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I learned a new word just now, from Theo Tait’s LRB review of two books on ghosts:

The will to ghost-belief is very strong. Clarke cites the interesting case of 50 Berkeley Square, notorious for a century as ‘the most haunted house in London’. It seems to have been lived in by a recluse for a short period. Thereafter a series of scary stories came to be associated with it: a haunted attic; an ‘evil room’; a housemaid struck dead with fright; the wraith of a sobbing child who had died in the nursery; the ghost of a betrayed woman who had thrown herself out of the window; a police notice forbidding anyone to use the upper floor. Clarke sent an email to the current resident, an antiquarian bookseller, and received the following response: ‘There are absolutely no first-hand accounts of anything at all. It’s fiction reversing into reality – similar to what folklorists call ostension.’ (Technically, I think, it’s quasi-ostension – the interpretation of real events according to folkloric or legendary templates: ostension is when people actually act out the folklore.) These fixed units of ghostly narrative seem to circulate endlessly – the body in the basement, the white lady, the hooded monk – just waiting for a suitable place to take up residence: often the same story concerning Anne Boleyn or the headless horseman or whoever will be found in various locations. And fiction constantly gives the ghost-seers new material. For instance, belief in spirit possession had all but died out in America before The Exorcist came out; now it’s widespread. As the ghost-hunter Harry Price put it: ‘People don’t want the debunk, they want the bunk.’

(Great quote in the last line!) The OED entry for ostension, though updated as of September 2004, does not include this sense; they have only “The action of showing, exhibiting, or making manifest[…] (Now rare)” and “Christian Church. The showing of the consecrated elements to the congregation at the Eucharist; (also) a similar display of some other object of veneration. Now rare (hist.).”

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This is great news:

The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies announced the official launch of the Doha Historical Dictionary of the Arabic Language, on May 25, 2013, following two years of extensive preparation by a select group of linguistic experts, lexicographers, and computational scientists from a variety of Arab countries. […]

During the meeting, they also announced the launching of a temporary website for the lexicon, hosted on the ACRPS domain for the time being[…]

The new dictionary, which will chronicle the history of Arabic terms over 2,000 years, is projected to take 15 years until completion, with achievement highlights being presented every three years. The dictionary hopes to make possible the facilitation of research on Arab intellectual legacy through the work it uncovers. As a comprehensive electronic corpus, the dictionary will be able to assist a number of projects related to machine language in Arabic, including machine translation and automated spelling and grammar checkers. A number of specialist lexicons will also be published as auxiliaries to the main project, including dedicated works on scientific terms, terms related to the study of civilization, a complete dictionary of contemporary Arabic, and educational dictionaries.

I’ve been complaining about this lack since 2004, and I’m thrilled it’s being dealt with. (Of course, “15 years until completion” is pure fantasy, but let’s not tell them that…) Hat tip to Paul Ogden, who has provided me with so many great links!

Update (Aug. 2025). The project was still going in 2019, and apparently in 2023, per Tamara Sleiman’s Case Study: The Doha Historical Dictionary of Arabic:

The Arabic Center has published one book to date, titled Toward an Arabic
Historical Dictionary. The book describes common methods used in the creation
of historical-etymological dictionaries. It also discusses the methods DHDA
uses in developing the seminal Arabic corpus and print and digital dictionaries.

Chris Santella’s story in today’s NY Times on salmon fishing in northern Russia begins “My fly skittered across the current in front of our jet boat on the Lower Tomba beat of Russia’s Ponoi River, darting erratically as the tension on my line increased.” I know nothing about fishing, but it was obvious from context that “beat” meant a stretch of river; no dictionary I have access to, however, has such a definition. Of course there’s the general sense “area of activity,” like a policeman’s beat, but the closest I can get to this specific usage is “A tract over which a sportsman ranges in pursuit of game” (OED, sample citation 1884 Weekly Times 29 Aug. 14/4 “On the first day’s beat he saw one brace of barren birds”), “a tract with more or less definite bounds over which sportsmen customarily range for game” (Webster’s New International). Does anybody know whether this is a commonly used term in angling, with rivers divided into named “beats,” or just an occasional extension of the general sense? If the former, lexicographers should take notice of it.

Update (June 2025). The OED has included the sense in its 2025 revision; see my comment below.

