Archives for November 2010

ANFRACTUOUS TUQUOQUEISM.

Back in 1994 I photocopied a couple of pages from John B. Bremner’s Words on Words to have a copy of the entry BUCKLEYISM, which begins:

A reviewer of a book by William F. Buckley, Jr., a collection of his newspaper columns, found himself marking many words he didn’t understand or wasn’t sure of. He wove some Buckleyisms into this sentence and led his review with it:

“For anfractuous tuquoqueism and immanentization of the eschaton without the chiliastic afflatus of solipsistic brachycephalics, one must etiologically etiolate the fustian rodomontade of phlogistonic energumens and their psychotropic epigoni whose sylleptic ignoratio elenchi and apodictic sciolism transmogrify the apopemptic meiosis and anaphoric interstices of the sibylline incunabula of autarkic ultramontanism, lest by jacobinical malversation the incondite tatterdemalions detumesce the osmotically jejune hagiolaters of soritically otiose taxonomists despite the inchoate enthymeme of paradigmatic animadversion and the meritocratic dirigisme of some anapaestic eponym.”

Bremmer says, “To find out how many of the 89 words in the lead paragraph could be understood by educated readers without being driven to a dictionary,” he asked twenty journalism professors: “The highest score was 60, recorded by an antediluvian lexicographer. The lowest was 35…” I myself beat out the antediluvian lexicographer with a score of 70, though I may have given myself the benefit of the doubt on some words I had only a general sense of. Anyway, I showed this to a coworker who challenged me to paraphrase it; my effort is below the cut.

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THE BOOKSHELF: OXFORD LANGUAGE BOOKS I.

Oxford University Press has been sending me review copies of its language-related books, and they’re starting to pile up, and the gift-giving season is approaching, so I figured it was a good time to start letting y’all know about them. I’ll start with a few, then continue in a later post.

OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word, by Allan Metcalf, is a thorough investigation of the history and uses of a great American lexeme. The author, a professor of English and Executive Secretary of the American Dialect Society, starts with the humble origin of the term in an 1839 column in the Boston Morning Post (“He.. would have the ‘contribution box’, et ceteras, o.k.—all correct—and cause the corks to fly, like sparks, upward”), as discovered by the great scholar Allen Walker Read almost half a century ago, and shows (following Read) how it was part of a craze for jocular abbreviations such as I.S.B.D. (“it shall be done”) and R.T.B.S. (“remains to be seen”); he points out that “these initialisms are not so different from those used in internet chat today,” though back then it was combined with a fad for humorous misspellings (there was an O.W. for “all right” as well). Then the presidential election of 1840, in which the initial letters of Old Kinderhook, Martin Van Buren’s nickname, were used as an electoral slogan, combining with the preexisting slang term in usages like this: “We acknowledge the receipt of a very pretty gold Pin,… having upon it the (to the ‘Whigs’) very frightful letters O.K., significant of the birth-place of Martin Van Buren, old Kinderhook, as also the rallying word of the Democracy of the late election, ‘all correct’… Those who wear them should bear in mind that it will require their most strenuous exertions… to make all things O.K.” And then there was no stopping it. Metcalf discusses hoaxes, false origins (no, it’s not Choctaw, as I once gullibly reported), and its use in business, literature, and other areas, as well as its spread around the world. Fun and educational!

Begat: The King James Bible and the English Language, by David Crystal. I’m a fan of Crystal’s (I loved his edition of Fowler), and he does a good job here investigating (and trying to quantify) the influence of the Authorized Version on the language. He’s well aware that “Much of the memorable linguistic distinctiveness of the King James Bible in fact originated in Tyndale,” and he uses Wycliffe, Tyndale, Coverdale’s Psalter, the Geneva Bible, the Bishops’ Bible, and Douai-Rheims as points of comparison. His preface ends: “We find biblical expressions appearing in such disparate worlds as nuclear physics, court cases, TV sitcoms, recipe books, punk rock lyrics, and video games. Those are the worlds this book will explore.” Speaking of music, I have to register mild outrage at his citing Boney M’s Eurodisco version of “Rivers of Babylon” rather than the great original by the Melodians, but there’s no accounting for taste.

