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I just learned an interesting bit of word history via Merriam-Webster’s delightfully discursive entry for caprice:

Etymology

borrowed from French, going back to Middle French, borrowed from Italian capriccio “whim, fancy,” earlier and medieval Tuscan caporiccio “bristling of the hair with fear, shiver of horror, shudder,” probably from capo “head” (going back to Vulgar Latin *capum, re-formation of Latin caput “head”) + riccio “hedgehog,” going back to Latin ērīcius — more at head entry 1, urchin

Note: Italian capriccio has been a word of disputed origin, the principle issue being the peculiar semantic shift from “shiver of horror”—a meaning easily explicable from the compound’s bases “head” and “hedgehog”—to “whim, caprice,” and hence to various further senses. On these grounds M. Cortelazzo and P. Zolli (Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana) consider the entire etymology uncertain, and speculate that two etyma of independent origin have somehow converged phonetically. Cortelazzo and Zolli state that the Sienese poet Cecco Angiolieri (died ca. 1312) used caporiccio in the sense “desire, wish” (“desiderio, voglia”), but in the sole occurrence of the word in the sonnets attributed to him, the meaning is actually far from clear. With this use set aside, the sense “whim, fancy” is not attested before the sixteenth century according to the Lessico etimologico italiano (vol. 9, column 1055), when the word was borrowed by French. The earlier meaning “shiver of horror,” first attested as a translation of Latin horror by the Florentine author Bono Giamboni (died ca. 1292), is apparently rare in Italian after the eighteenth century, but derivatives such as raccapricciarsi “to be horrified,” raccapriccio “horror, disgust,” are still current. The sense “whim, fancy” has suggested a connection with capra “goat,” an animal stereotypically known for its sudden leaps (compare capriole). The lexicographer Francesco Alunno, in Ricchezze della lingua volgare sopra il Boccaccio (1543), notes both meanings of the word without attempting to reconcile them: “And a sudden and unreasoning inclination is called capriccio, such as seems to come in the manner of goats, which all leap if one leaps. Likewise those shudders, shivers of cold that appear at the beginning of a still doubtful fever are called capricci.” (“Et Capriccio si chiama un’ appetito subito et senza rasone, tale, qual pare che venga alle Capre; che se una salta tutte l’altre saltano. Item Capricci si chiamano quei ribrezzi, griccioli del gielo, che vengono nel principio della febre anchora incerta.”) Whatever its etymology, caporiccio/capriccio is likely at least as old as the thirteenth century, given its rich attestation in dialects throughout the Italian peninsula, as documented in Lessico etimologico italiano.

I love all the detail, but I note with extreme disapproval the use of “principle” in place of the correct “principal.” Where have all the copyeditors gone? (The OED’s 1888 entry adds no useful information in the etymology but does note “About 1700 ˈcaprice was a usual accentuation; Pope rhymed the word with vice.”)

I recently saw the Sergei Loznitsa movie Two Prosecutors and was impressed enough that I decided to read the novella by Georgy Demidov that it was based on. I’m glad I did so, and I’m glad I saw the movie first, because the movie is better and the comparison is instructive.

The plot is simply told: in the dread year 1937, an idealistic young regional prosecutor named Kornev receives a short message, written in blood, from a political prisoner held in the local prison requesting a visit. He manages not only to gain entry into the prison but to talk the astonished head warden (how did this kid even find out about it?) into letting him see the prisoner, who turns out to be an old professor of his named Stepnyak, who (after ascertaining that Kornev’s parents are dead and he is unmarried) shows him terrible wounds resulting from brutal interrogations demanding confession to crimes he hasn’t committed, tells him there is clearly a regional band of counterrevolutionaries who have taken over the local NKVD and are discrediting the Party, and says that if he’s willing to risk his own career and perhaps life he should bring the situation to the attention of the central authorities. Kornev realizes there is no time to waste — the warden may be alerting his fellow conspirators even as they speak, and an arrest warrant may soon await him — and as soon as he leaves the prison, without even returning to his office, takes a train to Moscow to tell his story to Vyshinsky, the highest prosecutor in the USSR, who will surely do the right thing and arrest the wicked perpetrators. As you will have guessed, this does not go well.

The story was written in the late 1960s, though not published until 2009 (well after the author’s death), and was part of a wave of writing inspired by the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich revealing the various horrors of Stalinist repression. It’s well done for what it is, giving a very convincing picture of how the system worked down to the smallest details of the ways prisons coped with the sudden waves of arrestees sent their way (how are we going to get new barracks built in time?) and how the guards behaved, but it spends a whole lot of time giving detailed histories of both Kornev and Vyshinsky (the titular prosecutors), and after the inevitable arrest of the former describes what happened to him afterwards, and frankly it drags if (as is true of everyone today) you are already aware of what happened to those who bucked Stalin’s system.

