Archives for June 2020

Back in 2008 I posted about hats, quoting from Diana Crane’s The Social Meanings of Hats and T-shirts, where we are told:

The top hat, which appeared in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century, was worn first by the middle and upper classes. During the century, it spread downward, possibly because it was adopted by coachmen in the 1820s and for policemen’s uniforms in the same period…. In the 1840s and 1850s, unskilled laborers and fishermen were photographed wearing these hats …. At mid-century, they were being worn by all social classes…

Which is good to know, but it leaves unanswered the question OrneryBob asks at WordOrigins.org: why is it called that? Oecolampadius says:

The “top” may have been influenced by the French name for this hat, Haut de Forme. the word “haut” could be translated “high” or “tall” or “top.” According to this French site, It seems to have had the connotation of “high” in the sense of social order as in: “Man of the bourgeois in the 19th Century.”

But “top” doesn’t mean “high” or “tall,” and either of the latter words would make more sense as a description. Syntinen Laulu says:

When tall hats began to be worn in the 1790s (think all those French revolutionaries, and Beau Brummel & co.) they were known as round hats, because the brim was no longer ‘cocked’, i.e. bent at a sharp angle to make a ‘cocked hat’ (what we’d call a tricorne or bicorne, although both those words are later), but was more-or-less flat all round. The first citation for top hat in the OED (admittedly an un-updated definition) is surprisingly late – 1881.

The OED entry is from 1913; the citation is M. E. Braddon Asphodel xvi “She liked to have her son well-dressed and in a top-hat.” ElizaD antedates that with a quote from Alfred Drayson’s 1875 The Gentleman Cadet (referring to a cadet at Woolwich, London):

I was in the rear of the division, and dressed in plain clothes; my hat was what modern slang would term “a top hat,” and what in those days we called “a beaver.”

She adds a link to an interesting article about the history of the top hat from The Field; I like this cautious statement: “With any style of hat it is often difficult to pinpoint the first of a type, not just for the history of top hats. I would suggest that the Hetherington hat may well not have been the very first but one of the first.” But I’m still wondering why the term is “top hat.”

Lagniappe, in case it hasn’t been linked here before: xkcd on quotative like.

Slavomír Čéplö, aka bulbul, recently gave me a copy of Michael Cooperson’s translation of al-Hariri’s Maqāmāt, called Impostures (see this ancient LH post); the publisher’s blurb says:

An itinerant con man. A gullible eyewitness narrator. Voices spanning continents and centuries. These elements come together in Impostures, a groundbreaking new translation of a celebrated work of Arabic literature.

Impostures follows the roguish Abu Zayd al-Saruji in his adventures around the medieval Middle East-we encounter him impersonating a preacher, pretending to be blind, and lying to a judge. In every escapade he shows himself to be a brilliant and persuasive wordsmith, composing poetry, palindromes, and riddles on the spot. Award-winning translator Michael Cooperson transforms Arabic wordplay into English wordplay of his own, using fifty different registers of English, from the distinctive literary styles of authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer, Mark Twain, and Virginia Woolf, to global varieties of English including Cockney rhyming slang, Nigerian English, and Singaporean English.

I’ve barely begun exploring it, but it’s absolutely delightful; here’s the start of Imposture 40, “Iran go Brágh”:

Arthur O’Hannan reported:

I was just after puttin’ it before me to ride the breeze out of Tabroís. ‘Twas no place for a spalpeen, let alone a lord, for there wasn’t a soft heart or an open hand in it. So ’twas cuttin’ me stick I was, and lookin’ for fellows to travel the road with, when who should I meet but Buséad of Searúg and he wrapped in a coat amidst a women’s prashameen. “How are you getting on?” I asked. “And where are you going, with all your care?

He pointed to one of the ladies. With her pookeen drawn back from her face she was as fair as May, but she was looking scunnered and no mistake.

