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I pass along this disturbing news from the Log to forewarn the public that there are apparently a fair number of people (to judge from the comment thread there) who accept the following constructions as perfectly good English:

“The accident caused for two lanes and one inbound express lane to be blocked.”

“Philadelphia has been looking to start a fire sale at the deadline, but a lot of their demands have caused for teams to back away from making deals.”

“A trend called the ‘Fire Challenge’ made popular through social media websites caused for a 14-year from the Crosby area to be hospitalized with second-degree burns to his body.”

In the comments, John Lawler helpfully provides “a couple quick lists of verbs relevant to this construction”:

Verbs that optionally allow V for X to VP
call
choose
vote
decide
arrange
allow
want
provide
need

Verbs that do not allow V for X to VP
*demand
*pick
*get
*assign
*select
*trust
*equip
*guarantee
*insist
*promise
*offer

Ethan responds:

There must be considerable idiolectic variation in which verbs are in which category. For me the only verbs I would normally accept from your list “optionally allow V for X to VP” are call, vote, arrange, and (sounds to my ears like instructions to a toddler) “I need for you to VP“.

At any rate, this is, of course, merely language change in action and not cause for alarm, but it has certainly caused my brain [*for?] to seize up.

A couple of years ago I read and loved To the Lighthouse (LH post); now I’m reading the other of Woolf’s books that I think is generally acknowledged as a masterpiece, Mrs. Dalloway, and I’m just as enthralled as I remember being the last time I read it, decades ago. This time around, not only do I read with more understanding in general, but the internet permits me to look up and instantly absorb references that escaped me the first time. When she mentions Devonshire House and Bath House, I discover they’re grand mansions on Piccadilly, along which Clarissa Dalloway is walking, and when she writes “There were Jorrocks’ Jaunts and Jollities; there were Soapy Sponge and Mrs. Asquith’s Memoirs and Big Game Shooting in Nigeria…” Google tells me that the first two items are by the popular Victorian writer R. S. Surtees (and furthermore that the italics I have reproduced from my HBJ paperback are wrong, since “Jorrocks'” is part of the title and should be ital, whereas “Soapy” Sponge is the protagonist of some of his writings and not a title and should not be ital). And here are a couple of sentences that made me glad of my access to the OED:

Gliding across Piccadilly, the car turned down St. James’s Street. Tall men, men of robust physique, well-dressed men with their tail-coats and their white slips and their hair raked back who, for reasons difficult to discriminate, were standing in the bow window of Brooks’s with their hands behind the tails of their coats, looking out, perceived instinctively that greatness was passing, and the pale light of the immortal presence fell upon them as it had fallen upon Clarissa Dalloway.

I, like any modern speaker of English, think of a slip as a woman’s undergarment, so I was taken aback by these “well-dressed men with their tail-coats and their white slips,” but the OED explained that this was “A light under-waistcoat with the edge showing to form a border to a waistcoat worn with morning dress”; here are the citations:

1933 C. St. J. Sprigg Fatality in Fleet St. viii. 98 Oakley looked like..a monkey which had surprisingly been trained to wear a morning-coat and grey slip.
1941 H. G. Wells You can’t be too Careful iii. x. 158 And you looking lovely in a silk hat and light grey trousers. You’ll have, you know, white slips to your waistcoat.

I can’t quite picture it, but at least I know what it is. And the OED entry (from 1912) doesn’t even mention the modern sense; I wonder how old it is?

Arthur Chu has a very interesting essay at NPR’s Code Switch site that begins by describing how he speaks English in a “Chinese accent” for a video and goes on to unpick the complexities of such an accent:

Nearly every Chinese immigrant I’ve met does, in fact, “talk like that,” because it’s almost impossible not to have a thick accent when your first language is as fundamentally phonetically different from English as Mandarin or Cantonese is.

But it’s equally true that every single Chinese-American kid born here I’ve met emphatically does not “talk like that.” In fact, there isn’t a Chinese-American accent the way there’s a distinct cadence to how black Americans or Latino Americans talk. Most Chinese-Americans have a pitch-perfect “invisible” accent for wherever they live.

