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I was reading Margaret Drabble’s TLS review (November 20, 2020) of The Walker: On finding and losing yourself in the modern city by Matthew Beaumont when I was driven to post by the following paragraph:

The most entertaining chapter in the volume, on the Big Toe, takes as its starting point a fragmentary essay on the mouth by the surrealist philosopher Georges Bataille, from 1930, which ranges widely through iconography, anthropology, the history of bipedalism, the French physician de la Tourette’s analysis of human gait, and the novels of Thomas Pynchon and Carlo Emilio Gadda. It is full of puns, and thoughts about the nature and meaning of punning. Gadda’s “late modernist masterpiece”, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana (1957) contains, we are told, “an elaborate pun on la luce (meaning ‘light’) and l’alluce (meaning ‘big toe’)”, and introduces us to the feet of various painted saints, with their “flocks” or “herds” of toes. It speaks of the magnificence and hideousness of big toes, which we must stare at, Beaumont admonishes us, “unflinchingly, affirming our fear, horror and hilarity, to celebrate their humanity and inhumanity alike”. Gadda’s puns lead us, mysteriously but inexorably, to the thought that “It is as if creation itself is a ridiculous, Beckettian accident caused by a slip of the tongue”. Beaumont’s own contribution to the rich world of puns comes in a discussion of the opening scene of Coriolanus, where the aristocratic Menenius memorably addresses the rebellious First Citizen as “The great toe of this assembly”. This leads Beaumont, via Bataille and Roland Barthes, to declare that “Bataille, it might be said, calls for the dictatorship of the toeleprariat”.

In the first place, la luce and l’alluce make for a lousy pun, because the latter is stressed on the first syllable (and frankly I’m not impressed by “toeleprariat” either, but then I haven’t read Bataille and Barthes). But l’alluce sent me on a confusing etymological quest. Wiktionary says “From Late Latin (h)allucem, from Latin hallus/allus,” and the hallus entry says “Uncertain; probably a borrowing from a non-IE language. hallux is the only form that suggests an Indo-European structure.” What does that last sentence mean? And how did Italian go from hallus (genitive hallī) to alluce, as if from hallux? Well, there is a hallux, and it’s in the OED — “The innermost of the digits (normally five in number) of the hind foot of an air-breathing vertebrate; the great toe”; unfortunately, the entry is unchanged since 1898, and the etymology is not very helpful: “modern Latin, corrupted < allex (allic-) the great toe (Isidore Gloss.), found once in Plautus in phrase allex. viri a ‘thumb of a man’, a thumbling.” I turned to my Oxford Latin Dictionary and looked up hallus: “see allus.” That took me to:

allus or hallus, m. (app.) The great toe (cf. allex).

The “app.” stands for “apparently”; does that refer to the “m.” or the definition? And allex says “see hallec.” But (h)al(l)ec is a fish sauce! If anyone can bring any order to this mess, I’ll be grateful.
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1) Frequent commenter Jen (in Edinburgh) writes:

I’m reading Peter Moore’s Endeavour, a history covering the life of the ship and its journeys, rather than e.g. a biography of Cook or Banks. Having reached Tahiti, some of the members of Cook’s first expedition have been collecting Tahitian words, and the book notes that one they didn’t collect is Tōtaiete mā, the local name for the archipelago which Cook called the Society Islands.

I have a strong suspicion that it would have been impossible for them to do so – that ‘Tōtaiete’ is a form of the English word ‘society’, in the same way that ‘Kiribati’ is a form of ‘Gilberts’. But I can’t turn up anything about the etymology of the name on a quick search, and Wikipedia just cites the book itself. Do you think your erudite community might know more?

I join her in her suspicion and her quest for knowledge.