“I married herself,” says he, “for to wash off the clat of lonesomeness and comfort me on the shaughraun, but from that day out ’tis nothing with her but the heart-scald. When it comes to me rights, she puts the pot in the tailor’s link, and I to thole more than a body can bear. Now the breath is barely in and out of me, just enough to sing the ullagone. So we’re a-kempin’ to the Brehon to ask him to show Murrogh to the one in the wrong. If he sets things right between us, well and good; otherwise, the divorce it is, and many a dry eye after!”

I will never be in a position to judge to what degree that’s an accurate rendition of the Arabic, and frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. It’s pure pleasure to read.

The Silphium Gatherer has a post about how fieldwork used to be done:

For the past several decades, linguistic fieldwork in Libya has been extremely difficult, even at times downright impossible. This has certainly been the case for foreign researchers: not only was it nearly impossible to get research permits for Libya from the 1980s to 2000s, and fieldwork that did occur was heavily monitored and restricted, but there has been so little work on Libya in general, and scholars of Libya in Western institutions, that interested students usually have no place to start or advisors with whom to work. But this also to a great extent true for Libyans as well: Libyans with linguistic training have typically returned to work in universities teaching translation studies or foreign languages and only a few have published research in Libya on Libyan languages. Up until 2011 it was illegal to openly research anything other than Arabic—the regime’s official position was that Amazigh is a dialect of Arabic, and numerous researchers (not to mention activists) were thrown in jail for trying to write, teach, or research Amazigh in Libya. And now, although the activism and dedication of numerous Libyans has led to the increased visibility of the Amazigh and Tebu languages in Libya, actual fieldwork and research remains difficult for everyone due to the current political and military struggles.

I’ve always assumed that fieldwork during the colonial era and during the kingdom was, in contrast, much easier. Foreign researchers could simply have taken advantage of colonial power structures to go where they wanted, and indeed many did. Or after independence they were given permits to do so. And this is largely the case for research on Libya up until the early 1970s in a variety of fields—anthropology, linguistics, history, urban studies and so on. But, on examining a bunch of older linguistic works more closely, I was surprised to find that many of them were not actually done in the place the language was actually spoken at all—some of them not even in Libya. Of course, these studies were still carried out within colonial power structures. But, it’s likely that French scholars, for example, weren’t as easily able to travel to then-Ottoman Libya as they were able to travel within French colonial domains, and therefore took advantage of what opportunities they had to produce knowledge on the region. I’ve gathered some of these sources together under the rubric “non-site fieldwork”, the opposite of “on-site fieldwork”. […]

I should note, of course, that “non-site” fieldwork isn’t by default a bad thing. Sometimes a community of speakers is indeed dispersed around the world, because of persecution or migration. Sometimes work with speakers outside of their place of origin is a prelude to on-site fieldwork and an important part of making connections with the community. Or, it can follow on-site fieldwork as part of collaboration with local researchers. Those are all good things.

But when a language is still widely spoken in its homeland, research with a single speaker far away from that place is not likely to give the best, most nuanced picture of that language, and moreover, is much less urgent, since that language isn’t likely to die out or be replaced. Strangely enough, the impulse to do “non-site” fieldwork seems to be growing among Western scholars—but for Arabic dialects of northern Africa rather than for the minority or endangered languages which are in need of documentation.

I found that history interesting and surprising.

Studiolum at Poemas del río Wang has done a deep dive into an ever-intriguing bit of mythology, Lilith and the draconcopes. We all know Lilith was Adam’s first wife, but where did that story come from? Click the link to find out the details; I just want to quote some piquant passages:

In fact, Lilith appears in one single place in the Hebrew Bible, in Isaiah 34 (13-16), where the Lord foretells how He would destroy Edom:

“Thorns will overrun her citadels, nettles and brambles her strongholds. She will become a haunt for jackals, a home for owls. Desert creatures will meet with hyenas, and wild goats will bleat to each other. There the lilith לִילִית will also lie down and find for themselves places of rest. The owl will nest there and lay eggs, she will hatch them and care for her young under the shadow of her wings. There also the falcons will gather, each with its mate.”

