги (чтобы купить другие, соответствующие моим нынешним вкусам)

I am what was known in the Soviet era as a “booklover”; for sixty years I have been buying, collecting, and trading books — and in recent years, selling them (in order to buy others that suit my current tastes).

He says that now, of course, you can get pretty much anything you want: “Хочешь Платона, Костанеду, Стругацких, Пастернака, Даниэлу Стил или, прости Господи, Армалинского – только плати” [you can get Plato, Castaneda, the Strugatskys, Pasternak, Danielle Steel, or — God forgive me — Armalinsky, you just have to pay]. But back in the day, from the ’60s through the ’80s, things were more interesting — booklovers had to go to a lot of trouble to find what they wanted, and those who had access to the desired books through connections could charge what the market would bear. He goes on to list the “white whales” that were in particular demand:
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Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett’s Guardian piece is one of those news stories that leave me filled with rage and wanting to smash things:

“All you need is a five-minute spot on a morning TV show,” a colleague told me recently. “Then everyone will buy your novel.” I tried to picture myself, with my horror of being filmed, in thick orange makeup, perched on a sofa in a brightly lit studio while trying to talk about how the French critic Hélène Cixous inspired me to want to write the first great ovulation novel. It sounded ridiculous for all involved.

Yet when you’re a writer, you are supposed to take every opportunity you can get. That was the attitude to news that Helen DeWitt had turned down the $175,000 (£129,000) Windham-Campbell prize on the basis of being unable to fulfil its promotional obligations, which included six to eight hours of filming. The prize, which this year was given to eight writers in recognition of their life’s work, is intended to give recipients time and space to work independently of financial concerns.

DeWitt is a critically acclaimed author, and her debut novel, The Last Samurai – published 26 years ago – is widely regarded as a work of innovative genius. Opinions on her recent stance are strongly divided: some have praised her principled refusal to play the self-promotion game that takes so much out of writers, while others have called her a spoilt, entitled nightmare. […]

Reading through DeWitt’s posts, a picture of a supremely talented writer emerges, one who has faced long periods of living hand to mouth, being out of print, tricky paths to publication causing untold stress, struggles with depression and executive dysfunction, and caring responsibilities. Many authors can empathise.

Unable to commit to the promotional work required, DeWitt says she asked the prize organisers for adjustments that they ultimately refused. According to the novelist Daisy Lafarge, this revealed an attitude to disability and chronic illness that is “impoverished and embarrassingly outdated”. “The prize’s refusal to meet her halfway exposes something I’ve found to be endemic in the book world,” says Lafarge, who adds that the art world is way ahead on facilitating the access and assistance needs of artists. In publishing “if you’re not able-bodied, your choices are to drop out or just grit your teeth”. Both are costly. […]

Yet this controversy doesn’t only highlight inclusivity issues in publishing. It’s also that writing no longer feels like the main job. Many writers are oddballs, and some are geniuses whose giftedness is arguably a form of neurodivergence. Artists such as that can be sensitive and difficult. They need uninterrupted time to create. They do not fit easily into the world of professionalised self-promotion that constitutes modern publishing. As DeWitt wrote in a blog post: “We can think of so many writers we admire for whom the whole thing would be unthinkable – off the top of my head, Dickinson, Proust, Kafka, Beckett, Pessoa, Salinger, Harper Lee, Pynchon, DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Ferrante.”

Why on earth would you dangle a large wad of money in front of someone you claim to believe is an important writer but make it contingent on their doing things no writer should be asked to do (though some, of course, are willing to)? Publicity is the business of publishers and salespeople; a writer’s job is to write. I’ve been a DeWitt fan since 2003 and have long been furious that she hasn’t gotten the support that should go along with the universal respect she commands; happily, as the end of the linked piece reveals, a “conservative university thinktank” has offered her a grant of $175,000 with no strings attached, and good for them, I say, even if they’re just trying to score points off the libs. (You can read DeWitt’s own detailed account at her blog.) Thanks, Eric!

