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I always enjoy Gary Shteyngart’s writing (e.g., 2004, 2011), and his latest New Yorker essay, “A Martini Tour of New York City” (archived), is no exception. The first paragraph:

Three years ago, as the pandemic was loosening its grip on the world, and as I started to recover from the aftereffects of a botched childhood circumcision that had returned to haunt me in middle age, I rediscovered the bottomless pleasure of a cold dry Martini. My emergence from both a global and personal health crisis plunged me into a daily Saturnalia. As restaurants reopened, I unhinged my jaw and left it open: suadero tacos dripping with lard; twisted knobs of dough crowning gigantic Georgian khinkali dumplings; the mutton chop at Keens Steakhouse that is made for sharing in theory, but not in practice—all fell victim to my appetites. And to help the food go down easy, I also consumed gallons of Willamette Valley pinot noir and hyper-local artisanal ales. Soon enough, my A1C levels were in the prediabetic range and I knew that action had to be taken.

From this I learned the word suadero ‘(cooking, Mexico) a thin cut of fried beef that is commonly used as a taco filling,’ “Possibly from sudadero,” and later on (“Matt and I followed up our drinks with some shishito peppers”) I learned shishito ‘A sweet Japanese pepper, a cultivar of the species Capsicum annuum,’ “Borrowed from Japanese 獅子唐 (shishitō).” I was familiar with khinkali dumplings (and have in fact eaten them), but looking up the Georgian word ხინკალი I learned that it is “ultimately borrowed from Avar хинкӏал (xinkʼal)” and that it gave rise to Armenian խինկալի (xinkali), which is “Folk-etymologically explained as խին (xin, ‘fat’) +‎ -կալ (-kal, ‘to hold’) or as խինալի (xinali), խնալի (xnali, ‘full of fat’).” Elsewhere he uses the term fat-washed, which Google tells me is “a clever cocktail technique that adds savory flavor to spirits. To fat-wash your alcohol, you just add a liquid like sesame oil or melted butter to a spirit at room temperature.” And for a bit of synchronicitous lagniappe, I offer this sentence: “The bacon of the devils on horseback set off a long Proustian moment as we recalled the Martini-accompanying bar snacks of yore, the pigs in a blanket, for example, that went so well with the Polo Bar’s Gibsons.”

A couple of years ago the indefatigable ktschwarz linked to Ben Yagoda’s 2011 Slate essay on why Americans think bumbershoot is British, but I suspect not many Hatters saw the comment, and although I did, I had entirely forgotten it and was freshly surprised when Ben linked to it on FB: “What? It’s not Britspeak?” said I (in my hypothetical internal monologue) and clicked through to read the very interesting details:

In my recent Slate article about Americans using more Britishisms, I wondered aloud, “Why have we adopted laddish while we didn’t adopt telly or bumbershoot?” More than one English person responded to this query with another: “Bumbershoot? What do you mean, bumbershoot?”

I told them I had always thought of this funny term for umbrella as one of those words, like cheerio and old man, that the stage Englishman is required to say. My wife had the same impression. But when I looked into the matter, I learned that we were apparently misinformed. The Oxford English Dictionary identifies the word as “originally and chiefly U.S. slang.” And the digital archive of the Times of London, comprising 7,696,959 articles published between 1785 and 1985, yields precisely zero hits for bumbershoot.

As late as 1933, there was no British association. That year the New York Times ran a short editorial praising bumbershoot as “a term that drips with poetry and magic” and referring to it as “the mystical name, the children’s name, for an umbrella.” (And can we lament for a second that the Times editorial-page prose style no longer drips with poetry and magic?) Some days later, R.A. McGlasson wrote a letter to the editor saying that the word was commonly used in his Dutchess County, N.Y. childhood 50 years earlier; another correspondent, Louis Margolis, reported he first heard it while “spending a summer on a Connecticut farm in New London County at the tender age of ten or eleven years.”

