Adam Smyth’s LRB review of Mr Collier’s Letter Racks: A Tale of Art & Illusion at the Threshold of the Modern Information Age by Dror Wahrman starts with an excursus on the varied fates of printed matter:
Most printed texts lived very briefly, and then were gone for ever. About one in ten thousand 16th-century broadside ballads survives today. Where did printed pages go to die? Some were used for lining pie dishes; for lighting pipes; for wrapping vegetables at Bucklersbury Market, or drugs at the apothecary’s, or (according to Henry Fitzgeffrey) ‘to dry Tobacco in’. ‘Great Iulius Commentaries lies and rots,’ the poet and waterman John Taylor wrote, ‘as good for nothing but stoppe mustard pots.’ Sir William Cornwallis kept ‘pamphlets and lying-stories and two-penny poets’ in his privy, and many texts were ‘pressed into general service’, as Margaret Spufford put it in Small Books and Pleasant Histories (1981), as toilet paper. Books were pulled apart to serve in the binding and endpapers of later books, the pages of an unwanted Bible perhaps padding the spine of an unholy prose romance. A Booke of Common Prayer (1549) in Lambeth Palace Library has endpapers made from a broadside almanac of 1548; the Folger Shakespeare Library copy of The Tunnyng of Elynour Rummyng (1521), John Skelton’s great poem of drunkenness, survives only because it was used as waste paper for the binding of another book. To read an early modern book was to confront the broken, recycled material remains of former texts, and the effect is of a kind of memory or haunting: of a book remembering its origins. Thomas Nashe imagined his printed pages being used to wrap expensive slippers (‘velvet pantofles’), ‘so they be not … mangy at the toes, like an ape about the mouth’. As Leah Price showed recently in How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, we can do many things to books other than read them.
This reminded me of the more pressing need for reuse during the terrible Petrograd winter of 1919; Viktor Shklovsky is writing (in his 1970 book of criticism and reminiscence Тетива [Bowstring]) about his friend and fellow literary theorist Boris Eikhenbaum:
Boris had two rooms. He lived in the small one, so he could be warmer; he would sit in front of the iron stove on the floor on top of a pile of books and read them, tearing pages out of them and pushing the rest into the stove. He was a very educated man with a superb knowledge of Russian poetry and periodicals. In those years he passed his library through fire.
The original Russian:
У Бориса две комнаты. Жил он в маленькой, чтобы было теплее; сидел перед железной печкой на полу на груде книг, читал их, вырывал из них страницы и засовывал остальное в печку. Он был очень образованным, превосходно знавшим русскую поэзию и русскую журналистику человеком. В те годы провел он свою библиотеку сквозь огонь.
Basel still has a tradition of broadside ballads. During their Fasnacht parade, they pass out single sheets of satirical songs written in the local dialect.
I suppose the <х> in his surname is pronounced with a real /x/. My fiancée laughs at me when I have trouble managing /x/ after [i], in (Persian) words like گریختن I will say [goriçtæn] if I don’t pay close attention. Deutsch mag ich, aber die Sprache hat meine Zunge umformiert!
Whose?
Deformiert.
Эйхенбаум
Desinformiert.
Umformiert! I didn’t particularly want to say that people who have trouble with /x/ after front vowels have deformed tongues, and the word I chose, which does exist, means what I did want to say. It’s not really comparable, »umformieren« is a much rarer word, but this reminds me a little of the time I came across an earnest German teenager who assured me that »Greis« was not a word.
Stu Clayton, what’s going on? What have you done with Grumbly Stu? Is this like Bombay becoming Mumbai; change for the sake of it? I liked Grumbly Stu. I suppose next we’ll have to call you Sir Stuart or Prof. Clayton.
I was struck today: what an odd-looking word “thoroughfare” is.
(A notice at the entrance of a car park said “No public thoroughfare”.)
Crown, “Stu Clayton” is just a rebranding of the same reliable product, as you guessed (and yourself practice continually). I want to expand into more serious markets, you see. But my friends are welcome to call me “Grumbly” here, my old nom de fume. It gives them an opportunity to display awareness of historical continuity.
