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Luke Fater writes for Atlas Obscura about an unexpected lexical goldmine:

British-born William Dampier began a life of piracy in 1679 in Mexico’s Bay of Campeche. Orphaned in his late teens, Dampier set sail for the Caribbean and fell into a twentysomething job scramble. Seeing no future in logging or sugar plantations, he was sucked into the burgeoning realm of New World raiding, beginning what would be the first of his record-breaking three circumnavigations. A prolific diarist, Dampier kept a journal wrapped in a wax-sealed bamboo tube throughout his journeys. During a year-long prison sentence in Spain in 1694, Dampier would convert these notes into a novel that became a bestseller and seminal travelogue.

Parts of A New Voyage Around the World read like a 17th-century episode of No Reservations, with Dampier playing a high-stakes version of Anthony Bourdain. Aside from writing groundbreaking observations on previously un-researched subjects in meteorology, maritime navigation, and zoology, food was a constant throughout his work. […]

While you won’t find flamingos, penguins, or turtles on too many contemporary menus, several contributions from A New Voyage reshaped our modern English food vocabulary. In the Bay of Panama, Damier wrote of a fruit “as big as a large lemon … [with] skin [like] black bark, and pretty smooth.” Lacking distinct flavor, he wrote, the ripened fruit was “mixed with sugar and lime juice and beaten together [on] a plate.” This was likely the English language’s very first recipe for guacamole. Later, in the Philippines, Dampier noted of young mangoes that locals “cut them in two pieces and pickled them with salt and vinegar, in which they put some cloves of garlic.” This was the English language’s first recipe for mango chutney. His use of the terms “chopsticks,” “barbecue,” “cashew,” “kumquat,” “tortilla,” and “soy sauce” were also the first of their kind. […]

In the years following its publication, A New Voyage became an international bestseller, skyrocketing Dampier to wealth and fame. The first of its kind, the work generated a hunger among European audiences for travel writing, serving as an inspiration for Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Charles Darwin brought a copy of A New Voyage with him aboard the Beagle’s voyage to South America, having cited the book as a “mine of information.” Noting his keen eye for wind and current mapping, the British Royal Navy consulted him on best practices, later extending him captainship of the HMS Roebuck, on which he was commissioned for an in-depth exploration of South Africa, Australia, and Indonesia.

Alas, his name became mud (“For generations, Dampier was taught throughout much of the Commonwealth as, first and only, a piratical figure.[…] Disgraced and indebted by court fines, Dampier died penniless”), but he led an interesting life and provided us with some delicious words. Thanks, Trevor!

Cade Metz wrote for the NY Times last month about a problem that’s been in the news lately:

Last fall, Google unveiled a breakthrough artificial intelligence technology called BERT that changed the way scientists build systems that learn how people write and talk. But BERT, which is now being deployed in services like Google’s internet search engine, has a problem: It could be picking up on biases in the way a child mimics the bad behavior of his parents. […]

On a recent afternoon in San Francisco, while researching a book on artificial intelligence, the computer scientist Robert Munro fed 100 English words into BERT: “jewelry,” “baby,” “horses,” “house,” “money,” “action.” In 99 cases out of 100, BERT was more likely to associate the words with men rather than women. The word “mom” was the outlier. […]

In a blog post this week, Dr. Munro also describes how he examined cloud-computing services from Google and Amazon Web Services that help other businesses add language skills into new applications. Both services failed to recognize the word “hers” as a pronoun, though they correctly identified “his.” […]

Researchers are only beginning to understand the effects of bias in systems like BERT. But as Dr. Munro showed, companies are already slow to notice even obvious bias in their systems. After Dr. Munro pointed out the problem, Amazon corrected it. Google said it was working to fix the issue.

Dmitry Pruss, who sent me the link, wrote:

AI models isn’t a typical matter of experience at LH but I need some grasp of the issues in the famous paper which led to the Google researcher firing, beyond the very basic explanations [in the Times story]. Maybe we can put the recent findings on the language model flaws to a discussion, and perhaps even learn something new / positive from it??

