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A remarkable post by Victor Mair at the Log begins by quoting a query from a reader:

I was wondering what the periodic table of elements looked like in China, and found this image.

This may or may not be the “official” periodic table, but I thought it was interesting to see the similarities in the characters. Specifically the character for gold, which is also the character for metal in general, and is a prefix for a large portion of the periodic table. The character for water is a large part of the character for mercury, and a few others, and all of the gas elements have the same character in them. It makes me wonder what the protocol is for naming new elements in Chinese, since they seem to be focused on the properties of the element itself, and that would take more investigating than might be possible for new elements, which usually only exist for fractions of fractions of seconds. Newly discovered elements these days are named (in English) after people: Bohrium, Rutherfordium, Fermium, Einstenium, etc. and I wonder what the Chinese equivalent of those elements is.

Mair then comes out with this astonishing fact: “The first thing we may say about the names of the chemical elements in Chinese is that every single one of them is monosyllabic.” He discusses the history of the names in Chinese and presents his own list of all the elements, giving for each element the number, symbol, English name, Chinese character (traditional and simplified), and Pinyin version; he ends with Tom Lehrer’s elements song and the elements song in Japanese. The thread that follows is also extremely interesting, and I second Nickolas’s call for someone to “please create a ‘Rosetta Stone’ spreadsheet of the periodic table in (at least) the top ten to fifteen world languages and highlight the differences.”

As a follow-up to this post, and as a convenient summary of Dmitritsky’s self-reinventions — both he and the heroine Salomea are by now presenting themselves as entirely different people, she as the Frenchwoman Ernestine de Millevoie (see this post) and he as the Hungarian Volobuzh — I offer this paragraph, in which Dmitritsky tries to explain to his old pal Ramirsky, who hasn’t seen him for a decade before running into him in a Moscow hotel, why he’s so different:

“You see in me now the Hungarian magnate Volobuzh,” continued Dmitritsky, “and no doubt that’s why you didn’t recognize me. If my own will had participated in all the metamorphoses I’ve undergone, even as much as Jupiter’s did in his amorous escapades, you might think that Dmitritsky too had a base soul, but I give you my word of honor that it all happened simply by a sort of miracle: fate covers my eyes and whacks me with its wand one, two three! ‘Well,’ it says, ‘now you’re Mateusz, a servant and lackey and nothing more.’ If I’m Mateusz, all right, I’m Mateusz! And I start on my assigned duties, without grumbling and with complete diligence. Just as I’m entering into the role — eins, zwei, drei — you’re a count! Nothing to be done, if I’m a count I’m a count, and I don’t refuse that either. Before I can manage to carry out a feat worthy of a count, attendez! You’re Prokhor Vasilievich, a merchant’s son! Fine, for the sake of variety I’ll be a merchant’s son. In this way fate has led me through various callings and conditions and has brought me to the rank of a Hungarian magnate. You can ask any of the local nobility, any Hungarian you like: am I bringing disgrace on the calling of magnate? Of course, I could be reproached with ignorance of the Hungarian language, but judging by the local magnates, every magnate does not require the language of their fatherland; such a language is necessary only for the simple folk…”

– Ты видишь теперь во мне венгерского магната Волобужа, – продолжал Дмитрицкий, – и оттого, разумеется, не узнал меня. Если б во всех метаморфозах, случившихся со мной, участвовала моя собственная воля, хоть настолько, сколько у Юпитера для его любовных похождений, ты бы мог подумать, что и у Дмитрицкого низкая душа, но я тебе даю честное слово, что все это совершается просто каким-то чудом: судьба завяжет мне глаза, хлопнет жезлом раз, два три! ну, говорит, теперь ты Матеуш, слуга, холоп и больше ничего. Матеуш так Матеуш! и примусь за исполнение данного мне назначения, без ропоту, с полным усердием. Только что войду в характер роли – ейн, цвей, дрей – ты граф! Нечего делать, граф так граф, я и от этого не отказываюсь. Не успею совершить какой-нибудь подвиг, достойный графского сана, – аттанде! Ты Прохор Васильич, купеческий сын! Пожалуй, для разнообразия буду купеческим сыном. Таким образом судьба вела меня через разные звания и состояния и привела на степень венгерского магната. Можешь спросить у всей знати здешней, у какого хочешь венгерца: унижаю ли я звание магната? Конечно, можно меня упрекнуть в незнании венгерского языка, но, судя по здешним магнатам, каждый магнат не нуждается в отечественном языке. Отечественный язык нужен только простому народу…

Even in the twentieth century, self-proclaimed aristocrats of vague lineage and obscure homeland were wandering the world expressing themselves in variously accented languages, none of them apparently native; for all I know, there may still be Hungarian magnates to be found in aspirational salons.

