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Stephen Fried’s fond reminiscence of Jim Quinn (Philadelphia magazine, 10/19/2020) came out over five years ago, but I just discovered it, and since Quinn is one of my language heroes (first touted just a few weeks into the existence of LH, reinforced in 2004, 2007, and 2013) I wanted to share it with y’all. I’ll quote the language-related passages, but he led an interesting life in general, so I recommend the whole thing:

Jim Quinn was one of Philadelphia’s finest, funniest, and smartest writers — of longform journalism, essays about food and language, and poetry for the first four decades of his career, and later of fiction as well. He was also, arguably, the city’s longest-living, longest-haired, and most prolific link to the best things about the 1960s, maintaining throughout his 85 years a sense of wonder and humor, political commitment, righteous indignation, and shrugging indifference to authority. […]

Quinn could write the most gorgeous sentences. But much of the joy of his reportage was his amazing attention to details that told the story better than he could. “He describes everything, yes everything, in most specific terms since euphemism is a word he has never heard,” said the New York Times Book Review in 1972 of his first major book, Word of Mouth: A Completely New Kind of Guide to New York Restaurants. […]

In his late 20s, Quinn was convinced by friends to return to college. In 1963 he enrolled at Temple University, where he got involved in campus politics and anti-war protests. […] He was, at the time, working toward his PhD in English literature — writing a dissertation on the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid, and lots of his own poetry. But editors who were fans of his food writing started reaching out with assignments. […]

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My wife and I are reading Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet (see this post), and at one point a character refers to having “a long cool drink of nimbo.” Naturally I wanted to know what this “nimbo” might be; after some frustration, I realized it was a variant of nimbu: “There may be no better drink for beating the heat than a nimbu soda, a lime-and-soda drink that’s ubiquitous in India.” But what’s nimbu? Well, Hindi नींबू (nīmbū) ‘lemon/lime (fruit or tree)’ (Urdu نیمبو) is from Sanskrit निम्बू (nimbū), which is “Of Austroasiatic origin; compare Mundari लेम्बु (lembu). Compare also Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *limaw (‘lime, citrus’), whence Malay limau (‘citrus’).” And this is where it gets interesting, because the long list of descendants of the Hindi/Urdu word includes Classical Persian لیمو (lēmū, līmū), from which is derived Arabic لَيْمُون (laymūn), borrowed into Old French as lymon, which is the source of English lemon. Furthermore, lime (the fruit) is:

[French, from Spanish lima, from Arabic līma, from Persian līmū, lemon, any of various citrus fruits; akin to Hindi nimbū and Gujarati lību, lime, of Austroasiatic origin; akin to Mundari (Munda language of Jharkhand, India) lembu.]

So lemon and lime are doublets; I probably knew that at some point, but I certainly didn’t know all the details, which are a lot of fun (note that Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *limaw gets turned around in Fijian and Polynesian and becomes moli). And now I want a long cool drink of nimbo.

I’ve long been a fan of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (see this 2011 post), and I like Corey Robin’s take on it:

In that famous first chapter of Mimesis, Erich Auerbach does something that usually drives me insane. Introducing the story of Odysseus’ scar from Homer’s Odyssey, Auerbach writes, “Readers of the Odyssey will remember the well-prepared and touching scene in book 19, when….” Six pages later, when he introduces the story of the Akedah, the binding of Isaac in the Book of Genesis, Auerbach writes, “the story itself begins: everyone knows it….”

When contemporary academics do this kind of thing, make this gesture of knowingness, it drives me crazy, as I said. I want to cry out, no, everyone does not know it, readers will not remember! But in Auerbach’s case, I don’t mind it. Why not?

Because, despite his saying we all know the story, Auerbach always proceeds to narrate the story. He gives you, the reader, the details of the story, its plot, the relevant background. When he then undertakes his analysis, which follows his summary of the plot, we’re all working on the same page. He doesn’t make knowing references, without any support or concreteness. He doesn’t invoke authority to justify his claims. He doesn’t pile up concept upon concept, or context upon context, to get himself out of the work of argument, of demonstrating that what he is saying is indeed true, or at least has a justifiable claim upon our attention and engagement.

So despite his use of the “we,” which a generation of academics has taught us is exclusionary or creates a false idea of readerly consensus and audience, Auerbach actually works, hard, to create that “we.” By setting out his evidence, he invites us to disagree with him, to remove ourselves from that “we” if we have reasons to object to it. Despite our assumptions of the democratic progress we’ve made from the midcentury intellectual/critic to today’s intellectual/critic, the actual style and substance of that midcentury intellectual/critic’s engagement is far more democratic in some ways than that of much of our contemporary world.

