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My final post from David Daiches’ Two Worlds (see this post), from chapter 7, is probably the most Hattic of the lot; it’s about Scots Yiddish, which intrigued me in 2014:

The morning slow train from Edinburgh to Dundee used to stop (as I suppose it still does) at many of the Fife coast towns on the way. This is why the train used to be, in the 1920s, the favourite mode of transport of those Edinburgh Jews who made a precarious living as itinerant salesmen, peddling anything from sewing needles to ready-made dresses among the good housewives and fisherfolk of Fife. They were the ‘trebblers’, in their own Scots-Yiddish idiom; they had come as young men from Lithuania or Poland seeking freedom and opportunity but somehow had never got on as they had planned. Those with more push and enterprise had moved westward to Glasgow and often on from there to America; a few had managed to build up flourishing businesses in Edinburgh; but the trebblers were the failures, who spent their days carrying their battered suitcases from door to door in the little grey towns of Fife, to return home in the evening with a pound gained to a shabby but comfortable flat in one of the more run-down districts of Edinburgh. There, in old stone buildings where the gentry and nobility of Scotland had lived in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, within a stone’s throw of the ‘Royal Mile’ with its violent and picturesque historical associations, they re-created the atmosphere of the Ghetto and lived a life of self-contained Jewish orthodoxy. Edinburgh, one of the few European capitals with no anti-semitism in its history, accepted them with characteristic cool interest. In its semi-slums they learned such English as they knew, which meant in fact that they grafted the debased Scots of the Edinburgh streets on to their native Yiddish to produce one of the most remarkable dialects ever spoken by man. (Yet not such a comically incredible speech as my American friends seem to imagine: Scots preserves many Germanic words lost in standard English and found, in a similar or even identical form, in Yiddish, as ‘lift’ for air (German Luft), ‘licht’ for light (identical in Scots, German and Yiddish), ‘hoast’ for cough (German husten). Douglas Young has pointed out that Goethe’s last words, ‘mehr licht’, would have been pronounced the same in Scots, ‘mair licht’; and they would be the same in Yiddish.) Their sons and daughters, making full use of the city’s admirable educational facilities, grew up to be doctors and scientists and professors, changing their names from Pinkinsky to Penn, from Finkelstein to Fenton, from Turiansky to Torrence. But they themselves, the Scottish-Jewish pioneers who never quite got where they wanted to go, changed nothing. On Fridays in the winter, when the sun set early, they would be home by the middle of the afternoon, to welcome the sabbath. On Saturday, of course, as well as on all Jewish festivals, there was no ‘trebbling’. And on weekdays in the Dundee train they would chant their morning prayers, strapping their phylacteries on to arm and forehead.

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Ian Austen reports for the NY Times (archived):

When Kristy Findlay moved to Quebec City after her American-born husband accepted a job there, she soon developed a longing. “I would go to parks with my young children, I would hear a little English spoken, and I feel like: Oh my gosh, I’m hungry for it,” said Ms. Findlay, who was raised in Ontario. […]

But even in this Francophone redoubt, Ms. Findlay was ultimately able to find a place where her craving for conversation in her native language could be sated. At a former jail and Presbyterian college standing amid the cobblestone streets of the city’s historic Upper Town, a discreet sign above the entrance, reading simply “Morrin,” gives no hint of the linguistic heterodoxy taking place inside.

The Morrin Cultural Centre acts as a hub for Quebec City’s English speakers much the same way as outposts of the Goethe-Institut do for Germans living abroad. It’s a place for books, education, conversation and, above all, it’s a reminder to English speakers that they aren’t alone.

At its heart is the city’s only English-language library. With its cast iron balcony railings and green leather chairs, it still has a decided 19th-century flavor, even if its wooden shelves are filled with contemporary titles. […]

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LH reader/commenter Martin writes:

Back in 1971, I worked for a few months in a flower bulb packing and shipping operation in New Jersey, alongside a bunch of pretty raunchy women who were fond of the expression “Kiss my taint!” They explained to me the taint is the area between anus and genitals, because “T’aint the one hole and t’aint the other hole.” […]

“Taint” was included in E. E. Landy’s Underground Dictionary (page 181) in 1972, with the same etymology as that supplied by my New Jersey co-workers in 1971.

