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David Hollingshead’s Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong is basically a standard-issue defense of the humanities against the crazed attack of the modern-day right wing, but it starts from an interesting angle that I thought was worth investigating for its own sake:

For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, archive perusers, and history buffs who grew to love their areas of study because of the specific objects that constitute the field: the two women I overheard whispering about how they wanted to fuck Adam Bede, in one of my undergrad classes; the student of mine who disclosed that he loved The House of Mirth because “something similar happened to me recently” (????); or the guy who collects swords as a way into understanding the medieval period are examples of this type. You’ve certainly met these people or been taught by them; they are often motivated by personal attachments to specific works, and my hunch is that they represent the majority of those who care about art today.

Secondary Source People are different; they become obsessed with the discourse about the objects being studied. Professional critics, “theory bros” (gender neutral), Letterboxd reviewers who primarily read other Letterboxd reviews, the weirdly combative people in your seminars who know all about the different scholarly camps on a topic—this group prioritizes the conversations, contexts, and conflicts surrounding the works above and beyond the works themselves. Secondary Source People are the main contingent both producing and consuming academic writing. For them, the question of a text’s beauty or capacity to immerse is less important than how its ideas expand or contract as we engage with them.

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I have been alerted by a reader to an odd etymology: the word aspic, in the words of the OED “A savoury jelly made with meat stock; a cold dish consisting of such a jelly set in a mould and containing pieces of meat, seafood, or hard-boiled eggs,” is from French, and “Littré suggests its derivation < aspic asp, because it is ‘froid comme un aspic,’ a proverbial phrase in French.” The entry is from 1885; Wiktionary elaborates somewhat:

Borrowed from French aspic, from Latin aspis, and possibly influenced by French basilic (“basilisk”). The culinary sense may come from association with the snake due to the traditional colors and cold temperature of aspic, in addition to the fact that the gelatin was often molded in a shape similar to a coiled snake.

There is also an aspic “An asp (see asp n.2); used chiefly in poetry” (e.g. a1616 “This is an Aspickes traile,” W. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra v. ii. 344), which is of course from Latin aspis, and yet another, “The Great Lavender or Spike (Lavandula Spica), a plant from which a volatile aromatic oil is obtained” (1604 “Oyle Of Aspicke, which the Physitians and Painters vse much, the one for plasters, the other to vernish their pictures,” E. Grimeston, translation of J. de Acosta, Naturall & Morall Historie Indies iv. xxix. 288), which has a different history:

< French aspic (in huile d’ aspic vulgar form of huile de spic) for spic, < Italian spigo the Great Lavender, originally Spikenard, = Old French espic < Latin spīcus (in medieval Latin) Spikenard, doublet of spīca spike.

A messy little cluster — thanks, david!

Nitsuh Abebe, the new NY Times On Language columnist (see this post), has a new column (archived) on the word scam. Most of it is about how the word is more popular than ever and has expanded its remit to cover “any system, however legitimate, that ends with somebody profiting at your expense”; while mildly interesting, this is just another example of language change at work, and you’d have to be a dedicated peever to work up much outrage about it. But he includes a section on etymology:

Part of Falcone’s interest in scamming comes from a remarkable place. His grandfather, he says, was a pitchman with traveling carnivals before settling in Atlantic City, where he’d work the piers selling decks of cards rigged for magic tricks. This happens to be the source of the word “scam” itself: All we know for sure, etymologically, is that as of the early 1960s, it was carnival slang for fleecing the public. Beyond that, speculation runs wild. Is it related to “scamp” or “scamper” or “sham?” Does it come from British dialects that used it for “the impurities in rocks and minerals?” From Irish American criminal slang? From the French “escamoter” — to evade, or to conjure away? No theory seems to come with any real evidence. Beyond 20th-century carnies, all is mystery.

So if you’re inclined to set a high bar of deception before calling things scams, you don’t have much history to appeal to; it’s a young word with obscure origins.

I didn’t know any of that — its carny origins, its recency, or its mysterious etymology. The OED (entry published 1982) cites it first from 1963 (“He..worked..as a carny huckster… ‘It was a full scam.’” Time 28 June 48/2) and says simply “Of unknown origin.”

My local classical station played a piece featuring the once famous harpsichordist Igor Kipnis; my first thought, on hearing the ID, was “He died quite a while back — I wonder if anybody much below my age knows his name any more?” Then came the second thought: “Where’s the name Kipnis from, anyhow?” A Ukrainian Wikipedia page describes several hypotheses:

1) from an alleged Yiddish kypin (given in the Ukrainian spelling кипін) ‘boiling water’ — I can find no evidence of this as a Yiddish word, and it would seem to represent Ukrainian кипіння ‘boiling/seething’ (= Russian кипение)
2) from an alleged Lithuanian ciepes ‘soap,’ but they apparently mean Latvian ziepes (from MLG sepe or Middle Dutch zepe)
3) a Hebraicized form of the Ukrainian surname Кирпоніс [Kirponis] ‘flat-nose’; this is the only suggestion in English Wikipedia

They also compare the surnames Tsipnis and Tsipis, which come from the female name Tsip(pora) – Sepphora; I don’t know if this is supposed to be an alternative etymology. None of that is especially convincing, and I wondered if any learned Hatters had a better idea.

