languagehat.com

Nitsuh Abebe’s latest “On Language” column (archived; see this post) is on the word frictionless, which is not particularly interesting in and of itself; I was skimming along:

“Frictionless” used to be an intensely physical word: It first thrived in the late 1880s, when the engineers of the Second Industrial Revolution were scrambling for new lubricants, bearing designs and low-friction alloys to keep factory machines from grinding themselves to bits.

Today’s use, though, comes from computing, in which “friction” is anything that stands between a user and the completion of a task — whether it’s learning complicated system architecture or having to click a single additional “OK” button to order shoes. Removing those obstacles was, for a while, the tech world’s grand selling point.

…when I got to this:

These complaints [about “the dream of a frictionless existence”], funnily enough, echo the oldest use of “frictionless” cited in the Oxford English Dictionary — from an 1848 satirical poem, which mentions “a brain cool, quite frictionless, quiet, / Whose internal police nips the buds of all riot, — / A brain like a permanent strait-jacket put on / The heart that strives vainly to burst off a button.”

I thought the date must be wrong — that sounded more like 1948 than 1848 (especially “internal police” and “permanent strait-jacket”). But when I investigated, I learned that sure enough, it’s a quote from James Russell Lowell’s “A Fable for Critics,” which is indeed from 1848 (and is indeed the earliest OED cite, along with “1848 in J. Craig, New Universal Dictionary”; the entry is from 1898). Here’s some more context (it’s a very long poem):

Sons fit for a parallel—Thompson and Cowper;
I don’t mean exactly,—there’s something of each,
There’s T.’s love of nature, C.’s penchant to preach;
Just mix up their minds so that C.’s spice of craziness
Shall balance and neutralize T.’s turn for laziness,
And it gives you a brain cool, quite frictionless, quiet,
Whose internal police nips the buds of all riot,—
A brain like a permanent straight-jacket put on
The heart that strives vainly to burst off a button,—
A brain which, without being slow or mechanic,
Does more than a larger less drilled, more volcanic;
He’s a Cowper condensed, with no craziness bitten,
And the advantage that Wordsworth before him had written.

I confess I had no idea Lowell could be so lively; I may have to investigate him further. At any rate, does anyone else feel that the bit originally quoted seems more modern than its date?

Another translation comparison! This one, by David Isaacson, is of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, and it’s a good one — not, for the most part, focused on how the Russian is rendered, but on what makes Chekhov work in English. Some snippets:

I can think of no other drama that has so many interpreters. Big name playwrights (David Mamet! Heidi Schreck! Conor McPherson! Annie Baker!) are eager to try their hand at it. Correct me if I’m wrong, dear reader, but I don’t think that’s generally the case with other playwrights presented in translation. Companies doing Moliere’s Tartuffe are usually content to go with the Richard Wilbur or Ranjit Bolt versions. Since playwright Amy Herzog started adapting Henrik Ibsen a few years ago, directors have coalesced on her versions of An Enemy of the People and A Doll’s House. So my query really should be phrased: With so many published English versions of Uncle Vanya available, why so many freakin’ translations and adaptations?

The American Players Theater’s Nate Burger says

“The reason people think they don’t like Chekhov is because they haven’t experienced Chekhov through someone else’s lens that makes it contemporary or makes it approachable. And so I was, like, I bet I can do that.”

Burger proposes that what draws people to adapt Uncle Vanya is the lack of approachability in previous incarnations. I think it’s the opposite: Playwrights are not overcoming some innate textual difficulty; rather they are reveling in the sensation that Chekhov is our soul brother. In fact, Annie Baker says, “If you just literally translate exactly what [Chekhov] wrote, it sounds super contemporary.” It’s that inherent sense of contemporaneity that makes modern playwrights’ palms start to itch with the need to open their inkpads and put their stamps on the proceedings. […]

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Alex Vadukul writes in the NY Times (archived) about a man who feels like a younger version of me, if I had been a yeshiva bokher:

For a young Jewish scholar and writer named Mendel Uminer, books are the wellspring of enlightenment. So when he scored a studio apartment a block away from Central Park on Manhattan’s Upper East Side a year ago, he brought his books with him — all 10,000 of them. What followed, at least for a little while, was a charmed existence in his 600-square-foot temple of knowledge.

