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Last night, having just watched a documentary on the Connecticut River flood of 1936, my wife and I discovered that our basement had flooded — apparently the sump pump had failed. So this morning we called the Barstows (it’s great to have contractors you can rely on in emergencies) and they sent a crew over within half an hour, unclogged the pump (“you should have it checked every year”), vacuumed the floor, and left. I investigated and discovered that, although most of the boxes were up out of harm’s way (a precaution we took after the last flood, a decade or so ago), there was a box of sf books and magazines that had gotten wet, so I brought it up, opened it, and set everything out to dry. Part of the contents was a set of Worlds of Tomorrow, a companion magazine to If which I was buying in the mid-’60s; I opened the January 1966 issue at random and found in the table of contents “How to Understand Aliens,” by Robert M. W. Dixon. “The Robert M. W. Dixon?” I thought, and sure enough, the Australianist linguist about whom I posted repeatedly in January 2006 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) had written both stories and articles for sf magazines back in those days.

I wish I could send you to an online version of “How to Understand Aliens,” but there doesn’t seem to be one. You can see the beginning in accursed snippet view here, but that’s not much help. You can read the article here (thanks, Owlmirror!). I’ll copy out a short passage that will give you some idea; the whole thing is well done, as one would expect, and hopefully gave some readers (and writers) a better idea of how language works:

Space linguists could gain valuable practice in unravelling bizarre languages by having a preliminary workout on a terrestrial language before venturing into extra-terrestrial contact. For instance, a cadet linguist thrown amongst a tribe of Australian Aborigines would be able to get an idea of the variety of similar meanings a word can have when he learned that gargal could mean, firstly, the upper part of the human arm as it meets the body; secondly, the lower part of a branch, where it meets the trunk of a tree; and thirdly, the mouth of a stream where it flows into a larger river. And of how the meaning of a word can be extended to apply to new situations: the word for ‘hollow log’, maralu, being taken over to apply to ‘shirt’ when the aborigines first came into contact with white men wearing this novel garment.

Philip Jenkins’ Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 Years looks like a really good book judging from the sample I had Amazon send me; I’ll probably wind up getting the whole thing. Here are a couple of piquant excerpts from the part I read:

Looking back at its long history, Egypt’s Christians only knew state favor for a fleeting interval, and a similar story could be told of Syria, that other ancient center of the faith. From 542 to 578, the greatest leader of the Monophysite church was Jacobus Baradaeus, whose nickname refers to the rags he wore to escape the attention of imperial authorities constantly on the watch for this notorious dissident. Translating his name as “Hobo Jake” would not be far off the mark. Instead of living in a bishop’s palace, he remained ever on the move, wandering from city to city. He roamed between Egypt and Persia, ordaining bishops and priests for the swelling underground church. His career, in other words, looked far more like that of an early apostle than a medieval prelate, and there were many others like him. Numerically, Jake won far more converts than Paul of Tarsus, and he covered more ground. The heart of the Christian church never left the catacombs, or if it did, it was not for long.

[…]

We can imagine a counterfactual universe in which the schism between Rome and the East occurred in the fifth century, not the eleventh, and papal Rome never recovered from subjection to successive waves of barbarian occupiers. By 450, much of the old Western empire was under the political control of barbarian warlords who were overwhelmingly Arian Christians, rather than Catholics. Perhaps the papacy might have survived in the face of Arian persecution and cultural pressure, perhaps not. In the East, meanwhile, the Monophysite Roman Empire would have held on to its rock-solid foundations in a faithfully united Eastern realm that stretched from Egypt to the Caucasus, from Syria to the Balkans. This solid Christendom would have struggled mightily against Muslim newcomers, and conceivably, they would have held the frontiers.

