Archives for August 2011

I never gave the phrase “bolt upright” much thought, but I guess I assumed the word “bolt” was some sort of adverbial. Ben Zimmer, in a recent NY Times column (primarily about whether literary language is still distinct from the vernacular in American English), treats it as a verb: “When we see a character in contemporary fiction ‘bolt upright’ or ‘draw a breath,’ we join in this silent game, picking up the subtle cues that telegraph a literary style.” Mark Liberman, in a post at the Log, was surprised, having had a sense of the word similar to mine, and asked “So is ‘bolt upright’ really a verb phrase?” He has no problem finding evidence that it has been (the OED has plenty of citations like Smollett’s “The patient, bolting upright in the bed, collared each of these assistants with the grasp of Hercules”), but clearly verbal usage seems to be rare these days, and he ends his post:

So for me, and I think for many of the contemporary writers who use the expression, “bolt upright” is just a idiomatically-modified version of the adjective upright, in which bolt has some semantic resonance with the verb bolt (as in what horses and fugitives do), and maybe with the noun in lightning bolt, but no real compositional path from its constituent parts.

That makes sense to me; how about you?

My pal Kári Tulinius sent me a couple of language-related links from The Atlantic thinking I would find them of interest, and I pass them on to you for the same reason:
The Eerie Beauty of Rare Alphabets, by Edward Tenner, features a worthwhile project: “Without support from governments, NGOs, or foundations, the English-born, Vermont-based writer Tim Brookes has been documenting this heritage in a unique way, carving specimens on local curly maple in his Endangered Alphabets Project.” You can see samples of his work at the Atlantic link, and watch a short video of him describing it at his Kickstarter page.

Language Mystery: When Did Americans Stop Sounding This Way?, by James Fallows, is about Mid-Atlantic English, also called the “Transatlantic accent”; it’s familiar from many Hollywood movies of seventy-plus years ago, and the Atlantic post links to a ten-minute documentary from the ’30s, “Wings Over the Golden Gate,” which features, besides lovely color views of the San Francisco area, the plummy tones of narrator Gayne Whitman, a prime specimen of the accent in question. Fallows asks why “it so totally fell out of fashion, and so fast,” but I think he’s exaggerating both the totality and the speed—Wikipedia says “it was used on stage generally – and especially in productions of Shakespeare and other pieces from the British Isles – and frequently in film until the mid-1960s” and adds that it is still occasionally used.

I was struck by the word “serow” in the río Wang post “A litle sheet or serow of paper”; it turned out to be from a definition in the edition of Calepinus published in Basel in 1590: “Schĕdŭlă, ae […] Ang. A litle sheet or serow of paper.” I quickly realized it was a typo for scrow; what I hadn’t realized, but soon discovered, was that that archaic word, an aphetic form of Anglo-French escrowe ‘scrap; scroll,’ was the source of the modern English noun scroll, apparently by contamination with roll. So scroll and escrow are historically the same word. Anglo-French escrowe, says M-W, is “of Germanic origin; akin to Middle Dutch schrode piece cut off, Old High German scrōt — more at shred.” (As it happens, there is an English word serow, referring to a kind of goat antelope; while irrelevant to the meaning of schedula, it may be of interest to AJP.)

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Victor Mair has another of his thought-provoking and informative posts about Chinese at the Log; this one is called Fried scholar’s and begins with the discovery that shìde 士的 on a Chinese menu, which looks like it should mean “fried scholar’s,” was actually a Mandarin borrowing of Cantonese si6 dik1 and meant ‘steak.’ He goes on:

The usual way to say “steak” in Modern Standard Mandarin (MSM) is niúpái 牛排, and that expression is also used in Cantonese, where it is pronounced ngau4 paai4. But si6 dik1 士的 (“steak”) is also used very commonly in speech and even, as on restaurant menus, in writing. This is a good example of how a parallel vocabulary develops in Cantonese and other Sinitic languages: one based on indigenous morphemes, and one on loanwords.

