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To quote the start of Justin Weinberg’s Daily Nous obit, “Judith Jarvis Thomson, professor emerita of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the most influential moral philosophers of the past 50 years, has died.” I don’t normally commemorate philosophers at LH (though I’ve actually read or skimmed a couple of her articles), but there were some things in Claudia Mills‘ introduction of Thomson at the Rocky Mountain Ethics Congress in 2009 (quoted at the link) that resonated enough with me that I wanted to quote them:

I was asked to give this introduction because I knew Judith Jarvis Thomson not only as a brilliant thinker, but as a brilliant teacher. When I was an undergraduate at Wellesley, I took courses with Prof. Thomson through the Wellesley-MIT exchange. Here is my notebook from the first one: 24.231. (At MIT, departments don’t have names, they have numbers, so 24 is Philosophy – I soon learned from my classmates that it was an error to refer to the course as PHIL 24.231 – PHIL was redundant, as 24 already WAS Phil.) […]

Here is the paper assignment for our second paper for the class, due April 7, 1975. “Is there a variety of utilitarianism which is true? If so, which? And why? If not, why not?” One student put up his hand right away: “What do you mean, ‘is true’?” Without a word, Prof. Thomson turned to the chalkboard and wrote: “S” is true just in case S. That was all. Asked for further guidelines to assist us in writing the paper, she gave us this one: “No eloquence!” I felt as if she was addressing that pithy piece of advice directly to me.

Judy Thomson taught me even more about how to write than she taught me about how to do philosophy. For one paper, she commented on my tendency to switch terminology: I’d talk about “duties” for a while, and then, to add some interest, I’d vary my vocabulary a bit and start talking about “obligations.” She taught me not to do that, that the reader was going to become alarmed: wait, a new term has been introduced, why? She taught me that the point of writing was actually to SAY SOMETHING. On another paper, when I had underlined one particular point for emphasis, she told me: “You think that if you say it loudly enough, people won’t hear how false it is.” I finally wrote a paper that began with a sentence that pleased her. I still remember the sentence. It was: “Two things seem to me to be true.” She brightened upon reading it. “You just like it because it’s short,” I told her, as I knew she had disliked my long, flowery, dare I say eloquent, sentences. “I don’t just like its length,” she told me. “I like IT!” That was a wonderful moment that I’ve carried with me for thirty-four years. I wrote a sentence that Judith Jarvis Thomson admired.

Just the thought of having to deal with “S” is true just in case S terrifies me, and I have even more respect for my wife for having done grad work in philosophy (though she sensibly didn’t try to make a career of it). But I’m tickled by the fact that MIT departments don’t have names, they have numbers (but of course!), and I love the insistence on eschewing elegant variation (see my rant about one form of it here). And “No eloquence!” is a widely (though not universally) applicable admonition.

Continuing the Raj theme, herewith Maya Jasanoff’s 2008 LRB review [archived] of Hartly House, Calcutta, an epistolary novel allegedly by Phebe Gibbes (see below) and first published in 1789. I’ll quote some bits of LH relevance:

Telling Arabella about the imminent departure of ‘our Governor’, Sophia gushes about [Warren] Hastings’s merits:

The Company … will, by this event, be deprived of a faithful and able servant; the poor, of a compassionate and generous friend; the genteel circles, of their best ornament … Nor possibly can a successor be transmitted, of equal information and abilities. For, Arabella, he has made himself master of the Persian language, that key to the knowledge of all that ought to constitute the British conduct in India.

[…]
The other danger that Sophia skirts lies in an equally common fate for British women in India: marriage. Condemning the ostentatious new wealth of Anglo-Indian ‘nabobs’, and the women who travel to India to marry them, Sophia vows repeatedly ‘never to marry in Indostan’: ‘I will not violate to be a nabobess.’ Her will is tested by the constant stream of male attention she receives (and coquettishly enjoys receiving), and by her guardian Mrs Hartly, who ‘thinks matrimony the duty of every young woman, who meets with an offer she cannot disapprove’. Yet even when she meets the captivating Edmund Doyly, ‘the best male companion I have met with at Calcutta, the Governor and Mr Hartly excepted’, Sophia sticks to her guns: ‘if nabobism was not the stumbling block of my ambition … there is no saying what might happen.’ […]

