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Some wonderful language in Peter Linebaugh’s CounterPunch review of Common People:

Common people used to be people of the commons. Leah Gordon & Stephen Ellcock with additional writing by Annabel Edwards, Common People: A Folk History of Land Rights, Enclosure and Resistance (Watkins: London 2025) explain this in such a lovely book. It brings together word and picture. Of the 240 pages there is scarcely an image-less page and no image without good speech quoted along with. I will say something about each but first overall on this the 500th anniversary of the German Peasants’ Revolt the book is introduced by images of Albrecht Dürer’s “Monument to the Vanquished Peasants.” […]

After this introduction we plunge right in to history and its dates, eight pages of clear timeline of enclosures and resistance. Here are the facts of the English class war between the Haves and the Have Nots. These facts form what E.P. Thompson would call “idioms” or “peculiarities of the English.” I looked up the word “idiom” in Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage and learned that it comes from a Greek word closely translated as “a manifestation of the peculiar” and Fowler explained that in the realm of speech this might refer to what is peculiar to the language of a people, the dialect of a district, or the vocabulary of a technique. The idiomatic exists alongside, though not against, abstract grammar. So it is with commoners and their powers of pasturage, estovers, turbary, pannage, piscary: all are idiomatic, that is, peculiar to language, district, and profession. Some might mistake the idiomatic with the incidental or trivial.

Look at the pictures of Crow Scaring, another of Twig Gathering, or Gleaners, or Leech Finders, or Acorn Knockers. We are invited to remember the world where Adam delved and Eve span. It is through them that we begin to find uncanny, magical, and spiritual relations. […]

The chapter on ‘Rural Rebels and Traditions’ begins with ten well-chosen illustrations with an emphasis on disguise, masking, cross-dressing, black face, fools, jesters, and mummers, and then a further two dozen photos and art of the resistance embedded in the deep folk history of opposition – the hobby horse, the straw bear, the sweep, Morris dancer, Jack-in-the-Green, oak apple day, the green man, mari lwyd, hoodening, the burryman. Like the Flora Britannica wonderfully described in Richard Mabey’s book of the same title, these popular forms are particular to place and peculiar to community life in the commons, “the granular minutiae of quotidian peasant activities.”

I have no nostalgia for the Old Ways and the life of the doughty peasantry, but I love granular minutiae and forgotten words. Thanks, Trevor!
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Here’s the start of the first chapter in How Literatures Begin (see this post), “Chinese,” by Martin Kern:

To think about the beginning of Chinese literature raises a simple question: which beginning? The one in high antiquity? The one around 200 BCE, following the initial formation of the empire, when China’s “first poet” Qu Yuan (ca. 340–278 BCE) came into view as the model that has since been embraced by public intellectuals and literati for more than two millennia? The medieval period, from, roughly, the third through the ninth century, that gave us “classical Chinese poetry”? The early twentieth century with its conspicuous break with tradition and the promotion of modern, vernacular literature in response to both the collapse of the empire and the full experience of foreign—Japanese and “Western”—literature? Sometime in between, when particular genres came to flourish, such as Chinese theater and opera under Mongol rule (1279–1368) or the Chinese novel soon thereafter? All these are legitimate choices, some perhaps slightly more so than others. They can be based on language, literary forms, political institutions, exposure to the world beyond China, the concept of modernity, and other factors. What follows is an essay on antiquity: the time that is at once discontinuous with all later periods and yet its constant point of reference.

Mythologies of Writing and Orality

For most ancient traditions, the modern notion of “literature” does not map well onto the nature, purposes, functions, aesthetics, and social practices involved in the creation and exchange of texts. In pre-imperial China, the term wen originated as broadly denoting “cultural patterns,” including those of textile ornament, musical melodies, the various formal aspects of ritual performances or any other aesthetic forms; it also was often used to refer to ancestors as “cultured” or “accomplished.” It was only over the course of the Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE) that the idea of “literature”—at that point just one of the many forms of aesthetic expression—was gradually privileged above all others to the extent that wen, together with its extension wenzhang (patterned brilliance), came to refer primarily to the well-developed written text. In other words, there was no early Chinese term for “literature” until wen, perhaps some fifteen centuries after its first appearance, began to be used primarily in that sense.

