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Since this seems to be Italian week at LH — I’ve posted about manco and muers — I thought I’d pass along a couple of interesting lexical items I’ve run into lately.

1) Watching Il generale Della Rovere, probably my favorite Rossellini movie (I’m not a big fan in general, and I especially think his later ambition to educate people via television was misguided), I was annoyed when at a crucial moment a bunch of prisoners are upset to hear that “il federale” has been killed, and the subtitle calls him “the party secretary.” I had no idea what that meant (my main association with the English phrase involves the Communist Party, but that seemed unlikely in the context), and my dictionaries were no help: they had federale only as an adjective meaning ‘federal.’ Finally, persistent googling turned up the entry in the Grande Dizionario Italiano: “B s.m. Nel periodo fascista, segretario di una federazione di fasci di combattimento.” So it’s some kind of fascist official, and the subtitle should have made that clear.

2) I came across the word pieve ‘parish’ and discovered it’s descended from Latin plēbem (acc.) ‘plebeian class,’ which makes it a doublet of the borrowed plebe. That kind of thing is my idea of fun.

A reader sent me this story in Italian by Isaia Invernizzi from Il Post, which she calls “an online Italian newspaper that often has surprising little pieces like this,” and provided her own “hasty translation,” which I will share here; it’s an awful situation that reminds me of Janet Malcolm’s “Iphigenia in Forest Hills” (see this 2010 post):

Transcribing an intercepted conversation in dialect between a murder trial defendant and his mother appeared to be a simple enough task that would lead to a rapid verdict. Instead, a court in Udine ran up against an unexpected problem last year: when the court-appointed Foggian dialect interpreter began listening to the conversations, he realized he could understand almost nothing. The defendant and his mother were from San Severo, a town in the province of Foggia in Puglia, so they were speaking the dialect of San Severo, a more local one that differs from Foggian. The interpreter was forced to give up and the court had to look for an expert in Sanseverese, which took quite a while.

Still, when trials involve dialect, delays are the least serious of all possible consequences. There can be worse, including the worst kind of all: taking dialect too lightly can lead at times to tremendous miscarriages of justice.

Dialect is part of a more general problem related to wiretaps, which have been at the heart of many investigations in the last few years and have served as a basis for many convictions. The most significant overlooked risk in the use of wiretapping has to do with the accuracy with which recorded conversations are transcribed, because there are no uniform standards or official guidelines in Italy.

Each person entrusted with the job does it their own way: some will transcribe everything word for word, some just the most interesting exchanges, some will underline certain parts. There isn’t even a specific professional figure. Transcriptions are sometimes handled by the judicial police, sometimes by forensic transcribers who may have had very different kinds of training, sometimes by experts hired by the parties.

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I haven’t seen the book, but just judging from the description at the publisher’s page I thought Multilingualism and History, edited by Aneta Pavlenko, was worth a post:

We often hear that our world ‘is more multilingual than ever before’, but is it true? This book shatters that cliché. It is the first volume to shine light on the millennia-long history of multilingualism as a social, institutional and demographic phenomenon. Its fifteen chapters, written in clear, accessible language by prominent historians, classicists, and sociolinguists, span the period from the third century BC to the present day, and range from ancient Rome and Egypt to medieval London and Jerusalem, from Russian, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires to modern Norway, Ukraine, and Spain. Going against the grain of traditional language histories, these thought-provoking case studies challenge stereotypical beliefs, foreground historic normativity of institutional multilingualism and language mixing, examine the transformation of polyglot societies into monolingual ones, and bring out the cognitive and affective dissonance in present-day orientations to multilingualism, where ‘celebrations of linguistic diversity’ coexist uneasily with creation of ‘language police’.

Some of the chapters of most interest to me: 2 – “Greek Meets Egyptian at the Temple Gate: Bilingual Papyri from Hellenistic and Roman Egypt (Third Century BCE–Fourth Century CE),” 6 – “Multilingualism and the Attitude toward French in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem,” 9 – “Language Ideology and Observation: Nineteenth-Century Scholars in Northwestern Siberia,” and 11 – “Multilingualism and the End of the Ottoman Empire: Language, Script, and the Quest for the ‘Modern’.” If anyone has actual experience with the book, I’ll be glad to hear about it.

An interesting tidbit at Nathan Hopson’s LLog post:

I recently received the following delightful question from Hilary Smith (University of Denver) about the origins of the term for protein in Chinese (dànbáizhì) and Japanese (tanpakushitsu). […] The hanzi/kanji used are identical (蛋白質), though in written Japanese the term is often タンパク質 or たんぱく質 because the 蛋 character is not one of the “regular use” kanji (常用漢字 jōyō kanji) selected by the officially announced by the Japanese education ministry for mastery during compulsory education.

