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My brother sent me this link illustrating and defining the Scots word sook (SND), given as “sycophant, crawler, toady, to fawn and flatter” with the sample sentence “Ah’ve heard o sookin in wi the boss Smithers but this is takin it ower far. Yir fired!” I enjoyed the word, of course, but I was thrilled that it was from a most enjoyable site I hadn’t been familiar with, Stooryduster:

The Scottish Language is full of attitude, great on the ear, emotive, and the words are not too far from English which makes them globally accessible. I hear and speak Scots every day. Perfect for me to illustrate and translate.

It seems to have been quiescent for over a year — the latest entry is Curl-doddy, from April 22, 2025 (defined as “The devil’s bit scabious, the seed-bearing stem of the ribwort plantain, clover, both red and white and other such round headed flowers”: “Ye canni ca it curl-doddie, that’s for the deil’s bit scabious frae the Scabiosa family, an dinni snigger”) — but the archives go back to the year 2000, so there’s plenty to investigate. Thanks, Eric!

Adam Thirlwell has a wonderful LRB review essay (25 June 2026; archived) of a book I keep meaning to read, Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev (the review is of the new translation by Bryan Karetnyk). It opens irresistibly:

In a library​ when I was young I came across a book published by the Hogarth Press. It was so delicate I hardly wanted to touch it. It had a mottled green cover, it was maybe seventy pages long, and I read it in one amazed hour. The book was Maxim Gorky’s Reminiscences of Leo Nicolayevitch Tolstoi, from 1920, which the Woolfs would later republish in a fuller volume, with two more of Gorky’s reminiscences: of Chekhov and the less world-famous Leonid Andreyev. I loved the book entirely, and surely any book is lovable that has Tolstoy on the phone to Chekhov? For a while I considered stealing it, this rare object, which seemed to contain answers to the mystery of something called literature. The translation a century ago was by S.S. Koteliansky with Leonard Woolf (Woolf’s contribution presumably being to correct the occasional syntactical blemish), and was only rarely reprinted. Now at last there is a new translation, by Bryan Karetnyk, and everyone can contemplate this strange and moving work.

(Koteliansky was very helpful to Dorothy Richardson [see this LH post], whose experiences with translating you can read about here.) I’ll quote some more good bits and hope you’ll click through for the whole thing:

In the 19th century a new tone emerged in Russian writing and it created much confusion – both in Russia and elsewhere. Everyone was agreed that whatever it was, it wasn’t European. The only Russian who was European was Turgenev, and it made him highly suspicious. But maybe to give it this nationalist tinge isn’t accurate at all. There were basically three or four writers – Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Chekhov, with Turgenev a possible addition and Gogol an ancestor – who had crafted a form of fiction writing that seemed to offer such a radically fluid and cavernous account of human relations, so much less brittle than Thackeray or Zola, that it no longer seemed to be art at all. Anna Karenina was a ‘piece of life’, Matthew Arnold said, not a novel. Virginia Woolf wondered at Dostoevsky’s naked characters, vessels of ‘this perplexed liquid, this cloudy, yeasty, precious stuff, the soul’. Everyone else in European literature suddenly seemed ordinary. It was a freak of time and space.

One feature of such apparently exposed writing was to collapse any distinction between life and literature. It seemed natural in this era to covet biographical intimacy, to devour lives and letters, and Gorky’s Reminiscences are especially intense. He believed that no anecdote was too domestic to be meaningful, like this story of Tolstoy praising Chekhov’s ‘The Darling’ in front of Chekhov. ‘On that day, Chekhov had a temperature: he was sitting with red blotches on his cheeks and his head tilted forward, cleaning his pince-nez meticulously. He said nothing for some while, then finally, with a sigh, he said quietly and with embarrassment: “There are misprints in it …”’ Gorky writes as if everything private in the lives of these writers were a mystery to be decoded, as if this story of Chekhov might be some clue to his modesty, and therefore his talent. I don’t think he was mistaken. Maybe at a certain point all literature is personal. It’s difficult to admit this because the ideal is of something abstract and therefore perfect. It was the ideal for sure in Paris, where Flaubert proposed that the realist novel was also the impersonal novel, that the personality of the author was of no interest to anyone serious. […]

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About:

Alman is a simplified dialect of German designed to reduce the complexity of the language while maintaining mutual intelligibility with Standard German. It systematically eliminates several complex grammatical features:

• Gender System: Uses a single article form for most contexts
• Case Markings: Removes most case-based inflections
• Noun Declensions: Simplifies noun endings across cases
• Job Titles: Eliminates gender-specific forms in occupational titles

The English home page opens with a deadpan Mark Twain riff:

In 1880, an American author filed a detailed complaint about the German language, together with a proposal for its reform. He had studied it for nine weeks, under great difficulty and annoyance; three of his teachers died in the meantime. The file has remained open since.