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A new Digital Scholarship in the Humanities article by Eetu Mäkelä, James Misson, Devani Singh, and Mikko Tolone (open access) examines Early English Books Online (EEBO):

Abstract

Digital archives that cover extended historical periods can create a misleading impression of comprehensiveness while in truth providing access to only a part of what survives. While completeness may be a tall order, researchers at least require that digital archives be representative, that is, have the same distribution of items as whatever they are used as proxies for. If even this representativeness does not hold, any conclusions we draw from the archives may be biased. In this article, we analyse in depth an interlinked set of archives which are widely used but which have also had their comprehensiveness questioned: the images of Early English Books Online (EEBO), and the texts of its hand-transcribed subset, EEBO-TCP. Together, they represent the most comprehensive digital archives of printed early modern British documents. Applying statistical analysis, we compare the contents of these archives to the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), a comprehensive record of surviving books and pamphlets in major libraries. Specifically, we demonstrate the relative coverage of EEBO and EEBO-TCP along six key dimensions—publication types (i.e. books/pamphlets), temporal coverage, geographic location, language, topics, and authors—and discuss the implications of the imbalances identified using research examples from historical linguistics and book history. Our study finds EEBO to be surprisingly comprehensive in its coverage and finds EEBO-TCP—while not comprehensive—to be still broadly representative of what it models. However, both of these findings come with important caveats, which highlight the care with which researchers should approach all digital archives.

1. Introduction

The purpose of this article is 2-fold. First, we aim to show, with major datasets often used for digital scholarship, that the collection history and composition of datasets matter, and cannot be ignored when doing research without jeopardizing the validity of results. Second, by demonstrating this principle in a descriptive manner across various dimensions of interest (including temporal, geographical, and linguistic coverage), we also wish to offer a solution: a series of practical guides for users of these datasets, with which they can make informed decisions about which imbalances they need to account for, and how. While this paper’s analyses of composition and its consequences will benefit users of the datasets of Early English Books Online (EEBO n.d.) and EEBO-TCP (n.d.) specifically, our guides offer a template which is readily usable for other collections, as evidenced by our sister publication on Eighteenth Century Collections Online (Tolonen, Mäkelä, and Lahti 2022).

It looks like a valuable read for anyone who uses those archives. Thanks, Leslie!

Every once in a while journalists turn their beady eyes on the ever-fresh topic of “how those crazy kids are talking these days” and make solemn efforts to decipher it; the latest entry, by Callie Holtermann in the NY Times (archived), is less solemn and more sensible than most, and it includes an admirable bit of institutional self-flagellation (the passage beginning “In November 1992”):

If you’d like to truly mortify yourself in front of a young person, try asking the meaning of a phrase that’s being repeated in schools around the country like an incantation: “6-7.”

The conversation might go something like this. You’ll be informed that it doesn’t have a definition — it’s just funny, OK? And also, isn’t it a little bit embarrassing that you’re asking? “There’s not really a meaning behind 6-7,” explained Ashlyn Sumpter, 10, who lives in Indiana. “I would just use it randomly,” said Carter Levy, 9, of Loganville, Ga. Dylan Goodman, 16, of Bucks County, Pa., described the phrase as an inside joke that gets funnier with each grown-up who tries and fails to understand it.

“No offense to adults, but I think they always want to know what’s going on,” she said.

They have certainly been trying. Several months after “6-7” began popping up in classrooms and online, the phrase has become the subject of perplexed social media posts by parents and dutiful explainers in national news outlets, most of which trace it to the song “Doot Doot (6 7)” by the rapper Skrilla. Last month, Dictionary.com chose the term as its word of the year, acknowledging it as “impossible to define.”

This is the oldest trick in the adolescent handbook: Say something silly, stump adults, repeat until maturity. Today, though, such terms ricochet around a network of publications and on the pages of influencers, all promising to decipher youth behavior for older audiences. “Six-seven” feels a bit like a nonsense grenade lobbed at the heart of that ecosystem. Desperate to understand us? Good luck, losers!

It is not the only way that younger generations are, consciously or not, scrambling the Very Earnest analysis of their forebears.

She goes on to talk about skibidi, Ballerina Cappuccina, Tralalero Tralala (a shark with human legs), and “Pudding mit Gabel” before continuing:
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OK, this is one of those ridiculously trivial questions that bother me enough to bother you all with. I came across a reference to L’Hoest’s monkey and of course wanted to know how to pronounce the name; my first-approximation guess was /lo:sts/ (“loasts”), and that is indeed how the zookeeper says it in this video (though she may not be pronouncing the final /s/), so that might have satisfied me… but I went to the Wikipedia article hoping for confirmation, only to discover that it was named “in honor of François L’Hoëst [nl], director of the Antwerp Zoo, in 1898.” At that Dutch page we learn that “François L’Hoëst (Tongeren, 1 maart 1839 – Antwerpen, 29 oktober 1904) was een Belgisch zoöloog.” So now I need to know how Belgians say the name L’Hoëst; the diaeresis is a confusing creature, as we learned in the Citroën thread. Anybody know?

