languagehat.com

Fact-checking is perhaps peripheral to the concerns of LH, but it was a focus of my copyediting career and is something I do on a regular basis when I read, so I was glad to see Colin Dickey’s CJR piece on the subject:

Early newspaper printers had more interest in opinion and polemic than objectivity. There was little premium on facts—readers wanted the news, but they wanted it slanted. This began to change with the advent of wire services, where space was precious. In 1854, Daniel H. Craig, the head of the Associated Press, sent out a circular to his agents detailing a request for only “material facts in regard to any matter or event”—in as few words as possible. “All expressions of opinion upon any matters; all political, religious, and social biases; and especially all personal feelings on any subject on the part of the Reporter, must be kept out of his dispatches.” Wire reports couldn’t afford to expend wasted verbiage on opinion or local idiom—they needed to distill newsworthy content to its bare minimum. Doing so was a good business: the Associated Press packaged its content as the raw material that local newspapers could fashion into their own opinion and spin. […]

In 1923, Briton Hadden and Henry Luce revolutionized the role and purpose of facts. Their fledgling publication—Time magazine—would gather up other outlets’ work and edit it into bite-size reports and commentary. To ensure before publication that every printed word was objectively verifiable, they added another major innovation: a research department, or what we now call fact checking. (The working title of the magazine was Facts.) Editor John Shaw Billings crowed in 1933 that “We can ask what dress Queen Mary wore last Thursday and have an answer in twenty minutes.” […]

The research process at Time would set the standard for American magazines. But no publication has been more consistently identified with its rigorous fact-checking than The New Yorker. It began to mercilessly check facts after an error-plagued 1927 profile of Edna St. Vincent Millay led to Millay’s mother threatening a libel suit against the magazine. The New Yorker’s obsession with facts quickly became almost an end unto itself. The magazine established a fact-checking empire, one composed of telephone directories and reference books, carbon copies and filing systems. […]

If writers were pitted against fact checkers, it was because the former resented a check on the idea of the lone genius whose words were unassailable. In the era of New Journalism, The New Yorker’s fact-checking arm came in for criticism from figures like Tom Wolfe, who saw in it a form of groupthink and regarded it as a cabal of women and middling editors all collaborating to henpeck and emasculate the prose of the Great Writer.

Since the dawn of the digital age, upstart and august publications alike have largely abandoned fact-checking when it comes to online stories. Unlike print, digital content is never completely set in stone, so websites have returned to an ethos closer to that of the New York World’s Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play, issuing post facto corrections as needed in lieu of prepublication checking.

I know it’s been fashionable since at least the 1960s to mock the very idea of fact-checking as bourgeois frippery or (since the advent of French theory) as inherently senseless, since there’s no such thing as objective reality (or whatever — I could never figure out what they were saying in enough detail to even provide a nutshell caricature), but I have no patience for that sort of thing, and I think a lot of people have realized recently that it has very unfortunate real-world consequences. Just because facts are hard to pin down and you can rarely be completely sure of them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

A hilarious quote (courtesy of Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti) from Clive James, “Primo Levi’s Last Will and Testament”:

The translator’s Italian is good enough to make sure that he usually doesn’t, when construing from that language, get things backward, but he can get them sidewise with daunting ease, and on several occasions he puts far too much trust in his ear. To render promiscuità as “promiscuity,” as he does twice, is, in the context, a howler. Levi didn’t mean that people forced to live in a ghetto were tormented by promiscuity. He meant that they were tormented by propinquity. The unintentional suggestion that they were worn out by indiscriminate lovemaking is, in the circumstances, a bad joke.

We’ve discussed translation from Italian a number of times, e.g. here; the OED’s etymology for promiscuity:

Originally < classical Latin prōmiscuus ([from miscēre to mix]) + –ity suffix. In later use probably reinforced by French promiscuité confused and indiscriminate mix (1731 with reference to people, 1832 with reference to things), promiscuous sexual behaviour (1839 or earlier) < classical Latin prōmiscuus + French –ité -ity suffix. Compare Spanish promiscuidad (a1795 or earlier), Portuguese promiscuidade (1813), Italian promiscuità (1611).

