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A reader sent me a quote from a post at the blog Doomsday Machines investigating the origin of the phrase “will the survivors [of nuclear war] envy the dead?” It comes from a speech Khrushchev gave at a Soviet-Hungarian Friendship Meeting that was reprinted the next day in Pravda; the relevant bit goes:

I wonder if the authors of these assertions know that if all the nuclear warheads are detonated the earth’s atmosphere will be so contaminated that nobody can tell in what condition the survivors will be and whether they will not envy the dead. Yes, yes, comrades, that is how the question stands.

The blog post continues:

The exact, original Russian from the speech seems to be: “в каком состоянии будут оставшиеся в живых люди — не будут ли они завидовать мёртвым?” — literally, “of the conditions of the surviving people — won’t they envy the dead?” […]

Did Khrushchev get the phrase from [Herman Kahn’s 1960 book On Thermonuclear War]? I have no idea. I have seen it speculated that the Russian version of the phrase is more directly traced to a particular translation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, but tracing Russian origins of a phrase go beyond my ken.

My correspondent said “Naturally the last sentence triggered the thought, this is a perfect question for Language Hat.” He came to the right place, because although there are a number of Russian translations of Treasure Island, which was wildly popular in Europe as soon as it appeared (the first Russian version came out in 1886), I figured the place to look would be in the most popular Soviet translation, the 1935 one by Nikolai Chukovsky, Kornei’s son (he appears as a five-year-old in this LH post about his dad’s diary), and sure enough, I hit pay dirt — at the end of chapter 20 we find (bold added):

— Вы для меня вот как этот плевок! — крикнул он. — Через час я подогрею ваш старый блокгауз, как бочку рома. Смейтесь, разрази вас гром, смейтесь! Через час вы будете смеяться по-иному. А те из вас, кто останется в живых, позавидуют мертвым!

Stevenson’s original:

“There!” he cried. “That’s what I think of ye. Before an hour’s out, I’ll stove in your old block house like a rum puncheon. Laugh, by thunder, laugh! Before an hour’s out, ye’ll laugh upon the other side. Them that die’ll be the lucky ones.”

A very satisfying rummage through literary-quote history; thanks, Duncan!

I’m reading Agatha Christie’s Five Little Pigs (called a masterpiece by Geoffrey O’Brien; see this post) and I was struck by the final phrase in this paragraph:

Here, in a small cubic space, existed Miss Cecilia Williams, in a room that was bedroom, sitting room, dining room and, by judicious use of the gas ring, kitchen – a kind of cubbyhole attached to it contained a quarter-length bath and the usual offices.

I deduced what those offices must be, but I was unfamiliar with that use of the word; the OED (entry revised 2004) enlightened me:

7.a. In plural (formerly also occasionally in singular). The parts of a house, or buildings attached to a house, specially devoted to household work or service, or to storage, etc.; esp. the kitchen and rooms connected with it, as pantry, scullery, cellars, laundry, etc.; (also) the stables, outhouses, barns, and cowsheds of a farm.
[…]

7.b. In singular or plural. A privy, a lavatory. In later use frequently as usual offices. Cf. ease n. III.11b. Now somewhat archaic or euphemistic.

1727 The Grand Mystery..proposals for erecting 500 Publick Offices of Ease in London and Westminster.
(title)

1871 The forty-five big and little lodgers in the house were provided with a single office in the corner of the yard.
E. Jenkins, Ginx’s Baby (1879) i. 9

1890 The boys’ offices should be provided with doors.
in P. Horn, Village Educ. in 19th Century Oxfordshire (1979) 153

1909 Three reception, four bedrooms, kitchen, and usual offices.
Daily Graphic 26 July 16/1 (advertisement)

1948 Mildred had been too shy when Adam, indicating a door, had said, ‘“The usual offices”..,’ to open the door and look in.
J. Cannan, Little I Understood ix. 124

1951 I went to the usual office at the end of the passage.
N. Marsh, Opening Night ix. 220

1957 The bathroom’s to the right and the usual offices next to it.
J. Braine, Room at Top i. 13

1980 Aft of the lobby..is the dining saloon for the passengers with the offices of necessity on either side of it.
W. Golding, Rites of Passage i. 6

Even if it’s now “somewhat archaic or euphemistic,” I’m surprised I hadn’t run into it (of course it’s possible I’ve simply forgotten, as I had forgotten that Latin officium is a contraction of opificium); are you familiar with this quaint expression?

