languagehat.com

OK, it’s not actually linguistics (just another dumb headline), but come on, “Super-salty pizza sends six kids to the hospital in Japan, linguistics blamed” (by Casey Baseel, SoraNews24) is a great story, and it does deal with Japanese:

Pizza, famously, is hard to screw up, so much so that “_____ is like pizza. Even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good,” became shorthand for things in which acceptable quality is very easy to find. Here’s the thing about something that’s hard to screw up, though: When someone does somehow manage to screw it up, it’s probably going to be really, really bad. Case in point, a half-dozen teens in Japan recently sat down for some pizza, then ended up in the hospital from it. […]

The students had used a from-scratch recipe, with the task for some of the students being to make the dough for the pizza crusts. If you’ve never made pizza dough, you might be surprised to learn that salt is a crucial ingredient. […] The recipe the students were following called for three tsumami of salt. Tsumami is the noun form of the word tsumamu, which means to close the fingertips around something. In other words, “three tsumami” would mean “three pinches” of salt.

However, according to a statement from the Kitakyushu Board of Education following an investigation, the students in charge of making the dough weren’t familiar with the term tsumami, at least in this cooking context, and used a lot more. It’s unclear exactly how much salt they put into the dough, but they might have gotten confused by tsumami’s connection to tsumamigui, a combination of tsumami and an alternate pronunciation of kui/“eating.” Tsumamigui means to “nibble” on something, but by extension it’s also often used when talking about snacking on finger foods, where the image of using just the fingertips can sometimes get a little less ironclad.

With that in mind, it’s likely that the students in charge of making the dough took the recipe’s “three tsumami of salt” to mean not three pinches, but three handfuls, and so the dough contained an amount of salt several magnitudes larger than it was supposed to. Regardless of the exact nature of the misinterpretation, the six students who were hospitalized after eating the pizza were found by doctors to be suffering from symptoms caused by excessive sodium intake.

Thanks, Scopulus!

John Gallagher, the author of Learning Languages in Early Modern England, has a very informative LRB review (archived) of two books on the transmission of information in Early Modern Europe, Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Rachel Midura and The Great Exchange: Making the News in Early Modern Europe by Joad Raymond Wren. Anyone interested in the topic should read the whole thing; I’ll excerpt a few bits, starting with the onomastic tidbit that inspired my post title:

The early modern postal system had its origins in medieval northern Italy, on the plains south of the Alps where couriers beetled between Milan and Venice, Verona and Mantua, and where guides could be hired to accompany the intrepid traveller or jaded merchant through Alpine passes. Political intrigue and commercial exigency fed the need for a reliable service. A letter might be marked with the words cito cito cito – ‘quickly quickly quickly’ – to spur on its carrier or adorned with a sketched hangman’s noose as a warning to anyone who threatened to delay or disrupt its progress. The speed with which mail came to traverse the region, and beyond, was due in large part to the work of the Tassis family, which began operating a company of couriers in the Italian city states around 1290. Later, as success brought ennoblement and they sought to distance themselves from their humble beginnings, the Tassis would be known as the House of Thurn und Taxis (which operated the Thurn-and-Taxis Post), but their roots were in the Valle Brembana, below the Alps and not far from the roads that linked Milan to Venice.

Readers of The Crying of Lot 49 are, of course, familiar with the Thurn-and-Taxis monopoly and the the post horn symbol that signifies it (we await silent Tristero’s empire); I was struck by the fact that Taxis was apparently a Latinization of the surname Tassis, but the Wikipedia article says the family name was Tasso and provides this dubious information:

When the Brussels line was raised to the hereditary status of counts in 1624, they needed illustrious lineage to legitimize their intended further ascension to the high nobility. Alexandrine von Taxis commissioned genealogists to “clarify” their origin, who until then had only been considered a family descending from medieval knights who had become merchants. They now claimed, albeit without documentary evidence, that they descended from the Italian noble family Della Torre, or Torriani, who had ruled in Milan and Lombardy until 1311. She then applied to the emperor for a name change. With the Germanization, the coat of arms symbol of the Milanese family, the tower (Torre), became Thurn (an older German spelling, nowadays Turm) and was placed in front of the actual family name Tasso, translated with Taxis (an older German spelling for Dachs = Badger). The tower of the Torriani was added to the badger as a coat of arms. They formally adopted the German form of their name in 1650, including the comital Innsbruck line, which also exists to this day.

