languagehat.com

I ran across a reference to a bird called Rufous treepie and thought “What an odd name!” So I turned to the OED and found this entry, reproduced in its entirety:

tree-pie
noun

A tree-crow of the genus Dendrocitta, found in India, China, and neighbouring countries.

No citations, no pronunciation, no etymology, nothin’. It’s a 1914 entry, but I’m not sure that’s an excuse.

1) The 10th Annual Tucker Awards for Excellence in Swearing:

Let’s face it: 2024 was a shitshow on many levels. But if we compare the past year to the comparably shitty 2016 and 2020, the landscape of swearing was different in 2024. Whereas “fuck 2016” and “fuck 2020” were common refrains in those years, this time around we have far fewer fucks to give. […] So in the spirit of escapism from *gestures wildly at everything*, it’s fitting that for our overall Tucker Award winner we recognize a remarkable cinematic portrayal of swearing that dramatizes events from a century ago. The film Wicked Little Letters, which hit theaters and Netflix in 2024, tells the true story of two women who lived as neighbors in the 1920s in the southern England town of Littlehampton: the devout Edith Swan (Olivia Colman) and the rabble-rousing Irishwoman Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley). When Edith starts receiving incredibly obscene and insulting letters, she blames Rose for sending them, leading to accusations of libel that land Rose in jail. Others in the town start receiving similarly abusive letters, but is Rose the true culprit? I’ll refrain from spoilers here — just watch the movie in all its profane glory. The red-band trailer has some of the choicest swears.

The winner for Best Fucking Swearing in Film was Anora, which I’m dying to see (pull quote: “Me go fuck myself!? Me fuck myself!? You go fuck yourself and your fucking mother, motherfucker!”). See link for much more sweary goodness, including Best Fucking Book about Swearing (The F-Word, natch) and Best Fucking Data Analysis (“Which Countries Swear the Most?”); here’s last year’s post.

2) Public Domain Day: Works from 1929 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1924! The Sound and the Fury, A Farewell to Arms, A Room of One’s Own, Red Harvest and The Maltese Falcon… and that’s just the first few. They need to reform the copyright law, but this makes me happy for now.

3) A Wee Coak Sparrah – Duncan MacRae: From 1959 onwards, MacRae’s recitation of “The Wee Coak Sparrah” was a core ingredient of Scotland’s televised New Year celebrations. (A cock-sparrow is “A male sparrow; A quarrelsome, cocky person.”) Thanks, Trevor!

Today is Hogmanay, and when my wife asked me about the word I said confidently that I had once done a post on it and would refresh my memory and tell her. Imagine my surprise when I discovered I hadn’t! So I am remedying the omission now; happily, the OED updated their entry in 2010:

1. Scottish and English regional (northern). (The call used to demand) a New Year’s gift; esp. a gift of oatcakes, bread, fruit, etc., traditionally given to or demanded by children on the last day of the year. Now rare.

1443 Et solutum xxxj die decembris magn. hagnonayse xijd. et parv. hagnonayse viijd. xxd. Et solutum primo die mensis Januarij Pasy munstrallo ex precepto domini xijd. Et solutum iiijto die mensis Januarij instrionibus Thome Haryngton ex precepto domini xxd.
in Folklore (1984) vol. 95 253
[…]
1905 The visitors never failed to receive their Hogmanay which consisted usually of bun, shortbread, and wine or whisky.
Scottish Review 21 December

2. Originally and chiefly Scottish. The last day of the year, 31 December; New Year’s Eve; spec. the evening of this day, often marked with a celebration.
Recorded earliest in compounds.

1681 We renounce..old wives Fables and By words, as Palmsunday, Carlinsunday,..Peacesunday, Halloweven, Hogmynae night, Valenteins even.
W. Ker et al., Blasphemous & Treasonable Paper emitted by Phanatical Under-subscribers 3
[…]
1985 Hogmanay saw Frank and me delirious On five pernod and blackcurrants plus four cans Of special plus a snakebite We didny know how to make right.
L. Lochhead, True Confessions 103

2001 It’s Hogmanay, time to party and look bootylicious for the Bells.
Sunday Herald (Glasgow) 20 December (Magazine) 29 (caption)

(I like very much the title A blasphemous & treasonable paper emitted by the phanatical under-subscribers; you can see the “Hogmynae night” section at the bottom right on p. 3, in the paragraph starting “We renounce the Names of Moneths.” As for the 2001 citation, the Bells in question might be this or this or yet another.) The etymology is particularly interesting:
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Back in 2018 I posted about the Australian Aboriginal language Yanyuwa because “it’s one of the few languages in the world where men and women speak different dialects”; now I’m coming at it from a totally different angle, thanks to this Facebook post by Alex Foreman (I am quoting the entire text):

I made a joke about how if someone finds a language without any voiceless consonants I’d have to accept it as real, typology be damned, and then someone pointed out that yeah that’s actually a thing.

