languagehat.com

Occasionally I feel guilty about neglecting what is, after all, part of this blog’s name, but now I have an occasion to remedy that failing. I’m reading Yuri Slezkine’s The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (a very generous gift from an LH reader); it’s over a thousand pages long, because it combines several strands of narration into one book, and one of those strands is a collective biography of some of the people who wound up living in what has become known as the House on the Embankment since Yuri Trifonov’s novel of that name (published in 1976). One of those people was Artemy Khalatov (Russian Wikipedia article), described thus on pp. 383-4:

One of Koltsov’s closest collaborators and head of the Association of State Book and Magazine Publishers (OGIZ), moved into a large, six-room apartment on the seventh floor of Entryway 12 (four floors below Rozengolts). […] Khalatov (thirty-five at the time of the move) was famous among the Bolsheviks for his long curly hair, full beard, and Astrakhan hat, which he rarely took off. Before being put in charge of nationalizing and centralizing the publishing industry, he supervised rationing in War Communism Moscow, chaired the Commission for the Improvement of Scholars’ Living Conditions, founded the State Puppet Theater, and, as head of People’s Nutrition (“Down with kitchen slavery! Long live communal food consumption!”), inspired Yuri Olesha’s Envy.

(I wrote about Envy here.) And then, on pp. 457-8, Slezkine quotes this passage from the memoirs of Ivan Gronsky, editor of Izvestia (and another resident of the House), about a Politburo meeting on August 5, 1931:

On the agenda was the work of OGIZ. The presenter was Khalatov. He entered the room and stood, not where he was supposed to, but at the other end of the table, closer to Stalin. Just as Khalatov was about to begin, Stalin suddenly asked:

“Why are you wearing a hat?”

Khalatov looked lost.

“But you know I always wear this hat.”

“It shows a lack of respect for the Politburo! Take off your hat!”

“But, Iosif Vissarionovich, why?”

I had never seen Stalin in such a state. Usually he was polite and spoke softly, but now he was absolutely furious. Khalatov still did not remove his ill-fated hat. Stalin jumped up and ran out of the room. We all began to reason with Khalatov in semi-facetious terms: “Artem, don’t be silly. . .” Khalatov relented, and began his report. Stalin came back, sat down, and raised his hand. Molotov, as usual, said: “Comrade Stalin has the floor.”

The General Secretary’s brief intervention can be summarized as follows: “The political situation in the country has changed, but we have not drawn the appropriate conclusions. It seems to me that OGIZ should be split up. I propose taking five publishing houses out of OGIZ.”

The proposal was accepted. Khalatov left the meeting as a nobody.

Wearing hats indoors can be dangerous! And note that in 1931 it was still possible to think you could get away with arguing with Iosif Vissarionovich. (If you’re curious, here’s an image of Khalatov in his hat.) But he did not in fact leave the meeting as a nobody; Slezkine concludes the passage by saying “He continued to live in the House of Government and to wear his hat.”

The AHD defines terroir as “1. The aggregate characteristics of the environment in which a food or wine is produced, including regional and local climate, soil, and topography. 2. The flavor imparted to a food or wine by such characteristics” (it’s from Vulgar Latin *terratōrium, alteration of Latin territōrium, territory); it’s pretty much a foodie term, but a useful one, and I’ve been familiar with it for many years. I was thus interested to learn from William Doyle’s TLS review of Thomas Parker’s Tasting French Terroir: The History of an Idea that “the regional variety of wine and food produced in France was clearly recognized as long ago as the sixteenth century, and positively celebrated in the earthy writings of Rabelais” (I pause to note the appositeness in this context of “earthy”); Olivier de Serres‘s “instantly popular” Le Théâtre de l’agriculture (1600) used the term frequently. But “in the seventeenth century it ceased to be anything to celebrate”:

Dictionaries of the time began to define the term as an undesirable taint, something disagreeable to good taste and polite society. In a kingdom whose values were increasingly dictated by metropolitan and courtly high society, the idea of terroir signified all that was uncouth and provincial. The best food and wine should have no hint of strong regional character, any more than the best people sounded or behaved like provincials.

