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My wife asked me about the word plan — was it related to plane? I had a vague idea that it was, that they were both from Latin plānus ‘level, flat,’ but I wasn’t at all sure, so I looked it up, and it turns out to be more complicated and interesting. The OED revised its entry in 2006, and the top sense is “An organized (and usually detailed) proposal according to which something is to be done; a scheme of action; a strategy; a programme, schedule” (first cite 1635 “In marshalling of our armies, and Battels, our moderne plans jump almost with those of the Ancient; yet our Sieges, beleaguring of townes, and instrumentes of war doe far exceede theirs”), while almost as early is “A drawing, sketch, or diagram of any object made by projection on a horizontal plane; esp. one showing the layout of a building or one floor of a building” (1664 “Andrea Palladio, to whom we are oblig’d for a very rare Collection of antique Plans and Profiles of all sorts of Buildings, design’d after a most excellent manner”); the etymology:

Partly < French plan drawing, sketch, or diagram made by projection on a horizontal plane showing the layout of a building, city, area, etc. (1547 in Middle French; 1545 as plant), drawing guiding the establishment of a building, or of a work which is to be realized (1563; 1538 as plant), set of measures adopted in order to accomplish something (1627) (< planter: see plant v.), and partly < French plan plane surface (1553 in Middle French), use as noun of plan, adjective (see plane adj.). Compare Italian pianta (a1529), Spanish planta (1600).

So it’s half plane and half plant. I like messy word histories.

I decided to try one of the few Veltman novels I hadn’t yet read, Райна, королевна Болгарская [Raina, princess of Bulgaria] — it didn’t sound too appealing, and in fact didn’t turn out to be very good, but it was short and eventful and taught me a fair amount of Balkan history, so it was worth it. The odd thing is how un-Veltmanlike it is — I think it’s the only one of his books I wouldn’t have guessed immediately was by him. It’s sort of a prequel to Светославич, вражий питомец [Svetoslavich, the devil’s foster-child] (see this 2013 LH post), which features Svetoslavich’s search for his father’s skull, which had been made into a drinking cup by the Pechenegs; this novel covers the last years of the life of his father Sviatoslav I and ends with his death at the hands of the Pechenegs. But it has none of the bizarreries and divagations of the earlier novel (and indeed everything else by Veltman) — it’s pretty much a straightforward Walter Scott imitation, fictionalizing the events described here and adding the obligatory romantic subplot involving the titular princess (I’m not sure whether Veltman invented her or plucked her out of some obscure chronicle). It appeared in Библиотека для чтения 59 (1843), and wasn’t published separately as a book — it seems to have sunk without trace in Russia, unsurprisingly. The interesting thing is that it became popular two decades later in Bulgaria when it was translated and turned into a play; the Bulgarians, then engaged in a long effort to gain independence from the Ottoman Empire with occasional help from Russia, were thrilled with this tale of their struggle against the Byzantine Empire almost a millennium earlier, also aided by the Russians (well, Rus).

The only interesting feature from a linguistic point of view consists of a few foreign words tossed in as spicy exotica, e.g. кула (Bulgarian кула ‘tower,’ from Ottoman Turkish قله [kulle]) and калугер ‘monk’ (cf. Macedonian калуѓер, from Greek καλόγερος) — on the latter, see this 2006 LH post featuring the rare English word caloyer.

ktschwarz reminds me that the NY Times has rebooted On Language:

Written memorably by William Safire for most of its run, the original column was a mainstay of the magazine for 32 years until 2011. Now that social media, online communities and contemporary political discourse are transforming language profoundly — and these new grammars and vocabularies are flowing into large language models that, slowly but surely, are becoming a dominant force — we think it’s high time to bring the column back. The primary writer will be Nitsuh Abebe. His first column published earlier this week, on the word “lethality.” That follows a string of great columns Nitsuh has written in recent months about the em-dash, the neologism “cope,” the suffix “-maxxing” and the reluctance people have to use periods in texts.