I posted my last entry in this series exactly a year ago; now it’s time to survey my haphazard 2025 reading. I started off the year with Simenon’s Maigret and the Old Lady, because we’d seen a television adaptation; it was as enjoyable as you expect Simenon to be. My Russian reading began with Alexander Veltman’s Виргиния, или Поездка в Россию [Virginie, or a journey to Russia] (LH) and left off there for quite a while (I’ve been finding it hard to choose novels that hold my attention). Because I was watching Jacques Rivette’s (very long) Joan the Maid (Jeanne la pucelle), I found myself reading Helen Castor’s excellent Joan of Arc: A History, which starts with Agincourt and presents Joan in the context of the Hundred Years’ War and the complex politics of her time rather than just tramp over the well-trodden ground of her vision, rise, and fall, and I finally got a decent sense of that stuff. (As it happens, my wife and I are now watching Rivette’s four-hour La Belle Noiseuse, which I last saw when it came out in the early ’90s, so I’ll probably be reading the Balzac story it’s based on.) I read Paul Werth’s 1837: Russia’s Quiet Revolution, which didn’t rock my world but was enjoyable and informative. My wife and I chose Olivia Manning’s School for Love for our nighttime reading and enjoyed it (LH). Because I loved Terence Davies’ The Deep Blue Sea (I strongly recommend his autobiographical films Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, which are even better), I read its source material, Terence Rattigan’s play of the same name, which I liked (we talked about Rattigan here). I started Mbougar Sarr’s La plus secrète mémoire des hommes and greatly enjoyed it (LH), but for whatever reason set it aside — I hope to get back to it someday.

I liked Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States so much I gave a copy to my history-minded grandson for his birthday; it’s a great help in figuring out how we got where we are today. For Russian reading, I turned to a couple of stories by Leonid Andreev (LH), then Gorky’s The Lower Depths (LH). My wife and I read Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle and liked it a lot (I wrote about the title here but for some reason never reported on the book). I started Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here but gave up on it — Lewis just isn’t a good enough writer to hold my attention. I read Zamyatin’s На куличках [The back of beyond] (LH), and as always when I read something of his I think “I really have to read more Zamyatin.” I read Maria Rybakova’s Анна Гром и ее призрак [Anna Grom and her specter], about a Russian émigré and suicide in Berlin who writes letters from her ghostly postmortem existence to the man she loved; I started out liking it but became disillusioned — as I wrote Lizok:
[Read more…]

Waseda University has a press release, “Phonetic or morpholexical issues? New study reveals L2 French ambiguity,” that begins:

Ambiguous speech production is a common challenge for learners of a second language (L2), but identifying whether the problem lies in pronunciation or deeper linguistic processing is not always straightforward. A new study conducted by Professor Sylvain Detey from Waseda University, with Dr. Verdiana De Fino from IRIT, UT3, University of Toulouse & Archean Labs, France, and Dr. Lionel Fontan, Head of Archean Labs, France, sheds light on this distinction. Their study was published on October 30, 2025, in the journal Language Testing in Asia.

The researchers sought to determine whether ambiguous speech errors made by Japanese learners of French could be better categorized through a combined phonetic and morpholexical assessment approach. By “morpholexical,” they refer to errors related to the way learners select and form words—such as choosing the correct verb ending, preposition, or gender marker—rather than just pronunciation mistakes. They designed an experimental protocol where learners’ utterances were evaluated by native French speakers for perceived ambiguity between word forms.

Using an innovative rating method and perceptual analysis, the team explored how certain cues in speech, such as vowel quality or gender-marking consonants, can lead to multiple interpretations. The results revealed that ambiguity in L2 speech cannot always be explained by phonetic inaccuracy alone; rather, morphological processing plays a significant role, especially when learners attempt to utter complex word forms or inflectional patterns. “Our findings indicate that some speech errors stem not only from misarticulation but also from confusion at the morpholexical level,” says Prof. Detey.

The study provides empirical evidence that calls for a shift in how L2 pronunciation and lexical access are taught. Instead of isolating pronunciation drills from vocabulary and morphology exercises, educators may need to integrate them more holistically. Such integration could help learners overcome the hidden ambiguities that occur when sound and meaning interact.

Interesting stuff; I don’t remember where I came across the link, so if someone out there sent it to me, I thank them. (The paper is open access.)