Later Christian scholars would know the fundamental languages of the faith — Greek, Coptic, and Syriac — and they would have free access to the vast treasures surviving in each of those tongues. Latin works, however, would be available only to a handful of daring researchers willing to explore that marginal language with its puzzling alphabet. Only those bold Latinists would recall such marginal figures of Christian antiquity as Saints Augustine and Patrick. In contrast, every educated person would know those champions of the mainstream Christian story, Severus of Antioch and Egypt’s Aba Shenoute. In this alternate world, the decisive turning point in church history would have been not Chalcedon, but Second Ephesus, which we today remember as the Gangster Synod, the Council That Never Was. And the One Nature would have triumphed over the noxious errors of the Dyophysites, the Two Nature heretics.

I know some historians look down their noses at alternate history, but I love it, and I find this example particularly stimulating. Down with Latin, up with Greek, Coptic, and Syriac! Long live Severus and Aba Shenoute!

I’m finally getting around to reading a book that a kind Hatter got me almost a decade ago (thanks, Andrei!), Stalin’s Children: Three Generations of Love, War, and Survival by Owen Matthews, and am enjoying it greatly; the first chapter has material of clear LH interest:

I spoke Russian before I spoke English. Until I was sent to an English prep school, dressed up in a cap, blazer and shorts, I saw the world in Russian. If languages have a colour, Russian was the hot pink of my mother’s seventies dresses, the warm red of an old Uzbek teapot she had brought with her from Moscow, the kitschy black and gold of the painted Russian wooden spoons which hung on the wall in the kitchen. English, which I spoke with my father, was the muted green of his study carpet, the faded brown of his tweed jackets. Russian was an intimate language, a private code I would speak to my mother, warm and carnal and coarse, the language of the kitchen and the bedroom, and its smell was warm bed-fug and steaming mashed potatoes. English was the language of formality, adulthood, learning, reading Janet and John on my father’s lap, and its smell was Gauloises and coffee and the engine oil on his collection of model steam engines.

My mother would read me Pushkin stories like the extraordinary folk epic ‘Ruslan and Lyudmila’. The supernatural world of dark Russian forests, of brooding evil and bright, shining heroes conjured on winter evenings in a small London drawing room and punctuated by the distant squeal of trains coming into Victoria station, was infinitely more vivid to my childhood self than anything my father could summon. ‘There is the Russian spirit, it smells of Russia there,’ wrote Pushkin, of a mysterious land by the sea where a great green oak stood; round the oak was twined a golden chain, and on the chain a black cat paced, and in its tangled branches a mermaid swam. […]

[My mother] is also ferociously witty and intelligent, though I usually only see this side of her when she is in company. At the dinner table with guests her voice is clear and emphatic, pronouncing her opinions with unfashionable certainty in roundly enunciated English.

‘Everything is relative,’ she will say archly. ‘One hair in a bowl of soup is too much, one hair on your head is not enough.’ Or she will declare: ‘Russian has so many reflexive verbs because Russians are pathologically irresponsible! In English you say, “I want”, “I need”. In Russian it’s “want has arisen”, “need has arisen”. Grammar reflects psychology! The psychology of an infantile society!’

When she speaks she slips effortlessly from Nureyev to Dostoyevsky to Karamzin and Blok, her snorts of derision and dismissive hand-waves interspersed with gasps of admiration and hands rapturously clapped to the chest as she swerves on to a new subject like a racing driver taking a corner. ‘Huh, Nabokov!’ she will say with pursed lips and a raised eyebrow, letting all present know that she finds him an incorrigible show-off and a cold, heartless and artificial individual. ‘Ah, Kharms,’ she says, raising a palm to the sky, signalling that here is a man with a true understanding of Russia’s absurdity, its pathos and everyday tragedy. Like many Russian intellectuals of her generation, she is utterly at home in the dense kasbah of her country’s literature, navigating its alleys like a native daughter. I have always admired my mother, but at these moments, when she holds a table in awe, I am intensely proud of her.