The role of the lilith is here to mark, along with all the other ominous beings, how desolate the Lord makes Edom. But as to exactly what kind of being it is, we [are] not informed here, since the name is a hapax legomenon, a word that only occurs once in the Bible. Nevertheless, it must have been familiar to the Jews of the period if it could be used to indicate the extent of the destruction. As if we were reading today that a place has become a home for vampires and orcs, the nest of Dracula. The products of the fantasy literature of the last hundred years are pretty much in the public consciousness, they don’t need to be explained.

The words lili and līlītu in the Mesopotamian languages, Sumerian, Akkadian and Assyrian, meant ʻspirit’, in some texts a disease-bearing spirit living in the wind. It was probably from there and in this sense transferred into the Aramaic spoken by the Jews of Babylon and the Bible. In the 4th to 6th century AD, “bowls of incantation” were widespread in the area: these were hidden in the base or ground of the houses as traps to catch the liliths intruding in the houses. These bowls were used by all local cultures and languages. Several hundreds were found from Jews with texts in Aramaic, biblical or talmudic references.

Typically, Bible translations did not know what to do with the name. The Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Diaspora Jews merges the hyenas with the lilith under the name “onocentaur”, and translates the goat, understood as a satyr, as “demon”. […] Basically, this translation is followed by the Vulgate, the Latin translation of St. Jerome, which translates the lilith as lamia, a child-devoring female demon in Greek mythology[…] The meaning of ʻonocentaur’ was only slightly clearer than that of the lilith. Based on ὄνος = donkey, it was interpreted as a kind of donkey-centaur. […]

In Jewish rabbinic literature, the name only occurs four times, always referring to the text of Isaiah, in a sense of “evil spirit” until the 8-10th c. AD, that is, well into the Middle Ages, when a Hebrew treatise called The alphabet of ben Sira made it a person. The treatise contains twice 22 proverbs in Aramaic and Hebrew, arranged according to the Hebrew alphabet, and illuminates the meaning of each with a Midrashic story. According to the story that interests us here, Ben Sira heals the sick little son of King Nebuchadnezzar with an amulet. When the king asks him what he wrote on the amulet, Ben Sira tells him that God kneaded the first human couple from the dust of earth, and they were thus equal. The woman, Lilith, therefore, did not want to lie under Adam in the bed, as required by Jewish sexual morals, but she wanted to be above. She rebelled and fled to the Red Sea, where she mated with demons. God sent three angels after her, Senoy, Sansenoy and Semangelof, who, however, failed to bring her back. All they could agree with her was that although she as a demon now had power to infect newborn children, nevertheless if the names of these three angels were written somewhere, she would not hurt the child there.

Literature considers this tractate a kind of satire, a compilation of parodies brought together by bored yeshivabohers, a huge hoax full of pedant talmudic hochmetsing over assorted smut, from farting through masturbation to incest (for example, Ben Sira himself is said to be born from the union of Prophet Jeremiah with his own daughter). This is how seriously we have to take the tradition of Lilith as Adam’s first wife. True, in the double creation story of the Book of Genesis, God first creates the man and the woman in His own image (Gen 1:27), and then He creates the woman from the rib of the man (Gen 2:22). For believers in the literal interpretation of the Bible, these were two creations: but then, where is the first woman? This logical hiatus was made up for by the yeshivabohers with the lilith which stood without any real meaning in the Bible and the Talmud. Before them, however, neither the Jewish nor the Christian exegetical tradition raised and answered this question, especially not by creating a “first wife”.

(Oh, and draconcopedes are “large and strong snakes, whose maiden-face is similar to the man, but their body ends in snake body.”)

For the further titillation of any who share the yeshiva bokher spirit, Michael Gilleland offers A Pearl from a Dung-Heap, an inscription excavated at Stabiae in the Villa San Marco in 2008-2009; graffiti are the same the world over.

