languagehat.com

Untapped: The Australian Literary Heritage Project is a great idea:

Most Australian books ever written are now out-of-print and inaccessible to readers. That includes local histories and memoirs, beloved children’s titles – and even winners of our most glittering literary prizes, such as the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

Untapped is a collaboration between authors, libraries and researchers, working together to identify Australia’s lost literary treasures and bring them back to life. It creates a new income source for Australian authors, who currently have few options for getting their out-of-print titles available in libraries. […]

We have worked with Australian authors, literary agents and estates to obtain the rights and digitise 161 culturally important out-of-print novels, histories, memoirs, poetry and more. They are available to borrow as ebooks from public libraries around the country, with our library partners promoting them so everyone has an opportunity to rediscover these texts. And they’re available for sale as ebooks too!

We used sophisticated scanning methods to copy the print book, then applied OCR to convert the text. After that, we used dedicated proof readers to pick up any errors and make sure the scan is of library quality. For that proofreading work, our focus was on hiring arts workers affected by COVID.

I discovered it at this MetaFilter post by mosessis, who included some of the results:

• There was substantial public demand to borrow these titles
• There was substantial public demand to purchase these titles
• There was no evidence that e-lending cannibalised book sales (and some evidence it may actually have increased them)
• The Untapped project generated around $120,000 in additional income for authors in the project’s first 12 months. All participants received ebook royalties from retail sales and library licensing.
• Libraries and publishers could both benefit from library control of e-lending infrastructure

I hope the wider world pays attention to the conclusion that e-lending doesn’t hurt book sales, which is what I would expect: many people who read a book and like it will want their own copy.

I was astonished to read this quote from Robin Williams, talking about Jack Nicholson:

“He once was with me at a benefit and leaned over and said, ‘Even oysters have enemies’. In a very intense voice, I responded with, ‘Increase your dosage’. More fascinated than scared. He says things that even Buddha goes, ‘What did you mean?’”

To an English-speaker, “Even oysters have enemies” sounds like weirdness from the outer limits, but any reader of Russian literature would immediately recognize it as a version of “И устрица имеет врагов!” [Even an oyster has enemies!], No. 86 in Плоды раздумья [Fruits of meditation] by the great (and fictional) Kozma Prutkov. I have no idea how it wound up in the brain of Jack Nicholson, but it gave me a frisson of delight.

(Incidentally, устрица ‘oyster’ is borrowed from Dutch oester, which is from Latin ostrea; our oyster comes from the same Latin word, but via French. And враг ‘enemy’ is borrowed from Old Church Slavonic; the inherited doublet is во́рог, which is archaic or folk-poetic.)

I ran across Letters of state written by Mr. John Milton, to most of the sovereign princes and republicks of Europe, from the year 1649, till the year 1659 and of course was particularly interested in the one to the ruler of Russia (presumably Aleksei Mikhailovich, since it’s dated 1657), which starts off resplendently:

Oliver Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, &c. To the most Serene aud Potent Prince and Lord, Emperor and great Duke of all Russia, sole Lord of Volodomaria, Moscow and Novograge, King of Cazan, Astracan and Syberia, Lord of Vobscow, great Duke of Smolensko, Tuerscoy, and other Places. Lord and great Duke of Novogrod, and the Lower Provinces of Chernigoy, Rezansco and others. Lord of all the Northern Climes; also Lord of Eversco, Cartalinsca, and many other Places.

Most of it was easy to decipher (Volodomaria = Vladimir, Novograge = Novgorod, etc.), but what on earth was “Vobscow”? Comparison with a similar but modernized list of titles gave me the key: it’s Pskov, which used to be Pleskov (Плѣсковъ) and “was historically known in English as Plescow.” I have no idea how Plescow turned up as Vobscow (bad handwriting?), but googling [Vobscow Pskov] gets no hits, so I’m guessing this is not commonly known, and I thought I’d put it out there for those who might be interested.

Or so say D. E. Dijksterhuis, M. W. Self, J. K. Possel, et al., in their “Pronouns reactivate conceptual representations in human hippocampal neurons” (Science 385.6716 [26 Sep 2024]:1478-1484; DOI: 10.1126/science.adr2813). I don’t have access to the full article, but here’s the Editor’s summary:

Languages use pronouns to refer to nouns or concepts that were introduced earlier in a conversation. Do these pronouns activate the same neuronal representations in the brain as the previously introduced words? Using human intracranial recordings, Dijksterhuis et al. found that during reading, single cells in the medial temporal lobes that respond selectively to specific individuals also respond to pronouns that later in sentences refer to previously read nouns. These results indicate how memory and language are linked at the single-cell level. —Peter Stern

The abstract is available at the link. Interesting, if true!

