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I keep waiting for Language Log to debunk this BBC News story by Katie Alcock—I mean, BBC News is notorious for bad science reporting, and the Loggers take delight in bashing them for it (see here and here for two of many examples)—but so far nothing, so I’ll just toss it out here and see what people have to say. The story begins “The University of Haifa team say people use both sides of their brain when they begin reading a language – but when learning Arabic this is wasting effort. The detail of Arabic characters means students should use only the left side of their brain because that side is better at distinguishing detail.” That sounds like classic overstatement/oversimplification to me, but I’ll let somebody else sort it out; I have to get ready to go to New Jersey tomorrow, because frequent commenter jamessal is getting married to his lovely fiancée this weekend, and I’m heading down early to spend a few days before the ceremony sampling the ice cream they’re producing for sale. Wish them well, and try to ignore whatever spammers infest LH during the next few days—I don’t know whether I’ll get a chance to clean them out before Sunday, when I return.
Oh, and if you like jazz and other forms of American roots music, check out The Daddy O’Daily, a brand new blog by my old pal Mike Greene, a fine musician, writer, and raconteur.
Update. See now Lameen’s informed post on the subject.

I’ve been having an exchange elsewhere about the word gyp ‘cheat, swindle,’ and I am (with some trepidation) bringing it here in the hopes of having a productive discussion and perhaps learning a few things. I will lay out the facts as I know them and my attitude toward the word based on those facts; as always, I welcome correction from those who know more than I. What I do not welcome is moral posturing, so please keep it to a minimum. I think we can make the good-faith assumption that both I, your jovial host, and the commenters who have the good taste to frequent this establishment deplore bigotry in general and the persecution of Gypsies/Romá in particular. It’s fine to suggest that the word is offensive for one reason or another, but please do not suggest that those who use it are therefore bigots and should feel bad. Reasonable people can have different understandings of the offensiveness of a given term. It is possible I may change my understanding based on what is said in this thread, but it will not be because of unsupported assertions, however vigorously stated. With that out of the way, here are the facts as I understand them.
1) Gypsies/Romá have been treated terribly ever since they first appeared in Europe in the fourteenth century. They were enslaved, expelled, branded, mutilated; their children were taken away; the Nazis tried to exterminate them (to quote the Wikipedia article, “Ian Hancock has estimated that almost the entire Romani population was killed in Croatia, Estonia, Lithuania, Luxembourg and the Netherlands”). Their sufferings have historically been reported less and taken less seriously than those of any other ethnic group of similar prominence; only recently has this begun changing (and one result of the change is the current disfavoring of gyp, as well as of Gypsy itself). It should go without saying that I would avoid doing anything that would cause pain to actual members of the group.
2) The word gyp is of unknown etymology. Most sources now say (with or without qualification) that it is derived from a colloquial shortening of Gypsy, and this is certainly a likely possibility, but nobody knows for sure. The OED (in a still unrevised entry) derives the verb from the noun, and says the noun is “perh[aps] short for GIPSY or for GIPPO [‘A scullion, varlet,’ from Old French *gipel, jupel (later jupeau), ‘A short tunic worn under the hauberk’].” American Heritage says “Probably short for Gypsy,” which is a reasonable summary.
3) The word gyp is now widely considered offensive and avoided by those who try to avoid all forms of verbal offense. The exchange I mentioned at the start of this post came about because one person wrote that something seemed like “a jip,” questioned his own spelling, and was told the spelling was gyp but that it was “not the preferred nomenclature,” whereupon the first person looked it up, found it given as “American, back formation from Gypsy,” and said “Well, there goes another word from my vocabulary.” When someone said “the association with gypsies is so far removed from anyone’s real life in the US that we’re not actually doing anybody favors by getting rid of it,” the person who had talked about “preferred nomenclature” responded that similar explanations had been given for condoning the use of the words “gay” and “Jew” in pejorative ways, and therefore “I couldn’t really feel comfortable” using it. When I said that I didn’t see it as in any way like “gay” and “Jew,” he responded “even though I don’t know anybody who identifies as a Gypsy or anyone with Roma ancestry (that I’m aware of), now that I know the derivation of the word it still feels like about the same thing to me. It’s still maligning a group of people based on a stereotype of their culture/genetics, whether or not they’re around to hear it.”

