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I always enjoy the NY Times‘ Metropolitan Diary section (little tales of city life sent in by readers), and today there was one that made my linguistic antennae vibrate:

Dear Diary:

My daughter returned home to New York from college in Michigan for summer break. Her three roommates came along for a weeklong stay.

Sitting around the kitchen table one morning, they were eagerly planning things to do in the city. They mentioned a nightclub.

“There’s a really good diner around the corner for afterward,” I said.

Marisa, born and raised in Michigan, looked confused.

“Diner?” she said. “What do you mean ‘diner?’”

“Huh?” I replied. “What do you mean?”

“What’s a diner?”

“What?”

Marisa’s eyes darted around to the other Michigan girls. They also looked confused.

I was confused too.

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Another in my occasional series featuring dubious statements about language by scholars in other fields: Nelson Goering posts on FB about a book on Vietnamese history he’s reading in which the author claims the Vietnamese word for water, nác/nước, derives from “one of the archaic Vietnamese terms for woman (nàng).” (This is in service of a point about “a possible Earth Mother cult,” which makes me sigh an entirely separate sigh.) Now, I know next to nothing about Vietnamese etymology, but I know enough to be skeptical about that, and sure enough, a quick visit to Wiktionary informed me that nước is “From Proto-Vietic *ɗaːk (‘water’), from Proto-Mon-Khmer *ɗaak (‘water’).” (If you’re curious about that archaic Vietnamese term for woman, nàng, it’s from Proto-Tai *naːŋᴬ ‘lady.’) I realize the Vietnamese word starts with n- and the protoforms with d-; I am assuming this is a regular or at least explicable development or it wouldn’t be stated with such assurance, but as I say, I am ignorant about Vietnamese etymology, so if there is reason to think Wiktionary is wrong (which, of course, it not infrequently is) and the historian is right, by all means let me know.

In my Kurosawa festival, I’ve gotten to The Bad Sleep Well [Internet Archive], which is astonishingly good, with a riveting performance by Mifune — I can’t believe I’d barely heard of it. (Actually, I can, because it’s the grimmest, bitterest movie he ever made aside from Ran, and it openly attacks the corruption and brutality of corporate life.) But I bring it here for its title, which in Japanese is 悪い奴ほどよく眠る Warui yatsu hodo yoku nemuru. Now, I don’t actually know Japanese, but I did when I was very young and I’ve read a fair amount about it since (and seen a lot of movies), so I can generally figure out how sentences work; in this case, I know 悪い奴 warui yatsu is ‘bad guys’ and よく眠る yoku nemuru is ‘sleep well.’ But what’s this hodo? My trusty Rose-Innes Vocabulary of Common Japanese Words has the following array of senses:

1) Approximate quantity : about.
2) Quantity ; price ; much.
3) Comparisons of equality : as–as.
4) Neg. comparisons. (example: sore hodo waruku nai not so bad as that)
5) An individual is compared to all the other individuals of the same kind.
6) So–(that).
7) Enough.
8) The–the. (example: ōi hodo ii the more the better)
9) Moderation ; limit.
10) Time. (example: saki-hodo mairimashita he arrived a short time ago)
11) Various. (examples: hodo no ii hito desu he’s a decent person; ii hodo ni aisatsu shite oita I gave a vague answer)

(He has lots of example sentences; I just copied out a few to give an idea of the relevant sense.) This reminds me of the dustman’s dumpling and doesn’t give me much help. Can any Japanese speakers out there explain how the sentence works? If I put “the bad sleep well” into GT, I get 悪人はよく眠る akunin wa yoku nemuru; how does hodo modify the sense?

Also, in the course of the movie I noticed a lovely example of Japanese laconicism: “Kimi… boku… doko e?” [‘you… me… where?’], rendered in the subtitles as “Where are you taking me?” But you have to get that from context.

Cal Revely-Calder (who has an interesting Three Things substack) writes about faces in the New Yorker (archived); I was enjoying its brio and historical tidbits, but when I got to this passage I knew I had to post it:

Yet there’s another side to this coin. Our vocabulary also speaks of invention, even artifice. The English word “face” derives from the Latin facies, implying a created form; so does the French visage, from videre, suggesting something seen from without. “Mask,” “masque,” “mascara,” “maquillage,” and their European relations seem to be etymologically linked, and carry long-standing associations with concealment, distortion, pretense. For Socrates, the art worth prizing was the cultivation and preservation of natural beauty; we’ve happily overwritten it with what he treated suspiciously as kommōtikē, the art of changing how one looks. Even “person,” along with “impersonation” and “personae,” derives from persona, a theatrical mask through which classical actors spoke. The cultural historian Hans Belting suggested that faces and masks were conceptually inseparable: we shouldn’t think of one as “real” and the other as “fake”—one as the thing we have and the other as the thing we temporarily don. Life, he wrote, was fully “a perpetuum mobile,” an “expressive drama,” in which our faces resolve into one legible position, one legible role, then reassemble themselves into the next. We make them up, in every sense.

I was suspicious about “the Latin facies, implying a created form,” but it seems to be true; Wiktionary says:

The term faciēs is to faciō as speciēs is to speciō, literally meaning “a make, imposed form”.