“and yourself practice continually”: look, Grumbly, J ap Crown speaks British English, so it’s “practise”.
British, is it? I was just thinking the same thing and wondering whether it was just me who spelt the verb with as S. I’m glad to know there’s a whole group of us. Same with license.
Does ‘thoroughfare’ look as peculiar to you today as it did yesterday, dearie?
“Stu Clayton”, indeed. The only constant is change. O tempora o mores.
“Spell My Name With An S”, a classic tale.
dearie: In the US the word “thoroughfare” usually means a street or road, rather than passing through. So here the notice, I mean sign, at the entrance to the car park, I mean parking lot, would probably have said “no through traffic”. (Or possibly “not a public thoroughfare”.)
Heh. JC links to this very comment thread, making the point that some names (links) always refer to the same thing.
No, that’s just what happens from an <a href=””> tag when I forget to paste in the right URI. I don’t remember which one I intended, but here’s the Wikipedia article and the story itself (PDF).
Worst spambot attack I’ve ever seen. 😮
From the surnames thread:
Oh.
German Kämpfer “fighter”, Kampf “fight/struggle” (noun), kämpfen “fight/struggle” (verb).
I’ve seen the unshifted Kämpe, apparently somewhere between “fighter” and “champion”, in a fantasy setting.
From this thread:
…Exactly; I’ve never encountered it before. The closest I know is umgeformt. And Greis is purely literary; a functionally illiterate teenager can’t possibly know it.
Durchfahrt! A passage through something, both the act of passing and the way where it happens.
Exactly. No throughfare.
“Thorough” in English has specialized semantically to the sense “through and through”, to the extent that I have to remind myself that it’s originally the same word as “through”. (Knowing a little German helps.)
If the word “throughput” had been coined a few centuries earlier, it might have been “thoroughput”.
And “fare” has come to mean “what you pay to ride in the vehicle” rather than the ride or journey itself, so that we don’t necessarily think of traveling when we see the words “welfare” or “farewell”.
Thanks, I knew the Latin prodigy of the kjempe family, but not that the Kemps belonged there. Or that the German branch was so productive.
*sigh* thoroughput, not thoroughout
(Fix by Hattic magic? Unless your arms are too tired from shoveling spam.)
It might have to do with stress rather than time of coinage.
Oh, I thought you meant ‘throughout’.
Oh, and broadside ballads in the local dialect. Traditional broadside ballads around here were usually written in a literary or biblical register, although often mixed with, er, miselevated colloquialisms. But I’ll rush to admit that I have my knowledge almost entirely from parodies.
Worst spambot attack I’ve ever seen. 😮
Oh, I’ve seen worse. That was only 200 or so; I’ve had to clean out over 600 from a single thread. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
Fix by Hattic magic?
Fixed!
Thorough, which was not only a thorough policy, but a policy of going through with it. Fortunately, it failed, and there was no absolute monarchy in England.
John: Thanks. May I suggest that as an alternative etymology of Tory?
which actually does exist
In some sense, perhaps. When I try to find out online about umformieren, I keep getting redirected to umfirmierien ‘rebrand’. Ah, this commercial age! So what does the former actually mean?
“fare” has come to mean “what you pay to ride in the vehicle”
Similarly, in AmE tuition has come to mean not ‘the act of teaching’ but ‘what you pay for being taught’ (BrE (tuition) fees). Ah, this commercial country!
And just to infect you all with an earworm about fares,, made famous by Mark Twain, exhibiting marvelous examples of entrainment (with actual trains, even):
Conductor, when you receive a fare,
Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
A blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare,
A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare,
A pink trip slip for a three-cent fare,
Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
CHORUS
Punch, brothers! punch with care!
Punch in the presence of the passenjare!
Reading that link told me a lot about buff: the colors of the (U.K.) Whig party were blue and buff, and they were also the colors of the (U.S.) Continental Army. So from one point of view, the American Revolution was simply a faction fight within the Whig party.
So what does [umformieren] actually mean?
