THE BOOKSHELF: THE F-WORD.

Oxford University Press sent me a copy of the new third edition of Jesse Sheidlower's magnum opus, The F-Word. Before I continue, I should point out that the book, and therefore this post, is chock-full of examples of the most notorious curse word in the English language. You have been warned.

As I say, this is the third edition. Some of you who have acquired one of the earlier editions may be wondering "Do I need the third?" The answer is: Yes, yes you do. If you care enough about the history and use of the word fuck to own the book, you owe it to yourself to get this edition. This is not one of those pro forma "revisions" that correct a few errors, toss in a few added items, and add a new preface; no, the text of the dictionary is twice as large as the second edition, over a hundred new words and senses have been added, and coverage is far wider. The first edition included only American uses; the second added some U.K. and Australian examples, but more as flavoring. This one aims to cover the entire English-speaking world, a project greatly aided by Sheidlower's having gone to work for Oxford UP and thus getting access to the files of the OED: "uses that are specifically British, Australian, or Irish are included in their own right, and a very large number of quotations have been added from non-American sources to illustrate all entries, not just those associated with a particular national variety. The reader will thus find vastly more British examples (including Welsh and especially Scottish in addition to English), and also quotations from Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada, South Africa, and elsewhere." A word that has circled the globe deserves no less.

RED HERRING.

I have just run across Michael Quinion's post at World Wide Words about the phrase "red herring"; I have seen the implausible explanation that herrings were dragged across trails to confuse hounds (who would do that, and why?), and Quinion (with the help of Gerald Cohen, Robert Scott Ross, and the Oxford English Dictionary) clears the matter up. A seventeenth-century treatise by Gerland Langbaine on horsemanship "suggested a dead cat or fox should be dragged as a training-scent for the hounds, so that the horses could follow them":

If you had no acceptably ripe dead animals handy, he added, you could as a last resort use a red herring...

Robert Scott Ross and the OED now trace the figurative sense to the radical journalist William Cobbett, whose Weekly Political Register thundered in the years 1803-35 against the English political system he denigrated as the Old Corruption. He wrote a story, presumably fictional, in the issue of 14 February 1807 about how as a boy he had used a red herring as a decoy to deflect hounds chasing after a hare. He used the story as a metaphor to decry the press, which had allowed itself to be misled by false information about a supposed defeat of Napoleon; this caused them to take their attention off important domestic matters: “It was a mere transitory effect of the political red-herring; for, on the Saturday, the scent became as cold as a stone.”

This story, and his extended repetition of it in 1833, was enough to get the figurative sense of red herring into the minds of his readers, unfortunately also with the false idea that it came from some real practice of huntsmen.

STRANGE DATIVES.

Here's the start of Mark Liberman's latest post at the Log:

Yesterday, Daniel Mahaffey wrote to ask about his friend's "unusual indirect object sentences". Thus after backing into a dog in a crowded kitchen, she said "I nearly stepped on me a dog".

Daniel reasons that this is analogous to the benefactive pronouns in standard written English phrases like "I wrote him a song", or in widespread vernacular examples like "I wrote me a song" (where the standard version would be "wrote myself a song").

But, as Daniel observes, a couple of things are different in this case. First, analogous examples in (what we might call) the standard vernacular would put the pronoun before rather than after an intransitive preposition: "I stacked me up some firewood", not "I stacked up me some firewood". Second, in "… stepped on me a dog", the pronoun me has a looser semantic connection to the verb than typical benefactives — it doesn't refer to a beneficiary, recipient, or purpose of the action, instead apparently adding just a vague sense of interest or involvement. This may be why "…stepped me on a dog" seems (if anything) even odder to me than "…stepped on me a dog".

But wait, there's more. Daniel notes that his friend (who is from SE Georgia) also says things like "I need to go look for me a dress" or "I'm going to the mall to shop for me a dress".. In these examples, the placement of the pronoun seems even more surprising, since for is a transitive preposition expressing an argument of look or shop — here "a dress" — and me is thus inside a prepositional phrase, not just on the wrong side of a particle.

Update. See now the guest post by Larry Horn (author of "'I love me some him': The landscape of non-argument datives") at the Log.

HILDA MORLEY.

Today's post at wood s lot begins with a nice snippet of Ern Malley (and anyone not familiar with the Ern Malley hoax should read this excellent introduction, with a nice Herbert Read quote that it is "possible to arrive at genuine art by spurious means") and moves on to quote a longish poem ("The Ships Move On") by a poet I was completely unfamiliar with, Hilda Morley (1919 - 1998). It's a shame such a fine poet was treated so badly by the boy's club at Black Mountain College, where she taught at the height of its influence but is ignored in histories of the place, and even more of a shame she is still unknown to the poetry-reading public. I'll put a short poem by her below the cut; here's a moving preface to her work by Robert Creeley (written shortly before her death), and here's a discussion at digital emunction sparked off by Kent Johnson's nomination of her as "the most unjustly and bizarrely forgotten U.S. poet of the 20th century."

HOW KEATS SPOKE.

As fond as I was of William Safire, I must admit I prefer the new, unpredictable "On Language" column in the NY Times. This week, Caleb Crain writes about how John Keats talks in the recent movie Bright Star (which I still haven't seen) and how he might have talked in reality. While Crain appreciated the "playful, delicate, precise" dialogue of the movie, he thinks Keats may have talked quite differently, saying "Keats was self-conscious about his everyday speech":

In August 1818, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine accused him of “Cockney rhymes,” pointing out that he matched thorns with fawns and higher with Thalia. In poems that he inserted in his letters, he rhymed shorter with water and parsons with fastens. The pattern suggests that he suffered from nonrhoticity — the tendency to drop “R” sounds from the ends of syllables and words. As well he should have, the scholar Lynda Mugglestone wrote in 1991, noting that nonrhoticity was part of “then-current educated usage.” In fact, Mugglestone observed, Blake had rhymed lawn with morn, and Tennyson was to rhyme thorns and yawns.

