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Another sprig from the luxuriant linguistic hothouse that is Mikhail Shishkin’s Письмовник (The Light and the Dark; cf. this post): at one point he uses the Russian phrase По кочану, literally ‘by the head (of cabbage)’ but in practice a snarky rhyming response to the question Почему? ‘Why?’ and thus comparable to the English snarky-but-banal “Because.” I wondered how Bromfield had rendered it, so I checked and discovered he had “The answer’s a lemon,” which made no sense to me. Well, it turns out that’s a UK sort-of-equivalent; Eric Partridge has a listing in his invaluable though unreliable A Dictionary of Catch Phrases:

answer is a lemon—the; also the answer’s a lemon. A derisive reply to a query—or a request—needing a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ but hoping for ‘yes’; a ‘sarcastic remark—acidic in its conclusion’, as Noble aptly calls it; orig. (c 1910) US […]

But his evidence for its US origin is (as so often) extremely dubious, so I turn to the Varied Reader: are you familiar with this tart phrase, and do you know anything about its history?

I’m a sucker for translations into Scots (see my encomium to MacDiarmid’s version of Blok), so how could I resist Robert Crawford’s “Enheduanna’s Song” (LRB, Vol. 47 No. 19 · 23 October 2025; archived):

A version in Scots of a Sumerian hymn to the goddess of love and war, attributed to the priestess Enheduanna of Ur (fl. 2255 BCE), the world’s earliest identifiable author. As well as praising the nurturing but also terrifying and vengeful goddess, daughter of the moon, the poem inveighs against the rebel King Lu-gal-an-ne, who has flung Enheduanna out of the goddess’s temple.

Leddy o aa the airts, aye-bleezin licht,
Gracie and lowin, luved by Heivin and Erd,
Gaird o the Heich Shrine, wi yir lang braw robe,
Fain o the richt gowd circlet o the priesthuid,
Wha’s haun has won aa o the seivin airts,
My Leddy, gaird o ivry unco airt!
Ye’ve gaithered the airts, ye’ve held them in yir haun,
Ye’ve braided the airts, smooricht thaim tae yir breist.

Draigon-lik ye’ve pushionit the merse,
Yir thunnery rair wedes aa the flooirs awa,
Fleet wattir hurlygushin fae the muntain,
Foremaist Muin-Dochter, Queen o Heivin an Erd.
Ootpoorin fluffed flames doon aa ower the laund,
Graced wi the Heich God’s airts, baist-muntit Leddy,
Ye gie deliverances as the Heich God bids;
Ye awn grand rites – and wha can ken whit’s yours?

O malafoosterer o launds, scowe-weengit,
Enlil’s beluivit, ye flichter ower the merse,
Meenister o the Heich God’s strang decreets,
O Leddy, at your soun the launds boo doon.
Whan mankind passes unnerneath yir een,
Frichtit and tremmlin at yir roilin bleeze,
Frae ye they get the upcome they deserve:
Wi sangs o scronach they brak doon and greit;
They trek tae ye alang the peth o souchs.

It goes on for many more stanzas; most of the vocabulary is decipherable with a bit of squinting, but I had to look up the wonderful malafooster ‘To destroy, wreck, ruin’ ([Mal(e)-, badly, + ? Ir. dial. fuster, to bustle, fuss.]; citation: “The big laddie’s malafoostered oor snowman”). (Enheduanna previously on LH.)

Ryan Starkey, whose map of British English dialects was seen here a couple of years ago, had a clever post back in 2019 called England Could Have Been Sexland (and its speakers called Saxophones). It amused me and I hope it will amuse you.

Ruth Selman reports on a 17th-century letter written in cipher:

I’m excited to report that the challenge set in my blog post of 4 August 2025 has been met. The letter sent by William Perwich on 9 April 1670 from the court of Louis XIV in France has been successfully decrypted, not once but twice.

