languagehat.com

Cal Revely-Calder (who has an interesting Three Things substack) writes about faces in the New Yorker (archived); I was enjoying its brio and historical tidbits, but when I got to this passage I knew I had to post it:

Yet there’s another side to this coin. Our vocabulary also speaks of invention, even artifice. The English word “face” derives from the Latin facies, implying a created form; so does the French visage, from videre, suggesting something seen from without. “Mask,” “masque,” “mascara,” “maquillage,” and their European relations seem to be etymologically linked, and carry long-standing associations with concealment, distortion, pretense. For Socrates, the art worth prizing was the cultivation and preservation of natural beauty; we’ve happily overwritten it with what he treated suspiciously as kommōtikē, the art of changing how one looks. Even “person,” along with “impersonation” and “personae,” derives from persona, a theatrical mask through which classical actors spoke. The cultural historian Hans Belting suggested that faces and masks were conceptually inseparable: we shouldn’t think of one as “real” and the other as “fake”—one as the thing we have and the other as the thing we temporarily don. Life, he wrote, was fully “a perpetuum mobile,” an “expressive drama,” in which our faces resolve into one legible position, one legible role, then reassemble themselves into the next. We make them up, in every sense.

I was suspicious about “the Latin facies, implying a created form,” but it seems to be true; Wiktionary says:

The term faciēs is to faciō as speciēs is to speciō, literally meaning “a make, imposed form”.

(face): Compare typologically Czech tvář, Polish twarz [both ‘face’] (<< Proto-Slavic *tvarь, akin to *tvoriti)

All of which was new to me, and may be new to you.
[Read more…]

Jennifer Szalai reviews for the NY Times (archived) a new biography of a remarkable man:

George Forster is one of the most fascinating figures you have probably never heard of. He was a naturalist, a humanist, an explorer and a revolutionary. His intellectual and emotional journey began in 1772, when he was still a teenager. For three years and 18 days, he sailed on Capt. James Cook’s second voyage to the South Seas, a young man both enthralled and horrified by what he saw.

The 17-year-old Forster had been recruited to the trip by his father, Reinhold, a Lutheran pastor with a bad temper and scientific ambitions. Reinhold and George collected shells, dried plants and animals preserved in alcohol. George made pencil sketches and watercolors. The journey was treacherous, but he delighted in the lush landscapes and the many islanders they encountered. What appalled him was the behavior of his fellow Europeans.

Forster is the vibrant subject of Andrea Wulf’s “The Traveler,” a lively new book that hums with her characteristic verve. Wulf first encountered Forster’s name while researching previous books on the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and the early German Romantics. She was intrigued. Who was this 18th-century man who criticized an “unfair difference between the sexes” and promoted an early concept of human rights? A gifted linguist, Forster also noticed connections between the languages of the South Pacific, developing a theory of Polynesian migration that would be proved some 200 years later. He became enamored with the French Revolution and tried to bring it to Germany. “The Traveler” thrillingly revives the forgotten life of this “liberal thinker far ahead of his time.”

I have bolded the bit that makes it Hattic, but really, the whole thing is worth reading. Here’s another snippet:

When Cook’s men encountered resistance, they would speak of intransigent natives. Forster, however, not infrequently empathized with islanders who tried to defend themselves. Imagine that a bunch of strangers arrived on one’s shores and started waving guns around while making demands: “Surely from all appearances these people had a right to look at our men as a set of invaders.”

One of those people I wish I could meet. (His name, however, He was born George, but his name is now more appropriately often given as Georg Forster.)

I liked Talia Felix’s Etymonline post about A.1. Sauce so much I thought I’d share it; it’s a nice bit of philological/historical investigation:

In personal curiosity I was looking at a webpage about the history of H.P. Sauce. The page also included a history of A.1. Sauce, which some people evidently think tastes similar. It claimed that this latter sauce was invented by the chef of King George IV and that the king himself gave it the name of “A-1.” While I felt an initial burst of excitement – I’m a big fan of George IV or “Prinny” as he was long known – I also had some skepticism. Prinny died in 1830, several years before our first attestation of A-1 as slang (1837, in Charles Dickens). And I’ve read Aspinall’s collection of Prinny’s letters – A-1 doesn’t sound like the way Prinny talked, even when he was being informal (drunk). Likely he’d have favored a French word or something out of Grose: elderly monarchs aren’t known for being on top of slang trends.

I started looking on Newspapers.com for some indication that A.1. Sauce was really that old. Almost immediately I turned up an advertisement from 1881 where the company’s own product description said it was invented in 1862 for the International Exhibition, and that the Chief Royal Commissioner was the person who called it A.1.

