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A decade ago I posted about the project to revise the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, whose first edition appeared in 1967. The revised second edition is now online here, free for anyone to access. As Dave Wilton says at Wordorigins.org (where I learned about it):

The new edition not only includes words that have appeared since 1967, the editors have also cleaned up questionable entries for older words—for example, the DCHP-1 had separate entries for toque and tuque, which are now combined into one. As well, many entries have full color, photo illustrations and charts showing the term’s use across the provinces or through time. […]

Users of the DHCP must be aware, however, that the dictionary only includes citations from Canadian sources. So when a term is older in other dialects, the older citations will not appear. This editorial choice, while a valid and justifiable one, means that users cannot rely on the DHCP alone, but must use it conjunction with more comprehensive sources like the OED. Still, this isn’t going to be a serious limitation to most users.

Hurray, say I!

I wasn’t going to post about this, but everybody and their brother (and my brother, for that matter) sent me links about it, so I guess I have to. Fortunately, Dave Wilton of Wordorigins.org has done an excellent post on the topic that begins:

The Oxford comma was in the news recently when a federal court interpreted a Maine statute regarding overtime pay for dairy truck drivers. In the case of O’Connor, et al. v. Oakhurst Dairy, the lack of a comma, or so the news stories would have it, resulted in a victory for workers’ rights. […]

The problem with the news reporting on this case is that the ambiguity does not rest solely with the lack of a comma. And, more importantly, the decision of the circuit court did not rest on the punctuation but rather relied on other methods to interpret the statute in question.

It ends:

To my knowledge, O’Connor, et al. v. Oakhurst Dairy is the first legal case that involves this particular use of the comma, and the courts ruled here that the punctuation is not dispositive. In other words, the Oxford comma cannot, at least in and of itself, be taken as determinative of meaning. In this, the news reports have been getting it wrong—whether or not one uses the Oxford comma just doesn’t matter all that much, in law or anywhere else.

And in between are all the details you could want, unless you want enough details to go to the decision itself (the third link — the second is to the NY Times story). Much as I would like to see a victory for the Oxford comma (in the same way I like to see the Mets or Huskies win), this is not such a victory. It’s just another labor dispute. (Insert your own joke about truckin’ or spilt milk.)

1) In a text I was editing there was a reference to “rhopalic verse.” Having no idea what “rhopalic” meant, I looked it up and discovered it meant “having each succeeding unit in a prosodic series larger or longer than the preceding one” (e.g., each line in a poem being a syllable longer than the preceding line). So far, so recondite, but it was the etymology that got me to post about it: it’s from Greek rhopalikos ‘like a rhopalon [ῥόπαλον],’ a club thicker toward the end. As Pound said, the natural object is always the adequate symbol.

2) I have long known the word exarch ‘a bishop lower in rank than a patriarch’ or ‘a governor of a distant province under the Byzantine emperors’; it’s pronounced /ˈɛksɑrk/, like a good Greek derivative (it’s from Greek ἔξαρχος). But looking for something else in my dictionary I discovered the homograph exarch ‘(of a xylem strand) having the first-formed xylem external to that formed later.’ I can only hope that’s pronounced /ˈɛksɑrk/ as well, because otherwise it would be excessively annoying; my dictionary doesn’t give a pronunciation.

A Sonic Atlas of English Language is a 131-page book the bulk of which consists of a list (to quote the title page) of “8000 English words, organized by the relative audio frequency of each word, from the highest to the lowest pitched: A potential reference for spatial acoustics and sound design, the study of hearing loss and speech, musical and lyrical composition, sound art and poetics.” You can download the pdf here; Trevor, who sent it to me, added the following quote from I know not what source:

Those interested in the musical or “phonographic” qualities of language will find the Atlas useful. All language has a frequency, and the relative frequencies of English words can be organized to follow musical concepts: For example, and as pointed out by author Shane Butler, the following words will tend to be spoken from high to low sound frequencies: beat, bit, bet, bat, and bought, something confirmed by the calculations in the Atlas. The Atlas also enables other, almost endless combinations of words to be organized by their relative sound frequencies. In addition, the Sonic Atlas also enables authors to assemble work out of particular phonemic patterns. For example, the Austrian poet Ernst Jandl, developed a German sound poem almost entirely composed of words with the “sch” and “f ” (/ʃ/ and /f/) sounds, while American poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s poetic work “No. 111” focuses on the “er” (/ɜr/) sounds in American English words. These are just a few of many examples of writing that the Atlas might cultivate. (p. 84)

It’s not anything I’m likely to use, but I’m sure there are those who will be eager to download and play with it. Thanks, Trevor!