So: any thoughts?

My wife is making Norwegian meatballs today, as she does around this time every year, and as I walked through the kitchen my eye fell on a container of mace. “Hmm,” thought I, “where does that word come from?” So I went to the OED (entry updated March 2000) and found this:

Etymology: < Old French macis (although only attested slightly later than in Middle English) or its etymon post-classical Latin macis aril surrounding the nutmeg (12th cent.). The form macis was taken as a plural in Middle English and a new singular mace was formed from it.
Compare Old Occitan macis (14th cent.), Italian macis, †mace (14th cent.), Spanish macis (1525), Portuguese macis (14th cent.). It is uncertain whether there is any connection with classical Latin macir resin of an Indian tree (Pliny), Hellenistic Greek μάκιρ. There is no probable connection with classical Latin maccis, the name of an imaginary spice in Plautus.

So mace is from a singular reanalyzed as plural, like pea. Who knew?

If you’re wondering about aril (“aril surrounding the nutmeg”), it’s (OED again) “< modern Latin arillus (also in use; compare modern French arille), < medieval Latin arilli, Spanish arillos, raisins.” And mace reminds me of John Collier’s unforgettable short story “The Touch of Nutmeg Makes It”; it’s the first story in this collection, if you want to experience it.

Rose Waldman writes for Tablet about her discoveries as a translator of Yiddish:

Yiddish was the language of my childhood, my first language, the one in which I learned to speak and later, to read and write. In Hasidic Williamsburg, where I was born and raised, Yiddish rumbled all around me. It was a natural part of the environment, sounding native to the very air. […] But then I fell into my literary translation career—“fell into” being the precise description of what happened, though that is a story for another time—and suddenly, I was surrounded by a network of “Yiddishists,” secular people who revered Yiddish, who spoke about the language in romantic, sentimental tones, who quoted Yiddish writers with the same awe my English professors used to quote Chekhov and Austen and Hemingway. The Yiddishists argued over word usage and grammar with an earnestness that can only ever be exhibited by pedantic language-loving nerds, one of whom, I discovered, was I.

My transformation into a bona fide Yiddishist, albeit a Hasidic one, occurred in barely noticeable increments, but all at once I found myself nodding along to phrases like “ancestral language” and “cultural responsibility” and “endangered heritage” with the same earnestness as my Yiddish-loving colleagues. Suddenly, the beauty of a certain Yiddish phrase could make my breath catch. And one day I realized, to my utter surprise, that not only was Yiddish no longer a child’s language to me, but instead rang so richly and resonantly in my ears, its words moved me as no other language could. Yiddish had always been where I felt most at home, but now it had captured my heart.

But there was something else, though it took me a book’s worth of translating before I realized it. I had grown up on Hasidic Yiddish. The Yiddish I spoke (and speak) is homey and friendly and gives me a sense of confidence and belonging. […] We use it. Nearly nobody else does. But for all its life and vibrancy, Hasidic Yiddish is missing a whole bunch of words. No wonder I hadn’t noticed the language’s beauty. So many of its beautiful words had been lost.

[Read more…]

Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft, “a writer, historian and critic,” has a TLS meditation, “The punning of reason,” on his ineradicable addiction to punning:

In the beginning was the word. But the trouble was that the word sounded like other words. And it still does, so you poke at it. This is called “punning”. For there was never just the one, solitary, word. It entered the world as one of many. Though each word seemed to possess a specific shade of meaning all its own, they were tied together by invisible lines of phonetic resemblance. The mouth has limits. Tongue, palate, cheeks, and lips can only shape a breath of air in so many ways. Perhaps this was not true for God, when He blew on the face of the waters and His breath – “wind” in one translation of the Hebrew word ruach – hovered there, but it is true for us. And we can be tempted to tug at the invisible lines of phonetic resemblance, to create puns, even – perhaps especially – when it annoys our friends and loved ones.