2) I just watched the very silly movie Green Dolphin Street (solely because I’ve long loved the Miles Davis version of the movie’s theme, “On Green Dolphin Street,” and I was curious about its original setting). Executive summary: the sisters Marguerite (Donna Reed) and Marianne (Lana Turner) are both in love with the hunky young scapegrace William Ozanne (Richard Hart), who is in love with Marguerite but (having inadvertently deserted from the Royal Navy and wound up helping run a lumber concern in New Zealand) drunkenly sends a letter proposing marriage to Marianne rather than her perkier sister, and when the prim, ambitious Marianne shows up and he realizes his error, there is nothing for it but to swallow hard and marry the wrong woman, which occasions a great deal of hand-wringing, hangdog looks, and emotional outbursts. At any rate, in the section of the movie set in New Zealand there is a fair amount of spoken and chanted Māori (you don’t want to know how the movie treats its Māori characters), and I was curious about how accurate the language was. Anybody happen to know?

Back in 2013, the excellent blog called odamaki posted about an unusual word that the OED had missed (and it’s still not there):

It is incredible to me that the Oxford English Dictionary does not have the word pogonip. Merriam-Webster say that they have a cite from 1865. I had thought that the OED had put all of their material for the letters M through R online, before the editors started jumping around more last year. How did this word fall through the cracks in the OED’s reading program for American genre fiction?

Perhaps pogonip got swept up into general-use dictionaries because it was used in a Louis L’Amour story “Down the Pogonip Trail”. Later writers of Westerns and frontier fiction seem to have propagated the word after that. […]

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Today’s NY Times has a story about Swiss cartographers called “The People Who Draw Rocks” (archived); it’s fascinating, especially if you love maps as much as I do, but what brings it to LH is this sentence:

Known around the office as “felsiers,” a Swiss-German nickname that loosely translates as “the people who draw rocks,” Dähler, along with Jürg Gilgen and Markus Heger, are experts in shaded relief, a technique for illustrating a mountain (and any of its glaciers) so that it appears three-dimensional.

Of course I wanted to know about “felsiers,” clearly based on German Fels ‘rock,’ but I couldn’t find it anywhere, even on the internet — googling [felsiers rock] gets you only the Times story, and googling [Schweizerdeutsch felsier] gets you “Your search did not match any documents.” I realize Swiss German isn’t well represented online — you can’t google up a comprehensive Schweizerdeutsch dictionary the way you can French or standard German — but I’d like to be sure this is an actual word and not a Times distortion, so if any German-speaking Hatters can help out, I’ll be grateful.

I finally finished Makanin’s 1998 novel Андеграунд, или Герой нашего времени [Underground, or A hero of our time], about a Brezhnev-era “underground writer” who stopped writing and in the early 1990s is spending his time drinking and walking the corridors of the large, run-down apartment building where he makes a semi-legal living watching people’s apartments while they’re away; it took me three weeks, but I’m not going to make a post of it, because I’m not sure what to say about it other than that it’s long, dense, complex, and worth the reading, and also because it hasn’t been translated, so what’s the point of recommending it? At any rate, I moved on to Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s (much shorter) novel Весёлые похороны [The cheerful funeral, translated as The Funeral Party], which is set — very unusually for a Russian novel! — in New York, and near the start of chapter 2 I read:

Тетка села на самый край сиденья, растопырив розовые ноги в подследниках, которые на этом континенте не водились.

Her aunt sat at the very edge of the seat, spreading her pink legs/feet in podsledniki, which are not found on this continent.