On a murky Monday in late September, I started work to find my inbox brightened by two emails with solutions which made sense, both in the context of a columnar transposition of the text and because they included gossip at the court also reported by the Venetian ambassador on the same day. The cryptographers who cracked the cipher were Matthew Brown (working alone) and Dr George Lasry, Professor Norbert Biermann and Tomokiyo Satoshi (working together). The latter team are well known for deciphering a group of letters from Mary Queen of Scots, found in the National Library of France, in 2023.

The tricky aspects to the cipher were working out how many columns it was in (20) before randomly rearranging them until they formed recognisable words, and identifying all the letters which were ‘nulls’, i.e. should be discarded before attempting to decrypt (a number it is impossible to be certain about without Perwich’s original cipher key). The letter frequencies pushed the cryptographers in the right direction. Most letters appeared a usual number of times for the English language but, exceptionally, there were 8 Qs. On noting that 6 of these were towards the right margin, they were made aware that each line was probably completed with nulls.

The solution was reached by using codebreaking software the team had developed along with extensive manual work, in part required because Perwich had mistakenly omitted a couple of letters in his ciphertext. […] You will note that some numerical codes, standing in for names and places, remain in the deciphered letter. These were a separate system, impossible to crack without the key, especially as there were two numbers for each entity, but possible to interpret with knowledge of the historical context.

Click through for details, images, the solution in modern English, and the historical outcome; having fallen under the spell of David Kahn’s The Codebreakers almost half a century ago, I love this sort of thing.

Anatoly quotes a passage from the Telegram channel “Минутка этнографии” (in Russian):

“Словаки клали в гроб к подозреваемому вампиру книжки, желательно на чужом языке, чтобы он пытался их прочесть и у него не было времени выходить из могилы (Низшая мифология славян… С. 259). “

My translation:

In the coffin of a suspected vampire the Slovaks placed books, preferably in a foreign language, so that he would try to read them and would not have time to leave the grave (Lower Mythology of the Slavs, p. 259).

He likes the idea but wonders if it’s true; there is a new book Низшая мифология славян. Этнолингвистические очерки, but he can’t find an electronic copy to check. At any rate, se non è vero, è ben trovato. I knew I’d find a use for that book of Albanian poetry! (One of his commenters suggests that the Slovaks could have put a set of Stalin’s complete works in Russian in the grave. That should work.)

Lucas Reilly at Mental Floss asks Why Do Ghosts Say “Boo”?:

People have screamed “boo,” or at least some version of it, to startle others since the mid-16th century. (One of the earliest examples documented by the Oxford English Dictionary appeared in that 1560s poetic thriller, Smyth Whych that Forged Hym a New Dame.) But ghosts? They’ve only been using the word boo for less than two centuries.

The etymology of boo is uncertain. The OED compares it with the Latin boare or the Greek βοᾶν, meaning to “cry aloud, roar, [or] shout.” Older dictionaries suggest it could be an onomatopoeia mimicking the lowing of a cow.

Whatever its origins, the word had a slightly different shade of meaning a few hundred years ago: Boo (or, in the olden days, bo or bu) was not used to frighten others but to assert your presence. Take the traditional Scottish proverb “He can’t say bo to a goose,” which for centuries has been a slick way to call somebody “timid” or “sheepish.” Or consider the 1565 story Smyth Whych that Forged Hym a New Dame, in which an overconfident blacksmith tries to hammer a woman back into her youth, and the main character demands of his dying experiment: “Speke now, let me se / and say ones bo!” […]

But boo became scarier with time. After all, as the OED notes, the word is phonetically suited “to produce a loud and startling sound.” And by 1738, Gilbert Crokatt was writing in Presbyterian Eloquence Display’d that “Boo is a Word that’s used in the North of Scotland to frighten crying children.”