A Lingua Franca post by Ben Yagoda takes off from a 1965 remark by Robert Manry, a copy editor for the Cleveland Plain Dealer: “I told myself that if most of the days ahead were as pleasant as this, our trip would be a breeze, or, as the English say, a piece of cake.” Yagoda, like me, was surprised by the attribution to the English, and investigated, finding that it began as RAF slang, the first quote in the Google Books database coming from a 1942 Life magazine article written by an RAF pilot: “It sounds incredible considering that we were 150 miles from the target but the fires were so great that it was a piece of cake to find the target area.” He has an Ngram chart showing US usage overtaking UK in the 1970s, and ends with this anecdote:

There’s a coda to the tale of a piece of cake. Fans of Roald Dahl may recognize it as the title of one of his short stories, included in his 1946 collection Over to You: Ten Stories of Flyers and Flying. That story is actually an extensive reworking of his first published work, an article in the August 1942 edition of The Saturday Evening Post called “Shot Down Over Libya.” In the piece, labeled a “factual report,” Dahl talks about being given the assignment, in 1940, to bomb a group of Italian trucks in the Libyan desert. One of his fellow flyers remarks, “Hell’s bells, what a piece of cake!” Another agrees, “What a piece of cake.” (This is retroactive evidence of an earlier British use of the expression than given in the OED, but can’t be included in the dictionary as such since the publication date is 1942.)

Do my UK readers now think of this as an Americanism, or does it still retain a whiff of its raffish RAF origins?

I’ve linked to Balashon, the “Hebrew Language Detective,” any number of times, since the detailed etymological investigations there are meat and drink to me, and I’m happy to report it’s reached its 500th post. I am also happy to report that thanks to readers clicking on Google and Amazon ads and links, “that small amount of income has allowed me to reinvest in resources”:

Just recently with that revenue, I was able to purchase a book I was interested in for a very long time, Michael Sokoloff’s A Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic. This book, which was published in 2002, is a fantastic resource for researching Aramaic words from the Babylonian Talmud (of which many influenced later Hebrew words) and has in-depth etymologies as well. For today’s post, I thought I’d look at the methodology of Sokoloff, as well as a number of his predecessors, and hopefully you’ll get some insight into how I do the research for Balashon. The word I’m looking at is alunka אלונקה – “stretcher, litter”.

The post is long and full of images of dictionary pages; it’s the kind of thing I used to enjoy in Polyglot Vegetarian back when MMcM was still updating it. I’ll let you follow its winding path and enjoy the weighing of the various etymological suggestions; I’ll just quote this bit near the end:

But what Sokoloff provides, which none of the books I’ve quoted until now did – is the sources for the etymologies! That’s so important, and yet until I acquired his book, I had no idea how much it was missing. I’m sure Klein, Steinsaltz and the others did research and had reasons for their theories. But without documentation, it all just seems like speculation.

Congratulations to Balashon and its dedicated creator, David Curwin, to whom I wish many more years of life, happiness, and blogging.

I was reading Catherine Shoard’s Guardian puff piece on Mark Rylance (“the best actor of his generation,” “the world’s greatest actor”) when I was pulled up short by this passage:

He plays Terry, a banker who once ran a Congo-based squad of assassins (including Penn and Ray Winstone). As projects go, it feels a bit skew whiff for a pacifist so committed that he winces at the very mention of American Sniper.

I was so unfamiliar with “skew whiff” that I assumed it must be a typo, but a moment’s googling showed me my error: the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines it as “sloping instead of straight, or wrongly positioned: You’ve got your hat on skew-whiff.” And it’s not some recent bit of slang; the OED (in an entry from 1933) takes it back almost three centuries:

dial. and colloq.

Askew, awry (lit. and fig.).