The movie dispenses with all that. After a brief prologue in which a haggard prisoner, assigned to light a stove with a large number of letters written by prisoners asking for their cases to be reconsidered, stashes one away to smuggle out (his background too is described in the novel), it shows Kornev arriving at the prison, making his way past the various obstacles, and talking with Stepnyak (their conversation is shown at length). When he takes the train to Moscow, he is kept from sleeping by a one-legged WWI veteran (played by the same actor who portrayed Stepnyak, though I didn’t realize it until I saw the cast list) telling a long shaggy-dog story about how he had visited Lenin in Smolny in 1918 and received a promise of alms that he never actually got, and was now determined to see Stalin to get his long-delayed recompense. This is not from the book, it’s a brilliant repurposing of Gogol’s story (from Dead Souls) of Captain Kopeikin, who lost an arm and a leg in the campaign against Napoleon — I laughed out loud when I recognized it (which very few viewers seem to have done, judging by the reviews). When he finally sees Vyshinsky, the great man appears sympathetic but tells him he needs more evidence and gives him a document authorizing him to conduct investigations. On the train back he finds himself in a compartment with a couple of chatty engineers who insist he drink with them and when they get to Bryansk (in the novel the city is not named) offer to drive him home, since it’s too early for a cab. When he notices they’re not going the right way, they reveal that they’re NKVD officers, tell him he’s under arrest, and pull up in front of the same prison gates we saw at the beginning. The end.

I was immensely glad Loznitsa (who wrote the screenplay) had had the gumption to jettison the background material and concentrate on the basic story, which is told with all the power the cinema makes available. It left me shaken in various ways, and I recommend it to anyone who’s intrigued by the description. And I hope that more moviemakers will show that kind of ruthlessness when adapting literary material; a movie is a very different animal from a book.

I’ve complained about bad reviews more than once, so it’s only fair that I give credit to a good one — namely, Meghan O’Gieblyn’s NYRB review (March 21, 2024; archived) of The Rigor of Angels by William Egginton. The book itself sounds like something I might want to read:

William Egginton, a literary scholar at Johns Hopkins, calls this tendency “metaphysical overreach.” His new book, The Rigor of Angels: Borges, Heisenberg, Kant, and the Ultimate Nature of Reality, is a joint biography of three figures who called attention, much as Dostoevsky did, to the problems and paradoxes that emerge when we try to extend our ordinary way of seeing the world beyond the human scale. These contradictions—or what Kant called antinomies—arise when we try to eject ourselves beyond space and time, imagining earthly life from an eternal perspective. (Egginton calls this illusory vantage “the god of very large things.”) They also arise when we zero in too closely on things at a minute scale. (Egginton calls this, borrowing a phrase from Arundhati Roy, “the god of very small things.”)

Whether large or small, the point of view is presumed to be objective, unmoored, and impartial: hence the false divinity. This is not a new problem, but Egginton argues that it slyly persists in many thought experiments and theories, including the multiverse hypothesis, interpretations of quantum mechanics, and debates about free will. Borges, Kant, and Heisenberg each cautioned against such confusions and, as Egginton puts it, “shared an uncommon immunity to the temptation to think they knew God’s secret plan.”

(A copyeditor’s quibble: rather than “borrowing a phrase from Arundhati Roy” I would say “adapting a phrase from Arundhati Roy,” since Roy’s title was The God of Small Things.) O’Gieblyn describes philosophical concepts in such a way that I feel I might be able to wrap my head around them, which is comforting; here she is on Kant:
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I just watched Orson Welles’ 1952 short ghost movie Return to Glennascaul (silly but gorgeous) and was struck by the phrase “keep in” used of a fire: the narrator meets a couple of women at a crossroads, drives them to their isolated house, and is invited in for “tea, or perhaps something stronger,” and the older of the women is pleased to find that “the fire has kept in.” I’d never heard or seen that expression (that I remember), so I went to the OED, and sure enough, s.v. keep (entry from 1901):

to keep in
[…]

3. To keep (a fire) burning: cf. in adv. II.ii.14. Also intransitive of a fire: To continue to burn.

1659 As culinary fire must be kindled and kept in by external materials.
J. Arrowsmith, Armilla Catechetica 160

1711 They observe the law..which orders the Fire to be always kept in.
J. Addison, Spectator No. 72. ¶7
[…]

1849 The fire..keeps in well twelve hours.
Journal of Royal Agricultural Society vol. 10 i. 149

1892 The fire can be kept in all night.
Review of Reviews 15 March 299/1

And s.v. in (entry revised 2021):
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I’ve been alerted to The Speakers of Indo-European and Their World (ed. Sergio Neri and Michiel de Vaan; open access) twice today — by David Marjanović in this comment and by Matthew Scarborough in this blog post, where he writes “My own contribution deals with methodology in investigating prehistoric loanwords in Ancient Greek and a preliminary archaeolinguistic case study of etymologically obscure vocabulary in the semantic fields of construction and crafting terminology”; the publisher’s page says:

