languagehat.com

A fascinating factoid:

Nazi is obviously a short form of National socialist, or Nationalsozialist to be precise, just as Sozi is a short form of Sozialist. But the word has a much more interesting story than that.

Long before the rise of the NSDAP in the 1920s, people in at least southern Germany could be called Nazi if they were named Ignatz, or came from Austria or Bohemia (where they apparently had lots of Ignatzes); it was supposedly also used as a generic name for soldiers of Austria-Hungary, like the German Fritz or Russian Ivan. It had to be used with caution between friends, though, since it could also mean “idiot” or “clumsy oaf”. That’s how it found it’s way into politics; the fact that Adolf came from Austria (not Bohemia, though) could have made the pun even better. […]

An example of pre-hitlerian use of Nazi in southern Germany can be found in a “Bayerische Komödie in 4 Akten”: Der Schusternazi, “the shoemaker nazi”, by Ludwig Thoma in 1905.

Via bayard at Wordorigins.org, where Oecolampadius points out that the OED agrees: “The term was originally used by opponents of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and may have been influenced by Bavarian Nazi, a familiar form of the proper name Ignatius and used to refer to or characterize an awkward or clumsy person.” (Odd that they use the Latin form of the name.)

Last year I wrote about the mysteriously limited availability of the wonderful Sergei Dovlatov in English; I am happy to learn from this PEN America post that “when we were putting together PEN America 12, we decided we would re-publish one of Dovlatov’s stories. Happily, one of his translators, Antonina W. Bouis, is a generous member of PEN; I still have her copy of The Suitcase (though I’ll be returning it soon, promise!), from which we selected ‘A Poplin Shirt.'” And I’m pleased that my championing of Dovlatov seems to have played a small role in their decision.

A recent post by Geoff Nunberg at the Log discusses the dudgeon people get into over verbal blunders by politicians (and inevitably the comment thread descends rapidly into tedious political bickering); however, he links to this fascinating post from 2008 (which I apparently missed at the time) in which he provides a new etymology for verbiage: apparently it has nothing to do with the other verb- words (from Latin verbum)!

As it happens, though, the word almost certainly doesn’t come originally from verb– + –age, as the OED says it does. According to Alain Rey’s Dictionnaire Historique de la Langue Française, the word verbiage first appeared in French in 1674. It was derived from the the Middle French verb verbier or verboier, which he glosses as “gazouiller” (“chirp, warble”) as applied to birds, and which he connects to a 13th-century Picardian verbler, “warble, speak in singsong” this in turn derived from Frankish *werbilon, “whirl, swirl” (cf German Wirbel “whirl”). “Since the 17th century,” Rey writes, “the derived form verbiage has been connected by popular etymology to verbe and for its meaning to verbeux [ = ‘verbose, wordy’].” Since the English verbiage isn’t attested until 1721 (and then, as it happens, in Prior’s poem about Locke and Montaigne), it seems quite likely that it was borrowed from the French — this would explain both its idiosyncratic form and its unaccountably restricted original sense. Both morphological and semantic analogy, then, would favor a popular reanalysis of the form of the word as verbage and of its meaning as “wording.”

I did not know that, and I’m glad to learn it.

I’m digging into The Russian Context: The Culture Behind the Language by Eloise M. Boyle and Genevra Gerhart (which I wrote about here), and I’m sure I’ll have much more to say about it, but right now I just want to quote this paragraph from the introduction to the Literature section (which “contains those quotations from literature that the educated Russian carries in his head, and that a student of Russian will encounter not only in everyday conversations with Russians, but when he picks up a newspaper or turns on the television”); it provides a concise explanation of a well-known phenomenon:

Educated Russians carry a virtual library around with them, not necessarily because of an innate interest in literature, but because their teachers (and sometimes parents) made sure it would be carried around: practically everyone in the country has been required to memorize essentially the same bits of poetry and prose. (Scratch a Russian, any Russian, and you can hear about a green oak tree at the seaside with a golden chain around it.) Such memorization led to a shared interest in and understanding of literature, which then became a way for people to communicate with one another. This led in turn to a sense of community felt at poetry readings and other literary events. This fodder for allusions is therefore readily available to all, and is found everywhere in Russian life: in speech, in advertising, and in journalism.

