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My wife and I are watching the tenth season of Shetland (and looking forward to the eleventh, while mourning the recently announced departure of lead actress Alison O’Donnell), and I was delighted to see that one of the characters, a craggy and mysterious poet named Ed Tulloch, runs a pub called The Watergaw. After the show I read her the Hugh MacDiarmid poem of that name (which I’ve loved for over half a century now), and then I thought I’d investigate the word, which turns out to be not only interesting in itself but tangled up in the history of the poem.

The OED entry (revised 2015) says:

1. A secondary or imperfectly-formed rainbow; (more widely) any of various phenomena in the clouds and sky that are believed to be portents of approaching rain. Also in extended use. regional in later use (now chiefly Scottish). Cf. weather-gall n [“An imperfect rainbow, believed to be a presage of storm”].

1573 Like as a rocke that from a loftie mount doth headlonge fall, Enforst with rage of wind, or els with shoures, and water gall.
T. Twyne, translation of Virgil in T. Phaer & T. Twyne, translation of Virgil, Whole .xii. Bookes Æneidos xii. sig. Nnᵛ

1594 And round about her teare-distained eye Blew circles stream’d, like Rain-bows in the skie. These watergalls in her dim Element, Foretell new stormes.
W. Shakespeare, Lucrece sig. L2ᵛ

a1676 As the Water-gall is the Image, Shadow, or weak Representation of the Rain-bow.
M. Hale, The Primitive Origination of Mankind, Considered and Examined According to the Light of Nature (1677) 16

1744 False good news are always produced by true good, like the water gall by the rainbow.
H. Walpole, Letter 29 June in Correspondence (1954) vol. XVIII. 466
[…]

1824 There is also often seen a fainter coloured bow, commonly called a water-gall, above the Rainbow.
O. Gregory, Lessons Astronom. & Philosophy (6th edition) xxvi. 169
[…]

1913 From the treatment by Seneca there quoted it seems that this must refer to the broken rainbow or water-gall.
A. E. Bell, Study Nat. Sci. in 13th Century (M. Lett. thesis, Univ. of Calif.) 63

1925 I saw yon antrin thing A watergaw wi’ its chitterin’ licht.
‘H. MacDiarmid’, Sangschaw 2

1998 Tunes that furled aroon his heid like the mist that wyved aroon Beinn a Bhuird, fan the wattergaw hung i the lift.
S. Blackhall, Bonsai Grower 61

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I greatly enjoyed Michael Ledger-Lomas’s LRB review (23 July 2026; archived) of Converts: From Oscar Wilde to Muriel Spark, Why So Many Became Catholic in the 20th Century by Melanie McDonagh, but I have to give him a whack on the knuckles for the absurd statement at the end of this passage about Frederick Rolfe:

Rolfe drifted to Venice, where he fraternised with gondoliers and male prostitutes before dying destitute in 1913, but not before he had produced another masterpiece, The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole. It obsessively yet exquisitely recounts Nicholas Crabbe’s martyrdom, which is also his own: Crabbe is yet another failed priest whose ‘ruthless immitigable faith’ both sustains him in and perpetuates his isolation and eventual death. ‘Immitigable’ – this and many other weird neologisms capture the perverse autodidacticism of Rolfe and his martyrs. Hadrian’s enemies in Rome had sniped at his ‘hendecasyllabical allocutions’.

Why do people treat their own ignorance as eternal truth? Immitigable, far from being a “weird neologism,” is a perfectly good word of long standing; OED (entry from 1899):

That cannot be mitigated, softened, or appeased; implacable; not to be toned down.