Courtesy of LH’s favorite archivist, Leslie Fields (e.g.), Juliane Tiemann’s “Archival Notations of the Norwegian Charter Material” (Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies, Vol. 12, No. 14, 2015):

Medieval Nordic charters have received increasing attention in digitization projects in recent years due to their multifaceted roles in national histories, legal traditions, and cultural practices. A charter, which is a legal document, was originally a single-leaf parchment (or paper in later periods) with a recto (hair side) and a verso or dorse (flesh side). To prevent forgery and verify the authenticity of the document’s contents, various techniques were used to add visual and material authentication, for example, in the form of seals or chirographs. Such prominent characteristics set charters apart from other types of manuscripts. Furthermore, unlike other medieval sources, these documents are typically dated and geographically located.

However, I argue that while scholarship has extensively explored the linguistic and textual contents found on the recto of these documents, as well as the historical contexts of charters, there remains a significant gap in the analysis of textual additions made by later owners of these objects. These textual additions found in the blank spaces on the dorse of these objects are largely traces of documentary and archival practices in the early modern and modern period. These practices include numbering the objects and summarizing their content, often containing multiple layers resulting from reorganization of archival materials and changes in ownership. Due to the lack of scholarship focusing on these “silent” voices in the material, their significance in understanding the complex lifecycles of historic documents held in archival repositories has been largely overlooked. These additions can contribute critical provenance information and reveal how charter materials were handled and preserved, as well as details on revisiting earlier legal matters over time. In this article, I explore this issue with a particular focus on Norwegian materials. […]

[Read more…]

Frequent commenter Y sent me Robert H. Lowie’s linguistic memoir “A Case of Bilingualism” (Word 1.3 [1945]: 249-259) saying “This is a fun paper, from a famous figure in American anthropology. I think you’ll like it”; I do indeed, and I think you will too. Here are some choice bits:

I was born in Vienna in 1883. My father was a Hungarian from the vicinity of Stuhlweissenburg, south-west of Budapest. In that section of the country German had remained dominant, so that he learnt Magyar as a foreign tongue. My mother was Viennese, and, accordingly, High German was the language of our household. My father’s was a generalized South German form, my mother’s richly flavored with the racy vernacular locutions which even educated Austrians affect. Typical are such words as Bissgurn ( “termagant”), dalket (“awkward, gauche”), hopatatschet (“supercilious”). She was capable of expressive original creations, such as verhallipanzt (“entangled, confused”), which appears in no Idiotikon Vindobonense I have been able to consult. Again, like many educated Austrians, she was somewhat easy-going on certain points of grammar, substituting the dative for the genitive with während and wegen. On the other hand, her father, a physician, austerely criticised such derelictions when I indulged in them. It was he, too, who urged his daughter to keep up her children’s German in America since we were likely enough to learn English there.

When we left Vienna to join my father in New York, where he had preceded us by three years, I was ten and had just passed the entrance-examination for a Gymnasium, my sister being two and a half years younger. We immediately entered public schools and rapidly acquired fluency in English. My mother, obeying her father’s injunction, maintained German as the sole medium of communication between parents and children, though my sister and I soon came to speak to each other more frequently in English. The family intimates were all Austrians and Germans, and though our morning newspaper was English, in the evening and on Sunday we regularly bought the Staatszeitung. The Sunday edition of that paper had a puzzle-column, over which we pored for hours, winning several prizes in the form of German books. We occasionally went to the two German theatres and in later years visited German societies. We read the classics and the serial modern novels that appeared in our Sunday Staatszeitung.

Nevertheless, our German could not possibly develop as it would have in Austria. The range of topics discussed with our parents and their friends did not coincide with that thrust upon us in the classroom and in association with age-mates. It was not as a matter of course, but through later deliberate effort, that I learnt gleichschenkliges Dreieck, Herrentiere, and Beschleunigung as the equivalents, respectively, of “isosceles triangle,” “primates,” and “acceleration.” Similarly, dealings with storekeepers were largely in English. Important, too, was the fact that there were, of course, no compulsory school-compositions to be scrutinized by the Argus-eyes of a German pedagogue. […]

[Read more…]

Geoffrey O’Brien, in an NYRB review (February 8, 2024; archived) of several books on mystery novels, concludes with some thoughts on patterns in such stories that I thought were worth bringing here:

Such a book was a city held in the hand, a portable labyrinth. Every plot was also a geography, even if the action was confined to a single room or, in the end, to a single exchanged glance, as in Agatha Christie’s masterpiece Five Little Pigs (1942). The words were a diagram. To read them was to advance into different spaces, sensing a continuity of passageways from one book to another. At every turn signs could be detected, marks hovering in the air around faces, housefronts, patterns of rubble and erosion denoting a shifting border between safety and terror, free movement and confinement. It was a lot like moving through an actual city, newly conscious of such borders, recognizing their scuffed surfaces almost everywhere and finally learning to mistrust even the shiniest and most thoroughly sanitized wards.

