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Russian лунатик [lunátik] and English lunatic are the faux-est of faux amis: the English word means only ‘madman’ and the Russian one only ‘sleepwalker’; I should really have called the post Veltman’s Sleepwalker, but that would have sounded weird to me, since I think of it with the Russian word, so Lunatik it is. If the novel ever gets translated, I can use “Sleepwalker” for the resultant post. At any rate, this is one of those novels that wound up disappointing me, not because it is bad but because it started out looking like it was going to be much wilder and more intriguing than it turned out to be.

After Raina (see this post) I was really hoping for a return to Veltmanian form with his 1834 novel Лунатик, and I was thrilled when I saw the title of the first chapter: “1–∞ год” [Year 1–∞]. “That’s the stuff!” (I said to myself), and read the first couple of paragraphs:

Beneath the light-blue vault of the Universe, on the path to infinity, rolls the languid companion of the sun, the Earth’s good neighbor.

As she traces her orbit, as if in love, she never averts her gaze from the world inhabited by humans; her face is eternally turned toward it, and no one born of earth has ever beheld the back of her head—neither Galileo, nor Isaac Newton, nor Johannes Kepler, nor Edmond Halley, nor Giovanni Battista Riccioli…

Под голубым сводом Вселенной, по пути к бесконечности, катится томная сотрудница солнца, добрая соседка земного шара.

Совершая свой круг, она, как будто влюбленная, не отводит взоров от мира, населенного человеками; лик её вечно обращен к нему, и никто из земнородных не видал её затылка: ни Галилей, ни Исаак Невтон, ни Иоганн Кеплер, ни Эдмонд Галлей, ни Жак-Баптист Рикчиоли…

Very promising! The next few chapters were headed “1811 год” [The year 1811], “1812,” and “I. 1812 год” [I. The year 1812], which was pleasingly quirky. Alas, after a few flourishes he got into the plot itself, which turned out to be a standard-issue confusion-of-identity/loss-of-memory one that culminates in “Oh no, those two lovebirds can’t get married after all.” Veltman loved that shit, but I can’t really get into it. Still, it was a fun read and had some exciting descriptions of the French takeover of Moscow that must have influenced Tolstoy (the bemused adventures of the young hero, Avrely, kept reminding me of Pierre’s almost identical mishaps in War and Peace). I’ll quote a couple of nice bits; first an amusing description of a hearty officer who’s resigned his commission and moved back to his provincial estate to live with his wife and daughter:
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Nils William Olsson has a paper called “What’s in a Swedish Surname?” (Swedish American Genealogist 1.1 [1981]) that is, as you might expect, about Swedish surnames. I’ll quote some bits that particularly interested me:

It should be emphasized that the patronymic is not identical with a family name. It was not until the latter part of the 19th Century that the patronymic in Sweden congealed to become a family name. Before that time it had changed with each generation. Thus persons named Sven and Anna, the children of Anders, were known as Sven Andersson and Anna Andersdotter. If Sven in turn had a son, he became Svensson and his daughter became Svensdotter. Iceland is the only Scandinavian country today, which retains the system of patronymics. Even the telephone directories follow this custom by listing Icelandic telephone subscribers by their Christian names. The patronymic follows in second place.

By the 15th and 16th Centuries family names begin appearing in Sweden, at first confined almost exclusively to the aristocracy, somewhat later but in a parallel development to what was happening in the British Isles and on the Continent. At first the family name was simply an identifier added to the patronymic. This identifier was usually the symbol emblazoned on the field of the escutcheon, thus Ture Jonsson Tre Rösor, a Swedish political leader, who died in 1532 was named thus because of the three roses inscribed on his coat of arms. Gustaf I (1521-1560), the first of the modern kings of Sweden was known as Gustaf Eriksson Vasa or Vase because of the fact that his escutcheon was inscribed with a vase (fasces in English). One of the oldest Swedish families of nobility used an escutcheon on which the chief or upper half was emblazoned in gold, the lower half or base was inscribed in blue. In the popular jargon of the day the family which carried this heraldic emblem was first known as Dag och Natt, later changed to Natt och Dag (Night and Day), a name carried by the family to the present time […]

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Venya Gushchin reviews (for the Brooklyn Rail, “an independent forum for arts, culture, and politics throughout New York City and far beyond”) what sounds like an interesting translation-cum-adaptation of one of the most famous works of Russian literature:

The plot of Eugene Onegin, Aleksandr Pushkin’s famous novel-in-verse, is barebones. Our eponymous hero is a Byronic fop, bored by aristocratic life in early nineteenth-century Saint Petersburg. After moving to his inherited estate, he meets his friend Vladimir Lensky’s fiancée’s sister Tatiana Larin. She falls in love with Eugene Onegin, who condescendingly rejects her. After an ill-fated ball, Onegin kills Lensky in a duel. Years later, back in Saint Petersburg, Onegin sees a now married Tatiana. Now it’s his turn to confess his love and be symmetrically rejected. Unlike in the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, there is no intricate network of characters, no metaphysical quest for the meaning of life itself.