Towering stacks of Judaica lined the walls, heaps of film criticism and opera history filled the prewar bathroom, piles of plays and poems blocked a window, and Uminer slept on a floor mattress engulfed in dog-eared novels. Waking up around noon, he spent his afternoons on his sunlit chaise, devouring the works of Yiddish writers like Chaim Grade and critics like Edmund Wilson, nourishing his mind while the city churned outside.

“I’m always reading,” Uminer, 31, said. “I’m reading to extract knowledge. Every book I own, I need. My library is my manual for life.”

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In my ongoing Kurosawa retrospective, I’ve reached 1954 and Seven Samurai, which I’ve seen more often than any other of his (it’s one of my favorite movies, and of course whenever I read DeWitt’s great novel I have to rewatch it). I’ve been following along with the excellent commentaries (two different tracks, one with five film scholars!) on the Criterion set, and at one point there’s a reference to the “shamisen player.” I’ve run across that form before, but I think of the instrument as a samisen, and I finally got irritated enough to investigate. My memory that it used to be known as samisen turns out to be correct; the OED (entry from 1909) has only that form even in Japanese (“Etymon: Japanese samisen”), and Webster’s Third (1961) uses the headword samisen, adding “also samsien […] or shamisen.” (I was unaware of the form samsien, and Google Books finds only 19th-century uses.) But here in the 21st century, Wikipedia has it under Shamisen, starting the article “The shamisen or samisen (三味線), also known as sangen (三絃) (all meaning ‘three strings’), is a three-stringed traditional Japanese musical instrument derived from the Chinese instrument sanxian,” and AHD has “sham·i·sen (shăm′ĭ-sĕn′) also sam·i·sen (săm′-).” So why the difference?

Wiktionary has an interesting and complex etymology:

The instrument derives from the Okinawan 三線 (sanshin). Originally called 蛇皮線 (jabisen, literally “snakeskin strings”) in Japanese, so named for the way the Okinawan instrument’s soundbox is traditionally covered in snakeskin. The traditional jabisen instrument was imported into the Sakai area of Osaka during the Eiroku era (1558–1570), then later modified by biwa luthiers to have the square-shaped shamisen soundbox of today.

The reading jabisen shifted over time to 蛇味線 (jamisen), replacing the 皮 (bi, “skin, leather”) character with 味 (mi) for phonetic reasons, i.e. as ateji (当て字). Then jamisen changed to shamisen, replacing the 蛇 (ja, “snake”) character with 三 (sha, usually read san, “three”) for semantic reasons. The sha reading for the 三 character is irregular.

The shamisen reading is first cited to a text from 1580.

AHD derives it straightforwardly from san ‘three’ + mi ‘taste, touch’ + sen ‘string’; the references for the Okinawan etymology are in Japanese, so I can’t evaluate them. Thoughts?
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Dave Wilton did a Big List post that starts:

One distinction between the British and North American lexicons is the usage of biscuit and cookie. What North Americans call a cookie, the British call a biscuit. And what Americans call a biscuit has no exact counterpart in British cuisine. American biscuits are savory and resemble a scone in some respects, but a scone is denser and less salty.

Nothing new there (and he goes on to etymology), but Syntinen Laulu left a comment on the companion discussion post that provided many details new to me, and I thought I’d pass it along:

It’s not quite that simple. For one thing, the British term biscuit encompasses savoury biscuits, sometimes called ‘cheese biscuits’ (which means biscuits for cheese, not cheese-flavoured). Many such biscuits are also known as crackers, as in the USA; but not all the types of biscuit eaten with cheese are of a crackery type.

For another thing, for nearly two centuries the English sweet biscuit has been overwhelmingly a shop-bought item. (I say ‘English’ advisedly, because many Scottish housewives continued to bake their own shortbread long after it became available in shops.) In my 1960s urban childhood it was normal to bake cakes both family-size and individual (e.g. scones, fairy cakes) at home, but home-baked biscuits were unusual. Since the 1830s the biscuit-baking industry had been popularising and standardising a wide range of sweet biscuits, all of them of dense dough baked hard so that they maintained a clean-cut symmetrical shape, stayed good for months if not years, and could survive being exported in tins to the far corners of the Empire without being reduced to crumbs. And although some were and are made in simple shapes and left quite plain, many types have elaborate shapes, are decorated, and/or include currants or jam, or are covered with icing (that’s frosting to Leftpondians) or chocolate, or are paired into ‘sandwiches’ with a flavoured filling.