1576 What cause was there..that the malice of my minde should be immitigable?
A. Fleming, translation of Cicero in Panoplie of Epistles 19

a1780 Did she mitigate these immitigable, these iron-hearted Men?
J. Harris, Philological Inquiries (1781) iii. v. 308

1814 He..on his flesh..inflicts Fierce vengeance with immitigable hand.
R. Southey, Roderick xvii. 214

1831 For four or five days and nights the pain was immitigable.
E. J. Trelawny, Adventures of Younger Son vol. III. 138

1887 The principle or the impulse of universal and immitigable charity.
A. C. Swinburne, Studies in Prose & Poetry (1894) 188

Consult a dictionary before spouting off, for heaven’s sake!

The following passage is a good example of how lively the review is:
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Terry Eagleton is usually a good read, and his LRB review (23 July 2026; archived) of Frank Callanan’s James Joyce: A Political Life has some interesting thoughts on Joyce’s relations with politics and modernism; he starts by explaining that Joyce, far from being indifferent to politics, was “a loyal disciple of Charles Stewart Parnell,” and continues:

If it’s easy to mistake this haughty young recusant for a critic of nationalism, it’s largely because, with the Parnellites plunged into division and disarray over the fate of their leader, Joyce was now politically homeless. Parnell’s brand of nationalism had been civic rather than ethnic, political rather than cultural, constitutional rather than revolutionary and inclusive rather than sectarian (he was an Anglo-Irish Protestant). Joyce championed all these views, but found none of them adequately represented by the nationalist currents on offer after Parnell’s death. If Joyce’s politics were hard to decipher, it was partly because he concealed his Parnellism behind something of the politician’s reserved and enigmatic demeanour. There’s a touch of Adrian Leverkühn, the protagonist of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, about the youthful Joyce’s imperious, lip-curling, faintly demonic manner. […]

Joyce despised the clericalism and chauvinism of some of his fellow nationalists, but that doesn’t mean that he had any love for the British. He grew up steeped in the nationalist culture of his country, during the first rumblings of the only political revolution the British Isles witnessed in the modern era. Ireland was Britain’s oldest colonial possession, as well as the first British colony to achieve (partial) independence in the 20th century. Joyce once wrote that ‘it is my revolt against the English conventions, literary and otherwise, that is the main source of my talent,’ suggesting a direct connection between his literary modernism and his anti-colonialist politics. Nobody who grew up in Dorking or Hastings could have written Finnegans Wake, with its insolent disfiguring of the language of the conqueror. It is a minor historical irony that Joyce spent some of his time in exile teaching English for a living.

He was deeply sceptical of cultural nationalism, not least the doughty efforts of the Gaelic League to revive the Irish language, which had been dealt a severe blow by the Great Famine. Most of those who died or were forced to emigrate were the poor, and the poor constituted the majority of Irish speakers. Joyce had an exceptional flair for languages, and may have attended a course in Irish taught by Patrick Pearse, one of the slain heroes of the 1916 insurrection. Like the Parnellites, Joyce regarded nationalism as a modernising project rather than a means of resuscitating the past. He wanted to see Ireland as an enlightened, autonomous European nation-state, not as a land of saintly peasants (a few of them colourfully crazed) speaking what might seem gibberish. Ancient Ireland was in his view as dead as ancient Egypt, though he did not undervalue the achievements of its artists. In fact, his interest in ancient myths and legends was typical of both nationalism and modernism, which tend to be archaic and avant-garde at the same time. To imagine a future beyond modernity may mean dipping back into the pre-modern past. Irish nationalism certainly took an interest in the pre-modern: one 18th-century Irish scholar argued that Irish was the language spoken in the Garden of Eden. Yet nationalism is only about two and a half centuries old, and sees itself for the most part as a modern invention.

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Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti posted a quote from Patrick Kurp to highlight the erroneous Aristotle reference (“Perhaps he meant Poetics instead of Politics”), but I was struck by the word rhupunts. I’m pretty sure I’ve never run into it before; Britannica says:

rhupunt, one of the 24 metres of the Welsh bardic tradition. A rhupunt is a verse composed of three, four, or five four-syllable sections linked by cynghanedd (an intricate system of accentuation, alliteration, and internal rhyme) and rhyme. In a four-section verse, the first three sections are made to rhyme with one another, and the fourth section is made to rhyme with the fourth of the next verse. The whole is written as a single line or is divided into as many lines as it has rhyming sections.