I am, of course, aware of the loathing expressed by some denizens of San Francisco for the abbreviation “Frisco,” but I always wondered about it; now, thanks to Vinnee Tong’s KQED piece on the topic, I know. The nickname itself originated in the late 19th century, and: “Not long after people started using it, other people started hating it. They said only out-of-towners used it.” But the mass campaign against it apparently started with Herb Caen, “the revered columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle,” whose book Don’t Call It Frisco came out in 1953. Charles Fracchia, the founder of the San Francisco Museum and Historical Society, says: “Caen’s book ruined the nickname for a lot of people. People wanted to seem proper, and cultured, so they listened to Caen and shunned it.”

But then Tong quotes people who have nothing against it, like Joey Wilson, co-owner of Frisco Tattoo in the Mission: “My parents always called it that. They were blue-collar workers. It was just something that was instilled in me as a kid.”

And now Joey Wilson wants to know why Caen’s opinion should matter more than his. After all, Caen was born in Sacramento.

“So that’s the question — why does it upset you to call it Frisco?” he says. “Give us a reason. And who are you to tell us what we can and can’t do? I’m from here. I’m born and raised here, so I think I got rights to call it whatever I want.”

Working on this story one day, I grabbed a Lyft and got to talking with the driver, a guy named Lorenzo Beasley.

“I grew up on the bottom of the city, a small neighborhood called Visitacion Valley,” Beasley says. “I think more of the urban community, like blacks or Hispanics in the city, those people always grew up using that word.”

Beasley says you hear it in Hunters Point, Lakeview, the Fillmore, Potrero Hill and especially the Mission.

I asked him who doesn’t like Frisco.

“It’s like a higher class of people, I guess,” Beasley says. “People who stay in Nob Hill and stuff. They look at it like slang, so they’re not really with it. It’s definitely a bit of snob thing involved.”

For Beasley, whether you use Frisco says what neighborhood you’re from.

Stanford linguist Teresa Pratt echoes that. She says that when you’re talking about language and word choice, like nicknames, you’re virtually always talking about money and power.

“Institutions or people who have power have an interest in maintaining that the way they speak is the right way to speak,” Pratt says. “Because it helps them. Because it’s coupled with this ideology that’s really widespread, that there’s a right way to speak, that there’s a way to speak that gets you ahead.”

Pratt says word choice is like a signal.

“Language as cultural capital, right?” she says. “It’s something like knowing exactly where to put your forks at the end of a meal.”

That’s an exemplary way to handle the story: present both sides, but give added weight to the opinion of someone who deals with this stuff professionally, a linguist. And “knowing exactly where to put your forks at the end of a meal” is a perfect comparison: nothing wrong with that if that’s important to you, but not a moral imperative. Thanks, Eric!

In my reading of Tsvetaeva, I’ve gotten to the first poem she wrote to Pasternak after rapturously devouring his 1922 masterpiece My Sister, Life (see this LH post, in which the word ржи [rzhi], the oblique form of рожь [rozh’] ‘rye,’ also features), and I’ve run into a simultaneous crisis of semantics and textual criticism. It’s a magnificent poem, the best she’d written in a long time (Pasternak was obviously good for her); the first two stanzas are:

Неподражаемо лжет жизнь:
Сверх ожидания, сверх лжи…
Но по дрожанию всех жил
Можешь узнать: жизнь!

Словно во ржи лежишь: звон, синь…
(Что ж, что во лжи лежишь!) — жар, вал…
Бормот — сквозь жимолость — ста жил…
Радуйся же! — Звал!

Inimitably life tells lies:
Beyond expectation, beyond the lie…
But by the trembling of all your veins
You can recognize it: life!

As though you’re lying in rye: ringing, blue…
(So what if you’re lying in a lie!) — heat, berm…
The murmur — through honeysuckle — of a hundred veins…
Rejoice! — He called!

I have ста жил “of a hundred veins,” but when I googled тишизн, the genitive plural of a nonce word тишизна ‘quietness’ (which occurs in the last stanza of this poem, in one other Tsvetaeva poem, and apparently nowhere else in Russian literature — the normal word is тишина), I wound up in Alyssa W. Dinega’s A Russian Psyche: The Poetic Mind of Marina Tsvetaeva, where on p. 97 we find it given as “sta zhal” and translated as “of a hundred bee stings.” What was going on? A Google Books search on “Бормот — сквозь жимолость — ста” (the start of the line) reveals that about half the books have жил ‘of veins’ and half жал ‘of stings.’ This is troubling.

Now, I’m reasonably sure жил is the correct reading, because it better fits the rhyme scheme of the poem and makes more sense to me, but I’d like not to have to depend on my own judgment. Is there a critical edition of Tsvetaeva’s poems that can be trusted for such things?

David Shariatmadari has another interesting linguistics-related piece in the Guardian that begins:

Scientists have just published a startling analysis of commonly used words in 4298 languages (62% of all those spoken). They wanted to find out if there were associations between particular sounds and meanings that couldn’t be put down to the fact that the languages were related, are used close to one another, or to chance.