I wrote about the green oak here:

Pushkin, of course, is a far greater poet than Landor, and he is not only a classicist; his Mozartean combination of classical expression and frequently romantic sensibility can be found in English poetry only in Coleridge. What Nabokov calls “the extraordinary lines, among his greatest, that Pushkin added in 1824, four years after its publication, to the beginning of Ruslan i Lyudmila (‘By a sea-cove [stands] a green oak,/ on that oak a golden chain,/ and day and night a learned tomcat/ walks on the chain around [the oak]…’) is the only thing in any language I know that can be set beside Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”

I could wish there were a similar literary culture among my own countrymen.

An author might start a novel this way: “On his thirtieth birthday, Voshchev was laid off from his factory job for weakness and woolgathering.” Or he might lay out a whole little scene, with the protagonist thinking about his birthday on his way to work, then being called into the personnel office and told the bad news, with persuasive descriptions of decor and tones of voice. But that’s not how Andrei Platonov does it. Here’s the first paragraph of Kotlovan, in the superb translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson, The Foundation Pit (the Russian is below the cut):

On the day of the thirtieth anniversary of his private life, Voshchev was made redundant from the small machine factory where he obtained the means for his own existence. His dismissal notice stated that he was being removed from production on account of weakening strength in him and thoughtfulness amid the general tempo of labor.

There’s nothing attractive about those sentences. Their wordiness, their labored syntax, their odd and rebarbative jargon, everything about them seems to want to push you away rather than lure you in. And yet you are drawn in; there’s something about the narrative, some funhouse-mirror quality, that makes you want to see where it’s going. You follow Voshchev to “a beer room for workers from the villages and low-paid categories” where he hears “sincere human voices” and remains “until evening, until the noise of a wind of changing weather; he then went over to an open window, to take note of the beginning of night, and he caught sight of the tree on the clay mound—it was swaying from adversity, and its leaves were curling up with secret shame.” The next morning, Voshchev walks further down the road but is soon exhausted, and at this point comes a sudden irruption of intensity, the kind of thing we hope for from a Russian novel:

A dead, fallen leaf lay beside Voshchev’s head; the wind had brought it there from a distant tree, and now this leaf faced humility in the earth. Voshchev picked up the leaf that had withered and hid it away in a secret compartment of his bag, where he took care of all kinds of objects of unhappiness and obscurity. “You did not possess the meaning of life,” supposed Voshchev with the miserliness of compassion. “Stay here—and I’ll find out what you lived and perished for. Since no one needs you and you lie about amidst the whole world, then I shall store and remember you.

“Everything lives and endures in the world, without becoming conscious of anything,” said Voshchev beside the road. And he stood up, in order to go, surrounded by universal enduring existence. “It’s as if some one man, or some handful of men, had extracted from us our convinced feeling and taken it for themselves!”

Here the words “dead,” “earth,” “meaning,” “endure,” and especially “conscious” are signals of where the novel is going. Who is living and who and what is dead, and can we always tell the difference? Who is conscious, and of what? What meaning can we find, enduring on and in the earth? Soon Voshchev joins a crew of men digging the titular pit, intended for the foundation of a building to house proletarians. But there are many discussions of the novel’s political content (Chandler and Meerson’s Afterword does a good job of summarizing the history and politics involved, though I’ve added a short bibliography below for those particularly interested); what I want to focus on here is the amazing language.

And yet you can’t discuss the language without talking about politics, because politics is the soil it grows out of. Platonov has been called a natural Stalinist; what is meant by that is that he shared the Stalinist belief that life could be radically transformed, that nothing was impossible to truly conscious people who had thrown off the shackles of the bourgeois past. (Of course, in Platonov’s case this came as much from Nikolai Fedorov, with his loony insistence that mankind must become immortal and bring everyone who ever lived back to life, as from Marx and Lenin.) Like a good Soviet citizen, filled with optimism and enthusiasm, Platonov gave up his early career as a writer after the famine of 1921 and spent the next years going around Russia supervising the digging of ponds and wells, the draining of swampland, and the building of power stations. Chandler writes:

And then, between 1929 and 1932, he was sent on a number of journeys through central and southern Russia. Other writers who visited collective farms did so as members of Writers’ Brigades—and they, of course, were shown only a few model collective farms. Platonov, however, was sent by the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture, and he saw what was really happening.