I responded: “Amazingly, it’s in the OED (entry published 2017 [coarse slang (originally U.S.). The perineum.])… with the same etymology!” To wit:

Representing a colloquial pronunciation of it ain’t < it pron. (compare α forms at it pron., adj., & n.¹) + ain’t at be v. α forms.

For the semantic motivation see quot. 1955. [“My prick was throbbing somewhere around her taint—you know what a woman’s taint is: ‘taint asshole and ‘taint cunt,” ‘W. Baron’, Play this Love with Me v. 62]

As Martin says, a rare case where the folk etymology seems to be right.

Unrelated, but I’ve run across the odd surname Sencindiver, whose origin seems to be unknown; this site says “The family name Sencindiver does not have a known European origin. The meaning of the name is not clear but it is possibly of American or Native American origin.”

Or, if you prefer, controsentences. Matthew Reisz posted in Facebook:

Are there many examples of sentences which can be interpreted in two completely opposite ways? I came across a striking case the other day and thought I’d do a nerdy post about it in the hope of encouraging people to come up with their own.

My wife was very ill during the pandemic, spending several weeks alone in hospital while largely cut off from family or friends. When we were recently discussing how she managed to get through this horrible ordeal, my son said to her: “You never lost your temper.”

Initially, I was pretty startled by this statement, since I certainly remember her lashing out at incompetent or irritating nurses (although she usually apologised afterwards), not to mention the tiresome people who came up with bland platitudes to try and cheer her up.

But then I realised Julian meant something else. Françoise had never “lost her temper” in the different and slightly more unusual sense that she had never lost her capacity to get angry – just as one might say that someone had never lost their sense of humour or their optimism during hard times.

In other words, she demonstrated that she had not lost her temper (in one sense) precisely by losing her temper (in another). Or, to put it the other way round, losing her temper was actually a sign that she had not lost her temper! It would be hard to find a more perfect example of a sentence which meant both one thing and its exact opposite. And that set me wondering how common this is.

He goes on to talk about “words, known as contronyms, which can mean both one thing and something close to its exact opposite,” but those are more common and more familiar; the sentence thing is interesting — though with regard to this particular example, I agree with Kathryn Gray, who commented:

While I get what you mean, and it’s strictly correct, ‘losing your temper’ is so *in* the English language as idiom for ‘becoming angry’ that I would and could never think of it in any other way or assume any other meaning is intended by the speaker than ‘becoming angry’.

In one of those lists of Words for Things You Didn’t Know Had Names (e.g.) I saw an entry for vagitus ‘the cry of a new-born child.’ My initial reaction was skepticism — I assumed it was a Latin word dragged kicking and screaming into an English context where it didn’t belong — but a look at the OED (entry from 1986) showed that it is in fact used, however rarely:

a1651 Thou hast not yet the strength of a well grown Christian; well, but is there the vagitus of an Infant?
N. Culverwell, White Stone in Elegant Discourse of Light of Nature (1652) ii. 119

1825 Vagitus, the cry of young children; also the distressing cry of persons under surgical operations.
R. Hooper, Lexicon Medicum (ed. 5) 1237/1

1921 The various inspired articles..hardly went beyond the vagitus, the earliest cry of the new-born method.
19th Century & After July 28

1938 To go back no further than the vagitus, it had not been the proper A of international concert pitch,..but the double flat of this.
S. Beckett, Murphy v. 71

1957 He actually seemed to forehear the babe’s vagitus.
V. Nabokov, Pnin ii. 47

1977 My speech was to be nothing more than a vagitus, an infantile cry.
A. Sheridan, translation of J. Lacan, Écrits iii. 31

The etymology is simplicity itself: “Latin, < vāgīre to utter cries of distress, to wail.” And the pronunciation — pay attention, now — is /vəˈdʒʌɪtəs/ (vuh-JYE-tus, first two syllables as in vagina); if you’re going to use this extremely obscure and marginal word, make sure you know how to say it.