This must be the only book currently on sale that carries a blurb by Mary Wollstonecraft on its jacket. Reviewing Hartly House, Calcutta in the Analytical Review, Wollstonecraft praised the novel’s ‘entertaining account of Calcutta … apparently sketched by a person who had been forcibly impressed by the scenes described. Probably the groundwork of the correspondence was actually written on the spot.’ For Wollstonecraft, as for other reviewers, the primary virtue of the novel lay in its informative account of Indian life – an account that many took to be based on personal experience.

So who was behind this richly detailed narrative? Though Hartly House, Calcutta was published anonymously, Franklin attributes its authorship to Phebe Gibbes. More or less the only information we have about Gibbes consists of petitions she sent to the Royal Literary Fund in 1804. In them, she stated that she had published ‘22 sets’ of novels, but that her father-in-law’s profligacy and the death of her only son in India had left her and her two daughters destitute. Of the ‘22 sets’ Gibbes claimed, 14 have apparently been identified, though the author’s name appears in only one. Her career, in Franklin’s words, ‘presents a fascinating example of anonymous authorship’. So how have scholars come to identify her as the author of this book? The strongest circumstantial evidence Franklin cites – tucked away in a footnote – is a payment by her publisher James Dodsley to ‘G. 20 pounds for Hartly House, Calcutta’. There was also Gibbes’s known connection to India through her son. Frustratingly, Franklin never addresses this question directly. His jargon-heavy introduction reads far more like a specialist academic article than like the broadly contextualising essay many readers need.

The paucity of biographical evidence about Gibbes leaves a crucial point teasingly uncertain. Did the author of Hartly House, Calcutta ever go to India? Franklin thinks not: ‘it is doubtful that Gibbes herself ever made the passage to India.’ He supports this suggestion with an impressive excavation of contemporary printed sources on which Gibbes based some of her descriptions. Her discussion of the ‘five tribes’ (varnas) of Hindus, for instance, comes straight from a passage in Alexander Dow’s The History of Hindostan. A section on Mughal history draws on William Guthrie’s A New Geographical, Historical and Commercial Grammar of 1785. In writing of India’s sacred rivers, she paraphrases William Macintosh’s Remarks on a Tour through the Different Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa. In a nicely postmodern turn, Gibbes acknowledges her debt to such works by having Sophia warn Arabella ‘not to set me down for a plagiarist, though you should even stumble upon the likeness, verbatim, of my descriptions of the Eastern world in print; or once presume to consider such printed accounts as other than honourable testimonies of my faithful relations’.

But what were the sources for the novel’s descriptions of everyday habits, of the look and feel of the city and the way people lived in it? Consider Sophia’s remark that ‘the streets of Calcutta … are distinguished by the name of the beisars, or traders, by which they are occupied.’ Franklin observes that ‘Gibbes’s error’ in using the term beisar (‘bazaar’) to refer to tradesmen as opposed to markets ‘would seem another indication that her knowledge of India was second-hand’. Yet foreigners on the spot could routinely slip up on such linguistic niceties – and Gibbes’s phrasing is sufficiently unclear as to make both interpretations possible. In fact, the passage goes on to provide a strikingly accurate series of transliterated and translated Bengali words, and stands out as one of many remarkable examples of the rich local knowledge in which Hartly House, Calcutta abounds. Sophia writes not only about Calcutta’s major monuments and landmarks; she describes the kinds of garden statuary people prefer, the availability and price of different vegetables, what it is like to go to the theatre, the races, or just to have an evening nautch (‘dance’) at home.

