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Alice Dragoon writes for MIT Technology Review about a man of many words:

Brian Sietsema has a favorite word.

It’s somewhat surprising that he can choose just one. He’s the person spellers rely on to confirm pronunciations and answer questions about the roots of the words they’re given at the Scripps National Spelling Bee—arguably the world’s most prestigious competition of its kind. The story of how the word earned the top spot on his personal list may well mark the beginning of his unique career path as both a linguist and a Greek Orthodox priest.

In third grade, Sietsema ventured to a garage sale at a friend’s house with 50 cents in his pocket and picked out three books that struck his fancy. Although they were priced at 50 cents each, his friend’s mother said the books he’d chosen were on special and sent him home with all three, including a collection of Edgar Allan Poe stories called Masterpieces of Mystery. Knowing it contained macabre tales like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” his own mother told him he’d need to wait a few years before reading it. Naturally, he started it right away.

As he read “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” Sietsema was baffled by the main character’s description of arriving at the moon in a balloon. Pfaall reported tumbling into a crowd of people who were “eyeing me and my balloon askant, with their arms set a-kimbo.” Sietsema had never encountered the word akimbo (with or without a hyphen) and asked his parents what it meant. They didn’t know, and it wasn’t in the family’s dictionary. The question also stumped his teachers, and the dictionaries in his classroom and the school library were no help either. “For years, I didn’t know what this word meant,” Sietsema says. It stuck in his mind that there was a word out there that he, his parents, and his teachers didn’t know. He thinks it wasn’t till he got to college that he finally found a dictionary with the answer: The moon dwellers in Poe’s story had been standing with their hands on their hips, elbows turned outward.

“I credit that puzzle with getting me into dictionaries and being curious about etymology,” he says. It kindled a fascination with words—and an abundance of curiosity—that would shape his life’s trajectory and work.

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The heat here has ramped up to the point where it’s hard to think coherently (we have A/C only in our bedroom), but I wanted to report on the unusually generous load of presents (I’m turning 75, so people have overdone it). My especially over-the-top brother not only gave me the two-ton Centennial King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band set (includes 4 CDs, two vinyl albums, a hardcover book with annotations, and a poster), A Short History of Cahiers du Cinema by Emilie Bickerton, and I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Anyan Hu but three Russian movies in classy Deaf Crocodile editions: In The Moscow Slums (Khitrovka. The Sign of Four; characters include Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vladimir Gilyarovsky, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, and Anton Chekhov!), the classic White Sun of the Desert (which I saw and loved many years ago), and Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel (the Estonian movie based on the Strugatsky novel — I read and enjoyed it but don’t seem to have reported on it here). My exceedingly generous wife splurged on Keith Jarrett at the Blue Note: The Complete Recordings, which I am now listening to with supreme pleasure. My sister-in-law and her significant other gave me The Saragossa Manuscript, the crazed and irresistible movie by Wojciech Has (based on Jan Potocki’s 1815 novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, which I own but have yet to read), and Franz Koglmann’s Fruits Of Solitude, the most recent album by one of my favorite European jazzmen (I already have over a dozen of his albums, including the long-deleted early hatARTs); Songdog and his family dropped by with the BGO set of John Surman’s first three albums, fabled highlights of British avant-garde jazz (he goes into my small pantheon of jazz baritone players, along with Gerry Mulligan, Lars Gullin, and Serge Chaloff, whose surname I just discovered is ancestrally the Russian-Jewish Халов), as well as a bottle of Connemara. A LH reader sent me Franz Koglmann’s Fruits Of Solitude, the most recent album by one of my favorite European jazzmen (I already have over a dozen of his albums, including the long-deleted early hatARTs) — thanks, David! And Slavo/bulbul gave me Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union by Vladislav M. Zubok, which I’m very much looking forward to (see my rave for his earlier Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia — my god, that post is now two decades old!). Quite a haul, and tonight I get to see the US team play Bosnia!

And if you want to give a present to yourself or a deserving other, may I recommend Michael Erard’s new book The Language Beat: Essays and Reporting on Language and Life? As longtime readers will know, I consider Erard one of the few journalists worth reading on the topic of language — see my reviews of Um. . .: Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean (2007) and Babel No More (2011) — and this looks to be an excellent read. The publisher’s description says:

THE LANGUAGE BEAT collects 47 essays and pieces of reporting that he originally published in The Atlantic, Science, Aeon, Nautilus, Lingua Franca, The Texas Observer, and elsewhere.

The topics that he explored range from dialects, language learning, and multilingualism to language policy, sign languages, naming practices, political rhetoric, and the work of linguists themselves. They showcase Erard’s ambition to tease out the language part of the human story and to locate the human in the language world.