Instead, Pushkin gives us sparkling, encyclopedic digressions on urban and countryside Russian life. The poet-narrator is as much a character as those outlined above, his asides and personality at times overtaking narration in feats of dexterous versification. Most famous among these digressions is his stylistically varied confession to a foot fetish. […]

I quote these nimble variations on a theme from Robert E. Tanner’s recent Ambivalent Souls: A True Translation of Alexander Pushkin’s ‘Eugene Onegin’. […] In Ambivalent Souls is not a timeless classic, but a messy, constantly shifting text, always approached from a particular historical perspective. […] With notable exceptions like Boris Dralyuk’s My Hollywood and Maggie Millner’s Couplets, contemporary formal verse can sound archaic or child-like. Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous literal translation of Eugene Onegin dispenses with form altogether, the text’s “greatness” conveyed instead through two volumes of commentary. Formal fidelity, chosen by others like Charles Johnston, can at times result in accurate but dated versions that fail to capture the narrator’s chattiness. Tanner makes Pushkin as fluid and glittering in English as he is to contemporary Russian readers.

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Ah, in my younger days how I would have lusted for the Gold Medal of Philology! To get up on a stage before a glittering international crowd and give a carefully prepared speech humbly acknowledging that my ground-breaking work on the Indo-European zero-grade present formation was perhaps not without interest… Well, Kim Willsher of the Guardian tells us how it all went down:

At a ceremony at the French national assembly attended by Nobel prize winners, former government ministers, MPs, decorated scientists and academics, all attention was on a previously unknown literature professor.

Florent Montaclair, then 46, a balding, bespectacled figure in an ill-fitting suit and rosé-coloured shirt, was receiving the 2016 Gold Medal of Philology – the study of language in historical contexts – from an international society of the same name. Montaclair was the first French recipient of the medal, previously awarded to the Italian author and academic Umberto Eco, those attending were told.

It was a glittering event and an impressive achievement – but unfortunately, detectives claim, the award itself was entirely fake and part of a complex international hoax worthy of a film script.

Although the ceremony did take place, there was no International Society of Philology. The American university to which it was supposedly affiliated existed only online and its address was given as a business services company in Lewes, Delaware. The award – likened to a Nobel prize – was invented by Montaclair, and the academic had bought the medal from a jeweller in Paris for €250 to present to himself. Now the professor is under investigation for suspected forgery, use of forged documents, impersonation and fraud. He denies any criminality.

Click through for the thrilling details; who knew philology was a venue for such goings-on? (Incidentally, I must point out that Lewes, Delaware, like its English namesake, is pronounced in two syllables: /ˈluː.əs/.)

The Storica blog has a post about Pinocchio that has some Hattic material:

Carlo Collodi serialised the story in Il Giornale per i bambini, the first Italian children’s magazine, beginning on July 7, 1881. The first installment was titled Storia di un burattino — Story of a Puppet. Eight episodes later, over four months, the Fox and the Cat lured Pinocchio into a forest at night, robbed him, and strung him from the branch of la Quercia grande, the Great Oak: gli legarono le mani dietro le spalle, e passatogli un nodo scorsoio intorno alla gola, lo attaccarono penzoloni al ramo di una quercia. He shut his eyes, opened his mouth, stretched his legs, gave one great convulsion, and stayed there as if frozen stiff. Fine.

Collodi was done. He had collected his fee. Italian children wrote in begging him to continue. He resumed reluctantly five months later, on February 16, 1882, with the title changed from Storia di un burattino to Le avventure di Pinocchio and a Blue Fairy — first introduced as a literal child-corpse with turquoise hair, lying in a window of a forest cottage — appearing in chapter sixteen to revive him. […]

The legacy of the book has almost nothing to do with the satire. It has to do with the language.

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Via Laudator Temporis Acti:

Letter of Edward Lear to Evelyn Baring:

Thrippsy pillivinx,

Inky tinky pobblebockle abblesquabs? — Flosky! beebul trimble flosky! — Okul scratchabibblebongibo, viddle squibble tog-a-tog, ferrymoyassity amsky flamsky ramsky damsky crocklefether squiggs.

Flinkywisty pomm,
Slushypipp.

Beebul trimble flosky indeed! You can see the autograph letter at the link. It must have been fun to be a friend of Lear’s.

Another word that keeps popping up in our reading of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet (see this post) is gymkhana, and eventually I thought to investigate it, since I was fuzzy about both meaning and etymology. Wiktionary says:

From Hindustani گیند خانہ (gendxānā) / गेंदख़ाना (gendxānā, “racquet court”), from گیند / गेंद (gend, “ball”) + خانہ / ख़ाना (xānā, “court”). Influenced by gymnastics and gymnasium.

I’ve probably learned that before, but the fake gymnastics connection makes it hard to remember the true origin! And I think the Raj-related meaning is better explained in the OED entry (from 1900):

Originally Anglo-Indian.

‘A place of public resort at a station, where the needful facilities for athletics and games of sorts are provided’ (Y.). Hence (esp. in European use), an athletic sports display. Now spec. a meeting at which horses and their riders take part in games and contests; also a competition designed to test driving skill. Also attributive, as gymkhana club, gymkhana meeting.