I like the terms nabobess and nabobism, but was struck by the intransitive use of violate (“I will not violate to be a nabobess”), which is not in the OED entry (updated June 2014). Clearly it’s short for “violate my vow,” but it reads oddly to me; who knows how it read in 1789? [This turns out not to be the case; see Giacomo’s comment below.] I’m delighted by the Wollstonecraft blurb and I enjoyed the investigation of authorship (it must have been a thrill to find that record of payment) and sources (I wish she’d quoted that “series of transliterated and translated Bengali words”), but this passage from the last paragraph surprised and annoyed me:

One is also struck, reading this book more than two hundred years later, by how little enduring fiction emanated from British India, despite its commanding hold on the imperial imagination. With the exception of Kipling, many novels about colonial India have fallen between the cracks: who reads Meadows Taylor or Flora Annie Steel now? (More often, India glints in the background of British domestic fiction, as readers of Vanity Fair, The Moonstone and Sherlock Holmes know.)

What about Paul Scott’s magnificent Raj Quartet? Is Jasanoff implying that it’s on a level with Meadows Taylor and Flora Annie Steel, whoever they are? Or has she never read Scott? Either way, it’s her loss.

Yesterday I posted about gulli-danda; today I have a bunch more Hobson-Jobsonish terms to offer, drawn from Appendix B, “A Selection of Inventories contained in the Factory Miscellaneous Records, the Public Despatches, and the Bengal Inventories,” of The Nabobs: A Study of the Social Life of the English in Eighteenth Century India by Percival Spear — I certainly hope you can see it at this Internet Archive link (p. 178; the single-page text is here — search on “intestate”). It’s chock-full of wonderful words: “A pallaqueen” [presumably a palanquin, though the OED doesn’t list that spelling]; “2 Old Landskipps [=landscapes]”; “3 pallumpores” [palampore, OED: “A kind of richly patterned cotton cloth, originally made in India” < Hindi palaṅg-poś bedspread, coverlet]; “4 Brass Pigdannies” [Hobson-Jobson “Pigdaun, s. A spittoon”]; “One Old Hoboy” [=oboe] is followed by “A Box with a Dead Scorpion”… it’s wonderful reading, and I thank the perspicacious Trevor for passing along his find.

Every once in a while I succumb to an irresistible offer and subscribe to the LRB, as a result of which I get e-mails with more offers, and they’ve sent me one for a book:

The latest in our series of LRB Collections ‘Anyone for gulli-danda?’ features writing about sport from the London Review of Books, by Tariq Ali, Gabriele Annan, Terry Castle, Marjorie Garber, Jane Holland, Benjamin Markovits, Karl Miller, David Runciman, Amia Srinivasan and Heathcote Williams.

I’m not tempted by the book, but needless to say I was intrigued by the title, and a bit of googling turned up the Wikipedia article Gillidanda:

Gilli Danda (also spelled Gulli-Danda) also known as Viti Dandu, Kitti-Pul and by other variations, is a sport originating from the Indian subcontinent, played in the rural areas and small towns all over South Asia as well as Cambodia, Turkey, South Africa, Italy, Poland, and in some Caribbean islands like Cuba. The game is played with two sticks: a large one called a danda (Dandi in Nepali, Dandu/दांडू/ದಾಂಡು in Marathi, Kittipul/கிட்டிப்புள் in Tamil and Kannada, കോൽ in Malayalam), which is used to hit a smaller one, the gilli (Biyo in Nepali, Viti/विटी in Marathi, kittikol/ கிட்டிக்கோல் in Tamil and Chinni/ಚಿನ್ನಿ in Kannada, കുറ്റി in Malayalam). […]

