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I wrote about the issue of cannot versus can not way back in 2003; as I said there, “The only context in which can not, two words, occurs is as an emphatic alternative: ‘You can do it, or you can not do it.'” Today ESPN provided a perfect illustration of why the negative must always (except in that rare circumstance) be spelled as one word, cannot. In a graphic at the top of the screen during the disastrous first half against Slovenia (the 2-0 score looked so bad that my brother turned off the TV and took a nap, having gotten up at 3:30 AM to watch the first game of the day), they ran the following announcement:

U.S. CAN NOT ADVANCE OR BE ELIMINATED TODAY

Now, what that unambiguously says, and the way I first read it, is: “The U.S. team can either fail to advance or be eliminated as a result of today’s games.” That doesn’t make any sense, of course, because if they fail to advance, they’re eliminated, but that’s what it says. A moment’s thought showed that what they meant was not CAN NOT but CANNOT: “It is not possible for the U.S. team to either advance or be eliminated as a result of today’s games.” People make fun of style rules as the hobgoblin of little minds, but this is a good example of why clarity demands them.
Here‘s the NY Times report on the game, which was a thriller. This is not a sports blog and I do not usually say this kind of thing, but the U.S. was robbed by some of the worst refereeing I have ever seen. There was no reason to call back the goal that would have made it 3-2 in the final minutes except blindness or worse. Fie, I say! Fie!

This Slate article by Rosecrans Baldwin is both the funniest and the most intriguing thing I’ve read in a while. He starts off by observing that “Novelists can’t resist including a dog barking in the distance,” and hits you with enough examples, from all levels of literature, that you accept the phenomenon as valid. But what does it mean? He says:

Trains whistle, breezes blow, dogs bark. You’re thinking, “So what if novels are full of barking dogs? The world is full of them, too.” But I don’t find it curious when actual dogs turn up in novels. Dogs that authors bother to describe, or turn into characters, don’t pull me out of my reading trance. The thing is, these so-called dogs are nameless and faceless, and frankly I doubt them; it’s the curious incident when one actually does come into view. Really, are there so many out-of-sight, noisy dogs in the world? Listen: My bet is you’ll hear a highway, an A/C unit, or another human before a dog starts yelping.
[…]
Most authors, however, employ the trope as a narrative rest stop, an innocuous way to fill space and time; since the bark is hollow, a reader can read anything into it, or nothing at all. Charlaine Harris, queen of the vampire authors, in Dead as a Doornail: “The entire parking lot was empty, except for Jan’s car. The glare of the security lights made the shadows deeper. I heard a dog bark way off in the distance.” The chief of Scandinavian crime writers, Henning Mankell: “She begins to tell him. The curtain in the kitchen window flutters gently, and a dog barks in the distance” (The Eye of the Leopard). And “genre” books aren’t the only guilty category. Take 2666, Robert Bolaño’s magnum opus: “The window looked out over the garden, which was still lit. A scent of flowers and wet grass drifted into the room. In the distance he heard a dog bark.” For all we know, these dogs are off-camera sound machines set to woof.
[…]
Martin Amis says, “All writing is a campaign against cliché.” Well, what if these dogs aren’t just cliché, but something more? What if they’re a meme? Perhaps distant dogs are a way for novelists to wink at one another, at their extraordinary luck for being allowed into the publishing club. When an author incorporates a faceless barking dog into his novel, he’s like an amateur at Harlem’s Apollo Theater rubbing the Tree of Hope—he does it because so many others have done it before him, and it might just bring him some luck.

The ending is hilarious; I won’t spoil it for you, but I hope you will visit the link and read it for yourself. (Hat tip to Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org.)

Addendum. A nice addition to the corpus (thanks, Rick!): “Nayland Smith walked to a window, and looked out across the sloping lawn to where the shadows of the shrubbery lay. A dog was howling dismally somewhere.” (The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, Ch. 7)

I ran across the participle stymieing, and it looked wrong, so I looked it up (for that matter, it still does—I just looked it up again to make sure). Of course, while I was at it I checked the etymology, and got quite a surprise: the familiar verb meaning ‘stand in the way of, be an obstacle to’ was originally a Scottish golf term meaning ‘obstruct a golf shot by interposing your ball,’ or in the words of the OED “To put (one’s opponent or oneself) into the position of having to negotiate a stymie; also intr. (of a ball) to intervene as a stymie.” As you can see from this, the verb comes from an earlier noun (of obscure origin): “An opponent’s ball which lies on the putting green in a line between the ball of the player and the hole he is playing for, if the distance between the balls is not less than six inches; also, the occurrence of this; often in the phrase to lay a stymie.” The first citation is:

1834 Rules of Musselburgh Golf Club in C. B. Clapcott Rules of Golf of 10 Oldest Golf Clubs (1935) 66 With regard to Stimies the ball nearest the hole if within six inches shall be lifted.

Is anybody familiar with this golf usage? The latest citation in the OED is from 1901.

