Search Results for: chicken

From Chickenman to Eagleton.

I’ve barely begun reading Michael S. Gorham’s 2003 Speaking in Soviet Tongues: Language Culture and the Politics of Voice in Revolutionary Russia (which incorporates his article “Mastering the Perverse: State Building and Language ‘Purification’ in Early Soviet Russia,” discussed in this 2008 post), and I’m already hooked — it’s one of those dense books whose every page provides material to think about. There are all kinds of passages I could quote, but for the moment I’ll limit myself to this (from pages 30-31), on the adoption of new family names (I’ve incorporated the footnotes, bracketed, in the text):

A less well-known study of registered name changes in the early Soviet years brings this point to bear, by showing that, apart from those taking on surnames in the Soviet spirit (Maiskaia, Oktiabr’skii, Leninskii, Mashininskii, Kombainov, Boitsov), hundreds of other citizens took advantage of the spirit of revolution to realize their own, personal transformation, which often had little or nothing to do with supporting or resisting the state. [Surnames listed are derived, in order, from the Russian words for “May,” “October,” “Lenin,” “machine,” “combine,” and “fighter.” …] Some took the opportunity to abandon derogatory “talking” surnames (a relatively common trait in Russian), such as Sobachkin, Korovin, Krysov, Tarakanov, Dikarev, Negodiaev, Durakov, Zhirnyi, Sliun’kov, Pupkov, Pupkin, Kulibaba, Likhobaba, and Sorokobabkin. [Surnames derived, in order, from the Russian words for “dog,” “cow,” “rat,” “cockroach,” “savage,” “scoundrel,” “fool,” “fat,” “saliva,” “navel [pup],” “coolie wench,” “varmint wench,” and “blabbermouth wench.” …] Others simply opted for more prestigious, poetic, or euphonic names — again, having little to do with the new Soviet order per se (Pushkin, Tolstoy, Onegin, Nevskii, Gorskii, Amurskii, Uralov, Anis’ia KhliupinaGalina Borovaia, SamodurovPoliarnyi, KurochkaOrlov). [The first surnames listed are derived from names of Russian writers or fictional characters … and geographical references (Neva, gora [“mountain”], Amur, Urals). In the “before → after” examples, Anis’ia Khliupina rejects a surname evocative of “sloshing” or “slogging” (e.g., through the mud) for one that recalls a pine forest (acquiring a more classical, high-society given name as well), a “self-made fool” becomes “the polar one,” and “Chickenman” becomes “Eagleton.”]

I loved seeing Pupkin in the second list, a name indelibly associated with Robert De Niro’s great role in The King of Comedy,

CHICKENSHIT.

Mark Liberman has a typically incisive Language Log post about that satisfying expletive chickenshit, sparked off by this quote from a Washington Post story: “McCain… used a curse word associated with chickens and accused Cornyn of raising the issue just to torpedo a deal.” (Mark says “Amazingly, Andrew Sullivan was… baffled by this bit of bowdlerization,” but I confess when I read the story earlier I myself was baffled. I associate chickenshit with bosses, not chickens, and wondered vaguely if McCain had squawked in outrage.) After a thorough lexicographical examination, he says “It seems to me that there is some philosophical work to be done here, along the lines of Harry Frankfurt’s pathbreaking exegesis of bullshit,” and I couldn’t agree more. I disagree, however, with Mark’s suggestion that “the essence of chickenshit — or at least a critical factor in chickenshit — is misrepresentation of motives”; that seems to me an ancillary, not a defining, factor. In an update he quotes an excellent analysis by Paul Fussell, whose book Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War contains an entire chapter “Chickenshit, An Anatomy”:

Chickenshit refers to behavior that makes military life worse than it need be: petty harassment of the weak by the strong; open scrimmage for power and authority and prestige… insistence on the letter rather than the spirit of ordinances. Chickenshit is so called — instead of horse- or bull- or elephant shit — because it is small-minded and ignoble and takes the trivial seriously. Chickenshit can be recognized instantly because it never has anything to do with winning the war.

Gallus gallus may vanish from the face of the earth, but chickenshit will always be with us.

CHICKEN CHICKEN.

Chicken chicken chicken chicken, chicken chicken (chicken chicken chicken); chicken chicken chicken chicken: chicken! (Chicken chicken.)

Linguistic Legacy Materials at LDD.

Language Documentation and Description (LDD) “is an international journal that publishes peer-reviewed research on language documentation, language description, and language support, broadly conceived”; at a Nick Nicholas Facebook post, Peter Austin commented:

There’s a bunch of interesting papers in this issue of LDD about the social lives of linguistic materials and the need to study the various “versions” of published “final” documents.

It does indeed look interesting, with titles such as “Philology in the folklore archive: Interpreting past documentation of the Kraasna dialect of Estonian” (Tobias Weber) and “Legacy materials and cultural facework: Obscenity and bad words in Siouan language documentation” (Saul Schwartz).

