languagehat.com

Every once in a while journalists turn their beady eyes on the ever-fresh topic of “how those crazy kids are talking these days” and make solemn efforts to decipher it; the latest entry, by Callie Holtermann in the NY Times (archived), is less solemn and more sensible than most, and it includes an admirable bit of institutional self-flagellation (the passage beginning “In November 1992”):

If you’d like to truly mortify yourself in front of a young person, try asking the meaning of a phrase that’s being repeated in schools around the country like an incantation: “6-7.”

The conversation might go something like this. You’ll be informed that it doesn’t have a definition — it’s just funny, OK? And also, isn’t it a little bit embarrassing that you’re asking? “There’s not really a meaning behind 6-7,” explained Ashlyn Sumpter, 10, who lives in Indiana. “I would just use it randomly,” said Carter Levy, 9, of Loganville, Ga. Dylan Goodman, 16, of Bucks County, Pa., described the phrase as an inside joke that gets funnier with each grown-up who tries and fails to understand it.

“No offense to adults, but I think they always want to know what’s going on,” she said.

They have certainly been trying. Several months after “6-7” began popping up in classrooms and online, the phrase has become the subject of perplexed social media posts by parents and dutiful explainers in national news outlets, most of which trace it to the song “Doot Doot (6 7)” by the rapper Skrilla. Last month, Dictionary.com chose the term as its word of the year, acknowledging it as “impossible to define.”

This is the oldest trick in the adolescent handbook: Say something silly, stump adults, repeat until maturity. Today, though, such terms ricochet around a network of publications and on the pages of influencers, all promising to decipher youth behavior for older audiences. “Six-seven” feels a bit like a nonsense grenade lobbed at the heart of that ecosystem. Desperate to understand us? Good luck, losers!

It is not the only way that younger generations are, consciously or not, scrambling the Very Earnest analysis of their forebears.

She goes on to talk about skibidi, Ballerina Cappuccina, Tralalero Tralala (a shark with human legs), and “Pudding mit Gabel” before continuing:
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OK, this is one of those ridiculously trivial questions that bother me enough to bother you all with. I came across a reference to L’Hoest’s monkey and of course wanted to know how to pronounce the name; my first-approximation guess was /lo:sts/ (“loasts”), and that is indeed how the zookeeper says it in this video (though she may not be pronouncing the final /s/), so that might have satisfied me… but I went to the Wikipedia article hoping for confirmation, only to discover that it was named “in honor of François L’Hoëst [nl], director of the Antwerp Zoo, in 1898.” At that Dutch page we learn that “François L’Hoëst (Tongeren, 1 maart 1839 – Antwerpen, 29 oktober 1904) was een Belgisch zoöloog.” So now I need to know how Belgians say the name L’Hoëst; the diaeresis is a confusing creature, as we learned in the Citroën thread. Anybody know?

I thought Anatoly Vorobey’s Avva post (in Russian) was of enough general interest to translate it here; Anatoly and his wife, of Russian origin and living in Israel, are both fluent in English:

R. and I have a bit of a problem at home with switching to English in spontaneous communication without really meaning to, and in the last couple of years, our older child has enthusiastically joined in. Every now and then I catch myself and try to put an end to this depravity by saying something like “today everyone is going to speak such and such a language,” but it never works. Yesterday I accidentally discovered a very effective remedy, which I’m sharing: when, for example, a child says something in English for no particular reason, I add “Yulia said in English.” As soon as I starting doing this, it turned into a competition within the family, and we all “catch” each other using English, including me (“Dad said in English”), and we try to watch ourselves and not switch in the middle of a sentence unless there’s a good reason.

In our family, the main way to get people to do something less is to make a joke out of catching them doing it. I don’t know what that means, but it’s a fact.

I think this is what the kids call a “lifehack.”