That experience complicated his optimism. He seems still to have retained a belief that the shining communist future was a possibility, but having seen the stupidity, inefficiency, corruption, and brutality that were everywhere on the ground, no matter what the Kremlin planners might intend, he had to respond, to tell the truth as he saw it, and that response involved a complex and brilliant manipulation of the very language the Kremlin used to propagate its ideas. Characters are always talking about “directives” and “backwardness” and “tempo,” regurgitating the catchwords that ceaselessly bombard them from Party organizers, “plenipotentiaries,” and other emissaries from officialdom. One of them asks: “Is it really sorrow inside the whole world—and only in ourselves that there’s a five-year plan?” The five-year plan inside us is one of the things the novel is about; some of the characters are trying to fulfill it by constant work, others by denunciations and violence, and the main viewpoint character, Voshchev, by questioning and introspection, irritating pretty much everyone else (as Platonov irritated the Party, despite his professed devotion to its ideals). By the time the novel heads into increasingly surreal-seeming and deadly territory, you’re so accustomed to the strangeness of the telling that you can’t escape its spell.

Fedorov called modern writing “the work of men who have stopped being human and who have become typewriters.” It may be that the style of The Foundation Pit is, in its way, an attempt to revive the “sacred, resurrectional character” of language and thus restore fraternal relations to mankind. There’s never been anything else like it; even Platonov quickly retreated from it (he did, after all, want to be published), and his later works are written in a more “normal” style. But this will always be his masterpiece.

The first paragraph in Russian:

В день тридцатилетия личной жизни Вощеву дали расчет с небольшого механического завода, где он добывал средства для своего существования. В увольнительном документе ему написали, что он устраняется с производства вследствие роста слабосильности в нем и задумчивости среди общего темпа труда.

A few books to help the reader who wants more background:

A Companion to Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit, by Thomas Seifrid. The Foundation Pit is such a complex novel, with so much going on below the surface, that it’s well worth reading this guide (not long, but longer than the novel!), of which its publisher, Academic Studies Press, says “In addition to an overview of the work’s key themes, it discusses their place within Platonov’s oeuvre as a whole, his troubled relations with literary officialdom, the work’s ideological and political background, and key critical responses since the work’s first publication in the West in 1973.” (Fortunately, the paperback is only $21; many of this publisher’s books, as you can see on the linked page, are several times that.)

The Best Sons of the Fatherland: Workers in the Vanguard of Soviet Collectivization, by Lynne Viola. You have to make allowances for her excessive enthusiasm for her subject, the “25,000ers” recruited from factories and other dens of trustworthy proletarians who fanned out across Russia to help impose collectivization (Mark Von Hagen’s review says she is “sympathetic to their struggle against all the other actors in this tragic story, who appear as villains, including … the backward Russian peasants” who were the victims), but she paints a detailed picture of the nitty-gritty of the process on the ground.

Above all, read Moshe Lewin’s classic The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia. Lewin explains the economic background and effects of Stalinism and collectivization in such a clear way that even I, an economic illiterate, could understand what happened. This will help you understand not only Platonov but the entire subsequent history of the Soviet Union.

