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Two trivial but entertaining items:

1) Ian Frazier’s NYRB review (archived) of Common Phantoms: An American History of Psychic Science by Alicia Puglionesi, an account of the American Society for Psychical Research, includes this piquant bit:

The society also set up such Borgesian-sounding entities as the Committee on Phantasms and Presentiments, the Census of Hallucinations, and the Committee on Thought Transference.

Unfortunately, the archives of the ASPR turn out to be incredibly boring: “As the hours went by, Puglionesi found herself confronting a tedium requiring a ‘devotion to something beyond the self, something so vast that it can only be glimpsed through the labor of many human lifetimes.’”

2) Our old friend Conrad sent me this Guardian link with the comment that he “felt this was one for you”; after discussing the phenomenon of the apparently near-universal opinion in the UK that “Keir Starmer’s a wanker” (commonly sung at sporting events to the tune of the riff of the White Stripes’ 2003 “Seven Nation Army,” with which I was completely unfamiliar even though not only did it receive “widespread critical acclaim” but it is “arguably… the world’s most popular sports anthem” — I have to agree that the riff is catchy as hell), Jonathan Liew provides a semantic analysis that makes it Hattic material:

Let’s start with the word choice, which feels subtly telling in this case. If Boris Johnson was, as the darts crowd sang in late 2021 at the height of the Partygate scandal, a “cunt”, then somehow calling Starmer a “wanker” is altogether more piteously dismissive – insinuating not just degeneracy but a kind of bashful cowardice. The first word imputes a straightforward roguishness, perhaps even a grudging regard; the wanker, by contrast, is essentially beneath contempt.

Thanks, Conrad!

When I’m feeling low I like to pull a book off my poetry shelves and immerse myself in something completely different; as often as not it’s one of Trevor Joyce’s, and just now I was flipping through What’s in Store (see this post) when I was caught by his lovely version of the sorrowful old Irish ballad “Seán Ó Duibhir a’ Ghleanna” (sometimes Englished as “Seán Dwyer of the Glen”). You can see the whole thing in Irish with a literal translation (and some YouTube links) here; I’ll quote the first and last stanzas of Trevor’s version:

Through the early sunshine
of this summer morning
hounds raise up their howling
   while the sweet birds sing.
The small beasts and the badger
keep covert with the woodcock,
all lie low from the echo
   and the booming of the guns.
Fox red on rock keeps lookout
on the horsemen’s hurly-burly
and the woman by the wayside
   lamenting scattered geese.
But now the woods are levelled
let us leave familiar landmarks
since, Séan, my friend, it’s over,
   the game is up and gone.

[…]
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I recently looked up the word ipecac (an emetic), which turns out to be short for ipecacuanha, and found that although the OED’s ancient (published 1900) entry gives this etymology:

< Portuguese ipecacuanha /ipekaˈkwanja/ , < Tupi-Guarani ipe-kaa-guéne.

Notes
According to Cavalcanti, cited by Skeat Trans. Philol. Soc. 1885, 91, the meaning of ipe-kaa-guene is ‘low or creeping plant causing vomit’. The word is said to be a descriptive appellation applied to several medicinal plants, the proper name of the Cephaëlis, which produces the ipecacuanha of commerce, being poaya.

…the currently accepted one is much more interesting; Wiktionary:

From Brazilian Portuguese ipecacuanha, from Old Tupi ypekakûãîa, from ypeka (“duck”) +‎ akûãîa (“penis”).

Also, my wife and I watched Sentimental Value last night; it’s a terrific movie, and all the acting is good, but Renate Reinsve is spectacularly good and should get all the prizes. My question, of course, is about her surname; this site says “The name is derived from the Old Norse elements reinn, meaning reindeer, and sve, which can be associated with to be or to dwell,” but there doesn’t appear to be an Old Norse sve, and I’m wondering if anybody has any better information.

