languagehat.com

Back in 2010 I posted about the death of Sol Steinmetz, rabbi and etymologist; now a longtime LH reader has sent me a copy of his 2008 book Semantic Antics: How and Why Words Change Meaning, and it’s a pure delight. In the introduction, he says:

Changes in meanings make language flexible and malleable. But how do words take on new meanings? The study of meanings and the changes of meaning that words undergo is called semantics (from Greek sēmantikos “having meaning, signifying”). I’ve titled this work Semantic Antics because many English words have changed meaning in fascinating, unusual, and unexpected ways. Those are the words I focus on in this book.
[…]

As a language consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary, I was fortunate to have had access to the OED’s treasury of historical citations, which I used to trace and illustrate the development of meanings discussed in this book.

His very first entry, about “A1,” taught me something I didn’t know; after citing the first use in the sense ‘first-class, outstanding’ in Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1837) — “‘He must be a first-rater,’ said Sam. ‘A, 1,’ replied Mr. Roker.” — he explains:

Dickens adopted a technical shipping term, A1, and used it figuratively. The shipping term was created by Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, a British publication founded in 1760 by Edward Lloyd to circulate and exchange shipping news among merchants and underwriters. Lloyd published his first Register of Ships in 1764, and in it he devised a system for classifying the condition of every registered ship. In this system, the top classification was A1, the letter A denoting a first-class condition of a ship’s hull, and the number 1, a top condition of the ship’s stores. When shipping merchants would describe a ship’s condition as being “Al,” it was the highest praise they could assign to it, and so inevitably the term passed into figurative use as a synonym of “first-class, excellent.”

And paging through it I see all sorts of entries I look forward to exploring; many thanks, Brian!

I was looking at the Wikipedia article for Sokoto when I noticed the “Name and etymology” section, which begins: “The name Sokoto (which is the modern/anglicised version of the local name, Sakkwato) is of Arabic origin, representing sooq, ‘market’ in English.” Is this true? If so, how is it derived? Sounds like folk etymology to me, but others will know more.

Beth of the Cassandra Pages is an old friend (my wife and I visited her in Montreal in 2004: 1, 2) and it’s always a pleasure to hear from her; she’s sent me a link to You see grēne where I see grœg from a Scottish knitting blog written by Kate Davies, whom Beth calls “a very smart designer,” and while it’s mostly about colors themselves, there’s enough linguistic material I thought I’d bring it here.

Your responses to yesterday’s piece – in which I introduced KC’s fabulous Chingly Yorlin – really interested me. In both the Ravelry group and newsletter comments, many of you suggested that you do not see Chingly as I do – as a greenish-grey – but as very definitely green. […] Whether we see / name a colour as “green” or “grey” can depend on many factors: the physical mechanics of perception, our cultural heritage, our linguistic positioning, and (it is now increasingly clear) our age. […]

As grey is one of those shades which, for many of us it seems, perpetually hovers in an area of chromatic indeterminacy, you may be interested to know that, in some languages, it is among the first colours to be named. In Old English, grœg (grey, grey-ish) is a basic colour term (or BCT) that appears in the language at an earlier date than blue (hœwen) and which is used in a wide variety of contexts in reference to everything from wolves and stones to stormy seas.* [*My discussion of of grey and green in Old English and Old Norse-Icelandic draws heavily on Carole Biggham and Kirsten Wolf’s excellent A Cultural History of Colour in the Medieval Age, volume 2 in Bloomsbury’s Cultural History of Colour series (2021; 2024)]

Gren (grēne) is a BCT that precedes blue in the Old English language too: in reference to freshness or newness, to un-ripe or uncooked things, to glassy gemstones and to metals with a colourful patina, such as copper or brass. Grēne also frequently appears in Old English place names in association with landmarks, property boundaries, and objects in the natural world, such as paths, hills, and trees.

[Read more…]

As anyone who has been following LH for any length of time will be aware, I am no fan of “AI,” but this seems like a situation in which large language models could be of great use; the Austrian Academy of Sciences reports:

The Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW) is collaborating with Mistral AI and Sail Reply, a Reply Group Company, on the development of a Large Language Model (LLM) for Ancient Greek: Apollo, named after the Greek god of light and patron of the arts and sciences, will propel research on ancient Greek texts. The model supports advanced searching and automatic text restoration in hundreds of thousands of undeciphered papyri and inscriptions, making it possible to accurately capture content in a matter of hours rather than years. The OeAW and its partners are doing pioneering work, as LLMs have not yet been developed for a historical language evolving over many centuries or the reconstruction of heavily damaged ancient texts.