I was reading this Places Journal essay by the architect Jola Idowu about a kind of concrete made with shells called “tabby” when I came to this excursus on the word:

Over the course of about five centuries, knowledge of how to make concrete using oyster lime traveled from North Africa to Spain to Spanish Florida and then to the British colonies, a history that can be traced through the etymology of tabby. The word descends from the Spanish building material tapia, or rammed earth. When tapia was used in North Africa, it shrunk under the hot sun, compelling builders to develop a formula that could withstand drier weather. The North African tabbi added lime from shells and stone fragments to make a stronger, more resistant form of rammed earth, which the Almoravid and Almohad dynasties of the Moorish caliphate used for military construction from the 13th to 16th centuries. Later, the conquistadors who crossed the Atlantic to explore and colonize the West Indies brought tabbi to the Americas.

When Juan Ponce de León arrived in Puerto Rico as its first Spanish governor, he built his home with tabbi, then known in Spanish as tapia real. This is the oldest continuously inhabited residence in the Western hemisphere, and it was built with local stone mixed with shells and lime sourced from Cuba. But shipping was too expensive for large architectural projects; builders needed a local solution. So in 1580 the colonists began making tapia with oyster shells from nearby reefs. Tabique de hostion, or oyster concrete, was used for the old walls of San Juan and other construction projects on the neighboring island of Hispaniola. Soon this architectural knowledge spread to Spanish Florida, and up the coast to Georgia and the Carolinas.

But as far as I can tell, tabby, tapia, and tabique have separate origins. The OED says of the first that the ‘concrete’ sense “may be a different word, though it may also have originated in a fancied resemblance of colour to that of the tabby cat,” which “is generally held to have been so named from the striped or streaked colour of its coat” after the “general term for a silk taffeta, apparently originally striped,” itself from “French tabis, earlier atabis […], Spanish tabi, Portuguese tabi, Italian tabi, medieval Latin attābi […], apparently < Arabic ʿattābiy, name of a quarter of Baghdad in which this fabric was manufactured, named after ʿAttāb, great-grandson of Omeyya.” Now, the OED entry is from 1910, but Wiktionary agrees; it says Spanish tapia ‘wall; wall made of adobe bricks’ is probably of Germanic origin, from Proto-Germanic *tappô ‘tap, plug,’ and tabique is from Arabic تَشْبِيك (tašbīk). Anybody know anything about this tangle?

This is one of those posts that will not be of much general interest, but as sometimes happens I have to vent my irritation and you are all the victims. Marietta Shaginyan is now probably utterly forgotten even in her homeland; back in the day, she was known largely for a series of worshipful books on Lenin and a few cheeky pseudo-adventure novels from the 1920s (back before such things became libri non grati). I happened to have Vol. 2 of her Collected Works, which contains two of the latter: Месс-менд, или Янки в Петрограде (tr. Mess-Mend: Yankees in Petrograd) and Кик [Kik]. I tried the first, which is relatively well known, and liked it to some extent, but once I got the idea I quailed at the thought of reading hundreds more pages of it, so I thought I’d give the later — and much shorter — work a try.

At first I enjoyed it quite a bit. It starts with a list of characters involved with the brand-new Amanausskaya Pravda, the four-page newspaper of the Amanaus sanatorium somewhere in the Caucasus; having been a wall newspaper, it has graduated to its first printed edition, and after a series of letters from the editor to potential contributors, the book reproduces it for us: an editorial celebrating the end of the Civil War and the beginning of socialist reconstruction, a local-news section (The Arrival of Comrade Lvov, A Convent Has Become a Factory, etc.), a brief poem, an essay on the mineral riches of the region, and so on, the final item being an ad for a new movie The Deed Is Done being shown at the Svetozar Cinema. But it turns out there is no such movie, the ad is suspected of being a White plot, and various people connected with the paper are called in for questioning by the GPU. Furthermore, Comrade Lvov has disappeared while on a trip hunting bison. Mystery! We then get documents written by the people arrested: a poem, a novella, a melodrama in verse (called Колдунья и коммунист ‘The witch and the communist,’ abbreviated as Кик, whence the title), and a movie treatment (with digressions on geology), all incomplete. It’s good fun, and the reader is eager to know how it will be resolved.

