The NY Times has published Quiz: Do You Speak 2025? (“An assortment of absurd, useful and funny words and phrases entered the vernacular this year”; archived), which goes from 1. “Imagine you’re wearing a new outfit. What culinary term would you not want someone to use about your appearance?” to 11. “In 2025, what phrase might one use to describe entering a state of focus in order to achieve one’s goals?” I got 7 out of 11 (“You more or less speak 2025”), but that was with a lot of luck (including the fact that I just the other day saw a story about “the Italian brain rot crew” and happened to remember the names, which are memorable). I know it’s fluff, but hey, it’s about language; actually, I might not have posted it if it weren’t for the inclusion of Le poisson Steve, which both my wife and I found irresistible.
I won’t make a separate post out of it because it will mean something only to Russian-speakers, but Anatoly at Avva has a very interesting post about how the word обыденный changed its meaning from ‘done/made in a single day’ (which apparently was an important concept in folk culture) to its current sense of ‘ordinary, commonplace, everyday.’ There’s material on etymology and on Ukrainian and Belarusian equivalents, as well as splendid examples of peevery (Yakov Grot: «обыденный, как ясно показывает его происхождение, может значить только однодневный»).
Also, let us all join Joel at Far Outliers in his “profound gratitude and appreciation to the doctors, nurses, technicians, and orderlies of Wojewódzki Szpital Zespolony w Kielcach for saving my life during my sudden blogging hiatus this month.” Click through for his harrowing experience.
1/11. I only speak 1453.
Huzza to the Wojewódzki Szpital Zespolony w Kielzach and all who sail with her.
Seconded.
If that had been in a Brit hospital, there might be several tongues the guardian angels/nurses might speak; but Polish?
Polish was the third language, after English and Spanish, on signs in the room where my brother was hospitalized in Brooklyn recently. No idea why Polish; I would have expected Chinese or maybe Yiddish, since the hospital is on the border between Bed-Stuy and Williamsburg.
Thanks for visiting, fellow Hatters. A Polish hospital ward is definitely an immersive language-learning environment. One of my linguistics professors, Derek Bickerton, used to say a prison was one of the most highly motivating and therefore effective language-learning environments. A hospital ward is pretty good, too, at least for learning to follow orders.
Many of the younger RNs could manage some English. One English usage I couldn’t help correcting was when two different RNs told me to “sit down” when I was flat on my back after an EKG. I reflexively corrected them to “sit up”!
One unexpected English speaker was an overnight skeleton-crew janitress who helped clean up after my botched adult Pampers change during my long night of four liters of laxative-laced water in preparation for a colonoscopy. She told me, “I don’t have time for this shit!” Which led me to think she was a recent, possibly Ukrainian, immigrant who was working far beneath her capabilities! That was the night I learned how to fasten my own Pampers!
Kielcach
Jailtacht “IRA members learning Irish in prison”
Kielcach
Fixed, thanks.
Jailtacht
Made me laugh!
@ktschwarz: The location you mention is pretty close to Greenpoint, which has NYC’s largest concentration of Polish speakers, so that seems likely to have been a factor.
The main website of the umbrella NYC Health + Hospitals organization (all public hospitals in the city, basically) currently lets you toggle from the English page to alternative content in Albanian, Arabic, Bengali, Chinese (simplified characters), Chinese (traditional characters), French, Haitian Kreyol, Hindi, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Urdu.
ETA: By contrast the website for the NYC public schools drops Polish (and also Hindi) from that list but adds Ukrainian and Uzbek. I don’t know whether there’s some rationale, like the city’s current population of LEP Polish-speakers tending to be more elderly and thus more likely to be hospital patients but less likely to be parents of schoolchildren, or it’s just different bureaucracies making their own judgment calls.
I got maybe one or two of those. (from the archived version). EDIT: mind you, “thirsty” meaning “sexually aroused” is new slang for me.
“What is Gen Alpha’s favorite series of numbers?”
I know that one, it’s 6-7 — but I was not familiar with the term Gen Alpha.
When I was a teenage neurosurgeon at Royal Free in the early 1980’s, virtually all the cleaning and catering staff were Filipino (this was before the characteristic NHS member of staff from the Philippines was a high-quality nurse, as at present.) The signs in the corridors all had Tagalog glosses written on them (but no other languages besides English.) I particularly remember “Huwag maingay”, outside the operating theatres.
huwág ‘don’t’ + maingay ‘noisy’
Huh, and maingay is ma- + ingay ‘noise’:
I love complicated etymologies.
Surely “I was a teenage neurosurgeon” is a worthy entry in the series which also includes “I was a teenage Communist” and “I was a teenage werewolf” etc. etc.
“I Was a Teenage Communist Neurosurgeon Werewolf.” The plot complications write themselves.