Stan at Sentence first posts about the Scots Syntax Atlas (SCOSYA), “a fantastic, newly launched website that will appeal to anyone interested in language and dialect, especially regional varieties and their idiosyncratic grammar.”

Its home page says:

Would you say I like they trainers? What about She’s no caring? Have you ever heard anyone say I div like a good story? And might you say You’re after locking us out? All of these utterances come from dialects of Scots spoken across Scotland, but where exactly can you hear them?

To answer this question, we travelled the length and breadth of Scotland, visiting 145 communities, from Shetland in the north to Stranraer in the south. We were particularly interested in the different ways that sentences are built up in these different areas. This part of a language is called its syntax, and it’s one of the most creative aspects of how people use language.

The resulting interactive Atlas has four main sections: How do people speak in…?, Stories behind the examples, Who says what where?, and Community voices. The two questions are self-explanatory. Community voices is a collection of extracts (audio and transcripts) from the conversations recorded – a trove of accent and dialect diversity. […]

The Scots Syntax Atlas was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and created by researchers from the University of Glasgow, University of Edinburgh, and Queen Mary University London. It’s fully and freely available and is a joy to explore. Someone please tell me they’re working on an Irish English version.

Keep putting the good stuff online, O scholars!

It’s been a long day, so I’ll just list stuff:

99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style by Matt Madden

Outline: A Novel by Rachel Cusk

How Russia Learned to Write: Literature and the Imperial Table of Ranks by Irina Reyfman

God’s Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts by Brent Nongbri (thanks, bulbul!)

And some foreign-language movies (thanks, Eric!): The Assassin (刺客聶隱娘), directed by Hou Hsiao-hsien, and Travels with Hiroshi Shimizu.

I hope all my readers are having a good holiday season, and remember — the days are getting longer! (Unless, of course, you’re in the Southern Hemisphere.)

Cratylic names (I have just learned) are what I thought of as “speaking names” (from the German term sprechende Namen); they are so called from Plato’s dialogues with Cratylus about the truthfulness of names, and you can read Erin Somers’ post about them here. I have found the most amazing collection I have seen of such names in the first paragraph of Thomas Keymer’s LRB review (8 February 2018) of two books by Thomas Love Peacock:

Marilyn Butler​, whose Peacock Displayed was published in 1979, wasn’t the first to connect Peacock’s name with the showy wit of his satires. It started with Shelley, his friend and patron, who joked in 1820 about ‘the Pavonian Psyche’ (pavo: peacock), as though Peacock himself had the kind of name that he specialised in giving to his characters. In the seven novels he produced between Headlong Hall (1815) and Gryll Grange (1860), names are rarely hard to decode. Anyside Antijack is a time-serving Tory politician; Cephalis Cranium, a phrenologist’s brainy daughter; the Revd Mr Grovelgrub, a sycophantic tutor; Dr Harry Killquick, a hit-or-miss physician; Sir Bonus MacScrip, venal member for the borough of Threevotes; Peter Paypaul Paperstamp, the sinecure-seeking poet of Mainchance Villa; Sir Simon Steeltrap, scourge of poachers on his hunting estate at Spring-gun and Treadmill. Some of the names indicate real-life targets such as George Canning, the Tory statesman who started out as the attack dog of the Anti-Jacobin, and Wordsworth, whose acceptance of a government post as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland in 1813 confirmed his apostasy from radical politics. Other names aim at several targets, or are simply generalised types. Occasionally Peacock adds a twist. In his third and now best-known novel, Nightmare Abbey (1818), Mr Glowry, the ‘atrabilarious’ patriarch of the estate, employs only servants who reflect his melancholy by means of ‘a long face or a dismal name’: Raven, Crow, Skellet, Mattocks, Graves. When in need of a new footman, Glowry jumps at the opportunity to hire Diggory Deathshead. But Deathshead turns out to be ruddy-cheeked and cheerful, and is promptly fired.