But in the last couple of decades the British food industry has embraced the principle of the American cookie – made of cake-dough, baked long and slow to remain just a bit chewy, and more ‘home-made-looking’ – and marketed them by that name. These have become popular in the UK, and cookies are accepted by British people as a specific subcategory of the genus biscuit. So a British child asked ‘What are your favourite biscuits?’ might well say ‘Choc chip cookies!’ and a British host proffering a plate of only cookie-type biscuits might say either ‘Have a cookie’ or ‘Have a biscuit’. But if it were a plate of British-style biscuits, saying ‘Have a cookie’ would be clearly nonsensical: and if it were a mixture of both British and cookie-type biscuits, the offer ‘have a cookie’ would imply that the Garibaldis, Jammy Dodgers and Petticoat Tails on the plate weren’t meant for you.

NB also that in Scotland the word cookie traditionally meant a small soft slightly sweetened bun, intended to be split and filled with whipped cream (thus occupying much the same tea-time-treat space as the English scone). Whether this usage has survived the introduction of soft-biscuit cookies, I don’t know.

I’ll be interested to see what further knowledge Hatters provide.

An interesting Facebook post from Claire Bowern:

I promise I will stop posting about the Dixon book shortly and go back to #chookbook updates, fieldwork book edits and complaints about email, but I was thinking this morning about what Australianists do and don’t seem to agree on, particularly the linguists. (“we disagree” here means “different people think different things, not “I think one thing and other people think something else”, just in case that’s not clear).

I’m pretty sure almost all of us agree that Pama-Nyungan is a language family, in the same way that Austronesian or Indo-European are language families. We don’t all agree on the composition of the family or its internal structure. We have radically different estimates of how old the family is (4-15kya!). We pretty much all agree that language change works the same way in Australia that it does elsewhere, but I’m pretty sure we don’t agree on how language change works and what processes are most important. Pretty much all of us are puzzled by the relative lack of sound change in Australia, but we don’t agree on what that implies and how to deal with it. We’ve all done fieldwork and understand the complexities of multilingual and multilectal communities and what that means for change, but we disagree about how that might scale up to the Holocene. We agree that all sorts of different data are important for reconstructing history, but we use different material in practice and place different weights on it.

(After the Routledge 2nd edition I said I would never edit another book ever ever again, but now I’m wondering if something that explores these questions from all different angles by people who disagree but can actually talk to each other might be worth doing.)

I’m not sure what “the Dixon book” is, but here’s her previous post about it:
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I watched Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel (see this post) with great pleasure; not only is it well made (and surprisingly avant-garde for the Soviet Union of the Brezhnev era), but it’s in Estonian, which is fun. But not all of it! At one point our hero, Inspector Glebsky, gets an anonymous note in French that warns him of “un terroriste dangereux, connu par le surnom Filine.” The subtitle called him Owl, which puzzled me; when I checked the Russian text of the Strugatsky novel the movie is based on, I found the note read thus:

«Господина инспектора Глебски извещают, что в отеле находится в настоящее время под именем Хинкус опасный гангстер, маньяк и садист, известный в преступных кругах под кличкой Филин. Он вооружен и грозит смертью одному из клиентов отеля. Господина инспектора убедительно просят принять какие-нибудь меры».

In the translation by Josh Billings:

“MISTER INSPECTOR GLEBSKY: PLEASE BE INFORMED THAT A DANGEROUS GANGSTER, SADIST AND MANIAC IS CURRENTLY STAYING AT THE INN UNDER THE NAME HINKUS. IN CRIMINAL CIRCLES, HE GOES BY THE NAME ‘THE FINCH’. HE IS ARMED AND THREATENING DEATH TO ONE OF THE INN’S CLIENTS. MISTER INSPECTOR IS KINDLY REQUESTED TO TAKE SOME SORT OF ACTION.”

So Филин explained Filine, but why Owl? It turns out that филин is the Russian word for Bubo bubo, the Eurasian eagle-owl, a bird with which I was unfamiliar. As for the word филин, Wiktionary sez: “The origin is uncertain. Has been compared to Ukrainian квили́ти (kvylýty, ‘to groan, to moan’).” And it turns out the French equivalent is Hibou grand-duc, which is a splendid name: “Il est possible que les aigrettes proéminentes de cet hibou aient été rapprochées de la couronne ducale.” I have no idea why Billings chose to render it “finch.”