Syntinen Laulu in this Wordorigins.org thread provides a pungent historical summary of the phrase “without benefit of clergy,” which I have always misunderstood (as I suspect have most modern English-speakers):

In medieval English law, all members of the clergy were exempt from being tried by the king’s justice, and were only answerable to clerical courts. This, BTW, is the issue on which King Henry II fell out with his friend Thomas Becket, who he had made Archbishop of Canterbury: Henry held that ‘criminous clerks’ should be handed over to answer for their crimes in ordinary courts, and quite right too; but Becket resisted, and thus started a row that ended with his assassination by six of Henry’s knights. The outrage that this event cause forced Henry to back down: anyone in holy Orders, no matter how minor, when charged with a crime in a secular court could claim benefit of clergy and have their case heard in a church court. This was a huge privilege because church courts handed out far milder punishments; a crime that would get you hanged or your hand lopped off in a secular court might result only in a sentence of a year in the Bishop’s prison, or a barefoot pilgrimage to Walsingham.

The big question was: who was a cleric and thus entitled to benefit of clergy? Eventually the test was agreed to be whether the accused could read a verse of the Bible. As literacy became more widespread, more and more people were able to claim it and it got further and further from its original sense and intention; but – this being England, where being obsolete isn’t seen as necessarily a reason to abolish anything – it was allowed to drag on as an increasingly odd anomaly. There’s a Wiki entry that describes the process; suffice to say that by the 18th century pleading benefit of clergy was a device whereby a first offender might be liable to a radically milder sentence for many crimes, but – as in the case of riot – not all.

That Wiki entry has lots more details should you want them. (And note the spiffy new look of the Wordorigins site!)

And Bob Ladd at the Log investigates the current use of whence, which occurs in phrases like “to whence he returned,” “for whence he leaves,” “at whence he was tagged,” etc.; in the comments, Rachael Churchill says “People are using ‘whence’ as a fancy substitute for ‘where’, regardless of context, just like they use ‘whom’ as a fancy substitute for ‘who’, regardless of context,” and
Sniffnoy says:

I have a suspicion that the whole “to whence” thing comes from the phrase “to whence it came”, which has “to whence” but which also has “whence” used in the original sense. But if you don’t know what “whence” means, and you read this, you may take away some different ideas about how to use “whence”. (“It” here can of course be replaced by another pronoun.)

There are other interesting comments, and I’ll try to repress my snobbish revulsion at the whole mess of innovation.

Paul Anthony Jones has a Mental Floss piece called 25 Words That Don’t Mean What They Used To; it’s a grab-bag of different kind of changes, from obvious semantic extensions (fantastic) to serious changes of meaning (though probably many Hatters already know that cheap originally meant ‘trade, bargaining’). It’s worth a look, even though it shouldn’t be relied on for details — he says “Rival comes from the same etymological root as words like river and rivulet,” but as I said back in 2004, “river and rival aren’t actually related, since the Latin word ripa ‘(river) bank,’ the root of river, is of unknown etymology.” The entry for punk has an odd omission:

No one knows where the word punk comes from, but its earliest meaning in English was as another name for a prostitute—the meaning by which it appears in Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure. Over the centuries, the word seems to have accrued a whole host of fairly unsavory connotations, until it first began to be used of a petty criminal or a criminal’s assistant sometime around 1900, and ultimately any disreputable person, an outcast, or an inexperienced person in the 1920s and ’30s.

Gee, hasn’t it acquired another meaning since then, the only one known to most persons of the twenty-first-century persuasion?

But there’s some good stuff there, things I didn’t know, like the etymology of handicap (hand-in-cap!) and the fact that ambidexter once meant “A corrupt lawyer who takes fees or bribes from both sides in a case” (though an earlier sense was “A person who has two contradictory or incompatible roles; a double-dealer”). And the first entry, on alienate, makes a nice complement to this 2005 LH post on William Barnes’s suggested word-equivalents in purified English, which includes “alienate, To unfrienden.” Thanks, jack!

Another great resource I have learned about, via Stan Carey, is the Dictionary of Affixes, created by Michael Quinion (known to me for his excellent World Wide Words). In the Introduction, Quinion says:

This site is about some of the building blocks of the English language, those beginnings and endings that help form a large proportion of the words we use. […] The entries on this site cover most of those active in the language today, as well as others that have contributed to the language in the past; only the most specialist, obscure or archaic have been left out. However, place-name affixes (-burgh, -ham, -thwaite, -wick) have been excluded. Personal name affixes such as Fitz-, Mac-, and -son have also been omitted.

