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In Jé Wilson’s NYRB review (March 7, 2024; archived) of Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner, there is a description of Comyns’ childhood that begins “She grew up as Barbara Bayley in Warwickshire, in a manor bordering the River Avon, a few miles from Stratford. The fourth of six children, five of whom were girls, she spent much of her time running wild outside with her siblings.” Later it says “In keeping with the general neglect, the Bayley girls were left to tumble up when it came to education.” I was unfamiliar with the phrase “tumble up,” and my wife said she was too, so I did some investigating. The OED (entry from 1915) has (s.v. tumble):

II.7.b. to tumble up: to make haste, originally (Nautical) from below deck. slang.

1826 The command was repeated by the boatswain and his mates, who were piping and roaring down the hatchways—‘Tumble up, tumble up from below.’
W. N. Glascock, Naval Sketch-book 1st Series vol. I. 8

1832 Tumble up smartly, my lads.
F. Marryat, Newton Forster vol. II. iv. 48
[…]

And Green’s has it in two senses:

1. to rush, to hurry.
[…]
2. to rise from bed.

But these senses don’t appear to correspond to the use in the context of the quoted sentence, where it seems to mean something like ‘make do as best they could.’ Is anyone familiar with this sense? Is it too recent to be in the dictionaries? (Incidentally, Comyns is pronounced as if spelled Cummins; it’s historically the same Irish name as Cummings.)

Songdog was over here today and mentioned a Turkish-American friend whose given name was Ebru; intrigued, I looked it up and discovered that it means ‘ebru (marbled paper, handmade in a variety of styles by artisans using traditional techniques),’ with this surprising etymology:

From Ottoman Turkish ابرو (ebru), a clipping of Classical Persian ابر و باد (abr-u-bād, literally “cloud and wind”); earlier texts employ the simpler ابری (abri, literally “cloudy”), a term that is still in use.

I hope it’s true, because it’s very charming indeed. (You can see an example of the marbled paper at the link.)

This is about as niche as niche gets, but I’m always up for an obsessive investigation into some terminally obscure phenomenon, especially when it involves type, and I figure I’m not the only one, so I hereby present Jonathan Chan’s search for the origin and meaning of ⍼:

1. Apr. 2022 U+237C ⍼ RIGHT ANGLE WITH DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW (“Known as right angle with downwards zigzag arrow, angle with down zig-zag arrow, \rangledownzigzagarrow, and ⍼, no one knows what ⍼ is meant to represent or where it originated from.”)
2. June 2023 update: U+237C ⍼ ⍼ (“Our glyph comes from Monotype under the matrix serial number S16139.”)
3. Jan. 2024 Monotype Mathematical Sorts (“And finally, here we have once again the 1972 list of mathematical characters, including series L231 containing ⍼, which is bound together with the original list rather than collected alongside as looseleaf.”)
4. Aug. 2024 U+237C ⍼ is (also) S9576 ⍼ (“The earliest verifiable appearance of ⍼ is then January 1963, and must have been created in the eight-year period between then and December 1954.”)
5. Feb. 2026 U+237C ⍼ is Azimuth

Very satisfying to finally get a solution! I have to say I was shocked by this passing remark in the 2023 update: “I requested a digital scan of that page, which cost 18£.” Eighteen pounds for a scan of one page?! But good for him for coughing up. (Via MeFi.)

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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