[Read more…]

An Ask MetaFilter question led to an amazing result. The question was:

Is there a pun in Hamlet’s first line in the movie Hamlet liikemaailmassa? The scene takes place in a kitchen where someone is slicing ham; Hamlet comes up, takes over, and cuts a large piece off for himself. As he does so he says something which is rendered in the English subtitles thus: “Ham … let me!”. The actual dialogue is given in Finnish, though. Is there a pun in the Finnish as well? What is it?

I responded “I am having no luck finding the quote in Finnish online, but I think the answer to your question is certainly ‘yes.’ It just doesn’t make sense that the translator would wantonly introduce an obvious pun.” But I was wrong, because (thanks to the detective work of Finnish MeFite keijo) it turns out that the Finnish text is “Kinkkua, anna minä,” which simply means ‘Ham, let me’ and (as keijo says) “is not funny in any way in Finnish without the context. However, it is a brilliant pun introduced by Kaurismäki and not the translator, since most of the viewers will be familiar with the English translation.” So Kaurismäki deliberately wrote an unfunny line in Finnish because of the effect it would produce in translation! I wonder if other writers have done this?

Mark Liberman at the Log has a post about a (re)coinage found in this Candace Buckner sports story for the Kansas City Star in a quote from high school lineman Shane Ray: “As a team, we don’t like that feeling of being underlooked…” The guy who sent Mark the link speculated that “underlooked” is a blend of “overlooked” and “underestimated,” and Mark agreed—but pointed out that the OED has it with a figurative sense, “To miss seeing by looking too low,” with a citation from over 200 years ago:
1802 BEDDOES Hygëia II. 56 Do they not underlook that sole essential condition to happiness, the inward state?
(I tried to check this with Google Books, but Google has apparently only digitized Volume I—could it be they don’t realize there’s a second volume?)
Mark asks “Is there a name for a coinage that re-discovers an old and rare word?” Commenters suggest “neo-con,” “paleologism,” “reologism,” and “neopaleologism.”

On page 167 of Terry Martin’s The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 there’s a table headed “Official List of ‘Culturally Backward’ Nationalities”; these were nationalities considered “eligible for preferential assistance, and enjoying appropriate awards and privileges” in what Martin calls the Affirmative Action Empire of the USSR in the early 1930s; the criteria were an extremely low level of literacy, an insignificant percentage of children in school, lack of “a written script with a single developed literary language,” presence of “everyday social vestiges” (oppression of women, racial hostility, etc.), and a lack of national cadres. Martin says the list “followed conventional usage, except that it included Greeks and Bulgarians as culturally backward, and made the interesting distinction that Tatars were only culturally backward outside the Tatar ASSR, a curious tribute to Tatarstan’s zealous pursuit of korenizatsiia.” I found the list fascinating; it included names so obscure it took diligent research to figure out who they were (greatly aided by Wixman’s The Peoples of the USSR: An Ethnographic Handbook), as well as a couple of unfortunate typos like “Volugy” for Voguly. But I nailed them all, and was contemplating doing a lot of work to post a list with links to the appropriate Wikipedia articles when I discovered that some industrious Wikipedian had gotten there before me. Some items were misidentified and a couple of typos missed, but of course, it being Wikipedia, I was able to correct them. So as a public service, I present the now perfected Cultural backwardness article, with its 97 nationalities (some of which are mere tribes or other subunits).

And as an unrelated public service, I will mention that SAGE Journals Online is offering free online access back to 1999 until October 15, 2010. Enjoy!