On behalf of the OeAW, the project is led by Anna Dolganov, an ancient historian and papyrologist at the Austrian Archaeological Institute of the OeAW, who provides field–specific guidance, oversees the integration of relevant sources, and guarantees scientific quality. Through her expertise, Dolganov ensures that historical contextualization and methodological standards are upheld. […]

Anna Dolganov: “Our project with Mistral AI and Sail Reply is building the world’s first advanced multimodal Large Language Model for an ancient language, trained on the largest digital corpus of historical Greek to date. This AI system can be developed in many directions for a wide range of research tasks, from reconstructing fragmentary inscriptions and papyri to conducting semantic and thematic searches across the entire Greek textual tradition to deciphering handwritten texts. For example: there are one million Greek papyri worldwide that have never been read, tens of thousands of which are held by the Papyrus Collection of the Austrian National Library. Such treasures of historical knowledge are our target. This LLM marks the beginning of an exciting journey in the study of antiquity.”

I didn’t realize there were so many unread papyri — if this works as advertised, it could be a boon. Thanks, Martin!

The poet Tony Harrison has come up here before (and I am sad to learn from that Wikipedia article that he died last year); all poets deal in language, of course, but his attention to language as such was uncommon and uncommonly enjoyable. I think he was first mentioned here in 2005 for his Yan Tan Tethera libretto, and I quoted his poem “Them and [uz]” in 2024; I have now discovered his long poem “Y.,” first published in the LRB in 1985 (archived), and it is (among many other things) so gloriously filthy I can’t resist sharing some of it, while hoping any interested parties will click through for more. It begins:

  My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your power to master words.
  Arthur Scargill, Sunday Times, 10 January 1982

Next millennium you’ll have to search quite hard
to find my slab behind the family dead,
butcher, publican, and baker, now me, bard
adding poetry to their beef, beer and bread.

With Byron three graves on I’ll not go short
of company, and Wordsworth’s opposite.
That’s two peers already, of a sort,
and we’ll all be thrown together if the pit,

whose galleries once ran beneath this plot,
causes the distinguished dead to drop
into the rabblement of bone and rot,
shored slack, crushed shale, smashed prop.

Wordsworth built church organs, Byron tanned
luggage cowhide in the age of steam,
and knew their place of rest before the land
caves in on the lowest worked-out seam.

This graveyard on the brink of Beeston Hill’s
the place I may well rest if there’s a spot
under the rose roots and the daffodils
by which dad dignified the family plot.

If buried ashes saw then I’d survey
the places I learned Latin, and learned Greek,
and left, the ground where Leeds United play
but disappoint their fans week after week,

which makes them lose their sense of self-esteem
and taking a short cut home through these graves here
they reassert the glory of their team
by spraying words on tombstones, pissed on beer.

This graveyard stands above a worked-out pit.
Subsidence makes the obelisks all list.
One leaning left’s marked FUCK, one right’s marked SHIT
sprayed by some peeved supporter who was pissed.

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I keep running across the term découpage in learnèd discussions of movies and not knowing what it means, so I decided to find out — doubtless not for the first time, but I’m hoping that posting about it will make it stick. The OED is unhelpful; its two senses of the word are:

1. The decoration of a surface with an applied paper cut-out; an object produced by this technique.
[…]
2. Cinematography. = cutting n. 2h.

Even I know it’s not the same thing as “cutting,” and once again I deplore the OED’s cavalier attitude to areas of knowledge it doesn’t consider worth detailed differentiation. Wikipedia is even worse; its Decoupage page only deals with the “paper cutouts” sense. Fortunately, there’s a new book On the History of a Film Aesthetic Concept: Découpage, by Guido Kirsten (Routledge, 2026), whose publisher’s summary does a much better job of explaining it:

Unlike editing, découpage does not take place after the film has been shot, but before. The French term refers to the breakdown of a scene into a sequence of shots. In order to translate the written screenplay into film language, cinematographers and directors employ a genuinely cinematic way of thinking―a thinking in sequences of moving images and sounds, including the camera setups, movements, and shot sizes. Découpage is thus crucial in shaping a film’s specific form. Using the tools of conceptual history, Guido Kirsten traces the term’s evolution from its emergence in the 1910s through the eventful film history of the twentieth century until its recent rediscovery. By differentiating layers of meaning and discussing important shifts in the concept’s evolution, this book improves the understanding of key film theoretical texts, whose meaning has been distorted by mistranslation, and shows how a deeper reflection of découpage promises to enrich the analysis of contemporary moving image media.