Gillidanda is known by various other names: it is called Tipcat in English, itti dakar in Sindhi, Dandi-Biyo (डण्डी बियो) in Nepali, guli-badi (ଗୁଲି ବାଡ଼ି) in Odia (regional variations dabalapua ଡାବଲପୁଆ and ପିଲବାଡ଼ି pilabadi in Phulbani and guti-dabula ଗୁଟିଡାବୁଳ in Balasore), gulli-ṭāṇ (???????????????????????? ????????????) in Bhojpuri, alak-doulak (الک دولک) in Persian, dānggűli (ডাঙ্গুলি) in Bengali, Tang Guti (টাং গুটি) in Assamese, chinni-kolu ಚಿನ್ನಿ ಕೋಲು in Kannada, kuttiyum kolum in Malayalam, vitti-dandu विट्टी दांडू in Marathi, Koyando-bal(कोयंडो बाल) in Konkani, kitti-pul (கிட்டி-புல்) in Tamil, Gooti-Billa (Andhra Pradesh) or Karra-Billa (Andhra Pradesh) or Billam-Godu (Andhra Pradesh) or chirra-gonay (in Telangana) in Telugu, Gulli-Danda (ਗੁੱਲ਼ੀ ਡੰਡਾ) in Punjabi, Geeti Danna (گیٹی ڈنا) in Saraiki, Iti-Dakar (اٽي ڏڪر) in Sindhi, Lappa-Duggi (لپا ڈگی) in Pashto, Kon ko in Cambodian, Pathel Lele in Indonesian, syatong in Tagalog, awe petew in Ilonggo, çelikçomak in Turkish, ciang sat in Zomi language, “Đánh Trỏng” or “Đánh Khăng” in Vietnam, Quimbumbia in Cuba and Lippa in Italy.

Who knows if those are all actually the same game, but it’s quite a collection of names; I’m not sure gulli-danda, with or without the hyphen, isn’t the best.

Sue Butler, who edited the Macquarie Dictionary of Australian English for almost 40 years, writes for the Guardian about the misuses that matter to her and those that don’t; there’s nothing especially new here, but I agree with most of it and it’s always good to remind people of these things:

As the long-term editor of an English dictionary, I have arrived at the trouble with pedants: they cry foul too often. I have a sneaking suspicion that the desire to be right is more important to them than the desire to defend the language from degradation, which is what they claim to do. In many instances the transgression that they lament is simply an instance of language change (“agreeance” v “agreement”, for instance), or a variation that is accepted in the community but not their personal choice (the pronunciation of “schedule”), or an innovation that, conservative as they are by nature, they do not like (the use of “agenda” as a verb).

In the comments under a YouTube about gardening, a woman who describes herself as a purist – which is definitely claiming the high moral ground – calls out a gardening expert who was demonstrating how to repot clivias. He referred to the plant as a “klai-vee-uh” at the beginning of the show but then called it a “kli-vee-uh” later on. Both pronunciations are current, although the purist claimed that “klai-vee-uh” was the correct one since it was named after Lady Charlotte Clive, granddaughter of Clive of India. The only rule the presenter broke was the rule of consistency. If you are going to prefer one pronunciation over another where both pronunciations are current and valid, then you should stick to your choice. Otherwise you risk losing your audience while they fight over the different pronunciations, rather than attend to the intricacies of disentangling the roots of overgrown clivias. […]

So when to care and when not to care? I do care when one word is being confused with another, especially when it is part of a phrase where the meaning of the individual word has become less important than the meaning of the whole phrase. For example, we find that increasingly we are handing over the “reigns” to someone else (as opposed to the “reins”), possibly because we are no longer familiar with driving a horse and carriage, or even riding horses, so that phrases like “the reins of power”, and “keeping a tight rein on expenses”, or “giving someone free rein”, all involving a sense of control, seem to be acquiring “reign” rather than “rein’.

Straight-out errors are always worth calling out. I cannot abide the way that “infamous” is used instead of “famous”. We used to have two words. A person was famous for very laudable reasons, and infamous because they had done something reprehensible. Famous – known for the right reasons. Infamous – known for all the wrong reasons. But now we talk about a great hero being infamous. This is simply wrong.

Some errors, however, become so entrenched that the community ceases to see them as mistakes. “Regardless” of how many times we are scolded for using “irregardless” instead, it seems that it makes no difference. The community has accepted “irregardless” for whatever reason. Maybe it sounds better. Maybe the extra syllable gives it more weight. Maybe a language community that is always looking for patterns, lines “irregardless” up with “irrespective” and finds that convincing. This is not actually a change that matters. There is no misunderstanding, no ambiguity, no break in the flow of communication.

Of course, her “straight-out errors” are another person’s language change; I don’t like that use of “infamous” either, but if people keep using it, it’s not wrong, it’s just English. There’s no harm in arguing against it, though, and in general I like the cut of her jib. Thanks, Lars!