I pun compulsively. Puns are my constant companions, a floating cloud of potential associations superimposed on the field of linear communication. It is as if I cannot stop touching the words. I read ruach and it becomes Rauch, from the Hebrew for “wind” to the German for “smoke”. Some words summon the punch lines to jokes I haven’t made yet, and I grin inwardly. The Japanese expression itadakimasu, an expression of thanks for a meal to come, makes me think: “eat a duck I must”. As a hundred books of puns destined for use as bathroom reading attest, I’m not alone. (There is in fact a neurological condition characterized by compulsive punning, originally called Witzelsucht, or “joke-seeking”, by Hermann Oppenheimer, who identified it in the late nineteenth century. I swear I don’t have it.) I was visiting Kyoto’s Fushimi Inari shrine with a friend, who told me that the Japanese word for pun is oyajigyagu, or “old guy gag”. Puns are the jokes older men tell. Wordplay does not float free from culture. […]

[Read more…]

I’m reading Charles Portis’s True Grit (having loved his Norwood), and I just came across the sentence “He is a half-breed Comanche and it is something to see, watching him cut for sign.” If you google “cut for sign” you can find any number of explanations of this evocative regional term, e.g., from Texas Monthly:

After a harrowing skirmish with the Comanche in 1860, Charles Goodnight cut for sign to track down warriors who had escaped. That practice, in which a person searches for people or animals by “cutting,” or studying a section of land for clues, may seem like a lost art of the Old West, but it is still used today. “Ranchers cut for sign to find lost dogs and cattle or to find trespassing animals that could damage their property,” says Brad Guile, who lives near El Paso and used the technique when he was stationed at Fort Bliss. By identifying subtle changes in the landscape, a person can determine where an animal is headed and how old its tracks are.

But what I want to know is, what is this use of “cut”? The closest sense in the ancient OED entry (not fully updated since 1893) is 16.b. “To come across, strike, hit upon (a path, etc.). esp. U.S. with trail. Also elliptical“:

1892 Field 23 Jan. 119/1 At length we cut our spoor again, and hunted it along carefully and slowly.
1899 T. W. Hall Tales 19 One of his men dashes breathlessly in..with the exciting report that he has cut the raiders’ trail.
1903 A. Adams Log of Cowboy vii. 90 If you have no authority to cut this trail then you don’t cut this herd.
1903 A. Adams Log of Cowboy vii. 90 They were merely cutting (trail cutting) in the interest of the immediate locality.

But this is an extension of the sense “To cross (a line): expressing motion,” where the meaning is clear; I don’t see how you get from that to “cut” = “study a section of land.” All thoughts, anecdotes, and sidetracks welcome.

My wife heard a guy on the radio say “inter-PO-late” (with penultimate stress), and said “That’s not right, is it?” I said no, I didn’t think so, but (having long since learned not to trust my first reactions) I went off to make sure. Turned out I was right, officially the word only has antepenultimate stress (/ɪn.ˈtɜɹ.pə.ˌleɪt/, in-TER-polate), but I was a bit taken aback by the variety of ways it’s used. AHD:

1. To insert or introduce between other elements or parts.
2.
    a. To insert (material) into a text.
    b. To insert into a conversation. See Synonyms at introduce.
3. To change or falsify (a text) by introducing new or incorrect material.
4. Mathematics
    a. To estimate a value of (a function or series) between two known values.
    b. To create a continuous function that incorporates (a finite set of data), such as creating a curve that passes through a fixed set of points or a surface through a fixed set of curves.
5. To introduce estimated values of (pixel data) into a pixel array to improve the quality of an enlarged digital image.

The OED (entry from 1900) begins with “To polish or furbish up; to put a fresh gloss on. Obsolete”; this reflects the etymology (AHD again):

[Latin interpolāre, interpolāt-, to touch up, refurbish, from interpolis, refurbished; see pel-⁵ in the Appendix of Indo-European roots.]