I feel that’s exactly right; when I started on the book, I felt intimidated because I’d read hardly any of the works he references, but I found that his account of them gave me enough of a handle that I could immerse myself further if I so desired, and I could easily follow his argument. It wasn’t at all like reading a scholar of these degenerate latter days who constantly drops references to Žižek, Sloterdijk, & Co. for generalized shock and awe. I did not, however, appreciate the commenter on his post who felt compelled to write:

“In that famous first chapter…” Really? I mean, I’ve read a lot of books but I never heard of that one. Pot, kettle, etc.

Smug parading of one’s own ignorance is another blight on our times. Pull down thy vanity!

I recently ran across a very odd word (odd, that is, to those who don’t work in the relevant industries); I quote the OED entry (revised 2016):

gobo
noun²

Originally U.S.

1. Cinematography, Television, and Photography. A dark plate, screen, or mask used to shield a lens from light. Also (Theatre): a partial screen or mask used in front of a spotlight to project a shape or image or to reduce the light on stage.
1923 ‘Gobo’ and other utterances..are flung around a studio by camera men.
New York Times 21 October x. 5

1925 Elephant ear, a form of gobo consisting of an upright post with a black card or board suspended at right angles, used to shade the camera lens from overhead light.
Los Angeles Times 29 November b6
[…]

1994 Gobos can produce projected images up to 6m in diameter and can be used in conjunction with colour films, slides or moving images.
Museums Journal January 36/3

2. Cinematography and Audio Technology. A (portable) screen or shield used to prevent a microphone from picking up extraneous noise.

1930 Gobo, portable wall covered with sound-absorbing material.
Sel. Glossary Motion Picture Technician (Acad. Motion Pictures, Hollywood) 15/2

1931 A Gobo is a portable wall used in absorbing sound when talkies are being made. And an Elephant Ear is a small Gobo used on certain conversational close-ups.
Lowell (Massachusetts) Sun 1 October 14/6
[…]

2003 This session..is as good as it gets, musically and technically: no gobos, no headphones, no second takes.
JazzTimes September 128/1

It’s odd because it sounds funny, it’s odd because it’s used in two such different (though parallel) senses, and it’s odd because the etymology isn’t known — the OED’s guess is “Origin uncertain; perhaps < gob- (in go-between n.) + ‑o suffix.” You’d think with such a recent word somebody might have preserved the knowledge of how it came about.
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I hadn’t been aware of TYPO: The International Journal of Prototypes (at least I’m not aware of having been aware of it…), but I like the cheeky name; their new issue, #14, is out, and Alex Cigale, in a FB post, writes:

With my gratitude to Editors Norman Conquest and Paul Rosheim, I’m delighted to have 5 translations from the Russian of poems by Russian Futurist Elena Guro (circa 1910) in TYPO: The International Journal of Prototypes. Please consider purchasing Issue 14 to support the work of this restlessly inventive journal dedicated to keeping the spirit of literary Modernism alive. I’m particularly delighted to share the issue with poetry translations and introduction to Nikolai Zabolotsky, a member of Oberiu (second generation Russian Futurist), by Дмитрий Манин/Dmitry Manin, who presents a side of Zabolotsky, an acknowledged master of philosophical nature poetry, known to few English readers. There are also two “Biblical Sonnets” by Genrikh Sapgir of the Lianozovo School who helped revive the spirit of Russian Futurism post-Stalin. The issue includes translations from Italian, French, Hungarian, German (Rilke’s prose, “The Testament”), visual poetry by John Vieira and Kristen Szumyn, and much else that will keep this reader newly informed and entertained for some time to come. https://blackscatbooks.com/2026/03/31/typo-14-spring-break/

Suddenly autumnal vernal

The earth breathed with willows into the near sky;
under the skittish clamor of raindrops it thawed.
It may be that she felt surpassed,
perhaps, she had been slighted,
but she continued believing in miracles.
Believing in her own high window:
small sky among the dark branches,
she never deceived us – guilty in nothing,
and so here she sleeps, breathing….
and it has become warm.

1912

I really like that translation; it has the ring of an English modernist poem of the era, say by Pound. Guro’s original Russian, “Вдруг весеннее,” is here. I don’t seem to have mentioned Elena Guro at LH (the stress in Guro is on the second syllable — apparently it’s from French Gouraud); she was a painter, playwright, poet, and fiction writer, and probably would be better known if she hadn’t died of leukemia at 36.

Update. Alex realized he’d had a slip of the brain when doing the draft translation, and he’s changed “autumnal” to “vernal” to match the Russian (see my comment below).