The term was revived by Rousseau and was looked at askance by the rationalizing, centralizing Revolution; “What everybody agreed on was the superiority of French terroir to anywhere else.”

The review ends with a question as to whether the concept is in fact distinctively French: “Was the term terroir (which has no precise English equivalent) uniquely French, or could some similar notion be found in the culture of other European countries?” I’m sure the answer is “yes and no,” just as with hygge and sisu and all the other supposedly untranslatable terms.

My loving and tolerant wife abetted my addiction by taking me to Grey Matter/Troubadour Books (note that their Fall Sale will be Sept. 28-Oct. 1, and everything in the store will be 35% off — I encourage everyone in the area to take advantage of it); I was thrilled to learn from their website that “Grey Matter is now the proud owner of the remains of that legendary fishing destination of the wise, Gotham Book Mart” (where I spent a substantial amount of time and money in the 1980s), and when I got there I headed straight for the tables devoted to material from Gotham. One of the items I grabbed (for a dollar!) was the Dec. 1936 issue of Contemporary Poetry and Prose, a short-lived periodical edited by Roger Roughton (who apparently committed suicide in 1941, and has left little trace online); it promised poems by St.-J. Perse and Paul Eluard, among others, and a short story by Isaac Babel. Imagine my surprise when I turned to the appropriate page and found “With Our Father Makhno/ An Episode of the Russian Civil War/ by ISAAC BABEL/ (Translated from the Russian by George Reavey)”… followed by a page and a half of blank space. Since among the Announcements (which are an enjoyable read in themselves: “The Notes on Contributors have already been discontinued for some time, as they were usually made up at the last moment and did not contain much information anyway”) was the severe “It is hoped that there will not again be the long list of mistakes which appears in this last year’s numbers,” I thought perhaps it was the mother of all typos, but when I got home Google Books found this editorial in the next issue, which cleared it all up:

                CENSORED !

On page 143 of CONTEMPORARY POETRY AND PROSE NO. 8 (Dec. 1936), there appeared, as announced, the heading of a short story, WITH OUR FATHER MAKHNO, by Isaac Babel, the famous soviet author. But alas, beneath the title and the translator’s name was an alarming, or ridiculous, blank. Two explanations, both somewhat unjust to the editor, were generally offered: one was simply that the text of the story was left out by mistake; the other was that it was just a 1920ish joke. Now there have been one or two rather odd mistakes in past numbers, due perhaps to the blue-eyed view of the paper taken by the stolid, peasant-like printers, but even they could not accept two blank pages without comment. As for the joke theory, Dadaism has never shown its anti-clockwise face in other numbers.

No, the text of Babel’s story had been quite consciously removed, not by order of the Lord Chamberlain or the editor, but by the printers. For perhaps many people do not know that most of the censorship in this country is carried out by the solicitors whom all large printers must keep; and this must be so, as long as the censorship laws are as violent, ignorant, unjust and immoral as they are now. Censorship is not a matter of commonsense; no layman can decide what is likely to meet with disfavour. In this case, after having previously ‘passed’ the story, the lawyer decided, when the whole edition was on the press and nearly due out, that WITH OUR FATHER MAKHNO was ‘doubtful’ and must be removed. There was no time to alter the cover announcement, the contents page or the index, and there was no suitable substitute piece of that length on hand. So the only thing to do was to leave the blank there, and hope that readers would recognise the innocence of the editor and the iniquity of the censorship laws — which very few did!

It goes on to give another example of infuriating censorship, and says “It is very doubtful whether moral censorship is defensible at all: although aimed against pornography, it seems to have had little success there, and otherwise the application of the law has been memorable chiefly for its abuse.” To which one can only heartily agree. It’s hard to remember in these loosey-goosey times what things were like for writers and publishers in the bad old days.

I don’t want to neglect to write about the recent death of John Ashbery (NY Times obit). I’ve posted his poems here a number of times (2009, 2005, 2004); here’s a recent (May 5, 2016) one from the LRB (which is temporarily making their entire archive of Ashbery poems available without a subscription):

Understandably

It’s beautiful, and all that:
the corner student with the carpet tunnel
or you just don’t know
where to get one
which is all that matters.
I didn’t know but what
during our recent homecoming special
very good plastic muffins were featured,
(the cement trees yesterday),

and that probably wouldn’t be a surprise.
Turn the window off.
The stars, what happens next?
Replacement issues, timid leftovers
burning in reality.