Hilary wrote that she had circumstantial evidence from some extant texts that, like a lot of other technical vocabulary, this word was coined in Japan to translate a European term in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. That language, she suspected, was German. In German, the word is Eiweiß, which breaks down to Ei (egg) weiß (white). This is a perfect match for the Sino-Japanese term’s first two characters; the third means “stuff” or “substance.”

Hilary asked if I could confirm the German origin and comment on the date of coinage in Japanese. […] The standard answer to the origins of 蛋白質 in Japanese is provided by the Nihongo daijiten (“Great Japanese Dictionary” 日本国語大辞典), last edited in 1995. The dictionary cites Shiba Ryōkai’s (司馬凌海 1839-1879) 1862 七新藥 (Shichi shin’yaku, “Seven new medicines”) as the oldest extant use of the term 蛋白質. […]

In digging just a little further I came across an article by Shiba Tetsuo (芝哲夫) that uncovers evidence of the term used a year earlier, in 1861, by Kawakami Kōmin (川本幸民 1810-1871). Kawakami was the translator to Japanese of Julius Adolph Stöckhardt’s (1809-1886) Die Schule der Chemie (“School of Chemistry”), a highly influential text first published in 1846. It went through over twenty editions and was widely translated. Thus far, the German origins hypothesis for 蛋白質 was holding up well, though the date of origin was pushed back far beyond not just the texts Hilary had access to, but even a year past its canonical coinage.

However, Kawakami was not working directly from German. Japan had centuries of skill and knowledge working from Dutch texts (via Rangaku 蘭学, or “Dutch learning”), and Kawakami was a veteran scholar of the Dutch learning. He therefore turned to an existing Dutch expanded translation by Jan Willem Gunning, De scheikunde van het onbewerktuigde en bewerktuigde rijk: bevattelijk voorgesteld en met eenvoudige proeven opgehelderd: derde Nederduitsche uitgave van Stöckhardt’s Schule der chemie (“The chemistry of the organized and unorganized kingdom… 3rd. ed. of Stöckhardt’s Die Schule der Chemie”). Kawakami’s multi-volume translation was published as 化学新書 (Kagaku shinsho, “New book of chemistry”). Therein, he used the term 蛋白質 to translate the Dutch “eiwit,” which is structurally identical to the German Eiweiß.

That Rangaku link was eye-opening; I hadn’t realized that the Japanese, like the Russians, borrowed so much from Dutch (though of course it’s not at all surprising when you think of the history of Western contacts with Japan). And it’s very satisfying to me to see examples of the benefits of dogged research; to quote Robert Caro’s Newsday boss Alan Hathway: “Just remember one thing: Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamn page.”

Margaret Talbot has a New Yorker review (archived) of Susannah Gibson’s “intelligent and engrossing” new book, The Bluestockings: A History of the First Women’s Movement; the origin of the term is explained in this section:

The Bluestockings might be best known today, if they’re known at all, as conveners of salons, as hostesses who created the ideal conditions, often in sumptuous homes, for heady conversation. The frequent guests at the salonnière Elizabeth Montagu’s gatherings included diplomats, painters, politicians, and writers, who batted around matters of philosophy, literature, history, art, foreign affairs, and science. The usual festive staples—card playing, tippling, and sexual shenanigans—were forbidden, replaced by tea and lemonade, and witty, erudite talk. The lexicographer Samuel Johnson might chat with the young novelist Frances Burney, the painter Joshua Reynolds with the self-taught classical scholar Elizabeth Carter, the celebrated actor David Garrick with the botanist Benjamin Stillingfleet. It was Stillingfleet, randomly, who bequeathed the name Bluestockings to the group. When he made a beeline from field work to Montagu’s parlor, he’d often neglect to change his casual, blue worsted stockings for the silken white ones that men usually donned for such occasions. The term caught on, Gibson writes, “to imply a kind of informality, a way of valuing intellectual endeavours above fashion,” but it stuck like a burr specifically to women with intellectual aspirations. In time, like other words used to classify unorthodox females, it would acquire a pejorative cast. Later still, that negative connotation would be turned inside out by second-wave feminists of the nineteen-sixties and seventies who gleefully adopted antiquated taunts like “virago” and “shameless hussy” and “Bluestocking” to name their bookstores and presses and journals. (Until reading Gibson, I had no idea that “Bluestocking” owed its origins to the sartorial carelessness of a male botanist; I’d vaguely imagined that it referred to women far wilder than the real Bluestockings, women who might have lifted their skirts and flashed actual ink-splattered indigo tights, preferably with runs in them.)