This book focuses on the history of the Indo-European languages. Research on the origins and dispersal of Indo-European has long relied on linguistic and archaeological evidence. Recent advances in archaeogenetics have made it possible to confirm, challenge, and refine earlier hypotheses. The 26 conference contributions collected in this volume combine linguistic, archaeological, and genetic data to investigate various topics in European and Eurasian population history, language contact, cultural practices, lexical semantics, grammar, and etymology.

That’s about as Hattic a book as I can imagine; here’s the T of C, with titles as varied as “Splitting the stone sky, sitting in the womb of the dawns: How to become a divás putrás in Early Vedic afterlife” (by Roland A. Pooth) and “The Thematic Aorist in Late Nuclear Proto-Indo-European” (by Jeremy Rau). I look forward to investigating it.

Gary D. German’s Benjamin Franklin: Orthoepist and Phonetician has been published in open-access form (hurrah!); Vol. 1 is Language, Literacy and Social Mobility in Franklin’s World and Vol. 2 is Colonial American Voices and London Norms: Franklin’s Quest for an Orthographic Reform. The latter is full of details of Hattic interest: Part III is “A Historical Phonology of Colonial New England English: ‘Probing under the Iceberg,’” Part IV “Franklin’s Reformed Mode of Spelling (1768/1779), ‘English’ or ‘American’?” and Part V “Franklin’s Linguistic Legacy.” The Introduction to Part IV reads as follows:

As announced in the General Introduction (cf. Volume I), Part IV is the culmination of a long study, the objective of which was to compare the data accrued in Part III regarding the nature of New England pronunciation and, in particular, of Franklin’s native Boston, Philadelphia influenced pronunciation. Part IV assembles and discusses all the elements needed to definitively establish:

a. whether the accent represented by Franklin’s proto-phonemic alphabet is based on his colonial American accent or
b. whether it is based on what he viewed to be refined London speech.

The second option has been my working hypothesis for the reasons outlined throughout this book, starting in the General Introduction.

Thanks to the lessons learned about Franklin’s idiolect in Part III, a secondary, but very significant, objective is to identify what appear to be more conservative New England features that surface now and then in his transcriptions and which contradict the underlying patterns of his scheme. Part IV is organized as follows.

Chapter 25 introduces the fundamental elements needed to understand the background, nature and a page-by-page outline of the contents of the RMS.

Chapter 26 includes a detailed study of the original manuscript versions of the data preserved in the archives of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and Vaughan’s 1779 edition of Franklin’s RMS which appears in Chapter 5 of a collection of Franklin’s writings.

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Reading Ian Buruma’s New Yorker review/essay (archived) on the history of ideas of European integration, I was struck by a couple of names that turned out to have interesting backgrounds. First came “the half Japanese Austro-Hungarian Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi.” How could I not want to know more? The Wikipedia article made it even more impressive:

Richard Nikolaus Eijiro, Count of Coudenhove-Kalergi (German: Richard Nikolaus Eijiro Graf von Coudenhove-Kalergi; Japanese: リヒャルト・ニコラウス・栄次郎・クーデンホーフ＝カレルギー伯爵, romanized: Rihyaruto Nikorausu Eijirō Kūdenhōfu-Karerugī Hakushaku; 16 November 1894 – 27 July 1972), was a politician, philosopher, and count of Coudenhove-Kalergi. A pioneer of European integration, he served as the founding president of the Paneuropean Union for 49 years. His parents were Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi, an Austro-Hungarian diplomat, and Mitsuko Aoyama, the daughter of an oil merchant, antiques-dealer and major landowner in Tokyo. His childhood name in Japan was Eijiro Aoyama (青山 栄次郎). Being a native Austrian-Hungarian citizen, he became a Czechoslovak citizen in 1919 and then took French citizenship from 1939 until his death.

From that Coudenhove-Kalergi link we learn that the family “is an Austro-Bohemian noble family of mixed Flemish and Cretan Greek descent, which was formed by the marriage of Count Franz Karl von Coudenhove (1825–1893) with Marie Kalergi (1840–1877) in 1857″; if you follow the Marie Kalergi link you will see that she was a fierce looking lady (as befits a Cretan Austro-Hungarian countess). And if you follow the earlier Aoyama link you will find that Mitsuko Thekla Maria, Countess of Coudenhove-Kalergi, born Mitsuko Aoyama (青山光子), “was one of the first Japanese people to immigrate to Europe, after becoming the wife of an Austro-Hungarian diplomat, Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi, in Tokyo.” Her photo also depicts a formidable lady, though she looks reserved rather than fierce (as befits her background).

