As a followup to my earlier post on words for ‘butterfly,’ I offer you the funny and erudite reflections of Q. Pheevr on the English word:

Still, butterfly is a funny thing to call a butterfly, isn’t it? It’s also not obvious exactly what the compound means—okay, so it’s probably right-headed, and therefore refers to some sort of flying insect. But what, exactly, is the relation between the ‘butter’ part and the ‘fly’ part? (OED sez: “The reason of the name is unknown,” but offers some speculation, to which I return below.) There are several possibilities. I hope that the Language Loggers will forgive me for saying this, but Sanskrit has at least four words for ‘compound’, and I intend to use them here to illustrate the multiplicity of possible meanings of butterfly.

And so he does; I’ll quote here my favorite:

Butterfly could be a tatpurusha compound, in which the relation is one of interaction rather than resemblance. For example, a butterfly could be an insect that eats butter, in which case one would have to wonder, as Alice did of the bread-and-butter fly, how it could possibly survive without human intervention. Or it could be quite the reverse—an insect that shits butter, as suggested by the OED: “Wedgwood points out a Dutch synonym boterschijte in Kilian, which suggests that the insect was so called from the appearance of its excrement.” Trouble is, as A World for Butterflies points out, butterflies don’t shit. (Caterpillars do, though, and apparently there is one species that, thanks to a diet of yellow flowers, does emit appropriately coloured frass. (Yes, caterpillar shit is called frass, and yes, it’s derived from fressen. The OED defines frass as “the excrement of larvæ; also, the refuse left behind by boring insects,” and although I’m sure Nabokov (whose birthday was Earth Day) would have insisted that there are no boring insects, I will not.))

Now, there’s a man who knows how to parenthesize (and yes, that is a word; Southey wrote (in his “unfinished and, indeed, unfinishable” The Doctor, which sounds quite intriguing from this description and which includes the first published version of “The Story of the Three Bears”): “Sir Kenelm Digby observes… that ‘it is a common speech (but’, he parenthesizes, ‘only amongst the unlearned sort) ubi tres medici duo athei’.”).

(Via Mark Liberman at Language Log.)

Update (Mar. 2023). I’ve provided an archived version of “The Story of the Three Bears,” but the bartleby.school.aol.com URL linked at “this description” has not been saved by the Wayback Machine. Bah.

Cristi Laquer and Scott Kolp have started a language blog called Invented Usage that looks like a lot of fun, with discussions of language, the distinction or lack thereof between poetry and prose, and a funny exchange between the bloggers about possible names for their prospective blog. Welcome to Blogovia, Scott and Cristi!

The National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Smithsonian Institution are collaborating on Documenting Endangered Languages, “a new, multi-year effort to preserve records of key languages before they become extinct” as the NEH’s press release says. Here‘s the Program Solicitation with details of the project, and here‘s a news report by Carl Hartman (thanks, Laurent!).

In the words of The Penguin Companion to Literature 4: Classical and Byzantine, Oriental and African (1969):

The Thai version of the Rāmāyana exhibits marked differences from the Sanskrit epic. Episodes known from Sinhalese, southern Indian and Bengali versions are included, while Khmer and Javanese versions have also influenced its development in Thailand… Early in the formation of the local tradition ancient Buddhist versions probably played an important part.

The only complete Thai version is the Ramakian of Rama I (1782-1809). Invocations and texts of episodes, some intended for performance as dance-drama, are known from the 18th century. Despite the relatively late date of such manuscripts, the epic has a long history in Thailand. [Edwin Gerow]

At this site you will find “a line by line translation of King Rama I’s version of Hanuman’s journey to Lanka, each paragraph of translation following its Thai text,” and you can hear it read in Thai by clicking on the RealAudio links. An excellent find by Plep [13th May].

Addendum (Nov. 2025). I was going to apologize for copying what I thought was Plep’s misspelling “Ramakien” for my post title, but it turns out that’s the standard transliteration of the Thai — at least, that’s what the Wikipedia article uses:

The Ramakien (Thai: รามเกียรติ์, RTGS: Rammakian, pronounced [rāːm.mā.kīa̯n]; lit. ’Glory of Rama’; sometimes also spelled Ramakian) is one of Thailand’s national epics. It is a Thai version of the ancient Indian epic Ramayana, and an important part of the Thai literary canon.

