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Tom Shippey’s LRB review (3 December 2020; archived) of Edward the Confessor: Last of the Royal Blood by Tom Licence makes a good point about one of Edward’s posthumous problems:

It didn’t help his reputation to be saddled with the designation ‘the Confessor’, for hardly anyone knows what that means. Did he have things to confess? Was he someone people confessed to, like a priest? The term seems to have been attached to him by successive biographers in an attempt to get him canonised as a saint, and in that context ‘confessor’ is a term for someone slightly lower down the sanctity scale than a martyr, one who professes his faith in and adheres to Christianity in spite of persecution (which doesn’t seem to apply to Edward at all: his enemies were all Christians too).

The OED (entry from 1891) defines it thus:

technical. One who avows his religion in the face of danger, and adheres to it under persecution and torture, but does not suffer martyrdom; spec. one who has been recognized by the church in this character. (The earliest sense in English.)

And they have this interesting note on pronunciation:

The historical pronunciation, < Anglo-Norman and Middle English confeˈssour, is ˈconfessor, which is found in all the poets, and is recognized by the dictionaries generally, down to Smart, 1836–49, who has ˈconfessor in senses 2 [the one I quoted], 3 [“One who hears confessions”], conˈfesser in sense 1b [“One who makes confession or public acknowledgement or avowal … of a crime, sin, or offence charged”]; for these, Craig 1847 has ˈconfessor and conˈfessor; but conˈfessor is now generally said for both.

Daniel Jones (13th ed., 1967) says first-syllable stress is used by “some Catholics.”
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I’m making my way through Mikhail Shishkin’s Взятие Измаила [The taking of Izmail] (see this LH post on Shishkin) and trying to grasp all his far-flung references, but one has so far defeated me, and I’m hoping against hope that one of my variously learned readers can explain it. Here’s the passage, part of a long speech by a defense lawyer trying to convince a jury not to convict his client, a mother who killed her own child (the time, though unclear, is sometime between the legal reforms of the 1860s and the Revolution):

How can killing be avoided?! Just imagine for a moment that Cain did not kill Abel! And then it turns out that there was nothing: no Julius Caesar, no Napoleon, no Sistine Madonna, no Appassionata, no Shakespeare, or Goethe, or War and Peace, or Crime and Punishment! Nothing! And you keep repeating your “Thou shalt not kill”! Come to your senses, Hipponians!

Да как же не убивать?! Представьте себе только на минуту — Каин не убивал Авеля! И тогда получается, что ничего не было: ни Юлия Цезаря, ни Наполеона, ни Сикстинской мадонны, ни Аппассионаты, ни Шекспира, ни Гете, ни «Войны и мира», ни «Преступления и наказания»! Ничего! А вы талдычите свое: не убий! Иппонийцы, опомнитесь!

There were various towns called Hippo — Thucydides mentions one in Italy, Josephus one that helped massacre Jews, and of course there was Augustine’s — but I have no idea which one’s citizens might be brought into this context or why.

A couple of other interesting bits from the novel: at one point, a speaker says “если у бедя дазборг” [if the bed′ has a dazborg], and I was at a loss until I realized it stood for “если у меня насморк” [if I have a cold]; i.e., it’s the Russian equivalent of “if I hab a code.” In another legal speech, the orator says “Да вы сами посмотрите на галиэю” [But look at the galieya yourselves]; a little googling convinced me this was the Heliaea (Ἡλιαία, Doric Ἁλία), the supreme court of ancient Athens. And in yet another long speech, Guryev, a bitter young man recently released from the Gulag, says “Не в силе Бог, но в правде!” [God is not in strength, but in truth!] I immediately recognized this as a familiar quote, and a little googling told me that I knew it from The Brothers Karamazov: the “Mysterious Visitor” tells Zosima “Господь не в силе, а в правде” [God is not in strength but in truth]… but also from the movie Брат 2 (Brother 2), where Danila says to Mennis:

Вот скажи мне, американец, в чём сила! Разве в деньгах? Вот и брат говорит, что в деньгах. У тебя много денег, и чего? Я вот думаю, что сила в правде: у кого правда, тот и сильней!

Tell me, American, what is strength? Is it in money? My brother says it’s in money. You have a lot of money, and so what? I think strength is in truth: whoever has the truth is the strongest!

