Archives for June 2003

The latest entry at The Discouraging Word, “The koan of the meshuggeneh,” has this to say about the etymology of koan: “Koan comes straight from the Japanese, from ko, public, and an, variously defined by our usual dictionary sources as “matter, material for thought” (OED, AH) and “proposition” (M-W).” It bothered me that the second definition was so vague, and even more that the word was only traced back to Japanese when it was clearly a Sino-Japanese loan word—I expect dictionaries to be more precise these days. So I did a little research and discovered that the original Chinese word, gongan (kung-an for you unreconstructed Wade-Gilesians), meant ‘legal case’; it’s composed of gong ‘public’ and an ‘(legal) case, records’ (the links go to the characters, with translations and renditions in Cantonese, Hakka, Minnan, Wu, and Sino-korean as well; I take this opportunity to bow reverently in the direction of the online Chinese character dictionary, one of the best language resources on the net).

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I cannot resist posting the following links; the second is of obvious linguistic relevance, and the first is just so damn funny I have to share it. But they are rough and knotty and deal with scandalous or salacious material. Readers of delicate sensibilities should pass over this entire entry. You have been warned.

1. A John Dolan review of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, a rehab memoir. Anyone who knows the Exile and its evil ways will not be surprised to hear that it begins “This is the worst thing I’ve ever read” and then takes off the gloves. It gets down and dirty. It may well be unfair. But I really can’t bring myself to care when it includes passages like this:

Walking on a trail outside the clinic, Frey names and capitalizes everything: “Trail,” “Tree,” “Animals.” Then he sees a lower-case “bird.” I was offended for our feathered friend. Why don’t the birds get their caps like everybody else?

But then Frey is no expert observer, as he proves in one of the funniest scenes from his nature walks, when he meets a “fat otter”: “There is an island among the rot, a large, round Pile with monstrous protrusions like the arms of a Witch. There is chatter beneath the pile and a fat brown otter with a flat, armored tail climbs atop and he stares at me.”

Now, can anyone tell me what a “fat otter with a flat, armored tail” actually is? That’s right: a beaver! Now, can anyone guess what the “large, round Pile with monstrous protrusions like the arms of a Witch” would be? Yes indeed: a beaver dam!

I warn you, however, that the review contains Bad Language and Worse Attitudes.

2. The second link contains almost nothing but Bad Language. It is, in fact, an immensely long and learned discussion of what must be considered (in the U.S., at any rate) the Worst Word in the English Language. (Damn, I’ve picked up James Frey’s Capital Abuse Habit.) No, not the f-word, which we hear so often only the most reclusive and old-fashioned could possibly be shocked by it, but the c-word. It is A Cultural History of C*nt (the namby-pamby asterisk being mine, not the author’s—an attempt to avoid misdirected Google hits). It begins with an etymological excursus to which, frankly, you should not pay much attention (“The ‘cu’ prefix of ‘cunnus’ has long associations with femininity…. Eric Partridge discusses the ‘quintessential femineity’ [Partridge, 1937/1961] of ‘cu’, and James McDonald explains that this word/sound, or an equivalent such as ‘ku’, ‘existed in a common Germanic language over two thousand years ago.”) and proceeds to a fascinating history of the usage of the word. Here is one of the few bits I can actually quote without resorting to more asterisks; it’s also as funny as the Frey review:

…when John Spellar MP made a speech in the House of Commons: “[he tried to say] ‘We recognise that these cuts in the defence medical services had gone too far,’ but he inserted an unwanted letter ‘n’ in the word ‘cuts’. It still made perfect sense.”

The author is Matthew Hunt (yes, it rhymes), and the piece is headed “Dissertation”; it has a long enough bibliography that it may actually be one. At any rate, enjoy it if you dare!

Credits: the first link is via No-Sword Sieve (2003-06-04, bottom), the second via Stavros. Thanks, guys!

There is a much-cited aphorism in linguistics that “a language is a dialect with an army”; I think I had seen it attributed to Max Weinreich, but I did not know that he originally wrote it in Yiddish as “A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot” [‘A language is a dialect with an army and a navy’] in the article “Der yivo un di problemen fun undzer tsayt” (“Yivo” and the problems of our time) in the periodical Yivo-bleter 25.1 [1945]. Now I do, thanks to a page of the Danish Babel site, which includes all manner of good things, such as How to Say “Merry Christmas (and a Happy New Year)” in 300 Languages, the Yiddish version of which is given as “A freylikhn geburtstog funem goyishn meshiakh, un a git yor,” though I have to wonder under what circumstances this sentence has ever been spoken. (I suggest skipping down past the ordering by word for ‘Christmas’ to the list by language family, which is preceded by a large USORTEREDE.)

Addendum. Jim at UJG has added a paragraph with new information, including this page with further details on the quote (“Weinreich attributes this formulation to a young man who came to his lectures, and he decided, ‘I must bring to a large audience this wonderful formulation of the social fate of Yiddish.'”). All praise to Jim!

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John Hardy has a magnificent entry at Laputan Logic, explaining in more detail than I’ve ever seen how “Arabic” numbers evolved. I won’t bother trying to permalink, just scroll down to Tuesday, June 03 (and down past the “Fun with numbers” box, depending on your tolerance for whimsy); as usual, he has lavish and highly informative illustrations. (Warning: the page is slow to load.)

Before going off to the Guggenheim to meet the visiting Juliet after her immersion in Matthew Barney and sweep her from the sterile Upper East Side to the lively East Village for dinner (ah, the life of a New York City blogger!), I rummaged through her archives and came across this site dedicated to Anna Akhmatova, which includes a short video clip of her reading. (I also found this moving reminiscence of James Tiptree, Jr., the first thing I’ve read that gives me any sense of why she—that’s right, she—killed her husband and herself in 1987.)