Ben Zimmer of Visual Thesaurus has a post on some very early examples of what we think of as text-speak. He says that Allen Walker Read, in the course of his investigation of the origin of “OK,” proved that it “had emerged out of a kind of ‘abbreviation play’ that was popular in the U.S. in the 1830s — OK originally stood for ‘all correct’ intentionally misspelled as ‘oll korrect'”:

Even before KTJ of UTK (Katie Jay of Utica, or Uticay) came on the scene in the United States, England had LNG of Q (Ellen Gee of Kew) and MLE K of UL (Emily Kay of Ewell), who starred in two tragicomic verses published in 1828 in the London-based New Monthly Magazine. You can read “Dirge, to the Memory of Miss Ellen Gee of Kew” here, and “Elegy to the Memory of Miss Emily Kay (Cousin to Miss Ellen Gee of Kew)” here. These verses (the second one in particular) traveled far and wide, appearing in newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. They very well may have played a role in the American fad for silly abbreviations that gave rise to OK.

Zimmer reprints “Elegy to the Memory of Miss Emily Kay,” with a “decrypted and annotated rendering” which can be very useful (it’s not immediately obvious that “How soon so DR a creature may DK,/ And only leave behind XUVE!” means “How soon so dear a creature may decay,/ And only leave behind exuviae!”). And at the end he has a surprise:

But wait! Could this verse style have been an American invention after all? On the American Dialect Society mailing list, Joel S. Berson provides an example that uses many of the same types of abbreviation play, published in U.S. newspapers in 1813 — a full fifteen years before Miss LNG and Miss MLE K. The hunt continues…

The 1813 example begins “Come listen to my DT, all those that lovers B;/ Attune your hearts to PT, and read my LEG.”

Occasionally in my reading I come across mentions of people who seem significant beyond the sparse traces they’ve left in the historical record, and when they have a connection with literature I sometimes try to memorialize them here. Such a case is the couple Valentin Osipovich (or Iosifovich) Stenich (a pseudonym—his birth name was Smetanich) and his wife Lyubov Davydovna (née Faynberg or Feinberg). Valentin was born in 1897 and was probably shot in 1938; Lyuba is given the dates 1908-1983 here, but (according to the Russian Wikipedia linked to her husband’s name) the KGB said she was 33 in 1937, which probably is more realistic. They were both translators, as were so many writers not in favor with the Bolsheviks; he (after writing poetry praised by Blok) translated both Dos Passos’s The 42nd Parallel and parts of Joyce’s Ulysses (according to Geert Lernout’s The Reception of James Joyce in Europe, “There are rumours that he had translated the whole novel, but his archive was confiscated when he was arrested”), and she translated Maeterlinck, Sartre, and Brecht, among others. But more important is their humanity. In her second book of memoirs (translated as Hope Abandoned) Nadezhda Mandelstam writes “I can count on my fingers the people who kept their heads and thought the same as M. The main ones were Stenich, Margolis, and Oleinikov […] All three perished—two in the dungeons, and one in a labor camp.” In the first volume, Hope Against Hope, she devotes most of Chapter 67 to a description of the couple, calling Stenich “a man with a great feeling for language and literature and an acute sense of the modern age” and saying “he might have become a brilliant essayist or critic, but the times were not auspicious”; when the Mandelstams said they needed money, Lyuba “put on a stylish hat and set off,” returning with “a little money and some clothing.” At this time the Steniches were living in terror, waiting for Valentin to be arrested (friends of theirs had been arrested, and they knew it was only a matter of time), but “nothing happened that evening, and Stenich was not arrested until the following winter.” This was his final arrest, after which he was quickly shot; before that he had spent some years in internal exile, and it was during such a period that Cummings visited Moscow and met Lyuba, whom he calls “eyes.” He reports his last encounter with her thus:

(eyes’ eyes open,understanding; she laughs softly)”drôle homme!”(then with a,to myself,completely new part of herself;a secret a luminous — and scarcely which might dare to recognize its own existence — tenderness unadventured,lonely;not with ideas not through ideals nor by comrades by a million or a billion or innumerable or humanity explored)”comme mon mari”

After Stenich’s death she married the screenwriter and director Manuel Vladimirovich Bolshintsov (1902-1954). She was also a friend of Anna Akhmatova, who often stayed with her when visiting Moscow.