Also, I’m impressed the original link and its audio files still work.

Adam Langer, journalist, author, playwright, and filmmaker, has a series of articles in The Book Standard under the general rubric “Enough About Me”; #8, “In Which the Author Hands in His Copyedited Manuscript and Pays Tribute to the Most Unheralded Job in Publishing,” contains a number of exchanges with six copy editors, members of a profession Mr. Langer rightly admires:

That’s the way it goes with copyeditors. They perform one of the most important jobs on manuscripts, saving authors from their misspellings, their grammatical errors, their logical and stylistic flaws, and yet, their efforts remain largely anonymous. As for me, I was always a terrible copyeditor. An attention-span problem, I guess. I’m still not sure if “copyeditor” is one word or two… [It’s two in Merriam-Webster—LH]

At any rate, I will take this opportunity to pay tribute to one of the most unheralded jobs in publishing by providing this conversation with five highly reputed copyeditors. Their remarks have been edited for continuity; hopefully, somebody else has copyedited them.

The five are Judit Z. Bodnar, Courtney Denney, Dorian Hastings, Steve Lamont, and Betsy Uhrig, and in a postscript he asks the same questions of Jude Grant. Some of the questions are a little silly (“What if you have to copyedit a book that you hate? Can you distance yourself?”), but the answers are usually enjoyable, and I loved the descriptions of each editor’s “weapons”—Ms. Bodnar’s for example, are:

Style manuals: Chicago, ALA, Words into Type, Recipes into Type. Dictionaries: Webster’s Unabridged, Biographical, and Geographical. Synonyms and Antonyms (not all that useful, sad to say). Several foreign dictionaries. Dorland’s Medical. Bartlett’s and other quotation sources, including biblical. Several editions of Roget’s. Several world atlases and a few road atlases. Complete Shakespeare and Milton, the King James Bible and Pruden’s Concordance, plots of the great operas, Oxford Companion to Ships and the Sea. A number of books each on when and how things were invented. A branch of NYC Public Library a couple of blocks away.

Ilan Stavans, subject of an earlier LH post, is interviewed by Christine Lagorio for the Village Voice; his new book sounds like fun:

In his new Dictionary Days: A Defining Passion (Graywolf), Stavans pushes the limits of how reference books can be read. He does so by pointing out their necessary imperfections, such as trying to lock a language in its time and place, à la Johnson’s 1755 Dictionary of the English Language. To Stavans, a dictionary takes on many other roles: sharp consultant, witty comrade, flip arm candy, live-in partner. In an ode to the rigid orthographic volumes, he even titles a chapter “Sleeping With My OED.”
The book is a brave feat not only because it shows he’s got academic boxing gloves on, but also for the intimate vantage point it affords readers. By opening up his personal life, Stavans seems to enhance his linguistic argument, recognizing that this intimacy—e.g., the hyper-detailed description of Stavans’s personal library bookshelves and his eight-year-old son’s talk of heaven—is part of why people read.

Unfortunately, there are a number of pointless swipes at lexicographers other than the hip, “radical” Stavans. Claiming that “many common curses” aren’t to be found in dictionaries is a moldy complaint that a glance at anything published in the last couple of decades should have forestalled, and talking about “the growing dialects that lexicographers fear” is dumb and insulting—the words are the interviewer’s, but they seem to represent Stavans’ chip-on-the-shoulder attitude, at least as reflected here. On the other hand, we know better than to trust how reporters represent linguists.

A useful 1982 reference book, Bookbinding and the Conservation of books: A Dictionary of Descriptive Terminology, by Matt T. Roberts and Don Etherington. From the Foreword:

The text of the present book is not a history of bookbinding—although there is a great deal of history about the craft contained herein, and it also discusses the materials used, the notable binders whose names illuminate it, and other useful information. It is rather an up-to-date dictionary.
The succinct definitions and explanations, as well as the biographical vignettes, contained in this dictionary will be a boon to those who seek this kind of information. Those concerned, whether they are practicing binders, technicians, rare book librarians, collectors, or simply laymen, will find this a welcome source of answers to their questions. Not the least of these is the one frequently asked of me during my long service in the Library of Congress as Chief of the Rare Book Division. How can I best treat the leather bindings in my personal library ? But this is only one of the thousands of questions to which this dictionary provides the ready answers. The text speaks accurately and helpfully to all those who will seek it out and profit from the immense amount of information it presents in a lucid and comprehensible form.
FREDERICK R. GOFF Honorary Consultant in Early Printed Books Library of Congress

Courtesy of ElizaD at Wordorigins.