Janet and John sounds dreadful — no wonder he preferred Pushkin. And much as I love Nabokov, I know exactly why his mother finds him “an incorrigible show-off” and “cold, heartless and artificial.” (For Ruslan and Lyudmila, with its green oak, golden chain, and tomcat, see this post, itself almost a decade old.)

Gal Beckerman has a NY Times piece on celebrity bookshelves (“With celebrities now frequently speaking on television in front of their home libraries, a voyeuristic pleasure presents itself”) that might not be worth a post except that 1) I myself certainly focus on those shelves when they show people talking from home, and 2) Cate Blanchett has the OED and Karl Schlögel’s Moscow, 1937, discussed on LH here and at The Millions here! Also exciting to me: Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress, has Heart of the Ngoni — if you have any interest in the Bambara, or West African mythology and culture in general, it’s a wonderful book.

Also, Madeline Kripke, the lexicographic collector I wrote about back in 2013, has died at 76 of coronavirus:

One question that none of Ms. Kripke’s reference books answers is what will happen to her collection. After avoiding eviction in the mid-1990s by agreeing to remove the volumes stacked in the hallway, she had hoped to transfer the whole enchilada [slang for the entirety] from her apartment and three warehouses to a university or, if she had her druthers [n., preference], to install it in her own dictionary library, which she never got to build.

“Unfortunately, it appears that no clear plan existed for her collection,” her brother, her only immediate survivor, said in a phone interview. “We are now in touch with some of her expert friends for advice.”

Make plans and follow through, people! (And yes, she was Saul’s sister.)

As promised in my review of The Petty Demon, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks reading Sologub’s first novel, the 1895 Тяжёлые сны [Bad Dreams], and while it’s not nearly as good, I’m not sorry I read it — it illuminated the world of what Blok, and after him Mandelstam, called Russia’s глухие годы (“remote and desolate years,” in Clarence Brown’s translation), the last couple of decades of the nineteenth century, and it gave rise to thoughts about the genre of satire that I will report on below.

In form it’s a mashup of Turgenev (love entanglements in a nest of the gentry, progressive ideas crushed by the dead weight of Russian conservatism) and Dostoevsky (anguished psychology, suffering children, and a murder straight out of the Brothers K), laced with the openness about sex that was just bursting into Russian literature (this is considered its first “decadent novel”) and Sologub’s own depressive attitude toward life (favorite words: злоба ‘spite, malice’ and its adverb злобно, мучить ‘to torment,’ мрачно ‘gloomily, drearily, glumly,’ хмуро ‘gloomily, dismally, sullenly,’ тоскливый ‘melancholy, dreary, depressing,’ злорадство ‘malicious pleasure, schadenfreude’). The protagonist is a provincial teacher named Login (Sologub was just such a provincial teacher, and the novel is apparently full of autobiographical elements) who is being driven mad because of the stupidity, drunkenness, and malicious gossip that surround him; his friends are worthless, his bosses are evil, and the only light in his life is Anna, the daughter of an oddball local member of the gentry who has taught her to be independent and value virtue over society’s baubles. The descriptions of nature are magical (this is a specialty of Russian literature, from Gogol to Pasternak and beyond) and there are marvelously effective scenes (the former general who shows off the obedience of his six children, ordering them to laugh, cry, fall down, play dead, and wriggle out of the room, is straight out of Saltykov-Shchedrin), but on the whole the book takes too long to get from setting up its characters and situations to the concluding cholera, murder, and riot. Like everybody else, he needed an editor.