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Via happydog’s Wordorigins post, I present Railroad Terminology, Slang, and Definitions, from the Brotherhood of Railroad Signalmen, Glenn Holmes Sr., Local #72. I have a weakness for such assemblages of the jargon of particular trades, lovingly assembled not by lexicographers but by the practitioners of the trade, who tend to write unscientific but enjoyable entries. The lead-in to the vocabulary goes like this:

When I hired on the MO-PAC, back in ’76, I overheard my foreman tellin’ one of the old head signalman on our gang to ” . . . keep an eye out fer th’ switch engine, cus it could show up at anytime”. Well, being a new boot and not knowin’ nothin’, I asked my foreman, “How do you know which one of these trains is a switch engine?” and he told me “After ya been on this man’s railroad for a few years, you’ll know what a switch engine is, now get back to diggin'”. Right friendly feller he was.

  Well, here I am, some 30 years later and now I’m th’ “old head” and I got new boots and citizens asking me th’ same things, ‘cept I’m a little friendlier. Ya’ think you know what a “Tommy Dodd” is, or how ’bout a “snipe“, or maybe a “Blue Goose“. Read on and enjoy and when someone asks you “What is a Pussyfoot, anyway?” you’ll know just what to tell ’em. Oh, and by the way, a switch engine is . . .

An entry pulled at random: “When do you shine?” = “What time were you called for?” And for AJP, a “Green Goat” is a hybrid electric locomotive using batteries to power electric traction motors. Have fun, but watch out for Rule G!

David Friedman has a blog called Sunday Magazine where he posts “the most interesting articles from the New York Times Sunday Magazine from exactly 100 years ago, with a little bit of commentary or context” (you can read about it here); while it’s great reading, it’s not normally LH material… but From 1890: The First Text Messages is. The article is headlined “FRIENDS THEY NEVER MEET: ACQUAINTANCES MADE BY THE TELEGRAPH KEY. CONFIDENCES EXCHANGED BETWEEN MEN WHO HAVE NEVER SEEN EACH OTHER — THEIR PECULIAR CONVERSATION ABBREVIATIONS,” and David writes “the abbreviations they used seem a lot like the abbreviations used in today’s text messages,” quoting the following passage:

In their conversations telegraphers use a system of abbreviations which enables them to say considerably more in a certain period of time then they otherwise could. Their morning greeting to a friend in a distant city is usually “g. m.,” and the farewell for the evening, “g. n.,” the letters of course standing for good morning and good night. The salutation may be accompanied by an inquiry by one as to the health of the other, which would be expressed thus: “Hw r u ts mng?” And the answer would be: “I’m pty wl; hw r u?” or “I’m nt flg vy wl; fraid I’ve gt t mlaria.”
By the time these courtesies have taken place some early messages have come from the receiving department or from some other wire, and the man before whom they are placed says to his friend many miles away: “Wl hrs a fu; Gol hang ts everlastin grind. I wish I ws rich.” And the other man says: “No rest fo t wickd, min pen,” the last two words indicating that he wants the sender to wait a minute while he adjusts and tests his pen. Presently he clicks out “g a,” meaning “go ahead,” and the day’s work has begun.

He says “I’m not sure what “Wl hrs a fu” is supposed to mean,” and neither am I; any guesses? (Via MetaFilter.)

This is not, strictly speaking, language-related, but it’s such a striking anecdote I can’t resist passing it on—and besides, it’s about people who want desperately to talk to each other. In language. So without further ado, a translation from the Russian of the Captain’s Daughter (via Anatoly); she is remembering the days when she and her tall, black-browed, energetic First Love were eager to get married and go to America together:

Of course nothing came of it. That’s what first love is for. But do you know what I remember most?
At that time, far from every apartment in Yerevan had a telephone. And even if there was one, not every phone could make calls to other cities, and in my neighborhood there were no intercity phones. So to talk with Moscow, I would visit a friend or relative who had one, and at the appointed time First Love would call. I couldn’t place the call myself; in the first place, the telephone wasn’t mine and they wouldn’t take money, and in the second place, it was expensive.
So one time I made the trek from my Bangladesh (for which Muscovites can read “South Butovo”) to the Sixth Nork Massif (call it “Khimki”) to be there by exactly three in the afternoon, because that was when First Love was supposed to call. But my friend had forgotten or gotten mixed up, and she wasn’t home. There was nobody there at all. And I stood in front of the door, swallowing tears and listening to the telephone ringing loudly, heartrendingly, inside the apartment… I stood there for an hour—and for an hour, with brief interruptions, the phone kept ringing.
Now tell me, how can such a thing be presented today, in the age of cell phones, Skype, and iPads? And yet it happened…

And can anyone below middle age now imagine the surprise and concern with which people used to pick up a ringing phone and learn that it was a long-distance call? The first thought was that someone must have died. People didn’t make such expensive calls just to chat.