Like her, I had no idea the term originally referred to a man, and I imagine many of my readers will also be surprised by the information. The OED (entry revised 2013) says:

In sense A.2 [sense 1 is Bluestocking Parliament, “Now historical. The nominated assembly of 1653 […], the members of which wore puritanically plain clothing”] also originally with allusion to blue stockings as worn by men, specifically cheap blue worsted stockings as opposed to more expensive and formal white silk stockings; in early use apparently particularly associated with the attire of Benjamin Stillingfleet, an attender of social assemblies or salons hosted by Elizabeth Montagu (compare 1757 at sense A.2a). The expression came to be used more generally in allusion to social assemblies or literary salons hosted by Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Vesey, and Frances Boscawen, among others, which were characterized by social informality and intellectual exchange. The emphasis on the encouragement of female intellectuals in this circle led to the association of the term blue stocking (and its derivatives) specifically with the involvement of women in the intellectual world. This was later reinforced further by the increasing identification of stockings as an item of female rather than male attire (compare stocking n.²).

By the way, here’s an interesting tidbit about one of the women so nicknamed:

Elizabeth Carter lived at home much of her life, tending to her widowed father, but she also learned Latin, Greek, Italian, Hebrew, German, and Spanish; when she wanted to learn Arabic and couldn’t find instructional books, she made her own Arabic dictionary.

Hatters who are aware of my fanatical regard for Godard may be surprised to learn that I am also a fan of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, but such is the case, and today I watched For a Few Dollars More with a commentary track by Tim Lucas, who is a master of the form and always opens my eyes to many aspects of a movie I hadn’t known or noticed. However, in this case he made a glaring mistake that I feel it is my duty to publicly correct, so future generations of Leone fans will not be misled. In discussing the Clint Eastwood character, conventionally known as The Man With No Name, Lucas mentions that in one scene he is called Manco, adding that this is the Italian word for ‘monk.’ I grunted in muffled outrage: the word for ‘monk’ is monaco, and manco means ‘left’ (as opposed to ‘right’). What made the error particularly amusing was that Lucas went on to discuss at length the fact that, while Eastwood’s character shoots with his right hand, he does everything else with his left (possibly in an attempt to distinguish him from his character in A Fistful of Dollars, since the producer of that movie had threatened legal action if this one was presented as a sequel). Thus the name, or nickname, was appropriate, and I’m sure Lucas would have enjoyed pointing that out if he’d known.

Incidentally, the Wiktionary etymology for manco is:

From Latin mancus, from Proto-Indo-European *mh₂n-ko- (“maimed in the hand”), from *méh₂-r̥ ~ *mh₂-én- (“hand”).

Anybody know if that is plausible?

The always excellent Ian Frazier (who has been contributing to the New Yorker for half a century now) has an essay about the Bronx (archived) that includes the following paragraph:

As much as any of America’s so-called Founding Fathers, Gouverneur Morris remade his country and sent ripple effects out into the world. He was born in 1752 in the family’s manor house, which stood at the end of a lane leading inland from its dock, at the mouth of the Bronx Kill. The house had been in the family already for three generations. Morris was a close friend of George Washington and wrote the Preamble to the Constitution. It would not begin “We the People of the United States” or say “in order to form a more perfect union” (those phrases echoing forever) if not for him. Morris served as Ambassador to France during its Revolution, proposed the idea for the Erie Canal, and worked for the canal’s creation. Of a rational and orderly mind, he led the committee that created the street grid for New York City. He suggested a decimal-based system of coinage when the new country was developing its monetary system, and he invented the word “cent,” for penny. Dozens of things all over the Bronx are named for Gouverneur Morris or his family. There’s Morris Heights, Morris Avenue, Gouverneur Place, Gouverneur Playground, Gouverneur Morris Square, and Gouverneur Morris Triangle. The Bronx’s Gouverneur Morris Houses are among the biggest New York City Housing Authority projects in the borough. Morris High School (now Morris Academy for Collaborative Studies), which commemorates him, was the Bronx’s first major public secondary school. His name is everywhere, and yet almost nobody knows who he was.

Of course what struck me was the part about his inventing the word “cent” in the ‘penny’ sense. Checking the OED (entry revised 2016), I found sense 3.a.i. “A monetary unit of the United States, introduced in 1792, equivalent to one-hundredth of a dollar; a coin of this value,” with the first citation

1782 One hundred [units] would be the lowest Silver Coin, and might be called a Cent.
R. Morris & G. Morris, Letter 15 January in R. Morris, Papers (1978) vol. IV. 36

“G. Morris” is of course Gouverneur, and R. is Robert Morris (no relation); the OnlEtyDic says “The word cent first had been suggested by Robert Morris in 1782 under his original plan for a U.S. currency,” and I’m wondering if Frazier simply made a mistake or whether authorship of the word is disputed.