The French writer and scholar Chloé Thomas has a remarkable essay in Arts of War and Peace called A Wilderness of Mirrors: Eliot, Max Frisch and the C.I.A. that starts:

In 1964, Swiss author Max Frisch published the novel Mein Name sei Gantenbein, commonly regarded as one of his greatest achievements. The title, using a form of subjunctive associated with reported speech, which knows no strict English or French equivalent, translates literally as Let’s pretend my name is Gantenbein. Although difficult to summarize, the novel revolves around an unnamed narrator who, after having been left by his wife, invents a number of fictitious characters to help him account for his experience, “trying out stories as if they were clothes” […]

The 1966 French translation of the book was published as Le Désert des miroirs […], a title that, at first glance, seems to be meant as an echo to the “mirroring” theme of the novel, with its interplay of identities, at least one explicit mirror scene (when Gantenbein actually tries out clothes in a shop), and an experiment with mirroring names in an Oriental tale made up by Gantenbein for Lila, with characters named Ali and Alil. Gantenbein’s French translator was André Coeuroy. […] The French title, however, stems directly, it seems, from the one that had been chosen for the English translation by Michael Bullock, which appeared in 1965, a year before the French version: The Wilderness of Mirrors […]. It was T. S. Eliot, obviously, who provided Frisch’s novel with both its English and, indirectly, French titles. Here is the passage from “Gerontion” from which it was taken, towards the end of the poem:

These with a thousand small deliberations
Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,
Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,
With pungent sauces, multiply variety
In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,
Suspend its operations, will the weevil
Delay? […] (Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays 38)

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I was rereading one of my favorite Pasternak poems, Зеркало (Mirror) (that webpage has the original Russian alongside an abridged translation by Peter France and Jon Stallworthy), when I stuck on an unusual word I had hurried over before in my attempt to make sense of the whole thing: саднят [sádnyat]. I had scribbled ‘smart, burn’ above it in my copy, which was all I really needed in context, but what kind of verb was it, and where was it from? Before proceeding with those issues, though, I’ll quote the relevant section from Jean Marie Schultz, “Pasternak’s ‘Zerkalo’” (Russian Literature XIII [1983]: 81-100), as a sample of how much work it is to figure out what’s going on in his early poetry:

Here the verb “sadnit'” compacts two distinct sensations, one tactile and one olfactory. First, with its meaning of “to smart” or “to burn”, “sadnit'” indicates the feeling that an abrasion might produce; thus, the verb conveys the sensation the trees (if personified) might be expected to have as their sap flows out over the broken limbs. Second, that the trees burn the air with their sap relates possibly to the very pungent odor that pine resin from newly broken limbs has as it fills the air, particularly after a rain (VIII:iii) when all smells are intensified.⁴

fn 4: Sap is a tree’s natural antiseptic, and the burning sensation produced by the application of an antiseptic to a wound is well known. However, it must be remembered that this is a humanly perceived feeling so that we have here, as throughout the poem, the human experience imposed upon a seemingly impersonal description. Furthermore, the allusion to the “medicinal” function of sap prefigures the medicine, “lekarstvo”, introduced in the next stanza. Likewise, the underlying evocation of the sap’s odor here also works toward the development of a sub-motif revolving around scent (V:iii).

OK, so what’s the story with the verb? Well, Wiktionary provides help with its usage;
it occurs in collocations like но́гу са́днит [nógu sádnit] ‘my leg is sore’ and на се́рдце са́днит [na sérdce sádnit] ‘my heart hurts.’ But what’s really interesting is the etymology, given in Russian Wiktionary: it’s derived from Old Russian садьно ‘wound,’ which in turn goes back to Proto-Slavic *saditi, from Proto-Indo-European *sodéyeti, causative of *sed- ‘to sit.’ The English verb sit is from that root, but cast your eyes down that page and see how much else is! The thematic root present *séd-e-ti gives Proto-Celtic *sedeti, which with a couple of prefixes gives us Welsh eistedd and hence eisteddfod; the -ye- present *sédyeti gives Greek ἕζομαι (as well as sit); *séd-os ~ *séd-es gives Welsh hedd ‘peace’; *sod-ó- gives Proto-Slavic *xodъ and Greek ὁδός; *sōd-o- gives Proto-Germanic *sōtą ‘soot’ (“reflecting the nature of soot as accumulated particles that sit on surfaces”); *sōd-u-s gives Proto-Slavic *sadъ ‘grove; garden’ (hence Russian сад, which also features in the poem); *sod-yo-m ‘seat’ gives Old Irish suide and Latin solium; *sed-lo- ‘seat’ gives Proto-Germanic *setlaz; *ni-sd-ós ‘nest’ (with zero grade) gives Proto-Balto-Slavic *nísda (leading to Russian гнездо) and Proto-Germanic *nestą (leading to nest)… well, I could spend all day lost in the web of connections. In Russian alone, the root is the ultimate source of посадить/сажать ‘to seat, plant,’ сиделка ‘(sick-)nurse,’ седло ‘saddle,’ село ‘village,’ сажа ‘soot,’ досадный ‘annoying,’ наседка ‘brood-hen,’ население ‘population,’ осадки ‘precipitation,’ осада ‘siege,’ председатель ‘chairman, president,’ расселина ‘crevice, fissure,’ сосед ‘neighbor,’ ссадина ‘scratch,’ усадьба ‘farmstead, country estate,’ and всадник ‘rider, horseman’ (as well as many others). This is the kind of thing that made me want to be a historical linguist.