My wife asked me about the word plan — was it related to plane? I had a vague idea that it was, that they were both from Latin plānus ‘level, flat,’ but I wasn’t at all sure, so I looked it up, and it turns out to be more complicated and interesting. The OED revised its entry in 2006, and the top sense is “An organized (and usually detailed) proposal according to which something is to be done; a scheme of action; a strategy; a programme, schedule” (first cite 1635 “In marshalling of our armies, and Battels, our moderne plans jump almost with those of the Ancient; yet our Sieges, beleaguring of townes, and instrumentes of war doe far exceede theirs”), while almost as early is “A drawing, sketch, or diagram of any object made by projection on a horizontal plane; esp. one showing the layout of a building or one floor of a building” (1664 “Andrea Palladio, to whom we are oblig’d for a very rare Collection of antique Plans and Profiles of all sorts of Buildings, design’d after a most excellent manner”); the etymology:

Partly < French plan drawing, sketch, or diagram made by projection on a horizontal plane showing the layout of a building, city, area, etc. (1547 in Middle French; 1545 as plant), drawing guiding the establishment of a building, or of a work which is to be realized (1563; 1538 as plant), set of measures adopted in order to accomplish something (1627) (< planter: see plant v.), and partly < French plan plane surface (1553 in Middle French), use as noun of plan, adjective (see plane adj.). Compare Italian pianta (a1529), Spanish planta (1600).

So it’s half plane and half plant. I like messy word histories.

I decided to try one of the few Veltman novels I hadn’t yet read, Райна, королевна Болгарская [Raina, princess of Bulgaria] — it didn’t sound too appealing, and in fact didn’t turn out to be very good, but it was short and eventful and taught me a fair amount of Balkan history, so it was worth it. The odd thing is how un-Veltmanlike it is — I think it’s the only one of his books I wouldn’t have guessed immediately was by him. It’s sort of a prequel to Светославич, вражий питомец [Svetoslavich, the devil’s foster-child] (see this 2013 LH post), which features Svetoslavich’s search for his father’s skull, which had been made into a drinking cup by the Pechenegs; this novel covers the last years of the life of his father Sviatoslav I and ends with his death at the hands of the Pechenegs. But it has none of the bizarreries and divagations of the earlier novel (and indeed everything else by Veltman) — it’s pretty much a straightforward Walter Scott imitation, fictionalizing the events described here and adding the obligatory romantic subplot involving the titular princess (I’m not sure whether Veltman invented her or plucked her out of some obscure chronicle). It appeared in Библиотека для чтения 59 (1843), and wasn’t published separately as a book — it seems to have sunk without trace in Russia, unsurprisingly. The interesting thing is that it became popular two decades later in Bulgaria when it was translated and turned into a play; the Bulgarians, then engaged in a long effort to gain independence from the Ottoman Empire with occasional help from Russia, were thrilled with this tale of their struggle against the Byzantine Empire almost a millennium earlier, also aided by the Russians (well, Rus).

The only interesting feature from a linguistic point of view consists of a few foreign words tossed in as spicy exotica, e.g. кула (Bulgarian кула ‘tower,’ from Ottoman Turkish قله [kulle]) and калугер ‘monk’ (cf. Macedonian калуѓер, from Greek καλόγερος) — on the latter, see this 2006 LH post featuring the rare English word caloyer.

ktschwarz reminds me that the NY Times has rebooted On Language:

Written memorably by William Safire for most of its run, the original column was a mainstay of the magazine for 32 years until 2011. Now that social media, online communities and contemporary political discourse are transforming language profoundly — and these new grammars and vocabularies are flowing into large language models that, slowly but surely, are becoming a dominant force — we think it’s high time to bring the column back. The primary writer will be Nitsuh Abebe. His first column published earlier this week, on the word “lethality.” That follows a string of great columns Nitsuh has written in recent months about the em-dash, the neologism “cope,” the suffix “-maxxing” and the reluctance people have to use periods in texts.