And really, the decadent grumpiness is way over the top; I laughed out loud when I got to a scene where some boys were being naughty and he sums up with “Их шалости были флегматичны” [their naughtiness was phlegmatic] (for shalost’ ‘prank, mischief, naughtiness’ see here and here). Furthermore, the intense focus on (what I see as) adolescent angst is boring to me; as I said here in the context of Lermontov’s Pechorin, I’m no longer young and bamboozled by flair and a good line of existentialist patter. Here’s a particularly ripe sample:

— Да, да, я не люблю тебя, хоть ты дороже всего для меня на свете. Я не знаю, что это. Я такой порочный для тебя, и я хочу обладать тобою. Я ненавижу тебя. Я бы хотел истязать тебя, измучить тебя невыносимою болью и стыдом, умертвить, — и потом умереть, потому что без тебя я уже не могу жить. Ты околдовала меня, ты знаешь чары, ты сделала меня твоим рабом, — и я тебя ненавижу, — мучительно. Что ж, пока еще ты свободна, — прогони меня, видишь, я-дикий, я-злой, я-порочный. Скажи мне, чтоб я ушел.

“Yes, it’s true, I don’t love you, even though you’re dearer to me than anything in the world. I don’t know what it is. I’m so depraved for you, and I want to possess you. I hate you. I would like to torture you, to torment you with unbearable pain and shame, to destroy you, and then to die, because without you I can no longer live. You have bewitched me, you know magic spells, you have made me your slave, and I hate you, agonizingly. Well, while you’re still free, drive me away; you can see that I’m wild, I’m wicked, I’m depraved. Tell me to go away.”

Oh, come on. I’m too old for that shit.

And aside from plot, abnormal psychology, and nature description, the book is largely preoccupied with detailed satire of provincial life, focusing on but not limited to the educational establishment; there are the usual mayor, police chief, superintendent, all the characters out of Gogol’s Inspector General and every other takedown of life in the boondocks, and of course the women, scheming to marry their daughters off to the most promising up-and-comers and gossiping viciously about everyone. It skewers its targets accurately, but in the end, who cares? The point of social satire, it seems to me, is to draw people’s attention to social ills so they may be corrected, and that is not a literary aim. For it to work as literature, the characters have to break free of their social purpose and leap off the page with their own quirks and obsessions having nothing to do with the betterment of things, such as happens everywhere in Gogol and often in Shchedrin. Here, apart from the general with the obedient and terrified kids, it doesn’t; the townspeople are variously drunken, loutish, and corrupt, and there’s not much more to say about them. People at the time might well be driven to indignation, but after over a century, who cares? And, in the lapidary formulation of Village Explainer Ez, literature is news that STAYS news.

Molly Harris writes for BBC Travel about an unusual language:

The Sarine River skirts the edge of Basse-Ville (lower town), dividing both the canton of Fribourg and the city of Fribourg into two sectors: German-speaking and French-speaking. The city of around 40,000 people is clearly one of duality: street signs are all in two languages; residents can choose whether their children will use French or German in primary school; and the university even offers a bilingual curriculum.

However, head to medieval Basse-Ville, caught between the German- and French-speaking divisions of Fribourg, and you’ll find yourself in a no-man’s land where the two languages have become one: le Bolze. […] While the exact origins of the language are unknown, many believe that Bolze was created during the Industrial Revolution in the 19th Century, when people began to migrate from the countryside into cities as jobs became available during the industrial boom. As a city bordering both French- and Swiss German-speaking countryside villages, Fribourg grew and expanded into a bilingual, cultural and industrial hub for the poor seeking work. […] These workers needed a way to understand one another and work together. So they merged their mother tongues to create a new language.

Bolze is a conversational melding of Swiss German and French, using the two languages to create a completely new version. Passed from generation to generation orally, and only found in the Basse-Ville of Fribourg, the few remaining Bolze speakers only speak it to one another in order to continue their cultural heritage along the shore of the river and within the stone walls that border their neighbourhood. […]

“This is a part of the history of Fribourg,” Sulger explained. “The Bolze culture is made of people who are perfectly bilingual. This is really rare in Fribourg, because usually we speak one language or the other better. Those who speak Bolze can really speak both, and can do this mixture.” “It makes Bolze speakers special because it is spoken only by so few people,” he added. […]

As of April 2019, thanks to an influx of immigrants, at least 160 nationalities live in the canton of Fribourg, and more people in Switzerland speak Serbo-Croatian, Albanian and Portuguese in Switzerland than Bolze. Though older generations may still speak Bolze in their homes and to one another on the street, the younger generations can only learn it at home ­– just as Swiss German is learned within the family – or by listening to and learning from those who are fluent. It is not taught in schools, nor are there any official language classes.