I may have to investigate further; I’m intrigued by the mention of mistranslation. But I’ve got the general idea. (Compare Faux raccord; as I wrote there, “In general, film terminology is extraordinarily hard to grasp if you’re not part of the industry, and the fact that it differs so greatly between languages doesn’t help.”)

Courtesy of Stu Clayton, a brief and enjoyable video clip in which two guys try to guess the ten most spoken languages in the world (lumping together first- and second-language speakers). Stu says “Being ignorant, I was surprised by nr 10”; I wasn’t surprised, but I did enjoy the ride, as I hope will you.

Ben Yagoda at Not One-Off Britishisms discusses a phrase I was familiar with but didn’t realize was making inroads over here:

I see that only once in the history of Not One-Off Britishisms have I addressed the expression “to move house,” which is the British equivalent of what Americans mean when they say, “to move.” It was back in 2011, the first year of the blog, and I recounted, in passing, “the thrill of seeing,” in a New Yorker Janet Malcolm piece about Gertrude Stein, published eight years earlier, a sentence that began, ‘She and [Alice B.] Toklas were about to move house from Bilignin to a manor in Culoz, a few miles away…’”

I didn’t mention that the first time I ever encountered the expression also had a New Yorker connection. It was in 1996 or so, and I was interviewing Tina Brown, the magazine’s editor in chief (who is British, as Janet Malcolm is not), and she said something about “moving house.” I had not yet devised the concept of NOOBs, but the expression was so striking and different that I filed it away in the recesses of my consciousness.

The OED‘s first two citations for the phrase were both written by Thomas Hardy, the first in an 1888 short story called “Waiting Supper”: “Side by side as they had lived in his day here were they now. They had moved house in mass.” (Incidentally, the OED defines the word “wait,” as Hardy used it in the story’s title, as “To postpone (a meal) in expectation of the arrival of someone. colloquial.” It has four citations, all English, from 1788 to 1861. From an 1836 Charles Dickens letter: “I hope and trust you did not wait dinner for me.” The only time I’ve ever encountered it, till now, is from my wife, born in Massachusetts, where a lot of Britishisms, like “rubbish,” linger.)

But “move house” had been in circulation for at least three decades before Hardy’s story–probably well over three decades.

Click through for the antedates (which are always fun); I normally have no objection to Yanks picking up shiny bits of Britspeak, but this one is (in my opinion) dumb: “moving” is short and punchy, “moving house” is long and dull.

One of those silly but enjoyable online quizzes, from Isabella Kwai at the NY Times: “Hey, Bampot! Can You Tell Real British Insults From Fakes in This Quiz?” (archived). The intro:

How do I snub thee? Some British researchers are counting the ways, asking people around the country to send them swear words and insults that might be little known to outsiders.

“We’re really interested in those words that only make sense if you’re from a particular place,” said Chris Montgomery, a senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield who is leading the endeavor along with Modern Toss, an arts group.

Their hope, Dr. Montgomery said, is to preserve the diversity of curse words being used around Britain, particularly if they are obscure. “It’s a real window on people’s creativity with language,” he said.

Can you find the genuine British insult among the fakes?

I got 6 of 8, through sheer luck — I only knew a couple of them. Thanks, Nick!

I enjoyed all of Edward Mendelson’s NYRB review (archived) of Zadie Smith’s play The Wife of Willesden (a riff on Chaucer’s Wife of Bath); here I will excerpt a section on a topic dear to my heart, the importance of a clear personal voice in any literary writing:

The play’s comic and transhistorical virtuosity arises in part from a half-concealed argument—which Smith makes everywhere in her work—about the moral significance of a personal voice. “From the moment Alyson opens her mouth” in The Canterbury Tales, Smith recalls in her introduction,

I knew that she was speaking to me, and that she was a Kilburn girl at heart…. Alyson’s voice—brash, honest, cheeky, salacious, outrageous, unapologetic—is one I’ve heard and loved all my life: in the flats, at school, in the playgrounds of my childhood and then the pubs of my maturity, at bus stops, in shops, and of course up and down the Kilburn High Road, any day of the week. The words may be different but the spirit is the same.

Like everyone in the modern world, Alvita constructs her voice by amalgamating scraps and fragments of other voices into something uniquely her own. A stage direction reports: “Her accent is North Weezy [i.e., Northwest London] with moments of deliberate poshness as well as frequent lapses into Jamaican patois and cockney for comic effect.” In one of the paradoxes of personhood, Alvita becomes herself by containing multitudes, which is what makes possible her connection across the centuries with the unique voice and spirit of Chaucer’s Alyson.

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