Cephalis Cranium! Diggory Deathshead! I don’t know if I want to actually read the novels, but I’m deeply impressed.

Bee Wilson’s 2018 LRB review of The Littlehampton Libels: A Miscarriage of Justice and a Mystery about Words in 1920s England by Christopher Hilliard (Oxford, June 2017) is full of all sorts of interesting things, as obviously is the book, but I want to quote some bits about language:

Edith Swan, a 30-year-old laundress from the seaside town of Littlehampton in Sussex, was accused of sending a letter to a sanitary inspector called Charles Gardner that contained words of ‘an indecent, obscene and grossly offensive character’. […]

The Littlehampton Libels by Christopher Hilliard is a short but dazzling work of microhistory. It uses the story of some poison pen letters in a small town to illuminate wider questions of social life in Britain between the wars, from ordinary people’s experience of the legal system to the way people washed their sheets, and is a far more exciting book than either the title or the rather dull cover would suggest. For a short period, the mystery of these letters became a national news story that generated four separate trials and, as Hilliard writes, ‘demanded more from the police and the lawyers than most murders’.

This is a book about morality and class, about the uses and abuses of literacy and about the tremendous dislocations in British society after the First World War, which extended far beyond those who had suffered the direct trauma of battle. Hilliard uses these poison pen letters – written in language that was as eccentric as it was obscene – to ‘catch the accents of the past’. The Littlehampton Libels is about a battle between two women who were members of only the second generation in Britain to benefit from compulsory elementary education, women for whom the written word was a new and exhilarating weapon.

Hilliard asks what it was like to live in a society where ‘nice’ women had to pretend that they were ignorant of all profanity. Melissa Mohr claims in her excellent book Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (2013) that the British started to swear more during and after the First World War, because strong language – like strong drink – is a way to alleviate despair. In 1930, John Brophy and Eric Partridge published a collection of British songs and slang from the war. They claimed that soldiers used the word ‘fucking’ so often that it was merely a warning ‘that a noun is coming’. In a normal situation, swear words are used for emphasis, but Brophy and Partridge found that obscenity was so over-used among the military in the Great War that if a soldier wanted to express emotion he wouldn’t swear. ‘Thus if a sergeant said, “Get your —ing rifles!” it was understood as a matter of routine. But if he said, “Get your rifles!” there was an immediate implication of urgency and danger.’

[Read more…]

Independent.ie reviews what sounds like an interesting book, Irish Speakers, Interpreters and the Courts 1754-1921 by Mary Phelan, which describes the wretched history of the suppression of Irish:

In 1737 (shortly before a famine that killed at least 300,000 people), the British-controlled parliament on Dublin’s College Green took a key step towards making Irish speakers feel like foreigners in their own country. The Administration of Justice (Language) Act decreed that from then on, all court proceedings would be carried out in English and English only. Gaeilgeoirs were entitled to an interpreter, but only if they could prove to the judge’s satisfaction that they did not have more than a few words of the ‘correct’ tongue.

What did this mean in practice? Phelan answers that question with extensive reference to jury records, newspaper reports and Dublin Castle correspondence. Her narrative may be a little for academic for general readers, but it certainly proves the truth of an astute observation by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu: “A language is worth what those who speak it are worth.”

Some of the stories Phelan has dug up are surprisingly comical. In one case at Limerick assizes, a man was accused of assault with a “cleith ailpín”, which the judge misheard as a “clean napkin”. He praised the prisoner’s “humane tenderness” and told the jury to acquit, whereupon the courtroom erupted in laughter. One of the lawyers had to explain that a “cleith ailpín” was in fact a shillelagh or cudgel and “would have felled an ox”.