1754 Scots Mag. July 337/2 Behind, with a coach-horse short dock, cut your hair; Stick a flower before, scew-whiff, with an air.
1839 W. Holloway Gen. Dict. Provincialisms (new ed.) 154/1 Skew-whift, adj. (Askew, from Skef, Belg. oblique; and perhaps Whiffed, blown.) Awry.
[…]
1895 J. T. Clegg Stories, Sketches, & Rhymes in Rochdale Dial. 228 Her judgment’s getten thrut skew-wift.
1899 Shetland News 20 May 7/2, I hed ta geng skewquieff.
1935 A. P. Herbert What a Word! iv. 101 Go on cackling..until the orator has to stop and ask you why you cackle. Then tell him. He won’t get Frankenstein skew-whiff again.
1946 D. L. Sayers Unpop. Opinions 59 When Neptune shouldered Britain out of the sea, he did not make a neat engineering job of it. Characteristically, Britain came up skew-wiff, with one edge thick and hard and the other soft and thin, like a slice of wedding-cake.
1959 I. Opie & P. Opie Lore & Lang. Schoolchildren iii. 47 If a boy’s cap is on skew-whiff: ‘Are you wearing that cap or just walking underneath it?’
[…]
1974 J. Cleary Peter’s Pence iii. 82 Our plans seem to have gone a bit skew-wiff, don’t they? That’s the trouble with the Irish.
1977 Lancashire Life Feb. 53/4 Thi tie’s put on skew-wiff.

Is this a word every UKanian knows? And are any of my non-UK readers familiar with it?

Rylance is indeed an amazing actor, by the way, and my wife and I are thoroughly enjoying the BBC Wolf Hall adaptation.

Anatoly Vorobey quotes (in Russian) a passage from an 1811 letter by Konstantin Batyushkov to Nikolay Gnedich complaining about the Russian language so strikingly I thought it was worth translating here:

Guess what I’m beginning to be angry about. What? The Russian language, and the writers who deal with it so unmercifully. And the language, it’s just not very good, it’s a bit boorish, it smells of Tartary. What is this y [ы]? And this shch [щ]? What about these sh, shii, shchii, pri, try? O barbarians! And the writers? Never mind them! Forgive me for getting angry at the Russian people and their dialect. I have just this minute been reading Ariosto, breathing the pure air of Florence, delighting in the musical sounds of the Ausonian language and speaking with the shades of Dante, Tasso, and sweet Petrarch, from whose lips each word is bliss.

Anatoly goes on to quote a passage from Bely’s Peterburg complaining about how awful the sound y [ы] is, concluding “Not a single cultured language knows the y: it’s something obtuse, cynical, slippery.” A strange coincidence of attitudes! Anatoly says he himself thinks the y is a very nice sound: “I like it a lot.”

Something recently struck me about Wolf Hall (which I’ve almost finished): I haven’t had to look up any words. This is fairly astonishing for a historical novel; from Walter Scott on, novelists who dabble in the dead past tend to pound nails in its coffin not only with words like “thee” and “thither” and “accoutred” and exclamations like “Over God’s forbode!” but with quaint terms for long-forgotten objects and customs. (For a full-immersion experience, check out Skeat’s A glossary of Tudor and Stuart words, especially from the dramatists.) Even Ford Madox Ford, a fine writer whose Fifth Queen trilogy is one of the better pieces of historical novelry around, couldn’t resist tossing in some of ye olde wordhoard, as I posted here (aumbry, balinger, tulzie, et al.). Mind you, this passage from Alan Judd’s biography of Ford, quoted in the Wikipedia article linked above, is accurate:

He creates a version of Tudor English that is not only effective but does not in any way hinder the sense of reality. This is a considerable achievement; the use of a dated form of one’s own language always sounds the contrivance it is, unconvincing, artificial and slow. In order to work it needs to sound natural and in order for that to happen the author needs to have created a world or an atmosphere in the context of which it can be natural… The result in The Fifth Queen is vigorous and convincing, sometimes compressed poetic speech.

But it’s even more true of Mantel’s book, and I am in awe of how she pulls it off.

William Giraldi’s New Republic essay “Object Lesson” is, let’s face it, just another books-are-the-greatest-thing-ever rant, with an added helping of e-reader panic (though he gracefully admits at the end that the panic is irrational), but it resonates with me and my 5,000 or so books:

Those of us who dwell within mounts of books—a sierra of them in one room, an Everest in another; hulks in the kitchen, heaps in the hallway—can tell you that, in addition to the special bliss of having and holding them, it’s a hefty, crowded, inconvenient life that’s also an affront to the average bank account. (New hardback books are expensive to buy and economically neutered the second you do.) What’s more, your collection is a fatal Niagara if it falls.[…]

For many of us, our book collections are, in at least one major way, tantamount to our children—they are manifestations of our identity, embodiments of our selfhood; they are a dynamic interior heftily externalized, a sensibility, a worldview defined and objectified. For readers, what they read is where they’ve been, and their collections are evidence of the trek.[…]

