languagehat.com

The Australian National Dictionary Centre, the fine folks who bring you Ozwords, a blog listed in my sidebar, have a dictionary listing as well, Meanings and origins of Australian words and idioms, and from the letter N I bring you:

neenish

It is a tradition at the Australian National University that computers have names as well as serial numbers. The computers at the Australian National Dictionary Centre are named after Australian food items: king prawn, icypole, pavlova, lamington, floater – and neenish. The last named computer gets its title from the neenish tart. But are neenish tarts Australian? Many people believe that they are. First, for those who are not of the cake-shop conglutination (aficionados of glucogunk), what is a neenish tart? It is, it seems, a cake with a filling of mock cream, and iced in two colours – white and brown, or white and pink, or (occasionally) pink and brown. In May 1995, Column 8 in the Sydney Morning Herald included some discussion of the origin of the term: Wendy Kerr and Jenny Hawke, of the Forbes public library, found this in Patisserie, an encyclopedia of cakes, by Aaron Maree: ‘Thought to have been invented by cooks in outback Australia.’ And that may be right. Leo Schofield, writing in the SMH in 1988, said his mother made them from a Country Women’s Association cookbook sold in Orange in World War II. When he asked for information, some readers suggested they had a Viennese or German origin. But a Mrs Evans said they were first made in her home town, Grong Grong. She and her sister, Venus, nominated Ruby Neenish, a friend of their mother’s, as the originator. Mrs Evans said that in 1913, running short of cocoa and baking for an unexpected shower tea for her daughter, Ruby made do by icing her tarts with half-chocolate, half-white icing. From then on they were known as neenish tarts. That, said Leo, would account for the tarts’ popularity in country districts and country cookbooks. We have been unable to track down the eponymous Ruby Neenish, and some of the ‘authenticating devices’ in this account feel a little shaky – just how ‘unexpected’ can a shower tea be?

The earliest reference to neenish we have been able to find occurs in a 1929 recipe for neenish cakes. This is in Miss Drake’s Home Cookery by Lucy Drake, published at Glenferrie in Victoria. The cases are made from: 8 ozs. almond meal; 6 ozs. icing sugar; 1 large tablespoon flour; essence almonds; 2 whites of eggs. The filling is made of: 1 gill cream; 1/2 gill milk; 1/4 oz. gelatine; 1 tablespoon sugar; essence vanilla. No mock cream here. The icing is half white and half pink.

The fifth edition of the Country Women’s Association Cookery Book and Household Hints, published in Perth in 1941, has the following recipe, provided by E. Birch of Baandee: Cream 2 ozs. butter and add 1 tablespoon sugar, rub in 5 ozs. self-raising flour and a pinch of salt and mix to a stiff paste with an egg. Knead well. Roll on a well-floured board till very thin, line patty tins with paste and fill with a good thick custard. Glaze the tops with thin icing. Use chocolate and white alternately’. This time, the icing is half chocolate and half white. And, of course, no mock cream. More interesting is the fact that the cakes are called nienich tarts. This certainly has a Germanic ring to it, and the spelling continues to be used in the CWA Cookery Book as late as 1964.

So here is the challenge. Do any of our readers have a cookery book printed before 1929 which includes neenish or nienich cakes or tarts? Can anyone provide evidence for a European origin? Are there any supporters of the pseudo-eponymous Ruby Neenish?

I love not only the word neenish but the ultra-Aussie town name Grong Grong. Thanks, Paul!

Brian Wallheimer reports for Phys.org on what I must consider a dubious hypothesis:

Purdue University research shows that ancient languages match up with the genetic codes found in Persian walnut (Juglans regia) forests, suggesting that the stands of trees seen today may be remnants of the first planned afforestation known in the world.

In a paper published in the journal PLoS One, Keith Woeste, a research geneticist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service and a Purdue adjunct assistant professor of forestry, found that the evolution of language and spread of walnut forests overlapped over wide swaths of Asia over thousands of years. He believes as traders traversed the Silk Roads, connecting Eastern Europe and Africa with far-East Asia, they purposely planted walnut forests as a long-term agricultural investment.