How can Thurn be “an older German spelling” of Turm? And, even more pressingly, how can Taxis be “an older German spelling” of Dachs? Is this seventeenth-century nonsense or modern nonsense? At any rate, here’s a passage about the “postal wars”:
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Out of the blue I remembered a phrase my mother was fond of — she’d often say things like “He was holding it right in his hot little hands” — and it occurred to me that it must be an idiom she’d picked up somewhere, but where? What was its background? It wasn’t in Partridge, so I turned to the internet and turned up this bulletin board page, where we find:

It seems to turn up first in Victorian fiction. The earliest use of it that I’ve come across is in a short story called “Self-Control”, by Mrs Mary Jane Phillips, published in the December 1857 number of The Ladies’ Repository: ‘”Poor little fellow!” I murmured, and stooped to kiss his fevered cheek, but just then he threw his hot little hands upward, exclaiming, “O don’t, mamma, Feddy didn’t mean to!”‘. Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1863 very popular novel “Sylvia’s Lovers” has this: ‘Sylvia sate down on the edge of the trough, and dipped her hot little hand in the water’.

So it was first used seriously (and mawkishly) about actual feverish children, and of course was repurposed as a humorous reference to such uses. My mother, growing up in the 1920s, probably was unaware of the original Victorian examples, but her parents presumably knew them. I wonder if anyone still uses the phrase?

Mariona Miret interviews a remarkable man:

Fredo Valla has dedicated his life to defending the Occitan language and spreading its history. This year, 2024, he received the Robèrt Lafont Award from the Generalitat de Catalunya, a prize given to people or organizations that have distinguished themselves in the defense, projection and promotion of the Occitan language in any point of its linguistic territory. […] I had the pleasure of interviewing him at his home in Verzòl (Italy), with the late afternoon rays of light bathing the kitchen, while he acknowledged the many contradictions he has faced, with all its personal and collective implications, in order to tell the stories that no one else tells. But be mindful: even though our interview has a strongly Occitan focus, Fredo’s life has taken many turns and has tasted many flavours. Behind the Occitan man hides an extremely multifaceted person. Fredo Valla has been a blacksmith, a geologist, an interior architecture designer, a cultural journalist for the most important Italian newspapers, and a writer of popular books for children. […]

Originally from Sant Pèire (Val Varacha, Italy) and now settled in Verzòl (Piedmont), Fredo Valla has developed throughout his cinema career a line of work marked by the commitment to culture and to personal roots, often in relation to the mountains that have seen him grow, the Occitan Valleys of Italy, or Valadas Occitanas (original Occitan term). Since the 90s, Valla has been a film screenwriter and documentary director, with a detailed approach which strives to be faithful to historical and cultural reality. […] In his latest major work, Bogre (2020), Valla and his team embark on a road trip through Bulgaria, Occitania, Italy and Bosnia to reconstruct the relationship between the Bogomils and the Cathars, the two great heresies that spread across Europe during the Middle Ages.

You can find Fredo Valla’s entire filmography and extensive biography on the website fredovalla.it. The film Bogre is available for streaming and subtitled in English and many other languages at chambradoc.vhx.tv/products.

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Paul Lukas’s H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright Typographic Mystery will be of interest to anyone with even a casual interest in typefaces; it’s well-written, suspenseful, and amusing. I got to it via chavenet’s MeFi post, which attracted plenty of good comments, including one linking to a handy comparison showing the (very few) differences between Arial and Helvetica. And the Lukas post introduced me to a word I didn’t know (or, he added cautiously, had forgotten): gunite, “A form of shotcrete in which a dry cementitious mixture is blown through a hose to the nozzle, with water injected only at the point of application.” Both Wiktionary and the OED have the obvious etymology (gun +‎ -ite), but only the former adds the crucial information “originally a trademark from 1909.” The OED (entry revised 2024) defines it more wordily and more informatively:

A form of sprayed concrete in which a dry mixture of cement and sand is forced at high pressure through a hose, water being added as it passes through a nozzle at the end of the hose, allowing the resulting concrete to be applied at high velocity to surfaces for which poured concrete cannot easily be used. Frequently as a modifier, designating equipment used in the application of gunite, or something made or constructed using gunite, as in gunite hose, gunite pool, etc. Cf. shotcrete n.