Short Cuts: A Guide to Oaths, Ring Tones, Ransom Notes, Famous Last Words, and Other Forms of Minimalist Communication, by Alexander and Nicholas Humez (brothers who have collaborated on other language books—the surname is pronounced hyu-MAY) and Rob Flynn (a computer industry writer); the subtitle gives an idea of the kind of material covered, and it’s full of etymological information like (in the “In and Out of Trouble” chapter, discussing parking tickets) “A ticket was originally a stick: Old French estiquet—whence etiquette—was a Germanic borrowing originally meaning a branch or switch stuck in the ground as a target for practice shots but later taking on the meaning of ‘note, label’ and random nuggets like (in the Police Blotter section, quoted from the Ellsworth American) “A suspected dead body in the Penobscot River June 27 turned out to be a blue bucket.” Ideal to keep around for those occasions when you don’t have time to immerse yourself in anything but want a quick informative nibble. (Full disclosure: I copyedited the book and am thanked in the acknowledgments.)

Virtual Words: Language on the Edge of Science and Technology, by Jonathon Keats (author of Wired‘s “Jargon Watch”), examines how techie words get coined and why some (like blog) succeed while others (like flog, a “flack blog” by marketers that pretends to be by ordinary people) fail. I was won over by the discussion of w00t, which cites Grant Barrett’s essay on the word’s history, deriving it from two 1993 dance songs, and discusses the “fast and furious” response from gamers (for whom “it was self-evident that w00t belonged to leet, a semi-encrypted form of English that evolved on Internet relay chat and bulletin board systems in the 1980s”) and Barrett’s thorough counter-response.

GEORGIAN GRAMMAR PROJECT.

I continue to love serendipity. I was googling the name Kita Tschenkéli to try to fill in the biographical information on his LibraryThing author page (this is one of my pastimes), and one of the hits was the Georgian Grammar Project (whose “lexicon has been compiled on the basis of Kita Tschenkéli’s ‘Deutsch-Georgisches Wörterbuch'”). The project “consists of a Morphological analyser, a Georgian LFG Grammar, a demo treebank…, and an (un-annotated) corpus of non-fictional (mainly newspaper) and fictional texts.” What really excited me was the list of freely available resources from which their corpus was compiled: the electronic newspaper archive Opentext (“it comprises approximately 100 million words and is by far the largest collection of Georgian texts available online”), the text archive of the Georgian service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty with around eight million words, and the “largest archive of fictional texts (both prose and poetry)”: the UNESCO Project digital collection of Georgian classical literature (both prose and poetry) with three million words. When I get around to wrestling with Georgian for the third time (I seem to make the attempt at ten-year intervals), this will be invaluable—and maybe by then the creators of the site will have fulfilled their promise to switch from “a proprietary encoding where each Georgian character is mapped to an ASCII character” (!) to Unicode.

A DEMOCRATIC CUE.

I just finished reading an excellent collection of essays, The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century Russia (edited by Wayne Vucinich and based on papers from a conference held in December 1966); the amazingly detailed entry by Mary Matossian on the peasant’s way of life introduced me to plenty of new vocabulary, and Donald Fanger’s “The Peasant in Literature” made sense of the development of literary representations of peasants (as well as emphasizing that they are only that, and cannot be taken as reflecting the actual lives of peasants). I wanted to quote this passage from his discussion of Radishchev:

When the peasants gathered to see off the conscripts in “Gorodnya” speak in a language as elegantly artificial as that of the cultivated narrator, it is not because Radishchev was unaware of the way they really spoke, but because eighteenth-century literary decorum required a lofty style for the expression of serious sentiments. So when a peasant mother apostrophizes her departing son in phrases full of Church Slavonicisms, inversions, parallelism, and chiasmus, her language is no more than a sign that she is to be taken with full seriousness; the apparatus of elegance is in effect a democratic cue, signifying that her feelings are universal human ones, independent of class.

A good and subtle point. Later on, when literature turned to naturalism, Grigorovich, in “the first ‘inside’ account of peasants to be written by an outsider,” “offered conversations whose authenticity seemed guaranteed by their frequent unreadability (thanks to the proliferation of peasant dialect terms.” Obviously these are two extremes, but on the whole I think it’s better to err on the side of minimizing the difference of “quaint” local speech and maximizing the likelihood of winning the reader’s respect for the character.

