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Elizabeth Preston reports for the NY Times (archived) on an important discovery in swearology:

“Holy motherforking shirtballs!” a character exclaimed on “The Good Place,” a television show that took place in a version of the afterlife where swearing is forbidden (as it is in this newspaper, most of the time). In a way, this celestial censorship was realistic.

A study published Tuesday in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review found that curse words in several unrelated languages sound alike. They’re less likely than other words to include the consonant sounds L, R, W or Y. And more family-friendly versions of curses often have these sounds added, just like the R in “shirt” or “fork.” The finding suggests that some underlying rules may link the world’s languages, no matter how different they are.

“In English, some of the worst words seem to have common phonetic properties,” said Ryan McKay, a psychologist at Royal Holloway, University of London. They’re often short and punchy. They also tend to include the sounds P, T or K, “without giving any obvious examples,” Dr. McKay said. These sounds are called stop consonants because they interrupt the airflow when we’re speaking.

Dr. McKay teamed up with his colleague Shiri Lev-Ari to learn whether this familiar pattern went beyond English. They wondered whether it might even represent what’s called sound symbolism.

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From the Letters to the Editor page of the Dec. 2 TLS:

Book jackets

Bernard Richards (Letters, November 25) asks if the Bodleian Library continues its “evil and reprehensible” practice of stripping book jackets. I can’t speak for the Bodleian, but it is certainly the case that the British Library has stripped book jackets from the day it was founded, and has not stopped. I became aware of this sustained vandalism in 2011, when I was asked by its curators to provide some covers for a BL exhibition – all examples held in-house had been defaced as a matter of principle. There may be some derelict (but unargued) bibliographical propriety involved in this imposition of cultural amnesia from “above”. But propriety, as we know, is theft.

John Clute
London NW1

I join Richards and Clute in strongly objecting to the practice, but I like the last line very much.

Last year I posted about the Twitter feed of Paul Anthony Jones; now we learn his origin story and some pleasing words in his Guardian piece Flapdoodler, roorback, yulehole: Why forgotten words need rescuing from obscurity. He begins with a Christmas gift of “a hardback illustrated children’s edition of the Oxford English Dictionary” when he was around seven:

It’s fair to say I became obsessed with it. For the next day or two I sat and read it, cover to cover, as you would a novel. I wrote down all the words I came across that I didn’t know, starred and highlighted all those I liked and made lists of all those that seemed truly bizarre to me in sound, shape or spelling. Incognito. Flummery. Hullaballoo. Canoodle.

I really have no idea why I became so immediately enamoured. But looking back, there’s no denying that the gift changed my life. A love of language had been sparked and over the years and decades that followed I took that interest and ran with it. From school to university, my love of language grew until eventually I found myself on a postgraduate linguistics course, studying the history and psychology of our language in more detail than ever before. It should have been unendingly fascinating – and yet I absolutely hated it.

Towards the end of my course, it struck me that there had been something joyless about it. Everything I had loved about language – about sharing my love of language – was gone. It felt as if all the most interesting aspects of it were being kept behind glass, like rare artefacts in a museum that no one visits any more. I wanted to tell everyone about everything I was learning and discovering, but, instead, here it was, locked away in rooms and classrooms that only those who already found language interesting would ever think to enter. It was stifling and infuriating. I completed my course, told my tutor I’d had enough (an interesting conversation, to say the least), and went back to waiting tables. “The most highly qualified waiter in Newcastle,” as my mates knew me.

It was a reset moment. I realised that what I truly enjoyed – and what I believed I excelled in – was taking what I had learned and repackaging it in such a way that anyone could appreciate it, and find our language and its origins as fascinating as I do. After all, just like art and sport and music, language is one of the few things found in every culture on the planet. I resolved to tap into that shared interest and open this wonderful subject up to everyone, regardless of their background or academic experience.