Glimpses of space flickered in patterns that were like music. The music reverberates through Arthur Conan Doyle in “The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb”:

It was a labyrinth of an old house, with corridors, passages, narrow winding staircases, and little low doors, the thresholds of which were hollowed out by the generations who had crossed them…the plaster was peeling off the walls, and the damp was breaking through in green, unhealthy blotches.

Or Raymond Chandler in The Big Sleep:

A building in which the smell of stale cigar butts would be the cleanest odor…the fire stairs hadn’t been swept in a month…crusts and fragments of greasy newspaper, matches, a gutted imitation-leather pocketbook.

[Read more…]

Or so says Emmanuel Oliveiro; Ruth Schuster reports for Haaretz (archived):

Decades after a number of unknown alphabets were discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and against all odds, Emmanuel Oliveiro of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands believes he has cracked the “impossible” one known as Cryptic B. The code had been considered to be impossible to decipher, mainly because of the sheer paucity of Cryptic B material. All we have are isolated fragments from two scrolls called 4Q362 and 4Q363, and a few spots in other scrolls where scribes briefly introduced Cryptic B in the middle of a Hebrew text, Oliveiro explains, in the journal Dead Sea Discoveries in December.

Oliveiro’s process was based on analysis and intuition, similar to the methodology the scholar Józef Milik used when deciphering Cryptic A in 1955. Both began with assuming that they were dealing with a mono-alphabetic substitution system– where each of the 22 letters of Hebrew or Aramaic is consistently replaced with a specific cryptic sign (as in – say A is always be replaced by $). […]

But the key breakthrough was suddenly realizing that a sequence of five letters in a Cryptic B fragment might represent the five-letter Hebrew word Yisrael, spelled yod, sin, resh, aleph, lamed. It is true that the resh did not survive the eons intact. But looking at the high-resolution image of the age-darkened fragment – the word ישראל (Yisrael) leaps out. “Once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it,” as Oliveiro tells Haaretz by Zoom.

Many more details and images, along with history of the scrolls and their other scripts, at the link; I agree with David Weman, who sent me the link, that the quote at the end is delightful:

So, without certainty, Oliveiro cracked the impenetrable. “I told my friends and wife that I am going to try this and they’re like, you could be stuck here for 40 years and never crack the code,” he says. “And what do you hope to find anyway, a secret felafel recipe? But once I saw it – I think it was quite fast.” How fast? About two months to cross the desert of Cryptic B and see Yisrael.

Thanks, David!

OK, I’m an addict — as much as I tell myself I should branch out and find new authors to explore, whenever I finish a Russian novel and am at a loss as to what to read next I always seem to find myself reaching for my complete Bunin. I’m now most of the way through his last collection, Темные аллеи, translated by Richard Hare in 1949 as Dark Avenues and in 2008 by Hugh Aplin under the same title, and I hate the thought of having no more new Bunin to read, but of course I’ll just go back and reread my favorites. Anyway, I recently finished Генрих [Genrikh] and wanted to share one of his splendid winding sentences that also happens to have a couple of interesting terms I had to look up:

Был Земмеринг и вся заграничная праздничность горного полдня, левое жаркое окно в вагоне-ресторане, букетик цветов, аполлинарис и красное вино «Феслау» на ослепительно-белом столике возле окна и ослепительно-белый полуденный блеск снеговых вершин, восстававших в своем торжественно-радостном облачении в райское индиго неба, рукой подать от поезда, извивавшегося по обрывам над узкой бездной, где холодно синела зимняя, еще утренняя тень.

Hare, who calls the story “Henry,” renders it:

Then came Zemmering and the whole festive air of a foreign mountain resort; he sat by the warm window in the restaurant car with a bunch of flowers, Apollinaris and a bottle of red wine on a dazzling white table, the dazzling white midday glitter of the snow-covered peaks standing out majestically against the indigo blue paradise of the sky, while the train wound along across narrow precipices, wrapped in bluish wintry early morning shadows.