So where did all this stuff about George IV and the sauce being from the 1830s come from? Well the rest of my day got spent trying to untangle that. Short version is: none of that Prinny stuff is correct; but because Wikipedia got hold of it, it’s hopelessly all over the place now, and all your AI answers will say it’s true. It looks to have resulted from perhaps legitimate confusion (or perhaps deliberate exaggeration) of certain facts.

Click through for the details, which can have their own interest; I particularly like this parenthetical:

(Note that most sources say the International Exhibition was in South Kensington; but one of the entrances was at Hyde Park Corner and another required crossing Hyde Park. Maps of the exhibition show the “refreshment rooms” were near the entrances by the park.)

Always check maps!

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned, my wife and I have watched a lot of British police procedurals, so we’re familiar with the slang phrase stitch up, defined by Green (sense 3) as “(UK Und./police) of the police, to incriminate a person in order to ensure a conviction by planting evidence, faking confessions etc.; also in non-police use” (first citation 1970 [UK] G.F. Newman Sir, You Bastard 127: Your confederate has just about stitched you up). My wife asked me what the underlying metaphor was: stitching someone into a bag? Green doesn’t say explicitly (though under the general heading stitch up v. he has the bracketed [sewing up a garment neatly and conclusively]), but I found a discussion at the Stack Exchange English Language & Usage site; the question is specifically about “stitched up like a kipper,” so the answer that seems most useful starts with the kipper:

I’m not convinced it’s a “mixture of similes”. I can’t find any relevant references to like a kipper prior to about 1970, and I think when it did come in about then, it started as South London slang.

So I’m inclined to credit the explanation given here, that it’s a reference to the the extra wide tie called the ‘kipper’ that became popular around then. Thus called partly because the original designer was Michael Fish, and partly because of the tie’s shape.

On the metaphorical allusion to kippers the foodstuff, I’d note that they’re pretty unrecognisable as “fish” once they’ve been split and smoked. They’ve been well and truly done over.

Also note that to have a stitch on someone was (now obsolete) British slang for to bear a grudge. Which is probably where the later slang stitch someone up came from (it means to “frame” someone – falsely make it appear they’re guilty).

OP’s more general definition (to trick someone) is increasingly common lately, but I think with or without “kipper”, most usages still relate to being (usually falsely) made to appear guilty.

Does that seem plausible to others? And is anyone familiar with the ‘bear a grudge’ usage?

Nitsuh Abebe’s latest “On Language” column (archived; see this post) is on the word frictionless, which is not particularly interesting in and of itself; I was skimming along:

“Frictionless” used to be an intensely physical word: It first thrived in the late 1880s, when the engineers of the Second Industrial Revolution were scrambling for new lubricants, bearing designs and low-friction alloys to keep factory machines from grinding themselves to bits.

Today’s use, though, comes from computing, in which “friction” is anything that stands between a user and the completion of a task — whether it’s learning complicated system architecture or having to click a single additional “OK” button to order shoes. Removing those obstacles was, for a while, the tech world’s grand selling point.

…when I got to this:

These complaints [about “the dream of a frictionless existence”], funnily enough, echo the oldest use of “frictionless” cited in the Oxford English Dictionary — from an 1848 satirical poem, which mentions “a brain cool, quite frictionless, quiet, / Whose internal police nips the buds of all riot, — / A brain like a permanent strait-jacket put on / The heart that strives vainly to burst off a button.”

I thought the date must be wrong — that sounded more like 1948 than 1848 (especially “internal police” and “permanent strait-jacket”). But when I investigated, I learned that sure enough, it’s a quote from James Russell Lowell’s “A Fable for Critics,” which is indeed from 1848 (and is indeed the earliest OED cite, along with “1848 in J. Craig, New Universal Dictionary”; the entry is from 1898). Here’s some more context (it’s a very long poem):

Sons fit for a parallel—Thompson and Cowper;
I don’t mean exactly,—there’s something of each,
There’s T.’s love of nature, C.’s penchant to preach;
Just mix up their minds so that C.’s spice of craziness
Shall balance and neutralize T.’s turn for laziness,
And it gives you a brain cool, quite frictionless, quiet,
Whose internal police nips the buds of all riot,—
A brain like a permanent straight-jacket put on
The heart that strives vainly to burst off a button,—
A brain which, without being slow or mechanic,
Does more than a larger less drilled, more volcanic;
He’s a Cowper condensed, with no craziness bitten,
And the advantage that Wordsworth before him had written.