It’s not easy being a communist werewolf. There are ideological issues. Not all comrades are understanding.
“Awoooo, comrade — let me at your brain!”
J.W. Brewer : what is remarkable about “I was a teenage Communist”? Probably tens of thousands of people were.
languagehat : interesting.
You’re missing some cultural context.
This would be in the context of 1950’s B-movie America, where the concepts “werewolf” and “communist” were not clearly distinct in the minds of many of the public.
Plus ça change …
languagehat : It’s Christmas now here, happy, I guess.
Hope you’re having a good day!
Nɛ fʋ Bʋriasʋŋ!
the website for the NYC public schools drops Polish (and also Hindi) from that list but adds Ukrainian and Uzbek. I don’t know whether there’s some rationale
i’m not sure how the hospital system makes its choices, but i’m pretty sure the Board of Ed picks languages based on the number of currently enrolled home-speakers. that would definitely bump polish for ukrainian, though maybe only in the last 2 years, since most nyc ukrainians are jewish and historically more inclined to put “russian” on forms that ask about language*. i’m interested in the hindi/uzbek differential, though – especially because as i understand it, most nyc uzbek speakers are bokharian jews, who have also often tended to put “russian” on forms.
.
i think “thirsty” meaning “sexually aroused” is a misunderstanding. “thirsty” as i hear it used (especially among my 20ish to 30something friends) means quite simply “thirsty [for sex]” or “sexually desperate” – filling more or less the semantic territory that “horny” used to hold. i say “used to” because in that same cohort, “horny” has now shifted to mean “sexy”, “sexually arousing/engaging”, “perhaps overly sexual”.
e.g. “i’m sorry for horny-posting on main, i’ve just been so thirsty ever since i saw guillermo del toro’s Frankenstein!”, which could describe the same action as “i’m sorry for posting thirst-traps of guillermo del toro’s Creature – his Frankenstein’s just such a horny movie!”.
.
* stereotypically, that’s because they speak russian more often than ukrainian – as opposed to, say, the east village ukrainian sphere, which resembles the greenpoint polish world in being christian, aging, and shrinking** (despite maintaining a reasonably solid linguistic community). but anecdotally, at least, there’s been a lot of ukrainian-language-learning in brighton beach / little odessa since the russian invasion.
** that, however, may be changing if (i’m not entirely sure) the past two years of war have brought a meaningful number of younger ukrainians into the city.
גיט ניטל אַלעמען!
git nitl alemen!
I think David E. misapprehends 1950’s America. Werewolf-sympathizers and Communist-sympathizers were quite distinct subsets of the national population back then, with minimal overlap. Which via various complex social mechanisms meant that the majority who sympathized with neither nonetheless did not, by and large, conflate them.
Of course it was easier to be a Communist werewolf in the U.S. before the Sino-Soviet split created uncertainties as to which cabal of foreign werewolves you ought to be simpatico with (the Trots had already split off from the CPUSA mainstream but had been notably unsuccessful in attracting werewolves).
languagehat : It’s almost an hour after midnight here, and I’m making kapama — rice, blood sausage, lard, chicken thighs, pork shoulder, white wine, anise seed, allspice, black pepper, pickled cabbage, et cetera for Christmas in a clay pot, layered, in the oven.
@rozele and gut nittel-nakht to you as well (it would be a shonda to use the same transliteration, I think). Leaving aside the issue that many NYC immigrants born in the territory of the former Ukrainian SSR did not in fact have Ukrainian-as-such as their cradle tongue, I think there’s a separate issue that those who are genuinely L1-Ukrainian-speakers will more-often-than-not have enough functional literacy in Russian that already-existing Russian language material would be “close enough for government work,” except recent geopoltical/military developments have made some-but-not-all bureaucrats less likely to pursue the “why-should-we-do-a-Ukrainian-translation-of-this-form/pamphlet-when-y’all-can-read-the-Russian-one” approach, because it seems insensitive. Those in NYC whose L1 is Georgian or maybe-Uzbek are probably easier to still handle with that angle. Which is not, I should hasten to add, necessarily a wicked one but rather a pragmatic one.
“When I was a teenage neurosurgeon” is not remotely the strangest thing I have heard with regards to medicine.
Nobody I know of approximately my own age (pushing fifty) who grew up in Ukraine is not fluent in Russian. Most, but certainly not all, speak Ukrainian. It may be different among younger (or much older) people, but for people of Ukrainian origin born, say, between 1965 and 1985, Russian seems like the most likely language for them to know.
@JWB @Brett: absolutely! it’s not a question of anyone misrepresenting themself – it really is, often, about what a person puts on a form, and that decision’s shaped by all kinds of things, very much including the ones you named.
Frohe Weihnachten!