Archives for June 2009

So the Lane Fox book sent me to my copy of Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, which has been patiently waiting on my shelf for years; I’m almost finished with it, and while it’s too long and I could do without the navel-gazing sessions in which the author cogitates on the Meaning of It All (“Zeus has no character, he is the support beneath every character”), I have enjoyed his fresh take on the hoary old stories (particularly welcome after Graves’s slanted scholarship). The lack of an index is annoying, but thanks to the magic of the internet one can search in the Google Books text if need be.
But I’m not here to praise Calasso, I’m here to get off my chest one of those incredibly petty gripes nobody cares about but me. Tim Parks has done, as best I can tell without having read the original, a good job of translating a text full of recondite material, but he blew it in one case that cost me a good bit of googling to remedy. On page 382 of my paperback copy he says “Haematius, king of the city, welcomed Cadmus as a guest.” I looked up Haematius in Wikipedia, as is my wont (I often wind up adding the Greek name to articles, and sometimes doing more revising), but there was nothing there. I googled the name: nothing except a few false hits from A Dictionary of Christian Biography, Literature, Sects and Doctrines (the book has HARMATIUS, which was mis-scanned). Luckily, Google Books has the Italian edition; it’s only Snippet View, but I was able to determine that the original talks about “Ematio sovrano,” and some more detective work convinced me that the Greek name was Ἠμαθίων or Emathio(n), a name associated with the Macedonian region of Emathia: Pape-Benseler tells me that Nonnus mentions a king of Samothrace of that name, and the scene here is Samothrace. So in the unlikely event anyone else runs into the false name, the explanation is here to enlighten them.

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Ben Zimmer over at Word Routes has a post on one of the most disputed word histories ever, that of jazz. Was it first used for baseball, music, or something else? In San Francisco, New Orleans, or elsewhere? The earliest known use of the word supports the baseball/Bay Area theory: “Ben Henderson, a pitcher for the Portland Beavers (another Pacific Coast League team), dubbed a lively pitch his ‘jazz ball,’ according to the Los Angeles Times of April 2, 1912.” It was popularized by San Francisco Bulletin sportswriter E.T. “Scoop” Gleeson, who explained the term in a March 6, 1913 report from the spring training camp of the San Francisco Seals:

What is the “jazz”? Why, it’s a little of that “old life,” the “gin-i-ker,” the “pep,” otherwise known as enthusiasalum. A grain of “jazz” and you feel like going out and eating your way through Twin Peaks. It’s that spirit which makes ordinary ball players step around like Lajoies and Cobbs.

The earliest known New Orleans reference had been from the June 20, 1918 Times-Picayune, but Ben has turned up an earlier one, from Nov. 14, 1916: “The writer takes the opportunity to give New Orleans the proper credit for the origination of ‘jas bands’: ‘Any one ever having frequented the “tango belt” of New Orleans knows that the real home of the “jas bands” is right here.'” (You can see a reproduction of the article at Ben’s post.) So for now, the credit for the term rests with “the peppy baseball players of San Francisco,” but who knows what further archival research will turn up? Stay tuned!

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Andrej Bjelakovic asked (in this thread) “what’s the deal with the ‘I can’t help but’ + bare infinitive? Is it frowned upon only by some fuddy-duddy prescriptivist or is it generally considered non-standard?” The short answer is that it’s fine but it has been frowned upon. The long answer follows.
As always in such matters, I turn to Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (or its equally reliable, cheaper, and more available twin, Merriam-Webster’s Concise Dictionary of English Usage; in this case, the former was closer to hand). The entry begins as follows:

cannot help, cannot but, cannot help but A lot has been written about these phrases. To put as charitable a light on the matter as possible, most of what you may read is out of date. We have hundreds of citations for these phrases, and we can tell you two things for certain: these phrases all mean the same thing — “to be unable to do otherwise than” — and they are all standard. To the usual three we can add can but and cannot choose but, which also have the same meaning but are less frequently met with. We will take up each of the five in turn.

They say can but was called “pompous” by Bernstein but give examples where it sounds “natural enough”; they point out that cannot choose but is often used with a conscious echo of Coleridge’s “The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:/ He cannot choose but hear.” Cannot help “is grammatically the odd one of the five. It is followed by a present participle, whereas the others are followed by the bare infinitive.” Their first citation is from Swift (1712): “yet I cannot help thinking, that . . . our Conversation hath very much degenerated.” Cannot but “is an old established idiom. It has even been a favorite of some of our old warhorses of usage — Henry Alford, Richard Grant White, Fitzedward Hall…” They give citations starting with George Farquhar‘s 1698 Love and a Bottle: “I can’t but laugh to think how they’ll spunge the sheet before the errata be blotted out.” Finally we come to the usage Andrej asked about:

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Jordan at Macvaysia has been wondering whether the English word cooties, which he defines as “an imaginary affliction, used by kids in the west as an excuse for shunning and/or teasing other kids,” might come from Malay kudis ‘scabies’ (Indonesian Wikipedia) rather than, as dictionary etymologies suggest, Malay kutu ‘louse.’ I have no idea whether this is plausible, but I figure someone out there might.