If you read German, there’s a decade-old piece by Isabelle Eichenberger called “Nei, dasch zvüu, tu me connais!” [No, that’s too much, you know me!], and there’s a film Ruelle des Bolzes (not, alas, on YouTube), but I can’t find an etymology for Bolze (I assume it’s pronounced à l’allemande). Thanks, jack!

I ran across a reference to a “bastable” that perplexed me; it turns out there’s a fuller form “bastable oven,” and the OED has an entry from 2019:

1. attributive. Especially in Ireland: designating an earthenware or (in later use) cast-iron pot with three short legs and a lid, used for baking over a fire; esp. in bastable oven, bastable pot.

2. Especially in Ireland: an earthenware or (in later use) cast-iron pot with three short legs and a lid, used for baking over a fire.

The etymology is interesting:

Variant of Barnstaple (in Barnstaple oven n.; compare forms at that entry), with simplification of the consonant cluster to rst and assimilatory loss of r before s.
Among forms attested for the place name Barnstaple are Barstaple (a1484), Barstable (1549), Bastable (1675).

The entry for Barnstaple oven, also from 2019, explains that “Barnstaple was formerly known for the manufacture of pottery, especially (from the end of the 16th cent.) prefabricated unglazed cloam ovens, which enjoyed considerable commercial success in the West Country, Ireland, and the North American colonies.” The first citation is:

1716 A. Hill Ess. for December iii. 35 The Barnstaple Ovens of Devonshire..being first form’d of common Potters Clay, in one entire Piece, are not only cleaner, and cheaper than any other Ovens, but bake with more Evenness, and Certainty.

You can see a photo at this Bread in Ireland page (which explains the history of soda bread: “The concept of leavening bread with acid and baking soda had been long in use by the American Indians (who used ashes) and had been used for some time by Europeans in North America. This quick, very simple method of making bread suited the poorly equipped Irish household, and also worked with the low gluten flour available in Ireland”), and more photos and descriptions here (where it’s spelled “bastible,” just another in a parade of historical variants).

My wife and I are almost finished with Rachel Cusk’s Outline (our latest bedtime reading), and we’ve just gotten to the passage Stan Carey quoted recently at Sentence first (a woman is describing her feelings about being hired to teach English in Athens):

She wasn’t quite sure how the language barrier was going to work: it was a funny idea, writing in a language not your own. It almost makes you feel guilty, she said, the way people feel forced to use English, how much of themselves must get left behind in that transition, like people being told to leave their homes and take only a few essential items with them. Yet there was also a purity to that image that attracted her, filled as it was with possibilities for self-reinvention. To be freed from clutter, both mental and verbal, was in some ways an appealing prospect; until you remembered something you needed that you had had to leave behind. She, for instance, found herself unable to make jokes when she spoke in another language: in English she was by and large a humorous person, but in Spanish for instance – which at one time she had spoken quite well – she was not. So it was not, she imagined, a question of translation so much as one of adaptation. The personality was forced to adapt to its new linguistic circumstances, to create itself anew: it was an interesting thought. There was a poem, she said, by Beckett that he had written twice, once in French and once in English, as if to prove that his bilinguality made him two people and that the barrier of language was, ultimately, impassable.

Stan says “Some of this rings true for me,” and it does for me as well; as I said here (and I think elsewhere, but I can’t find any specific posts), “Like many people capable of such interactions, I feel very different when speaking different languages.”