LOSING LANGUAGE.

From The Observer, Tom Lubbock: a memoir of living with a brain tumour: “For art critic Tom Lubbock, language has been his life and his livelihood. But in 2008, he developed a lethal brain tumour and was told he would slowly lose control over speech and writing. This is his account of what happens when words slip away.” This diary of loss is terrifying and exhilarating—exhilarating because Lubbock is so determined to make us feel and understand what he’s going through, and succeeds so well.

Suffolk, August 2008

The first verbal glitches occur after my first fit. At this point, I have no idea what is going on. They last a few minutes, in episodes I would describe as word-blindness or deafness. It is hard, in the nature of it, to follow and record what specifically happens in these quite short periods. It’s as if I’ve become very remote and detached from words. I’m no longer fluent. I’ve forgotten how to do it. I can’t do it automatically. I can’t hear whether a word that I say has come out right or not. It’s as if it’s not me that’s speaking, but some kind of inefficient proxy forming the words. It’s like there is a time-delay between speaking and hearing your own words, or if you were speaking a language whose phonetics and semantics you don’t properly know. And when I speak or write, the words do sometimes come out wrong, slightly nonsensically. […]

June 2010

[…] The mystery of summoning up words. Where are they in the mind, in the brain? They appear to be an agency from nowhere. They exist somewhere in our ground or in our air. They come from unknown darkness. From a place we normally don’t think about.

For me, no word comes without prior thought. No sentence is generated without effort. No formulation is made automatically. I am faced continually with a mystery that other people have no conception of, the mystery of the generation of speech. There is no command situation, it goes back and back and back. Where the self lies at the heart of the utterance, the speaker generating the word, is always clouded. This is true for everyone, but for most people this is not something to think about. The generation of words is automatic. For me, that automatic link is broken. Word generation involves strain, guesswork, difficulty, imprecision.

And there are some striking quotes:

“A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket.” –Charles Péguy

Thanks, Trevor!

POSH.

A question from dearieme in this thread sent me to the OED’s new draft revision (Sept. 2010) of the etymology of posh, a perennial favorite of folk etymologists (no, it’s not from “port outward, starboard home,” and I’m surprised the OED dignifies that old wheeze with an entire paragraph):

Origin unknown.
  It is possible that the word arose as a transferred use of POSH n.1 [‘halfpenny,’ from Romani], POSH n.3 [‘a dandy,’ origin unknown] (compare quot. 1912 at POSH n.3 [“If he described another [tailor] as a great ‘posh,’ which means well-dressed, the whistle would place him in a.. ridiculous light”]), or both of these; the semantic development may thus have been either from ‘money’ to ‘moneyed, wealthy’, and hence to ‘upper-class’ and ‘smart, stylish, luxurious’, or alternatively from ‘dandy’ to ‘upper-class‘ and ‘smart, stylish, luxurious’.
  An alternative suggestion derives the word < Urdu safed-pōś dressed in white, well-dressed, also used as a colloquial and derogatory term for ‘affluent’ < safed white (safed (Old Persian saped)) + pōś covering, also ‘clothed in, wearing’ (< Persian pōś: see PAPOOSH n.). However, this poses phonological problems and there is no direct evidence for the transition into English.
  A popular explanation (still frequently repeated) is that the word is < the initial letters of the phrase port outward, starboard home, with reference to the more comfortable (because cooler) and more expensive side for accommodation on ships formerly travelling between Britain and India. It is often suggested that the Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company stamped tickets for such cabins on this route with the letters P.O.S.H., whence the word. However, no evidence has been found for the existence of such tickets. See further G. Chowdharay-Best in Mariner’s Mirror (1971) Jan. 91-2.
  It is unclear whether the following shows an (earlier) variant of this word:
  1903 P. G. WODEHOUSE Tales of St. Austin’s 37 That waistcoat.. being quite the most push thing of the sort in Cambridge.

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TRANSLATION IN PRACTICE.