The first citation:

1912 Sealing rock with gunite to stop disintegration at Panama.
Scientific American 27 January 44/2 (caption)

I can’t say I particularly like it, but it’s a short, memorable word, clearly fit for purpose.

Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org has a Big List entry on a word that was unfamiliar to me; it begins:

Literally, laneway (lane + way) is a redundant term, and one that is unfamiliar to most Americans. It is found in Canada, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the U.K. Originally simply meaning a road, the word in Canadian usage has narrowed to mean an urban back alley.

Today, laneway is chiefly found in Canada, but older instances of the term are found chiefly in Ireland. The oldest example I’ve been able to find, however, is in England’s Lancaster Gazette of 11 May 1822 in a notice of a property sale that describes the bounds of the property: […]

We see the distinctly Canadian sense of an urban back alley in the early twentieth century. From the Toronto Daily Star of 5 June 1911:

The light necessary to the tenants of the offices on the east side of the Traders Bank building is supplied from windows looking out over a narrow laneway and across the roof of the Nordheimer building.

And there is this from the 2 November 1923 issue of the same paper that makes the distinction between a laneway and a street clear:

Juryman: “Do you know if this is a laneway or a street?”

Mr Murphy: “It is a laneway, and has not been opened as a street. Application has been made.”

In the latter half of the twentieth century we get the Canadianism of laneway house or laneway dwelling, referring to a small house built on a laneway behind an existing house. The term is especially prevalent in Toronto and Vancouver.

There’s a fair amount of additional material on Canadian developments; as always in cases such as this, I’m struck by my complete ignorance of a term in common use across the border. Are you familiar with it?

Xerîb sent me a wonderful word, saying accurately that “It has Hattic interest in two ways.” The OED (entry revised 2002) says s.v. moloker n.:

slang. Now rare. Perhaps Obsolete.
A cheap hat, spec. a renovated silk hat.

1890 Molocher, a cheap hat.
A. Barrère & C. G. Leland, Dictionary of Slang vol. II. 60/1

1893 A good Molocker (Molocker, it appears, is the trade term for renovated old chapeaux).
Westminster Gazette 18 July 3/3
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1906 The man who takes your [old silk] hat away from your door sells it to a wholesale dealer in old hats, who promptly converts it into a ‘myloker’, or a hat for the second-hand market.
Tit-Bits 21 April 120/1

There’s also a verb, ‘To renovate (a silk hat),’ qualified as Obsolete. rare, with a single citation:

1863 ‘Tis like an old hat that has been ‘molokered’, or ironed and greased into a simulacrum of its pristine freshness.
G. A. Sala, Breakfast in Bed v. 105

The etymology is “< Yiddish melokhe handicraft, craft, trade < Hebrew mĕlā’ḵāh work, occupation.” Xerîb kindly provided some additional links, including the Jewish English Lexicon entry for melacha ‘Work or actions forbidden on Shabbat or Yom Tov; often refers to creative work or the use of electronics; Work in general,’ with a set of Example Sentences (“I couldn’t start fixing the chair, because that would be melacha”), the Green’s Dictionary of Slang entry, and the Internet Archive copy of Sala’s Breakfast in Bed highlighting the last citation, whose full context is worth quoting here:
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Granta magazine has an online series, Mark Up, for which they “invited writers to tell us their thoughts on punctuation and grammar”; so far, though, the only one that seems to fall under “grammar” is a cranky rant about the verb “to gift” by Christian Lorentzen, who sounds like a nonagenarian even though he looks considerably younger, so I’m going to focus on the others, which are far more interesting: Harriet Armstrong on what we really mean when we punctuate our text messages with ‘lol’, Madeline Cash on her mother’s use of ellipses, Will Harris on Alice Notley’s ‘wrong’ quotation marks, Maggie Millner on pauses, silences and choosing where to end the line, Grace Byron on the question mark, Rebecca Perry on parentheses, Akshi Singh on X (to indicate a kiss), and Adam Mars-Jones on lesser-known punctuations marks (¶, ç, ⁁). I suppose it’s worth saying that these essays are not the work of linguists and doubtless contain statements that will not pass muster to the eagle eye of a specialist, but I like this sort of thing. I particularly enjoyed the Will Harris piece, which begins:

