Archives for August 2007

You know what captchas are, right? Those sequences of characters you have to type in to prove you’re human before you can comment on some blogs (not mine so far)? Well, English Headwear Blog has posted a collection of the weirdest examples. The Russian one (about halfway down) is particularly delightful. Thanks to Joe Clark for the tip!

In the words of the Intute: Arts and Humanities page about it:

The Glosas Croniquenses website stems from the research of an academic at the University of Arizona to trace the presence and interpret the use of Andean and Caribbean words in 16th century Spanish American chronicles. The result is a collection of glossaries, listing all the native words in seven different key texts (including Juan de Betanzos, ‘Suma y narración’; Pedro de Cieza, ‘Crónica del Perú: segunda parte: el Señorío de los Incas’; and Polo Ondegardo, ‘Notables daños de no guardar a los indios sus fueros’. Each glossary entry is accompanied by a quotation from the text (in Spanish) and its Spanish equivalent. This allows users to understand how the particular word is being used, its interpretation by the text’s author, and what this reveals about the Spanish perception of Andean culture. A detailed introduction to each text, and the metholodogy used to collate data, is provided. In short, this is a rich and valuable resource for anyone interested in indigenous languages of South America and the history of Spanish colonialism in this continent.

It looks like a good idea well carried out; thanks for the link, Paul!

An interesting Martin Wainwright story in the Grauniad:

A dialect so dense that it held up social reforms has been rescued from obscurity by the publication of its first dictionary [dead link as of 2017].

Thousands of terms used in Pitmatic, the oddly-named argot of north-east miners for more than 150 years, have been compiled through detailed research in archives and interviews with the last generation to talk of kips, corf-batters and arse-loops.

First recorded in Victorian newspapers, the language was part of the intense camaraderie of underground working which excluded even friendly outsiders such as the parliamentary commissioners pressing for better conditions in the pits in 1842…

The first Pitmatic dictionary, including pit recollections and analysis of the origins of the dialect’s words, has been compiled by Bill Griffiths, the country’s foremost Geordie scholar, whose previous work includes the standard Dictionary of North East Dialect. His new book reveals an exceptionally rich combination of borrowings from Old Norse, Dutch and a score of other languages, with inventive usages dreamed up by the miners themselves. “There’s been an urgency to the project, copying the handwritten diaries and songs stored away in family homes,” said Mr Griffiths, who also collected booklets, pit newspapers and magazines and spent hours interviewing ex-miners…

Part-financed by the Heritage Lottery Fund, in a three-stage dialect study of the north-east called Wor Language, the dictionary reveals the deeply practical nature of Pitmatic. The dialect was originally called Pitmatical, and its curious name was a parallel to mathematics, intended to stress the skill, precision and craft of the colliers’ work.

Term after term is related to mining practices, such as stappil, a shaft with steps beside the coal seam, or corf-batters, boys who scraped out filthy baskets used for hauling coal to the pithead.

Other words are more earthy: arse-loop is a rope chair used when repairing shafts and a candyman or bum-bailiff is a despised official who evicts strikers from company-owned homes.

Many thanks to Kattullus and Maureen, who sent me the story simultaneously.

Every time I move, I have to physically handle every one of my thousands of books in the course of shelving it; many of them haven’t been touched since the last move, and I think to myself “Do I need to hang on to this?” Now that I’m in an area with used bookstores that might take my excess inventory, I’m setting aside a growing pile of books I’ve decided I can dispense with. Sometimes the decision is easy (I’m never going to read Thomas Mann in German), but often I open a book at random, trying to locate whatever it was that made me buy it in the first place. I did this with Howard Nemerov‘s The Blue Swallows (U. Chicago, 1967, reprinted 1969, presumably bought my sophomore year in college, when I would have had no idea that Nemerov was Diane Arbus’s big brother, and may not have known who Diane Arbus was); I glanced at a few tired retreads of New Criticism poetry and some japes that may have sounded more genial forty years ago, and was on the point of tossing it on the discard pile when my gaze lighted on “A Full Professor”:

Surely there was, at first, some love of letters
To get him started on the routine climb
That brought him to this eminence in time?
But now he has become one of his betters.
He has survived, and even fattened on,
The dissertation and the discipline.
The eyes are spectacled, the hair is thin,
He is a dangerous committeeman.
An organism highly specialized,
He diets on, for daily bill of fare,
The blood of Keats, the mind of poor John Clare;
Within his range, he cannot be surprised.
Publish or perish! What a frightful chance!
It troubled him through all his early days.
But now he has the system beat both ways;
He publishes and perishes at once.

It’s no masterpiece, but it’s got good rhythm and genuine wit. And after all, the book is a nice thin paperback; it doesn’t need much to justify itself. I put it on the shelf between Ogden Nash and Pablo Neruda.

I have for some time been interested in the development of whatever into a standalone comment (OED: “Usually as a response, suggesting the speaker’s reluctance to engage or argue, and hence often implying passive acceptance or tacit acquiescence; also used more pointedly to express indifference, indecision, impatience, scepticism, etc.”), and now Mark Liberman at Language Log has satisfied my curiosity with a post on the subject. It turns out to be attested as far back as the early ’70s (first OED cite: “1973 To our Returned Prisoners of War (U.S. Secretary of Defense, Public Affairs) 10 Whatever, equivalent to ‘that’s what I meant’. Usually implies boredom with topic or lack of concern for a precise definition of meaning.”), and it’s now frequently reduced to “wev”:

Is it boring to listen to my stream-of-consciousness? It must be, or I would have more readers! However, this blog is fun, regardless, so wev.
(Gotta love that paranoid chipmunk…except that it’s really a prairie dog, but wev.)
Just my opinion though mind you, so wev.
HAH. ok wev…moving on.

I would have thought this was a purely graphic abbreviation, but apparently it’s spoken as well. Just one more proof that I’m hopelessly out of it. Wev.

Just appropriating my wife’s computer for a moment to thank everyone for their kind words yesterday on the anniversary and the move. My own computer is not yet set up, and I’m pretty beat from putting up bookshelves and shelving books (and discovering, as I do every move, that I’ve put the shelves at the wrong heights and have to rejigger them while keeping the books I’ve already put on them from sliding off and causing me to curse even more loudly), so I’ll go pass out now. I hope to be back to regular posting before too long, but tomorrow we’re helping my mother-in-law move to assisted living (yes, it all happens at once in the world of Languagehat!), so the rebound may not be immediate.
Oh, but before I go: be sure and read Erin McKean’s guest column in last Sunday’s NY Times Magazine. Why can’t they just send Safire off to a hard-earned retirement and give her the gig on a permanent basis? It’s a pleasure to read someone who knows what she’s talking about and says such interesting things. If you thought “corpus” was a dry concept, think again. The things you can learn from a corpus!