A public service notice: Globus Books is having a two-day online sale (20% off on orders of $40+) on July 3rd and 4th. If you want to buy some Russian books, now’s a good time.

And a personal note: today is my birthday, and I’ve already gotten some presents of Hattic interest, notably (from my generous wife) Keys to the “Gift”: A Guide to Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel, by Yuri Leving, which I’m extremely excited about — it’s my favorite Nabokov novel, which means it’s one of my favorite novels, period. On the sf front, I got This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, which got great reviews, and on the cop-show front, All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire, by Jonathan Abrams, which comes at the perfect time, since I just finished the fifth and final season of The Wire, which I continue to think of as the best TV show in existence. (Some people think the last season is the best, others the worst; I can understand both points of view, because the development of the earlier story arcs and characters was fantastic, whereas the newspaper stuff was disappointing by comparison to the general excellence of the show: dogged reporter Alma and honest, professional editor Gus vs. bad editors whose names I don’t even remember, which shows you how cardboard they are.) Tonight I’ll be dining on the traditional chicken curry, with lemon meringue pie for dessert. My wife knows how to keep me purring contentedly.

South Florida English.

JC has linked the Graun’s story in a comment on a nine-year-old post, but I thought it was worth featuring, so here’s Phillip M. Carter’s account at The Conversation — he’s the guy who led the study being reported on:

“We got down from the car and went inside.”

“I made the line to pay for groceries.”

“He made a party to celebrate his son’s birthday.”

These phrases might sound off to the ears of most English-speaking Americans. In Miami, however, they’ve become part of the local parlance. According to my recently published research, these expressions – along with a host of others – form part of a new dialect taking shape in South Florida.

This language variety came about through sustained contact between Spanish and English speakers, particularly when speakers translated directly from Spanish. […]

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Curry.

Bee Wilson, whose LRB reviews have been quoted here before (2009, 2019), had one last year (archived) of Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionised Food in America by Mayukh Sen and The Philosophy of Curry by Sejal Sukhadwala. She spends the entire review talking about curry, which probably irritated Mr. Sen, but if you’re interested in the subject it’s well worth reading. Herewith some sections addressing the word and its meaning:

As a child in the early 1980s, I believed that curry was synonymous with Indian food and that Indian food was synonymous with curry […] As a teenager, I started cooking from Madhur Jaffrey’s books and saw with a jolt that, for Indian cooks, hearing British people declaring they loved curry could come across as a crass postcolonial misrepresentation. Jaffrey arrived in London from Delhi in 1955 to study at Rada, and taught herself to cook using her mother’s recipes because she disliked English food (except fish and chips). In England, Indian food was thought to be anything sprinkled with curry powder: a substance Elizabeth David described as ‘unlikeable, harshly flavoured, and possessed of an aroma clinging and as all-pervading in its way as that of English boiled cabbage or cauliflower’. ‘To me the word “curry” is as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the term “chop suey” was to China’s,’ Jaffrey wrote in An Invitation to Indian Cooking (1973). ‘“Curry” is just a vague, inaccurate word which the world has picked up from the British, who, in turn, got it mistakenly from us … If “curry” is an oversimplified name for an ancient cuisine, then “curry powder” attempts to oversimplify (and destroy) the cuisine itself.’

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The Joys of Denglisch.

Alexander Wells writes for the European Review of Books:

Whenever I leave my Berlin apartment, the first thing I see is a sign saying CHICKEN HAUS BURGER; the second is a café blackboard announcing: « You can’t buy happiness but you can buy CROIFFLE and that’s kind of the same thing. » A billboard advertises an upcoming film as « ein STATEMENT für GIRLPOWER »; one shop promises a wide range of Funsocken. Rather more disturbing — particularly here in Neukölln, a neighbourhood copiously populated by leftie Americans and families from the Middle East — is the Arabic-German barber shop called WHITE BOSS. And when I go downtown to the bookstore where I occasionally host readings, the only good coffee nearby is served by a place unbelievably named PURE ORIGINS. […]

Which is not to say that Berlin’s English-language readers — the natively anglophones plus many whose first language is Swedish, Spanish, Turkish or Arabic — do not know German at all. The Berlinglish they speak is informal English, slightly simplified, full of swears, nightlife slang and loan words — mostly adopted from German. Knowing the contours of this dialect is no small part of my editing work. Taken together, its German-to-English loans register all the points of cultural interface that an expat life simply cannot avoid — Rundfunk, Finanzamt, Anmeldung — as well as some that have made it across on account of their own attractive promises: Spätkauf, Flohmarkt, Falafelteller, Wegbier.