And I learned that it’s originally from the speech of Alexander Nevsky to the Novgorodians before leading them out to defeat a stronger Swedish army in 1240. I love the way a cultural nugget like that can make its way from the thirteenth century to the twenty-first, acquiring different connotations along the way. (Oddly, the Russian Wikipedia article only discusses Alexander Nevsky, ignoring all later uses.)

The Economist (no author given) reports (archived) on an interesting aspect of Brazilian Portuguese:

The song, a hit at Brazil’s carnival in 2014, starts like any other. A man wonders whether a woman will still love him after he loses his job, his house and his car. But then the chorus gets weird. If the woman stays, the singer belts over a thumping drum, it is because she likes his “lepo lepo”. Most Brazilians had no idea what “lepo lepo” meant.

A talk-show host put the question to strangers on the street. “I use it a lot, but I don’t know,” one man admitted. Some people guessed that it was slang for penis (it is actually slang for sex or sexual prowess). It turned out that the phrase was unfamiliar outside Bahia, the north-eastern state where Psirico, the band, is from.

No matter. Its construction, a loose example of what linguists call reduplication, a way of forming words in which an existing word or part of a word gets repeated, is common in Brazilian Portuguese. “We play around with words, and end up making new ones,” says Márcio Victor, the lead singer of Psirico.

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OK, it should be “no left temporal lobe,” but my title is punchier. Anyway, Grace Browne writes for WIRED about a remarkable case study:

In early February 2016, after reading an article featuring a couple of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who were studying how the brain reacts to music, a woman felt inclined to email them. “I have an interesting brain,” she told them.

EG, who has requested to go by her initials to protect her privacy, is missing her left temporal lobe, a part of the brain thought to be involved in language processing. EG, however, wasn’t quite the right fit for what the scientists were studying, so they referred her to Evelina Fedorenko, a cognitive neuroscientist, also at MIT, who studies language. It was the beginning of a fruitful relationship. The first paper based on EG’s brain was recently published in the journal Neuropsychologia, and Fedorenko’s team expects to publish several more.

For EG, who is in her fifties and grew up in Connecticut, missing a large chunk of her brain has had surprisingly little effect on her life. She has a graduate degree, has enjoyed an impressive career, and speaks Russian—a second language–so well that she has dreamed in it. She first learned her brain was atypical in the autumn of 1987, at George Washington University Hospital, when she had it scanned for an unrelated reason. The cause was likely a stroke that happened when she was a baby; today, there is only cerebro-spinal fluid in that brain area. […] Over the years, she says, doctors have repeatedly told EG that her brain doesn’t make sense. One doctor told her she should have seizures, or that she shouldn’t have a good vocabulary—and “he was annoyed that I did,” she says. (As part of the study at MIT, EG tested in the 98th percentile for vocabulary.) The experiences were frustrating; they “pissed me off,” as EG puts it. “They made so many pronouncements and conclusions without any investigation whatsoever,” she says.

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Boy, is this a handy site (and a natural for LH): Linguist names.

How often does this come up? You encounter a name of a linguist that you need to say out loud, and you have no idea how to say it. The goal of this page is collect some names that have presented this sort of problem either for me or for other linguists.

People who are linked without comment have included IPA transcriptions of their name pronunciations on their websites. NB: If people pronounce your name differently from how you’d like it to be pronounced, or if you’ve ever been asked how to pronounce your name, that’s a hint that you should put that information on your website. It is more likely to reach the target audience if it’s on your site than on mine. Roman Jakobson–you’re off the hook on this one.

As I scrolled down, I kept thinking “Huh — I never would have guessed.” Who knew that William Labov says [ləbˈoʊv]? And I would have pronounced Katherine Demuth’s surname like the painter Charles (/dɪˈmuθ/) if it hadn’t been for Maria Gouskova informing me it was [dˈiməθ]. Gouskova modestly doesn’t include her own name on the list, but on her homepage she conveniently has it in both English ([məˈɹijə ɡuˈskoʊvə]) and Russian ([mˠaˈrʲijə ɡˠusʲˈkˠovˠə]) versions, with audio files. (Thanks, Y!)

Mark Liberman at the Log posts about Lau, Geipel, Wu, & Keysar, “The extreme illusion of understanding” (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2022), whose abstract reads:

Though speakers and listeners monitor communication success, they systematically overestimate it. We report an extreme illusion of understanding that exists even without shared language. Native Mandarin Chinese speakers overestimated how well native English-speaking Americans understood what they said in Chinese, even when they were informed that the listeners knew no Chinese. These listeners also believed they understood the intentions of the Chinese speakers much more than they actually did. This extreme illusion impacts theories of speech monitoring and may be consequential in real-life, where miscommunication is costly.