I had actually planned to write about it last week, but that “lethality” essay (archived) annoyed me by being so focused on the news of the day. The new one (archived), on “agentic,” is more to my taste, paying greater attention to word history:

There are various reports and they all seem to agree: The tech world is currently awash in the concept of agency. It is, more specifically, extremely into the word “agentic,” which peppers the language of the tech-associated, the tech-adjacent, the tech-adjacent-adjacent.

That’s “agentic” as in, you know, having agency — possessing the capacity “to influence and control outcomes through assertive individual action,” as the Oxford English Dictionary has it. The word holds a lot of meaning in computing, but Silicon Valley aspirants seem just as eager to apply it to themselves. They talk about being agentic people; sometimes they dress up the idea in a little rhetorical suit and talk about the Highly Agentic Individual. They are describing the kind of person who simply acts, assertively, to shape the world, rather than seeking approval or meekly following the herd. Candidates for tech jobs get asked if they’re agentic (good) or mimetic (yuck). On X, people debate whether the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, is in fact “the most agentic person alive.” One poster laments the way a cold can ruin your workday: “You won’t make any deals, you won’t be an agentic person. You’re milquetoast.” Another just needs an adequately agentic aide to help schedule medical appointments.

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David Oks’s essay on citations is not central to my interests, but I know there are lots of Hatters who do science and will probably have things to say; I myself found it extremely enlightening. I’ll quote the start and let you click through for the rest:

Here are a few headlines from the world of science. […] So scientists are submitting AI-generated papers; reviewers are using AI to assess them; obviously some amount of low-quality AI-generated content will end up getting approved and published. Well-regarded journals have been caught publishing papers with classic ChatGPT-isms like “here is a possible introduction for your topic” or “as of my last knowledge update.” But that’s not all. Many of those AI-generated papers are being cited by articles in other peer-reviewed journals: and many of those articles, unsurprisingly, appear to be AI-generated themselves.

It’s pretty well-known now that science is “drowning in AI slop.” In that regard, it’s not alone: AI slop is steadily infiltrating every school and workplace in the country. But there’s something about all of this that puzzles me.

I get why students, for example, would want to avoid doing homework. But I don’t really understand why scientists would want to avoid doing science. Or, rather, why they’re so eager to use AI to produce a huge number of shoddy papers. No one forced them to become scientists. I imagine that most people who work as scientists chose to do so out of something like love for the subject. So why are scientists using AI to produce and submit so much garbage?

I don’t think that the answer actually has much to do with AI. It has to do, instead, with the incentives that govern scientific institutions. You could boil it down to one word: citations.

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I’ve been saying things like “that’s how I roll” for quite a while now, and it occurred to me to wonder about the history of the phrase. As it happens, there’s a 2013 Stack Exchange post about it; most of the suggested answers are guesswork and contradictory, but there’s one that cites the OED:

The OED says it’s US slang originally in the language of rap and hip-hop. It’s sense VII.36.f. (and sense VII.36.e. is “Let’s roll”), under sense VII:

To move or convey on wheels or rollers, and related senses.

This is their first quotation of the phrase:

1991 ‘Hammer’ & F. Pilate (song title), This is the way we roll.

So I checked the OED, which does indeed have it as sense VII.36.f.:

intransitive. U.S. slang (originally in the language of rap and hip-hop). To act, behave (in a certain way). Frequently in that’s how (also the way) I (we, etc.) roll.

But it’s not clear to me that they’re deriving it directly from the sense “To move or convey on wheels or rollers,” and when I checked Green’s I found 4 (f) “in fig. use, to exist, to conduct one’s life”:
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Tom Johnson’s LRB review (Vol. 48 No. 6 · 2 April 2026; archived) of The Experience of Work in Early Modern England by Jane Whittle, Mark Hailwood, Hannah Robb, and Taylor Aucoin opens with a passage containing a goodly selection of little-known specialized terms:

Adam Smith​ began his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by arguing that the division of labour was the key to the prosperity of advanced economies. It made the production of goods far more efficient, allowing the creation of cheap commodities that could be enjoyed by everyone. ‘The woollen coat,’ he writes, ‘which covers the day labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen.’ He listed the shepherds, wool sorters, carders, dyers, spinners, weavers, fullers and dressers who ‘must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production’. The division of labour wove all these people together in unknowing co-operation, such that ‘the very meanest person in a civilised country’ had at their disposal better stuff than ‘many an African king, the absolute masters of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages’. Civilisation itself consisted in the miracle of specialisation.