As it turned out, they detected strong correlations between sounds and meanings that were independent of genetic relationship, borrowing or coincidence. For example, words for “small” often contained high front vowels (roughly, “ee” as in “peak” or “see”); words for “round” and “red” were linked to “r” sounds; words for “star” to “z” and words for “full” to bilabial consonants (“p” and “b”). Associations were found for body parts: “tongue” was correlated with “l” and “nose” with “n”. Remember, these similarities were found in languages as distant from one another as English and Tagalog, Yoruba and Mandarin.

Why does this matter? One of the first things a student of linguistics learns is that the relationship between the signifier (the sound of a word) and the signified (the concept it represents) is arbitrary. We use the word “tree” to signify a plant with a trunk and leaves, but there’s nothing particularly tree-like about the combination “t-r-e-e”. If a law was passed saying we had to call it “frave” instead, that word would gradually become normal, just like “ki” is for Japanese speakers and “umthi” for Xhosa. […]

Damian Blasi and his colleagues focussed on 30 fundamental concepts – none of which represent loud or distinctive noises, often fertile ground for onomatopoeia. These came from the famous “Swadesh list” of 100 basic words, and included “bite”, “drink”, “ear”, “leaf”, “we”, “tooth”, “skin”, “one” and “stone”. Incredibly, as well as positive links, they uncovered sets of sounds these words seem to “avoid” – ones that appear much less often than you would expect if it were down to chance. “Water” (strangely enough for English speakers) seems to avoid the “t” sound. Words for “tooth” avoid “b” and “m”. The “a” “h” and “r” sounds are found less commonly in words for “breasts”.

The study builds on earlier research which hinted at non-arbitrary relationships between sound and meaning. For example, people have been able to successfully pair up words that have opposite meanings in languages they don’t know. One study showed that English speakers could make better-than-chance guesses at the concreteness of unfamiliar foreign words – that’s to say, whether a word might mean something like “car” versus something like “happiness”. Intimations, if you like, of a universal language of sound.

I don’t know how seriously to take any of this, but it’s certainly food for thought. Thanks, Trevor!

It’s high time I spread the word about Boris Dralyuk’s brilliant compilation 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution. Fortunately, I don’t have to expend a lot of effort explaining to you how brilliant it is, because Caryl Emerson has done it for me in this TLS review (happily available even to nonsubscribers). I’ll just quote a few paragraphs to whet your appetite and send you to the TLS link for the rest (and to Wuthering Expectations for another rave):

Dralyuk must put these lyrical-ecstatic glimpses into some historical context, however. He does this deftly, in substantial introductions to his writers, who are grouped around evocative motifs (stolen wine, iron flowers, apocalypse). Each contributor receives a biography, a political orientation, an identifying literary group, and a long-term fate to contrast with the immediate vision. This breaks the two-and-a-half-year rule. And the ghastly end of so many of these writers – arrested, shot, suicided, hanged – eclipses the ecstasy of their revolutionary moment. Still, Dralyuk proscribes these later perspectives and persists in concentrating time on the cusp. His table of contents lists themes, contributors, lifespans, but not the titles of the entries, not even the language they are translated from (important for the Russian-Yiddish writers) – as if their collected texts constitute one mega-text from some transcendental realm. The poems are strung together into a multi-­authored entity called “The Revolution: A Poem Chronicle”. What consciousness, or energy, wrote it?

There are wonderful surprises. One is Alexander Kuprin’s “Sasha and Yasha” (1917), respectively a fighter pilot and a stuffed monkey, which appears to be a foundational text for the Socialist Realist cult of the missing leg that blossomed forth in the 1930s: the pilot or construction worker who loses a limb in line of duty but continues to fight or to build. Kuprin’s story is transcribed from testimony provided by the hero-pilot’s nine-year-old sister Nika. Equally invested in a child’s innocent perspective is “How He Died (A True Story)” (1917) by Alexander Serafimovich (1863–1949), born a Don Cossack, who knew Lenin’s elder brother at St Petersburg University and converted early to revolutionary violence. The story is a conventional martyrology of Tolstoyan simplicity. Ivan Naumenko, soldier and guard assigned to the Crimean imperial residence of Livadia, pining away for his family in the north of Russia, puts up with the abuse of his officers until one day, surprising himself, he punches one of them back. Naumenko turns himself in, fumbles with his belt as he strips naked (even his underclothes are recycled to the poorly stocked company storehouse), and his executioners tremble and turn away as they witness his preparations for the pit. One detail of the narration is striking: its portrait of the final Romanovs. It recalls Tolstoy’s screeds against the vices of the upper classes as well as Bolshevik poster art against the Old Regime (pot-bellied priests and cartoonish capitalists): “Inside the white palaces, awash with opulence, a drunken, dissolute life went on: the tsar drank, grand and not so grand dukes drank, barons, counts, priests, generals and officers drank – the whole pack of them crowding around him – and together they ate the Russian people out of house and home”. Serafimovich assigns the single most glorious peasant and Cossack vice to the reigning royal family, although the last two imperial households were overall of pious and abstemious habits. The reader now recalls the opening section of the anthology, “Stolen wine”, on the “wine riots” in major Russian cities that mingled alcohol and blood. From the town of Feodosia on the eastern coast of Crimea (October 1917) Marina Tsvetaeva writes of “Wine cellars raided – down every street, / every gutter – a flood, a precious flood . . . . Barracks and harbour drink, drink. / The World and its wine – ours!” And in her poem “Now” (November 1917), the fiercely anti-Bolshevik Zinaida Gippius laments from Petrograd: “The streets are slippery and vile – disgrace! . . . We all lie bound, bespattered, / on every street”.
[. . .]