The first thing you notice when you open Alice Notley’s epic poem The Descent of Alette is the quotation marks: there are lots of them and they’re in all the wrong places. This is how it starts:

‘One day, I awoke’ ‘& found myself on’ ‘a subway, endlessly’

‘I didn’t know’ ‘how I’d arrived there or’ ‘who I was’ ‘exactly’

‘But I knew the train’ ‘knew riding it’ ‘knew the look of’

‘those about me’

It’s clear that quotation marks are not being used here in ordinary ways – to indicate either direct speech or quotation from another text. Perhaps they’re performing another of their main roles: to point out a received idea, suggesting the author’s knowledge (and disavowal) of a choice of words – this is a ‘classic’ usage. Reading Alette, you sense Notley weighing up each phrase in this way, inspecting every word through the wry spectacles of quotation.

I love a good technical discussion of anything connected with language, so I enjoyed Timothy Linward’s Wargamer post Meet the mom and pop duo bringing Japan’s D&D killer, Sword World, to the West (I got the link from Nelson Goering’s Facebook post):

Though little known outside its native Japan, Sword World has had a colossal influence on gaming history and fantasy media. In the home market, it surpassed Dungeons and Dragons so completely that it all but erased D&D from Japanese pop culture, and its setting ‘Raxia’ laid the foundations for the Japanese take on Western fantasy you’ll find in modern manga, anime, and videogames. Yet the team producing the first English translation of this cultural behemoth is an unassuming couple from Kansas, Ai Namima-Davison and her husband Shawn – here’s their story. […]

Some history is necessary here. “One of the things that makes Sword World significant in terms of its role in RPGs in Japan, is that it actually started as a ‘replay’ of a D&D campaign”, Shawn explains. In 1986, Yasuda was approached by the publishers of Comptiq magazine to write a series of articles about the fancy new hobby of TTRPGs, and specifically D&D. He chose to frame his articles around ‘replays’ – written scripts not dissimilar to modern actual play shows, only in text format – which illustrated a game his friend Ryu Mizuno was running for his gaming group, ‘Syntax Error’.

The articles were incredibly popular, so much so that Mizuno rewrote the adventure from the replays into a series of fantasy novels, called ‘Record of Lodoss War’. Up to this point Western heroic fantasy hadn’t really landed in Japan, thanks in no small part to The Lord of the Rings having a very rough Japanese translation. While most Americans won’t know Record of Lodoss War at all, and those who do will most likely know it from the anime adaptation, it was more than just successful in Japan- it was ground zero for the Western-inspired fantasy.

Ai gives an example of the influence Record of Lodoss War held on her imagination. “When I was 21 years old, and traveling by myself to Turkey [through Greece] – I forget the name of the town – as I was walking around, somebody was calling the boat to Lodoss Island”. She recalls her sheer surprise: “It’s like, what? I can go there!?” In fact it was ‘Rhodes’ island, but as Ai says, “The sound is the same in Japanese”. A boat trip to Rhodes followed. […]

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An interesting NY Times piece by Sarah Chatta (archived):

Millions of banned books were smuggled into the Soviet Union in the 20th century — often in small batches, hidden in deliberately mislabeled containers, packed in food tins or tampon boxes and, in at least one case, tucked into a child’s diaper. […] Published in Russian and other languages and known as “tamizdat,” the books were part of an audacious American venture, part literature, part propaganda and part spycraft, to destabilize the authoritarian Soviet regime from within.

Over the past several years, Hunter College in Manhattan has become home to a library of these remarkable books, thousands of which were once banned in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and hundreds more that are censored in Russia today. The library is run by the nonprofit Tamizdat Project, which now possesses one of the largest special collections of contraband Russian literature in the world. The library is open to visitors upon request, and this month White Rabbit Books on the Upper West Side will open a new section of its store devoted to selling old and new contraband Russian literature curated by the project.

The Tamizdat Project is the brainchild of Yakov Klots, a soft-spoken, unassuming literary scholar who teaches at Hunter. He chose the name from a Russian word meaning “published abroad,” which, along with samizdat (“to self-publish”), was one of the two main methods of evading Soviet book censorship. The Iron Curtain, he noted, “wasn’t so iron after all,” and the books seeped through. Mr. Klots has assembled the library bit by bit, recruiting his students to build the metal IKEA bookshelves and soliciting book donations from friends and strangers, including the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, John Beyrle. […]

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