1861 [‘The first use of it that we can trace is (on the authority of Major John Trotter) at Rurki in 1861, when a gymkhana was instituted there’.—Y.]

1877 Their proposals are that the Cricket Club should include in their programme the games, etc., proposed by the promoters of a gymkhana Club.
Pioneer Mail 3 November
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I was surprised the first citation was so late; I’ve antedated it to 1854 (“The Gymkhana opens to-morrow, and a goodly meet is expected to take place, weather permitting”), but I got discouraged from trying to take it further back because the metadata on the alleged pre-1860 hits at Google Books is so terrible.

Back in 2020 I posted about the etymology of pedant; now I offer a very interesting review by Clare Bucknell (NYRB, May 14, 2026; archived) of On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-It-All by Arnoud S. Q. Visser. (You can see the book discussed at this Overthink YouTube video, hosted by Ellie Anderson and David Peña-Guzmán; Visser shows up at the 20:14 mark.) Herewith, as usual, some excerpts to whet your appetite:

In 1930 the poet and classicist A.E. Housman published the final volume of his edition of an obscure astrological poem by the Roman author Manilius. He had labored on the project for almost thirty years. All five of its volumes, he wrote, “were produced at my own expense and offered to the public at much less than cost price; but this unscrupulous artifice did not overcome the natural disrelish of mankind for the combination of a tedious author with an odious editor.” Housman did not mind being thought a pedant, out of touch with what “mankind” tended to relish. In fact he played up to it. His introduction to the last volume is full of needling corrections and unpleasantries, aimed both at rival Manilius scholars (“The corrections of Ellis were rather more numerous, and one or two of them were very pretty, but his readers were in perpetual contact with the intellect of an idiot child”) and, more unfairly, at the ancient author himself, for having been an incompetent astrologer. At the end he describes spotting a misprint (“rustling” for “rusting”) in a poem by Walter de la Mare that he declined to correct:

If I had been so ill-advised as to publish my emendation, I should have been told that rustling was exquisitely apt and poetical, because hedgerows do rustle, especially in autumn…and I should have been recommended to quit my dusty (or musty) books and make a belated acquaintance with the sights and sounds of the English countryside. And the only possible answer would have been ugh!

It’s hard to think of anyone who better answers to our contemporary notion of the pedant than Housman at his classical labors. But our understanding of pedantry, denoting the sticklerishness of academic specialists and grammar obsessives, is a relatively narrow one. […] In his lively cultural history, the Dutch scholar Arnoud Visser gathers a wide range of objectionable intellectual behaviors under the pedantry umbrella: debating aggressively in public, teaching in an obnoxious manner, neglecting one’s wife, dressing badly, quoting poetry at parties. The only constant across different time periods and milieus is that no one has wanted to be accused of it. Visser describes pedantry as “the excessive use or display of learning” (“excessive” according to shifting historical criteria) and potential pedants as those “who pursue learning and cultivate the mind”: professionals and amateurs, specialists and dilettantes, men and women. Medieval schoolmen worrying over Aristotle could be pedants; so could cultivated female salonnières in seventeenth-century Paris.

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I offer you a 25-second clip of a man telling a story. (I used TinyURL because the original URL would provide too much of a hint.) This is from an old LH post, so if you’ve been here longer than two decades you might have encountered it before! But probably not.

Addendum. I’m told that when you open the link you can see the URL. Rats. Don’t look!

Steven Mithen (/maɪðən/), a British archaeologist seen in these parts a couple of years ago, published a book called The Language Puzzle: How we Talked Our Way Out of the Stone Age that was recently reviewed in the LRB by Francis Gooding (Vol. 48 No. 7 · 23 April 2026; archived), and even though you won’t learn anything new and exciting, it’s a useful roundup of ideas on the topic. Some excerpts:

Saussure steered linguistics away from questions about the beginnings of language: for him it was a red herring, since words take meaning only in relation to one another, within the boundaries of their histories. The study of words can’t illuminate what came before words: there is no thread to be found in language which would help us trace human speech back to the moment of its emergence. ‘No society … knows or has ever known language other than as a product inherited from preceding generations, and one to be accepted as such,’ Saussure says in Cours de linguistique générale (1916). ‘That is why the question of the origin of speech is not so important as it is generally assumed to be. The question is not even worth asking; the only real object of linguistics is the normal, regular life of an existing idiom.’

Yet whether it is worth asking or not, the question of the origin of language never goes away. It remains one of the most fundamental mysteries of human evolution. So far as we know, true symbolic language is unique to the human species. (On the most generous reading it may go a bit further back in the human lineage. And there is an open question about cetaceans – it was recently discovered that the structure of humpback whale vocalisations is remarkably similar to the organisation of human speech.) And it continually recurs as the most probable explanation for the differences between human behaviour and that of all other living things. If you ask why we have been able to make pyramids and spaceships and musical instruments, while no other animal has managed anything of the sort in three billion years, the answer will always cite language as a decisive factor. So the question of how we alone came to be blessed – or cursed – with words is not to be lightly dismissed. But it does come with a serious difficulty: language is an evolved feature of the human organism, but words don’t fossilise like bones. How then to find the missing links?

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