I confess I had no idea Lowell could be so lively; I may have to investigate him further. At any rate, does anyone else feel that the bit originally quoted seems more modern than its date?

Another translation comparison! This one, by David Isaacson, is of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, and it’s a good one — not, for the most part, focused on how the Russian is rendered, but on what makes Chekhov work in English. Some snippets:

I can think of no other drama that has so many interpreters. Big name playwrights (David Mamet! Heidi Schreck! Conor McPherson! Annie Baker!) are eager to try their hand at it. Correct me if I’m wrong, dear reader, but I don’t think that’s generally the case with other playwrights presented in translation. Companies doing Moliere’s Tartuffe are usually content to go with the Richard Wilbur or Ranjit Bolt versions. Since playwright Amy Herzog started adapting Henrik Ibsen a few years ago, directors have coalesced on her versions of An Enemy of the People and A Doll’s House. So my query really should be phrased: With so many published English versions of Uncle Vanya available, why so many freakin’ translations and adaptations?

The American Players Theater’s Nate Burger says

“The reason people think they don’t like Chekhov is because they haven’t experienced Chekhov through someone else’s lens that makes it contemporary or makes it approachable. And so I was, like, I bet I can do that.”

Burger proposes that what draws people to adapt Uncle Vanya is the lack of approachability in previous incarnations. I think it’s the opposite: Playwrights are not overcoming some innate textual difficulty; rather they are reveling in the sensation that Chekhov is our soul brother. In fact, Annie Baker says, “If you just literally translate exactly what [Chekhov] wrote, it sounds super contemporary.” It’s that inherent sense of contemporaneity that makes modern playwrights’ palms start to itch with the need to open their inkpads and put their stamps on the proceedings. […]

[Read more…]

Alex Vadukul writes in the NY Times (archived) about a man who feels like a younger version of me, if I had been a yeshiva bokher:

For a young Jewish scholar and writer named Mendel Uminer, books are the wellspring of enlightenment. So when he scored a studio apartment a block away from Central Park on Manhattan’s Upper East Side a year ago, he brought his books with him — all 10,000 of them. What followed, at least for a little while, was a charmed existence in his 600-square-foot temple of knowledge.

Towering stacks of Judaica lined the walls, heaps of film criticism and opera history filled the prewar bathroom, piles of plays and poems blocked a window, and Uminer slept on a floor mattress engulfed in dog-eared novels. Waking up around noon, he spent his afternoons on his sunlit chaise, devouring the works of Yiddish writers like Chaim Grade and critics like Edmund Wilson, nourishing his mind while the city churned outside.

“I’m always reading,” Uminer, 31, said. “I’m reading to extract knowledge. Every book I own, I need. My library is my manual for life.”

[Read more…]

In my ongoing Kurosawa retrospective, I’ve reached 1954 and Seven Samurai, which I’ve seen more often than any other of his (it’s one of my favorite movies, and of course whenever I read DeWitt’s great novel I have to rewatch it). I’ve been following along with the excellent commentaries (two different tracks, one with five film scholars!) on the Criterion set, and at one point there’s a reference to the “shamisen player.” I’ve run across that form before, but I think of the instrument as a samisen, and I finally got irritated enough to investigate. My memory that it used to be known as samisen turns out to be correct; the OED (entry from 1909) has only that form even in Japanese (“Etymon: Japanese samisen”), and Webster’s Third (1961) uses the headword samisen, adding “also samsien […] or shamisen.” (I was unaware of the form samsien, and Google Books finds only 19th-century uses.) But here in the 21st century, Wikipedia has it under Shamisen, starting the article “The shamisen or samisen (三味線), also known as sangen (三絃) (all meaning ‘three strings’), is a three-stringed traditional Japanese musical instrument derived from the Chinese instrument sanxian,” and AHD has “sham·i·sen (shăm′ĭ-sĕn′) also sam·i·sen (săm′-).” So why the difference?

Wiktionary has an interesting and complex etymology:

The instrument derives from the Okinawan 三線 (sanshin). Originally called 蛇皮線 (jabisen, literally “snakeskin strings”) in Japanese, so named for the way the Okinawan instrument’s soundbox is traditionally covered in snakeskin. The traditional jabisen instrument was imported into the Sakai area of Osaka during the Eiroku era (1558–1570), then later modified by biwa luthiers to have the square-shaped shamisen soundbox of today.

The reading jabisen shifted over time to 蛇味線 (jamisen), replacing the 皮 (bi, “skin, leather”) character with 味 (mi) for phonetic reasons, i.e. as ateji (当て字). Then jamisen changed to shamisen, replacing the 蛇 (ja, “snake”) character with 三 (sha, usually read san, “three”) for semantic reasons. The sha reading for the 三 character is irregular.