Wiktionary has it, with a simplified definition and the pronunciation /ˈɹiːˌpɪnt/ but no etymology; Merriam-Webster gives the pronunciations rhu·​punt and ˈrēˌpint (the first presumably being a spelling pronunciation) and just says it’s from Welsh; and a Google Books search turns up hits in both English (“The Rhupunt (pronounced roo-poont) consists of interrhyming stanzas of either three, four, or five lines, each containing four syllables”) and Welsh (“Ni cheir ond rhupunt hir drwy’r gân honno”). It’s about as marginal as an English word can get, and I’ll probably forget it almost instantly, but I thought it was interesting (though not mysterious — some people know something about Welsh, some don’t) that there are two competing pronunciations for such an obscure word. Also, I’m mildly curious about the etymology.

Ben Yagoda has a post about the recent rise in frequency of the word alongside:

The American-born University of Sussex linguist Lynne Murphy recently remarked on her blog (Separated by A Common Language): “A few months ago, an American friend of my spouse asked him to ask me: ‘Why is everyone suddenly saying alongside?’”

That put the word on my radar, and within days I was asking the same question as Lynne’s friend. It seemed like I couldn’t avoid “alongside”! And a little research demonstrated that the two of us weren’t imagining things. […]

I hasten to say that “alongside” is an old word. Here’s the first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary: “Nautical. Close to the side of another vessel; side by side with another vessel. Later also: secured to a quay, wharf, etc.” This first citation is from 1704 and in 1798, there’s this from Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”: “The naked Hulk alongside came.” By that time the word had started being used in the non-nautical contexts we see today: first, to mean literally next to, and then more figuratively to indicate “together with” or “compared to.”

To get a sense of the current uses, here are a few examples from the New York Times, all posted today or yesterday, a couple with two in one article […]

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Joel of Far Outliers has another goodie from Culture.pl, European Nationalist Revolts in 1905, quoting an article by Zachary Mazur; this is the bit I thought belonged here:

For the next two years following the events of January 1905, protests and strikes broke out all over the Russian Empire. […] In October, the tsar issued a decree that allowed for limited democratic freedoms of press and assembly and the formation of a parliamentary assembly, called the Duma. […]

Prior to this moment, censorship had been stifling, strictly regulating the languages in which books could be published or theatre performed. Lithuanian, Yiddish and Ukrainian had been banned for decades. While the suppression of the Ukrainian language continued – seen as a threat to the Russian ‘heartland’ in a policy of identity erasure that remains tragically relevant today – Lithuanian, Yiddish and other suppressed languages finally began to gain legal recognition within the empire.

Lithuanians gained the right to publish newspapers in the Latin alphabet as early as the spring of 1904, but the popular press exploded thanks to the Revolution of 1905. The proliferation of daily newspapers, such as the Vilniaus žinios (Vilnius News) signalled the beginning of a mass Lithuanian culture. The first great national assembly of Lithuanians took place in Vilnius, with 200 delegates, between 4 to 5 December 1905. All sections of society – from Belarus, East Prussia (where many Lithuania speakers lived as well) – took part.

They ended by demanding political autonomy for Lithuania, and to have their own provincial parliament with boundaries defined on ethnographic terms. Lithuanian scientific and artistic associations grew at the time, establishing the cultural arms of the Lithuanian national movement. These became vital just a few years later for the establishment of the independent Lithuanian state after World War I.