Bear with me, bears.
The radar committee (woman in bathrobe, man
in bad mood) backed down. The chosen honorees arose
or are you going up? I don’t sit with smaller operations.

The ant farm, tossed on frozen seas –
didn’t they have an old pin-up of yours?
The hairnet (stay away) protects my great big head.
In your smart capacity summon the ambassador.
And the infection? It grew.
In 1951 I really, really am, little chum.
Sorry about the vegetables. Stones’ll be pretty with that.

What do you want, John? Informally, a
new body, and an assistant.
I’ll bet the place is swarming with printers.
I wrote them yesterday. Really reached out,
plugnutty. Like the noiseless farts of antiquity
squeamishness is best, yet still.

I laughed at “very good plastic muffins” and “Bear with me, bears,” and I plan to quote “In 1951 I really, really am, little chum” to my grandsons (that was the year I was born). And “plugnutty” appears to be old slang, short for “nutty from being plugged (hit with fists)”; compare these Google Books quotes: “manned by no plug-nutty, cauliflower-eared gangsters and gunmen” (1933), “he is failing in mental calibre, and boxing circles have designated the condition of the boxer by the term ‘plug-nutty’ and other similar names” (1938).

Mark Vanhoenacker is a pilot with British Airways, and writes engagingly about the language of the air:

The day I first flew in the cockpit of an airliner, I fell in love with the sights, of course, but also the sounds. […] I fell in love with what I saw from the airplane that day. But I was equally struck by the clipped, technical majesty of the words I heard through the expensive-looking noise-cancelling headset the pilots had handed to me. The pilots spoke of ‘localisers’ and ‘glideslopes’ and ‘veerefs plus five’ (VREF, I now know, is a baseline landing speed). On the radio they talked, in terms I could barely understand, to a series of laconic folks who identified themselves as ‘Maastricht Control’ and ‘London Centre’ and the all-powerful-sounding ‘Heathrow Director’. And the plane itself spoke out loud as we neared the ground, announcing our heights and then, all of a sudden, asking us in a brisk, clear voice, to ‘DECIDE.’ […]

A prominent feature of Aeroese is its deep nautical roots. Think port and starboard, forward and aft; deck; log; captain and first officer; bulkhead, hold and galley; rudder and tiller; wake; knot; even waves, as in mountain waves, an atmospheric disturbance that can produce turbulence. And of course the word aeronautical itself. […]

So what does Aeroese actually sound like on the radio? You can listen to certain air-traffic frequencies online – although most exchanges contain terms and certainly nuances that wouldn’t be apparent to non-Aeroese speakers. ‘Descend flight level 100, then reduce minimum clean.’ ‘Establish localiser two-seven-right, when established descend glide.’ And: ‘Check 63 north 40 west 1830 flight level 340 estimate 64 north 50 west 19 hundred CLAVY next.’ These examples from recent flights of mine I wouldn’t have been able to begin to make sense of as a teenager, even one who loved airplanes and read all he could about them.

Lots of good stuff there. Thanks, Jack!

Unrelated, but I support this Open Letter to the Linguistic Society of America about “the widespread problem of sexual harassment and the failure of existing responses from the academic units where our members study and work.” (More links and discussion at the Log.) I saw that at Yale forty years ago and it’s depressing that things haven’t gotten much better since.

Update. The LSA Executive Committee responds; they seem to be taking it seriously.

Back in the world of blogs, I mean (the only online world of personal expression that really means much to me). I first wrote about him and his wonderful blogs back in 2009, and at that time I said “this sucker’s going on the sidebar”; it’s been on the sidebar ever since, despite a lamentable absence of updates, and I’m thrilled I’ll be able to follow him on his new WordPress versions. See his announcement here (where he explains how he resumed writing online at Quora and became disillusioned with that venue), and by all means add his blogs to your preferred RSS feed. Callooh! Callay! I chortle in my joy.