(face): Compare typologically Czech tvář, Polish twarz [both ‘face’] (<< Proto-Slavic *tvarь, akin to *tvoriti)

All of which was new to me, and may be new to you.
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Jennifer Szalai reviews for the NY Times (archived) a new biography of a remarkable man:

George Forster is one of the most fascinating figures you have probably never heard of. He was a naturalist, a humanist, an explorer and a revolutionary. His intellectual and emotional journey began in 1772, when he was still a teenager. For three years and 18 days, he sailed on Capt. James Cook’s second voyage to the South Seas, a young man both enthralled and horrified by what he saw.

The 17-year-old Forster had been recruited to the trip by his father, Reinhold, a Lutheran pastor with a bad temper and scientific ambitions. Reinhold and George collected shells, dried plants and animals preserved in alcohol. George made pencil sketches and watercolors. The journey was treacherous, but he delighted in the lush landscapes and the many islanders they encountered. What appalled him was the behavior of his fellow Europeans.

Forster is the vibrant subject of Andrea Wulf’s “The Traveler,” a lively new book that hums with her characteristic verve. Wulf first encountered Forster’s name while researching previous books on the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt and the early German Romantics. She was intrigued. Who was this 18th-century man who criticized an “unfair difference between the sexes” and promoted an early concept of human rights? A gifted linguist, Forster also noticed connections between the languages of the South Pacific, developing a theory of Polynesian migration that would be proved some 200 years later. He became enamored with the French Revolution and tried to bring it to Germany. “The Traveler” thrillingly revives the forgotten life of this “liberal thinker far ahead of his time.”

I have bolded the bit that makes it Hattic, but really, the whole thing is worth reading. Here’s another snippet:

When Cook’s men encountered resistance, they would speak of intransigent natives. Forster, however, not infrequently empathized with islanders who tried to defend themselves. Imagine that a bunch of strangers arrived on one’s shores and started waving guns around while making demands: “Surely from all appearances these people had a right to look at our men as a set of invaders.”

One of those people I wish I could meet. (His name, however, He was born George, but his name is now more appropriately often given as Georg Forster.)

I liked Talia Felix’s Etymonline post about A.1. Sauce so much I thought I’d share it; it’s a nice bit of philological/historical investigation:

In personal curiosity I was looking at a webpage about the history of H.P. Sauce. The page also included a history of A.1. Sauce, which some people evidently think tastes similar. It claimed that this latter sauce was invented by the chef of King George IV and that the king himself gave it the name of “A-1.” While I felt an initial burst of excitement – I’m a big fan of George IV or “Prinny” as he was long known – I also had some skepticism. Prinny died in 1830, several years before our first attestation of A-1 as slang (1837, in Charles Dickens). And I’ve read Aspinall’s collection of Prinny’s letters – A-1 doesn’t sound like the way Prinny talked, even when he was being informal (drunk). Likely he’d have favored a French word or something out of Grose: elderly monarchs aren’t known for being on top of slang trends.

I started looking on Newspapers.com for some indication that A.1. Sauce was really that old. Almost immediately I turned up an advertisement from 1881 where the company’s own product description said it was invented in 1862 for the International Exhibition, and that the Chief Royal Commissioner was the person who called it A.1.

So where did all this stuff about George IV and the sauce being from the 1830s come from? Well the rest of my day got spent trying to untangle that. Short version is: none of that Prinny stuff is correct; but because Wikipedia got hold of it, it’s hopelessly all over the place now, and all your AI answers will say it’s true. It looks to have resulted from perhaps legitimate confusion (or perhaps deliberate exaggeration) of certain facts.

Click through for the details, which can have their own interest; I particularly like this parenthetical:

(Note that most sources say the International Exhibition was in South Kensington; but one of the entrances was at Hyde Park Corner and another required crossing Hyde Park. Maps of the exhibition show the “refreshment rooms” were near the entrances by the park.)

Always check maps!

As I’m sure I’ve mentioned, my wife and I have watched a lot of British police procedurals, so we’re familiar with the slang phrase stitch up, defined by Green (sense 3) as “(UK Und./police) of the police, to incriminate a person in order to ensure a conviction by planting evidence, faking confessions etc.; also in non-police use” (first citation 1970 [UK] G.F. Newman Sir, You Bastard 127: Your confederate has just about stitched you up). My wife asked me what the underlying metaphor was: stitching someone into a bag? Green doesn’t say explicitly (though under the general heading stitch up v. he has the bracketed [sewing up a garment neatly and conclusively]), but I found a discussion at the Stack Exchange English Language & Usage site; the question is specifically about “stitched up like a kipper,” so the answer that seems most useful starts with the kipper:

I’m not convinced it’s a “mixture of similes”. I can’t find any relevant references to like a kipper prior to about 1970, and I think when it did come in about then, it started as South London slang.

So I’m inclined to credit the explanation given here, that it’s a reference to the the extra wide tie called the ‘kipper’ that became popular around then. Thus called partly because the original designer was Michael Fish, and partly because of the tie’s shape.

On the metaphorical allusion to kippers the foodstuff, I’d note that they’re pretty unrecognisable as “fish” once they’ve been split and smoked. They’ve been well and truly done over.

Also note that to have a stitch on someone was (now obsolete) British slang for to bear a grudge. Which is probably where the later slang stitch someone up came from (it means to “frame” someone – falsely make it appear they’re guilty).

OP’s more general definition (to trick someone) is increasingly common lately, but I think with or without “kipper”, most usages still relate to being (usually falsely) made to appear guilty.

Does that seem plausible to others? And is anyone familiar with the ‘bear a grudge’ usage?

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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