The aim throughout has been to provide many examples, on the principle that it is easier to absorb the subtleties of the way such forms are used when they are seen in action. A second aim has been to show links between words, both grammatically and thematically; where possible I have tried to give some background and explain how words have come to mean what they do.

Here’s a sample entry, for -ad²:

-ad²

Indicating a direction towards some part of the body.

[Latin ad, to or towards.]

A set of adverbs was invented in 1803 by the Scottish anatomist John Barclay (1758–1826) in his book A New Anatomical Nomenclature; he created them from adjectives in ‑al (see ‑al¹) by replacing that ending with ‑ad, so for example making ventrad, towards the abdominal surface of the body, from ventral. They are specialist words, mainly confined to zoology. Two further examples are cephalad (Greek kephalē, head), towards the head, and caudad (Latin cauda, tail), towards the tail.

Making reference books available online when they go out of print is a great idea.

It’s been over a year since Matthew Scarborough of Consulting Philologist did one of those wonderful posts where he lays out all the resources available for a branch of Indo-European (see this LH post for an introduction, and Matthew’s roundup page is here); he explains the hiatus thus:

My progress on this series of blog posts aimed at introducing the main etymological resources for the various branches of Indo-European got somewhat halted due to my full-time teaching commitments, writing up four lecture courses that I’d never taught before at MacEwan University over course of the last academic year. As the last academic year wrapped up this spring, the additional complication of the pandemic has resulted in my summer teaching contract also being cancelled, which on the one hand gives me time to pursue some of my other unfinished projects such as my book on the Aeolic dialects of Ancient Greek and this blog series, but on the other hand, albeit without a current source of income.

(If you feel like making a contribution to his online tip-jar, he’s got a link to his Ko-fi account.) This time he’s doing the Italic branch (he’ll follow up with a post on Romance), and it’s got the usual through discussion of the good and bad points of Walde & Hofmann, Ernout & Meillet, and de Vaan, inter alia, with plenty of images; he sums up his take on them in this paragraph:

So, you may be asking, what do I (me, the author of this blogpost) do when I need to find the etymology of a given Latin word? Well, generally when I consult these works, I usually go to de Vaan’s Etymological Dictionary of Latin first, since his work is up-to-date, and generally reliable in the vast majority of cases. I will usually then further check de Vaan’s dictionary against Ernout & Meillet’s work for a second opinion. I only really use Walde & Hofmann if I am doing serious work on the history of a particular word and need references to older literature. If you’re not a specialist in Indo-European, generally de Vaan’s Etymological Dictionary of Latin is reliable, but it is worth bearing in mind that there are occasional Leiden school oddities of reconstruction that do exist that affect etymological interpretations, and because of this it’s still worth checking against the others.

And of course there’s a whole section on Sabellic (mainly Oscan and Umbrian), which I know shamefully little about. I love these posts and look forward to more!

Fintan O’Toole’s NYRB review (October 11, 2018) of Pretty Gentlemen: Macaroni Men and the Eighteenth-Century Fashion World by Peter McNeil starts out like this:

When Yankee Doodle stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni, he was not thinking of pasta. And the author of the ditty, probably a British professional soldier mocking the New England militiamen with whom he fought during the French and Indian War in the late 1750s or early 1760s, was not indulging in mere amiable ribbing of the colonials. Macaroni was an extravagant and self-conscious fashion in male display and an arena in which anxieties about British masculinity were being played out. Over the next decade, back home in England, the image of the macaroni militia officer would become a staple of the booming market in satiric prints.

Later, O’Toole writes:

The use of the term “macaroni,” the subject of Peter McNeil’s fascinating, deeply erudite, and superbly illustrated Pretty Gentlemen, reached its height between 1760 and 1780, though the word remained in everyday use for the rest of the eighteenth century. It did indeed originate with the habit of eating pasta, an outlandish affectation picked up by privileged young men on their Grand Tours to Italy and one that deliberately affronted the cherished self-image of the English as a nation of roast beef eaters. It came, however, to refer to an outré imported style of male dress and comportment.