It enrages me that good people like this, utterly harmless to any state, were ground casually underfoot by the Soviet regime, simply because it needed an endless supply of enemies and victims and the name Stenich wound up on their list. It’s easy to talk about “millions of victims” and feel an abstract horror, but it’s important as well to remind oneself of the lived reality of that victimization for all those real people, people much like you or me. And this is why I urge you all to read Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoirs if you haven’t already.

I’ve been slowly reading the January 14, 2010 issue of NYRB (very slowly—I keep it in my shoulder bag for emergency reading), and I’ve just gotten to a review that angered me enough to vent publicly. At the end of last year I posted about Vladislav Zubok’s Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia; toward the end of the NYRB issue I found a review [archived] of Zubok’s book by Michael Scammell, and it’s a kind of review I particularly dislike, the kind that attacks a book for not being the kind of book the reviewer wishes had been written.

Now, Scammell is no dummy; he translated The Defense and most of The Gift by Nabokov, and has written well-received biographies of Solzhenitsyn and Koestler. But he apparently loves the cliché narrative of late Soviet times (in which brave dissidents Fight the Power) so much that he can hardly bear to read anything different, even when he recognizes how groundbreaking and well researched and written it is. He eventually gets around to admitting that “Zubok is a reliable and prodigiously well-informed guide to the opinions, attitudes, and changing fortunes of loyal Soviet intellectuals… Zubok tells his story with a density of detail and complexity of analysis that is truly remarkable… His book is scholarly but also highly readable and accessible, and is rich in anecdotal material that enlivens the sociological analysis.” But first he bats Zubok around for his alleged omissions, and afterwards he bats him around for his ideologically incorrect orientation, and in general he clearly regrets that Zubok chose to write about the people he did; apparently Scammell is so wedded to the familiar stories of Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky, Sinyavsky, and Daniel that he would rather have seen yet another retelling (and he takes up much of his review with yet another retelling). It is as if he were reviewing W. Bruce Lincoln’s In the Vanguard of Reform: Russia’s Enlightened Bureaucrats, 1825-1861, a magisterial work on the bureaucrats who beavered away in government offices in St. Petersburg and elsewhere, laying the groundwork for the Great Reforms of the 1860s while the infinitely more famous dissidents like Herzen were thundering anathemas at tsarism from abroad, and complained that Lincoln was writing about such people instead of penning yet another paean to Herzen & Co. As I wrote in this thread, foreigners love to focus “on writers who got actively suppressed and weren’t able to publish their great work (Bulgakov, Platonov) rather than on those who managed to publish fine work under existing conditions,” and this is another example of the same prejudice.

Scammell annoys me in other ways as well. In his first paragraph he writes “If the classic nineteenth-century authors of Russia marked the golden age of Russian literature, and the modernists of the early twentieth, its silver age, the writers of the latter half of the twentieth century constitute a kind of bronze age,” perpetuating the mindless “Silver Age” terminology I complained about here and topping it with an absurd extension to a “bronze age,” as if the tale of Russian literature were one of foreordained degeneration (I guess twenty-first-century Russia is doomed to experience an iron age of literature). On page 54 he takes a gratuitous swipe at ’60s poets by calling their readings at the statue of Mayakovsky in downtown Moscow “a pale imitation of Mayakovsky’s own public readings,” just as though he’d been there a century ago and could compare for himself. (But hey, it’s bronze versus silver, right? Bronze has to lose.) And on the last page he counters Zubok’s “one may suspect that Russia needed its critical intelligentsia and its high culture only as long as it suffered from tyranny, misery, and backwardness” by citing “the brilliance of the modernist movement in Russia, starting with Alexander Blok and Andrei Bely, and continuing with the generation of Mandelstam, Pasternak, and Akhmatova”—as though the tsarist Russia those writers lived in were not a place of “tyranny, misery, and backwardness”!