In 18th century Scotland, bo, boo, and bu would latch onto plenty of words describing things that went bump in the night. According to the Dictionary of the Scots Language, the term bu-kow applied to hobgoblins and “anything frightful,” such as scarecrows. The word bogey, for “evil one,” would evolve into bogeyman. And there’s bu-man, or boo-man, a terrifying goblin that haunted man […] It was only a matter of time until ghosts got lumped into this creepy “muckle boo-man” crowd.

Which is too bad. Before the early 1800s, ghosts were believed to be eloquent, sometimes charming, and very often literary speakers. The spirits that appeared in the works of the Greek playwrights Euripides and Seneca held the important job of reciting the play’s prologue. The apparitions in Shakespeare’s plays conversed in the same swaying iambic pentameter as the living. But by the mid-1800s, more literary ghosts apparently lost interest in speaking in complete sentences. Take this articulate exchange with a specter from an 1863 Punch and Judy script:

Ghost: Boo-o-o-oh!
Punch: A-a-a-ah!
Ghost: Boo-o-o-o-oh!
Punch: Oh dear ! oh dear ! It wants’t me!
Ghost: Boo-o-o-o-oh!

He goes on to talk about the influence of spiritualism and traditions carried overseas by Celtic immigrants: “Scotland was a great exporter of people in the middle of the 1800s, and perhaps it’s thanks to the Scots-Irish diaspora that boo became every ghost’s go-to greeting.” For clickbait, it’s surprisingly informative! And A treatyse of the smyth whych that forged hym a new dame is available here, if you want the whole story; the “which that” in the title is striking.

By the way, if anyone’s interested in Media Cultures of the Russian 1990s: Inventing the Post-Soviet Public Sphere, edited by Maya Vinokour, it’s available for free download from Amherst College Press.

Ilia Simanovsky has a Facebook post that begins (I’ve translated from his Russian and added links):

In the early 1930s, Georgy Shengeli recruited young poets—Arkady Steinberg, Arseny Tarkovsky, Semyon Lipkin, and Maria Petrovykh—to translate, thereby rendering a great service to Russian literature. For the Quadriga (as the friends called themselves), this was an opportunity to make a relatively comfortable living from literary work. Their own muses were not well adapted to Soviet reality: Lipkin was religious, Tarkovsky was criticized for mysticism, Steinberg was assailed for formalism […] For the rest of their lives, the Quadriga depended on translations for their daily bread and in part for self-expression — although, alas, they did not generally have the opportunity to deal with poets of the stature of Milton or Saadi.

In 1934, the aspiring translators Tarkovsky and Steinberg befriended the Montenegrin communist and poet Radule Stijenski, who had emigrated to the USSR seven years earlier. There was no doubt that Stijenski was a communist, but the world hadn’t suspected until then that he was a poet. The three of them immediately realized this was an opportunity. The revolutionary Montenegrin hadn’t yet appeared on the Soviet book market, and it could be expected that if things were approached in the right manner, one book after another would be published, with the author and translators rejoicing in the royalties.

True, there were certain obstacles. Neither Tarkovsky nor Steinberg knew Serbian, and the poet turned out to be so ungifted that even the Montenegrin flavor allowed no hope that anyone would agree to voluntarily read his poems. As it happened, however, these circumstances were actually advantages. Both translators had plenty of talent seeking an outlet, and there was no need to worry about the translations’ similarity to the original—after all, Stijenski had never published in his native language (and remains a phenomenon confined to Russian literature). And speaking of originals, the questions of whether they existed or not, and what we mean by “originals,” have not been entirely cleared up. […]

The translators’ work was easy and creative—unable to publish their own poems, Arkady and Arseny had a great time. It turned out so well that Soviet critics were delighted, and children loved it.

Unfortunately, it ended in lawsuits and the Gulag; I don’t have the heart to translate the rest of the story, but you can get the basics from the Arkady Steinberg link above. (I posted about Maria Petrovykh here, and Boris Dralyuk wrote about Georgy Shengeli here.)