Alas, the final section consists of a speech by the purportedly missing Lvov, who reveals that the whole thing was a setup, a trap to catch the counterrevolutionary White bandits who had been planning to overthrow Soviet power in the region. Much worse, he then turns to analyzing the literary submissions in political terms, explaining how each was weakened by adherence to prerevolutionary norms and comes alive only when the lessons learned from the genius of Lenin were applied. And then I read the preface she wrote thirty years later, in which she explained that the whole adventure-novel element was just a pretext for the literary lesson she wanted to impart to herself and others (she went on to write Гидроцентраль [Hydroelectric plant], about the construction of a power station in northern Armenia, which has been called “talentless,” and those books on Lenin, starting with Билет по истории [History exam], which was absurdly rendered as “Ticket to History” in a reference work). What a letdown! “It was all a lesson on socialist realism” is even worse than “It was all a dream.”

On the plus side, at least part of it is set in Abkhazia, and it includes a couple of sentences in Abkhaz: Адàгуа iзvн фýнт адаvл адvрhòм (translated as ‘they don’t beat the drum twice for a deaf person’) and Aqynàл мбvлгоз ахфà ахащèiт (‘the clay pot rolled along and covered itself with a lid along the way’). I have no idea if they’re real Abkhaz or if they mean what they’re said to. And I finally looked up the obviously Armenian surname Shaginyan, which turns out to be Shahinyan (Շահինյան) in Armenian, and discovered it’s from Shahin, “a female or male given name which is the Persian term for hawk or falcon,” which I should have figured out for myself (I once had a boss named Shaheen, and boy did we celebrate when she was fired), but I guess I was thrown off by the Russian -g- for -h-.

I was reading a lively piece by Rory Sutherland about how speed shouldn’t always be prioritized when I was stopped in my tracks by the parenthetical in the following passage:

Someone I know who is an expert at Transport for London found out that quite a lot of people, quite a lot of the time, actually enjoy commuting. They enjoy the commute home much more than the commute to work. Men enjoy it a bit more than women. (That’s because men are a bit like Sky Boxes—we’ve got a standby mode. We like a bit of staring. If you look at coarse fishing, 95% male. Why is that? Because coarse fishing is basically staring with equipment.)

I was so unfamiliar with the phrase “coarse fishing” that I thought maybe “coarse” was a typo for “course” (though I had no idea what “course fishing” might be either). But lo and behold: “Coarse fishing (Irish: garbhiascaireacht, Welsh: pysgota bras) is a phrase commonly used in Great Britain and Ireland. It refers to the angling for rough fish, which are fish species considered undesirable as food or game fish.” I presume my UK and Irish readers are familiar with the term; how about the rest of you? Is this one of those Gobsmacked! terms that’s started to percolate out into the wider world, or is it (like Marmite) largely confined to the home islands?

Namwali Serpell (what a great name!) has a NYRB piece (archived) about the perennial issue of whether women’s writing might have a distinctive “style” (as she puts it). She has a lot of interesting things to say, and I approve of her take on it, but I’m just going to quote the first few paragraphs because I like the word she builds them around:

I learned a new word the other day: clocky. It describes someone who doesn’t pass as their (chosen) gender. It originated in the trans community and comes from the idea of “clocking” or recognizing something. Its use can be dysphoric or derogatory, a way to express the disappointment of missing the mark or to throw an insult back at transphobes. But lately, as the gender spectrum expands to include more ambiguous varieties, clocky has become a bit of a compliment. What a great word! I thought. It rolls off the tongue. It’s tongue-in-cheek. It has a little bite. Plus it rhymes with cocky—which makes for a lucky pun whichever way you spin it.

Clockiness has been on my mind because of a tidbit of literary history I also recently learned. In 1857 three stories about Anglican clergymen were published anonymously in Blackwood’s Magazine. The next year they were collected and republished as a book called Scenes of Clerical Life under the then unknown name George Eliot. The publisher, William Blackwood, sent copies to select members of the British literati, including Charles Dickens. Dickens knew of Marian Evans, the assistant editor of the Westminster Review who had scandalized London by living with a married man. But he had no idea that Evans had taken on a male pen name to publish Scenes of Clerical Life. He sent a letter to the writer via Blackwood, with a sly guess:

I should have been strongly disposed, if I had been left to my own devices, to address the said writer as a woman. I have observed what seem to me such womanly touches, in those moving fictions, that the assurance on the title-page is insufficient to satisfy me even now. If they originated with no woman, I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself mentally so like a woman since the world began.