Mark Liberman has a post at the Log in which he waxes wroth about what he calls a “bizarre meme” by which “every piece of linguistic research is spun as a challenge to ‘universal grammar’.” I wasn’t transfixed by it (my throwaway comment: “I, on the other hand, welcome the new wave of anti-‘universal grammar’ spinners”), but the dreaded name of Chomsky came up, and Dominik Lukeš wrote: “Something about what the statement ‘Chomsky was a massively gifted linguist’ by the other Mark P rubbed me the wrong way. I was trying to figure out in writing what the reason for my discomfort might be but it got a bit long and a bit too off topic, so I wrote a separate blog post about it.” I urge anyone interested in modern linguistics to read his post; not only does he explain (as his post title says) “Why Chomsky doesn’t count as a gifted linguist,” but he goes on to ask “So who deserves the label ‘gifted linguist’ defined as somebody who repeatedly elucidates legitimate language phenomena in a way that is relevant across areas of inquiry?” He discusses the work of MAK Halliday, Roman Jakobson, Charles Fillmore, William Labov, his “personal favorite linguist” Michael Hoey, and William Croft, whose Radical Construction Grammar is “probably the most interesting and innovative view of language that has come about since de Saussure.” For anyone who, like me, hasn’t been keeping up with the field for a while, it’s a great source for further exploration.
And our own gifted linguist, marie-lucie, has an excellent comment from which I extract this eye-opening passage:

I recently attended a presentation which centered on some syntactic structures in a language I know quite well, or rather, on translations into that language of complex English sentences, for which the consultant had obviously tried to please the linguist by coming up with sentences that were quite ungrammatical in her language – while she would have been quite capable of describing the (odd) situations presented if she had responded naturally with the (differently structured) resources of her own language.
This type of problem is one that linguists should always be aware of: a “wonderful” consultant who can always be counted on to come up with a translation may be linguistically imaginative rather than displaying models of her native grammatical competence. The modalities of thus adapting to the English structures could be a valid subject of study, if recognized by the linguist, but it is very misleading to describe such adaptations as spontaneous utterances typical of the structure of the language. Sentences thus obtained, which have no parallel in those naturally occurring in spontaneous utterances or in texts, should be very suspicious, especially if some of the features are quite at odds with those independently described in works on the same language.

[Read more…]

Another video, this one hilarious: English Swear Words. A Korean teacher of English explains the naughty words. As he says, not for pregnant women and small children. (Thanks, Jeremy!)

Update (July 2025). The original video has been removed, and I can’t find a replacement; here’s an annoying “remix” that at least gives you the idea.

How time flies! As always, I thank my commenters, without whom I wouldn’t bother blogging; this time around, I thought I’d link to a selection of posts, one from each year, that I remembered with fondness as I skimmed through the archives:

2002: WHAT HAPPENED TO ‘THOU’?
2003: HMONG/MIAO.
2004: MORE BAD WRITING.
2005: DIVAN.
2006: THE MULTIFARIOUS AUBERGINE.
2007: TRANSLATING SUBTEXTS.
2008: NORMAL.
2009: WAR AND PEACE: THE SUMMING UP.
2010 is the year in which we currently are, so history comes to a .

Addendum. Frequent commenter Sashura has done a very flattering post at Tetradki celebrating my octennial, for those who read Russian. (He calls me “русовед и славолюб” [‘Russian-knower and Slav-lover’], imitating the fictional writer Evgeny Sazonov’s “людовед и душелюб” [‘people-knower and soul-lover’], itself a takeoff on those time-honored Russian insults людоед ‘cannibal’ and душегуб ‘murderer’ [literally ‘people-eater and soul-destroyer’ respectively].)

Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org presents this video with the words “This is a great little story about the expectations people have about language,” and I won’t add anything to that except that it choked me up a little. It will take less than ten minutes of your time, and it’s worth it.

Dave of Balashon – Hebrew Language Detective (which I welcomed here and have since linked to less often than I should), has done a post—the last in a series on the five grains of the Land of Israel—on the Hebrew word כוסמת kusemet, which now means ‘buckwheat’ but once meant… well, that’s not clear, but I urge you to read his thoughts on the subject. And his final paragraph describes an interesting morphological/semantic split:

As we mentioned, Ben Yehuda made no reference to this usage. And in halachic literature, kusemet continued to refer to spelt. But even heavyweights such as these didn’t have control over the living language of Modern Hebrew. And the language seemed to come up with a solution of its own, and a strange on at that. Kusemet continued to be used for buckwheat, but the plural, kusmin כוסמין, was reserved for spelt – and you can actually find the two next to each other in the supermarket, even produced by the same company.

(In the course of his discussion, he links to this old LH post about emmer, spelt, and Italian farro; as usual, the thread wandered into a discussion of hats, snake goddesses, and what have you.)