I’ve always loved this famous sentence from the Communist Manifesto, translated by Samuel Moore (under Engels’s supervision) for the 1888 English edition: “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” The first seven words were used by Marshall Berman for the title of his superb book All That Is Solid Melts into Air (see this LH post), and it’s hard to imagine a different rendering. And yet it’s a very loose translation of the German, which reads “Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft, alles Heilige wird entweiht, und die Menschen sind endlich gezwungen, ihre Lebensstellung, ihre gegenseitigen Beziehungen mit nüchternen Augen anzusehen.” The first bit, “Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft,” literally means “Everything related to the traditional estates, [everything] stationary/stagnant, evaporates,” but how do you say that in English without putting the reader to sleep? The LRB has an excellent letter (in response to this review) on the subject in the 6 June 2013 issue:

Richard J. Evans’s comment on Jonathan Sperber’s attempt to find a better translation of Marx’s phrase ‘Alles ständische und stehende verdampft,’ usually rendered ‘All that is solid melts into air,’ pinpoints a particular difficulty in translating the German term Stand (LRB, 23 May). Sperber’s preferred version – ‘Everything that firmly exists and all the elements of the society of orders evaporate’ – is, well, frankly hideous. On the other hand it is a lot more accurate than the elegant version it seeks to replace. The words Stand and its adjective ständisch have been variously translated as ‘status’, ‘estate’, ‘estate-type’ and now here as ‘a society of orders’. None of these captures what Marx is talking about here, which is inequality organised on a basis other than class or market. For Marx the problem of the emancipation of the Jews was that it would ‘free’ them only to enter an unequal, class-based world and, in so doing, would dissolve what was distinctive in a Jewish way of life, whatever value you might place on that. Even more than Marx, Max Weber contrasted status-based (ständisch) inequality with market-based divisions. A status group (Stand) has a distinctive way of life, which is regarded in a particular way, and is reflected in legal provisions and even in clothes or diet. An example in our contemporary world might be children: we think of them as fully human yet somehow as a different order of beings from adults, with a different legal position and different preoccupations. To some degree, gender divisions too are ständische differences. For both Marx and Weber what mattered was that the sweeping away of the old order – the ancien regime of, er, ‘social orders’ – is at first experienced as emancipation, only for the reality to dawn that what replaces it are different forms of exploitation and oppression and new social identities grounded solely in market position: in buying or selling labour-power. The German term Stand is first cousin to the English word ‘standing’, and both Marx’s and Weber’s point was that modernity erodes all identities, honour and relationships in the acid of commercial exchange, leaving few of us really happy with where we stand.

Jem Thomas
Bristol

Russian is not only lucky enough to have a corresponding adjective сословный [soslovnyi] meaning ‘of or pertaining to сословие [soslovie],” where сословие is ‘estate’ in the old-fashioned sense of Stand (nobility, clergy, etc.), but lucky enough to have a phrase сословное и застойное [soslovnoe i zastoinoe] that chimes almost as nicely as the German “Ständische und Stehende” which it translates; the full sentence is “Все сословное и застойное исчезает, все священное оскверняется, и люди приходят, наконец, к необходимости взглянуть трезвыми глазами на свое жизненное положение и свои взаимные отношения.” But since English cannot provide a literal translation that is not hideous, I’m grateful we have the option of the lovely and suggestive “All that is solid melts into air.”

It is with a heavy heart that I pass on this link, in which Anne Curzan reports that many of her students think “a sight for sore eyes” is a negative expression:

I have polled several classes since. In each, while more than half the undergraduates welcome a sight for sore eyes, a significant percentage uses the phrase to refer to something (or someone) that is a mess, ugly, disgusting, or otherwise capable of making the eyes unhappy. I recently asked some folks under 15, and, while I will admit there were only six of them, all six of them believed “sight for sore eyes” was negative, not in any way a compliment or a welcome sight. […]

When I’ve told people about this change in meaning for the idiom, the most common reaction has been: “But that doesn’t make any sense.” And with this comment, they dismiss younger speakers’ reinterpretation of the idiom.

I would not be so quick to dismiss it. First, idioms don’t have to make sense. By definition, idioms have a distinctive meaning that cannot be inferred solely from the meanings of the words in the expression. Think about “a can of worms” or “beat around the bush”—the latter of which has shifted semantically from its origin: beating around the bush was how hunters got the birds to fly out, which was the goal; the goal was not to beat the bush itself (in other words, beating around the bush was a preliminary activity, not an avoidance strategy).

Second, it is easy to see how younger speakers got to this meaning—that is, I’m not sure it “makes no sense.” They are just reinterpreting how the word “for” functions in the phrase: it is a sight that creates sore eyes, just as a phrase like “a pen for calligraphy” is a pen that is used to create calligraphy.