The shamisen reading is first cited to a text from 1580.

AHD derives it straightforwardly from san ‘three’ + mi ‘taste, touch’ + sen ‘string’; the references for the Okinawan etymology are in Japanese, so I can’t evaluate them. Thoughts?
[Read more…]

Dave Wilton did a Big List post that starts:

One distinction between the British and North American lexicons is the usage of biscuit and cookie. What North Americans call a cookie, the British call a biscuit. And what Americans call a biscuit has no exact counterpart in British cuisine. American biscuits are savory and resemble a scone in some respects, but a scone is denser and less salty.

Nothing new there (and he goes on to etymology), but Syntinen Laulu left a comment on the companion discussion post that provided many details new to me, and I thought I’d pass it along:

It’s not quite that simple. For one thing, the British term biscuit encompasses savoury biscuits, sometimes called ‘cheese biscuits’ (which means biscuits for cheese, not cheese-flavoured). Many such biscuits are also known as crackers, as in the USA; but not all the types of biscuit eaten with cheese are of a crackery type.

For another thing, for nearly two centuries the English sweet biscuit has been overwhelmingly a shop-bought item. (I say ‘English’ advisedly, because many Scottish housewives continued to bake their own shortbread long after it became available in shops.) In my 1960s urban childhood it was normal to bake cakes both family-size and individual (e.g. scones, fairy cakes) at home, but home-baked biscuits were unusual. Since the 1830s the biscuit-baking industry had been popularising and standardising a wide range of sweet biscuits, all of them of dense dough baked hard so that they maintained a clean-cut symmetrical shape, stayed good for months if not years, and could survive being exported in tins to the far corners of the Empire without being reduced to crumbs. And although some were and are made in simple shapes and left quite plain, many types have elaborate shapes, are decorated, and/or include currants or jam, or are covered with icing (that’s frosting to Leftpondians) or chocolate, or are paired into ‘sandwiches’ with a flavoured filling.

But in the last couple of decades the British food industry has embraced the principle of the American cookie – made of cake-dough, baked long and slow to remain just a bit chewy, and more ‘home-made-looking’ – and marketed them by that name. These have become popular in the UK, and cookies are accepted by British people as a specific subcategory of the genus biscuit. So a British child asked ‘What are your favourite biscuits?’ might well say ‘Choc chip cookies!’ and a British host proffering a plate of only cookie-type biscuits might say either ‘Have a cookie’ or ‘Have a biscuit’. But if it were a plate of British-style biscuits, saying ‘Have a cookie’ would be clearly nonsensical: and if it were a mixture of both British and cookie-type biscuits, the offer ‘have a cookie’ would imply that the Garibaldis, Jammy Dodgers and Petticoat Tails on the plate weren’t meant for you.

NB also that in Scotland the word cookie traditionally meant a small soft slightly sweetened bun, intended to be split and filled with whipped cream (thus occupying much the same tea-time-treat space as the English scone). Whether this usage has survived the introduction of soft-biscuit cookies, I don’t know.

I’ll be interested to see what further knowledge Hatters provide.

An interesting Facebook post from Claire Bowern:

I promise I will stop posting about the Dixon book shortly and go back to #chookbook updates, fieldwork book edits and complaints about email, but I was thinking this morning about what Australianists do and don’t seem to agree on, particularly the linguists. (“we disagree” here means “different people think different things, not “I think one thing and other people think something else”, just in case that’s not clear).

I’m pretty sure almost all of us agree that Pama-Nyungan is a language family, in the same way that Austronesian or Indo-European are language families. We don’t all agree on the composition of the family or its internal structure. We have radically different estimates of how old the family is (4-15kya!). We pretty much all agree that language change works the same way in Australia that it does elsewhere, but I’m pretty sure we don’t agree on how language change works and what processes are most important. Pretty much all of us are puzzled by the relative lack of sound change in Australia, but we don’t agree on what that implies and how to deal with it. We’ve all done fieldwork and understand the complexities of multilingual and multilectal communities and what that means for change, but we disagree about how that might scale up to the Holocene. We agree that all sorts of different data are important for reconstructing history, but we use different material in practice and place different weights on it.

(After the Routledge 2nd edition I said I would never edit another book ever ever again, but now I’m wondering if something that explores these questions from all different angles by people who disagree but can actually talk to each other might be worth doing.)

I’m not sure what “the Dixon book” is, but here’s her previous post about it:
[Read more…]