A few months ago I raved about Valentin Rasputin’s Последний срок [Borrowed Time]; his 1972 Вниз и вверх по течению [Downstream and upstream, translated as Downstream] isn’t as good, but I enjoyed reading it — it’s basically a preparatory study for his famous Прощание с Матёрой (Farewell to Matyora), which came out four years later (and which I’ll be reading and reporting on before long). It describes the writer/narrator Viktor’s return by riverboat to his native village, which has been moved because the river it was on has been enlarged to create a reservoir; its message is basically the time-honored You Can’t Go Home Again, but it’s padded out with excessive descriptions of nature (these are almost irresistible to Russian writers). I probably wouldn’t post about it except that I liked this passage, which is entirely extraneous to the story but clearly something Rasputin felt strongly about (you can read the original Russian here — scroll down to “До чего было просто раньше,” near the bottom of the page); Viktor finds himself unable to read in his cabin, and reflects on how reading has changed for him since he became a writer:

How easy it was before, and how hard it is now — as if you’re perpetually on duty and can’t help seeing how a misplaced word fidgets or even thrashes around in painful convulsions, how empty, useless sentences giggle or call out in the middle of a serious conversation because they have nothing to do there, how a positive hero lies, bursts into falsehood like a nightingale, rolling around in high-sounding, respectable words as if in soapsuds just when the author thinks he ought to be uttering the truth, the truth and only the truth, how the whole book is hitting out and kicking, demanding that you read it and howling about equal rights for books, when you won’t and can’t get any benefit from that kind of reading. You see, you understand, but you can’t interfere — you can’t help it, restrain it, or shame it. It would really be better not to see or understand. The whole point is that a good book and a bad one are created from the same material, the same words — placed, however, in a different order, sounding in a different intonation, and blessed by a different finger.

But a good book, thanks to the same professional fastidiousness, is also not easy to read. When a phrase as ordinary as “she began to moan” makes you shudder from the pain of that moaning, when the name of a painted color lets you clearly distinguish its shades and smell, when you hear with your own ears the sound of an apple falling from a tree in a book and cry about the meeting of two people invented by an author’s imagination, you try to understand how all this was achieved, with what living water it was sprinkled; you go over the words again and again, following them like the steps of an endless staircase, trying to penetrate the amazing secret that makes them sound, smell, shine, and agitate. And you see everything, because in a book it’s difficult to hide anything, the whole intricate weave of words, their music, indicated note by note, the joints between phrases and pauses between thoughts — you see it all and still don’t understand a thing. Desperate, you put down the book and impotently close your eyes, hating yourself for your helplessness and mediocrity and all the rest of it.

But you can’t do without books. And of course you read, but lord, what difficult, trying, and endless work it is!

That’s eloquent, but (ironically) also somewhat bloated — compare Babel’s famous “Никакое железо не может войти в человеческое сердце так леденяще, как точка, поставленная вовремя” [No iron can pierce the pierce heart as icily as a period in just the right place]. And I note, checking the translation by Valentina Brougher and Helen Poot (in the indispensable Contemporary Russian Prose edited by Carl R. Proffer and Ellendea Proffer [Ardis, 1982]), that they have mistranslated хихикают ‘giggle’ as “hiccup”; this is not nearly so bad, however, as their later rendering of штабеля леса ‘stacks of timber’ as “neat rows of trees.” And my jaw dropped when I noticed they’d simply omitted this sentence (about a little boy standing in the water to look at an arriving ship):

Зато после некоторого раздумья он приподнял свой открывшийся всему белому свету отросточек и, направив его в сторону теплохода, стал булькать в воду.

But after some hesitation, he lifted his little appendage, which was revealed to the whole wide world, and, directing it towards the ship, began to gurgle into the water.

They’re translating for Ardis, the publisher that provided the world with editions and translations of the most daring modern Russian literature, and they can’t bring themselves to include a little boy pissing in a river!
[Read more…]

Balashon’s latest post, bareket and emerald, is about a connection I had forgotten:

From Hebrew (or some other cognate Semitic language, like the Akkadian barraqtu), bareket entered into Greek as smaragdos, which Latin borrowed as smaragdus, eventually becoming esmaraldus in Medieval Latin, esmeraude in French, and then “emerald” in English.