That reads well, but he’s left out the левое (‘left’) and the «Феслау», I don’t think восстававших в can mean ‘standing out against’ but has to be ‘rising up into,’ and he’s gotten the final bit wrong — see Aplin below for a better rendering.

And Aplin:

There was Zemmering and all the foreign festiveness of midday in the mountains, a hot left-hand window in the restaurant car, a little bunch of flowers, Apollinaris water and the red wine Feslau on the blindingly white table beside the window, and the blindingly white midday brilliance of the snowy peaks, rising in their solemnly joyous vestments up into the heavenly indigo of the sky within touching distance of the train, which wound along precipices above a narrow abyss, where the wintry shade, still of the morning, was coldly blue.

(Both translators, oddly, get Земмеринг wrong — it’s Semmering, which shouldn’t have been that difficult.) I had never heard of Apollinaris water, but it was easy to google up (Wikipedia: “Apollinaris is a naturally sparkling mineral water from a spring in Bad Neuenahr, Germany. Discovered in 1852, it was popularised in England and on the Continent and became the leading table-water of its time until about World War II. There are many references to it in high and popular culture.”); «Феслау» gave me more trouble, but I finally figured out it was Vöslauer, an alternate name for Blauer Portugieser — it should really be Фёслау (as here), but of course Russian no longer bothers with ё.

The story itself starts as a sort of romantic comedy: our hero Glebov, leaving Moscow for foreign parts, says farewell to the teenage Nadya in his hotel room and then to the slinky Lee [or, per Hare, inexplicably, Ly] in the train itself — both are jealous of all his other women, and Lee actually tries to open the door to the next compartment to make sure he hasn’t got another woman in there — and then when she leaves, sure enough Glebov unlocks the door and there is in fact another woman in there, his true love Elena Genrikhovna, a journalist who signs her stories Genrikh. It ends tragically, like almost all the stories in the collection. But I have to point out a Russian idiom both translators missed: when Lee tries the door and finds it locked, she says “Ну, счастлив твой бог!” This is literally “Well, your god is happy/lucky,” but it means “lucky for you” or “thank your lucky stars.” Hare went with “Well, God grant you happiness!” and Aplin with “Well, your God’s a lucky one.” Note to translators: learn those idioms!

Trevor Joyce has introduced me to John Taylor (1578 – 1653), who dubbed himself the Water Poet: “He spent much of his life as a Thames waterman, a member of the guild of boatmen that ferried passengers across the River Thames in London, in the days when the London Bridge was the only passage between the banks. His occupation was his gateway into the literary society of London, as he ferried patrons, actors, and playwrights across the Thames to the Bankside theatres.” In his e-mail, Trevor quoted this impressive passage from “his 1621 work Taylor’s Motto, which included a list of then-current card games and diversions”:

The prodigall’s estate, like to a flux,
The Mercer, Draper, and the Silkman sucks:
The Tailor, Millainer, Dogs, Drabs and Dice,
Trey-trip, or Passage, or The most-at-thrice.
At Irish, Tick tack, Doublets, Draughts or Chesse,
He flings his money free with carelessnesse:
At Novum, Mainchance, Mischance (chuse ye which),
At One and thirty, or at Poor and rich,
Ruffe, slam, Trump, whisk, hole, Sant, New-cut.
Unto the keeping of foure Knaves he’le put
His whole estate, at Loadum, or at Gleeke,
At Tickle-me-quickly, he’s a merry Greeke;
At Primefisto, Post and payre, Primero,
Maw, Whip-her-ginny, he’s a lib’rall Hero;
At My-sow-pigg’d, and (reader never doubt ye)
He’s skill’d in all games, except Looke about ye.
Bowles, shove-groat, tennis, no game comes amis,
His purse a nurse for any body is;
Caroches, Coaches, and Tobacconists,
All sorts of people freely from his fists
His vaine expenses daily sucke and soake,
And he himselfe sucks only drinke and smoake.
And thus the Prodigall, himselfe alone,
Gives sucke to thousands, and himselfe sucks none.

Click through to the Wikipedia article I linked to for explanations of many of these, e.g. Primifisto: “Primo visto, Primavista, Prima-vista, Primi-vist, Primiuiste, Primofistula, or even Primefisto, is a 16th-century gambling card game fashionable c. 1530–1640. Very little is known about this game, but judging by the etymology of the words used to describe the many local variants of the game, it appears to be one of Italian origin.” As for the connotations of “suck” in his day, further affiant sayeth naught. Thanks, Trevor!