Erard says “As a physical book, it would be 450 pages long, so out of a concern for the environment, it will only appear digitally,” and the price is definitely right, so what are you waiting for? Support good language journalism!

A very interesting NY Times piece by Elda Cantú (archived):

I have been speaking Spanish for over 40 years, and practically every day I learn a new word, an unfamiliar meaning or a new slang term.

I grew up on the border between Mexico and Texas, where a gallon container is called a yoga — after the English jug, the name given to milk containers on the U.S. side of the Rio Grande.

As a graduate student, I spent a few months among Puerto Ricans and Dominicans in New York, perreando at sweaty parties and soaking up the lyrics of what we’d now call classic reggaeton.

For nearly a decade, I worked as a journalist in South America. I married a Peruvian colleague, and even though we have lived in Mexico City for many years, the Spanish spoken in our home mixes vocabulary from our backgrounds: cuddling is apapacharse, a very Mexican word with Nahuatl roots, but scolding is the Peruvian resondrar. Chiles are called ajíes, as they are in Peru, but if we find them too spicy, we say nos enchilamos, the expression in Mexico.

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Shane MacDonald at The Catholic University of America’s Archivist’s Nook has a post called Title-Pages Through Time – A History of One Page:

When opening a book, typically the first page one encounters is the title page – a separate page that offers several pieces of information about the work, including the title, author name, and publisher information. The presence of a title page seems rather intuitive, but that assumption underlies how common the title page has become in our expectations on the structure of the book. However, the title page’s story is one of centuries of experimentation, often reflecting the commercial and intellectual trends of the time.

Prior to the era of the printed book, manuscripts did not have title pages. The original rationale behind printing a title on the lead page has often been explained by two key reasons tied to the printing of books. The first is that the printed book was a commercial object, and the presence of a title indicating the book’s contents would help advertise the work to consumers. The second reason has more to do with the economics of early book printing, with the printed work not being bound until much later, usually by a separate binder from the printer. As a result, there was a need to be able to easily identify what the contents of a printed stack were for the bindery and possibly protect the work while in storage and transit prior to binding.

These questions of how best to protect the work, how to identify what one has produced, and how to advertise it to consumers were “new needs brought with the advent of mass production.” Thus, when one compares the printed book to the production of pre-modern books – where binding came about right away and works were transcribed one at a time – it makes practical sense that medieval works would lack a title page.

The first several decades of the printed book – the incunabula period – witnessed much experimentation in how to label printed books. In broad strokes, the early development may be highlighted through the following developments: incipits and colophons, label-titles, and woodcuts and borders.

Click through for more history and for some gorgeous images.

I’ve been a huge fan of Gary Saul Morson for a long time (see my too-brief review of his Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time here) and I’ve been interested in Mikhail Bakhtin for even longer, but I’ve found him a hard nut to crack, so I was delighted to find Morson’s NYRB review (June 25, 2026 issue; archived) of Sergeiy Sandler’s new translation of Rabelais and His World. In the best review-essay tradition, it covers much more than the book under review, and I found it eloquent and informative enough to post some passages. It starts off:

Scholars speak of two Mikhail Bakhtins—on the one hand, there is the author of Rabelais and His World (published in 1965, though he began writing it in the 1930s) and, on the other, the author of Problems of Dostoevsky’s Creative Art (1929; revised as Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, 1963), the essays on the novel in The Dialogic Imagination (1975), and various philosophical works. Since Bakhtin first became widely known in the 1980s, his book on Rabelais has occupied a perplexing place in his oeuvre because it seems to contradict just about everything else he wrote. Bakhtin’s other works focus on our “unrepeatable” individuality as the source of all morals and values, whereas the Rabelais book makes fun of everything of concern to individuals and celebrates instead the collective. Students of Adam Smith who wonder at the apparent discrepancy between his two masterpieces, The Wealth of Nations (1776) and The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), often consider the “Adam Smith problem”; in much the same way the Rabelais book poses a “Mikhail Bakhtin problem.”

After some background on Bakhtin, he continues:

Reflecting his neo-Kantian training, Bakhtin’s earliest works focused on the significance of the soul’s embodiment in a particular time and place, as well as the ethical demands on a person in the “unrepeatable” here and now. Concerned with how people try to avoid their obligations, he diagnosed a syndrome common in Russia: pretending that one is simply acting “representatively,” that is, as the agent of some church, institution, or party that is actually responsible for one’s actions. For Bakhtin, such excuses are always false. People must take responsibility for—in Bakhtin’s terms, they must “sign”—their actions. Responsibility can be neither postponed nor passed on to others because what “I” can accomplish now cannot be accomplished by anyone else. All “alibis” for responsibility fail because, in Bakhtin’s famous phrases, “there is no alibi” and people live in a state of “non-alibi.” When Bakhtin turned his attention to Dostoevsky and other realist novelists, he found these ethical tenets implicit in the very shape of their stories.