She is, of course, absolutely correct, and the descriptivist half of me nods vigorously in agreement. The other half is running around in circles bellowing in fear and loathing, but I know from experience that after a while it will run out of energy, lie down and pant a while, and then get on with life, wincing only occasionally.

R.L.G. at The Economist‘s “Johnson” blog has a post on an interesting subject that hadn’t occurred to me:

On Twitter, a friend asked “Twenty years from now, how many Chinese words will be common parlance in English?” I replied that we’ve already had 35 years since Deng Xiaoping began opening China’s economy, resulting in its stratospheric rise—but almost no recent Chinese borrowings in English.
Many purported experts are willing to explain China to curious (and anxious) westerners. And yet I can’t think of even one Chinese word or phrase that has become “common parlance in English” recently.

He mentions guanxi, “the personal connections and relationships critical to getting things done in China,” as “the only word that comes close,” but I agree with him that it doesn’t come very close at all. He tosses out the idea that “perhaps China’s rise is simply too new, and we just need another 20 years or so,” and that’s certainly a possibility; it’s hard to argue with his conclusion: “Whether future Chinese borrowings will be new edibles, cultural items or even philosophical terms will depend on China’s development and how the West responds.” At any rate, something to think about. (The “Featured comment” by tacitus secundus points out that “The disinclination to borrow is reciprocal: By comparison with the many thousands of English words found in Japanese, Chinese has relatively few English loan-words.”)

Richard Stanihurst (1547–1618) was born in Dublin of what began to be called in his day Old English stock (“the descendants of the settlers who came to Ireland from Wales, Normandy, and England after the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169–71”), and as Andrew Hadfield writes in his TLS review of Great Deeds in Ireland: Richard Stanihurst’s De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis, edited by John Barry and Hiram Morgan, “he poured scorn on both the – as he saw them – barbarous native Irish, and the vulgar and rapacious New English who were replacing the Old English descendants of the Anglo-Normans as rulers of Ireland loyal to the English Crown.” I had to laugh when I got to this section of the review:

In a striking aside, Stanihurst repeats his judgements about English identity in Holinshed, accentuating the gap between Irish and English – “Those who live in the English province differ from the Irish in their way of life, their customs and their speech: they deviate not one finger’s breadth from the ancient ways of the English” – before turning on the mores of the English today. The English in Ireland speak the language of Chaucer, “beyond doubt the Homer of the English”, so that they use “English in such a way that you would not believe that England itself was more English”. Chaucer is the right model because “Nothing in his writings will strike the reader as being redolent of disgusting newness”, a nice dig at the moderns.

(If you want to see the passage in Latin, go to p. 28 of the Google Books version, or search on “Homerus.”) Peevers today look back on Shakespeare as the exemplar of English at its peak, but in Shakespeare’s time they looked back to Chaucer.

I was also struck by this description of the book under review, De Rebus in Hibernia Gestis: “Written in chatty, familiar Latin, and peppered with anecdotes and asides, De Rebus was designed to provide its author with an entrance to the republic of letters dominated by Erasmus and harking back to Cicero.” It chimed with this, from Richard Jenkyns’s review, earlier in the same issue of TLS, of Sarah Ruden’s new translation of The Golden Ass: “Apuleius … liked loosely hanging clauses, symmetries, echoing phrases, rocking rhythms and hints of rhyme. At the start of The Golden Ass, the narrator claims to be a Greek who has learned Latin only in adulthood: that is why his lingo may seem eccentric. And indeed it is a unique farrago of archaisms, colloquialisms, coinages and sheer fantastication, combining a driving energy with elusive beauty.” And both those descriptions reminded me of the early-nineteenth-century Russian novelists I’ve been reading, more concerned with having fun with language and storytelling than satisfying anyone’s idea of classical form.

I wrote to Boris Dralyuk asking him about the Russian phrase пятый угол [pyaty ugol] ‘fifth corner,’ which Brodsky uses in a couple of poems in a way that was opaque to me (in “Кентавры” “спрятавшись в пятый угол” ‘hidden in the fifth corner,’ and in “Элегия” “заштриховывать пятый угол” ‘to shade the fifth corner’); his explanation was so surprising and enlightening I thought I’d share it here, since other lovers of Russian will probably have as much difficulty finding references to it in books or online as I did:

The “fifth corner” is a cruel children’s game, in which bullies push a younger student around the four corners of a classroom until he “finds the fifth corner”; police took this up, and would offer a suspect the chance to escape the interrogation if he were to “find the fifth corner.” In the broader metaphorical sense, it signifies the desperate, foolhardy attempt to escape one’s fate — a pipe dream.

