Archives for April 2003

In a comment to an earlier entry, Beth asked for an explanation of the image “black sun” in Mandelshtam. I replied that it was an apocalyptic image (see Isaiah, Mark, and Revelations) but had more specific and complex meanings for Mandelshtam. So let’s look into how he uses it.

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The Rosetta Project provides a large number of Swadesh lists online, allowing you to “create a custom word list chart.” Via the suddenly reanimated Linguistiblogs, which also links to this delightful Proto-Indo-European crossword puzzle.

Update (Apr. 2021). The Rosetta Project site is still there, but they’ve completely changed things around, and the custom word list page seems to be gone (though it’s hard to tell, since the site is annoyingly difficult to navigate). I’ve substituted an archived link above; they now apparently present their Swadesh lists only as Internet Archive texts.

Diane Ravitch‘s new book, The Language Police, describes the disaster that has overtaken education with the triumph of know-nothing pressure groups on both left and right. Some results, from the summary in today’s New York Times review:

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Jonathon Delacour has an entry today featuring an extended quote (with a still) from one of my favorite scenes in all of cinema, the cafe scene from Godard’s 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle. If the idea of a ruminative philosophical meditation spoken over a close-up of a cup of coffee with cream being stirred into it strikes you as too silly for words, don’t bother, but if you find it intriguing, follow the link and read it—and then go rent the movie. You won’t regret it.

A couple of excerpts involving language:

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Avva directed me to this site, which reproduces the 1922 Petrograd Berlin [thanks, Anatoly!] edition of Osip Mandelshtam‘s Tristia; scroll down past a couple of introductions for jpg files of each page with transliterations and (shaky) literal translations of each poem, as well as notes on both text and content. It’s a wonderful resource…

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“Language” is, that we may understand one another. Is that so? The brilliant George Harriman, courtesy of the tireless y2karl (via MetaFilter).

Update. A link that works as of March 2014 (thanks, Anton!).

For some time, prodded by the unending debates I get into about English usage, I have contemplated writing a long entry in which I would set out the arguments on either side and steer a reasonable course between the extremes, giving such convincing examples that readers would understand at last, and hopefully even stop whining about “hopefully” (and “disinterested” and “hoi polloi” and all the rest of the shibboleths). Thinking about this tired me out, and I would read a good book instead. Now, as so often happens, procrastination has paid off, and I no longer have to do the oft-postponed task.

This is because I’ve finally gotten a copy of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition (online for free, but I always prefer physical books, and this one is beautifully produced), and discovered the brilliant essay on usage by Geoffrey Nunberg. Nunberg, whom I have recommended before, is a linguist who understands the prescriptivist arguments and even accepts some of them (at times I had to swallow hard while reading, but I never rebelled); his ideas are sensible, probably more so than mine would have been, and should convince all but the most closed-minded. The first three paragraphs should give an idea of what he’s up to:

Viewed in retrospect, controversies over usage usually seem incomprehensibly trivial. It is hard for us to fathom why Swift should have railed against the shortening of mobile vulgus to mob, why Benjamin Franklin should have written to Noah Webster complaining about the use of improve to mean “ameliorate,” or why Victorian grammarians should have engaged in acrimonious exchanges over whether the possessive of one should be one’s or his. Even comparatively recent controversies have a quaint air about them: most people under 50 would be hard-put to understand what in the world critics of the 1960s had in mind when they described the verb contact as an “abomination” and a “lubricious barbarism.”

This does not necessarily mean that there was never any substance to these controversies—or that there is nothing of importance at stake in the issues that modern critics worry over, even if it is certain that most of them will strike our successors as no less trivial than Swift’s and Franklin’s complaints seem to us. In his time, Swift may have been within his rights to complain about mob, which began as an affectation of aristocratic swells. The fact that the word later settled into middle-aged respectability doesn’t retroactively excuse its youthful flippancy. And contact started as business jargon before it was generally adopted as a useful verb. Perhaps current jargon like incentivize will develop along the same lines, but it doesn’t follow that critics have no justification for objecting to it now.