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Thomas Keyes, an Irish artist amd manuscript illuminator, writes about his project of recreating the Book of Kells; he begins with an account of the medieval monks of the British Isles and continues:

The Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones credits the monk Eadfrith with being Britain’s first great artist for his work ‘Cotton MS Nero D IV’, better known as the Lindisfarne Gospels. Lindisfarne Abbey was devastated by the pandemic and embroiled in the argument over Easter, losing its abbot and other monks that would not conform in 664. Eadfrith lived into old age and died in 721 as Bishop of Lindisfarne, a role he was appointed to in 698 meaning that he is likely to have worked on the manuscript earlier in his career. […]

What is now the greatest Book of the English inspired the greatest Book of the Irish, the Book of Kells, to be produced at the turn of the ninth century. The book of the four gospels, takes innovations found in Lindisfarne and expands upon them to an incredible degree, suggesting that there was a vibrant century of innovation between the two manuscripts, evidence of which has mostly been lost. The level of technical skill on display within the Book of Kells has never been matched. It still isn’t fully understood. The chemical knowledge required to create pigments that remain stable after 1200 years is centuries ahead of what we thought they were capable of. This coupled with the mathematical ability required for draughting the designs and the scriptural familiarity needed to skilfully add the appropriate marginal characters to bring the text to life shed light on an incredibly vibrant culture of learning and sharing. 

We still can’t be certain where the Book of Kells comes from exactly but the leading contenders are all islands and remote peninsulas which turned out to be the worst place to be staying for the next apocalypse that came to Britain and Ireland from the north, first striking Lindisfarne in 793. In the Book of Armagh, a manuscript contemporary with Kells, the name of the Abbot of Iona ‘Cellach’, appears next to an ominous passage from the Gospel of Mark ‘For those days will bring distress such as has never been until now since the beginning of the world that God created- and will never be again’

Eventually he gets to his own project:
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Language Log reports on a striking discovery, quoting Ariel David in Haaretz:

Around 1,400 years ago, or even earlier, somebody scribbled on the wall of a Jewish cemetery in Beit She’arim, in today’s northern Israel. The graffito was first spotted during excavations at this sprawling ancient necropolis in the 1950s, but experts could not make head or tail of it. Now for the first time, the key to unraveling the mystery has been found after two experts in Iranian history saw the text.

They were the first to realize it was written using Pahlavi script, an ancient alphabet developed for the administration, coinage and royal inscriptions of the once mighty Sassanid Persian Empire. Plus some isolated Hebrew or Aramaic letters. But there was more to the mystery.

“When I saw it I immediately thought it was Pahlavi, but then as I kept reading I realized that while the alphabet was Middle Persian, the language was not,” says Domenico Agostini, a professor of ancient history at Tel Aviv University. “I was stunned.”

He also wondered what a Middle Persian graffito was doing at Beit She’arim in the first place. So, it turns out that the seven lines of text were written in Aramaic transliterated into the alphabet that was normally used to write Middle Persian, the form of Persian common at the time of the Sassanid dynasty (3rd-7th century C.E.).

More at the link; it actually surprises me that there aren’t other examples, since Aramaic was the lingua franca of the day.

Dave Wilton has made a Big List post about the phrase politically correct (often abbreviated as PC), giving a useful account of its history in English, starting with its occurrence as “a collocation of words rather than a fixed lexical item” (as in a 1793 US Supreme Court opinion by Justice James Wilson) and proceeding to the current meaning “conforming to a body of liberal or radical opinion, esp. on social matters”; here’s the first example he finds of the latter (from the Christian Science Monitor of 4 September 1919):

Mr. Svarc charged that just as the Magyars would allow no priest to serve in Slovakia unless he were “politically correct,” in being which he had to become a traitor to those of his own blood and a slave to the Magyars, so the Magyar Government had issued orders to the bishops to cooperate with Austro-Hungarian consuls in this country to get “right conditions” in the United States.

He says “there is no doubt that politically correct had become a term of art in Marxist circles by the middle of the 1920s […] By the mid 1930s, politically correct was appearing in non-Marxist writing, but in reference to restrictions on speech in the Soviet Union, and it is here that the term starts to acquire its negative valence. […] In the 1970s, progressive—not necessarily Marxist—movements in the United States picked up the term. In the process, the term softens from hardline Marxist dogma to a call for inclusion and being mindful and respectful of voices and views that had traditionally been suppressed or ignored.” Which is well and good, but as I said in the comment thread:

I’m surprised you’re treating this as a purely English-language phrase, with no consideration that it might be a calque. Your 1919 quote implies that there was an equivalent Hungarian (or perhaps German) phrase that was being so translated, and a Russian corpus search found this from a 1930 collection by Yuri Pisarenko: “Политическая корректность режиссера не делает театр современным” [The political correctness of the director does not make the theater contemporary] — at that time it is highly unlikely it would be a calque from English. It is certainly an interesting phrase, and it deserves an international investigation, however that might be provided (you’d need scholars familiar with the major European languages and their histories).