I had actually planned to write about it last week, but that “lethality” essay (archived) annoyed me by being so focused on the news of the day. The new one (archived), on “agentic,” is more to my taste, paying greater attention to word history:

There are various reports and they all seem to agree: The tech world is currently awash in the concept of agency. It is, more specifically, extremely into the word “agentic,” which peppers the language of the tech-associated, the tech-adjacent, the tech-adjacent-adjacent.

That’s “agentic” as in, you know, having agency — possessing the capacity “to influence and control outcomes through assertive individual action,” as the Oxford English Dictionary has it. The word holds a lot of meaning in computing, but Silicon Valley aspirants seem just as eager to apply it to themselves. They talk about being agentic people; sometimes they dress up the idea in a little rhetorical suit and talk about the Highly Agentic Individual. They are describing the kind of person who simply acts, assertively, to shape the world, rather than seeking approval or meekly following the herd. Candidates for tech jobs get asked if they’re agentic (good) or mimetic (yuck). On X, people debate whether the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, is in fact “the most agentic person alive.” One poster laments the way a cold can ruin your workday: “You won’t make any deals, you won’t be an agentic person. You’re milquetoast.” Another just needs an adequately agentic aide to help schedule medical appointments.

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David Oks’s essay on citations is not central to my interests, but I know there are lots of Hatters who do science and will probably have things to say; I myself found it extremely enlightening. I’ll quote the start and let you click through for the rest:

Here are a few headlines from the world of science. […] So scientists are submitting AI-generated papers; reviewers are using AI to assess them; obviously some amount of low-quality AI-generated content will end up getting approved and published. Well-regarded journals have been caught publishing papers with classic ChatGPT-isms like “here is a possible introduction for your topic” or “as of my last knowledge update.” But that’s not all. Many of those AI-generated papers are being cited by articles in other peer-reviewed journals: and many of those articles, unsurprisingly, appear to be AI-generated themselves.

It’s pretty well-known now that science is “drowning in AI slop.” In that regard, it’s not alone: AI slop is steadily infiltrating every school and workplace in the country. But there’s something about all of this that puzzles me.

I get why students, for example, would want to avoid doing homework. But I don’t really understand why scientists would want to avoid doing science. Or, rather, why they’re so eager to use AI to produce a huge number of shoddy papers. No one forced them to become scientists. I imagine that most people who work as scientists chose to do so out of something like love for the subject. So why are scientists using AI to produce and submit so much garbage?

I don’t think that the answer actually has much to do with AI. It has to do, instead, with the incentives that govern scientific institutions. You could boil it down to one word: citations.

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I’ve been saying things like “that’s how I roll” for quite a while now, and it occurred to me to wonder about the history of the phrase. As it happens, there’s a 2013 Stack Exchange post about it; most of the suggested answers are guesswork and contradictory, but there’s one that cites the OED:

The OED says it’s US slang originally in the language of rap and hip-hop. It’s sense VII.36.f. (and sense VII.36.e. is “Let’s roll”), under sense VII:

To move or convey on wheels or rollers, and related senses.

This is their first quotation of the phrase:

1991 ‘Hammer’ & F. Pilate (song title), This is the way we roll.

So I checked the OED, which does indeed have it as sense VII.36.f.:

intransitive. U.S. slang (originally in the language of rap and hip-hop). To act, behave (in a certain way). Frequently in that’s how (also the way) I (we, etc.) roll.

But it’s not clear to me that they’re deriving it directly from the sense “To move or convey on wheels or rollers,” and when I checked Green’s I found 4 (f) “in fig. use, to exist, to conduct one’s life”:
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Tom Johnson’s LRB review (Vol. 48 No. 6 · 2 April 2026; archived) of The Experience of Work in Early Modern England by Jane Whittle, Mark Hailwood, Hannah Robb, and Taylor Aucoin opens with a passage containing a goodly selection of little-known specialized terms:

Adam Smith​ began his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by arguing that the division of labour was the key to the prosperity of advanced economies. It made the production of goods far more efficient, allowing the creation of cheap commodities that could be enjoyed by everyone. ‘The woollen coat,’ he writes, ‘which covers the day labourer, as coarse and rough as it may appear, is the produce of the joint labour of a great multitude of workmen.’ He listed the shepherds, wool sorters, carders, dyers, spinners, weavers, fullers and dressers who ‘must all join their different arts in order to complete even this homely production’. The division of labour wove all these people together in unknowing co-operation, such that ‘the very meanest person in a civilised country’ had at their disposal better stuff than ‘many an African king, the absolute masters of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages’. Civilisation itself consisted in the miracle of specialisation.