Louis Menand’s recent NYkr review essay (archived; ostensibly a review of Stefan Fatsis’s Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary) has some good things to say, but on the whole it irritated me, so (as is my wont) I will share my irritation here. Mind you, this is the same Menand who so sharply took Lynne Truss to task for her idiocy about language, so it’s not that he’s ignorant, in this essay he just doesn’t pay attention to what he’s writing beyond making sure it sounds clever. At any rate, I’m going to go through and pick out idiocies to flog, much as I did with Simon Winchester back in 2004; I do not regard Menand as a terrible writer tout court, like the egregious Winchester, but that’s all the more reason he shouldn’t have perpetrated this stuff.

There was good money in the word business. Then came the internet and, with it, ready-to-hand answers to all questions lexical. If you are writing on a computer, it’s almost impossible to misspell a word anymore. It’s hard even to misplace a comma, although students do manage it.

What? Words are misspelled and commas misplaced all the time; I guess what he means is that if you care about such things and pay attention to the squiggly red lines, you can avoid many mistakes, but if you care about such things you weren’t going to make many mistakes in the first place. Has he ever looked at internet sites other than carefully curated ones like newyorker.com?

As Fatsis tells the story of his lexicographical Bildung, he makes genial and informed digressions into controversies in the dictionary racket, some possibly overfamiliar, like how to label ethnic slurs and whether to include “fuck,” others more current, like the crusade to come up with a gender-neutral third-person-singular pronoun (after many failed launches, we appear to be stuck on “they,” which seems kind of lame) and whether or not large language models can create a dictionary (so far, not). He has a section on our contemporary speech wars, showing that many of the most radioactive words—“woke,” “safe space,” “microaggression,” “anti-racism”—are much older than we might assume.

We’ll let the pointlessly exotic Bildung slide, but what on earth does he mean by “which seems kind of lame”? Does he mean it seems like a normal word? Yeah, that’s the point. And what does he mean by “radioactive”? Is it just a fancy would-be synonym for, say, “contentious”? Frankly, the only thing that unites those words is that they were created by progressives, which, well, I will be charitable and not be mean about. But I wrinkle my brow.
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You know how sometimes you look at a word or phrase you’ve known all your life and suddenly wonder about it? That happened to me with by and large, and it turns out to have such an unexpected background I thought I’d post it. OED (entry from 1933):

1. Nautical. To the wind (within six points; cf. by prep. A.I.ii.7) and off it.

1669 Thus you see the ship handled in fair weather and foul, by and learge.
S. Sturmy, Mariners Magazine 17
[…]

2. In one direction and another, all ways; now esp., in a general aspect, without entering into details, on the whole.

1707 Tho’ he trys every way, both by and large, to keep up with his Leader.
E. Ward, Wooden World Dissected 35

1769 Miss Betsey, a charming frigate, that will do honour to our country, if you take her by and large.
in Southern Lit. Mess. vol. XVII. 183/2
[…]

The relevant senses are by 1.d. “Nautical. Close to the wind. Chiefly and earliest in full and by” (c1500 “What worde to sey, he [sc. the loodsman] is in doute, Eyther warae the lof, or ells full and by”; 2001 “With a foul wind, the boat was sailed full and by, and estimates made of the deviation from the direct track”) and large III.18. “Nautical. Of a wind: crossing the line of the ship’s course in a favourable direction, esp. on the beam or quarter” (1578 “Hauing a large winde, we kept our course vppon our saide voyage”; 1984 “With the wind large, and the yard braced in a little, it [sc. the tack] lay directly under the yard”). I expect AntC already knew this, but nautical terms are mare incognitum to me.