We’ve discussed Anthony Burgess before (e.g., Burgess’s Slang), but I thought this bilious and detailed passage from the Roger Lewis biography was worth sharing:

Burgess’s idea of order, and his mental make-up, is signified by his fancy for the discipline and formality of grammar and linguistics. Language, in Burgess, creates the content. His information about his ancestors is divulged in terms of how they spoke and sounded, and by the Lancashire hotpot they ate: speaking and swallowing. And of course he can’t mention Manchester speech without having a go at the ‘centralizing linguistic culture’ of London and the south, which ironed out regional dialects – yet where did his own sonic boom come from? Elocution lessons? ‘We provincials have suffered in forcing ourselves to conform,’ he announced in 1987, writing from 44 rue Grimaldi, Monaco. One of Burgess’s biggest inadvertent jokes was to call a book Language Made Plain, because he makes it complicated, in my view. When he talks about substituting ‘an alveolar nasal for a velar one’ or of ‘palatizing his unvoiced alveolar fricatives’, I haven’t a clue what he means – except that he is showing off and being boring. He can’t have friends or cronies at school – they have to be persons ‘true to the etymology khronios’; even as a hungry baby he was like the vociferously verbose Leonard Sachs, compère of The Good Old Days, the music-hall show broadcast from the City Varieties, Leeds. Instead of crying for more milk, it’s a question of ‘the lactal ducts never refilling fast enough’. With Lynne dead in her hospital bed at the Central Middlesex, all he can think about is that the origin of the word acites, one of her symptoms (a distension of the abdomen), is the Greek askos, a wineskin, and that one of her last acts had been to rebuke a Singapore nurse in fluent Mandarin Chinese, ‘astonishing me with a sleeping knowledge of the language I never knew she had’.

Clamour and confusion are concealed by language, and for Burgess living details become a literary process. He reminds me, therefore, less of any modern (or Modernist) artist, where the many-sidedness of existence is acknowledged and presented in a multitude of experimental ways, than of a late Victorian or Edwardian man of letters – his equivalent in painting being William Powell Frith, whose vast, thronging canvases of Ramsgate Sands, Derby Day or railway-station platforms and booking halls prompted Wilde to enquire innocently whether it was really all done by hand? Such, too, are Burgess’s modes of exaggeration – the bejewelled vocabulary, the polishings of his prose – the effect, though picturesque, is that the books are assembled by clockwork. His love of words is robotic.

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Bruce Allen sent me a link to an article in Antigone by Harry Tanner, “Beyond LSJ: How to Deepen Your Understanding of Ancient Greek.” It begins by describing how Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott created “one of the world’s most famous ancient Greek dictionaries” using “a team of students who painstakingly recorded words encountered, along with their contexts, on index cards”:

Very little is known about the criteria by which Liddell and Scott decided what each word meant; there is no preface, no introduction, no explanation about the methods by which these scholars arrived at their conclusions and – more to the point – their translations. This lack of explanation perhaps reflects a more generalised self-confidence of scholars in the 19th century: as E.H. Carr said of historians of that era, “they believed [history’s] meaning was implicit and self-evident.”

Tanner proceeds to the meat of the essay, the issue of what we mean by the meaning of words:

One of the key problems with dictionaries lies in how we tend to think about words, not least words in ancient Greek. We tend to think of them as existing somewhere in the mind with a definable, clear meaning — as if a word like “beauty”, or “mellifluous”, or “carrot” had a home, a clear piece of real estate in the mind, a mental dictionary entry. This limiting idea is far from new. In Plato’s Laches, Socrates asks, ​​πειρῶ εἰπεῖν ὃ λέγω, τί ἐστιν ἀνδρεία (try to articulate what I am saying, what is andreía?) (Laches 1[9]0e). What ensues is an attempt to define the word — to say what it properly means. The assumption at the heart of this dialogue, as well as at the heart of LSJ, is that words have true meanings which exist independently of the contexts in which they are found. It’s as if there is some mental catalogue in which we might look up a word and learn all there is to know about its meaning. But, of course, words are never that simple, and to pretend that they are risks missing out on all the polysemy and multivalence inherent in poetic and creative language.

The word andreia, Plato assumes, has a pure, unadulterated meaning outside of context, and it is our job to find it. Similar attempts are made in the Charmides on the word sōphrosunē (σωφροσύνη). Dictionaries seek to capture that idée mère — to describe in sundry words what it means. Following suit, LSJ glosses σωφροσύνη as “soundness of mind” — another attempt to provide a glancing, unified definition which neatly captures all there is to know about the word. Unfortunately, such assumptions tend to deprive us of the chance to appreciate the beauty and poetry of words.