Like most Russophiles who read Nabokov at an impressionable age, I was hooked by his description of пошлость (póshlost’) and have been seeking further elucidation ever since. I wrote a brief post about the concept back in 2007, and now that I’m reading Svetlana Boym’s Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia I can expand on it, because it is one of the basic elements of her “Mythologies of Everyday Life” chapter, and she goes into both its history and its cultural importance. However, since her discussion is both dense and wide-ranging (the section devoted to the word is twenty-five pages long), I’ll do the best I can to pull out some particularly interesting bits.
She begins her discussion as follows:

After making love with her new acquaintance in the resort town of Yalta, the heroine of Anton Chekhov’s short story “A Lady with a Dog” begins to cry, and then declares that she has become “a poshlaia woman.” Her lover orders a piece of melon brought to him on a porcelain saucer with a golden rim. He is embarrassed by her tears, which are not in good taste for a conventional, cool, and blase resort romance. Yet it is the shame and the lure of poshlost’ that turn this Western-style casual adultery into a typical Russian love story, complete with tears, grey dresses, autumnal landscapes, and nostalgia.

Poshlost’ is the Russian version of banality, with a characteristic national flavoring of metaphysics and high morality, and a peculiar conjunction of the sexual and the spiritual. This one word encompasses triviality, vulgarity, sexual promiscuity, and lack of spirituality. This one word encompasses triviality, vulgarity, sexual promiscuity, and lack of spirituality. The war against poshlost’ is a cultural obsession of the Russian and Soviet intelligentsia from the 1860s to 1960s. Perhaps nowhere else in the world has there been such a consistency in the battle against banality. In Dostoevsky, poshlyi is an attribute of the devil (or at least of his dreamline novelistic apparition), while Alexander Solzhenitsyn uses it to characterize Western-oriented youth. In everyday speech a “poshliak” (boor or slob, with a diminutive pejorative suffix) is not a servant of the devil or a “Western spy” but only a man who frequently uses obscene language or behaves like a common womanizer. Poshlost’ has also a broader meaning, close to byt [another hard-to-translate term, meaning ‘daily life’ but with a negative connotation], when it refers to the incommensurable everyday routine, obscene by virtue of being ordinary and evil by virtue of being banal.

I was surprised by the emphasis on sexuality in this passage—Nabokov’s only nod to that side of things is his sly rendering of the last syllable as “lust”—but she later goes on to support it with citations.

After a summary of Nabokov and a quick survey of the origin of the word (for which see my earlier post), she says, “There is an important connection between poshlost’ and the merchant class—kuptsy, at the higher level, and meshchane at the lower level of urban dwellers (the mythical Russian equivalent of the petite bourgeoisie),” adding the following footnote:

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Jamie Dubs at Free Art and Technology has posted Google’s Official List of Bad Words: “If you type ‘fuck’ or ‘shit’ into Google’s new What Do You Love? service you are adorably redirected to ‘kittens’ instead. I dug through their source code and extracted Google’s complete list of unspeakables, embedded below.” It’s a pretty funny list; oddly, as one of the commenters points out, “God” is on it. Why does Google prefer that you love kittens rather than God? Never mind, don’t answer, I don’t think I want to know.
While we’re on the subject of Google-related oddities, here is the worst-scanned book I’ve ever seen (Wohlgemeynte Gedanken über den Dannemarks-Gesundbrunnen, by Johan Gottschalk Wallerius and Johann Daniel Denso; it’s the whole book, not just that page—scroll down and see for yourself).
Update (2012). I’m pleased to see they’ve rescanned the book and it’s now perfectly readable.