Of course I wanted to know what the OED had to say, and it turns out the entry was updated in March 2000, so it’s reasonably current; after “A variety of pasta formed in short, narrow tubes, usually boiled and served with a sauce, esp. in Italian cookery” we get:

2. A dandy or fop; spec. (in the second half of the 18th cent.) a member of a set of young men who had travelled in Europe and extravagantly imitated Continental tastes and fashions. Also in extended use. Now historical.
[This use seems to be from the name of the Macaroni Club, a designation probably adopted to indicate the preference of the members for foreign cookery, macaroni being at that time little eaten in England. There appears to be no connection with the extended use of Italian maccherone in the senses ‘blockhead, fool, mountebank’ (compare macaroon n. 3), referred to in 1711 by Addison Spectator 24 Apr. 178/2: Those circumforaneous Wits whom every Nation calls by the name of that Dish of Meat which it loves best:..in Italy, Maccaronies.]
[See Update below for 1757 citation — LH.]
[1764 H. Walpole Let. to Earl of Hertford 6 Feb. (1857) IV. 178 The Maccaroni Club (which is composed of all the travelled young men who wear long curls and spying-glasses).]
1764 H. Walpole Let. Earl Hertford 27 May (1857) IV. 238 Lady Falkener’s daughter is to be married to a young rich Mr. Crewe, a Macarone, and of our Loo.
[…]
1823 C. Lamb South-sea House in Elia 6 He wore his hair..in the fashion which I remember to have seen in caricatures of what were termed, in my young days, Maccaronies.
[…]

But then I scrolled down and discovered a couple of surprising senses:
[Read more…]

I’ve almost finished Kataev’s Трава забвения (The Grass of Oblivion), and he’s back to mourning and celebrating his old friend and mentor Bunin; among other things, he quotes Bunin’s line “Вот капля, как шляпка гвоздя” [Here’s a drop, like the head of a nail] and says lots of subsequent poets have swiped the comparison without realizing that the important thing is not the visual image but the sound of капля… шляпка [kaplya… shlyapka], mimicking the sound of the drops falling on water. I looked up the poem, which turns out to be the 1900 “Нет солнца, но све́тлы пруды,” and liked it so much I thought I’d try my hand at an English version, however inadequate:

No sun, but luminous pools
Lie like molded mirrors,
And cups of motionless water
Would seem completely empty
If they didn’t reflect gardens.

There: a drop, like the top of a nail,
Fell — and like hundreds of needles
Putting furrows in backwater pools,
A downpour sparkled and spattered,
And the garden was noisy with rain.

And the wind made a fool of the foliage,
Confusing the baby birch trees,
And a sunbeam, as if alive,
Kindled the quivering glitter,
And filled the puddles with blue.

There’s a rainbow… What pleasure to live,
And what pleasure to think of the sky,
Of the sun, of the ripening grain,
And to value the simplest of joys:

To wander with uncovered head,
To watch the children scatter
Golden sand in the bower…
There’s no other joy on earth.

My “drop… top” doesn’t do as good a job as the Russian, but at least it tries. And another item of linguistic interest: my “hundreds of needles” represents the Russian “сотнями игол,” where игол [igol] is a nonstandard genitive plural of игла [iglá] ‘needle’ — the standard form игл [igl] is normally pronounced with two syllables, so игол is a spelled-out version that makes for a better rhyme with запрыгал [zaprygal] ‘jumped.’ Blok used the same form for the sake of the same rhyme in his Балаганчик [The Fairground Booth]:

И, под пляску морозных игол,
Вкруг подруги картонной моей –
Он звенел и высоко прыгал,
Я за ним плясал вкруг саней!

And, to the dance of frosty needles,
Around my cardboard girlfriend –
He jingled and jumped high,
I danced behind him around the sleigh!