Just keep scrolling; it’s presented with all the interactive frills Youth Today are accustomed to, and I find it impressive and mildly amusing. I can’t quite believe someone went to all the trouble to create such an elaborate site in the service of a joke language, and I can’t quite escape the niggling suspicion that they don’t think it’s a joke.

I got to it via MetaFilter, where (as expected) some people don’t understand language and others don’t understand humor; I enjoyed Bruce Ware Allen’s comment quoting his grandfather describing a talk by Robert Millikan (“Introduced with words of strong praise, Millikan spoke a language which I have rarely heard, except from our own children – a German which knows no dative, and in which genders are distributed by lot”) and one by adrienneleigh beginning “When i was 16 or so, i read Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17 (still one of the true books of my heart) and then, because of a tossed-off bit of trivia in it, set about to teach myself introductory Finnish.” Now, that’s my kind of reader!

AntC sent me a link to this RNZ story by Layla Bailey-McDowell, saying “This is one of those silly gossip-magazine ‘competitions’ that I wouldn’t bother with except a word in Te Reo Māori is the winner. (Also a Welsh word came third.)” It is certainly silly, but I like the word; the story begins:

A Māori word describing the responsibility to care for the natural world has been named the world’s most beautiful word by language-learning platform Babbel. The kupu, kaitiakitanga topped a list of 223 words from 75 languages after Babbel analysed discussions across online communities including Reddit and TikTok before an international panel of linguists, writers and cultural experts selected a winner.

The word means guardianship and protection. It was a way of protecting and caring for the environment for present and future generations based on the Māori world view. Babbel said kaitiakitanga stood out for its distinctive sound, layered meaning and cultural significance. […]

(I’ll spare you the guff about its profundity and “concept that has no direct equivalent in many other languages”; I’m sure you can fill in the blanks for yourself.) The runner-ups include such perennials as Welsh hiraeth ‘wistfulness; nostalgia’ (or, in excitable journalese, “A deep, bittersweet longing for a lost or never-truly-known home or time”) and Portuguese saudade ‘wistfulness; nostalgia’ (aka “A deep longing for someone or something that is absent – both painful and beautiful”), but it also has fresher items like Turkish yakamoz ‘phosphorescence in the sea due to bioluminescent dinoflagellates; the reflection of moonlight or other lights on water,’ which pleased me by being borrowed from Greek διακαμός ‘phosphorescence in the sea.’ (It also includes what it calls Yiddish luftmensch, although that’s the English spelling — the Yiddish word, לופֿטמענטש, is transliterated luftmentsh. It’s a word I’ve always loved, but I’m not sure I’d call it beautiful.) As for the winner, kaitiakitanga /kaiˈtiakiˌtaŋa/ is from kaitiaki ‘guardian’ +‎ -tanga (nominalising suffix), and kaitiaki ‘guardian’ is derived from tiaki ‘to guard,’ whose Polynesian cognates you can see at POLLEX. Thanks, AntC!

I always enjoy the NY Times‘ Metropolitan Diary section (little tales of city life sent in by readers), and today there was one that made my linguistic antennae vibrate:

Dear Diary:

My daughter returned home to New York from college in Michigan for summer break. Her three roommates came along for a weeklong stay.

Sitting around the kitchen table one morning, they were eagerly planning things to do in the city. They mentioned a nightclub.

“There’s a really good diner around the corner for afterward,” I said.

Marisa, born and raised in Michigan, looked confused.

“Diner?” she said. “What do you mean ‘diner?’”

“Huh?” I replied. “What do you mean?”

“What’s a diner?”

“What?”