I thought I’d check out Deadloch, an Aussie cop show that was reputed to be a well-done comic riff on deadly serious shows like Broadchurch (which my wife and I enjoyed a few years back), and sure enough it seems very enjoyable. But it uses some vocabulary I wasn’t familiar with; in the first few minutes someone mentions “all the nangs” in the vicinity of the crime scene, so of course I had to investigate. Wiktionary has it: nang (plural nangs) (Australia, New Zealand, slang) ‘A metal bulb filled with nitrous oxide gas, inhaled for its disassociative effects, normally intended as a propellant for whipped cream’ (Synonym: whippet). It seems to be quite new, since the OED doesn’t have it; there’s another nang, an adjective, which Wiktionary defines as (UK, slang, chiefly MLE) ‘excellent; awesome; masterful; deeply satisfying’ (“That was well nang!”) and says comes from “Jamaican Creole nyanga, potentially from West African languages, such as Mende (Sierra Leone) nyanga (‘ostentation; showing off’) or Hausa yanga (‘boastfulness’).” That one is in the OED (first published 2017):

British slang (chiefly London).

As a general term of approval: good, excellent, cool.

2002 Sometimes we use nang to mean good.
news.bbc.co.uk 18 January (Internet Archive Wayback Machine 21 Jan. 2002)

2002 That’s nang dude.
abctales.com 6 March (forum post, accessed 3 May 2017)

2004 The performance of ‘Rock Star’ with appearances by the Black Eyed Peas, Justin Timberlake, and E3’s finest Dizzee Rascal were nang.
Touch April 19/2

2016 I’m talking about a kid coming along and he’s nang. He was a very good yute.
‘Wiley’ in H. Collins, This is Grime 101
[…]

The etymology is simply “Origin unknown.” Which isn’t very nang.

I find Jonathan Rée’s LRB review (5 February 2026; archived) of two books on Alexandre Kojève interesting on a number of counts. For one thing, he had the unusual duality of being both a well-known philosopher (Hegelian variety) and an important figure in French governments (Rée’s piece begins “The​ obituary in Le Monde was unequivocal: the death of Alexandre Kojève on 4 June 1968 had deprived France of one of its greatest civil servants”). Of more Hattic relevance is his name; he was born Aleksandr Vladimirovich Kozhevnikov (in Moscow), but at some point (neither English nor French Wikipedia is clear about this) he adopted the snappier Gallicized version Kojève. Here is a piquant account of his adventures after leaving Russia:

After a hard journey, including a spell in a Polish prison, Kojève reached Berlin in July 1920 and a few months later came into possession of a large stash of diamonds, sent illicitly from Russia by his mother. He was just eighteen and found himself, as he recalled, ‘at the mercy of money and the pleasures of life’. His extravagances and indiscretions may have been extreme, but they did not stop him taking courses in Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chinese, and devouring, as he put it, ‘everything worth reading in philosophy’. He also registered at Heidelberg to pursue research on Vladimir Soloviev, whom he regarded as ‘the first Russian thinker to devise a universal philosophical system’. He commended Soloviev’s vision of an ‘end of history’ in which humanity would rally to the feminine figure of Sophia, or absolute wisdom, but criticised the irrational attachment to Christianity which, he said, prevented Soloviev from winning through to ‘a new stage in the evolution of thought’.

Kojève finished his dissertation in 1924 but didn’t stay in Heidelberg long enough to qualify for a degree. Berlin was far more exciting and before long he was involved with a glamorous Russian woman, Cécile Shoutak. She was already married, and her aggrieved husband persuaded his older brother, Aleksander Koyra, to remonstrate with Kojève. The scheme misfired, however: Koyra came away convinced that his sister-in-law was ‘absolutely right’ and that Kojève was ‘much, much better than my brother’. He then returned to his home in Paris and persuaded the scandalous couple to join him there in 1926. They married and lived in conspicuous luxury in the Latin Quarter, while Kojève took up an inquiry into determinism and modern physics. But the Crash of 1929 wiped out his investments, which put an end to his high living, his marriage and his work in natural science, though not to his friendship with Koyra.

Koyra was one of the most celebrated intellectuals of the Russian diaspora. He had studied philosophy in Germany and France before joining the Foreign Legion, fighting on the Eastern Front and taking French citizenship under the name Alexandre Koyré. He completed a state doctorate in 1922, at the age of thirty, and was appointed to the École Pratique des Hautes Études, where he started trying to rehabilitate Hegel in France. The ‘traditional interpretation’, he said, was completely wrong: Hegel was not the ‘absurd dialectician and outrageous reactionary’ portrayed in patriotic French textbooks but a ‘singularly attractive’ thinker, more interested in ‘experience’ than ‘method’. Early in 1933, Koyré gave lectures on ‘Hegel in Jena’ in which he evoked ‘a human Hegel, vibrant and vulnerable’. He admitted that Hegel’s notion of an ‘end of history’ looked preposterous, even self-contradictory: how could abstract philosophical reasoning adjudicate on questions of historical fact and how could there be a ‘future’ in which there is ‘no longer any future’? But the difficulties disappear, according to Koyré, once you realise that Hegel was talking not about history as such, but about the way philosophy reflects on it. ‘Philosophy always arrives too late,’ as Hegel once put it. ‘When philosophy paints its grey on grey, a form of life has grown old,’ or in other words, the ‘owl of Minerva’ – symbol of philosophical insight – ‘takes flight only at dusk’. The notion of an end of history is therefore hypothetical rather than categorical: it means that philosophy will not be complete until history is finished, or conversely, that if philosophy is complete, then history must be over. Koyré seems to have thought that no one in their right mind could imagine that these conditions would ever be fulfilled; but he conceded rather sorrowfully that, in Jena in 1806, ‘Hegel himself may well have believed it.’