Faithful reader Craig sent me the following anecdote of language-learning:

I’ve been taking ASL for a few weeks now and have noticed that learning ASL is unlocking forgotten Japanese vocabulary. I’ve not studied Japanese for over 30 years, but when I go hunting for a sign, I remember the corresponding spoken Japanese words, although not the kanji.

The topic-comment structure of ASL also feels a lot like the SOV structure of Japanese to me though I can’t imagine that that would be the thread to connect the two.

It should be noted that ASL formally has SVO structure, but topic-comment is also prevalent. Of course, I’m not qualified to speak on ASL grammar yet, so I don’t want to give any wrong impressions.

I thought this was fascinating; I wonder if anyone’s studied this kind of thing, and of course will be interested to hear similar stories from others.

I recently ran across a reference to “buck buck” and was mystified; I asked my wife if she knew the term, and she said “Oh yes, it’s a kids’ game.” So I googled the Wikipedia article and my curiosity was satisfied:

Buck buck (also known as Johnny-on-a-Pony, or Johnny-on-the-Pony) is a children’s game with several variants. One version of the game is played when “one player climbs another’s back” and the climber guesses “the number of certain objects out of sight”. Another version of the game is played with “one group of players [climbing] on the backs of a second group in order to build as large a pile as possible or to cause the supporting players to collapse.”

As early as the 16th century, children in Europe and the Near East played Buck, Buck, which had been called “Bucca Bucca quot sunt hic?” Pieter Bruegel’s painting Children’s Games (1560) depicts children playing a variant of the game.

In the United Kingdom, the game is sometimes called High Cockalorum, but has a large number of different names in various local dialects. These include: “Polly on the Mopstick” in Birmingham, “Strong Horses, Weak Donkeys” in Monmouthshire, “Hunch, Cuddy, Hunch” in west Scotland, “Mont-a-Kitty” in Middlesbrough, “Husky Fusky Finger or Thumb” in Nottinghamshire, “High Jimmy Knacker” in east London, “Jump the Knacker 1-2-3” in Watford, “Wall-e-Acker” or “Warny Echo” in north West London, “Stagger Loney” in Cardiff, “Pomperino” in St Ives, Cornwall and “Trust” in Lancashire. The game is sometimes played in the sergeants’ or officers’ messes of the British Armed Forces.

The article continues with further “national names and variants”; I confess I have my doubts as to whether all of them are actually variants of a single game or whether a bunch of vaguely similar games are being lumped together, but perhaps that’s more of a philosophical issue than a practical one. At any rate, I figure I’m probably not the only person unfamiliar with it, so I’m sharing my discovery here. I’ll add that the OED’s cockalorum entry (revised 2019) defines it first as an interjection “Announcing the climax of a conjuring trick or a sudden transformation. Cf. hi cockalorum int. Now rare,” then as a noun meaning 1 “Self-important behaviour; conceitedness, vanity. Now rare” and “Nonsense, silliness; rubbish” (1936 “Was there ever such cockalorum as now attends our public criticism of the B.B.C.?” World Film News August 8/2) and 2 “A person likened to a small or young cockerel or rooster; a pompous or self-important person. Also (esp. in high cockalorum): an important person; a boss or chief.” The etymology is extensive, verging on loquacious:
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Jessica Roy writes for the NY Times (archived) about the increasing public acceptance of a term. The story’s headline is “A Wildly Obscene Term’s Path to Mainstream Usage,” and you know that’s bullshit because if it were wildly obscene the Times wouldn’t touch it, but it does relate to sex, so I guess they feel daring for running with it:

If you suddenly feel like you’re noticing the term “rawdogging” used widely and in surprising contexts — online, in the office, at the bar — you’re not alone.

Over the last few months, the slang term, which has historically been used to refer to sexual intercourse without a condom, has been adopted to describe almost any activity accomplished without the assistance of a buffer. Now, you can rawdog the flu by refusing medication; you can rawdog cooking by not using a recipe; you can even rawdog life, by being sober.

The most obvious example of the term’s spread is the phenomenon of “rawdogging” flights. The trend, which was written about last month by GQ, has been cropping up across social media platforms like TikTok and X, with people — mostly men — enduring long flights without indulging in any entertainment other than staring at the in-flight map. The concept, which was the subject of a viral tweet in 2022, has come as a shock to some commenters who couldn’t imagine why someone would put themselves through something so boring.

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