It means “reassign roles in a group”, for instance positions to players in a soccer team. Being sport-shy, I don’t know what English word or words might be used here.
Shuffle ? Umformieren has a sport context feel, for me anyway. A cabinet shuffle is a Kabinettsumbildung.
“what you pay to ride in the vehicle”
or of course “the rider who is paying it” to a cabbie
Thanks, Hrumbly.
Trune, I doubt it. Tories and Whigs didn’t show up until the next reign (plus one Lord Protector). Wentworth, the architect of Thorough, was executed in 1641; the Tories were not heard of until 1678. The Irish etymology was certainly believed at the time, as the diarist and Nonconformist minister Oliver Heywood had it:
It’s only Tories with a capital T who aren’t heard of until 1678, the word is older. The Irish etymology is still current. The OED has a much better history of the word than Wikipedia does and it keeps going into the 20c. :
Something that’s a little sad about pasting the OED is that we lose the colours that separate the citations from the definitions, the italics and the bolded dates. Consequently it’s much less easily read. This is something that will be overcome within the next ten years, I suppose, but until then it’s slightly annoying. We really need colours – at least, I do.
A link is worth a thousand words.
Stu, linking the OED is fairly pointless, as most people don’t have access to it. From my viewpoint, pasting OED sections into Language Hat comments is an act of noblesse oblige.
Yes, I agree with John. (Although perhaps “C.C Phrases and combinations” could have been omitted as not adding much to the understanding of the word.)
I hoped my remark might elicit thought about the similar “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Does this expression extol conciseness, does it claim that sight has primacy over speech ? But a picture is useless to a blind person, or an author who can’t draw.
I fully expected the reply that OED links work only for subscribers. The OED passage reproduced above is as close to a picture as you can get with words, short of a fax.
linking the OED is fairly pointless, as most people don’t have access to it
Ta-da, freely available archive capture of Tory in the 1989 edition, as formatted online (pre-2023), with a great deal of helpful whitespace. This was, of course, almost entirely unrevised from 1913, except for sense “4.b During the American Civil War, applied in the Confederate states to a Union sympathizer” added in the 1986 Supplement, along with one earlier example each for “Tory democracy” and “Tory democrat”.
Make your donations right now at archive.org so that this can continue to be linkable; they have a donor match through December 31.
The OED’s full revision (2022) added more details to the Irish etymology, with Welsh cognates (in case anybody doubted that Trond was kidding).
I think I was at least half-serious at the time. As I remember it, the Irish word was well attested in Irish English, but the borrowing into English English and semantic development less so. The Thoroughs might explain the latter.
with Welsh cognates
Cognate with Welsh rhedeg “run”, assuming that the Wiktionary etymology here is right:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/t%C3%B3ir
It is not an etymological connexion which would have spontaneously occurred to me …
Trond: the borrowing into English English and semantic development less so
Did the OED entry answer your questions? The 2022 revision unfortunately dropped the Oliver Heywood quote from 1681 seen above, but antedated it with a ballad from 1678 (visible online thanks to the Huntington Library in California):
David E: Cognate with Welsh rhedeg “run”
OED does give that as a cognate to Irish tóir, although they stop at “the same Celtic base” and don’t follow Wiktionary, Pokorny, and AHD in taking that Celtic base back to PIE.
Wiktionary:
As I said here:
ktschwarz: Did the OED entry answer your questions?
I was going to say yes, but actually no. I’m not sure they can handwave away the oldest attestation just like that. King Charles his Torries in 1634 is right in the middle of the period when “the Thorough Party” ruled for the king against a fiercely Protestant and anti-royal Parliament.
I’ve also just learned that Wentworth was Lord Deputy of Ireland from 1632 until he was called back to England as adviser to King Charles in 1639. In Ireland he imposed what was seen as Thoroughs policy with tough means. A semantic association may actually have happened there, either in Wentworth’s time or shortly after, in the runup to the Civil War. The early attestations under OED’s sense 1 a. are from the 1640’ies and -50’ies and smack of disbanded units of soldiers loyal to the Crown.