It’s time to play Biblical Crux once again! (Cf. Daughter of Greed, from 2019.) I’m reading Mikhail Shishkin’s 2010 Письмовник (‘Letter-writing manual,’ translated by Andrew Bromfield as The Light and the Dark) despite the concerns about Shishkin’s novels I expressed here, and so far I’m enjoying it (though already there’s a worrying amount of “Oh how I love you! I can’t live without you!” — Shishkin seems to think that’s pretty much what women’s mental life amounts to). In form the novel is epistolary, with alternating letters from a man and a woman, and at one point the woman writes: “Я была уродка из семейства плеченогих, крыложаберных и мшанок. А она — хоровод Манаимский с глазами, как озера Есевонские, что у ворот Батраббима” [I was a freak from the family of brachiopods, pterobranchs, and Bryozoa; she was the dance of Mahanaim, with eyes like the pools of Heshbon by the gate of Bath-rabbim]. I knew about Heshbon (though it’s annoying that Bath-rabbim redirects to that page, when there’s no mention of Bath-rabbim there), but what was this dance of Mahanaim?

It turns out that at the end of Song of Songs 6 or the beginning of 7, depending on the tradition, there’s an obscure passage about “the Shulamite” which doesn’t seem to have attracted many commentators. I haven’t done a deep dive, but the only discussion I’ve found that’s neither antiquated (like Thomas Robinson’s) nor amateur/popular (like Archie W. N. Roy PhD’s) is by J. Cheryl Exum, who just died last year; in her Song of Songs: A Commentary, pp. 225ff., she writes:
[Read more…]

Ashifa Kassam reports for the Guardian on some research that falls very much in the remit of this blog:

When researchers asked people around the world to list every taboo word they could think of, the differences that emerged were revealing. The length of each list, for example, varied widely. While native English speakers in the UK and Spanish speakers in Spain rattled off an average of 16 words, Germans more than tripled this with an average of 53 words ranging from intelligenzallergiker, a person allergic to intelligence, to hodenkobold, or “testicle goblin”, someone who is being annoying. […]

“These words can be more offensive, or less, they can be loaded with negativity or with irony,” said Jon Andoni Duñabeitia, a cognitive scientist and professor at Madrid’s Nebrija University. “But taken together, they offer small snapshots of the realities of each culture.”

When it came to the differences between Spanish and German speakers, Andoni Duñabeitia had two theories. German, with its seemingly endless capacity to build new compound words, could simply offer more options, he said. “But it could also be that some people [speaking other languages] just don’t have these words readily available, or it’s harder for them when asked to produce them in a very neutral environment,” he said.

The study, which looked at taboo words in 13 languages from Serbian to Cantonese and Dutch, and across 17 countries, revealed other differences. The word “shit”, or its translated equivalent, for example, ranked among the most frequently used in several languages, including English, Finnish and Italian, but was not in the top rankings in French, Dutch, Spanish or German.

In contrast, words that sought to disparage women, such as “bitch,” turned up across cultures. “I think it comes down to the terribly sexist traditions of many countries,” said Andoni Duñabeitia, who was among the four dozen researchers involved with the 2024 study. “The vocabulary reflects the reality of societies where women have been mistreated, removed from everyday tasks and relegated to the background.”

Click that last link for the study (which is open access); thanks, Trevor!

Frequent commenter cuchuflete writes:

There is an expression heard with some frequency in these parts, “little by slowly”. When I first heard it a quarter century back, it was disconcerting to my Midwestern/Middle Atlantic ears. It, or more aptly I, have now become naturalized and it is ‘normal’ to my ears. Same goes for my Nottingham raised lady. We both savor it.

Last week I googled it. Top of results page was some AI slop declaring it a mistaken form of little by little. Little by slowly has additional meaning, whatever its origins. […] I haven’t been able to find anything about the origin of the phrase.

He cites a Stephen King use: “Now after reading this I’m going to step up my routine, little by slowly (as we say heah in Maine) to improve my distance.” Anybody know anything about the history of this quaint phrase?