Since bibliophiles are happy to acknowledge the absurdity, the obese impracticality of gathering more books than there are days to read them, one’s collection must be about more than remembering—it must be about expectation also. Your personal library, swollen and hulking about you, is the promise of betterment and pleasure to come, a giddy anticipation, a reminder of the joyous work left to do, a prompt for those places to which your intellect and imagination want to roam. This is how the nonreader’s question Have you read all these books? manages to miss the point. The tense is all wrong: Not have you read all, but will you read all, to which, by the way, the bibliophile’s answer must still be no. Agonizingly aware of the human lifespan, the collector’s intention is not to read them all, but, as E.M. Forster shares in his essay “My Library,” simply to sit with them, “aware that they, with their accumulated wisdom and charm, are waiting to be used”—although, as Forster knows, books don’t have to be used in order to be useful.[…]

Thanks, Paul!

Stan Carey has a post on one of the most successful Yiddish exports to English, kibitz:

Kibitz is a handy word that means to watch someone do something (normally a game, often cards) and offer unwelcome advice. It can also simply mean to chat or joke around. The word entered English almost a century ago via multiple languages, thieves’ cant, and ornithological onomatopoeia. This delightful etymology is summarised at Etymonline:

1927, from Yiddish kibitsen “to offer gratuitous advice as an outsider,” from German kiebitzen “to look on at cards, to kibitz,” originally in thieves’ cant “to visit,” from Kiebitz, name of a shore bird (European pewit, lapwing) with a folk reputation as a meddler, from Middle High German gibitz “pewit,” imitative of its cry.

That is indeed delightful, so I thought I’d share it. I’ll also add the final sentence, which Stan inexplicably omitted: “Young lapwings are proverbially precocious and active, and were said to run around with half-shells still on their heads soon after hatching.”

Anne Curzan has a piece at Lingua Franca that pushes my buttons so that they produce a loud, harsh, buzzing noise in my head. She begins:

I am being a stick-in-the-mud about the phrase as such, and I have decided I need to change my ways.

As the graduate students whose dissertations I have been reading over the past few weeks will attest, I have been underlining many — but not all — of their uses of as such. Finally one of them asked me what the problem was. She said, “I’m thinking perhaps I don’t know how to use this phrase.”

Or perhaps she knows exactly what this phrase means to many of her readers and I am just behind the times.

Here is an example from a recent dissertation of an as such that I left untouched, given that it is used the way I would use it:

[This scholar] argues that Christianity has become, for many college students, little more than a restrictive moral code, and as such, has earned a bad name.

In this sentence, the pronoun such has a clear antecedent (“a restrictive moral code”) and the prepositional phrase as such accords with the Oxford English Dictionary’s first definition: “As being what the name or description implies; in that capacity.”

Here is an example of as such from the same dissertation that I underlined:

[The organization] encourages students to acknowledge where their own lives challenge Christian belief, and as such, these students are unlikely to fear such representation in academically oriented texts.

As such in this sentence seems to be synonymous with therefore or consequently. As a reader, I find myself searching for the antecedent of such, and given that I cannot find one, the sentences feels out of kilter. To me.

“To me, too!” the voice in my head screams. “How can it not! It’s wrong!” But Curzan goes on to discuss the history involved, pointing out that the OED called it colloquial and vulgar in 1915 but that the extended use has been growing so common that Jonathon Owen, in a 2013 post on Visual Thesaurus, “recognizes that these kinds of changes happen” and wonders “if he should loosen up and let this one go.” She concludes:

My as-such underlining does not seem well justified. Yes, there are certainly critics of the construction out there. But the use of as such to mean therefore or consequently seems entrenched enough in published academic prose that writers should not feel they have to avoid this use for fear of harsh judgment that it is too colloquial or “slipshod.” If this use of as such ever comes up on the ballot for American Heritage Dictionary Usage Panel, I’m voting acceptable.

This puts me in a pickle. As you know, I am a stone descriptivist, and if usage favors a construction, my principles insist it is perfectly good English. On the other hand, I am only human, and as it happens I hate this extended use with a passion (and use my editorial pen to stamp it out when I encounter it in the course of my job); when I see a sentence like one she quotes beginning “The main problem is a lack of data from banks and other institutions that suffer losses; as such, these estimates are heavily dependent on the methods used…,” I snarl “as what?” and change the offending phrase to “therefore.” So I am placing the pickle before the Varied Reader and soliciting input. Does the phrase seem horrible, not so bad, or totally unremarkable? Should I, like Curzan, loosen up and let it go?