Marisa’s eyes darted around to the other Michigan girls. They also looked confused.

I was confused too.

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Another in my occasional series featuring dubious statements about language by scholars in other fields: Nelson Goering posts on FB about a book on Vietnamese history he’s reading in which the author claims the Vietnamese word for water, nác/nước, derives from “one of the archaic Vietnamese terms for woman (nàng).” (This is in service of a point about “a possible Earth Mother cult,” which makes me sigh an entirely separate sigh.) Now, I know next to nothing about Vietnamese etymology, but I know enough to be skeptical about that, and sure enough, a quick visit to Wiktionary informed me that nước is “From Proto-Vietic *ɗaːk (‘water’), from Proto-Mon-Khmer *ɗaak (‘water’).” (If you’re curious about that archaic Vietnamese term for woman, nàng, it’s from Proto-Tai *naːŋᴬ ‘lady.’) I realize the Vietnamese word starts with n- and the protoforms with d-; I am assuming this is a regular or at least explicable development or it wouldn’t be stated with such assurance, but as I say, I am ignorant about Vietnamese etymology, so if there is reason to think Wiktionary is wrong (which, of course, it not infrequently is) and the historian is right, by all means let me know.

In my Kurosawa festival, I’ve gotten to The Bad Sleep Well [Internet Archive], which is astonishingly good, with a riveting performance by Mifune — I can’t believe I’d barely heard of it. (Actually, I can, because it’s the grimmest, bitterest movie he ever made aside from Ran, and it openly attacks the corruption and brutality of corporate life.) But I bring it here for its title, which in Japanese is 悪い奴ほどよく眠る Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru. Now, I don’t actually know Japanese, but I did when I was very young and I’ve read a fair amount about it since (and seen a lot of movies), so I can generally figure out how sentences work; in this case, I know 悪い奴 warui yatsu is ‘bad guys’ and よく眠る yoku nemuru is ‘sleep well.’ But what’s this hodo? My trusty Rose-Innes Vocabulary of Common Japanese Words has the following array of senses:

1) Approximate quantity : about.
2) Quantity ; price ; much.
3) Comparisons of equality : as–as.
4) Neg. comparisons. (example: sore hodo waruku nai not so bad as that)
5) An individual is compared to all the other individuals of the same kind.
6) So–(that).
7) Enough.
8) The–the. (example: ōi hodo ii the more the better)
9) Moderation ; limit.
10) Time. (example: saki-hodo mairimashita he arrived a short time ago)
11) Various. (examples: hodo no ii hito desu he’s a decent person; ii hodo ni aisatsu shite oita I gave a vague answer)

(He has lots of example sentences; I just copied out a few to give an idea of the relevant sense.) This reminds me of the dustman’s dumpling and doesn’t give me much help. Can any Japanese speakers out there explain how the sentence works? If I put “the bad sleep well” into GT, I get 悪人はよく眠る akunin wa yoku nemuru; how does hodo modify the sense?

Also, in the course of the movie I noticed a lovely example of Japanese laconicism: “Kimi… boku… doko e?” [‘you… me… where?’], rendered in the subtitles as “Where are you taking me?” But you have to get that from context.

Cal Revely-Calder (who has an interesting Three Things substack) writes about faces in the New Yorker (archived); I was enjoying its brio and historical tidbits, but when I got to this passage I knew I had to post it:

Yet there’s another side to this coin. Our vocabulary also speaks of invention, even artifice. The English word “face” derives from the Latin facies, implying a created form; so does the French visage, from videre, suggesting something seen from without. “Mask,” “masque,” “mascara,” “maquillage,” and their European relations seem to be etymologically linked, and carry long-standing associations with concealment, distortion, pretense. For Socrates, the art worth prizing was the cultivation and preservation of natural beauty; we’ve happily overwritten it with what he treated suspiciously as kommōtikē, the art of changing how one looks. Even “person,” along with “impersonation” and “personae,” derives from persona, a theatrical mask through which classical actors spoke. The cultural historian Hans Belting suggested that faces and masks were conceptually inseparable: we shouldn’t think of one as “real” and the other as “fake”—one as the thing we have and the other as the thing we temporarily don. Life, he wrote, was fully “a perpetuum mobile,” an “expressive drama,” in which our faces resolve into one legible position, one legible role, then reassemble themselves into the next. We make them up, in every sense.