The Russian equivalent is интерполировать; it appears to have been introduced by Chebyshev (of the many spellings; see The Thread) in the 1850s as a mathematical term and to have spread slowly into other realms: circa 1918 Sukhanov puts it in quotes (“Сознание его успеха распространялось, «интерполировалось» и на его результаты”) and Remizov explains the noun интерполяция ‘interpolation’ in parentheses (“А правда, в этой сказке, говоря по-ученому, амплификаций (распространение) и интерполяций (вставка) незначительно, но это ничего не значит, все по качеству матерьяла”). In his 1926 anthroposophical/Marxist novel Moskva [Moscow], Andrei Bely has the following exchange:

“You don’t know how to interpolate, my good man.”
“No, sir!” The student became confused.
“Interpolate” — he slapped his knee and pounded out his words nasally — “what does that mean?”
And he prompted the answer himself: “It means to insert an intermediate term in a row of other, already known, data: well, sir…”

― Вы не умеете, сударь мой, интерполировать.
― Нет-с! Студент путался.
― Интерполировать, ― шлепал себя по колену рукой и долбился словами и носом, ― что значит?
И — сам же подсказывал:
— Значит ― включать промежуточный член в ряд других, уже данных, известных: ну – вот-с…

After that it seems to be well enough known not to call for explanations. (Incidentally, when I looked at the word in Russian I immediately thought of Интерпол [Interpol], which turns up fairly often in the Corpus results for интерпол*; as far as I remember, that association never once occurred to me in connection with the English word.)

There is also a verb interpellate “to question (someone, such as a foreign minister) formally concerning an official action or policy or personal conduct,” which can be pronounced with either antepenultimate (ɪnˈtəːpɪleɪt) or penultimate (/ɪntəˈpɛleɪt/) stress (if I ever had occasion to say it I would use the latter to avoid confusion), but it’s hardly ever used and would just confuse the issue, so I won’t even mention it here.

Audrey Truschke, who teaches South Asian History at Rutgers, has a lively piece for Aeon on the Mahabharata:

From the moment that the Mahabharata was first written two millennia ago, people began to rework the epic to add new ideas that spoke to new circumstances. No two manuscripts are identical (there are thousands of handwritten Sanskrit copies), and the tale was recited as much or more often than it was read. Some of the most beloved parts of the Mahabharata today – such as that the elephant-headed Hindu god Ganesha wrote the epic with his broken tusk as he heard Vyasa’s narration – were added centuries after the story was first compiled.

The Mahabharata is long. It is roughly seven times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey combined, and 15 times the length of the Christian Bible. The plot covers multiple generations, and the text sometimes follows side stories for the length of a modern novel. But for all its narrative breadth and manifold asides, the Mahabharata can be accurately characterised as a set of narratives about vice.

What I particularly like is that she quotes Sanskrit in the original and provides what read in English as excellent translations (I actually studied Sanskrit almost half a century ago, but it’s way too rusty for me to try to figure out how accurate they are):

After the slaughter, when blood has soaked the earth and most of the characters lie dead, Yudhishthira, the eldest of the five Pandavas, decides that he no longer wants the throne of Hastinapura. What is the point of ruling when you got there only through deceit, sin and death? Yudhishthira says:

आत्मानमात्मना हत्वा किं धर्मफलमाप्नुमः
धिगस्तु क्षात्रमाचारं धिगस्तु बलमौरसम्
धिगस्त्वमर्षं येनेमामापदं गमिता वयम्

Since we slaughtered our own, what good can possibly come from ruling?
Damn the ways of kings! Damn might makes right!
Damn the turmoil that brought us to this disaster!

At the end she says:

A note on the text: translations in this article are my own; I prefer colloquial translations. For recent retellings of the Mahabharata in English, I recommend that of John D Smith’s Penguin edition (2009) for fidelity to text and completeness, and Carole Satyamurti’s Norton edition (2016) for poetry.

So if you want to investigate further, there are some suggested translations. Thanks, Jack!