And then it occurred to me that I could make a start on that investigation by posting it at LH and seeing what the collective knowledge of the Hattery turns up. (While as you know I don’t try to keep threads “on topic,” I do hope we can avoid the tiresome issue of whether PC is a Good or Bad Thing and focus on the history of the phrase.)

I don’t remember when I first encountered the mysterious phrase “tace is Latin for (a) candle,” but it must have been long ago, since it’s kept in a very dusty attic of my memory; on the other hand, because it’s now so obscure I’ve very rarely run into it since. Here’s the OED entry (from 1910; note that tace is pronounced the good old anglicizing way, to rhyme with Stacey):

tace, v.
Pronunciation: /ˈteɪsiː/
Etymology: < Latin tacē, imperative of tacēre to be silent.

The Latin for ‘Be silent’. tace is Latin for a candle, a humorously veiled hint to any one to keep silent about something.

[Cf. 1605 W. Camden Remaines i. 162 Edmund of Langley..asked..his sonnes..what was Latine for a fetter-locke: Whereat when the yong gentleman studied, the father said,..I will tell you, Hic hæc hoc taceatis, as advising them to be silent and quiet.]
1697 W. Dampier New Voy. around World xiii. 356 Trust none of them, for they are all Thieves, but Tace is Latin for a Candle.
1752 H. Fielding Amelia I. i. x. 85 ‘Tace, Madam,’ answered Murphy, ‘is Latin for a Candle: I commend your Prudence.’
1821 W. Scott Let. 24 Feb. (1934) VI. 364 Tace shall be hereafter with me Latin for a candle.

Note that there is no attempt to account for what is on its face a nonsensical saying; note also that they classify tace as an English verb because it’s a verb in Latin, which seems to me utter idiocy. But where does the expression come from? Nobody knows! Pascal Tréguer has a good post about it at word histories (the whole site is well worth your attention); after a detailed account of the history of usage, he says:
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Hiphilangsci, which I posted about last year, has an interview with Andrew Garrett about Alfred Kroeber (link goes to both a podcast and, blessedly, a transcript), and if you’re fuzzy on Kroeber’s contributions and on the recent controversy involving him, it’s a good place to start. He’s remembered mostly as an anthropologist, but he made contributions to linguistics as well; some excerpts:

Kroeber was born in 1876 in the U.S. His grandparents were all born in Germany. His father came to the US as a young child, and his mother’s parents were born in Germany, so German was not only his family background but actually his household language. His first language was German. The first book that he read, apparently, was a German translation of Robinson Crusoe. He grew up in New York in a kind of, I guess, humanistic German-Jewish environment and went to Columbia College in Columbia University in the late 1800s as a student of literature. He got an undergraduate degree in comparative literature, and that would have been his trajectory, except that he encountered Franz Boas. He took a seminar from Franz Boas which he described later as transformational and as having adjusted his trajectory towards anthropology. That seminar was oriented towards text explication, and Kroeber described it afterwards as very similar to what the classical philologists will do with Greek or Latin texts, except these were texts with Native American languages, and Kroeber just loved figuring out language, so he got into anthropology through linguistics and text work. The first text documentation that he actually did was in New York working with the Inuktun language recording linguistic materials and texts. […]

You asked about his accomplishments, and it’s very complex, I think, because he was in an anthropology department for his whole career, he’s known today by most people as an anthropologist, but at the time that he started, anthropology and linguistics were not so separated as they are now, and I think many people saw at least some parts of linguistics as being part of anthropology. That was certainly how he was trained. In the first decade or 15 years of his career at Berkeley, most of the work that he did was linguistic in nature. It was work that we would now call language documentation, recording as many languages as possible in California, transcribing texts, publishing text material, and doing all of that with the with the goal of trying to understand the linguistic landscape of California. California has more linguistic diversity in it per square mile, I guess, than any place in the Western Hemisphere, and there are about 98 languages, Indigenous languages, and they belong to 20 or 21 unrelated language families. So the map is very messy, the relationships of the languages are… were unclear, and part of his interest, like the interests of many people at the time, was to try and understand history through linguistic relationships, and so figuring out, kind of doing the primary documentation of languages and figuring out their linguistic relationships was a major goal. And some of his most important publications in the first decade of the 20th century were identifying language families and proposing relationships and subgrouping within language families kind of with that in mind. He also, in the last decade of his life, after he retired, kind of returned to that primary, again, what we would call language documentation – basically, working with the material that he had collected early and had languished and trying to prepare it for publication and so on.