This might seem like a strange journey, particularly from bareket to smaragdos. But as this Philologos column explains (along with many other interesting linguistic details about the words we’ve discussed here and more) it’s reasonable when you look at how certain letters are exchanged in phonetic shifts.

Philologos actually promotes a different theory than what I’ve presented here. He says that the Hebrew baraket may have its origin in a Sanskrit word – marakata […]

Most of the sources I looked at, including Klein and the Online Etymology Dictionary say the Sanskrit word was borrowed from a Semitic source. (For further discussion see this page).

I say “had forgotten” because it turns out I wrote about it in 2004:

I enjoyed [Philologos’s] detailed investigation of the etymology of Yiddish shmergl ‘emery,’ which traces it back to Latin smericulum and Greek smaragdos ‘emerald’; I think the bald assertion that the latter is borrowed from Sanskrit marakata goes beyond the evidence, but this is, after all, a newspaper column, not a linguistic journal.

AHD fudges the details of the relationships with not one but two instances of “akin to”:

[Middle English emeraude, from Old French, from Medieval Latin esmeralda, esmeraldus, from Latin smaragdus, from Greek smaragdos; akin to Sanskrit marakatam, probably of Semitic origin; akin to Akkadian barraqtu and Hebrew bāreqet, a kind of gemstone (probably emerald); see brq in the Appendix of Semitic roots.]

Anybody know anything more about this tangle?

In this 700+-comment thread, which seems to have become a dumping-ground for all DNA-related commentary, Dmitry Pruss said mildly but convincingly:

An ob gripe, I don’t think that it’s the best idea to discuss “everything DNA” in this, already oversize, thread…

So I’m hereby opening this as a continuation. If you have thoughts about genomic components and Denisovan signatures, this is the place for them!

Jessica Vincent writes for Atlas Obscura about the kind of development that warms my heart:

Taller Leñateros is Mexico’s first and only Tzotzil Maya book- and papermaking collective. Founded in 1975 by the Mexican-American poet Ambar Past, the workshop is dedicated to documenting and disseminating the endangered Tzotzil language, culture, and oral history. And it does so environmentally, using only recycled materials (leñateros alludes to those who get their firewood from deadwood, rather than felled trees).

The project began when Past, escaping an unhappy marriage, traveled to the rural highlands of Chiapas, Mexico’s southernmost state. She wound up staying, and for the next 30 years lived among the indigenous women of San Cristobal’s surrounding villages. As she learned their language, she noticed that they spoke in couplets similar to those found in the Popul Vuh—the most famous and informative ancient Maya book yet discovered.

But none of these women could actually read or write Tzotzil. They used the historic, metaphor-riddled tongue in everyday conversation, but had never put their own words on paper. Inspired, Past got to work recording and translating their ancient Tzotzil poetry. Her hope was that, one day, they would publish the world’s first modern Maya book by the female indigenous community of Chiapas—and, in the process, grant us insight into both an ancient language and an ancient way of looking at the world.

Once 150 women agreed to let her record their poetry, Past bought property in San Cristobal. She set up a modest workshop there so that she and the women could collaborate. Past would transcribe and translate the recordings, and the women would produce the book using ancient Maya bookbinding techniques. […]

As Petra spoke, she turned the thick, grainy pages of Incantations: Songs, Spells, and Images by Mayan Women—the first book in over 400 years to be written, produced, and published by indigenous Mayas.

I’m guessing the “first in over 400 years” thing is an exaggeration, but still: great stuff. Thanks, Jack!

Today’s NY Times has a story about the tailors of Savile Row; my wife was reading it when she called me over and showed me this bit:

Both the tuxedo and the bowler hat were invented here, and when the suit emerged as the uniform of capitalism, the street set the gold standard for craft and durability. Its history and reputation are stellar enough that the name has found its way into at least one language. The Japanese word for “business suit” is sebiro. (Say it out loud.)

