Archives for August 2010

As I have noted before, I am a fan of Raymond Queneau, and I am pleased to discover that his Cent mille milliards de poèmes (Wikipedia) are cleverly generated at this site: every time you visit or refresh, you get a new combination of lines (in both French and English unless you specify a preference). The translations (and the site) are by Beverley Charles Rowe; here’s the main page of the site, and here’s Rowe’s remarkable collection of English dictionaries. And by googling a bit I discover there are a couple of other online editions, which you can read about here.

While we’re on the subject of poetry, yesterday’s wood s lot features the wonderful Louise Bogan, whom I quoted here. And while you’re there, don’t miss the interesting excerpt from “A Farewell to English,” by Michael Hartnett (“…they came like grey slabs of slate breaking from/ an ancient quarry, mánla, séimh, dubhfholtach,/ álainn, caoin, slowly vaulting down the dark/ unused escarpments, mánla, séimh, dubhfholtach,/ álainn, caoin, crashing on the cogs…”).

I wanted to quote a particularly good example of the way quotations are used in Russia from the Boyle/Gerhart book I wrote about here; I was googling for an English translation of the Pushkin poem cited when I discovered that this section happens to be included in a webpage of sample passages from the book (scroll down, it’s the second one). So I’ll let you read the poem there (the lines in italics in the Russian are ones that are particularly often quoted on their own), and I’ll just quote the jokes based on it here (the Russian is on the linked page):

“Why do you have Pushkin’s portrait on the wall in the KGB office? Why not Dzerzhinsky’s [founder of the KGB]?”
“Because he was the first to say ‘Strangle the noble impulses!’ [= ‘The soul’s noble impulses’].”

This quotation has to be pronounced with the intonation of an imperative. The punchline is based on the coincidence between the Genitive of душа (‘soul’) and the imperative of the verb душить (‘strangle, repress’), which is of course lost in translation. Another joke of the perestroika period shows people’s bewilderment and mistrust of the entire concept of glasnost:

Comrade, trust me: the era of Gorbachev’s glasnost will pass,
and the KGB will remember our names.

By the way, speaking of Russian literature, I found the interesting link Что читать? (‘What to read?’; Ищем советы, что почитать ‘We’re looking for suggestions about what to read’) in a comment at Lizok’s Bookshelf; it looks like a useful source of book descriptions.

Ben Zimmer has a wonderful takedown of the Telegraph story you may have seen: “Secret vault of words rejected by the Oxford English Dictionary uncovered.” An excerpt:

Looking deeper into the list, I felt a creeping sense of déjà vu. It turns out that a healthy majority of the entries come from a single source. In 2005, Merriam-Webster asked users of its online dictionary, “What’s your favorite word that’s not in the dictionary?” It compiled a top ten list (and later, with much fanfare, announced that the top vote-getter, ginormous, would enter the next edition of the Collegiate Dictionary). Beyond the top ten, Merriam-Webster provided a list of “Previous Favorite Words (Not in the Dictionary).” Of the 39 words listed by the Telegraph, a whopping 27 of them — from asphinxiation (“being sick to death of unanswerable puzzles or riddles”) to wurfing (“the act of surfing the Internet while at work”) — come from Merriam-Webster’s 2005 selection of “previous favorite words.”
Of the remaining words on the Telegraph list, some (such as freegan, griefer, and nonversation) have their own entries in Merriam-Webster’s Open Dictionary, an ongoing compendium of user-generated suggestions. A few others have actually achieved dictionary status already. Earworm, locavore, and pharming can all be found in the latest edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary.

Ah, journalism! Ah, humanity!

Stephen Chrisomalis, an anthropologist at Wayne State University who once ran also runs the site Forthright’s Phrontistery (which I wrote about here), now also has a blog Glossographia (“Anthropology, linguistics, and prehistory”), whose latest post [archived] is a very interesting examination of the history of the word chairperson. He writes:

A couple of weeks ago I started making some open notes here about a potential student project on word histories for use in my undergraduate teaching, which I am tentatively calling the Lexiculture Project. My desired learning outcomes for this course include a) getting students to discover or awaken whatever love of language; b) to get essentially untrained (budding?) linguists to be able to ask and answer interesting questions about language and culture in topics of interest to them. While my students (mainly anthropology majors with a smattering of linguists and others) aren’t mostly ready to undertake original research in most areas, they can certainly be taught the research skills needed to investigate word histories.