Jonathan Abrams reports for the NY Times (archived) about a worthy attempt at preservation:

While relaxing a couple of years ago, Prof. Joshua Caffery found himself in the mood to unwind with some old-time Cajun music. He asked Amazon’s Alexa to play selections from Dewey Balfa, a celebrated fiddler and singer credited with popularizing the genre. Instead, Alexa frustratingly steered him to the catalog of the modern pop artist, Dua Lipa, Caffery said.

“I love Dua Lipa,” said Caffery, the director of the Center for Louisiana Studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. “Don’t get me wrong. But it seems problematic if you’re interested in a different kind of culture and you want to surround yourself with the music of your region. That, to some degree, is threatening my hold on these things I love.”

Louisiana French, the oral dialect of which Balfa was a cultural guardian, is part of the Bayou’s societal DNA, a link to its history, music and identity. Today, Caffery described the language as struggling and endangered, a notion reinforced by Alexa’s overlooking Balfa.

In response, Caffery assembled a small team at the center to train its own language learning model in automatic speech recognition for Louisiana French, drawing from a trove of historical artifacts and interviews. Over the months, as the learning language model is trained on bits of the language — such as an old-age French nursery rhyme — it brings centuries-old dialect closer into the digital age. […]

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I had no intention of doing a Fourth-themed post, but JWB slyly sent me a link to Sophie Hardach’s BBC piece “The Viking word hidden in the Declaration of American Independence,” calling it a “simple but not actually wrong BBC piece on the varied etymologies of the lexemes that ended up in the phrase ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,’ with clickbait Viking headline.” Here’s a sample:

Let’s start with the brief phrase “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.

“This iconic line is actually a great demonstration of what a mongrel language English is,” says Tom Birkett, a professor of Old English and Old Norse at University College Cork in Ireland.

“Life” is rooted in Old English, a language brought to Britain by Germanic tribes from around AD400-500. “Liberty” and “pursuit” are Latin-rooted, then evolved into French and arrived in Britain with the Norman French conquest in AD1066.

And then there is “happiness”: a word echoing with distant voices telling stories of trolls, battles and seafarers.

“Happiness has an interesting etymology, as it comes from Old Norse happ, meaning ‘fortune’ or ‘good luck’,” says Birkett. “When ’happy’ is first attested in Middle English it means ‘fortunate’, or ‘blessed by good luck’.”

Thanks, JW! And if you’re musically inclined, don’t miss Bill Goldstein’s impassioned paean to Paul Simon’s “American Tune,” which “may actually be Simon’s single greatest work”:
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My excellent wife referred me to Ben Franklin’s 229 Words for Drunkenness, thinking that it would bring me cheer and perhaps LH material, and she was right on both counts. Jack Shepherd writes:

Anyone who’s had a toad and a half for breakfast, taken Hippocrates’ grand elixir, or been too free with Sir Richard knows that a thump over the head with Samson’s jawbone is sometimes more trouble than it’s worth. If none of that made much sense to you, take it up with Benjamin Franklin, who — when he wasn’t busy drafting the Declaration of Independence or flying his kite in a lightning storm — appears to have spent a surprising amount of time collecting amusing expressions about the dangers of drinking to excess.

Despite his contention that “Drunkenness is a very unfortunate Vice,” Franklin was by no means a teetotaler. […] But as much as Franklin enjoyed a decent French wine, he was also committed to the virtue of moderation, and it was in this spirit that he published his “Drinkers Dictionary” (“gather’d wholly from the modern Tavern-Conversation of Tiplers”) in The Pennsylvania Gazette in 1737.

It goes from the A’s (He is Addled, He’s casting up his Accounts, He’s Afflicted, He’s in his Airs) to the W’s (The Malt is above the Water, He’s Wise, He’s Wet, He’s been to the Salt Water, He’s Water-soaken, He’s very Weary, Out of the Way), and one can only wonder why there are no later letters (zounds, say I!). It’s a lot of fun, and I recommend perusing the whole thing. (Ben’s list was mentioned in passing in this 2024 post, but it deserves its own.) Skål!