From Dalkey Archive Press, Translation in Practice: A Symposium, edited by Gill Paul:

Though translation is a vital part of any vibrant literary culture, no practical guide to the process of translating foreign works into English and preparing them for publication has yet been made available to prospective translators, editors, or readers. In February 2008, editors and translators from the US and UK came together at the British Council in London to discuss “best practices” for translation of literary works into English. This volume comprises the results of that meeting, a collection of summaries, suggestions, and instructions from the leading literary translators and publishers. It is intended as an introduction, the first in an ongoing series of documents to be published by Dalkey Archive Press that will address the challenges faced by translators, publishers, reviewers, and readers of literary translations.

The best part? They make it available as a free pdf (742 KB). (Via MetaFilter.)

A QUESTION FROM AVVA.

Anatoly Vorobei writes:

Many years ago, my mind was blown by reading Otto Jespersen’s Modern English Grammar On Historical Principles. I read/skimmed mainly Part I: Phonetics, where Jespersen slowly, fascinatingly and painstakingly goes over the phonetical changes that occurred in English […], including the Great Vowel Shift as well as changes that came after it. He doesn’t just list the principal changes, he discusses at length when they occurred, approximately, what they were caused by, when this is known, and what were the exceptions to them. He gives many examples of words that underwent the changes or exceptions that didn’t, and for the latter he discusses the reasons why (that was one of the most interesting aspects of the book – realizing that sound changes are not always as completely universal in a language as I’d naively thought).
I want to find this book again, […] [b]ut before I even do that, I’d like to understand if I should really be looking for a different book instead. After all, Jespersen wrote something like 100 to 70 years ago. Perhaps many of his explanations are considered outdated by now; perhaps there have been much better books of this kind. I wouldn’t know – I’m not a linguist and my interest in this is amateur. If you know anything about how well his work stood the test of time, or about newer books of this kind I might be interested in, would you please let me know? I’d like to emphasize though that I’m not simply looking for, say, a concise one-volume “History of the English Language”, of which there are dozens, many doubtless excellent. I looked at a few and their phonetics sections mainly listed the important sound changes that occurred, with a few examples. They lacked the obsessive “deep-dive” into many examples, exceptions, discussions of sources and methodology, etc. that I remember loving in Jespersen.

I don’t know the answer (the history of English was not my specialty), but it’s a good question, and I thought some of my learned readers might know, so I’m passing it along.

10 DOWNING.

This Typefoundry post on the history and current state of the number that appears on the door of 10 Downing Street is pretty far afield from the usual concerns of Languagehat, but I happen to know that I have among my commentariat architects and other persons with an interest in this sort of thing, and besides, it’s a fascinating (and infuriating) piece, so here it is. There’s even a picture of “a small boy on a visit to London in 1924 who was allowed to pose for a photograph in the doorway. He was Harold Wilson, who became Prime Minister.”

SANSKRIT LITERATURE.

Venetia Ansell (who “read Classics and Sanskrit at Oxford and is currently working in Bangalore, India”) has a blog, Sanskrit Literature (“Bringing Sanskrit literature to a wider global audience”), that aims to “revisit Sanskrit classics through novel media and interpretations,” to “reinvigorate an interest in and love for Sanskrit and its authors,” and to “serve as a hub where like-minded people can share ideas.” The About page says:

Sanskrit has a tradition of literature richer and more diverse than anything produced by its sister languages in Greece and Rome. […] There are stories here to rival the Trojan War, beauty to outshine the tender couplets of Sappho, and drama to challenge Oedipus’ self-revelation. Such literature deserves to be read, watched, heard or experienced. For those of us who are unable to digest Shakuntala in the original, this means a translation, interpretation or adaptation into English, the language most accessible to audiences worldwide. […]
This forum is intended to act as a stimulus, to provoke translators, authors and artists of every type into looking to Bhatti, Bana and Vedanta Deshika as well as Valmiki, Somadeva and Kalidasa for inspiration, and to awaken an appetite in audiences for the poems, prose and plays of ancient India in whatever form.

Ansell has been writing a Seasonal Poetry series of posts about plants that appear in Sanskrit poetry, like malati (jasmine) and mango; each presents quotes from Sanskrit poetry (devanagari, transliteration, and translation), with discussion of the plant itself and its literary use. (Via MetaFilter.)