If anything, the thing that made me weird as a kid was that my English was too perfect. My grammar was too meticulously correct, my words too carefully enunciated — I was the kid who sounded like “Professor Robot.” In order to avoid being a social pariah in high school I had to learn to use a carefully calibrated proportion of slurred syllables and street slang in my speech — just enough to sound “normal,” not enough to sound like I was “trying too hard.” […]

The “Asian accent” tells the story of Chinese-American assimilation in a nutshell. Our parents have the accent that white Americans perceive as the most foreign out of all the possible alternatives, so our choice is to have no accent at all. The accent of our parents is the accent of the grimy streets of Chinatown with its mahjong parlors and fried food stalls and counterfeit jewelry, so we work to wipe away all traces of that world from our speech so we can settle comfortably into our roles as respectable middle-class doctors, lawyers, engineers, hundreds of miles from Chinatown.

No wonder we react so viscerally to the “ching-chong, ching-chong” schoolyard taunt. To attack our language, our ability to sound “normal,” is to attack our ability to be normal. It’s to attack everything we’ve worked for.

I liked this anecdote about interpreting between English and English:

Most vividly I remember being on vacation at the Waterton-Glacier International Peace Park that straddles the U.S.-Canadian border, bemusedly translating between my dad and a park ranger, both of whom were speaking English. One of them would say something. The other would blink in confusion. Only when I repeated it did they understand. And suddenly I realized my dad’s Chinese accent and the ranger’s Canadian accent were too far apart from each other to be mutually intelligible.

And if you’re interested in the history of the “ching-chong” thing, by all means click on the link within the quote. (Via MetaFilter.)

I almost forgot that today marks twelve years since the first LH post — Mark Woods (speaking of “marks”) often reminds me of the anniversary with a great black-and-white photo of a crowd of men wearing hats, but he’s taking a (well-deserved) break until early August, so I’m on my own. I don’t have much to say besides thanks for all the comments and post ideas over the years, and I hope you’ll all stick around and keep making this habit I’ve fallen into worthwhile. (When I made that first post, I was still living in NYC; I’ve moved three times since then, and changed blog platforms twice. But as a result of the move to WordPress, all twelve years of posts are open for comment, so make yourselves at home in them!)

Barry Mazur’s Berfrois essay “The Authority of the Incomprehensible” has a long middle section on the reprehensible use of mathematics as a rhetorical device to give unearned authority to a text, with a detailed discussion of Malthus; all this can be skipped unless you have a particular interest in it. What attracted me to the essay is apparent in its opening:

You may not know what Abracadabra means, but you very well feel its magical force, and its effect only gains from the obscurity of the incantation. It is true, of course, that ipsa scientia potestas est (“knowledge itself has powers”), but being confronted with something that purports to be wisdom and is Greek to you, is even more powerful.

In a word, we humans are prone to take certain incomprehensible assertions as carrying some kind of evidentiary authority because of their incomprehensibility, and irrespective of the content of whatever messages those assertions were meant to communicate.

Children are constantly showered with words, phrases, usages — that mean both nothing and everything to them — from those beings that tower over them. These are utterances that have presumably potent meaning to the adult world, and — deliciously — can be repeated, in a kind of Bayesian language game, to see what power one derives from proclaiming them.

I remember that the first time in my life I heard the word Chinatown mentioned blithely by some adult, I knew nothing of its referent, and was in awe that a presumably visitable town(?) could miniaturize, distill, and encompass a vast country and language with an inaccessible script: I felt compelled to use that word, Chinatown, repeatedly, in whatever context arose, no matter what it meant, for a full week after I heard it, to possess the sheer power of its incomprehensibility.

I’ve long been fascinated by the attraction of incomprehensibility (which sometimes prompts the exclamation “O altitudo,” about which I wrote here), and Mazur has some good things to say about it:

Here I want to argue that obscurity of a certain sort has a particular, and perhaps essential, role to play in intensifying emotional effect in literature and poetry. Nursery rhymes, of course, are garlanded with delicious meaninglessnesses and metaphors often overstretch their logic, the very tension of this over-stretching being a source of their power. But consider, as an example, the power of Cleopatra’s elegiac cry:

…His delights
Were dolphin-like; they showed his back above
The element he lived in: In his livery
Walked crowns and crownets; realms and islands were
As plates dropp’d from his pockets.

in Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra. This conjures, for me, a vivid forceful image, alive with a dazzling froth of motion, even though – or maybe I should say especially because – the idea behind the phrase “they showed his back” is impossible to hold in my head.

Incomprehensibility, itself, is a central character in the fascinating essay Über die Unverständlichkeit (On the Incomprehensible) by Friedrich Schlegel published in 1800, and brilliantly discussed in Michel Chaouli’s book The Laboratory of Poetry. Schlegel crowns incomprehensibility as the touchstone of inspired meaning. Imagine language as a soup, a medium for ideas, and the poet as a cook who brings the whole mixture to a boil and who only is certain that the broth is really cooked only if the ingredients are so transformed so as to have – in some sense – gotten away from him. They are singed with incomprehensibility.