The paper is “Ancient Humans Influenced the Current Spatial Genetic Structure of Common Walnut Populations in Asia,” by Paola Pollegioni, Keith E. Woeste, Francesca Chiocchini, Stefano Del Lungo, Irene Olimpieri, Virginia Tortolano, Jo Clark, Gabriel E. Hemery, Sergio Mapelli, and Maria Emilia Malvolti (not, n.b., by Woeste alone). One thing that gives me pause is that none of the authors has any connection to linguistics. But I do love walnuts, and I couldn’t resist using the word “juglandine” (which I created on the basis of Latin juglans, jugland– ‘walnut (tree)’ before discovering that it actually exists — but only, so far as I can tell, as a noun meaning “An alkaloid found in walnut leaves,” and thus I am staking my claim to it as an adjective), so here it is for your delectation. Shell and enjoy. (Thanks again go to Trevor for the link.)

I love Old Irish and I love cursing, so what could be better than this?

This colourful collection of Irish insults dates from the Early Medieval era and is primarily based on the period’s satirical poetry and prose. The insults are sourced from the electronic Dictionary of the Irish Language which in this instance relies heavily on Róisín McLaughlin’s ‘Early Irish Satire‘.

The only thing that could make it better would be if the insults were linked to eDIL and/or McLaughlin. Thanks, Trevor!

I just discovered that two words, neither of which is part of my active vocabulary, have alternate pronunciations on which dictionaries disagree. Merriam-Webster says footling ‘inept; trivial’ is either \ˈfü-təl-iŋ\ (three syllables, as would be expected for the participle of the verb footle) or \ˈfüt-liŋ\ (two syllables, rhymes with BOOT-ling), while American Heritage gives only the latter. Meanwhile, AHD says foosball ‘table soccer’ is FOOS-ball, as I would expect, whereas M-W gives only \ˈfüz-ˌbȯl\, as if it were a ball belonging to a guy named Foo. Since any intuitions I might have in the matter are worthless, I turn to the Varied Reader. If you use either or both of these words, how do you say it or them? Two syllables or three; FOOS or FOOZ?

This post at All Things Linguistic made me laugh:

• This is a wug. Now there is another one. Now there is another one. Now there is another one. Now there is another one. Now there is another one. Now there is another one. There is a vast army of wugs and they are coming for you.
• A hooded figure approaches you. “So you’re a linguist…how many languages do you know?” You know there is no point in explaining. No one understands. No one will ever understand.

Of course, it helps if you know about linguistic memes like wugs and colorless green ideas. Remember, Google is your friend!

Back in 2007 I wrote about what was then the earliest known occurrence of the protean word fuck, in the late-15th-century macaronic/cipher line “Non sunt in coeli, quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk”: ‘They are not in heaven because they fuck wives of Ely.’ Now, in breaking profanity-related news, Medievalists.net reports:

An English historian has come across the word ‘fuck’ in a court case dating to the year 1310, making it the earliest known reference to the swear word.

Dr Paul Booth of Keele University spotted the name in ‘Roger Fuckebythenavele’ in the Chester county court plea rolls beginning on December 8, 1310. The man was being named three times part of a process to be outlawed, with the final mention coming on September 28, 1311.

Dr Booth believes that “this surname is presumably a nickname. I suggest it could either mean an actual attempt at copulation by an inexperienced youth, later reported by a rejected girlfriend, or an equivalent of the word ‘dimwit’ i.e. a man who might think that that was the correct way to go about it.”

You can see a nice clear reproduction of that section of the rolls, as well as further discussion, at the link; all I can say is, Fuck yeah!

Update. Piotr Gąsiorowski says The Middle English Dictionary Needs a Fucking Update and gives what to me sounds like a very convincing PIE etymology of fuck. Don’t miss it.

I am sure I must have looked up windlass before, but since I’ve never used one, or seen one that I remember (I must have seen them on ships, where they’re used for weighing anchor, but not known what they were called), the meaning went right out of my head; I’m hoping that by posting about it I may manage to remember it. A windlass is (in the AHD’s words) “Any of numerous hauling or lifting machines consisting essentially of a horizontal cylinder turned by a crank or a motor so that a line attached to the load is wound around the cylinder”; there’s an image at the link. The OED says (entry from 1926) “Probably alteration of windas n., of obscure origin,” but AHD improves on that: “Middle English wyndlas, alteration of windas, from Old Norse vindāss: vinda, to wind + āss, pole.” In Russian they call it лебёдка [lebyodka], literally ‘female swan’ (‘swan’ is лебедь [lebed’]); compare crane and French grue, also names of lifting devices.