Another of Nick Nicholas’s Facebook reports from Greece (cf. A Melancholy Visit) points out (typos silently corrected):

Greece is a less secular country than those of the Anglosphere, so today is Epiphany and tomorrow is St John’s Day, not merely the sixth and the seventh of January. Feast days still mark the calendar here, like they used to in England. Candlemas and Michaelmas weren’t just made up to make university calendars sound like something out of Harry Potter, they correspond to της Υπαπαντής και του Άη Μιχάλη.

I had heard of Candlemas but could never remember what it was and why it was called that; per OED (entry published 1888, not fully revised) it’s “The feast of the purification of the Virgin Mary (or presentation of Christ in the Temple) celebrated with a great display of candles,” it’s celebrated on February 2nd, and the word goes back to Old English (“Her on þissum geare Swegen geendode his dagas to candel mæssan iii nonas Febr,” Anglo-Saxon Chronicle). But I especially wondered about the Greek name, Υπαπαντή; Wiktionary says:

Derived from Ancient Greek ὑπαπάντησις (hupapántēsis) “encounter”, variant of ὑπάντησις (hupántēsis), from the verb ἀπαντάω (apantáō), ἀντάω (antáō) “to meet”.

And this variant is in LSJ as ὑπαπάντ-ησις , εως, ἡ ; its only occurrence as listed there is in an inscription from ii/i B.C. But what an odd word! I understand haplo(lo)gy, but why add in a syllable? What happened to efficiency in communication?

Bernardo Bertolucci is one of the greatest Italian directors; everybody loves his The Conformist (Il conformista), but nobody seems to care about The Spider’s Stratagem (Strategia del ragno), which he made immediately afterwards and which blew me away when I saw it in New York decades ago. Last October, irritated by its unavailability on DVD/Blu-ray, I finally gave in and rented it from Prime Video and was as impressed as before. It’s about a guy who returns to the fictional town of Tara, where his father was killed in 1936, and tries to untangle what happened; what’s important for our purposes is that there’s a scene almost a minute long in which two townspeople have an animated discussion in Emilian (the subtitle says “Emilian dialect”), which of course excited me. I haven’t posted about it because I recorded the passage on my phone and kept hoping I’d be able to decipher enough to quote at least a phrase or two, but it’s defeated me, so I mention it in the hope that someone out there will have access to a screenplay in Italian or some other source that reproduces what the guys are saying.

The Italian Wikipedia article Lingua emiliana says:

L’unico film interamente girato in una varietà emiliana è L’uomo che verrà (2009) di Giorgio Diritti, che fa ricorso al dialetto bolognese nella sua versione originale. L’amministrazione comunale di Piacenza, con un finanziamento della Regione Emilia-Romagna, ha invece prodotto I strass e la seda (2020), la prima serie web in emiliano, i cui attori si esprimono in diversi dialetti del Piacentino.

(Note the almost meaningless “invece,” which Italians toss into sentences as if adding salt to pasta water; I complained about Ann Goldstein’s translating it as “instead” here.) I think they should at least mention the Bertolucci, surely the most prominent showcase that form of Italian has had. And it may be worth mentioning that The Spider’s Stratagem is based on “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” [Tema del traidor y del héroe] by Borges.

I’ve long been a fan of Roger Ebert’s film criticism, so how could I resist “The Thinking Molecules of Titan”? Chaz Ebert (his widow) introduces it thus:

In honor of World UFO Day we are reprinting Roger’s unfinished science fiction story about a phenomenon on Saturn’s moon, Titan. In 2013, I invited readers to write an ending to Roger’s tale and we got so many good ones that I asked our Far Flung Correspondent Krishna Shenoi to illustrate all of the finalists. They are also being reprinted today in a separate Table of Contents on this website. Please note that the version of Roger’s short story printed below is slightly altered in that it contains a couple of sentences added from a second version he wrote.

I know lots of Hatters are sf fans and will appreciate both the story and the artist’s rendering of the “cover of Amazing Stories from the Gernsback era” mentioned therein; furthermore, the central question of what kind of pattern might be coming from Titan resonates with the themes used by Peter Watts in his novels Blindsight (see this post) and Echopraxia (which bulbul gave me and which I am reading with great enjoyment now). What is communication, anyway? Something to ponder.

Oh, and here’s an amusing bit:

“An act of God,” said Alex, needling Regan. He knew Regan was a Unitarian and so would both reject God and maintain an open mind in the subject.