And there’s a nice quote from Mark Strand:

. . . language takes over, and I follow it. It just sounds right. And I trust the implication of what I’m saying, even though I’m not absolutely sure what it is that I’m saying. I’m just willing to let it be. Because if I were absolutely sure of whatever it was that I said in my poems, if I were sure, and could verify it and check it out and feel, yes, I’ve said what I intended, I don’t think the poem would be smarter than I am.

Not to mention the “marvelous piece of encouragement given by the Boston University mathematician Glenn Stevens to one of his students who came to him, swamped by perplexity when thinking about a certain problem in mathematics”: “It is good to be confused!”

On the quote from Anthony and Cleopatra (V.ii.88 ff.), Susan Snyder has a thoughtful discussion in Shakespeare: A Wayward Journey (p. 75):

What meanings attach to flux and superior solidity in this vision of the dolphin’s firm back gleaming above the dancing, shifting sea? For Kittredge, who was later followed by Dover Wilson, Cleopatra means that “as the dolphin shows his back above the water, so Antony always rose superior to the pleasures in which he lived.” This separates Antony’s superiority from his pleasures, opposes them in fact. But “delights” are the agents of his rising: it is they who show his back above the sea. Another gloss, this one from the Riverside Shakespeare, says that Antony “in his pleasures . . . rose above the common as a dolphin rises out of its element, the sea.” Now the pleasures have been dissociated from the sea, which is simply “the common.” But the sea with its unceasing flux is the element in which those uncommon pleasures lived. Antony’s delights are both flux, the succession of moments, and that which ultimately lifts him above flux — because the moment is fully realized. Finally, then, the motion patterns convey not only the essential, tragic incompatibility between stillness and flux but also a hint of transcendence.

I’ll add that “crowns and crownets” is metonymy for “kings and princes” and “plates” here has its oldest English meaning, “A coin, esp. a gold or silver one” (OED).

And if you were wondering about the name of the journal, berfrois is an Old French word (the source of English belfrey, which etymologically has nothing to do with bells) for a movable tower used in sieges; it can also, apparently, be used for “a grandstand, usually built a full story above the level of the lists , housing the ladies and other noble spectators of the gallery for a hastilude or tournament.” Though perhaps I shouldn’t have spoiled your pleasure in its incomprehensibility.

Olga Khazan has an amusing account in The Atlantic of going to Russia and trying to use her very rusty native language. I enjoyed it, of course, but one section requires amendment, since she doesn’t seem to have quite understood what was going on:

We’re sitting in a cafe with my cousin, who has lived in Leningrad/Saint Petersburg her entire life. She is offering Rich more food. He says, “I’m full” in English, and I try to teach him the words for “I’m full” in Russian, because I enjoy feeling smarter than others.

“Sut,” I say—full—remembering a word from childhood refusals to eat more buckwheat kasha. There’s no English letter for the “u” sound there, but it resembles the noise you’d make if you experienced a tremendous blow to the stomach.

“Sit,” he says.

“Sut.”

“Sit.”

I look at my cousin, who is turning red. “Actually,” she tells me in Russian, “that word can mean something else.”

Apparently the word I had been broadcasting to the entire restaurant is prison slang for “pissing from fright.”

“Ya nayelsa,” my cousin tells Rich gently. I have eaten enough.

I’m pretty sure there’s no such slang meaning for сытый [sytyi] ‘satisfied, replete, full’ (of which the short form is сыт [syt]); what her cousin was trying to tell her was that she was saying it wrong, leaning on the initial /s/ so that it sounded like ссыт [ssyt], the third person singular of the (very vulgar, but not slang) verb ссать ‘to piss; to be very afraid.’ I’m pretty sure if you pronounce сыт correctly, you don’t have to worry about the people at nearby tables looking askance at you. But of course if I’m getting it wrong, I hope my Russian-speaking readers will correct me. (Thanks for the link, Bathrobe!)