Mugglestone notwithstanding, some of the spelling mistakes in Keats’s letters look incriminating. He wrote “ax” for ask, “ave” for have and “milidi” for milady. It’s impossible to know, however, whether Keats had the lower-class accent that these spellings evoke or was merely pretending to have it in order to amuse his readers. He underlined to show he was kidding when he wrote to his friend Reynolds that “from want of regular rest, I have been rather narvus” and when he wrote to his sister that “I have been werry romantic indeed, among these Mountains and Lakes.” Even when he didn’t underline, he may have been axing his readers to understand that he was aving a joke all the sime. His ear for dialect seems to have been acute. From Scotland he reported to his brother Tom that whiskey was called whuskey, and when Reynolds went to Devonshire with his family, Keats wrote to him that “your sisters by this time must have got the Devonshire ees — short ees — you know ’em; they are the prettiest ees in the Language.” He was probably too gifted a linguist to have been saddled long with an accent that embarrassed him.

WHOSE IS THIS SONG?

A wonderful post at the wonderful (and multilingual) Poemas del río Wang. I have nothing to add but: enjoy! (Thanks for the link, Paul.)

THE BOOKSHELF: OUR MAGNIFICENT BASTARD TONGUE.

Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold Story of English, by John McWhorter, is an enjoyable but odd book. It's basically a combination of two items, each of which would ideally be very slim: a primer on descriptivist views of language (no, English isn't going to hell in a handbasket), and a popularization of McWhorter's work on creolization and the history of English. The latter takes up most of the book, and it is, to my mind, overwritten and unnecessarily repetitive. For instance, here's a précis of the first chapter: English "meaningless do" (as in "Do you think so?") and the progressive tense ("he is going") are hard to explain in terms of the other Germanic languages. Interestingly, both are present in Welsh and Cornish, descendants of the Celtic languages spoken in England when the Germanic speakers arrived. It seems likely that English picked it up from the version of the language spoken by Celtic speakers.

Makes sense, right? And it's presented in a lively fashion (sometimes too lively for this old fogey—McWhorter has a fondness for formulations like "shitte happens"). The problem is that the first chapter goes on for sixty pages, and doesn't really say much more than I put in those three sentences. The chapter draws to a close with a labored parallel about "people we will call the Robinsons and the Joneses"; the former "have developed an unusual deftness in playing the piano with their feet," and it happens that the Joneses "have the same skill." Why, the Robinsons must have gotten it from the Joneses! The thing is, though, that if you haven't bought his argument based on the actual facts of the case, you're not likely to buy it because of this bizarre fable of podalic pianists.

I don't mean to say there's nothing worth reading besides the basic argument; for instance, he makes the interesting point (borrowed from Andrew Dalby) that "if Welsh were, say, for some reason regularly taught in schools across Western Europe and in America, as French and Spanish are, then to linguists, raised with 'schoolboy' Welsh, the parallels between Celtic and English would seem glaringly obvious and would long ago have been accepted as having a causal rather than correlative relationship." I personally would have welcomed more of this sort of insight and less hammering on a few ideas (some of which aren't as convincing to me as the Celtic-influence one), but of course I'm not the target market. This would be a good book to give anyone interested in the history of English who enjoys this kind of popular writing.

SERGEI DOVLATOV.

Over at The Millions, Sonya Chung has an excellent review of Sergei Dovlatov’s Ours: A Russian Family Album, which I had no idea was so hard to get hold of: the NYPL only has one copy (which Chung had been hogging), and so, at the moment, does it's pretty expensive at Amazon. Chung doesn't understand it, and neither do I; Dovlatov is one of the funniest and most likable writers I know, and I'm sure Americans would love him if he were properly introduced. Here's a snippet of Chung's review:

Ours is composed of 13 stories, each about a different Dovlatov family member (the collection was published as fiction but is quite evidently based on Dovlatov’s real-life family). There is Grandpa Isaak, a Jew of enormous physical stature, who was mysteriously arrested for espionage and killed in a prison camp; Grandfather Stepan, an Armenian Georgian, who threw himself into a ravine; Dovlatov’s bastard cousin Boris, handsome and talented, who courted danger and whom “life turned into a criminal”; Uncle Leopold, a “hustler,” who disappeared from their lives for over 30 years before being rediscovered in Belgium. Mother and Father, an actress and a theatre director, “often quarreled,” and divorce when Dovlatov is eight years old; and of course there is Lena (pronounced “Yenna”—more on Lena later), Dovlatov’s wife, who emigrates with their daughter Katya years before Dovlatov, the two of them estranged by then. In the opening of the story that describes their courtship and marriage, the narrator Sergei Dovlatov tells us, “I emigrated to America dreaming of divorce.”

Would you guess that Ours is essentially a comedy? The humor is exhilarating, in a specific way that I find hard to describe. It’s likely there is something that Russians who experienced the Stalinist and Soviet eras first (or at least second) hand recognize as “Russian humor,” and as a Westerner I am just an enthusiastic tourist, smitten by an approach to the terrors and darkness of life that is both sharp and silly.