I raised my eyebrows and headed for the internet, where I found the Wiktionary entry for 背広 [sèbíró] ‘business suit’; the etymology says “Unknown, but thought to be related to English civil clothes, Savile Row, or Cheviot.” Sigh. I’ve long since stopped expecting, or even hoping, that newspapers will learn to double-check these enticing origin stories, but I still call them out when I get the chance.

Unrelated: I just learned that diathesis, which I knew only as an imposing word for grammatical voice (from Greek διάθεσις ‘disposition, arrangement’), is also a medical term meaning “a hereditary or constitutional predisposition to a group of diseases, an allergy, or other disorder.” I’m sure a great many Hatters knew that already; is it in common use?

Addendum. I just ran across a bizarre usage in the latest New Yorker; Evan Osnos is writing about the change brought by the telegraph: “By the end of the century, readers were wading through a flood of cheap errata from afar—mostly of war, crime, fires, and floods.” As far as I know, errata can mean only ‘errors in writing or printing’; can anyone think how it might have come to be used for (presumably) ‘newspaper stories’? (Insert boilerplate rant on decline of copyediting standards at major publications.)

Further Addendum. Another from the latest New Yorker: in Merve Emre’s “Tricked Out” (retitled online as Our Love-Hate Relationship with Gimmicks), she says “The word ‘gimmick’ is believed to come from ‘gimac,’ an anagram of ‘magic.’” No it fucking isn’t; OED, AHD, and M-W all concur in the judgment “Origin unknown.” The OED has a 1936 citation from Words (Nov. 12/2):

The word gimac means ‘a gadget’. It is an anagram of the word magic, and is used by magicians the same way as others use the word ‘thing-a-ma-bob’.

That’s certainly suggestive, but it’s not an etymology. Stop it with the cute word-origin stories, people! They’re all lies, lies!

…And then Emre says this:

In Vladimir Nabokov’s novel “Invitation to a Beheading,” from 1935, a mother distracts her imprisoned son from counting the hours to his execution by describing the “marvelous gimmicks” of her childhood.

Argh, what a mess! Invitation to a Beheading (the New Yorker quirkily insists on putting the titles of novels in quotes) is a 1959 translation of Приглашение на казнь, which was published in the Paris journal Sovremennye zapiski in 1935-36 and as a book in 1938; “marvelous gimmicks” is, of course, quoted from the translation, and the original has “удивительные уловки” [astonishing/wonderful tricks]. Emre goes on to chew on these “gimmicks” at length:

The most shocking, she explains, was a trick mirror. When “shapeless, mottled, pockmarked, knobby things” were placed in front of the mirror, it would reflect perfectly sensible forms: flowers, fields, ships, people. When confronted with a human face or hand, the mirror would reflect a jumble of broken images. As the son listens to his mother describe her gimmick, he sees her eyes spark with terror and pity, “as if something real, unquestionable (in this world, where everything was subject to question), had passed through, as if a corner of this horrible life had curled up, and there was a glimpse of the lining.” Behind the mirror lurks something monstrous—an idea of art as device, an object whose representational powers can distort and devalue just as easily as they can estrange and enchant.

Trick mirrors are gimmicks, but they are also metaphors for how gimmicks work, eliciting both charm and suspicion.

But all of this is bullshit, because it’s based on a translation; the original passage is in Russian and has nothing to do with the word “gimmick”! That’s not some esoteric quibble, and it’s perfectly evident if you give it a moment’s thought. But of course you’d have to know that Invitation to a Beheading is a translation, and I guess we can’t assume that knowledge on the part of the magazine’s authors or editors. We live in a fallen world.

…But wait, there’s more! She goes on to say:

Yet its single-use success—no other writer could get away with repeating her trick—reminds us that the literary marketplace, as Theodor Adorno once observed of the art world, favors “work with a ‘personal touch,’ or more bluntly, a gimmick.”

Adorno observed no such thing! She’s quoting from Aesthetic Theory, a 1995 English translation by Robert Hullot-Kentor of Adorno’s Ästhetische Theorie. I don’t have an easy way of finding out what Adorno actually wrote, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t “a gimmick.” So again, Adorno is irrelevant if you want to talk about gimmicks. And surely Emre is aware Adorno didn’t write in English.