Update (July 2009). It looks as if the true etymology is less exotic; it’s simply an extension of coot (there was a proverbial phrase “as lousy as a coot”). See these American Dialect Society listserv postings: 1, 2, 3, 4; Jonathan Lighter’s summary from the last:

What I think happened:
“lousy as a coot” > “cooty” (adj.) = “lousy, as is a coot” > “coot”
(back-formation) and “cootie” (through mishearing and in other cases as a
diminutive).

While googling one of the Andrew Boyds I was trying to disentangle at the LibraryThing author page, I ran across this delightful quote from The Pursuit of Reason: The Economist 1843-1993 (page 863), by Ruth Dudley Edwards; she is quoting a review by the Andrew Boyd who wrote for The Economist for many years:

Four-letter men were our forefathers. Never more so than when measuring things. With a bind and a bing, a fatt and a flyk, a shid and a swod and an unch. Meaning 250 eels, 8 cwt of lead, 4 bales of unbound books, a side of bacon, 4 feet of firewood, and either an ounce or an inch. They poured their wine by the aume or the fust, and cut their cloth by the goad – not to be confused with the gawd, which was a measure of steel. Their nook was not cosy; it covered 20 acres. Their idea of a glen, on the other hand, was either a bunch of teasels (in Essex and Gloucestershire) or 25 herrings. Take 15 glens and you had a rees. Take two pokes, and what you got was a gybe. Not that they ever agreed how much wool should go into a poke, or whether it should not rightly be a pook, a poik, a powk or a pock. But 240 dishes of lead were undoubtedly a boot, 28 lb of wood were a toad, a pint was of course a mugg, and a kade was a thousand sprats, though this could also be a gag.

One would not want to make any serious use of these terms without checking the OED, of course, but they make a fine gag.

An e-mail from a reader reminds me of something I meant to blog ages ago: back in January, Mark Liberman at the Log posted a nice chart of the ways different languages have of expressing what we English-speakers term “Greek to me.” That has links to other sources, and you can get commentary on Mark’s post at Strange Maps: “When a Hellenophone has trouble understanding something, his or her preferred languages of reference, as far as incomprehension is concerned, are Arabic and Chinese. And while for Arabs the proverbial unintelligible language is Hindi, for Chinese it’s… the language of Heaven. For Romanians, the ultimate in incomprehensibility is Turkish, for the Turks its French and the French consider Javanese the acme in huh?” (Thanks, Andrew!)

Anyone at all interested in Charles Olson (whom I quoted in the early days of LH) will want to watch the documentary Polis Is This by Henry Ferrini (linked page has six YouTube segments); you can see a review here, from which I excerpt a bit:

Lasting only an hour, Polis is This manages a compact introduction to Olson’s history, poetics, and landscape. In addition to primary footage of the man reading, lecturing, and ambling, are commentators ranging from Gloucester locals to family, scholars, and poets. A delivery man, on being asked if he’d heard of Olson, responds, “The poet? The big guy?” and goes on to say he appeared, as a child, in one of Olson’s poems….
Polis is This reinvigorated my interest and provided footholds into the substance of Olson’s work that have enhanced my subsequent reading. I was particularly helped by the passages where Olson’s recitations are given follow-the-bouncing-ball treatment: the poem, on screen, is filled in as it’s read, giving a sense of how it is intended to sound.

I wish more poets were given this kind of treatment; it really makes both the work and the person come alive.

So I’ve finished Robin Lane Fox‘s Travelling Heroes: In the Epic Age of Homer, and I feel compelled to warn others about it. The author is highly regarded, and it comes highly recommended; Mary Beard, for instance, contributes this blurb: “Lane Fox argues his case with tremendous style and verve. The book is full of wit and suspense… Detailed, learned, and always lively.” And the Guardian review by Oliver Taplin calls it a “seemingly effortless yet stupendously erudite book” and ends “This is someone who lives his history.” You will note, however, that Beard does not say that he proves his case or that she believes it, and Taplin, in between encomia, says “For all their seductive ingenuity, the criss-crossing, zig-zagging voyages of Travelling Heroes add up, in the end, to an intricate web of specialist speculation…. the whole is held together by a sticky tangle of ‘may’s, ‘might’s and ‘surely’s, stiffened by a passionate desire for them to be true.” And that, in what is supposed to be a history book, is far more important than the wit and suspense and verve.

But I’m going to go further than that, since I’m not a classicist and do not have to be nice to Mr. Lane Fox, who is doubtless both admired and feared in his field. I’m going to say that this is a bad book, plain and simple, and should not have been published in its present form. This pains me, because I am fascinated by Archaic Greece and love books that present history from a different perspective (like Beckwith). But facts are facts.

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