I thought Anatoly Vorobey’s Avva post (in Russian) was of enough general interest to translate it here; Anatoly and his wife, of Russian origin and living in Israel, are both fluent in English:

R. and I have a bit of a problem at home with switching to English in spontaneous communication without really meaning to, and in the last couple of years, our older child has enthusiastically joined in. Every now and then I catch myself and try to put an end to this depravity by saying something like “today everyone is going to speak such and such a language,” but it never works. Yesterday I accidentally discovered a very effective remedy, which I’m sharing: when, for example, a child says something in English for no particular reason, I add “Yulia said in English.” As soon as I starting doing this, it turned into a competition within the family, and we all “catch” each other using English, including me (“Dad said in English”), and we try to watch ourselves and not switch in the middle of a sentence unless there’s a good reason.

In our family, the main way to get people to do something less is to make a joke out of catching them doing it. I don’t know what that means, but it’s a fact.

I think this is what the kids call a “lifehack.”

We’ve discussed Anthony Burgess before (e.g., Burgess’s Slang), but I thought this bilious and detailed passage from the Roger Lewis biography was worth sharing:

Burgess’s idea of order, and his mental make-up, is signified by his fancy for the discipline and formality of grammar and linguistics. Language, in Burgess, creates the content. His information about his ancestors is divulged in terms of how they spoke and sounded, and by the Lancashire hotpot they ate: speaking and swallowing. And of course he can’t mention Manchester speech without having a go at the ‘centralizing linguistic culture’ of London and the south, which ironed out regional dialects – yet where did his own sonic boom come from? Elocution lessons? ‘We provincials have suffered in forcing ourselves to conform,’ he announced in 1987, writing from 44 rue Grimaldi, Monaco. One of Burgess’s biggest inadvertent jokes was to call a book Language Made Plain, because he makes it complicated, in my view. When he talks about substituting ‘an alveolar nasal for a velar one’ or of ‘palatizing his unvoiced alveolar fricatives’, I haven’t a clue what he means – except that he is showing off and being boring. He can’t have friends or cronies at school – they have to be persons ‘true to the etymology khronios’; even as a hungry baby he was like the vociferously verbose Leonard Sachs, compère of The Good Old Days, the music-hall show broadcast from the City Varieties, Leeds. Instead of crying for more milk, it’s a question of ‘the lactal ducts never refilling fast enough’. With Lynne dead in her hospital bed at the Central Middlesex, all he can think about is that the origin of the word acites, one of her symptoms (a distension of the abdomen), is the Greek askos, a wineskin, and that one of her last acts had been to rebuke a Singapore nurse in fluent Mandarin Chinese, ‘astonishing me with a sleeping knowledge of the language I never knew she had’.

Clamour and confusion are concealed by language, and for Burgess living details become a literary process. He reminds me, therefore, less of any modern (or Modernist) artist, where the many-sidedness of existence is acknowledged and presented in a multitude of experimental ways, than of a late Victorian or Edwardian man of letters – his equivalent in painting being William Powell Frith, whose vast, thronging canvases of Ramsgate Sands, Derby Day or railway-station platforms and booking halls prompted Wilde to enquire innocently whether it was really all done by hand? Such, too, are Burgess’s modes of exaggeration – the bejewelled vocabulary, the polishings of his prose – the effect, though picturesque, is that the books are assembled by clockwork. His love of words is robotic.

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Bruce Allen sent me a link to an article in Antigone by Harry Tanner, “Beyond LSJ: How to Deepen Your Understanding of Ancient Greek.” It begins by describing how Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott created “one of the world’s most famous ancient Greek dictionaries” using “a team of students who painstakingly recorded words encountered, along with their contexts, on index cards”:

Very little is known about the criteria by which Liddell and Scott decided what each word meant; there is no preface, no introduction, no explanation about the methods by which these scholars arrived at their conclusions and – more to the point – their translations. This lack of explanation perhaps reflects a more generalised self-confidence of scholars in the 19th century: as E.H. Carr said of historians of that era, “they believed [history’s] meaning was implicit and self-evident.”

Tanner proceeds to the meat of the essay, the issue of what we mean by the meaning of words:

One of the key problems with dictionaries lies in how we tend to think about words, not least words in ancient Greek. We tend to think of them as existing somewhere in the mind with a definable, clear meaning — as if a word like “beauty”, or “mellifluous”, or “carrot” had a home, a clear piece of real estate in the mind, a mental dictionary entry. This limiting idea is far from new. In Plato’s Laches, Socrates asks, ​​πειρῶ εἰπεῖν ὃ λέγω, τί ἐστιν ἀνδρεία (try to articulate what I am saying, what is andreía?) (Laches 1[9]0e). What ensues is an attempt to define the word — to say what it properly means. The assumption at the heart of this dialogue, as well as at the heart of LSJ, is that words have true meanings which exist independently of the contexts in which they are found. It’s as if there is some mental catalogue in which we might look up a word and learn all there is to know about its meaning. But, of course, words are never that simple, and to pretend that they are risks missing out on all the polysemy and multivalence inherent in poetic and creative language.