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In Anna Wiener’s New Yorker piece “How Perfectly Can Reality Be Simulated?” (archived), there is a mention of “the I’on Swamp, a former rice paddy on the outskirts of Charleston, South Carolina”; thanks to the magazine’s serif font, I could tell that it was “eye-on” and not “lon” (with an el), but the spelling threw me — I’ve never seen an apostrophe used that way. A little googling turned up Kyle Brooks’ 2017 post The I’On Swamp, in which he proffers the following explanation:

The early owner of the Clayfield Plantation was Jacob Bond I’On, which is where the current name for the swamp stems from. From what I could gather, most people called this swamp the Wappetaw Swamp during the 1700’s and 1800’s, and the name didn’t transition to the I’On Swamp until the 1900’s. As an interesting aside, this part of the Lowcountry spoke non-rhotic English in the 1700’s and early 1800’s, meaning that people born and raised in this region did not pronounce the “R” sound in words. Jacob Bond I’On’s last name is actually a modification of the name “Iron.” This name was modified to reflect how people were pronouncing the name, and the spelling stuck, both with the I’On family, but also the I’On Swamp.

Obviously that “Iron” story could be fake news, but it’s plausible and, for the moment, good enough for me. I wonder why they chose to use the apostrophe? It seems like “Ion” would be a natural and unremarkable rendering of the name. As it is, it looks as weird as de la O.

I enjoyed Irina Mashinski’s Facebook post about her love for Nabokov, which began while she was still living in the Soviet Union (“Вообще мой список такой: Лужин, Пнин, Дар, Лолита, Машенька, Подвиг, несколько рассказов из Чорба и вся Весна в Фиальте. И Другие берега. Началось, конечно, с Дара […]”), and one of her commenters, Yefim Somin, linked to his own post about his visit to the Vladimir Nabokov Museum, on what is now once again Bolshaya Morskaya (“Big Maritime”) Street:

I entered the mansion. The museum occupied only part of the first floor raised over the street level, the piano nobile of Nabokov’s memories. Not much remained from the hereditary owners: mostly carved oak doors, and amazingly, oak ceilings to match. Elsewhere, predictable images on the walls and in glass-covered display cases: old floor plans, Lolita, butterflies. The last room in the enfilade was reserved for education. A few old women sitting in chairs scattered over a large hall were intently watching a video of another old woman talking about the house. Nabokov’s sister had returned in the 1950’s, 40 years after fleeing, to see the house and the city, unlike her brother who never did. I stood in the corner, holding back an urge to scream: “Turn around and look at me, I am back too! Not quite 40 years but longer than Ulysses and Rip Van Winkle. Ask me, if you want to know what it feels like!” A fancy of a Rip Van Winkle return apparently gripped Nabokov, too. He described such a time traveler in The Gift. This character left St. Petersburg in 1836 and sailed to Boston, of all places. After years of adventures in the New World he came back to the old one in 1858. Thanks to the absence of the Internet as an information source, this fellow was amply taken advantage of by his friends and relatives. For instance, when asked about Pushkin, they assured him that Pushkin’s new poem had just come out the other day, and indeed, pointed out the great poet to him at a theater performance. Needless to say, the real Pushkin was killed in a duel in 1837. My own images of return for the first ten years after departure came invariably in the form of a nightmare: I am back and cannot leave again for some unclear Kafkaesque reason. Maybe I am late for the plane, maybe something is wrong with my papers, maybe I just forgot the way to the airport, or even worse: I can go, but my son has to stay, and it’s impossible to wrest him away from his keepers. I was apparently not alone: Mikhail Baryshnikov’s film White Nights is his version of just such a dream. There is a World Wide Web now, but even that won’t make you fully prepared for a real-life comeback.

I was pleased at the reference to one of my favorite bits in The Gift (see the first paragraph of this 2012 post), but what prompts me to post is the phrase piano nobile, which I’ve run across now and then and never been sure of. Happily, the OED revised its entry in 2006:
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The start of Jonathan Parry’s very enlightening LRB review of The Chief: The Life of Lord Northcliffe by Andrew Roberts (1 December 2022; archived):

‘Do dogs commit suicide?’ ‘Can monkeys smoke?’ ‘An electrical flying machine?’ Those who were intrigued by such matters in 1888 sought enlightenment from a new weekly magazine, Answers to Correspondents, which also explained ‘How to Cure Freckles’, ‘Terrors of Top Hats’, and ‘The Destiny of Lost Luggage’. The magazine’s title wasn’t quite accurate, since the answers were rarely definitive and most of the questions actually derived from the fertile brain of the editor, the 22-year-old Alfred Harmsworth. He quickly realised how to generate ‘talking points’ that would boost the paper’s circulation. The third issue addressed the mystery ‘Do Jews ride bicycles?’ with an assurance that the editor, a keen cyclist for many years, had never met a fellow enthusiast ‘of the Hebrew persuasion’. Within weeks he had been refuted by Alfred Cohen, a cycling club treasurer, among other genuine correspondents who produced lists of medal-winning Jewish riders. The paper itself was now a ‘talking point’. Eight years later, Harmsworth imported this technique into his most significant creation, the Daily Mail. In 2012, the journalist John Rentoul produced a satirical essay on the art of the newspaper headline called Questions to Which the Answer Is ‘No!’ It was a homage to Harmsworth, the Mail and their many imitators.