Later in the piece, Buruma says “In 1941, Italian antifascists produced the Ventotene Manifesto (named for a small island where they were interned), calling for a federal socialist Europe.” I looked up Ventotene and in the Italian Wikipedia article found this excursus on the name:

«… l’isola di Ventotiene (‘Ventotene’), chiamata nell’antichità greca e latina Πανδαταερíα e Πανδατερíα (‘colei che distribuisce tutto’), forse per la presenza di un tempietto dedicato a una perduta e così chiamata divinità locale, nome che fu poi trasformato in Bentitiene (‘isola dai fondali buoni tenitori’) o Bentitieni e anche Eutitieni, quest’ultimo in una singolare contaminazione tra greco e italiano…»

It’s sourced to Guglielmo Peirce, Gente di galera. La guerra nautica nel Mediterraneo tra Medioevo ed Evo Moderno, so I don’t know how reliable it is, but se non è vero…

I was scrolling down Facebook recently when I saw a post about scoring a copy of a book called Chamberpot and Motherfuck, and needless to say I dropped everything and investigated. I found a review by Nicholas Poole-Wilson (The Library, 19.1 [March 2018]: 94–96) of Chamberpot & Motherfuck: The Price-Codes of the Book Trade, by Exhumation [i.e. Ian Jackson], 2nd ed.; it’s behind a paywall, but the extract they allow you to read is worth posting on its own:

Every trade is also a tribe, booksellers no exception, and one way that a mercantile tribe signals membership is by language and price symbols, that is to say the cost or price code. Here are codes aplenty, 226 plus another eighteen in a sheet of Addenda, the total twice as many as the number in Ian Jackson’s earlier edition of 2010. The codes, ancient and modern, are presented with accompanying commentary in an attempt to combat the bibliographical neglect of their study. Roger Stoddard in his Marks in Books (Cambridge, Mass., 1985) ignores them; David Pearson’s Provenance Research in Book History (London, 1994) does not venture beyond the seventeenth century.

The orthodox cost code, scribbled on an endpaper, is a substitution code consisting of a series of non-repeating letters corresponding to certain numbers, usually either 1–9, or 1–10 if incorporating a zero. The bookseller will choose or coin an accommodating word or phrase according to taste (or lack of); sometimes the name of the bookseller in question, say ROSENTHAL; maybe a place, TUXEDO PARK; or the impossible dream, INTROUVABLE. Others may reflect a business attitude, from MY GOD HELPS to MONEY TALKS, even BANKRUPTCY.

One presumes CHAMBERPOT and MOTHERFUCK are two such codes, and it bespeaks an admirably raffish spirit to use them for the title. I confess I hadn’t been aware of what exactly a price code was; the OED (entry from 2007) is, as usual, helpful:
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Our Germany-dwelling Texas-bred friend Stuart Clayton alerted me to the existence of québecois faque, “eye dialect spelling of fait que,” which means “So, therefore, in that case.” Stu sez “Here’s a tie-up to France French ‘du coup’ which up until now I could never remember”:

The word “faque” (also spelled “fak”) is a very common colloquial abbreviation in Quebec French for the phrase “ça fait que” (which means something like “so,” “therefore,” or, in European French, “du coup”).

And he provided this Instagram clip of a québecois dude explaining it in French. I confess I was unfamiliar with both faque and du coup; thanks, Stu!

David Hollingshead’s Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong is basically a standard-issue defense of the humanities against the crazed attack of the modern-day right wing, but it starts from an interesting angle that I thought was worth investigating for its own sake:

For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, archive perusers, and history buffs who grew to love their areas of study because of the specific objects that constitute the field: the two women I overheard whispering about how they wanted to fuck Adam Bede, in one of my undergrad classes; the student of mine who disclosed that he loved The House of Mirth because “something similar happened to me recently” (????); or the guy who collects swords as a way into understanding the medieval period are examples of this type. You’ve certainly met these people or been taught by them; they are often motivated by personal attachments to specific works, and my hunch is that they represent the majority of those who care about art today.

Secondary Source People are different; they become obsessed with the discourse about the objects being studied. Professional critics, “theory bros” (gender neutral), Letterboxd reviewers who primarily read other Letterboxd reviews, the weirdly combative people in your seminars who know all about the different scholarly camps on a topic—this group prioritizes the conversations, contexts, and conflicts surrounding the works above and beyond the works themselves. Secondary Source People are the main contingent both producing and consuming academic writing. For them, the question of a text’s beauty or capacity to immerse is less important than how its ideas expand or contract as we engage with them.

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