Well, of course I turned to my dictionaries for the unknown-to-me podsledniki, only to find that it wasn’t in any of them, even the huge three-volume one. Fortunately, Google came to the rescue, providing descriptions like “Чулочно носочное изделие женское и для девочек, покрывающее ступни ног частично или полностью” [Women’s and girls’ hosiery, covering the feet in part or in full] and “это своего рода хитрость, которая позволяет даже самую неудобную обувь носить с комфортом и удобством” [it’s a kind of trick that allows even the most uncomfortable shoes to be worn with comfort and convenience]. So I had a decent idea of what it was, but no clue as to what it was called in English. I turned to my wife, who after hearing the description said “Oh, you mean Peds.” I had heard that term, but didn’t know what it was, so now I knew — but that word isn’t in dictionaries either! It’s a trade name that’s become the usual term, like Kleenex, but while the latter is in the OED (“The proprietary name of an absorbent disposable cleansing paper tissue,” first citation 1925), Peds isn’t, nor is it in any other reference book available to me. I thought at least Wikipedia would help, but the article PEDS Legwear is entirely useless, providing reams of corporate-history trivia but saying nothing whatever about the origin of the name or how long it’s been in use. A Google Books search turned up evidence of its existence in 1936, if the metadata for Broadcasting are to be believed, so that’s something, but it is, frankly, shocking that I can’t find out anything more in this twenty-second year of the twenty-first century. And I can’t help suspecting that the fact that the terms and what they represent are used largely by women has more than a little to do with their absence from lexica. (Another curious fact: a Russian Language Corpus search on подследник* gets zero results, so this novel is apparently not included in the corpus, even though other books of Ulitskaya’s are.) As always, any information is welcome.

Tobias Gregory’s “Don’t break that fiddle” (LRB, 19 November 2020; archived) is a review essay about literary imitation, a topic that has long fascinated me (cf. Axe Handles, Love and Theft, Against My Will, Mimesis); I’ll quote some good bits and let you head for the links if you want more:

How is imitation taught and learned? Is it like apprenticeship to a master, a matter of acquiring skill through practice? How would the apprenticeship model work if your master wrote in another language, time and place? Is imitation a phase, to be practised by a beginner and then dispensed with? How, as a reader or critic, do you identify, evaluate and discuss literary imitation? Does it require a demonstrable verbal resemblance between old and new? How can you tell when imitation is intentional, or when a precursor’s influence has crept in unbidden? Does it matter? On what grounds do you judge whether the imitating author has produced a living child or a lifeless portrait?

These are some of the questions that a history of literary imitation will explore. It is an enormous subject. Even if you want to stick to literature – a hard enough category to circumscribe – you can’t. Plato and Aristotle, whose discussions of mimesis started the ball rolling, were concerned with the way poets imitated reality, rather than their imitation of other authors. That somewhat narrower question emerged from the Roman rhetorical tradition, which is why literary imitation has usually been denoted by the Latin imitatio rather than the Greek mimesis. But the boundary between the broader and narrower senses has never been firm, and the history of literary imitation has always been bound up with the histories of philosophy, rhetoric and education. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil, Seneca, Quintilian, Petrarch and Erasmus will figure in any serious treatment, and from there it’s up for grabs. A different book could be written for each modern vernacular literature that bears the influence of classical antiquity. A thorough account will include both theory and practice: critical and philosophical writing on imitation, and the way authors have actually gone about it. Books, articles, whole careers have been devoted to studying particular cases: Virgil imitating Homer, or Renaissance humanists imitating Cicero, or English Romantics imitating Milton, or modern novelists trying not to imitate Joyce. A historian of imitation has to survey this vast body of scholarship without becoming overwhelmed. […]

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Whether you play Scrabble or not, this Stefan Fatsis piece for Slate is a good read if you like words, and I know you do: “It started at dinner two Saturdays ago, where the conversation turned, as it does at tournaments, to words that were played that day and words that were not…”

I got the link via MetaFilter, where potrzebie made a comment I can’t resist sharing here:

Once when I was playing Words with Friends with someone I was telling them about how my family’s Scrabble games always go off the rails and recounted this one specific dubious word my sister clearly made up and played, hoping it was real, and we challenged it but it turned out it was in fact real, and as a direct consequence she won the game.

Not five minutes later my friend played that dubious word. Six letter word, none of the letters super rare, but still, come on. My friend hadn’t heard the word before and I just handed off the exact word they needed to use most of their tiles a couple rounds later.