Since Bakhtin’s two philosophical treatises were the last to be published and translated, critics, especially in the West, have usually failed to appreciate how his literary criticism doubled as philosophical exegesis. Bakhtin was by no means the first Russian critic to mask philosophy as literary analysis. Before the revolution, almost all the greatest Russian thinkers did so, partly because Russians regarded literature as the most important cultural activity and partly because censors might overlook political ideas disguised as merely literary ones. […]

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Last week Brian Flesser, known in these parts as cuchuflete, let me know that he was in the ICU and not expected to last long (“Have had a good run for 79 yrs, so whatever happens is ok”); his wife Emma has given me the bitter news that his run was ended, and I wanted to share it with the Hattic community. He had been lurking here for many years but only started participating actively fairly recently; he sent me many excellent links for posting, and we exchanged friendly e-mails which on his part usually closed with Saludos or Até (“Brazilians love new slang and clipped phrases. Thus the closing of a letter, fully Até a próssima [until the next time…] is now usually nothing more than Até”). Once I asked him about his background, and he sent this:

Failed phd at hopkins in Golden Age Spanish Philology. Rare book dealer, bartender/waiter for Baltimore slumlord, Wandered southern Europe playing music in cafes for food while learning Portuguese and Italian. Dropped into straight world around age 30. Wharton MBA. Management strategy consultant in US, Europe and south America. Quit job I loved to be present as dad and husband. Industrial marketing and prod. Dev. director mostly logistics software. ~25 yrs until me and x700 best buddies “right sized” com a bunda no ar. So I became a daylily hybridizer cause that’s what you do with a liberal arts degree in Span. Lit. from Dartmouth.

(GT tells me com a bunda no ar is Portuguese for ‘with [our] butt in the air.’) What a pied life! This, from a 2021 e-mail, addresses hats:

Since the late 1960s my head has been subject, four seasons a year, to the benefits of a boina impermeable. It differs from a beret in width, extending out from the skull. Spaniards sometimes call it la boina de ala ancha, cap with wide wing. That helps as a rain shield—just a little—and offers a touch of shade. Looks rakish too, though at my age I doubt anyone notices. If your collection lacks a boina vasca or two, you haven’t yet become a fully fledged mad hatter or Bartholomew Cubbins acolyte.

And when I asked him about his nom de blog “cuchuflete” (I only knew the form cuchufleta ‘joke’), he responded:

The moniker has a literary history. I read it in either Rayuela (Hopscotch in Rabassa’s translation) or some short story by the whacky, wonderful Argentine, Julio Cortázar. When I registered for the wordreference forum, c. 2003, and eventually became the head moderator there, I used it because I liked the euphony of it. At the time, I had forgotten how J.C. used it, but it seemed pleasantly whimsical.

He once signed off: “Regards from Brian (cuchuflete), Emma, and a mob of barn cats including Gatinha, Tomás, Branquinha, Ferri, Ferrita, y demâs reinas y princesas del prado”; I’m glad he had Emma (whom he called “my Royal Britannic Majesty,” she being from Nottingham) and all those barn cats to brighten his life, and I sure will miss him. Saludos, Brian.

I recently ran across the Russian expression локон Аньези ‘curl of Agnesi’ and wondered “Why do we call it ‘witch of Agnesi’?” So I googled and found this explanation at Wikipedia:

It gets its name from Italian mathematician Maria Gaetana Agnesi who published it in 1748. The Italian name la versiera di Agnesi is based on Latin versoria (sheet of sailing ships) and the sinus versus. This was read by John Colson as l’avversiera di Agnesi, where avversiera is translated as “woman who is against God” and interpreted as “witch”.

That’s quite a story, but I’m not sure about the “read as avversiera” part, because apparently Italian versiera can mean ‘witch, she-devil,’ so there’s no need to charge poor Colson with misreading, just misunderstanding. The OED, s.v. witch (revised 2021), has:

II.8. Mathematics. More fully witch of Agnesi. A bell-shaped plane curve symmetrical about the y axis and that approaches the x axis as an asymptote, constructed geometrically from a circle whose base is the origin.