I was suspicious about “the Latin facies, implying a created form,” but it seems to be true; Wiktionary says:

The term faciēs is to faciō as speciēs is to speciō, literally meaning “a make, imposed form”.

(face): Compare typologically Czech tvář, Polish twarz [both ‘face’] (<< Proto-Slavic *tvarь, akin to *tvoriti)

All of which was new to me, and may be new to you.
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Jennifer Szalai reviews for the NY Times (archived) a new biography of a remarkable man:

George Forster is one of the most fascinating figures you have probably never heard of. He was a naturalist, a humanist, an explorer and a revolutionary. His intellectual and emotional journey began in 1772, when he was still a teenager. For three years and 18 days, he sailed on Capt. James Cook’s second voyage to the South Seas, a young man both enthralled and horrified by what he saw.

The 17-year-old Forster had been recruited to the trip by his father, Reinhold, a Lutheran pastor with a bad temper and scientific ambitions. Reinhold and George collected shells, dried plants and animals preserved in alcohol. George made pencil sketches and watercolors. The journey was treacherous, but he delighted in the lush landscapes and the many islanders they encountered. What appalled him was the behavior of his fellow Europeans.

Forster is the vibrant subject of Andrea Wulf’s “The Traveler,” a lively new book that hums with her characteristic verve. Wulf first encountered Forster’s name while researching previous books on the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and the early German Romantics. She was intrigued. Who was this 18th-century man who criticized an “unfair difference between the sexes” and promoted an early concept of human rights? A gifted linguist, Forster also noticed connections between the languages of the South Pacific, developing a theory of Polynesian migration that would be proved some 200 years later. He became enamored with the French Revolution and tried to bring it to Germany. “The Traveler” thrillingly revives the forgotten life of this “liberal thinker far ahead of his time.”

I have bolded the bit that makes it Hattic, but really, the whole thing is worth reading. Here’s another snippet:

When Cook’s men encountered resistance, they would speak of intransigent natives. Forster, however, not infrequently empathized with islanders who tried to defend themselves. Imagine that a bunch of strangers arrived on one’s shores and started waving guns around while making demands: “Surely from all appearances these people had a right to look at our men as a set of invaders.”

One of those people I wish I could meet. (His name, however, He was born George, but his name is now more appropriately often given as Georg Forster.)

I liked Talia Felix’s Etymonline post about A.1. Sauce so much I thought I’d share it; it’s a nice bit of philological/historical investigation:

In personal curiosity I was looking at a webpage about the history of H.P. Sauce. The page also included a history of A.1. Sauce, which some people evidently think tastes similar. It claimed that this latter sauce was invented by the chef of King George IV and that the king himself gave it the name of “A-1.” While I felt an initial burst of excitement – I’m a big fan of George IV or “Prinny” as he was long known – I also had some skepticism. Prinny died in 1830, several years before our first attestation of A-1 as slang (1837, in Charles Dickens). And I’ve read Aspinall’s collection of Prinny’s letters – A-1 doesn’t sound like the way Prinny talked, even when he was being informal (drunk). Likely he’d have favored a French word or something out of Grose: elderly monarchs aren’t known for being on top of slang trends.

I started looking on Newspapers.com for some indication that A.1. Sauce was really that old. Almost immediately I turned up an advertisement from 1881 where the company’s own product description said it was invented in 1862 for the International Exhibition, and that the Chief Royal Commissioner was the person who called it A.1.

So where did all this stuff about George IV and the sauce being from the 1830s come from? Well the rest of my day got spent trying to untangle that. Short version is: none of that Prinny stuff is correct; but because Wikipedia got hold of it, it’s hopelessly all over the place now, and all your AI answers will say it’s true. It looks to have resulted from perhaps legitimate confusion (or perhaps deliberate exaggeration) of certain facts.

Click through for the details, which can have their own interest; I particularly like this parenthetical:

(Note that most sources say the International Exhibition was in South Kensington; but one of the entrances was at Hyde Park Corner and another required crossing Hyde Park. Maps of the exhibition show the “refreshment rooms” were near the entrances by the park.)

Always check maps!