As dubious as I am about it, I give it major props for having been used by Beckett and Nabokov; if it’s OK with two of the greatest prose writers in English, who am I to say it nay?
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My wife and I are reading Nancy Mitford’s 1945 novel The Pursuit Of Love (as AJP recommended back in 2012) and we reached a passage that prefigured her famous 1954 essay “The English Aristocracy” and the Alan S. C. Ross article it was based on, about U and non-U English:

Uncle Matthew and Aunt Emily were now engaged upon an argument we had all heard many times before. It concerned the education of females.

Uncle Matthew: ‘I hope poor Fanny’s school (the word school pronounced in tones of withering scorn) is doing her all the good you think it is. Certainly she picks up some dreadful expressions there.’

Aunt Emily, calmly, but on the defensive: ‘Very likely she does. She also picks up a good deal of education.’

Uncle Matthew: ‘Education! I was always led to believe that no educated person ever spoke of notepaper, and yet I hear poor Fanny asking Sadie for notepaper. What is this education? Fanny talks about mirrors and mantlepieces, handbags and perfume, she takes sugar in her coffee, has a tassel on her umbrella, and I have no doubt that, if she is ever fortunate enough to catch a husband, she will call his father and mother Father and Mother. Will the wonderful education she is getting make up to the unhappy brute for all these endless pinpricks? Fancy hearing one’s wife talking about notepaper – the irritation!’

Aunty Emily: ‘A lot of men would find it more irritating to have a wife who had never heard of George III. (All the same, Fanny darling, it is called writing paper you know – don’t let’s hear any more about the note, please.)’

For notepaper, mirror, mantlepiece, and perfume, see the list at the Wikipedia article I linked above; I don’t know what the problem with handbags is, or why one should not take sugar in one’s coffee or have a tassel on one’s umbrella, but I’m sure someone here will enlighten me.

I knew, of course, that Blighty was an old-fashioned term for Britain, and I had the idea that it came from Hindustani, but having looked it up I find the details interesting enough to post. Wikipedia says:

“Blighty” is a British English slang term for Great Britain, or often specifically England. Though it was used throughout the 1800s in the Indian subcontinent to mean an English or British visitor, it was first used during the Boer War in the specific meaning of homeland for the English or the British. From World War I and afterward, that use of the term became widespread.

The word ultimately derives from the Persian word viletī, (from a regional Hindustani language with the use of b replacing v) meaning ‘foreign’, which more specifically came to mean ‘European’, and ‘British; English’ during the time of the British Raj. The Bengali word is a loan of Indian Persian vilāyatī (ولایاتی), from vilāyat (ولایت) meaning ‘Iran’ and later ‘Europe’ or ‘Britain’, ultimately from Arabic wilāyah ولاية‎ meaning ‘state, province’. […]

Blighty is commonly used as a term of endearment by the expatriate British community or those on holiday to refer to home. In Hobson-Jobson, an 1886 historical dictionary of Anglo-Indian words, Henry Yule and Arthur Coke Burnell explained that the word came to be used in British India for several things the British had brought into the country, such as the tomato and soda water.

Wiktionary also refers to Hobson-Jobson, but I can’t find the word in either my fat paperback copy or the online versions I’ve checked — the relevant entry seems to be this one:

BILAYUT, BILLAIT, &c. n.p. Europe. The word is properly Ar. Wilāyat, ‘a kingdom, a province,’ variously used with specific denotation, as the Afghans term their own country often by this name; and in India again it has come to be employed for distant Europe. In Sicily Il Regno is used for the interior of the island, as we use Mofussil in India. Wilāyat is the usual form in Bombay.

The OED (entry revised 2014) just says “< Urdu bilāyatī, regional variant of vilāyatī vilayati adj.”; the real meat is at that vilayati entry (first added in 2014). The definition is “South Asian. A foreigner; (originally) esp. an English, British, or European person,” and the etymology:

< (i) Urdu vilāyatī (also regional bilāyatī) and its etymon (ii) Persian vilāyatī foreign, especially British or European < vilāyat inhabited country, dominion, district (see Vilayat n.) + ‑ī, suffix forming adjectives expressing belonging (see ‑i suffix²).