Yiddish too experienced a renaissance (or naissance) based on new-found freedoms in cities with large Jewish populations, such as Warsaw, Łódź and Vilnius. The tsarist authorities lifted bans on Yiddish printing and theatre in 1905, allowing for the creation of art and literature in a vernacular that practically all Jews used on a daily basis. Finally distinctly Jewish art could move to the public stage and reach audiences that had never experienced such forms of culture. The demand was clearly there, since four new theatres popped up in Warsaw almost immediately after the ban was lifted. In Mokotów, there was Bagatela, Elizeum on Karowa Street, Jardin d’Hiver on Chmielna and Muranower on Bonifraterska, all performing exclusively in Yiddish. Sholem Aleichem’s play Scattered and Dispersed saw its debut at this time (directed by Mark Arnshteyn). Yiddish dailies also appeared, and their content shows the popularity of theatre at the time. Jardin d’Hiver was playing two shows per day, with the exception of Shabbat. In 1908, the dedicated journal Teater Velt (Theatre World) appeared. All this newfound energy for Yiddish culture caused a modernisation of the language and uniformity that did not exist before among the Jews of the Russian Empire. This emergence also allowed for literary theatre to grow. On top of that, American actors with new plays written in New York came over and were the most commercially successful pieces.

Click through to read about other topics, like the Pimps’ Pogrom (“Pimps supported the Tsarist status quo rather than the revolutionaries, as they could turn a profit under the state’s protection”).

It popped into my head to wonder about the origin of the titular phrase: did it ascend to antiquity? Was its origin in the Greco-Roman classics, the Bible, ancient Sumer? Imagine my surprise when I turned to the OED (s.v. ox, entry revised 2005) and found:

1.c. Chiefly U.S. [Apparently in allusion to a response given by Martin Luther (1483–1546) at the Diet of Worms (1521).] In collocation with gored. An interest that is threatened or harmed. Chiefly in whose ox is gored.

1843 If the Democrats, under like circumstances, had made such a declaration, the welkin would have rung and rung again with anathemas against repudiation. But it makes a difference whose ox is gored.
Brooklyn Eagle & Kings County Democrat 7 August 2/2

1885 This is a doctrine which if allowed, will be adopted very much on the principle of whose ‘ox is gored’.
American Naturalist vol. 19 593

1901 It makes a difference whose ox is gored, it seems.
F. Norris, Octopus ii. iv. 442

1973 He was widely known as a dare-devil who carried out his intentions without caring whose ox was gored.
V. C. Ike, Potter’s Wheel (1974) ix. 68

1994 Every teaching institution will have its department of cultural studies, an ox not to be gored.
H. Bloom, Western Canon i. i. 15

(I note, with the usual sorrow and deprecation, that the 1885 American Naturalist citation, which you can see in situ here, has an actual author, and a famous one at that: Edward Drinker Cope.) So not only is it not an ancient and universally recognized phrase, it is “Chiefly U.S.” and only goes back to 1845! Anyone know the alleged Martin Luther source?

I have been made aware that “the small South Pacific country formerly known as Nauru” has officially changed its name to Naoero (NY Times story). That is, of course, its right, but my immediate question is: how do you say the new name? The Times has this infuriating paragraph:

How the new name is pronounced depends in part on one’s accent. British, Australian and American English speakers variously pronounce it nah-OO-roo, now-AIR-o or nah-oh-EH-roh.

Well, isn’t that nice! Maybe some people pronounce it Fanshaw. But my question is, how is it pronounced in Nauruan? Anybody know?

I don’t normally make separate posts for different reviews of the same book, but Colin Burrow’s LRB review (9 July 2026; archived) of Arnoud Visser’s On Pedantry has so little in common with Clare Bucknell’s for the NYRB (LH), and it’s so frabjously expressive in and of itself, that I can’t resist presenting it on its own. It starts:

This is what​ ‘Listen up’ sounds like when translated into pedantese: ‘Why, you brute nebulons, have you had my corpusculum so long among you, and cannot yet tell how to edify an argument? Attend and throw your ears to me, for I am gravidated with child till I have indoctrinated your plumbeous cerebrosities.’ So speaks one of the earliest representations of the pedant in English literature, the schoolmaster Rombus who appears in Philip Sidney’s The Lady of May. This was an entertainment put on for Elizabeth I in 1578, in which courtiers were invited to laugh at schoolteachers and the queen was encouraged to choose between different styles of rustic suitor for the Lady of May.