So there’s another odd onomastic change: why did Koyra (Койра) choose to become Koyré ([kwaʁe])? Is this what studying Hegel does to people? (Kojève’s innamorata Cécile Shoutak also has an odd name — Russian sources call her Цецилия Леонидовна Шутак, and what kind of Russian name is Цецилия?) Anyway, the whole review is worth reading if you care about this stuff, and I’ll quote another Hattic bit: Kojève “took some pride in having defied taboo by encouraging smoking and using colloquial French.”

Time for another episode of Ask the Hatters! I was reading Jill Lepore’s New Yorker piece “Does A.I. Need a Constitution?” (March 23, 2026; archived) when I found myself flummoxed by the quote at the end of this passage:

A.I. companies’ democratic experiments quickly came to an end. This has made many people more rather than less anxious about A.I., especially in the past few months, owing not least to the newsworthy departures from leading A.I. companies of a number of high-profile safety and alignment researchers. “‘Shoot, the world is not paying enough attention to this’ is a way we all used to feel,” [Divya] Siddarth told me. “Now my mom calls me and says, ‘I saw on the Indian news that some guy resigned from Anthropic,’ and I’m, like, ‘Please.’”

I like to think I’m pretty well versed in the ways of spoken and written English after many decades of speaking and reading it, and I can usually interpret from context what an expression means even if it’s used in an unexpected way, but I have absolutely no idea what the purport of “I’m, like, ‘Please’” might be. Is it “Please, why are you telling me this?” Is it “Please, that’s bullshit”? Is it “Please, that’s not even news”? What’s it all about, Alfie?

Danny Bate featured here just a couple of weeks ago, but he’s got another post I can’t resist sharing: The Armenian Who Learned Greek in Ancient Egypt. This is another “who knew?” moment for me:

Written in Armenian letters for an unknown individual navigating the Greek-speaking society of Roman Egypt, this document is an absolute goldmine of historical and linguistic information. It’s both a testament to a multicultural Mediterranean world, and a valuable early witness to the Armenian language and its speakers. This is in spite of the fact that it doesn’t contain a single word of Armenian. […]

This document, cautiously dated to around the 5th–7th century AD, is a very early example of the Armenian alphabet, and the only one written with papyrus for its material. Yet it doesn’t come from anywhere near lands ever known as ‘Armenia’, nor does it write down Armenian speech. Its provenance is unclear. The French scholar Auguste Carrière bought the parpyrus from a dealer at the end of the 19th century. Scholars worked off a photograph of just one side until the original was rediscovered in 1993 by historian Dickran Kouymjian at the French Bibliothèque Nationale (designation: BnF Arm 332). Before Carrière, the trail goes cold, but the arid, papyrus-preserving climate of Egypt is the likeliest resting place. As for its language, the document is nothing but words of Greek.

Line after line, the document faithfully renders nouns, adjectives, verbs, phrases and whole sentences of Greek in Armenian letters. […] Now, I see two seams of information to be excavated from the papyrus: one about historical language (quelle surprise), but another about historical society. Let’s dig into the first.

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I was led down a rabbit hole today by ktschwarz, who linked to this 2011 Log post, whose long comment thread I read with fascination. I was particularly struck by a comment by Suzanne Kemmer which I must have read at the time, since I commented later on, but which I’d completely forgotten in the ensuing decade and a half; since it’s so interesting, I’m reposting it here in the hope of both enlightening the multitudes and remembering it myself:

On till death do us part:

I’ve researched the various analytic causative constructions in the history of English. The “make” causative as in it made me laugh only started to emerge in Middle English. An older analytic causative, occurring in Old English and persisting through the Middle English period, was [don (the ancestor of Modern English do) + (direct object) + INF]. So “it did us laugh” was the normal way of saying “it made us laugh”.

Till death do us part means ‘until death causes us to part’. The main verb do is in the subjunctive, to indicate irrealis. That’s why it does not have a 3rd person sg. marker in this preserved formula.

In Old English the don analytic causative construction also did not take the to that precedes infinitivals in most of the modern infinitival complement constructions. to only became grammaticalized later, and never made it to constructions with make, let, and the later have causative.

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