Mostly, however, the 1737 Act operated as a blunt instrument of power that almost certainly led to many miscarriages of justice. There was no proper training for interpreters and no written code of ethics to guide them on how the law should work. Any Irish-speaking witness suspected of being really bilingual, Phelan writes, “faced a hostile environment where they could be intimidated, bullied, threatened that they would not be allowed expenses, charged with perjury and even imprisoned for contempt of court”.

Sure enough, Foras na Gaeilge defines cleith ailpín as “club, cudgel, knobstick”; cleith is ‘pole,’ but I’m not sure what ailpín means.

That review comes courtesy of Trevor Joyce, who also sent me a link to The Snowman – Cork Style, a five-minute video full of fine dialect and lots of cursing (I plan to start using “Fuckin’ hell, it’s Baltic!” myself). Go raibh maith agat, a Threvor!

I’ve started reading Merezhkovsky’s «Воскресшие боги. Леонардо да Винчи» (translated as The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci [text]), and since it’s set in Renaissance Florence of course I’m reading up on that city and its history, which led me to bring up from the cellar a book I probably haven’t looked at in two decades, Florence: A Travellers’ Companion (part of the excellent Travellers’ Companion series — the focus is too posh and anglophile for my taste, but they have well-chosen excerpts from historical descriptions and lots of images), and my eye was drawn for obvious reasons to this entry:

[30] A Welshman introduces the word ‘cupola’ into the English language in 1549; from William Thomas’s Historie of Italie . . .

(William Thomas (c. 1507-1554) was a hot-blooded Welsh humanist who fled to Venice after stealing from his Catholic patron. He stayed in Italy for four years, and then returned home to become Clerk to the Privy Council and personal adviser to Edward VI. He was executed for treasonable opposition to the marriage of Mary to Philip of Spain.)

Within the citee are manie goodlie temples and other edefices, amongest the whiche the cathedrall churche [the Duomo] is an excellent faire buildyng. For the walles without are all covered with fine white and blacke marble, wonderfullie well wrought, and over the quere is an whole vaulte called Cupola, faceioned [fashioned] like the halfe of an egge, risyng betwene.iii. iles and the body of the churche: so artificially made, that almost it semeth a miracle. For it is so high, that the pomell on the toppe beyng able to conteigne .vii. persons, seemeth a verie small thyng to theim that stande by lowe. And the compasse of it by the base, is about .160. paces. Besides that the floore vnder this vaulte rounde aboute the quiere is laide with fine marble of diuers colours so faire, that it yeldeth a delite to theim that walke vpon it.

The steple standyng besides the churche, is likewyse of fine marble a verie faire and square tower, equall in height to the circute of the base, with diuers stories and thynges grauen in it, so artificiall and costlie, that it deserueth singuler praise.

I checked the OED, and sure enough, that’s the first citation (as of the 1893 entry): “1549 W. Thomas Hist. Italie f. 137v Ouer the queere is an whole vaulte called Cupola, facioned like the halfe of an egge.” The etymology is “< Latin cūpula little cask, small vault, diminutive of cūpa cask, tun.” Thomas was a lively writer (and also wrote an Italian grammar); I’m sorry he came to such a hard end.

Recently posted by bulbul on Facebook: The Most Common Last Name in Every Country, by Barbara Davidson. Fun, but bear in mind these caveats from the FB post:

Slavomír Čéplö
Fun, but fishy. Just looking at our neck of the woods, I have doubts and they are confirmed when looking at their methodology section:
“To determine the most common last name in every country, NetCredit analyzed surname data from genealogy portal Forebears.io, various country censuses and other sources. ”
So the data set is heavily biased and thus GIGO / the grain of salt rule applies. Plus the data has not even been processed properly; this is immediately obvious when you look at the data for the Czech Republic: the form they give – Nováková – is feminine, thus it is clear that they did not do any normalization. The Slovak data then clearly shows the bias: the surname Varga is of Hungarian origin and thus predominantly found in the parts of the country with large Hungarian populations, i.e. mostly the South and especially South-East; fun fact: that’s where I’m from and Uncle Varga is our next door neighbor :).