As for the novel — which made quite a splash when it came out — we’re enjoying it but probably won’t feel impelled to read the follow-ups (it’s the first of a trilogy); the structure (a series of interactions in which interlocutors and their experiences are carefully described but the narrator is left mostly a blank) is interesting, but not so interesting that we can’t tear ourselves away, and none of the characters have distinctive voices — they all sound like the narrator. I imagine we’ll return to the wonderful Tessa Hadley.

And if you’re wondering why this is Language Barrier II, I used the title for a 2004 post about a poem by Valerie Bloom.

Back in 2018 the Paris Review published a piece by Anthony Madrid called Guy Davenport’s Translation of Mao that’s so irresistible I can barely resist quoting the whole thing. But I am strong, so I will just quote the start:

In 1979, Guy Davenport’s second book of “stories” appeared: Da Vinci’s Bicycle. He was fifty-one. I put quotation marks around the word stories because almost nothing happens in any of them. When they’re good, they’re good for other reasons.

Davenport was a disciple of Ezra Pound and James Joyce, and like everyone answering that description, he was a supreme crank. The main problem with all of these guys is that they vastly overestimate the value of literary allusion. And I know all about it, ’cuz I was ruined in my youth by these lizard-eating weirdos. Davenport certainly did his part.

They were all brilliant. They could write sentences that stick with you forever. Most people never write even one; these guys could practically cut them off by the yard. Yet, none of ’em knew when to stop. They always, always got carried away. My hypothesis is that too much of their motivation for writing was to enshrine their crankitudes. They were always trying to get away with something.

Zoom in on Davenport. Let me ask you: How much Chinese do you suppose he knew? I think the smart money is on “very little.” He probably knew about as much as I do—which is to say, as much as can be learned from one semester of study, augmented by the eager observation of one or two native speakers reciting a handful of classic poems.

But a supreme crank knows how to exploit every little drop of whatever he or she knows. […] Armed with this thought, he did a translation of a famous poem by Mao Zedong. The form of his translation is unique in American letters: The text is set up as quatrains (that’s normal enough), but the individual lines have only three syllables each. Davenport knew that this did not accurately reflect the original Chinese, but—and this is where the brilliance comes in—it does get across (like nothing else available in English) the collapsed syntax and staccato pacing of classical shi poetry.

And here’s the start of the poem:

West wind keen,
[Up] steep sky
Wild geese cry
For dawn moon.

I’m skipping over the hilarious setting of the translation (a deadpan account of Nixon’s visit to the People’s Republic of China) and the original poem (not a shi but a ci) and two other translations of the same poem and leaving you to visit the link for them; here’s one last snippet:

But there’s the pity of it, Iago! Davenport’s version is misleading, damnably misleading, if our object is to “work towards the Chairman” and his particular poem. But! If we want to be led to a more general truth about what most Chinese poems were bound to sound like, both to Nixon and to Davenport as native speakers of English, then “West wind keen, / Up steep sky / Wild geese cry / For dawn moon” blows the other translations out of the water.

And I am forced to add that I made the mistake of clicking on the link for Madrid’s name and finding this page of his contributions to the Review, and they’re all just as delightful. Here he investigates the origin of the famous saying “Alexander wept, seeing as he had no more worlds to conquer” (“‘In what ancient text does that passage appear?’ Answer: it appears nowhere”), and here he raves about “Russia’s Dr. Seuss,” Kornei Chukovsky, throwing in a caricature by Mayakovsky and a clip of Chukovsky reading his own “Telephone” (1926). He also quotes the first stanza of “Putanitsa” (“The Muddle”), adding the Google Translate version:

The kittens were crocked:
“I’m tired of meowing!
We want, like a pig,
Grunt!”

“The line ‘We want, like a pig, grunt!’—especially if performed with a strong Russian accent—has great charm and authority, and has indeed acquired, in my household, the status of a classic line, like something out of Virgil.”

OK, I’m off to spend the rest of the day investigating his past contributions and cackling. Enjoy!