This has to have been ten years ago now and I still get all these feelings every time I think about it. Scrabble is fkn wild.

(The next comment was “And the word was..?” but potrzebie hasn’t responded yet.)

Via Laudator Temporis Acti, Edwin Muir reports on his cousin Sutherland:

Whenever Sutherland got drunk he began to invent language. I can’t remember now many of his feats in this way, but he liked words with a dashing Spanish sound, like ‘yickahooka’ and ‘navahonta.’ He was so pleased with the word ‘tramcollicken,’ which he invented himself, that he gave it a specific meaning which I had better not mention; but the word became so popular that it spread all over Wyre. From somewhere or other he had picked up ‘graminivorous,’ which struck him by its comic sound, and for a long time his usual greeting was, “Weel, boy, how’s thee graminivorous tramcollicken?”

One wishes he hadn’t been so reticent about the meaning of “tramcollicken” (and one wonders why “yickahooka” and “navahonta” were thought to sound Spanish), but a very enjoyable quote, and I may have to start saying “Weel, boy, how’s thee graminivorous tramcollicken?”

I had never heard of namburbi, but it’s such a fine word I had to post it. Wikipedia sez:

The NAM-BÚR-BI are magical texts which take the form of incantations (Akkadian: namburbȗ). They were named for a series of prophylactic Babylonian and Assyrian rituals to avert inauspicious portents before they took on tangible form. At the core of these rituals was an appeal by the subject of the sinister omen to the divine judicial court to obtain a change to his impending fate. From the corpus of Babylonian-Assyrian religious texts that has survived, there are approximately one hundred and forty texts, many preserved in several copies, to which this label may be applied. […]

The Sumerian rubric, NAM-BÚR-BI, which devolved from the broader class of counter-rituals, literally means “(ritual for) undoing of it (i.e of the portended evil)” or “apotropaeon,” where the Sumerian possessive suffix BI was originally a reference to a preceding omen apodosis. The impending catastrophe identified in the apodosis was to be averted by the implementation of an apotropaic ritual. In addition to dissolution NAM-BÚR-BI, it is also a generic name for rituals, NAM-BÚR written phonetically as nappulu in late Babylonian sources. In a few ritual descriptions of the 1st millennium BC, the caption NAM-BÚR-BI is found with its general, rather than the more specific “apotropaic ritual” context.

I don’t know what it means to say “NAM-BÚR written phonetically as nappulu” — are they implying that that’s the sound represented by the cuneiform spelling? I don’t know why they start off using “NAM-BÚR-BI” (in small caps, which I’m too lazy to reproduce) and then later in the article switch to “namburbi” (multiple authors and no copyediting, I suppose). And the last paragraph is absurdly speculative: “The profound psychological effect of the release ritual cannot be underestimated. For the private individual it would have had a deep impression, akin to absolution, but to a monarch it may have altered his behavior.” But it’s an interesting topic and a great word. Thanks, Ariel!

Thanks to the comments on Dmitry Pruss’s Facebook post, I went to Wiktionary and learned (or re-learned) that the familiar Russian word чемодан (chemodan) ‘suitcase’ is “Via a Turkic medium, from Persian جامه‌دان‎ (jâme-dân, ‘suitcase’)” [literally ‘garment-holder’]. And they add this very interesting fact: “Note that this Russian term has later become the source of re-borrowing into modern Persian چمدان‎ (čamedân) and many Turkic languages.” In the FB thread, Jamile Modarress Woods wrote “Chamedan is the name of a BBC program about Iranian exiles.” Reborrowings are fun.

And the post itself featured the marvelous Russian palindrome “чемодан… а надо меч” [a suitcase… but a sword is needed], illustrated by an image of Julius Caesar being attacked by a horde of assassins. Sadly, no one thought to photoshop in a suitcase.

Addendum. I won’t make a separate post of it, but the immortal Yuz Aleshkovsky has turned out, alas, to be mortal after all; he died today in Tampa. Here’s my post about him.