Addendum. He posted this on Facebook: Why hasn’t Australia developed more diverse regional accents?

A passage of linguistic interest from Ford Madox Ford’s Ancient Lights and Certain New Reflections (he is describing the late Victorian period when he was growing up):

Across the front of another confectioner’s near here is painted the inscription, “Routs catered for.” What was a rout? I suppose it was some sort of party, but what did you do when you got there? I remember reading a description by Albert Smith of a conversazione at somebody’s private house, and a conversazione in those days was the most modern form of entertainment. Apparently it consisted in taking a lady’s arm and wandering round among showcases.

There’s a description of a conversazione in one of Trollope’s early novels, and we talked about routs here (I think I would now be more tolerant of translating раут as “rout”). Another passage:

The word “exquisite” has gone almost as completely out of our vocabulary as the words “pot luck.” And for the same reason. We are no longer expected to take pot luck, because our hostess, by means of the telephone, can always get from round the corner some sort of ready-made confection that has only to be stood for ten minutes in a bain-marie to form a course of an indifferent dinner.

It’s interesting that he felt “pot luck” would no longer be understood by young Englishmen circa 1910; I’m pretty sure it’s been in continuous use in America, though it’s now mashed together as “potluck.”

Here‘s a fun three-decade-old piece by Jack Hurst about the name of a long-forgotten minor hit:

Country music’s novelty hit of the year, “My Toot-Toot,” doubtless owes much of its popularity to the obvious question: What is a toot-toot? […]

In French-influenced Cajun Louisiana, where the 47-year-old Simien lives, toot is a corruption of the Gallic word tout, meaning ‘all.’

“From the old Cajun (language), a toot-toot is something special, maybe your best girlfriend, your all, your everything,” Simien says. “I got the idea from hearing my grandmother and the older folks use the word quite a bit. Especially when they saw a newborn baby. They`d pinch the baby on the cheek and say, ‘Isn’t she — or isn’t he — a sweet little toot-toot?’

“And I used to hear older guys call their girlfriends toot-toot. Plus there was an old song — I never really heard the record, but I used to hear different bands play at house parties when I was a kid, and they would sing . . . several songs, really, and put that word in there: ‘Mon chere toot-toot.'” […]

The song’s title and Simien’s widely varied labors in its creation aren`t all “My Toot-Toot” has going for it. It also rides an apparently growing ripple of national urban interest in an accordion-based Louisiana brand of music called “zydeco.” […] Expect, therefore, to hear more in the next few months about zydeco, a term currently about as well known in the mainstream as “toot-toot.” The word zydeco is derived from the French words les haricots, which means green beans.

“Which doesn’t make any sense,” Simien says with a chuckle.

“But we call a dance or a party a zydeco. There was an old record a long time ago called ‘Zydeco Est Pas Sale’ that meant ‘no salt in the beans’ and became very popular. Some people didn’t know the whole title of it, so they just asked radio stations to ‘play that zydeco record,’ and they’d go to the dances and ask for the same thing. That`s how zydeco music got to be called that — or at least that’s my view of it.”

I could have sworn we’d covered zydeco before, but apparently not. Thanks, Eric!

Jenny List had an amusing piece some years ago for the Oxford Dictionaries blog about diacritics, starting by saying you might think they’re not needed for English, and continuing:

But as any halfway observant child would tell you, what about the café down the road? Or the jalapeño peppers you and your fiancée enjoyed on your à la carte pizza, brought to you by a garçon? Washed down with a refreshing pint of Löwenbräu while reading a Brontë novel, no doubt. Or perhaps you’re not as naïve as all that, dreaming as you were of a ménage à trois. No, that’s probably a bit risqué, not to mention too much of a cliché. For somewhere so supposedly devoid of diacritic marks on our letters, we do seem to see an awful lot of them.