Notes
The Urdu adjective is also reflected in occasional earlier borrowings of phrases, as e.g. Belattee Sahib, Blighty Sahib, literally ‘foreign gentleman’ (1833 or earlier; < vilāyatī šāḥib; compare sahib n.) and belaitee panee, belati pani soda water (1835 or earlier; < Urdu vilāyatī pānī, literally ‘foreign water’; compare pani n.).

In any case, it’s an enjoyable word, and I’m sorry it fell out of fashion.

John Jamieson’s Humanising the text: Walter Benjamin and machine translation has a good deal to say about Walter Benjamin’s ideas about language and understanding a text, as well as “the seemingly inexorable drift we are seeing towards a disembodied language — the language of machine translation output and AI.” He begins with “an article in a Finnish philosophy magazine about a new collection of Walter Benjamin essays translated into Finnish” and says:

The essential idea I gleaned from the article was the contemporary — that is to say, occurring about 100 years ago — decline in the art of storytelling. Particularly in “The Storyteller” (Der Erzähler), his essay devoted to the Russian author Nikolai Leskov, Benjamin describes and laments a transition from the epic genre, storytelling and the “exchange of experience” — firstly to printed texts and the novel, and then ultimately to mere “information”.

This transition from relationships to information provides a very useful and suggestive framework for describing linguistic communication on all sorts of different scales, and on many different levels, from the most general — the evolution of language as such — to the most specific — ie what happens every time we open our mouths or listen to what someone is saying to us.

It seems to me that the starting point on Benjamin’s transition — the genuine exchange of experience — is basically where speech comes from, where it originates.

But what I want to highlight, as usual, is the part where he gets specific:
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This one-and-a-half-minute video by Khalid Al Ameri will give you a brief introduction to some of the languages of India, as well as a good laugh. (Via Language Log.)

A guest Log post by Bob Ladd opened my eyes to a language issue I had never noticed:

A few days ago I received an editorial decision letter from a journal, which included a request to deal with a few typos. I had begun a sentence with the phrase “In the interests of brevity,” and the editor wanted me to remove the final -s from the word “interests”. Since I know that the editor is not a native speaker of English, my first reaction was to ignore the request, but I thought I should back up my insistence that this was not a typo with some sort of evidence, so I searched for the phrases “in the interests of” and “in the interest of” on Google n-grams. To my surprise, I discovered that both versions of the expression occur, with a roughly 60:40 preference for the version with “interest”, and that this proportion has been roughly stable since the early 20th century. Since Google’s book corpus permits the user to distinguish British and American English, I could also see that the version with “interests” is more common in BrEng and the version with “interest” in AmEng, but that both versions occur in both varieties.

He ends up with this:

I have never seen this difference cited as an example of British/American variation, and nor do I know of any prescriptive grumbling about people using the wrong version. In fact, until I received the editorial review last week, I was completely unaware of the existence of this variation. The consistency in my own writing suggests that individual speakers may settle on one form or the other and use it exclusively, but that the choice is essentially random.

Since modern sociolinguistics has made clear that much variation is meaningful, this conclusion is vaguely troubling. Only one observation from Google n-grams suggests something other than randomness: there is a striking diachronic difference that suggests that the choice between the two versions may once have meant something. Over the two centuries of the Google Books corpus, AmEng consistently prefers the version with “interest” in a ratio of about 3:1, while in BrEng there was a marked shift in the second half of the 19th century: over the course of 50 years or so British usage swung from 3:1 in favour of “interest” (as in AmEng) to 3:1 in favour of “interests”. The new British preference for “interests” then remains consistent through the 20th century, and this is what averages out to the 60:40 proportion in 20th century English as a whole. Could there have been a social motivation for the change in British usage?

For what it’s worth, here’s what the OED (entry revised 2024) says:
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