Smith was far less interested in what the division of labour looked like in practice. His breezy lists of workmen elide the generations of clever hands and centuries of folk knowledge required to make that coarse woollen coat. To begin with, you needed to know a shearling from a gimmer lamb, or hire someone who did. In 1611 Henry Bankes employed two shepherds, Durington and Blackwell, to value some lambs in Yorkshire; it turned out he was overpaying by sixpence a head. Then you had to set your sheep in a pasture, and send someone, perhaps a young servant like Jacob Jackson of Hurworth in County Durham, to mark their ears so that you knew which were yours (theft was common), and paint them with tar to keep them warm through the winter and spring. In June they would be brought down from the pastures and washed in a river before being sent to the shearing men. If you couldn’t afford sheep of your own, you could go into the fields after the clip and gather the leftover scraps.

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Anatoly Vorobey has a Facebook post that starts with a reference to a video in which Oleg Lekmanov compares a bunch of clips of people reading aloud the first stanza of Pushkin’s “Анчар” (The Upas Tree; there are a number of English translations, e.g. A.Z. Foreman, Michael Allen) to see if they read the last word in the second line as “раскалённой” (raskalyonnoi, the normal reading in modern Russian) or “раскаленной” (raskalennoi, with e as in Church Slavic, to rhyme with the final word of the stanza, “вселенной” [vselennoi] ‘universe’). Anatoly says it seems to him this is a sort of intelligentsia shibboleth, with a snobbish preference for the Church Slavic as “correct” (he quotes a textbook to that effect), whereas he thinks both pronunciations have a right to exist — a conclusion with which I, naturally, concur. One of his commenters brings up English rhymes like rove/love, but this seems to me a different, though parallel, case.

In any case, the Pushkin quote led me to look up the word анчар (apparently first used in this poem), which according to Russian Wiktionary (citing Vasmer) is borrowed from Dutch antjar, itself from Malay ančar. Amazingly (to me), the OED has an entry (from 1885) for antiar ‘The Upas tree of Java, Antiaris toxicaria; also, the poison obtained from it’; there are no citations, but there is an etymology: “< Javanese antjar, antschar.” And upas itself (entry from 1926) is “< Malay ūpas poison, in the combination pōhun (or pūhun) ūpas poison-tree.” All roads lead to Malaya.

Stephen Fried’s fond reminiscence of Jim Quinn (Philadelphia magazine, 10/19/2020) came out over five years ago, but I just discovered it, and since Quinn is one of my language heroes (first touted just a few weeks into the existence of LH, reinforced in 2004, 2007, and 2013) I wanted to share it with y’all. I’ll quote the language-related passages, but he led an interesting life in general, so I recommend the whole thing:

Jim Quinn was one of Philadelphia’s finest, funniest, and smartest writers — of longform journalism, essays about food and language, and poetry for the first four decades of his career, and later of fiction as well. He was also, arguably, the city’s longest-living, longest-haired, and most prolific link to the best things about the 1960s, maintaining throughout his 85 years a sense of wonder and humor, political commitment, righteous indignation, and shrugging indifference to authority. […]

Quinn could write the most gorgeous sentences. But much of the joy of his reportage was his amazing attention to details that told the story better than he could. “He describes everything, yes everything, in most specific terms since euphemism is a word he has never heard,” said the New York Times Book Review in 1972 of his first major book, Word of Mouth: A Completely New Kind of Guide to New York Restaurants. […]