Scott Martens
I wouldn’t treat this as very definitive either. On the other hand… what important, meaningful decision is anyone going to make after seeing this infographic? A lazy author making up a fictional character from a Slavic country will screw up standard gender suffixes (“Yuri Ivanova always wanted to be a cosmonaut…”)? Fail to recognize that a Peruvian named “Quispe” is probably going to consider themselves indigenous more than Hispanic? Name an exile from Togo “Lawson” without realizing that “Lawson” is the name of the royal family of Aneho, and anyone with that last name is connected to the royal family and that has political implications?

Besides, the most common family names in Canada have been “Li” (李) and “Singh” (ਸਿੰਘ) for eons, and it was “Tremblay” before that.

And while we’re on the subject of Slavo/bulbul, here’s his paper on diachronic Maltese (as second author; to appear in C. Lucas & S. Manfredi (eds.), Arabic and contact-induced language change: A handbook), courtesy of John Cowan, who says “Good stuff!”

I was reading the section on Pasternak’s 1922 Detstvo Lyuvers [The Childhood of Luvers] in the magnificent Reference Guide to Russian Literature (Neil Cornwell, ed.) when I was brought up short by this passage:

While there is little plot, the prosaic details encountered on this everyday journey stimulate the girl’s imagination into an endless process of recreating reality. The only logical chain linking the digressions, omissis and unrelated switches from which the story is woven lies in Zhenia’s life experience.

Now, I’m a widely read fellow, but I’m pretty sure I’ve never encountered the word omissis before except in Latin (where it is the dative/ablative plural of omissus ‘neglected, omitted,’ a passive participle of omittō). Wiktionary tells me it is also an Italian word (masculine, invariable) meaning “omission (deliberate),” though it is not in any Italian dictionary I have access to, so I presume it is rare; Dizy gives the following sample sentences:

Nell’ordinanza di rinvio a giudizio, gli omissis erano così numerosi da renderne incomprensibili i motivi.
I partecipanti alla riunione hanno chiesto, per alcuni documenti, una versione in cui figurassero meno omissis.
Rileggendo gli atti, i suoi “omissis” ad alcune domande mi hanno molto contrariato.

What I can say with some confidence is that it is not an English word (and I say that as someone who is notoriously lax about welcoming marginal items into the word-hoard); it is not in the OED (except in a Latin title: A. Boate, Observationes medicæ, de affectibus omissis, 1649) or any other dictionary I have access to, and Google Books gives only Latin hits, apart from a passage in David Ward’s Contemporary Italian Narrative and 1970s Terrorism:

And in relating what he had occasion to read in the secret files, and in order to further cloud the air of mystery, Genna makes ample use of the term OMISSIS, always in upper case, to indicate when information has been deemed too sensitive for the general public’s eyes and ears and is excised from a document.

The section was written by Daša Šilhánková Di Simplicio, who has written books in Italian and thus is presumably more at home in it than in English (though her first two names are Czech and/or Slovak, Šilhánková being the feminine form of Šilhánek), so I assume she used “omissis” as a term familiar from that language, perhaps not being sure what the English equivalent was (though you’d think “omissions” would do well enough — I note that while the Italian word is both singular and plural, here it is clearly plural in context, which might lead the innocent reader to suspect a singular “omissi”). I don’t blame her for its appearance in the final text, I blame the editorial staff at Fitzroy Dearborn, who should be able to differentiate between obscure but defensible scholarly terms and straight-up foreign words that will simply bewilder the hapless reader. (Of course, it may be that I am wrong and it is in fact used by some English-speaking scholarly community, in which case I welcome correction, as always.)