The word andreia, Plato assumes, has a pure, unadulterated meaning outside of context, and it is our job to find it. Similar attempts are made in the Charmides on the word sōphrosunē (σωφροσύνη). Dictionaries seek to capture that idée mère — to describe in sundry words what it means. Following suit, LSJ glosses σωφροσύνη as “soundness of mind” — another attempt to provide a glancing, unified definition which neatly captures all there is to know about the word. Unfortunately, such assumptions tend to deprive us of the chance to appreciate the beauty and poetry of words.

He explains some of the complex uses of σωφροσύνη, and continues:
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Another thought-provoking section of the introduction to How Literatures Begin (see this post):

If we focus on the cases where a new literature comes into view in response to new senses of group identity of one kind or another, we need to acknowledge that the petri dish in which this new set of reactions is cultivated almost invariably turns out to be an already multilingual and multicultural environment—cases such as premodern Japan, where virtually no one except immigrants spoke Chinese, are very rare, and even there a crucial factor in the development of the new literature was the arrival of a wave of refugees from the destruction of the Paekche state in Korea (chapter 2). To give just a selection of examples: later medieval Britain had a trilingual textual culture; mid-Republican Rome was home to speakers of Greek, Etruscan, and Oscan; the Swahili classic Al-Inkishafi came from a hybridized culture involving Arabic rulers and three competing Swahili dialects.

As a consequence, very strikingly, the beginnings of literatures are regularly venues for the transformative impact of interstitial figures, bilingual or trilingual intercultural actors, who become the catalysts for new forms of cultural expression. These individuals are often able to import into the target culture their expertise in an outside literary tradition (regularly from a cosmopolitan literature). Such entrepreneurial experts shuttling in between cultures are key figures in the beginning of literatures in Rome (Livius Andronicus, Naevius, and Ennius); Russia (Antiokh Kantemir [1709–44]); Japan (the refugees from Korea in the seventh century CE, especially Yamanoue no Okura [660–ca. 733], from a Paekche immigrant family); and India (Maulana Daud, the Muslim who in the 1370s composed the first Hindi work, the Candāyan). The bi- or trilingual individuals who must have been crucial in mediating the epics and songs of the Near East into the Greek-speaking sphere in the period before Homer and Hesiod are now lost to history. As with any feature of culture, all literary traditions interact and appropriate to one degree or another: in their initial phases, the splitting off of vernacular literatures from their parental cosmopolitan literatures will provide ready opportunity for such middle men and culture brokers.

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A few years ago, Princeton University Press published How Literatures Begin: A Global History, edited by Joel B. Lande and Denis Feeney; having had a chance to examine it, I find it a fascinating look at a phenomenon of great interest, and I’ll share some excerpts here, starting with the introduction:

Literatures are rather improbable things. While storytelling and myth making seem to be fixtures of human society, literatures are much more rare. After all, very few spoken languages ever developed a script, let alone enduring institutions of the kind surveyed in this volume. And in those instances where a literary tradition does take hold, survival is far from guaranteed. Literatures require technologies for their preservation and circulation, groups interested in their continuing production, audiences invested in their consumption, and so on. Literatures are sustained over time by diverse practices. But much like individual lives or entire cultures, they also experience birth and death, periods of florescence and of decay, migration from one place to another, and transformation from one shape into another.

With all the specialized interest in individual literatures, in addition to the widespread use of big-picture categories like postcolonial and world literature, one can easily lose track of just how strange it is that literatures exist in the first place. This book embraces such strangeness, asking how an array of literatures, extending across time and space, came to be. By examining the factors that have brought forth and kept alive various literary traditions, the case studies presented here provide the occasion to rethink many of our most basic assumptions about literature in the singular and literatures in the plural.

It is not hard to recognize the risks built into such a project. Neither the concept of literature, nor that of a beginning, can be taken for granted. There are, to be sure, intrinsic difficulties in translating the concept of literature from one idiom to another, especially because of the term’s modern European provenance. Using the term literature universally, that is, runs the risk of projecting a historically and culturally specific set of textual practices and aesthetic values onto times and places that worked very differently. Along the same lines, the search for beginnings can easily be construed as the attempt to uncover a single pattern or a uniform set of enabling conditions, common to each of the case studies included here. In reflecting on processes of literary beginning, it is all too easy to impose a hegemonic mold that all examples either manage or fail to live up to.

I normally bristle when I read the word “hegemonic,” but here it’s used sensibly and imparts an actual meaning. A later passage:
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