In his late 20s, Quinn was convinced by friends to return to college. In 1963 he enrolled at Temple University, where he got involved in campus politics and anti-war protests. […] He was, at the time, working toward his PhD in English literature — writing a dissertation on the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid, and lots of his own poetry. But editors who were fans of his food writing started reaching out with assignments. […]

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My wife and I are reading Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet (see this post), and at one point a character refers to having “a long cool drink of nimbo.” Naturally I wanted to know what this “nimbo” might be; after some frustration, I realized it was a variant of nimbu: “There may be no better drink for beating the heat than a nimbu soda, a lime-and-soda drink that’s ubiquitous in India.” But what’s nimbu? Well, Hindi नींबू (nīmbū) ‘lemon/lime (fruit or tree)’ (Urdu نیمبو) is from Sanskrit निम्बू (nimbū), which is “Of Austroasiatic origin; compare Mundari लेम्बु (lembu). Compare also Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *limaw (‘lime, citrus’), whence Malay limau (‘citrus’).” And this is where it gets interesting, because the long list of descendants of the Hindi/Urdu word includes Classical Persian لیمو (lēmū, līmū), from which is derived Arabic لَيْمُون (laymūn), borrowed into Old French as lymon, which is the source of English lemon. Furthermore, lime (the fruit) is:

[French, from Spanish lima, from Arabic līma, from Persian līmū, lemon, any of various citrus fruits; akin to Hindi nimbū and Gujarati lību, lime, of Austroasiatic origin; akin to Mundari (Munda language of Jharkhand, India) lembu.]

So lemon and lime are doublets; I probably knew that at some point, but I certainly didn’t know all the details, which are a lot of fun (note that Proto-Malayo-Polynesian *limaw gets turned around in Fijian and Polynesian and becomes moli). And now I want a long cool drink of nimbo.

I’ve long been a fan of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (see this 2011 post), and I like Corey Robin’s take on it:

In that famous first chapter of Mimesis, Erich Auerbach does something that usually drives me insane. Introducing the story of Odysseus’ scar from Homer’s Odyssey, Auerbach writes, “Readers of the Odyssey will remember the well-prepared and touching scene in book 19, when….” Six pages later, when he introduces the story of the Akedah, the binding of Isaac in the Book of Genesis, Auerbach writes, “the story itself begins: everyone knows it….”

When contemporary academics do this kind of thing, make this gesture of knowingness, it drives me crazy, as I said. I want to cry out, no, everyone does not know it, readers will not remember! But in Auerbach’s case, I don’t mind it. Why not?

Because, despite his saying we all know the story, Auerbach always proceeds to narrate the story. He gives you, the reader, the details of the story, its plot, the relevant background. When he then undertakes his analysis, which follows his summary of the plot, we’re all working on the same page. He doesn’t make knowing references, without any support or concreteness. He doesn’t invoke authority to justify his claims. He doesn’t pile up concept upon concept, or context upon context, to get himself out of the work of argument, of demonstrating that what he is saying is indeed true, or at least has a justifiable claim upon our attention and engagement.

So despite his use of the “we,” which a generation of academics has taught us is exclusionary or creates a false idea of readerly consensus and audience, Auerbach actually works, hard, to create that “we.” By setting out his evidence, he invites us to disagree with him, to remove ourselves from that “we” if we have reasons to object to it. Despite our assumptions of the democratic progress we’ve made from the midcentury intellectual/critic to today’s intellectual/critic, the actual style and substance of that midcentury intellectual/critic’s engagement is far more democratic in some ways than that of much of our contemporary world.

I feel that’s exactly right; when I started on the book, I felt intimidated because I’d read hardly any of the works he references, but I found that his account of them gave me enough of a handle that I could immerse myself further if I so desired, and I could easily follow his argument. It wasn’t at all like reading a scholar of these degenerate latter days who constantly drops references to Žižek, Sloterdijk, & Co. for generalized shock and awe. I did not, however, appreciate the commenter on his post who felt compelled to write:

“In that famous first chapter…” Really? I mean, I’ve read a lot of books but I never heard of that one. Pot, kettle, etc.

Smug parading of one’s own ignorance is another blight on our times. Pull down thy vanity!