Of course, the English language has appropriated so many words from other languages that it would be extremely surprising were some of them to manage the transition unscathed. Most words gradually lose their accents on Anglicization; cafe is a perfect example of this as its occurrence without the accent is slowly overtaking that of café. Our lexicographers use the Oxford English Corpus to track the relative use of diacritic marks when deciding upon the preferred form of an imported word. Other words have left their diacritics behind completely, such as muesli (which has lost its umlaut on the u) or canyon (which is an Anglicization of the Spanish word cañon). Sometimes a word will retain its accent to preserve the pronunciation thus bestowed or to settle any ambiguity between the imported word and a similarly spelled existing English word. Thus we find maté and mate or the three outwardly similar but completely different words pâté, pâte, and pate. Occasionally we even encounter the same word entering English by two completely different routes, such as rosé and rose or the unexpected souffle and soufflé. Who knew that omitting that final e-acute could put you in hospital!

Some of our most familiar diacritics appear in brand names. Most of us will have eaten Nestlé chocolate (or perhaps even drunk Nescafé coffee) or imbibed copious quantities of umlaut-bespeckled German beers, but not I hope before driving away in a Škoda or a Citroën. As an aside, given the treatment his surname receives from most Brits, it should be stressed that the pronunciation of that last trema on the ‘e’ is important: cars from the company founded by André Citroën are not lemons.

She goes on to talk about Häagen-Dazs ice-cream, Gü puddings, and the metal umlaut; as for André Citroën, we discussed the history of his name back in 2008 — his cars may not have been lemons, but the Citroëns were originally Limoenmans.

Felicitas Maeder’s article “Irritating Byssus – Etymological Problems, Material facts, and the Impact of Mass Media” (pdf; from Textile Terminologies from the Orient to the Mediterranean and Europe, 1000 BC to 1000 AD 36 [2017]) begins by quoting the OED’s etymological entry for the term byssus:

< Latin byssus, < Greek βύσσος ‘a fine yellowish flax, and the linen made from it, but in later writers taken for cotton, also silk, which was supposed to be a kind of cotton’ (Liddell & Scott), < Hebrew būts, applied to ‘the finest and most precious stuffs, as worn by kings, priests, and persons of high rank or honour’ (Gesenius), translated in Bible of 1611 ‘fine linen’, < root *būts, Arabic bāḍ to be white, to surpass in whiteness. Originally therefore a fibre or fabric distinguished for its whiteness.

It then examines written and material evidence of byssos in antiquity (“All mummy bandages analysed until today are made of linen”), the term byssus in the Bible (“In the Old Testament, different Hebrew linen terms were translated with the single term byssus in the Latin vulgate”), and later developments; she sums up this part of the argument thus:

The conclusion is: In antiquity byssus was a fine textile of linen (or cotton, rarely silk). In the 16th century the filaments of bivalves like Pinna, blue mussel and others were given the name byssus, in analogy to the ancient byssus.

The fatal consequences for textile history are: From that moment on, textiles called byssus in antique texts were no longer associated only with linen (or cotton, rarely silk). Byssus became, in popular wisdom, for journalists and for some authors, sea-silk. With the simple logic: byssus is the name of the filaments of the Pinna nobilis of which was made sea-silk, byssus is found in the Bible and in profane antique literature, so byssus is, almost always and everywhere and at any time: sea-silk.

She goes on to talk about sea-silk in antiquity and in Italy, with extended quotes from the Enciclopedia italiana di science, lettere ed arti di Treccani, and ends with an extended section on “Invented tradition and the role of mass media,” concluding:

John Peter Wild stated once: “To discover the meaning of a specific textile term, a lexicon is a good place to start, but a bad place to end.” How true! Studying the terms byssus and sea-silk in lexicons and dictionaries is of nearly no help. They only render the researchers uncertain with all their inconsistencies and contradictions. As we have seen, even actual specialised dictionaries raise more questions than answering them. […]

These few examples – from the thesis of a Roman university to historical and textile studies of antique and medieval times up to a modern specialised lexicon and biological reference book – show the consequences of the impact of mass media in present-day research, at least in the matter of byssus and sea-silk. The ‘power of naming’ – so it seems – lies more and more in fanciful websites, odd blogs, facebook accounts, and magic events around ‘secret and sacred old traditions’.

Interesting stuff; thanks, Trevor!