Bloggers Karamazov (“The Official Blog of The North American Dostoevsky Society”) has an interview with Rosamund Bartlett on the occasion of her new Dostoevsky translation, The Russian Soul: Selections from a Writer’s Diary. I’m very glad to see the Diary get some attention, even if this selection is drastically abridged (“a mere 135 pages”); I read basically the entire Russian text (skimming some of the more repetitive and anti-Semitic political passages) last year and found it a great help in understanding Dostoevsky in general and Karamazov in particular. Here are some excerpts from the interview:

I certainly did not realize quite how interesting I would find the Writer’s Diary until I came to spend a month researching and writing about it. Once I began reading the main sources, beginning with Gary Saul Morson’s 1981 monograph, and realized what a fundamental and innovative work it is, I became riveted. It was a revelation to learn that the Diary was only ever re-published once during the Soviet period, in 1929, and that it was not until 2011 that the first properly annotated complete edition was published in Russia. I also became fascinated by the story of the Diary’s recent popularity as subject of scholarly enquiry after Joseph Frank finally first confronted the issue of its troubling political content in the final volume of his biography in 2002. This is one of the reasons I was keen to include a list of Further Reading, which Notting Hill Editions agreed to. […]

The initial, very good selection of texts, mostly taken from Kenneth Lantz’s excellent translation, was made by the Notting Hill Editions series editor Johanna Möhring. Once I had drafted the Introduction, we had a lively exchange by email about the final selection, which was circumscribed by the need to stay within the 45,000 word limit, which is standard for Notting Hill Editions books. We both wanted to include a representative selection of entries which would reflect the diverse nature of the Diary’s contents but approached the task from different angles. Johanna’s background is in international relations, with research interests in defence, security and the nature of power, as well as Russia and Eastern Europe. She was concerned to show the “acid social realism” of Dostoevsky’s Weltanschauung, and his argument for Russia occupying a “special spiritual realm” in European politics and culture, not ignoring his anti-Semitism. I came to the project as a cultural historian whose background is in Russian literature, so I was particularly keen to convey Dostoevsky’s great power as a writer, as well as his ability to impart a deeper moral and religious resonance to the social and political concerns he raises. I was particularly adamant, for example, that we include “The Peasant Marey,” since it is a precious piece of autobiography which links an event in Dostoevsky’s childhood to his prison experiences and religious conversion in Siberia. […]

In the end I think the volume gives a fair idea of the Diary’s hybrid contents, as they evolved between 1873 and 1881. We begin with “Environment,” in which Dostoevsky starts polemicizing with imaginary opponents, and presenting opposing views in a manner reminiscent of the great dialogues in his novels. His advocacy of individual moral responsibility in “Environment” is also one of his central themes, which he will of course extend further in The Brothers Karamazov. “The Boy Celebrating his Saint’s Day,” meanwhile, in which Dostoevsky discusses a letter a reader had sent to him about a twelve-year-old boy who had committed suicide, was written when he had become both editor and publisher of the Diary. It goes to the heart of the Diary’s new focus on the causes of the spiritual crisis Dostoevsky perceived in society. I thought it important to include “My Paradox,” as it is one of Dostoevsky’s first expressions of anti-Semitism in the Diary, and appears alongside his utopian nationalism as a natural part of his analysis of contemporary politics. We balanced these kinds of entries with a selection which focus on literature, such as Dostoevsky’s obituary of George Sand, in which he discusses her supreme importance to his idealistic generation of the 1840s. We also included his review of Anna Karenina, and his musings on Don Quixote, important to him as the greatest exemplar in literature of a “positively beautiful” figure. The volume inevitably culminates with Dostoevsky’s paean to Pushkin. “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” is the fictional centerpiece in the anthology, since it presents Dostoevsky’s major themes in microcosm, anticipates their amplification in The Brothers Karamazov, and is a perfect distillation of his art. I would ideally have liked to have also included “The Meek One” as a counterpart, not to mention “Bobok.” I would also have liked to include one of the many discursive accounts concerning the trial of Ekaterina Kornilova, in whose case Dostoevsky became personally involved, but it would have been difficult to find the right excerpt to present in isolation. […]

The Diary was Dostoevsky’s favorite work, which he viewed as a single oeuvre like the novels, and it was more popular, because he deliberately wanted to enter into direct conversation with his readers. The way they responded by entering into passionate correspondence with him was in many ways prophetic of the blogosphere. At 1500 pages, however, the Diary is longer than two of his novels put together, and I believe The Russian Soul provides the first representative anthology, conveniently squeezed into a mere 135 pages.