Sounds like a great course! At any rate, he decided to use chairperson as a research topic, hoping to antedate the OED’s first citation from 1971 (Israel Shenker, New York Times, Aug 29, 58 “Instead of turning up as chairman or chairlady, each will have been transmuted into a sexually obscure ‘chairperson'”).

I didn’t expect much, maybe to find a few from the 60s, then move on with my demonstration of other techniques. The usual Googlery didn’t produce much of interest – not least because of the wacky metadata in Google Books and Google News Archive, producing thousands upon thousands of misdated records and more than one feisty embuggerance. (Oh, and PS, Google, when I search for chairperson do not show me results for chairman automatically.) I cursed once or twice at the Great God of Search, against my normal classroom practice (uhh … you can stop laughing now.) But Proquest, oh, sweet Proquest, how you came through for me. So instead of 1971, we have the following four early attestations:

1899 Washington Post Jul 15, pg. 6 “Indignant Womanhood”
“Madame Chairperson,” exclaimed the delegate, earnestly, “I feel the force of all that has been said concerning the necessity for us, the women of the nation, to nominate a clean candidate!”

1899 The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest Dec 1899, 10(1), pg. A32
NOTICE – Members of the East Aurora Don’t Worry Club are notified that there will be no more meetings until Mrs. Grubbins, the Chairperson, returns from the Sanatorium.

1902 The Philistine: A Periodical of Protest Sep 1902, 15(4), pg. 126
The answer is, I think, that a passion for the Chairperson is hardly possible when any moment you may be ruled out of order, and ordered to take your seat.

1910 Puck Aug 3, p. 68
“Madame Chairperson,” she shouted, “this measure is maternalism, plain and simple!”

All four of these quotations are clearly linked to first-wave feminism, the movement (to oversimplify grossly) for political rights such as the vote led by feminists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And of course (it almost goes without saying), all four instances are used to describe women – no man is described as a ‘chairperson’ until the 1970s. The first (WaPo) quotation actually is a quotation taken from the (sadly, undigitized) Detroit Journal – my Wayne State students were thrilled to find that chairperson first occurred in a Detroit publication! But the article is no feminist tract, but rather a jocular commentary on first-wave feminists, entitled ‘Indignant Womanhood’.

He goes on to say that the most interesting thing is that “I can find literally no further attestations of the word for over half a century”:

After 1910, we have no further ‘chairperson’ until 1970, when once again (as in 1899) it appeared in the Washington Post, this time associated with Betty Friedan, who used the term to describe herself. After that point, ‘chairperson’ occurs regularly up to the present, although the Corpus of Historical American English data suggest that it is being replaced by ‘chair’ as the gender-neutral form.

We live in a great age of lexicography, and I look forward to many more such discoveries.

Checking my referrer log, I just discovered a blog I wish I’d known about earlier, dormir debout. On the about page, the author (who goes by “kato” in the comment threads) says:

dormir debout – a French expression meaning, literally, ‘to sleep standing.’ Usually used in the expression ‘une histoire à dormir debout,’ meaning “a story at which to sleep standing,” in other words, a really boring story. So boring, in fact, that despite the act of standing usually discouraging sleeping, one passes right out….

Currently working on my MA in Zoroastrian Studies/Old Iranian languages at SOAS.

There’s much discussion of Arabic language and literature, including occasional quotation of Arabic poetry with translation and commentary; I noted with interest a post on 17th-century Egyptian curses. Unfortunately, there have been no updates since December. I hope it’s just on hiatus rather than defunct.

Update (Aug. 2022). The blog has been defunct for some years; the latest post seems to have been 19th Century Libyan Wolves (4 April 2011).

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.