The first citation is Colson:

a1760 The equation of the curve to be described, which is vulgarly called the Witch [Italian che dicesi la Versiera].
J. Colson, translation of M. G. Agnesi, Analytical Inst. (1801) vol. I. i. v. 222

And under Etymology:

In sense II.8 representing a mistranslation (in quot. a1760) of Italian †versiera, denoting a curve based on a versed sine (1718, introduced by G. Grandi as an Italian equivalent for his post-classical Latin versoria: see versor n.²), by association with versiera female demon (15th cent; ultimately related to avversario adversary, devil: see adversary n.); in witch of Agnesi with reference to the name of Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–99), the author of the work translated in quot. a1760.

I posted this to Wordorigins, but I’m still unsatisfied, so I thought I’d see if the Hattery could provide enlightenment:

My wife asked me about the phrase “have it in for (someone),” and I realized it is in fact a very weird construction. The OED says:

P.1.e. colloquial. to have it in for: to intend revenge on; to be determined to harm or cause trouble for; to feel hostility or strong dislike towards. Cf. in for at in adv. Phrases P.2.

First citation:

1825 Didn’t I owe the Major an ould grudge..? I had it in for him.
Captain Rock in London 17 September 226/3

But their “Cf. in for” isn’t any help; that phrase is defined as “Involved in some coming event, etc., esp. one which cannot be avoided; finally committed to do something; (now esp.) destined to experience something,” which doesn’t seem to have much relevance — and in any case, how does the phrase “have it in for” work? Any thoughts? (I know idioms are not transparent, and maybe this one is inexplicable, but I thought I’d ask.)

Dave responded:
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I know absolutely nothing about the Minions; it was only recently that I learned to associate the word with those images of cylindrical yellow creatures I occasionally saw around the internet. However, for obvious reasons I was absorbed by Eva Jaber’s Guardian story about their language and its influence on the slang of Youth Today:

I was four years old when Despicable Me was released in cinemas and the banana-coloured, overall-clad Minions took the world by storm. By the time I was seven, my siblings and I were using The Official Minion Manual to teach ourselves Minionese.

Minionese is, of course, the made-up language spoken by Kevin, Stuart, Bob and company, which consists of a combination of melodic gibberish and variations on genuine vocabulary from a diverse array of world languages. When the Minions shout “kanpai” (“cheers” in Japanese) or “para tú!” (a variation on the Spanish “para ti”), it might remind you of how gen Alpha slang, which primarily consists of nonsensical words such as “cap” and “mogging”, also draws on world languages. Consider the Bulgarian scat origins of “skibidi”, for example.

In anticipation of the forthcoming Minions & Monsters movie, which for the very first time includes a 15-minute sequence spoken entirely in Minionese, join me in breaking down the parallels between Minionese and gen Alpha slang. Next time you hear a minion shout “bello” on the big screen, appreciate how what Illumination originally intended as an endearing comedic tool has grown to embody a trend of embedding sociolinguistic diversity in the youth vernacular.

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I’m afraid it’s another passage from Richard Tarrant’s Texts, Editors, and Readers (cf. Abbots and Beavers, Textual Criticism as Rhetoric) — I just can’t resist this stuff!

Disputes about the text of Propertius involve many of the issues discussed in earlier chapters, for example, recension (specifically, disagreement over the shape of the stemma), the proper scope of conjecture, weighing of an author’s habits of expression as they can be elicited from a controversial transmission, the place to be given to interpolation. But because Propertius is agreed to be a major poet, even a great one, the disputes surrounding so many of his lines can also show how textual and literary considerations interact. That topic will be the focus of this chapter, after a brief review of Propertius’ recent editorial history.

For a few decades in the mid to late twentieth century, the text of Propertius seemed to have attained a degree of stability after a period marked by extremes of conservatism and scepticism. The most widely used text from that period is the OCT of E. A. Barber (1953, revised 1960). In producing his 1960 revision, Barber was influenced by the work of Shackleton Bailey, especially his Propertiana of 1956, a textual commentary on all of Propertius that contributed a number of brilliant conjectures but was characterized overall by restraint: confronted with an unreliable manuscript tradition and an author believed to cultivate an idiosyncratic style, Shackleton Bailey often concluded that the transmitted text might well be corrupt but that no attempt to correct it commanded assent. He was also dismissive of hypotheses that postulated widespread relocation of couplets or that bracketed large numbers of couplets as interpolations. Barber’s editorial policies followed similar lines: while accepting numerous conjectures and a smaller number of transpositions and deletions, he confined many plausible suggestions to the apparatus, producing what might be described as a moderately conservative text. The other noteworthy edition from this period, Paolo Fedeli’s Teubner of 1984, is markedly more conservative than Barber’s without displaying the extreme resistance to conjecture manifested by some editions of a century earlier.

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