Sidney’s playlet was eventually published two decades later, in the same year as Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. That made 1598 the year of the pedant. Shakespeare’s play included a walk-on part for the schoolmaster and turbo-pedant Holofernes. He is right down in Sidney’s groove, so get your plumbeous cerebrosities (leaden brains) in gear or you won’t understand a word of what he says about his rival, the braggart Armado:

He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument. I abhor such fanatical phantasimes, such insociable and point-device companions, such rackers of orthography, as to speak ‘dout’ sine ‘b’ when he should say ‘doubt’, ‘det’ when he should pronounce ‘debt’: d, e, b, t, not d, e, t.

Holofernes’s first sentence here means that Armado talks bullshit, or takes a small hank of raw wool and spins it out into a thread so fine that it loses all substance. There was a strong association in Shakespeare’s period between rough woven native woollen cloth and honest speech, or what Berowne in the same play calls ‘russet yeas and honest kersey noes’. Nasty overspun silks, expensive imports and foreigners like Armado (whose very name reminds you that the beastly Spanish are always ready to send another Armada) are all threats to the solid English of douBts and deBts and honest truths.

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I hope at least some of y’all are familiar with the W.C. Handy song “Yellow Dog Blues”; if not, there are links to a couple of performances at the Mississippi Blues Travellers page Where The Southern Cross The Dog – Moorhead, Mississippi, one of those maniacally detailed investigations of historical/cultural backwaters that so appeal to me. Most of it is about the music, but I’ll quote the part that goes into the etymology of “Yellow Dog”:

The Yazoo Delta RR was nicknamed the “Yellow Dog.” The Ruleville Depot National Historic Register designation says this nickname came about because the Yazoo Delta RR’s s locomotives and rolling stock were constantly covered in yellow dust from the surrounding agricultural areas and because of the trains’ habit of regularly jumping jumping the tracks.

W.C Handy gives a different explanation for the origin of the nickname “Yellow Dog” in Chapter 6 of his autobiography.

In W.C. Handy’s version, a “blistering sun beats down upon a gang of black section hands during the late nineties [note: construction of the the Yazoo Delta Railroad began in 1897]. They are working down in Mississippi, laying the railroad tracks for the Yazoo Delta line between Clarksdale and Yazoo City. Their hammers rise and fall rhythmically as they drive the heavy spikes and sing ‘Dis ole hammer killed John Henry, won’t kill me. Dis ole hammer killed John Henry, won’t kill me.’

A locomotive, following the progress of the men, is steaming idly on the track. The letters ‘Y.D.’ are painted boldy on its coal car. A travelling salesman comes up the embankment, mops the sweat from his face, shifts a chaw of tobacco from one bulging red cheek to the other, and says: ‘Hey, boy. What in tarnation does that Y.D. stand for?’

A Negro straightens up, rubs the kink out of his back and begins to scratch his head in obvious puzzlement. ‘H’m,’ he ventures slowly. ‘Yaller Dawg, I reckon.’

The strangers eyes twinkle. He cackles softly and walks on down the track. ‘Yaller Dawg,’ he repeats under his breath. ‘that’s pretty cute, hanged if it ain’t. Yaller Dawg. Gee whiz, that’s a good one.’ The Yazoo Delta R.R. was christened The Yellow Dog.

The story was circulated and the idea spread until one branch of of the Yazoo Delta was known as the North Dog. For reasons equally suggestive, the fast, direct train from Clarksdale to Greenville was known as the Cannon Ball, while its slow-time, round-about companion between those points was called the Peavine. Negroes had nicknamed all those roads.”

I just wish our old fiend thegrowlingwolf were still around; I’m sure he would have had plenty to say.