George Walkden [2025 homepage] has posted “Syntactic Reconstruction and Proto-Germanic: Cinematic Teaser” on Facebook; you can also view it at Mark Liberman’s Log post, and I urge you to take the two minutes needed to watch this brilliant attempt to attract attention to what might seem (and in fact is) a recondite subject. From the Log comments, I have to agree with Yuval, who said “How, HOW, did he miss the (rated) PG pun?” and with Matt‘s complaint about the price (“maybe someone at OUP will decide to ride this towering wave of publicity by offering a pre-order discount?”) — it boggles my mind that someone responded “290 pages at £65 for a hardback academic book seems quite affordable.” O RLY? I guess for those who enjoy Pétrus with their foie gras.

Alexander Anichkin, who comments here as Sashura, has a funny post about some language used by Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs that is both undiplomatic and untranslatable, namely that the EU, in supporting the US, “played the role of the well-known ‘under-officer’s widow,’ who flogged herself” (выступил в роли небезызвестной “унтер-офицерской вдовы”, которая сама себя высекла). For one thing, the word унтер-офицер [unter-ofitser], which I have rendered as the nonexistent “under-officer,” has no good equivalent in English; my Oxford dictionary defines it as “non-commissioned officer,” but as Sashura points out, this does not capture the “униженность и оскорбленность” (humiliating and insulting nature) of the Russian tsarist term and occupation. And the Gogol reference is well known to Russians but opaque to others; it’s from his great comedy The Government Inspector, and Sashura provides the original and three translations:

Городничий. Унтер-офицерша налгала вам, будто бы я ее высек; она врет, ей-богу, врет. Она сама себя высекла.

(The Government Inspector, перевод Arthur A Sykes, 1892)
GOVERNOR. The sergeant’s wife lied when she told you I flogged her—it’s false, yei Bohu, it’s false. Why, she flogged herself !

(The Inspector-General, translated by Thomas Seltzer)
GOVERNOR. The officer’s widow lied to you when she said I flogged her. She lied, upon my word, she lied. She flogged herself.

(Le Révizor, traduction pa Marc Semenoff)
LE GOUVERNEUR. — La femme du sous-officier vous a menti, menti, j’ai ne l’ai pas faire fouetter. Elle s’est fouettée elle-même.

I was deeply impressed by Sykes’s “yei Bohu” for ей-богу [ei-bogu] ‘really and truly! I swear to God!’; I can’t imagine what he thought English playgoers would make of it, and I wonder if cultivated Russians in the 1890s pronounced the -г- of богу as /h/ or if he’d been hanging out with southerners/Ukrainians. It’s interesting, too, that as the phrase has passed into general Russian usage, it’s lost the sarcastic sense it has in the play (the woman was in fact whipped by the governor, who is producing a ridiculous and unbelievable lie to exculpate himself) and become a term for self-abasement.

Sashura also mentions the phrase “кузькина мать,” famously used by Khrushchev, so I will take this opportunity to brag a bit by quoting the relevant entry (“we will bury you”) in Safire’s Political Dictionary, one of the editing jobs of which I am proudest:

One of the Russian leader’s favorite expressions was the picturesque peasant threat “We’ll show you Kuzka’s mother!” (kuzka being a kind of grain beetle, and its “mother” being the deeply buried larva); the hopelessly overmatched interpreters gave up and started translating this as the more familiar and comprehensible “We will bury you.” (For this eye-opener the lexicographer is grateful to editor and researcher Stephen Dodson.)

To clarify the implication, to show someone Kuzka’s mother — an underground larva — is, by implication, to bury them.

And if you’re interested in hard-to-translate idioms, don’t miss Victor Mair’s latest Log post about the Chinese expression 规矩是死的, 人是活的 “Rules are dead, people are living” and the variants and implications thereof.

I’m reading July 1914: Countdown to War, by Sean McMeekin, having enjoyed his The Russian Origins of the First World War (see this post) and having read in R.J.W. Evans NYRB review that it was “almost impossible to put down” (and of course being prompted by the centenary aspect); I’m still on the Prologue, but I’ve already run into a linguistic conundrum. In describing the preparations of the Serbian conspirators, he writes “Chabrinovitch, with papers provided by Popovitch, was to cross the border en route for Zvornik, on the Bosnian side; from there another confidence man would drive him to Tuzla, a town connected by railway to Sarajevo.” On the next page we get “Finally, in Tuzla, the three terrorists, having been reunited, turned over their deadly cargo to another confidence man, Mishko Jovanovitch, who, like Chubrilovitch, was both an upstanding local citizen (he owned a bank and a movie theater) and a member of Narodna Odbrana.” Setting aside the fact that I’ve been hit with a Chabrinovitch, a Ciganovitch, and a Chubrilovitch within the space of a few pages, about which it would be churlish for an aficionado of Russian literature to complain (though why he uses those archaic spellings instead of the correct Čabrinović etc. is beyond me), I want to focus on the phrase “confidence man,” which puzzled me. At first I thought “Well, the ‘con man’ sense I’m familiar with must be peculiar to the US, and in the UK it must mean ‘a man in whom confidence is placed,'” but a trawl through dictionaries put the kibosh on that idea (the OED defines it as “a professional swindler of respectable appearance and address,” the Concise [12th ed., 2011] simply as “a confidence trickster”). Furthermore, googling turns up no instances I can find of the phrase used as McMeekin uses it. So is he simply in error about its meaning, or am I missing something?