Cf. Betteridge’s law of headlines, which apparently has only been so called since 2009, “although the principle is much older.”

I’ve been a fan of Veniamin Kaverin since reading his 1971 novel Перед зеркалом [Before the mirror] (LH post); I also enjoyed his early Скандалист [The troublemaker] (LH post), and I’m now reading his 1931 novel Художник неизвестен [The artist is unknown, tr. by P. Ross, whoever that is, in 1947 as The Unknown Artist] and savoring it slowly. I haven’t gotten very far and haven’t come to any conclusions yet, but I thought I’d share this bit from near the start, a rant by one of the main characters, Aleksei Arkhimedov:

— Мне тяжело смотреть на этот щит, — сказал он наконец. — Он безобразен. Скульптору, который слепил его, следует вынести общественное порицание. И не только за то, что он плохо исполнил свою работу, смешав гербы ремесла с эмблемами власти, но за то, что он не понимает связи между личным достоинством и ответственностью за труд. Ты скажешь — романтика! Я не отменяю этого слова. У него есть свои заслуги. Когда-то русские называли романом подвешенное на цепях окованное бревно, которым били по городским укреплениям. Роман был тогда тараном. Потом он опустился. Он стал книгой. А теперь пора вернуть ему первоначальное значение. Романтика! Поверь мне, что это стенобойное орудие еще может пригодиться для борьбы с падением чести, лицемерием, подлостью и скукой.

Ross’s translation:

“It pains me to look at that coat of arms”, he said at last. “It’s ugly. […] The sculptor who carved it should be publicly rebuked. Not merely because he performed his work badly, mingling the arms of professions with the emblems of power, but because he has failed to understand the connection between self-respect and the responsibilities of labour. You’ll call it romanticism! I won’t reject the word. It has its uses. Once upon a time we Russians used to call a log of wood hanging from chains and bound by hoops, used in city fortifications, romanticism. Romanticism in those days was a battering ram. Then it lost caste. It became а book. Now it’s time we gave it back its original meaning. Romanticism! Believe me, this ramming weapon can still be of use in the fight with —— against honour, with hypocrisy, baseness and boredom.”

(I have omitted a sentence that is not in my Russian text.) You’re probably wondering about that “Romanticism in those days was a battering ram”; it makes no sense because the Russian actually says this:

Once upon a time Russians used to call a log of wood hanging from chains and bound by hoops, with which they beat at city fortifications, a roman. A roman in those days was a battering ram. Then it lowered itself. It became а book. Now it’s time to give it back its original meaning.

This is classic formalist fun; the point is that besides the word roman which in modern Russian means ‘novel’ (as well as ‘romance,’ but that seems irrelevant here), there used to be a homonym meaning ‘battering ram,’ and how could a novelist trained as a critic and scholar of literature resist the pun? The odd thing is that the ‘ram’ word, though it is in Dahl (“барс, таран, баран”), is — most unusually — not in Vasmer’s etymological dictionary, which uses Dahl as its basic source of words to be explained. Does anybody know of any work that’s been done on this mysterious lexeme, or have any theories?

I have long been familiar with a dish called “pigs in a blanket,” which refers to hot dogs in croissant dough, and am not surprised that it is a US thing (hot dogs, n’est-ce pas?), but I am quite surprised to learn that Brits have a dish of sausage wrapped in bacon called “pigs in blankets” (as well as “kilted sausages” or “kilted soldiers”); furthermore, “it is a seasonal item, seldom offered commercially outside the Christmas season. […] Tesco in 2019 reported that a majority of shoppers they surveyed planned to serve the dish at Christmas dinner and that more planned to serve pigs in blankets than any other side dish, including Yorkshire pudding, another traditional Christmas dish.” Talk about two countries divided by a common language! The US version “can be traced back to at least 1940”; as for the UK one, tobotic on Reddit says “Delia Smith made them popular about 30 years ago. I’m sure plenty of people had the idea to wrap sausages in bacon before that, but she popularized the term for them and the idea that they should be included in a Christmas dinner.” For what that’s worth.