The Discouraging Word today has an entry about the lexical item “defugalty.” Not only am I unfamiliar with it, so are all my dictionaries, and yet it exists—barely. Google turns up half a dozen examples, all of them using it as if it were a pre-existing word, not something that needs to be defined. Here are the contexts:

1. “As I was reading Mr. Norr’s article about the situation here at JSC, I noticed an interesting defugalty. Mr. Garman pointed out that the difference between platforms was only a few hundred dollars. I noticed he forgot that this was a ‘per platform’ cost.”
2. “I must be one of those complaining nitpicky, whining people who go to any length to imagine or try to trump up some ailment or defugalty. Chicken Little syndrome.”
3. “The pork checkoff defugalty had both winners and losers. Opponents wanted an end to the checkoff, but USDA says it will continue.”
4. “But, to his surprise, he found two white families, by the names of Fulbright and Campbell, already there and arguing over possession of the spring…. Springfield History records the defugalty between Fulbright and Campbell but omits mention of Samuel Martin in connection with the spring.”
5. “I went on the school board in 1929. I didn’t file for the election. Someone else put my name in;I think it was either Van Buren or Westhoff. Mrs. Sando and Mrs. Ravenscraft were both on the boardand were fighting…. It seems there was always some sort of ‘defugalty.'”
6. “Again…I am truly sorry you’re having this luck. I am here! While I was out (Okla.) I called the office every day and spoke to everyone there. Maybe you’re dialing the wrong extensions. Mine won’t work when I’m not there…. Sorry about the defugalty…but I received and aswered 50+ phone calls and 350 e-mails in the past 5-6 days.”

I think we can dismiss out of hand the speculation by TDW’s correspondent that the word (if we can call it a word) is derived from “fugue.” My Sprachgefühl tells me it’s a deformation of “difficulty”; compare the substitution of “definootly” for “definitely” (HDAS, Vol. I, p. 576). But we need data, citations, research! Anybody have any?

I thought the antiquity of blogging was common knowledge (among those with a decent education, needless to say), but Dorothea has insisted that I make an entry of this, so here ’tis; observe and learn. From Aristotle’s attack on the Pythagoreans in the Metaphysics:

All the same, as we have said, the causes and principles which they describe are capable of application to the remoter class of websites (topoi tou histou) as well, and indeed are better fitted to these. But as to how there are to be updates, if all that is premissed is the Linked and the Unlinked, and Present and Past, they do not even hint; nor how, without updates and change, there can be generation and destruction, or the activities of the links which traverse the web. And further, assuming that it be granted to them or proved by them that blogs (blogoi) are composed of these factors, yet how is it to be explained that some are lesser, and others greater? For in their premisses and statements they are speaking just as much about virtual as about mathematical objects; and this is why they have made no mention of markups (anasemeia) or links or other similar phenomena, because, I presume, they have no separate explanation of virtual things. Again, how are we to understand that number and the modifications of number are the causes of all being and updating, both in the beginning and now, and at the same time that there is no other number than the number of which the universe is composed? Because when they make out that Opinion and News are in such and such a region, and a little above or below them Controversy and Disharmony or Flames, and when they state as proof of this that each of these abstractions is a number; and that also in this region there is already a plurality of the magnitudes composed of number, inasmuch as these modifications of number correspond to these several regions,—is the number which we must understand each of these abstractions to be the same number which is present in the virtual universe, or another kind of number?

At this point he goes off into an excursus about number and never really gets back to blogs, but I think we have a pretty good analysis there. I might also point out that in Greek blogos is phonesthetically related to phlox, phlogos ‘flame,’ which gives rise to an entirely different set of responses and analogies. As I told Moira, I hope they covered all this at St. John’s; young people these days don’t even seem to realize that the Greeks had blogs.

Harry Hoijer’s Chiricahua and Mescalero Apache texts, with analysis, have been put online:

The Electronic publication of Harry Hoijer’s Chiricahua and Mescalero Apache Texts is a web-accessible Apache language linguistic database and text archive available to the public at no charge as part of the multilingual collection at the University of Virginia’s Electronic Text Center at Alderman Library. The metadata scheme used is an extension of the Text Encoding Initiative. It is a republication of Hoijer’s 1938 monograph originally published by the University of Chicago.
Hoijer’s original monograph is a complexly annotated document built around a set of 55 Apache language texts, including mostly narratives, but also songs, prayers, and speeches, elicited from nine different Apache speakers. These are accompanied by English translations and cross-referenced with a grammatical outline of the language, as well as linguistic and ethnological notes.

An amazing resource; many thanks to wood s lot for the link.

Once again, William Safire goes wandering through the vast countryside of the English language, stopping here to pluck a daisy and there to misidentify a tree. Today’s column begins with a thoroughly tedious mastication of the “Near East” vs. “Middle East” issue. Can there be anyone who hasn’t come across this before, either choosing one phrase or the other or deciding that it isn’t worth spending valuable brain cells on? But good W.S. can’t find anything else to maunder about, so he chews on this for awhile, citing uninteresting quotes and coming to unsurprising conclusions. There is, however, one novelty: after quoting several definitions of “Near/Middle East, now used interchangeably,” all variations on “the countries of Southwest Asia and Northeast Africa,” he delivers himself of the following thought: “I’d toss in Morocco and Tunisia.” Morocco and Tunisia? Does anybody reading this think they’re part of the Middle East? Bizarre, that’s what I call it.

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