Mark says:

In the first phase of the study, 240 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese were paired, and given 12 pragmatically ambiguous phrases […] Both speakers and listeners tended to overestimate the success of the verbal disambiguation […].

In the second phrase of the experiment,

We recruited 120 native English-speaking Americans as listeners. Each American listener was yoked to a Chinese speaker and was presented with an English version of the phrases and meanings. The procedure for the American listeners was identical to that of the Chinese listeners, except that they heard the speakers via audio recordings.

A similar overestimation of understanding persisted:

Next, we report the most surprising finding: the illusion of understanding persists even when the listener doesn’t know the language.

[…]

On average, American listeners who did not know Chinese identified the intended meanings 35% of the time, which was better than chance (25%) […] Though American listeners were less accurate than Chinese listeners, […] they still overestimated their success by 30pp, believing that they succeeded 65% of the time […] The Chinese speakers overestimated here as well. While Chinese speakers indicated that the American listeners would understand less (50%) than the Chinese listeners (70%),[…] they still overestimated the American listeners’ understanding by 15pp […].

I’m surprised at how surprised I am that people would think they could understand so much of a language they don’t know; I thought I was more cynical.

Faithful link-provider Trevor sent me a BBC story about a parliamentary first:

The popular Welsh word cwtch has been used for the first time in the UK Parliament. It commonly means a hug or cuddle but has no literal English translation. Brecon and Radnorshire MP Fay Jones said cwtch while questioning Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the House of Commons on 5 January. It is the only time the word has been recorded in Hansard, which publicly publishes a record of all parliamentary debates verbatim.

The Conservative politician was criticising Wales’ Covid regulations last Wednesday and said: “On Friday, I will be holding my team meeting in the local pub because under Welsh government rules we are not allowed to go to our socially distanced office. We cannot do Parkrun and we cannot watch outdoor sport on the touchline – but we can cwtch up together in the clubhouse to watch it.” […]

Ms Jones tweeted: “Absolutely delighted to learn this morning that my use of the word ‘cwtch’ in the Commons last week was the first time that word has ever been used in Parliament.” In 2019, another Welsh MP, Rhondda’s Chris Bryant, was making an ultimately unsuccessful run for election as Commons Speaker when he said that MPs “need more of a cwtch” – although he said it in interviews outside the chamber.

I was, of course, intrigued by the word; fortunately, the OED added it in December 2005:
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Having finished my latest Pelevin novel, Generation «П» (1999), I’m simultaneously amused and a bit disappointed — I’m glad I read it, mind you, but it signals what from my point of view is a descent from a generalized mystico-sociopolitical madness grounded in history (Russian and Soviet) to a ripped-from-the-headlines version that made him even more popular at the time and that he has continued ever since. I’ll let Mark Lipovetsky provide a general description (from his chapter “Postmodernist Novel” in Russian Literature since 1991 — see this post):

When Generation “P” (translated in English as Homo Zapiens and Babylon) appeared, the majority of Russian critics contemptuously attributed the novel’s unprecedented success to its political relevance — a fantastic version of the 1998 “default” of Russia’s economy and the subsequent resignation of the government – as well as to Pelevin’s recognizable parodies of numerous TV commercials. It was the first of Pelevin’s novels in which the writer displayed his unique sensibility to the “political unconscious” of the given moment and his ability to materialize phantasms hidden in political rhetoric by captivating and grotesque plots and images. However, what initially seemed well-packed journalism, is today almost universally acknowledged as one of the most impressive snapshots of, if not monuments to, the first post-Soviet decade.

Furthermore, when rereading Pelevin’s novel today, one cannot fail to notice its prognostic aspect. Even on a surface level, the novel presents a shrewd political forecast for the 2000s. In Generation “P,” a graduate from the Literary Institute trained to translate poetry from languages he does not know, a character without features but with a “pile of cynicism,” Vavilen Tatarsky, a virtual non-entity and pawn on the chessboard of invisible mighty players, becomes a copywriter, first for commercial then subsequently political advertisements, and as a result rises to the position of the supreme ruler of the media space, the living god and head of the ancient Guild of Chaldeans secretly ruling post-Soviet Russia.