The English spoken by those newcomers who settle here and end up making some German friends and studying the language — it also absorbs subtler influences from German. The other day my friend S., an American Berliner, said that he had noticed his English-language social circle starting to use the word « spontaneously » wrong. When Germans say they’ll organise a social event spontan, they mean they’ll work out the details at short notice. To socialise spontaneously, in English, means something rather different. But S. and I and our Neukölln friends have started using it in the sense of spontan. « OK cool text me Sunday and we’ll choose a place spontaneously. » This error is becoming part of our little language, our ultra-local dialect, just among us.

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New Mexican Spanish.

Simon Romero reports for the NY Times (archived) on a dialect of Spanish that is slipping away:

QUESTA, N.M. — When the old regulars gather at Cynthia Rael-Vigil’s coffee shop in Questa, N.M., a village nestled in the snow-capped Sangre de Cristo Mountains, they sip lattes and lavender lemonade and gossip in Spanish. Someone from Mexico City or Madrid sitting at the next table could be hard-pressed to follow their rare dialect. But Spanish speakers from four centuries ago might have recognized the unusual verb conjugations — if not the unorthodox pronunciations and words drawn from English and languages indigenous to North America.

For more than 400 years, these mountains have cradled a form of Spanish that today exists nowhere else on earth. Even after the absorption of their lands into the United States in the 19th century, generations of speakers somehow kept the dialect alive, through poetry and song and the everyday exchanges on the streets of Hispanic enclaves scattered throughout the region.

Even just a few decades ago, the New Mexican dialect remained at the forefront of Spanish-language media in the United States, featured on television programs like the nationally syndicated 1960s Val de la O variety show. Balladeers like Al Hurricane nurtured the dialect in their songs. But such fixtures, along with the dazzling array of Spanish-language newspapers that once flourished in northern New Mexico, have largely faded. […]

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Cockney.

One of the things I love about my wife is her tendency to ask random questions about language. Last night she suddenly said “Where does Cockney come from?” I said something like “I used to know, I think, or at least I looked it up, but that was a long time ago…” So I looked it up again, and discovered that the OED entry, updated as recently as September 2019, tells an interestingly tangled tale:

Etymology: In sense A. 1 [“The egg of a domestic fowl”] < cock n.¹ + egg n. (see α. forms at egg n.), although the medial syllable is difficult to explain: it may show *coken as a genitive plural form of cock n.¹ (although this noun usually shows strong rather than weak inflections); a facetious blend with chicken n. is perhaps thinkable; it is also possible that the n results from a variant of α. forms at egg n. with metanalysis, i.e. *ney, and that the vowel preceding it is an epenthetic development; analogical influence from pigsney n. [“A specially cherished or beloved girl or woman, a sweetheart.”] is perhaps also possible. Compare later cock’s egg n. at cock n.¹ and int. Compounds 2.

Sense A. 2 [“A spoilt or pampered person, esp. a child”] (and hence ultimately all later senses) probably shows a semantic development from sense A. 1, although the details cannot be traced in detail, and some have questioned the plausibility of such a development. Alternatively, senses A. 1 and A. 2 may show unrelated words, although alternative explanations for the origin of the word in sense A. 2 are variously problematic.

The identification of the second element (in sense A. 1) as egg n. appears to be confirmed by the following (apparently isolated) instance of a form showing β. forms at egg n.:

1598 J. Florio Worlde of WordesCaccherelli, cacklings of hens; also egs [1611 egges], as we say cockanegs.

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Pelevin’s Werewolves.

Having read Victor Pelevin’s Священная Книга Оборотня (2004), translated by Andrew Bromfield as The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, I’m not sure what to say about it. The narrator and protagonist, A Khuli (狐狸 huli is Chinese for ‘fox,’ and хули khuli is Russian for ‘what/why the fuck?’), was born in China a couple of thousands of years ago and is now working as a prostitute in Moscow; she looks like a girl in her early teens but is actually a werefox who uses her tail to hypnotically convince her clients they are having sex with her. She meets a high KGB (excuse me, FSB) officer named Alexander who turns out to be a werewolf with powers that enable him to find the oil his country needs in the Far North. They fall in love, and she explains to him the nature of reality, which is of course illusion, as in all Pelevin’s novels (the Heart Sutra is referred to more than once). As I wrote Lizok, “it’s standard-issue Pelevin (sex, drugs, computer games, corrupt business/power nexus, fancy brand names, plus a dollop of Eastern mysticism), but hey, I enjoy that mix, and he sure does know how to tell a story.” If you enjoy such things, I can recommend the novel; it’s longer than it needs to be, but it’s fun. Of course, there’s always the academic take on it, as in A History of Russian Literature by Kahn et al. (see this post):

The fox embodies the invigorating and restorative component of postmodernist cynicism descended from the long lineage of Soviet tricksters. The wolf reveals the underlying cynical foundations of post-Soviet negative self-identification and the neo-traditionalist politics of the 2000s and 2010s.

So there’s that too, if you like social significance. But I’m going to discuss some of the details I enjoyed.
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