I’m reading Kate Kelley’s Proto-Elamite: Writing and Society in Early Iran (see this post), and I thought this passage (pp. 15ff.) was of enough general interest to post:

Throughout the twentieth century, the archaeology of early Iran has often been analysed through a filter of its western neighbour Mesopotamia (Petrie 2013; Alizadeh 2021). The invention of proto-Elamite and its spread across Iran are no exceptions, having been described as an echo of the cultural model of the Uruk Phenomenon, a ‘social experiment’ (Lamberg-Karlovsky 1989: x) which may have, like the model proposed for Uruk, involved administrators (from Susa?) establishing a presence at strategic locations with an eye to securing trade. The mid fourth-millennium connections just described remain a crucial piece of the puzzle, but this should be paired with research into regional developments in their own terms. The state of decipherment of proto-Elamite has made it difficult so far to dive broadly into differences in the way writing was used in the proto-cuneiform and proto-Elamite worlds, but this is a research area with much future potential.

Although most of the numerical systems in proto-cuneiform and proto-Elamite are shared (Section 5.3), only a few dozen of the many hundreds of non-numerical signs in each system can be shown to be related. […]

If we were dealing with a fully developed writing system – that is,
heavily invested in communicating through recording the sounds of language – it would be natural to think that the writing system differences at Uruk and Susa were stimulated by different dominant languages. But in the case of proto-writing we may look to a more general divergence in culture that made the sharing of a socially embedded symbol system unacceptable, such as differences in religion, political expression, and social and economic organisation. The varied geographic settings at which proto-Elamite has been found (Section 3) contrast with the lowland distribution of proto-cuneiform. Moreover, the (as yet contentious) possibility that mobile groups were a significant social force in the proto-Elamite world may set the Iranian invention of writing apart (Section 2.4.1). Daneshmand (2024) introduced another important possibility, that the phenomenon of schismogenesis – intentional cultural differentiation from one’s neighbours – may also have shaped the use of writing in Iran from the proto-Elamite period and onwards. The history of writing in Iran for the next 3,000 years was very different from its western neighbours.

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As regular readers will know, I am a sucker for old-fashioned printing — one of the best parts of my job as a proofreader in a printing and design department in the 1980s (do such entities still exist?) was hanging out with printers and listening to them talk about the old days. PrintingFilms.com is a great resource; the About page says:

PrintingFilms.com is a collection of vintage films that showcase the technologies and processes of printing, journalism, and typography. It was established by Doug Wilson in 2012 after his work as director of Linotype: The Film.

The collection started when Doug was given a box of 16mm Linotype promotional films in 2011 by Dave Seat for digitization.

In 2013, Carl Schlesinger (a former Linotype operator at The New York Times) donated his extensive collection of films to the Museum of Printing, which assisted with preservation in 2015.

I recommend, as a starter, Type Speaks (1948, 25:27):

Created by the American Type Founders Company, this film features the appearance and narration of Ben Grauer, a famous NBC radio personality explaining his love of books and modern printing. The history of printing is briefly shown followed by showing the in-depth process of matrix and punch making.

The film shows the most in-depth and visually easy-to-understand process of making type. It follows the entire process of type making from original design (showcasing Lydian by Warren Chappell) to pattern making, punch cutting, matrix making, and the use of the Benton engraving machine.

I was struck by the pronunciation of vagaries as vuh-GARE-eez, which I don’t think I’d heard before — but then, how often do you hear the word at all?

Mark Liberman’s Log post inspired me to discuss the very interesting word solidus ‘slash (mark).’ It developed from the name of a gold coin of the Roman Empire, which gave rise to the Latin name for a variety of medieval coins, mostly made of silver: Byzantine, Carolingian, Italian, and — the one which concerns us here — the English shilling. The word shilling was, understandably, shortened to its first letter, for which they used the “long s”: ſ. This was frequently written as a simple slash mark, so, to quote the OED s.v. solidus (sense 2):

A sloping line used to separate shillings from pence, as 12/6, in writing fractions, and for other separations of figures and letters; a shilling-mark.

(Their first citation is “1891 in Century Dictionary, which can presumably be antedated — the entry is from 1913.) As Wiktionary tells us, it is a doublet of sol, sold, soldo, solid, sou, and xu (a hundredth of a dong).

RNZ reports on yet another distressing development due to the “AI” craze:

When a Wellington second-hand bookstore started to get bulk book orders, owner Anne-Marie Thorby smelt a rat. A Canadian buyer was sending multiple book orders to Book Haven in Newtown, sometimes minutes apart, for niche texts on New Zealand specific subjects.