Lipovetsky goes on to analyze the mythological and political aspects, which don’t interest me very much (not to mention that the politicians and businessmen of the day have long been forgotten); what does, and what kept me reading with pleasure, is Pelevin’s unquenchable linguistic humor, which keeps coming up with gems like these:

Эти агентства множились неудержимо — как грибы после дождя или, как Татарский написал в одной концепции, гробы после вождя. ‘These agencies multiplied irrepressibly — like mushrooms after rain, or, as Tatarsky wrote in a conception [i.e., outline/plan for an ad — I don’t know what this would be in English], like graves after the Leader [i.e., Stalin; he changes griby posle dozhdya to groby posle vozhdya].’

МАЛ, ДА УД АЛ [a slogan for a condom] ‘SMALL, BUT THE PENIS IS RED’ [a slight deformation of the saying мал, да удал ‘small but bold’ — i.e., don’t judge a person by outward appearance]

Седера Луминоса [a play on Сендеро Луминосо ‘Sendero Luminoso’]

кока-колготки, кока-колбаски, кока-колымские рассказы ‘Coca-pantyhose [kolgotki], Coca-sausages [kolbaski], Coca-Kolyma stories’

Mercedes is transformed into Merdeses (to get merde) and then Merde-SS

«Богоносец Потемкин» [ship name Godcarrier Potemkin, with богоносец ‘God-carrier, bearer of a religious mission’ a play on броненосец ‘battleship’]

That’s just a random sampling; he tosses them off the way Mozart tossed off tunes. The ads are also hilarious even if you don’t know the originals he’s riffing off, and I loved the bit where Tatarsky calls a friend late at night because he’s having a bad acid trip — the friend gives him a mantra to repeat, Ом мелафефон бва кха ша [Om melafefon bva kkha sha], which he later admits is a slight alteration of the Hebrew phrase od melafefon bevakasha ‘more cucumber, please’ (which is especially amusing because the friend urges him to repeat it while drinking vodka, cucumber being a traditional zakuska). Pelevin’s obsession with drugs (especially hallucinogenic), organized crime (and its jargon), and Buddhism (in what I’m guessing is a very idiosyncratic version) can become wearying, but I never get tired of his jokes. (Incidentally, the name Vavilen is derived from Vasily Aksyonov + Vladimir Ilich Lenin, which is a good joke in itself; it also sounds like Vavilon ‘Babylon,’ which winds up being a reason he gets elevated to godlike status.) Of course, most of the jokes will be lost in translation, but it’s a fun read anyway. Oh, and the “P” in the title stands for Pepsi… but of course we can’t help but think of Pelevin as well.

As with the polyglot story, I wasn’t expecting to post Imani Perry’s What Black Women Hear When They’re Called “Auntie”, even though it was very much language-related, because I was weary just thinking about the hot takes it might provoke from people who had no experience with the issue and yet would instantly form doggedly held opinions about it, but it was so brilliantly written and showed such a nuanced understanding of how to approach difficult areas of language that I thought what the hell, I’ll go for it. Herewith some excerpts:

In the spring of 2017, I noticed that young Black people on social media were referring to congressperson Maxine Waters as “Auntie Maxine.” It was a nickname given in response to her witty, acerbic, and wise comments about Donald Trump. A digital public sphere, horrified by his behavior, delighted in Waters’ giving him hell.

That nickname was a harbinger of something that has since become widespread: a renewed use in public of the word auntie in reference to Black women. I must admit, I didn’t like it at first. I was irritated that a congressperson was being called “Auntie” instead of by her professional title. That is a sign of my own formalism, rooted in the culture of the Black South. I am always wary of those who might diminish the hard-earned professional standing of a Black person.

Perry mentions “other distinguished Black women [who] have rejected being called Auntie” and continues:
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Not directly language-related, but this is such an amazing selection of freely accessible books I can’t resist passing it along for anyone interested. Click on the URL, then when the book page comes up click on “Contents,” and you can download the pdfs. And, wait, here’s some language-related stuff: Old Church Slavonic Grammar, by Horace G. Lunt, and Slavic on the Language Map of Europe: Historical and Areal-Typological Dimensions, edited by Andrii Danylenko and Motoki Nomachi, not to mention A “Handbook” to the Russian Text of Crime and Punishment by Edgar H. Lehrman. Via Martin Krohs at FB.