The things they don’t tell you in Russian class!

Incidentally, Boris was in the UK for the Translators’ Coven in Oxford and various Poetry Week events in London; I wish I could have been there, and I look forward to Lizok‘s report.

In another of those random moments of curiosity, it occurred to me to wonder where the expression “nest egg” came from. As you can see from the various lexicographical sources collected at TheFreeDictionary, it literally means “An artificial or natural egg placed in a nest to induce a bird to continue to lay eggs in that place.” The OED has the first citation from 1579 (J. Stubbs Discouerie Gaping Gulf sig. B5, “The church of Christ rased, the very nest egge broken, as farr as mens mischeeuous reasonable wit cold reach”) and gives the first figurative sense as “A sum of money laid or set by as a reserve” (1686 Let. 4 May in B. Rand Locke & Clarke 164 “The rest, I perceive, he is not troubled should remain as a nest egg till a farther occasion”; 1990 Internat. Business Week 2 Apr. 31/3 “Increasing numbers of seniors enjoying the fruits of private pensions, as well as nest eggs built up during the high-growth years”), with the sense “A sum of money serving as a nucleus for the acquisition of more” only from 1801 (R. B. Sheridan Let. Jan. II. 147 “Burgess has only the nest egg of my Quaker £100”)—which is odd, since it would seem to be the obvious extension of the literal sense.

My ancient Oxford French Dictionary gives the literal nichet for “nest egg”; my more recent Collins-Robert gives only the figurative pécule. The Russian word подкладень (podkladen’, stress on the first syllable) seems to have been forgotten since Dahl’s day, but then I expect the practice of putting such fake eggs in nests has long fallen into desuetude as well.

I have occasionally run across the word majolica but never had anything but the vaguest idea of its meaning (some kind of porcelain?); now, having run across it again in Abulafia’s The Great Sea, I’ve looked it up again and discovered that there are two words, or two variants of one word, with two slightly different meanings, neither of which I’ll remember five minutes after I post this, but I’ll pass it along for the general enlightenment and/or confusion. Merriam-Webster says:

ma·jol·i·ca \mə-ˈjä-li-kə\ also ma·iol·i·ca \mə-ˈyä-li-kə\ [Italian maiolica, from Old Italian Maiolica, Maiorica Majorca]
1 : earthenware covered with an opaque tin glaze and decorated on the glaze before firing; esp : an Italian ware of this kind
2 : a 19th century earthenware modeled in naturalistic shapes and glazed in lively colors

I must have known at some point that the word was from the name of the island Majorca, but I’d forgotten. The interesting thing is that the OED (in an entry updated in 2000) gives both pronunciations (in their system, /məˈdʒɒlᵻkə/ and /məˈjɒlᵻkə/) for the entry majolica, which seems bizarre; the first definition is “= maiolica n.” [“A fine kind of Renaissance Italian earthenware with coloured decoration on an opaque white tin glaze; (more generally) any tin-glazed earthenware in the same stylistic tradition, esp. Hispano-Moresque lustreware. Also: any of various other kinds of glazed and ornamented Italian ware (also called faience and Raphael ware)”] and the main definition of this spelling (sense 3) is “A type of 19th-cent. earthenware with coloured decoration on an opaque white tin (or sometimes lead) glaze, of vaguely Renaissance inspiration; (also) the technique of painting on to unfired opaque white glaze.” The etymology gives the following mind-boggling detail about spelling and pronunciation (bear in mind that their /j/ represents the y sound):

During the 19th cent. majolica was the predominant spelling, with j pronounced /dʒ/ , although maiolica also occurs (see maiolica n.). Cent. Dict. (1890) added an ‘Italian pronunciation’ with /j/ , while N.E.D. (1904) and Webster (1909) gave alternative naturalized pronunciations, with /dʒ/ and /j/ . The /j/ spelling, though not uncommon, became less frequent than the /i/ spelling during the 20th cent. in British use in sense 1, the spelling maiolica freq. being used in sense 1 (especially by art historians) contrastively with majolica in sense 3; U.S. dictionaries, however, still record the /j/ spelling and corresponding pronunciation with /dʒ/ as commoner (compare French, in which the spelling maïolique is in the late 20th cent. much less common than majolique, with corresponding pronunciation with /ʒ/ ; for the /j/ spelling compare also German Majolika, Dutch majolica).

Thank god I’m not going to be tested on any of this.