Man just look at this feature grid. This is utterly deranged. This may be the most insane arrangement of contrasts I’ve ever seen, including Ubykh. This is like Danish vowels. We’re in whacky conlang territory.

He then has a screenshot of the Phonology section of the Wikipedia article, which is truly a thing of wonder. The intro says “Yanyuwa is extremely unusual in having 7 places of articulation for stops, compared to 3 for English and 4–6 for most other Australian languages. Also unusual is the fact that Yanyuwa has no voiceless phoneme […].” It also has 16 noun classes, not to mention the male and female dialects and the less unusual (though still striking) avoidance speech and ritual speech (“For example, a dingo is usually referred to as wardali, but during ritual occasions, the word used is yarrarriwira“). Languages are endlessly interesting!

Jan van Tienen writes for the ERB about European equivalents of The Onion:

Few joke-forms are so beguilingly efficient as the satirical news headline. Consider a well-wrought one: « Fetus aborted after too few likes for ultrasound ». I remember coming across this one in 2012 on Facebook (obviously) and feeling a wonderful shock. It’s a full ideological roller-coaster in under ten words. And then there’s the sub-joke — « should you saddle a child with prenatal unpopularity? » — skewering a genre (parental anxiety clickbait) that deserves to be skewered. So dark, but that’s part of the efficiency: bring the reader so quickly to the darkest place but also trust, just as quickly, that the reader will land at the ethical conclusion. […]

That joke article appeared in the Dutch platform De Speld, our version of The Onion. Pretty much every European country has an Onion — Germany’s Der Postillon (founded in 2008), France’s Le Gorafi (2012), Austria’s Die Tagespresse (2013), Ireland’s Waterford Whispers (2009), Italy’s Lercio (2012), Spain’s El Mundo Today (2009) — indeed somehow has to have an Onion. They feel almost like public utilities, which is to say that they’ve come to be taken for granted. Satirical news is as old as real news, to be sure, but it has taken a particular form in our time. The Onion started as a satirical print newspaper in 1988 in Madison, Wisconsin, and has served as a blueprint for satirical news media around the world. « The Dutch version of The Onion » rings a bell in a way that « The German version of Private Eye » would not. […]

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I have long realized that I will never understand the British class system, with its social and educational corollaries, any more than I will understand cricket, and this was driven home to me by Daisy Hildyard’s story “Revision” (archived) in last week’s New Yorker. My problems begin with the very title, which comes up in the story when Petra barges in on the protagonist, Gabriel, who is too distracted to pay close attention to her self-absorbed chatter:

His eyes went to his laptop screen.

Petra followed his gaze. “How is your revision going?”

“Fine,” he said. “Great.”

There was a long silence that didn’t seem to bother her. She drank deeply, then sighed comfortably, like a tired pet, and settled her back against the wall.

“Actually, it’s a disaster,” he said. “I know I’m close to doing well, but I have this one paper on medieval literature that I just don’t get. I can’t get a first if I don’t do well in that paper.”

I had a feeling that the word was used differently across the pond, and the OED (entry revised 2010) told me the following:

I.3. Education. The action or process of going over a subject or work already learnt or done with the aim of reinforcing it, typically in preparation for an examination; an instance of this.
Not in North American use: cf. review n. I.8.

So it’s “studying for exams,” but with extra pressure? I know things are very different at Oxford than at American educational institutions, but despite having read Anthony Powell and watched every episode of Inspector Morse and Endeavour, I only have a hazy idea of how it works.

However, that’s not what drove me to post. Here’s the passage that requires explication:
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A Facebook post from Nick Nicholas baffled me by mentioning “a ham and cheese jaffle”; Wiktionary told me that a jaffle is “(Australia, South Africa) A type of toasted sandwich that is sealed around the edge (in one piece, and not separated in the centre), it has a filling, for example an egg.” Their etymology is “From a trademark for a utensil that creates jaffles”; the OED (which added the word in 2007) says “Of unknown origin.” (First citation: 1950 “A ‘Jaffle’ is actually a sealed, toasted sandwich,” Hardware Journal May 50.) You can see one — Nick’s own, in fact — at his subsequent post. I also enjoyed his cultural/linguistic observation “I am smirking because I’ve just had a service interaction in Greece, and being culturally Anglo, it is always a relief for me to be addressed here in the formal plural, by cab drivers and serving staff. It’s not like Greeks are eager to be formal in addressing you, so I take my politeness plural where I can.”

Not really Hattic material, but Fara Dabhoiwala’s “A Man of Parts and Learning” (LRB, Vol. 46 No. 22 · 21 November 2024; archived) is so good I have to recommend it. What a story!

I sing and celebrate Sebastian Biot’s site HyperEssays:

HyperEssays is a project to create a modern and accessible online edition of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne.