Maria Sereda has a Facebook post (in Russian) describing a phenomenon she’d learned about on a trip to Bishkek (Bishkek/Pishpek): in Kyrgyz, you can form an emphatic adjective by repeating the first syllable and adding -p-, and bilinguals do the same thing in Russian, creating, e.g., сипсиний [sipsinii] ‘very blue’ from синий [sinii] ‘(dark) blue.’ Commenters say the same is true of Azerbaijani, Kazakh, and “all of Central Asia,” and one says Turkish has the same phenomenon: sarı ‘yellow’ sapsarı, yeşil ‘green’ yemyeşil. As you can see, that last has -m- rather than -p-. I did some digging and found Andrew Wedel, “Turkish Emphatic Reduplication,” whose introduction begins “Emphatic variants of some Turkish adjectives are historically derived by prefixing a CVC syllable in which the initial CV are identical to the word-initial CV of the base of affixation, while the final C is taken from the set {p, s, m, r}.”

I also found Yılmaz Köylü, “Abstract knowledge of emphatic reduplication in Turkish” (Proceedings of the Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic 5 [2020]: 86–96), whose abstract says:

This study investigated whether native speakers of Turkish have abstract knowledge regarding the principles guiding the selection of appropriate reduplicative forms in emphatic reduplication in Turkish. […] The participants were asked to reduplicate 48 non-words in 4 experimental conditions where the number of segments and the phonological features of the word forms were manipulated. […] The results indicated that the interpolated consonant in Turkish was taken from the set of {p, m, s}. Moreover, the interpolated consonant was sometimes identical to the second consonant of the base, but never to the first consonant. The most frequently produced interpolated consonant was {p}. […] The results demonstrate that Turkish native speakers were able to extend the reduplication strategies they employed in real words to non-words.

I find this an interesting phenomenon and am curious to see what the Hattery has to say.

Sorry, I know there’s been a glut of AI-related material here, but I was disturbed by this in a different way. Rachel Chason writes for the Washington Post (archived):

SAFO, Mali — Most of the students had never seen their native language in its written form until recently. Now, they were eagerly sounding out the words appearing on the ThinkPad laptops before them, sometimes stumbling as they read a story written entirely in Mali’s most popular language, Bambara.

The twist? The story on their screens had been generated, translated and illustrated using artificial intelligence.

As Mali’s relationship with French — the language of its former colonial ruler, France — has grown more fraught, an effort to use AI to create children’s books in Bambara and other local languages is gaining momentum. With political tensions high between the two countries, Mali’s military government last year replaced French as the country’s “official” language, instead elevating Bambara and 12 other native languages, though French will still be used in government settings and public schools.

That change has meant there is more political will behind efforts like that of RobotsMali, a start-up that has used artificial intelligence to create more than 140 books in Bambara since last year, said Séni Tognine, who works in Mali’s Education Ministry and has been helping RobotsMali create its books. Now, he said, both the government and the people “are engaged in wanting to learn and valorize local languages.” […]

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Dmitry Oparin interviews Vasily Kharitonov for the Russia Program:

Vasily Kharitonov is a linguist at the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 2022, he went to the Nanai village of Dada in the Far East to teach children the Nanai language and study the local linguistic landscape. In a conversation with anthropologist Dmitry Oparin, the scholar talks about his methods of studying native speakers, the factors that influence the prestige of a language, and how the infrastructure in Russia works for those who communicate and read in more languages than just Russian. […]

You teach at a school in the village of Dada. Is this a Nanai village?

In Dada, all families are Nanai. That is, there are many non-Nanai here, but usually these are members of a Nanai family. There are almost no people like me who are not a part of some family.

How many Nanai are there in Dada and how many of them are native speakers?

For me, the question of being a native Nanai speaker isn’t binary — a simple “yes” or “no.” A person may have excellent comprehension, but may not speak a word. And there are those who both understand and speak, but usually understand better than they speak. This year, I came up with an entire language proficiency map. […]

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