Past controversies should put us on our guard against viewing these disputes too narrowly. Disputes about usage are always proxy wars. What is important is not the particular words and expressions that critics seize on at a given moment but the underlying mental vices that they (often temporarily) exemplify—for example, foppery, pretension, or foggy thinking. Language criticism is instructive only when it takes words as its occasion rather than as its object.

I’ll add that I’ve loved the AHD since its very first edition, which came out while I was in college and just discovering Indo-European; not only did this dictionary have illustrations in the margins and helpful (if sometimes prissy) Usage Notes, it had an appendix listing all IE roots that gave rise to English words. (I still have my much-annotated original copy of that appendix.) The Fourth Edition has gorgeous color illustrations, much less prissy Usage Notes, and a Semitic appendix to go along with the IE one. (Did you know that Hebrew magen ‘shield,’ as in “magen David,” is from the same root as Arabic jinni ‘djinn, demon’? It’s West Semitic *gnn ‘to cover.’). I recommend it to one and all without reservation.

This remarkable flash presentation not only teaches you how to bow correctly, it takes you through the entire complicated ritual of visiting a Japanese company, being introduced, presenting business cards, &c., accompanied by appropriate spoken dialog (with subtitles) and sidebars containing all sorts of relevant information (for instance, you should never write with red ink, since it was used for death sentences in ancient China and is considered highly inauspicious). Via plep.

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The Discouraging Word today explores the brief history (three recorded occurrences) and hard-to-pin-down meaning of a word that must have been in fleeting vogue in the fourth decade of the nineteenth century. You might also want to scroll down (none of your newfangled permalinks for TDW!) to the April 21 entry “Wonky pillars, and why the OED no longer considers us polite” for an exegesis of the more current, if not exactly familiar (to Yanks), word “wonky.”

Update (Sept. 2020). The OED still hasn’t updated its entry for spoffish; I might as well copy the last part of The Discouraging Word’s post to save the clickthrough (the site is dead, so it doesn’t need the traffic) if people just want the conclusion:

Understandably, neither M-W nor American Heritage are of any help. Thus we have resorted to a(nother) Google search, which turns up a few semi-valuable items: the folks at Chambers, for example, having deemed it one of Our Favourite Words, simply repeat the OED with their “fussy, officious (archaic).” A 1913 edition of Webster’s unabridged dictionary, however, is much more useful. Consider its definition:

a. [probably from Prov. E. spoffle to be spoffish.] Earnest and active in matters of no moment; bustling. [Colloq. Eng.] Dickens.

That far better captures the delicious irony that Dickens employs in his description of Noakes and throughout Sketches more generally. The “fussy” and “officious” of the OED’s definition foreclose the meaning of the word: while we don’t think spoffish could be a compliment, Dickens surely isn’t using it as an outright insult for Noakes, as the OED would suggest. Webster’s instead captures Dickens’ nuance quite adroitly. And it should be praised for hazarding an etymology, however unsupportable it may be.

(Spoffle, by the way, is not in the OED, although some have tried to neologize the word by applying it to “the large, sausage-like expanded foam device used by sound-men to cover their microphones.” That sense — or a related one — has achieved circulation in a picking-apart of the film Urban Legend, at least. And here. The word also seems to crop up on a number of seamy sites which we shall allow you, faithful readers, to pursue on your own.)

All in all, then, we recommend that future editors of Sketches use Webster’s definition, not the OED’s. For a word that seems largely Dickens’ own, the OED should have been more attentive to its original context.

Mamoun Sakkal has an excellent short history of Arabic writing and calligraphy. (Via Eclogues.)
Addendum. Directly below the Arabic link at Eclogues is one to The New and complete manual of Maori conversation : containing phrases and dialogues on a variety of useful and interesting topics : together with a few general rules of grammar : and a comprehensive vocabulary (Wellington, N.Z.: Lyon and Blair, Printers, Lambton Quay, MDCCCLXXXV, Rights Reserved). Sample exchanges:

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