No, it won’t do. If you disagree with Zubok, by all means say so, but don’t blame him for not writing a different book (especially since that book would have been a rehashing of familiar material), and spare me your false teleologies.

A post on Wordorigins.org asks a reasonable question that had never occurred to me: why is hemophilia called by a name that means ‘blood-loving’? Apparently it was first used in Friedrich Hopff’s 1828 article “Über die Haemophilie oder die erbliche Anlage zu tödlichen Blutungen” (On haemophila or the hereditary predisposition to lethal bleeding). There is an article by KM Brinkhous, “A Short History of Hemophilia, with Some Comments on the Word ‘Hemophilia,’” in Handbook of Hemophilia, Vol. 1, edited by KM Brinkhous and HC Hemker (American Elsevier, New York, 1975), for which Google Books has only the damnable snippet view; if anyone has access to it, it might shed some light.
Update. In the Wordorigins thread, Dr. Techie has discovered that a footnote on this page of Legg’s 1872 A Treatise On Haemophilia has a discussion of the word and its history, ending “The word is so barbarous and senseless that it is not wonderful that no one should be proud of it.”

I’m in the middle of E. E. Cummings’s EIMI, a sometimes too poetickal and occasionally wellnigh incomprehensible but withal lively (or Alive with Is, as Comrade Kem-min-kz might say) and well worth reading account of the author’s month (May-June 1931) in the still relatively new Soviet Union, newly admired by the Depression-struck West. Cummings went with a wary but open mind; what he saw there turned him into a conservative for the rest of his life. (There’s a Frank Bures review, with a couple of quotes, here, and a very useful set of annotations here.) At the moment I am inspired to post by a couple of inspired euphemisms encountered on successive pages.

On page 206, our hero is staggering back to his temporary home from a drunken party with his host and hostess, the American journalist Charles Malamuth (pseudonym’d by EEC “the Turk”) and his wife Joan (“the Turkess”), daughter of Jack London; the chapter ends thus:

  (“the”)at(“engineers have shaggy”)random(“ears”)misquote, upholding the who’s me upholding 1
  (“and p-“)1 starewiselying meward essays(“pi-“)his big eyes laugh helplessly(“pis-“)
  “Charlie!” she admonished
  (“stolsintheirbreeches”)he succeeded.

In other words, Malamuth’s amused but disapproving wife thinks (as he intends) that he’s about to launch into a well-known (at the time) WWI song: “The engineers have hairy ears,/ They piss without their britches [or “through leather britches”],/ They bang their cocks against the rocks,/ Those hardy sons of bitches”; he switches smoothly into the harmless mutation “and pistols in their britches.” (The tune, or a tune, is notated here, as “The Mountaineers,” by Vance Randolph, who provides many textual variants.)

On the next page and the next morning, the lathered Turk suggests that his hungover guest might “feel like perhaps dropping any soiled object into yonder socalled laundrybag”:

  “I cannot” almost tearfully “impose…”
  “you” busily “New Englanders are a very curious” sopping “folk. Folk you” he,beaming,said.

I’m really astonished that “Folk you” could be printed in New York City in 1933, even by a small publisher like Covici Friede (who had also, to be sure, printed The Well of Loneliness, so they did not shun controversy).

Incidentally, Pascal Covici was born in Romania, where I assume his surname was pronounced /ko’vič/ (koh-VEECH), but I assume that in his adopted America, it became koh-VEE-chee; anybody know? [thanks, MMcM!].

Addendum. On page 306, I’ve run into an even more startling use of obscenity, barely disguised: “Okay… there’s uh reel beerjoint eye know,thih beer’s suwell… nize un sudzy un beeg un cool… yunno—nut like this fuggin peevoh [Russian beer]!”