I’m back to reading Norwood (see this post), and I just ran across a sentence that made me happier than it had any right to: “It’s pure d. meanness is what is it.” (I’m not sure whether “what is it” is an error for “what it is,” which sounds far more natural to me, or whether it’s a regional form I’m not familiar with.) I had never seen or heard the term “pure d” except from my late friend Mike (thegrowlingwolf), a dyed-in-the-wool Texan who would say things like “That’s pure-d crazy”; the meaning was obvious and the sound of it irresistible, but I would never have dreamed of using it myself — it would have felt like swiping his boots. Naturally I wondered what the origin was, and how to spell it (I think Mike may have written “pure-dee” in his blog). Now seeing it there in print, with a period after the d., made me realize it must be short for “damn”: what a thrill! So of course I googled it, and found this Wordwizard page (I hadn’t known about Wordwizard) which investigates the question; Ken Greenwald cites the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE):

PUREDEE adjective, adverb. Also PURE-D, PURE DEE OLD, PURE O.D., PURE OLDEE, PURE-T [[all forms in lower case]] [Probably originally euphemism for pure damn(ed)] chiefly South and South Midland, U.S.: Genuine, real, just plain; very, really, completely.

<1938 “It’s the Pure D truth.”—Guide Mississippi FWP [[?? Field Worker Proposal]]

<1941 Texas “‘Them folks are mean out there,’ Mrs. Clampett said. ‘Just pure dee mean.’”—Hold Autumn by Perry, page 203 >

<1952 “Kip’s lip curled at this slovenly practice, one which he has always called purdee shif’less.” Ibid “You’re puredee heller.”—Home is Upriver by Harwin (Hench College), page 8 and 187>

<1953 Ozarks “Pure dee . . . Genuine, indubitable. ‘No, them ain’t no chigger bites. That’s the pure dee seven-year itch!’”—Down in the Holler by Randolph & Wilson, page 275>

<1958 central Texas “It’s pure-dee hog-hunting weather.”—Meskin Hound by Lathham, page 53>

<1964 North Carolina “He loafed about his office playing patience in a white uniform and pure-T bare feet, which scared all his patients away.”—If Morning Ever Comes by Tyler, page 44>

<1968 Louisiana “ A dull and stupid person, Pure-d dumb”—DARE Question HH3, Louisiana informant 35>

<1970 Texas “Elliott . . . found a pair of nearly new overalls . . . dry socks and one of his father’s gray work shirts. ‘Lordy, lordy. You wouldn’t know me from a pure-dee old scissorbill, Grady said wryly with satisfaction.”—Harper’s Magazine, April, page 80>

<1972 New York City [Black] “So this one day Miss Moore rounds us all up at the mailbox and it’s PUREDEE hot and she’s knockin herself out about arithmetic.”—in Calling the Wind (1973) by Major, page 348>

<1982 Indiana “I have heard pure D. in Southern Indiana used as what seemed to me to be a negative intensifier—it almost always precedes a negative word, nonsense, mean, ornery, etc.; Mississippi “During my youth, I often heard the usage in question, always, or nearly always—as pure oldee; Louisiana “Around 1950, I heard and used the phrase ‘pure D. It was used pejoratively (e.g., in response to a tall story, ‘That’s a load of pure D horse shit!’)”; central eastern Texas “In this part of Texas, as well as in the Houston area where I grew up, we said ‘pure O.D. __________,’ but pure dee old (something).”—Newsletter of the American Dialect Society Letters>

<1986 central west Florida “Pure D hell—unqualified hell; they give you pure D hell; pure D plumb nasty—extremely nasty; central west Arkansas they give you Pure D old belly—just plain belly”—Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States Concordance>

<1995 “‘That catfish was puredee good.’ Pure D(amn) good.”—Signal Magazine, December>

Then I checked Jonathon Green, and for maybe the first time was disappointed: not only do his citations not go back before 1953, but he suggests d might be “short for dandy.” Damn, Jonathon, get serious! “Dandy” my ass.