Lane Greene of The Economist writes to tell me about their new language blog, Johnson. It won my heart in the first entry I looked at, Wild pigs versus cucumber troops, when I saw the following sentence: “The Etymologisches Wö[r]terbuch der deutschen Sprache notes that Gurke is a loan word from Polish (ogurek or ogorek), which in turn comes from the Middle Greek agovros, meaning ‘unripe’ or ‘immature’.” That could have come straight out of LH, and any blog that quotes the Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache is jake with me. Furthermore, in their first post, after explaining that the blog is a revival of a monthly column on the English language written in the ’90s by Stephen Hugh-Jones (available here), they say “this blog is not to be primarily about peeves—’we simply can’t stand it when someone says thus-and-such,” which of course was music to my ears (and has proven to be true). In their second post, they mocked the absurd Queen’s English Society (also mocked by Mark Liberman at the Log and by John McIntyre at You Don’t Say, e.g., here). And they’ve already taken a couple of whacks at the NY Times for their prudery (“We learn from Jeffrey Goldberg that the Times will not even print the Yiddishism ‘tuchus’. Oy.”). All in all, I feel confident in giving Johnson the coveted Languagehat Seal of Approval.
And I have to pass on their hilarious post about their name:

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I’m back in body (after a more or less sleepless night and a four-and-a-half-hour bus ride), but my spirit is weak, so for the moment I’ll just pass along this enjoyable word dug out of the recesses of the OED by aldiboronti at Wordorigins.org:

twiffler, n.
Now Hist.
[ad. Du. twijfelaar something intermediate between two types (also as below), f. twijfelen be unsure, vacillate.]
A plate or shallow dish intermediate in size between a dessert plate and a dinner plate.

It is, of course, related to German Zweifel ‘doubt’ and has as its root the number twij twee, zwei, two.

And for lagniappe: Referees Brush Up on Curses in 17 Languages (for the World Cup).

I’m off to Rhode Island, the home of the cabinet, for the weekend. I’ll be staying with an old friend who delighted me with the explanation she had come up with for the odd name: carbonate, in the odd dialect of Vode Island, sounds pretty much exactly like cabinet. The Wikipedia entry calls this “unsubstantiated,” but it works for me. Have a good weekend; I’ll be back at my desk Sunday evening.

I was thunderstruck (well, surprised anyway, but I’m feeling a little weak-brained this morning, so it hit me strongly) to discover from this post of Anatoly’s that the Russian words “меч” and “шпага” are felt by Russians to be completely different things. Because they are both defined as “sword” in bilingual dictionaries, I assumed they were synonyms. It seems, however, that меч [mech] is the kind of sword you go into battle with, whereas шпага [shpaga] is the kind of sword you fence with. Anatoly can’t quite see how a language can mix up two such obviously distinct objects; as I say in his comment thread, I can sort of see the distinction, and I suppose as I read Russian with it in mind it will become clearer, but the two concepts will never be as distinct for me as they are for a Russian-speaker. Without diving into the Swamp of Sapir-Whorf, this is a clear example of the kind of effect language has on thought.
It is interesting, however, that the Wikipedia articles Шпага and Меч have the identical illustration, in the latter labeled “Изображение двенадцати разных мечей” [twelve different meches] and in the former “ново-прусские шпаги” [new-Prussian shpagas].

I’ve always vaguely wondered about the phrase past master—was there or wasn’t there also a passed master, and did the one come from the other?—and I’ve finally looked it up in the OED. The earliest form is
pass, v. 40. b. intr. To reach the required standard in an examination, course, etc. Formerly freq. with complement (esp. in to pass master): to graduate as, to become qualified as; (occas.) trans., to approve (a person) as. First cite: ?1566-7 G. BUCHANAN Opinion Reformation Univ. St. Andros in Vernacular Writings 13 Ane of profession of medicine passit maister, and ane regent in humanite.
From there we get passed master as a noun phrase meaning “A person who is especially adept or expert in a specified subject or activity”; first cite: 1882 H. C. MERIVALE Faucit of Balliol I. vi. 96 Faucit was a passed master as a guide to the classics.
But then there’s the more familiar past master, which (it turns out) is originally from the Freemasons:

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The NY Times has introduced a promising new feature at Schott’s Vocab, their vocabulary blog: Schott’s Daily Lexeme. “Schott’s Vocab is honored and delighted to have joined forces with the inestimable Oxford English Dictionary to offer each day a word of note. Naturally, being a Daily Lexeme – rather than a ‘word of the day’ – these offerings will tend toward the curious, humorous, sesquipedalian and archaic.” The first post brought to our attention the word petrichor (PET-rikor), “A pleasant, distinctive smell frequently accompanying the first rain after a long period of warm, dry weather in certain regions.” It’s great that there’s a word for that; it’s perhaps not the most euphonious word, but it’s not bad, and my wife and I intend to use it whenever the occasion presents itself. The second post showcases facinorous “Extremely wicked or immoral; grossly criminal; vile, atrocious, heinous; infamous,” which is not as much fun (because there are already plenty of perfectly good words for it) but is still worth knowing about. The best part: each entry links to the OED entry for the word (petrichor, coined in 1964; facinorous, first recorded in 1548), so you can see it even if you don’t have a subscription. Thanks for the heads-up, Bonnie!

Charles King, in his TLS review, “Among the Circassians” (April 23, 2010, p. 11), of a couple of books about the Caucasus, writes that the North Caucasus is a region “that many Russians would just as well forget they owned.” This use of “just as well” took me aback—for me, it would have to be “just as soon”—but I suspect it’s a dialect difference, so I turn to the Varied Reader: are you familiar with this use of the phrase?

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