So his career is very much sandwiched by linguistic work. He was actually a president of the Linguistics Society of America at one point. He did quantitative historical linguistic work before lexicostatistics and glottochronology. So he’s kind of underrecognized for his linguistic contributions partly because of the substance of his anthropological contributions.

As for the “denaming” of Kroeber Hall at UC Berkeley, I personally think it’s stupid (Garrett, who supported it, admits Kroeber is basically paying for the sins of early 20th century anthropology in general), but who cares? I have no skin in the game, and I say let Berkeley do what it wants with its buildings. (For the record, I was unqualifiedly in favor of the renaming of Calhoun College at Yale; John C. Calhoun really was a vile bastard.) At any rate, you can find out more about all this at the link; thanks, Y! (N.b.: There’s discussion of the Berkeley renaming in this thread, and I see TR added the podcast link to it while I was composing this post.)

I’m finally getting to watch The Wire, frequently cited as the best television show ever (yes, I know there are other contenders, and I wish jamessal were still around to discuss the matter); I’m six episodes in and completely gripped — the only way I can keep from binging is by reading discussions of each episode after I see it to decompress. I find I have surprisingly little trouble with the various accents, but speaking of accents, I have seen various people complaining that Dominic West, an Englishperson who in general does a good job playing Baltimore cop Jimmy McNulty, screws up by saying /ˈnaːko/ for what the complainants assume should be narco ‘narcotics officer’ (i.e., he’s inexplicably reverting to his native non-rhotic accent for that one word). But this is nonsense: he’s using the separate (and less well known) term knocko ‘(US black) a police officer, esp. a member of the drugs squad,’ from (as Green nicely puts it) “the knocking at one’s door or on one’s skull.” Here are Green’s citations, including one from the second episode of the show:

1950 [US] Goldin et al. DAUL 119/1: Knock-man. A policeman; an informer; a complaining witness in criminal proceedings.
1992 [US] R. Price Clockers 4: The white guy […] looked too twitchy and scared to be a knocko.
1997 [US] Simon & Burns Corner (1998) 16: Plainclothesmen. Knockers. Six police jump out of two unmarked Chevrolets.
2002 [US] Simon & Burns ‘The Detail’ Wire ser. 1 ep. 2 [TV script] Western [Baltimore] knockos come around here, picking shit up off the ground.
2021 [US] J. Fenton We Own This City 4: [T]he officers most likely to make up the plainclothes units known around town as ‘knockers’ or ‘jumpout boys,’ a reference to their aggressive tactics.

So now you know.

Cecily Hilleary writes for VOA about the “rez accent”:

In 1960, linguists predicted that compulsory education, mass media, foreign immigration and the “mobility of restless Americans” would ultimately standardize English, and in only a few generations, regional accents would disappear. Today, some scholars such as University of Pennsylvania sociolinguist William Labov note that while some accents are fading, others are growing stronger.

One example, according to Kalina Newmark, is Native American English, more commonly referred to as the “rez accent,” found among many Indigenous communities in the United States and Canada. Rez is the shortened word for reservation. Newmark, who is Dene and Metis from the Sahtu region of Canada’s Northwest Territories, attended Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, a school well-known for its diverse, Indigenous student body. […]

At Dartmouth, Newmark met Indigenous students from across North America and noticed an interesting phenomenon: Despite their different linguistic backgrounds, their English shared some distinctive features, especially when gathering socially. She found this was the case even with students who had never learned their heritage languages.

When assigned a project studying a non-English language, she and fellow Dartmouth student Nacole Walker, a Lakota from the Standing Rock Reservation in North and South Dakota, decided to investigate the rez accent, which had never been studied before.

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