He explains some of the complex uses of σωφροσύνη, and continues:
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Another thought-provoking section of the introduction to How Literatures Begin (see this post):

If we focus on the cases where a new literature comes into view in response to new senses of group identity of one kind or another, we need to acknowledge that the petri dish in which this new set of reactions is cultivated almost invariably turns out to be an already multilingual and multicultural environment—cases such as premodern Japan, where virtually no one except immigrants spoke Chinese, are very rare, and even there a crucial factor in the development of the new literature was the arrival of a wave of refugees from the destruction of the Paekche state in Korea (chapter 2). To give just a selection of examples: later medieval Britain had a trilingual textual culture; mid-Republican Rome was home to speakers of Greek, Etruscan, and Oscan; the Swahili classic Al-Inkishafi came from a hybridized culture involving Arabic rulers and three competing Swahili dialects.

As a consequence, very strikingly, the beginnings of literatures are regularly venues for the transformative impact of interstitial figures, bilingual or trilingual intercultural actors, who become the catalysts for new forms of cultural expression. These individuals are often able to import into the target culture their expertise in an outside literary tradition (regularly from a cosmopolitan literature). Such entrepreneurial experts shuttling in between cultures are key figures in the beginning of literatures in Rome (Livius Andronicus, Naevius, and Ennius); Russia (Antiokh Kantemir [1709–44]); Japan (the refugees from Korea in the seventh century CE, especially Yamanoue no Okura [660–ca. 733], from a Paekche immigrant family); and India (Maulana Daud, the Muslim who in the 1370s composed the first Hindi work, the Candāyan). The bi- or trilingual individuals who must have been crucial in mediating the epics and songs of the Near East into the Greek-speaking sphere in the period before Homer and Hesiod are now lost to history. As with any feature of culture, all literary traditions interact and appropriate to one degree or another: in their initial phases, the splitting off of vernacular literatures from their parental cosmopolitan literatures will provide ready opportunity for such middle men and culture brokers.

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A few years ago, Princeton University Press published How Literatures Begin: A Global History, edited by Joel B. Lande and Denis Feeney; having had a chance to examine it, I find it a fascinating look at a phenomenon of great interest, and I’ll share some excerpts here, starting with the introduction:

Literatures are rather improbable things. While storytelling and myth making seem to be fixtures of human society, literatures are much more rare. After all, very few spoken languages ever developed a script, let alone enduring institutions of the kind surveyed in this volume. And in those instances where a literary tradition does take hold, survival is far from guaranteed. Literatures require technologies for their preservation and circulation, groups interested in their continuing production, audiences invested in their consumption, and so on. Literatures are sustained over time by diverse practices. But much like individual lives or entire cultures, they also experience birth and death, periods of florescence and of decay, migration from one place to another, and transformation from one shape into another.

With all the specialized interest in individual literatures, in addition to the widespread use of big-picture categories like postcolonial and world literature, one can easily lose track of just how strange it is that literatures exist in the first place. This book embraces such strangeness, asking how an array of literatures, extending across time and space, came to be. By examining the factors that have brought forth and kept alive various literary traditions, the case studies presented here provide the occasion to rethink many of our most basic assumptions about literature in the singular and literatures in the plural.

It is not hard to recognize the risks built into such a project. Neither the concept of literature, nor that of a beginning, can be taken for granted. There are, to be sure, intrinsic difficulties in translating the concept of literature from one idiom to another, especially because of the term’s modern European provenance. Using the term literature universally, that is, runs the risk of projecting a historically and culturally specific set of textual practices and aesthetic values onto times and places that worked very differently. Along the same lines, the search for beginnings can easily be construed as the attempt to uncover a single pattern or a uniform set of enabling conditions, common to each of the case studies included here. In reflecting on processes of literary beginning, it is all too easy to impose a hegemonic mold that all examples either manage or fail to live up to.