Addendum. I should add that he spells place names (e.g., Šabac) correctly; it’s just personal names that get the Ruritania treatment. Also, he spells the name of Sarajevo’s river “Miljăcke” rather than the correct Miljacka (note that he adds an incorrect breve as well as changing a to e), so I’m starting to have concerns about accuracy in general.

Further addendum. My concerns have been heightened by his reference to “a token Bosnian Muslim with the wonderfully evocative name of Mehmedbashitch (‘Mehmed’ being a Turkic variant of Mohammad and ‘bashitch’ the Slavicization of the Turkish word for kickback, baksheesh).” Now, that’s just silly; Mehmedbašić (to give the name its proper spelling) has the Serbo-Croatian –ić ending added to a name formed from the elements Mehmed and (I presume) Turkish baş ‘head.’ Why do people feel the need to make up “colorful” details like that?

Yet another addendum. OK, this is getting bad. At the start of chapter 1, describing the “glorious summer of 1914,” he says: “On Sunday afternoon, 28 June, Zweig … was … sitting on a park bench in the spa town of Baden, reading a Tolstoy novel.” Naturally, I wondered: which Tolstoy novel? What a stupid detail to omit! If it was War and Peace, for instance, it would be pleasantly piquant. Fortunately, Google Books lets me preview The World of Yesterday (cited in the footnote), where I discovered what Zweig actually wrote: “I was sitting at some distance from the crowd in the park, reading a book—I still remember that it was Merejkovsky’s Tolstoy and Dostoievsky—and I read with interest and attention.” It would appear McMeekin was working from vague memories rather than actual notes. If he’s falling down so badly on stuff I can easily check, why should I trust him on the stuff I can’t? And (he asked, futilely, for the umpteenth time) don’t any reviewers ever bother to check up on such things?

John Emerson is, of course, a frequent LH commenter; he also walks the hard path of the independent scholar, hacking his way through untraveled wildernesses of culture and history, asking questions none have asked before him, like “Could Friedrich Nietzsche have married Jane Austen?” Back in 2007 I wrote enthusiastically about his book Substantific Marrow; now he’s come out with a new one, The Sex Life of the Nineteenth Century: An Autobiographical Approach to the History of Western Civilization (you can see its handsome cover, badly photographed by me, at its LibraryThing page). Like its precursor, it has what John calls “interesting scraps of citations”; here are two from pp. 50-51:

“In spite of all this, my father sent me to school when I was ten. “Why”, I would say to myself, “learn Greek and Latin? I don’t know! There’s no need of it, anyway! What does it matter to me if I pass my exams? What’s the use of passing one’s exams? It is of no use at all, is it? Yes it is, though: they say there is no employment without a pass….Then take history: learning the lives of Chinaldon, and Nabopolassar, of Darius, of Cyrus, and of Alexander, and of their cronies, outstanding for their diabolical names (remarquables par leurs noms diaboliques) is a torture. What does it matter to me that Alexander was famous? What does it matter?…..How does anyone know that the Latins ever existed? Perhaps their Latin is some counterfeit language….What evil have I done that they should put me to the torture?”

“Le soleil etait encore chaude….”, Collected Poems, tr. Bernard, written in 1864 when Rimbaud was ten years old.

Sometimes [Rimbaud’s mother] would send them to bed supperless because they had been unable to recite, without a slip, the hundreds of Latin verses she had set them to learn from memory.

Bernard, “Introduction”, p. xxix

There are discussions of everything from Tocqueville to the Swedish Rosicrucians, from krakens and basilisks to oafs and wimps, from “Erik Satie and the sewing machine” to “the czarist regime in two anecdotes.” It’s available here; I urge you to check it out, and I hope he will eventually publish his long-promised book on Inner Eurasian history.