Dralyuk has assembled a high-pressure book of crisis writings by authors caught strutting as actors on the world stage. His backstories and biographies permit the reader to relax in the interstices between texts, reassured that each witness had an entrance, an exit, and played many parts – even though this book is confined to showing only one of those parts in only one of each actor’s seven ages. Osip Mandelstam glimpsed the arc of these ages in May 1918, in the second of his two entries here: “Let’s praise, O brothers, liberty’s dim light, / the great and sombre year! . . . Let us praise power’s sombre burden, / a weight one can’t withstand. / Whoever has a heart, O time, must hear / your ship sink and descend”.

I’ve praised Dralyuk’s translations before, and that last snippet of Mandelstam will give you an idea; get the book for more, as well as what is surely the best available immersion into what Russia was thinking and feeling in that amazing period.

A recent guest post at the Log by Reza Mirsajadi clears up a point that had eluded me even though I studied Persian fairly intensively for a while:

For much of my adult life, whenever I have had to defend the Iranian people to conservatives, they have fought back with the “Death to America” argument. This more or less amounts to “They [Iranians] want to kill us, they said so!” I am so fed up with these misconceptions, and the news media and translators need to take responsibility for their part in it.

As someone who does a lot of translating, I understand that there is an ethical component to the craft. People rely on your work to understand the Other. For this reason, cultural context is absolutely imperative. The “Death to ___” chant commonly heard in Iranian political protests for well over sixty years, is a mistranslation. Yes, the Farsi word “marg” can translate to “death,” but “marg bar ___” translates to “Down with ___” […]

Furthermore, the “down with ___” chant as it is used today is not about a violent overthrow or physically harming the people of a nation. The phrase became popular during the Persian Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911), when political activists would chant “zende ba ___” (“long live ___”) in support of a policy or leader, or “marg bar ___” in opposition. These two phrases became entrenched within Iranian political discourse, and during the Iranian Revolution of 1979, swarms of protestors took to the streets chanting “marg bar Shah” to express their dissatisfaction with Iran’s monarchy. “Marg bar ___” and “zende ba ___” have continued to live on as colloquial phrases incorporated into political chants, and they have been appropriated to express opposition to or support for any number of subjects.

While the phrase “marg bar” has not made its way into most Farsi or Farsi-English dictionaries, it is commonly understood in Iran as an idiom without violent intent.

That would have been nice to know forty years ago when I was watching Iranian crowds chant, but it’s never too late to learn.

Mark Dominus describes his method of finding and ranking anagrams in this post:

This gave me the idea to score a pair of anagrams according to how many chunks one had to be cut into in order to rearrange it to make the other one. On this plan, the “cholecystoduodenostomy / duodenocholecystostomy” pair would score 3, just barely above the minimum possible score of 2. Something even a tiny bit more interesting, say “abler / blare” would score higher, in this case 4. Even if this strategy didn’t lead me directly to the most interesting anagrams, it would be a big step in the right direction, allowing me to eliminate the least interesting.

This rule would judge both “aal / ala” and “zolotink / zolotnik” as being uninteresting (scores 2 and 4 respectively), which is a good outcome. Note that some other boring-anagram problems can be seen as special cases of this one. For example, short anagrams never need to be cut into many parts: no four-letter anagrams can score higher than 4. The trivial anagramming of a word to itself always scores 1, and nontrivial anagrams always score more than this.

So what we need to do is: for each anagram pair, say acrididae (grasshoppers) and cidaridae (sea urchins), find the smallest number of chunks into which we can chop acrididae so that the chunks can be rearranged into cidaridae.

You can read further details at the link, as well as seeing other candidates; his pick for the single best anagram in English is cinematographer / megachiropteran: “It is 15 letters long, and the only letters that stay together are the E and the R. “Cinematographer” is as familiar as a 15-letter word can be, and “megachiropteran” means a giant bat. GIANT BAT! DEATH FROM ABOVE!!!”