HyperEssays.net hosts four editions of the Essays:

1. A 1598 edition, in middle French, edited by Marie de Gournay. This is a slightly revised version of Gournay’s original edition published in 1595.
2. A complete and searchable edition of John Florio’s 1603 translation of the Essays, in early modern English.
3. A 1685 translation by Charles Cotton, also in early modern English. Only some chapters of this edition have been copyedited and posted.
4. A complete and searchable modern edition of the Essays based on W. Carew Hazlitt’s 1877 update of Charles Cotton’s translation. I am slowly replacing the Cotton/Hazlitt translation with a contemporary one and adding new notes.

My goals with HyperEssays are to provide context and tools for first-time readers of the Essays and to design a lasting resource for all interested in Montaigne’s work.

To that end, I copyedit, update, and annotate the original text and its translations. I tag them for indexing and searching, and format them them for easy reading on smartphones, desktop computers, and tablets. In addition, I prepare and provide free chapter PDFs for offline reading.
[…]

Work on HyperEssays started on January 17, 2020 and likely won’t be completed for many years.

This is what the internet is for, and it makes me want to read more Montaigne. (I was too lazy to copy the links for the various editions, but once you click through, there they’ll be.) Via gwint’s MeFi post.

The NY Times has a quiz (archived) headed “A varied assortment of words entered (or re-entered) the lexicon this year. How well do you know them?” I somehow got 5 out of the 10; I assure you it was pure dumb luck, since I was ignorant of almost all the terms and usages.

And a merry Christmas and happy Hanukkah to you all! (Incidentally, the mail recently brought me a copy of Jon Fosse’s Septology, which was highly recommended to me in this thread; there was no indication of who had sent it, so if it was one of you, I’m deeply grateful and very eager to read it.)

Addendum. See now this lively essay by Mallory Valis, “a 16-year-old from Toronto, Ontario, with a penchant for literature and photovoltaics.” It starts:

Bro, this intro is high-key gonna slap. Just let me cook.

Oh wait, I should be more formal.

Uhh. . . . Henceforth I commence my righteous thesis. Yeah.

In the eyes of older generations, Gen-Z slang besmirches the Sacred English Language™ with its base, loose, and astonishingly convoluted wordplay. By now, you’ve heard it before. Words sprouting like weeds in conversations with friends or wriggling through Instagram comment sections: rizz, fit check, girlboss, slay, simp. . . the list spirals downwards into a pit of sacrilege.

A good bit from the middle:
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The great linguist William Labov, who practically invented sociolinguistics, has died at 97; Ximena Conde’s Philadelphia Inquirer obit (archived) is excellent:

Dr. Labov approached language as something that by its nature was variable, not governed by an ideal set of rules of grammar. His work changed whose dialects linguists saw worthy of study and dove into the socioeconomic politics of language. The way he saw it, dialects touched everything, from how you’re viewed to how you learn. “He really believed that every single person on the planet is worth talking to and has something to learn from,” said Gillian Sankoff, his wife and fellow sociolinguist at the University of Pennsylvania. The pair married in 1993.

Dr. Labov was born in Passaic, N.J., on Dec. 4, 1927, and raised in Rutherford, N.J. He majored in English and philosophy at Harvard University but also dabbled in chemistry, which he would use working as an industrial chemist before returning to school to study linguistics. He studied and worked at Columbia University before landing in 1971 at the University of Pennsylvania, where he would conduct some of his most lasting work.

Dr. Labov’s influence and innovations in linguistics can be broken into two categories: the technical and conceptual. On the technical side, Dr. Labov relied less on intuition than his predecessors, taking a clinical and statistical approach by recording his subjects and analyzing them on a computer before the technology became ubiquitous. He also transformed how linguists viewed language changes, researching these shifts in real time — like when he found the “Southern-inflected sound” of Philadelphia was slowly turning into a more “Northern” accent.

Bigger still was the choice to study speech patterns and changes in communities that would have been ignored. Dr. Labov took an interest in how Puerto Ricans in New York City talked and what he distinguished as African American English. Dr. Labov believed “everyday vernacular” was worthy of organizing and he didn’t dismiss dialects that might appear to carry errors because they don’t follow mainstream rules, former student and linguist Josef Fruehwald said. “People aren’t chaotic as they’re speaking,” said Fruehwald. “There’s structure to the pattern of variation they’re using.” […]

“Linguists are smart,” was Dr. Labov’s mantra when it came to more esoteric topics, said Fruehwald and others. Dr. Labov didn’t try to poke holes in papers he thought were “wrong”; instead he looked for something worthwhile to take away from them. Sneller, one of Dr. Labov’s last sociolinguistic students at Penn, said he often kicked off reading group discussions with a “what have we learned?” This approach was just one part of Dr. Labov’s never-ending quest for knowledge. Linguists who knew him said he was not one to be stuck in his ways methodologically or technologically, a trap some academics can fall into.

I love that line about not trying to poke holes in papers but looking for something worthwhile to take away from them; that’s how I try to approach what I read. Labov’s name, surprisingly, is pronounced [ləbˈoʊv] (lə-BOVE — see this LH post); there are more links at Mark Liberman’s Log post, as well as an account of the “Bunny Paper” which I urge you to read. He was quite a guy.