My wife and I were discussing the delightful character Marvin the Robot when she said “Marvin… what an odd name. Where is it from?” I didn’t know, so I looked it up, and it turns out it’s from the Welsh name Merfyn (pronounced MEHR-vyn), the name of an early king. The Welsh name was borrowed into English as Mervin, which turned into Marvin by the same process that turned person into parson and (uni)versity into varsity. More fun with etymology! Oh yeah, the Welsh name probably means ’eminent marrow’: mer ‘marrow’ + myn ’eminent.’ (M becomes v, which is written f, for complicated Celtic reasons I won’t go into here; take my word for it.)

This paper by Quang Phuc Dong* of the South Hanoi Institute of Technology** begins “There is an extensive literature dealing with English imperative sentences. As is well known, these sentences have no overt grammatical subject…” and ends “… it is clearly no accident that many quasi-verbs are homophonous with normal morphemes.” However, it is no ordinary linguistics paper, and if you don’t at least skim it you’ll be missing out on some great example sentences. And if you actually read it, you’ll learn interesting facts about some very common words.

*There is no such person.
** There is no such institution.

If you scroll all the way down past the paper itself, you will find the following among other elucidations:

“Quang Phuc Dong” is a nom de guerre (linguistique)… of James D. McCawley, who “created the interdisciplinary field of pornolinguistics and scatolinguistics virtually on his own.”

Every time I decide to cut William Safire some slack or just let him be, he does something so egregious I have to drag him once again before the bar of justice. His latest “On Language” column is called “Go To!” and is mostly an unobjectionable discussion of the spread of two terms that originated in sports jargon: go-to (as in “go-to guy”) and walk-off (as in “walk-off home run”); he wonders if the latter will undergo the same kind of metaphoric extension as the former. But, being Safire, he’s unable to broach the subject he wants to talk about without a cutesy historical lead-in, and since he knows essentially nothing about the history of language and apparently is not subjected to the humiliation of having his column fact-checked, he regularly perpetrates howlers in his tossed-off intros. This time he begins:

The sleepwalking Lady Macbeth, obsessively trying to wash her hands of imaginary blood, is observed by a Doctor of Physic and a horrified Waiting-Gentle-Woman. As Shakespeare’s most famous villainess cries, ”Out, damned spot!” the doctor whispers a warning to his fellow witness: ”Go to, go to; you have known what you should not.”

The meaning of the imperative go to, four centuries ago, was ”beat it,” now ”geddoutahere” or, as those who cherish archaisms still say, ”get thee hence.” In our time, those two short words have fused into a compound adjective with a wholly different meaning, and that modifier is sweeping the language…

Did he even glance at the scene he’s quoting? The Doctor and the Gentlewoman, secretly observing Lady Macbeth, are overcome by horrified compassion and exchange murmured comments to each other after each of her outbursts. When she says “The thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?—What, will these hands ne’er be clean?—No more o’ that, my lord, no more o’ that: you mar all with this starting,” the Doctor says, clearly to Lady Macbeth though of course not for her ears, “Go to, go to; you have known what you should not,” and the Gentlewoman agrees: “She has spoke what she should not, I am sure of that: heaven knows what she has known.” And regardless of the addressee, the phrase simply does not mean what Safire thinks it means, as a glance at the OED would have told him: definition 91b under go is:

go to Used in imp. to express disapprobation, remonstrance, protest, or derisive incredulity; —Come, come!

When Richardson’s Mrs. Jewkes says to Pamela “Go to, go to, naughty, mistrustful Mrs. Pamela; nay, Mrs. Williams […] I may as good call you,” she is not (forsooth) telling her to go away, she is chiding her for her supposed mistrust. (I should mention that at that time the abbreviation Mrs. was read “Mistress” and did not imply married status.)

I beg you, Times, exercise some quality control!