Smith was far less interested in what the division of labour looked like in practice. His breezy lists of workmen elide the generations of clever hands and centuries of folk knowledge required to make that coarse woollen coat. To begin with, you needed to know a shearling from a gimmer lamb, or hire someone who did. In 1611 Henry Bankes employed two shepherds, Durington and Blackwell, to value some lambs in Yorkshire; it turned out he was overpaying by sixpence a head. Then you had to set your sheep in a pasture, and send someone, perhaps a young servant like Jacob Jackson of Hurworth in County Durham, to mark their ears so that you knew which were yours (theft was common), and paint them with tar to keep them warm through the winter and spring. In June they would be brought down from the pastures and washed in a river before being sent to the shearing men. If you couldn’t afford sheep of your own, you could go into the fields after the clip and gather the leftover scraps.

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Anatoly Vorobey has a Facebook post that starts with a reference to a video in which Oleg Lekmanov compares a bunch of clips of people reading aloud the first stanza of Pushkin’s “Анчар” (The Upas Tree; there are a number of English translations, e.g. A.Z. Foreman, Michael Allen) to see if they read the last word in the second line as “раскалённой” (raskalyonnoi, the normal reading in modern Russian) or “раскаленной” (raskalennoi, with e as in Church Slavic, to rhyme with the final word of the stanza, “вселенной” [vselennoi] ‘universe’). Anatoly says it seems to him this is a sort of intelligentsia shibboleth, with a snobbish preference for the Church Slavic as “correct” (he quotes a textbook to that effect), whereas he thinks both pronunciations have a right to exist — a conclusion with which I, naturally, concur. One of his commenters brings up English rhymes like rove/love, but this seems to me a different, though parallel, case.

In any case, the Pushkin quote led me to look up the word анчар (apparently first used in this poem), which according to Russian Wiktionary (citing Vasmer) is borrowed from Dutch antjar, itself from Malay ančar. Amazingly (to me), the OED has an entry (from 1885) for antiar ‘The Upas tree of Java, Antiaris toxicaria; also, the poison obtained from it’; there are no citations, but there is an etymology: “< Javanese antjar, antschar.” And upas itself (entry from 1926) is “< Malay ūpas poison, in the combination pōhun (or pūhun) ūpas poison-tree.” All roads lead to Malaya.

Stephen Fried’s fond reminiscence of Jim Quinn (Philadelphia magazine, 10/19/2020) came out over five years ago, but I just discovered it, and since Quinn is one of my language heroes (first touted just a few weeks into the existence of LH, reinforced in 2004, 2007, and 2013) I wanted to share it with y’all. I’ll quote the language-related passages, but he led an interesting life in general, so I recommend the whole thing:

Jim Quinn was one of Philadelphia’s finest, funniest, and smartest writers — of longform journalism, essays about food and language, and poetry for the first four decades of his career, and later of fiction as well. He was also, arguably, the city’s longest-living, longest-haired, and most prolific link to the best things about the 1960s, maintaining throughout his 85 years a sense of wonder and humor, political commitment, righteous indignation, and shrugging indifference to authority. […]

Quinn could write the most gorgeous sentences. But much of the joy of his reportage was his amazing attention to details that told the story better than he could. “He describes everything, yes everything, in most specific terms since euphemism is a word he has never heard,” said the New York Times Book Review in 1972 of his first major book, Word of Mouth: A Completely New Kind of Guide to New York Restaurants. […]

In his late 20s, Quinn was convinced by friends to return to college. In 1963 he enrolled at Temple University, where he got involved in campus politics and anti-war protests. […] He was, at the time, working toward his PhD in English literature — writing a dissertation on the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid, and lots of his own poetry. But editors who were fans of his food writing started reaching out with assignments. […]

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