I normally bristle when I read the word “hegemonic,” but here it’s used sensibly and imparts an actual meaning. A later passage:
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My wife asked me (she knows I love these out-of-the-blue language questions) where the word parlous was from, and I said confidently that it was a variant of perilous showing the same sound change as parson (< person) and varsity (< university). But then I thought I’d check the OED for details, and was surprised by the order of senses:

1. Of a person or his or her attributes, behaviour, etc.: keen, shrewd, esp. dangerously cunning or clever; mischievous; capable of harming; malicious. Also (in positive sense): extraordinary, excessive, wonderful. Now rare (in later use colloquial or English regional).

c1390 Whon þeos perlous [variant reading parlous] prestes perceyued hire play.
Pistel of Swete Susan (MS Vernon) 53

1584 O you whose noble harts cannot accord, to be the sclaues to an infamous lord: And knowes not how to mixe with perlous art, the deadly poyson with the Amorus dart.
T. Hudson, translation of G. de S. Du Bartas, Historie of Judith v. 71
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1696 Parlous, a kind of made Word, signifying shrewd, notable.
E. Phillips, New World of Words (new edition)
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2.a. Perilous, dangerous, precarious; desperate, hazardous, dire. (Now the usual sense.)

c1425 Ful perlous is displese hem or disturbe.

J. Lydgate, Troyyes Book (MS Augustus A.iv) ii. 2273 (Middle English Dictionary)

I don’t think I’d run across the ‘dangerously cunning or clever’ sense before. Perilous itself only goes back to c1300 (“He nolde lete for no-þing þene perilouse wei to wende”); both words, of course, are based on peril, from Latin perīculum, which I hadn’t realized was “< an unattested verb only recorded in the compound experīrī to try, make trial of (see expert adj.¹) + ‑culum ‑culum suffix.” AHD has it under per-³ ‘to try, risk’ in the Appendix of Indo-European roots.
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Alexis Soloski has an entertaining piece in the NY Times (archived) about how to pronounce the name of the titular (though absent) character of one of the most famous of plays; of course, the idea that there is one “correct” way to say it is silly, but it’s fun to see how various actors have dealt with it. It starts:

Godot is a big name in theater. How do you say that name? Depends.

The actor Brandon J. Dirden articulates a variation on the word Godot at least a dozen times a night in the current Broadway revival of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” As he speaks, vowels and consonants dance around in his mouth, emerging as Godet, Goday, Godan, Godin, Gahdeh.

Dirden plays Pozzo, an aristocratic man who chances on two tramps, Didi and Gogo, played by Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves. When told that they are waiting for a man named Godot, Dirden cheerfully massacres the name, accenting a French pronunciation (Beckett wrote the original in French) with a viscous Southern twang.

“As if this play wasn’t confusing enough,” he said in a recent phone interview.

Here’s a particularly annoying quote:

In 2009, Anthony Page, the British director of a Broadway revival starring John Goodman and Nathan Lane, told The New York Times: “GOD-dough is what Samuel Beckett said. Also, the word has to echo Pozzo. That’s the right pronunciation. Go-DOUGH is an Americanism, which isn’t what the play intended.”

I fart in his general direction; his mother was a hamster and his father smelt of elderberries.

An ABC news story by Scout Wallen and Monty Jacka about a Tasmanian woman selling a 1937 edition of The Hobbit is interesting on a number of counts (there were two impressions of the 1937 first edition, and the second, with color illustrations, is worth a lot less; also, if you suspect you have a rare book, why would you throw out the dust jacket?), but the linguistic hook is the phrase I’ve bolded here:

Renee Woodleigh says she bought the book — which she says is a first edition copy — at the St Vincent de Paul op shop in Huonville, south of Hobart.

I had no idea what an op shop might be, but Wiktionary enlightened me:

(Australia, New Zealand) A shop, usually operated by a charity, to which new or used goods are donated, for sale at a low price.

It’s a contraction of opportunity shop, which makes sense but which I would never have guessed.

Also, I have to register my objection to the fact that among the illustrations of the book in question they include a film still with the caption “The Hobbit was adapted into a series of films by director Peter Jackson. (Warner Bros Pictures).” Gee, thanks for that extremely relevant information.