When I read this, I of course immediately wanted to know: How did Dickens clock her? What was the tell? Most readers at the time took the male name on the cover in good faith, so much so that some rube who happened to live near the town on which the setting in Scenes of Clerical Life was modeled started going around taking credit for it.

I am, of course, reminded of Robert Silverberg’s less successful attempt at gender analysis (the subject was James Tiptree, Jr.): “It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing.” (He later said, very graciously, “She fooled me beautifully, along with everyone else, and called into question the entire notion of what is ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ in fiction. I am still wrestling with that.”)

Oh, OK, I can’t resist quoting a little more (she’s discussing Judith Butler):
[Read more…]

Dave Wilton has a Big List entry on the word nimrod; as he says, “In current usage, nimrod is often used as a disparaging term for an inept or foolish person, but its original and basic meaning is as a term for a hunter.” That basic meaning derives (as any fule kno) from the biblical figure Nimrod, described as “a mighty hunter before the Lord”; Dave says “The name is probably a variant of Ninurta, a Mesopotamian god of war and the hunt.” The OED (entry revised 2003) has the following senses (I’ve given the first citation for each):

1. † A tyrannical ruler; a tyrant. Obsolete.
?1548 The boystuouse tyrauntes of Sodoma wyth their great Nemroth Winchester,..wyll sturre abought them.
J. Bale, Image of Bothe Churches (new edition) i. Preface sig. Bᵛ

2. A great or skilful hunter (frequently ironic); any person who likes to hunt. Also figurative.
1623 The Nimrod fierce is Death, His speedie Grayhounds are, Lust, Sicknesse, Enuie, Care.
W. Drummond, Flowres of Sion 20

3. North American slang. Usually with lower-case initial. A stupid or contemptible person; an idiot.
1977 Heard you are a Philly fan. What more can you expect from a nitwit, nimrod, R.O.T.C.
Connector (University of Lowell, Massachusetts) 19 April 12/5

Dave quotes the biblical name from the Old English translation of Genesis: “An þære wæs Nenroth; þe Nemroth wæs mihtig on eorþan.” He then gives a very interesting description of the progression of senses in English, with citations from Chaucer (“ne Nebrot, desirous/ To regne, had nat maad his toures hye”), John Bale (“The boystuouse tyrauntes of Sodoma wyth their great Nemroth Winchester”), and Looney Tunes (specifically, the 1948 animated short What Makes Daffy Duck: “Precisely what I was wondering, my little nimrod”). What interests me is the variety of forms; early texts have Nenroth, Nemroth, Nembrot, Nemeroth, and the like; I can’t help finding the modern Nimrod flavorless by comparison. And I note that Russian had Нимврод, Неврод, and Немврод before settling on Нимрод; in fact, in the same Shaginyan mock-poem I quoted here, we find:

Не царь, не бог, не падишах,
Не древних мифов порожденье,
Марс иль какой-нибудь Немврод, —
Сам комиссар за загражденье
Загнал державный свой народ!

Not king, not god, not padishah,
Not any fruit of ancient myths,
Mars or some Nembrod or other —
The commissar drove his mighty people
Beyond the barrier himself!

Bring back Nembrod, say I; besides being more impressive, it will remove any possibility of confusion with the modern slang term.

Occasional commenter and full-time beerologist Martyn Cornell, aka Zythophile, has a long post that begins:

It’s a claim you will find repeated in dozens – possibly hundreds – of places: that the so-called “Hymn to Ninkasi”, a poem in the Sumerian language to the goddess of beer, at least 3,900 years old, known from three fragmentary clay tablets found in and around the ancient city of Nippur, which stood between the Euphrates and the Tigris, is “effectively a Sumerian recipe for brewing beer”, “the oldest beer recipe in history”, with a description of “the detailed brewing process” that “modern researchers have used to recreate Sumerian beer.” The Hymn to Ninkasi, according to one American publication, “served not only as spiritual homage but also as detailed brewing instructions for the beverage that came to be known as beer.”

Unfortunately, that is all total steaming nonsense.

I can’t do justice to it here, but I’ll quote a few excerpts:
[Read more…]