“It started at the end of April. We do sell books all around the world and we were getting some from a company and it was just a couple of books and yay, they’re going to a far off place. Then that same week it was boom, suddenly the same company was sending us multiple orders, just minutes apart, huge orders. One order was for 71 books, and we physically can’t handle that.”

The buyer wanted books with ISBNs (a unique code used to identify a specific book, edition, or format) from the 1970s and 1980s, she told RNZ’s Midday Report. “They were local non-fiction niche books, so New Zealand local history, a tourist pamphlet on Waitomo Caves, Māori language books, New Zealand cookbooks, biographies, political cartoons, very niche – the local anglers club.” With postage and tariffs there was no way the buyer could turn a profit, she says.

“A $10 book could end up costing $40, so ridiculous. It had to be something else. That’s when we did some sleuthing and contacted AbeBooks, their little online forum.”

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My wife and I are watching the tenth season of Shetland (and looking forward to the eleventh, while mourning the recently announced departure of lead actress Alison O’Donnell), and I was delighted to see that one of the characters, a craggy and mysterious poet named Ed Tulloch, runs a pub called The Watergaw. After the show I read her the Hugh MacDiarmid poem of that name (which I’ve loved for over half a century now), and then I thought I’d investigate the word, which turns out to be not only interesting in itself but tangled up in the history of the poem.

The OED entry (revised 2015) says:

1. A secondary or imperfectly-formed rainbow; (more widely) any of various phenomena in the clouds and sky that are believed to be portents of approaching rain. Also in extended use. regional in later use (now chiefly Scottish). Cf. weather-gall n [“An imperfect rainbow, believed to be a presage of storm”].

1573 Like as a rocke that from a loftie mount doth headlonge fall, Enforst with rage of wind, or els with shoures, and water gall.
T. Twyne, translation of Virgil in T. Phaer & T. Twyne, translation of Virgil, Whole .xii. Bookes Æneidos xii. sig. Nnᵛ

1594 And round about her teare-distained eye Blew circles stream’d, like Rain-bows in the skie. These watergalls in her dim Element, Foretell new stormes.
W. Shakespeare, Lucrece sig. L2ᵛ

a1676 As the Water-gall is the Image, Shadow, or weak Representation of the Rain-bow.
M. Hale, The Primitive Origination of Mankind, Considered and Examined According to the Light of Nature (1677) 16

1744 False good news are always produced by true good, like the water gall by the rainbow.
H. Walpole, Letter 29 June in Correspondence (1954) vol. XVIII. 466
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1824 There is also often seen a fainter coloured bow, commonly called a water-gall, above the Rainbow.
O. Gregory, Lessons Astronom. & Philosophy (6th edition) xxvi. 169
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1913 From the treatment by Seneca there quoted it seems that this must refer to the broken rainbow or water-gall.
A. E. Bell, Study Nat. Sci. in 13th Century (M. Lett. thesis, Univ. of Calif.) 63

1925 I saw yon antrin thing A watergaw wi’ its chitterin’ licht.
‘H. MacDiarmid’, Sangschaw 2

1998 Tunes that furled aroon his heid like the mist that wyved aroon Beinn a Bhuird, fan the wattergaw hung i the lift.
S. Blackhall, Bonsai Grower 61

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I greatly enjoyed Michael Ledger-Lomas’s LRB review (23 July 2026; archived) of Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century by Melanie McDonagh, but I have to give him a whack on the knuckles for the absurd statement at the end of this passage about Frederick Rolfe:

Rolfe drifted to Venice, where he fraternised with gondoliers and male prostitutes before dying destitute in 1913, but not before he had produced another masterpiece, The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole. It obsessively yet exquisitely recounts Nicholas Crabbe’s martyrdom, which is also his own: Crabbe is yet another failed priest whose ‘ruthless immitigable faith’ both sustains him in and perpetuates his isolation and eventual death. ‘Immitigable’ – this and many other weird neologisms capture the perverse autodidacticism of Rolfe and his martyrs. Hadrian’s enemies in Rome had sniped at his ‘hendecasyllabical allocutions’.

Why do people treat their own ignorance as eternal truth? Immitigable, far from being a “weird neologism,” is a perfectly good word of long standing; OED (entry from 1899):

That cannot be mitigated, softened, or appeased; implacable; not to be toned down.

1576 What cause was there..that the malice of my minde should be immitigable?
A. Fleming, translation of Cicero in Panoplie of Epistles 19

a1780 Did she mitigate these immitigable, these iron-hearted Men?
J. Harris, Philological Inquiries (1781) iii. v. 308

1814 He..on his flesh..inflicts Fierce vengeance with immitigable hand.
R. Southey, Roderick xvii. 214

1831 For four or five days and nights the pain was immitigable.
E. J. Trelawny, Adventures of Younger Son vol. III. 138

1887 The principle or the impulse of universal and immitigable charity.
A. C. Swinburne, Studies in Prose & Poetry (1894) 188

Consult a dictionary before spouting off, for heaven’s sake!

The following passage is a good example of how lively the review is:
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