Again, not a weighty post, but the weather’s been miserable and I’m editing two books at once, so I trust you’ll cut me some slack. Lori Dorn reports that Welsh Weatherman Correctly Pronounces a 58-Letter Town Name Without Batting an Eye:

While reporting on the warm weather in Wales, broadcaster Liam Dutton correctly pronounced the name of the 58-letter town Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch without batting an eye or breaking a sweat. In fact, Dutton announced on Twitter that he’d be talking about the town in his broadcast and was really appreciative of the growing admiration for his performance.

It’s a very enjoyable 19 seconds.

I’ll pad out the post with a couple of links that have, strictly speaking, nothing to do with LH but which some readers may enjoy as much as I do:

The End of the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife Forgery Debate, by Andrew Bernhard (spoiler: it’s a forgery!)

New York Public Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Download and Use: Twenty thousand hi-res maps! What are you waiting for?

This is very silly, but I can’t resist sharing it: Ben Zimmer at the Log reports on the latest auto-replace disaster, which produced a sentence beginning “When the particitrousers of the revolutionary movement in Korea…”:

We can surmise that when the UK edition of Harden’s book came out for the Kindle, an editor felt the need to screen it for Americanisms that might not translate well across the pond. Pants, understandably, would be one such Americanism to flag, since in British usage pants more typically refers to underwear. The pants/trousers divide was evident in Samuel Butler’s 1875 poem, “A Psalm of Montreal: “Thou callest trousers ‘pants’, whereas I call them ‘trousers’, Therefore thou art in hell-fire and may the Lord pity thee!” (For more, see my 2006 post, “Pioneers of word rage.”)

Using the Google Books version of Harden’s book, we can locate six instances where American pants usage could safely be swapped out for trousers. But the search-and-replace mission went too far, finding the substring pants in the sentence beginning, “When the participants of the revolutionary movement in Korea…”

This isn’t the first time that sloppy e-book editing has led to search-and-replace follies. A few years ago, we learned of an edition of War and Peace for Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-reader in which all instances of Kindle were replaced with Nook, leading to sentences like “It was as if a light had been Nookd…”

See Ben’s post for links, discussion, and a 1904 joke involving occutrousers.

I’m now on Victor Terras’s chapter, “The Twentieth Century: 1925-53,” in The Cambridge History of Russian Literature (see this post), and thought I’d quote this passage on a couple of poets of the 1920s and ’30s (neither of them known to me):

Among the constructivists, there were at least two major poets: Eduard Bagritsky (pen-name of Eduard Dzyubin, 1897-1934) and Ilya Selvinsky (real given name: Karl, 1899-1968), who practiced a pointedly functional approach to poetic composition, seeking to integrate every level of their text — sound, rhythm, imagery, lexicon, syntax — with its intended meaning. Both Bagritsky and Selvinsky used slang, argot, regionalisms, local color, the rhythms of folk poetry whenever a poem’s theme demanded it. Bagritsky’s “local color” was that of Odessa and the Ukrainian countryside. His Lay of Opanas (Duma ob Opanase, 1926), loosely patterned after the Ukrainian folk ballad (duma), tells the story of the peasant Opanas, who chose the wrong side in the civil war and paid for it with his life. When Bagritsky moved on from themes of the revolution to topics of the Five Year Plan, his poetry retained an air of genuine revolutionary romanticism.

Ilya Selvinsky travelled widely, pursued several different professions, participated in a polar expedition, and projected his varied experiences into his work. He was one of the first Soviet writers to do serious research toward his literary projects and to view composing poetry as a goal-directed, rational activity. Like Bagritsky, he adapted his language to the subject at hand, using technical jargon, thieves’ cant, Odessa Yiddish, gypsy, and whatever other idiom was required. Selvinsky’s best poetic work is the verse epic The Ulyalaev Uprising (Ulyalaevshchina, written in 1924, published in 1927), which describes the rout of a counter-revolutionary uprising by Communist forces.

The more I read about Russian literature, the more impressed I am by the role Odessa has played in it, from the 19th century (Pushkin wrote chunks of Eugene Onegin there) through the great 20th-century Odessans like Babel, Olesha, Ilf and Petrov, and others; you can read about it in this New Yorker piece by Sally McGrane [archived], which I’m happy to see includes Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Pyatero [The Five]: “It’s not very famous. But it is the most nostalgic, sweet description of Odessa. He was a great patriot of the city, he loved it. He spoke eleven languages—the normal Odessan, back then, spoke four or five, but he spoke eleven.”