It’s a good selection, considering the ridiculous space constraints, and I hope a lot of people read it; I second her praise for Gary Saul Morson’s brilliant writing on Dostoevsky and for the Lantz translation (which has excellent notes and an indispensable introduction by Morson).

If you’re curious about my own Russian reading, I gobbled up Andrei Sinyavsky’s delightful Прогулки с Пушкиным (Strolls with Pushkin, which portrays Pushkin as a quintessential outsider who didn’t take anything very seriously except poetry and was very controversial in the exile community, which like all Russians worshiped Pushkin) and made my way more slowly through Georgi Vladimov’s grim Верный Руслан (Faithful Ruslan: Ruslan, deprived of his position as a guard dog when the Gulag camp is closed, finds new purpose in guarding a released prisoner in a nearby town and waiting for the camp to reopen), and I’m now about halfway through Yury Trifonov’s Другая жизнь (Another Life) — it’s slow going so far, maybe a little too Chekhovian, but I trust Trifonov and am sure I’ll be satisfied by the end.

Addendum. Melissa Frazier has a nice piece on Dostoevsky for the Jordan Russian Center:

Aileen Kelly has recently accounted for Herzen’s commitment to the natural sciences with reference to his reading of both Feuerbach and Schiller. The same is also true for Dostoevsky. While Feuerbach is most often remembered in the crude terms of “you are what you eat,” his was not a material world devoid of thought, but a world where thought as both imagination and reason is itself always embodied. As Feuerbach writes, his philosophy “joyfully and consciously recognizes the truth of sensuousness: It is a sensuous philosophy with an open heart.” Like Herzen and like Dostoevsky, the young Schiller trained in the sciences, and his plays anticipate Feuerbachian “sensuousness” on two levels: it is not just that his characters are remarkably physically involved—in The Robbers (1781), Franz “paces violently,” faints, and even “writhes … in fearful convulsions”—but that his audience responded in kind. Belinsky remembered the Moscow production of The Robbers in 1828 as “that wild, flaming dithyramb erupting like lava from the depths of a young, dynamic soul”; on just reading the same play in 1794 an excited young Coleridge wrote to his friend Robert Southey: “My God! Southey! Who is this Schiller? This Convulser of the Heart?” This insistence on putting minds in bodies and bodies in the world runs all through nineteenth-century science, although not in the kind that literary scholars know best.

Which gives me a chance to plug Aileen Kelly’s great biography of Herzen; see my review.

I’m still reading John Burnside’s The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century (see this post), and I’ve gotten to the chapter “La razón poética,” about the Generation of ’27. Burnside has an admirable desire to focus on women poets, and this chapter has a section on Ernestina de Champourcín (the name is apparently from Provence, and the -ou- is pronounced /u/). On p. 196 we find the following:

To live, and to welcome, not just the unknown but that which no mortal being (nadie) can know. It is, perhaps, tempting to see in such work the language of exile, where the love of home-place, and of those who remain there, is tainted with bitterness and longing for what is forever lost (and, as exiles soon learn, once the home-place has been corrupted, the only remaining option is to carry on, as a very different writer puts it, ‘boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’. That past, however, can never be regained.

I don’t know whether the average reader notices these things, but as a copyeditor I can’t help seeing that the parenthesis before “and” is never closed; what’s especially surprising is that there’s no place to put an end-parenthesis, since “That past” refers to the immediately preceding “the past,” and you can’t really do that across the barrier of a parenthesis. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m outraged or disgusted (not being from Tunbridge Wells), but it doesn’t sit well with me. This is what happens when you get lost in the weeds of a rambling bit of prose, and the publisher doesn’t pay somebody to notice and fix it.