Jonathon Green has published another of his quarterly updates for Green’s Dictionary of Slang, in which he focuses mainly on one of those obscure language folk who I think should be better known:

The work of the independent Australian scholar Dr Gary Simes (1950-2017) has already been sampled for GDoS. Aside from a variety of general publications, often on gay themes, his Dictionary of Australian Underworld Slang, featuring two hitherto little-known glossaries of criminal jargon, was published in 1993, and a major discussion of early gay speech, ‘Gay Slang Lexicography’, was featured in the specialist journal Dictionaries volume 26 (2005). When he died in 2017 he was at work on his magnum opus, the Dictionary of the Language of Sex and Sexuality in Modern English. Like the OED and my own lexicon of slang, it is prepared ‘on historical principles’, i.e. underpinning each headword and its senses with a chronological list of citations of usage.

It would, undoubtedly, have been a major contribution to lexicography in general and that of (gay) sexuality in particular. Nonetheless, even though the project could not be finished, and absent substantial funding will never be so,² Dr Simes had typed up a manuscript from the many file cards which – he was no fan of computers – held his research. The ms is far from complete, but a substantial amount exists and much of the research, especially as regards slang, has never so far been included in a dictionary.

It is thus a text that deserves wider circulation. To that end, and thanks to the trustees of Dr Simes’ estate and GDoS contributing editor James Lambert, who is responsible for safeguarding and overseeing the use of the physical materials, we have been allowed to see the ms, and to extract from it for GDoS use such slang-based material as seems valuable. This is a lengthy task and will doubtless consume many months work. Extracted text will appear under the tag Simes:DLSS and new tranches will become available as the regular 90-day updates continue.

I am in equal parts charmed and annoyed by scholars who refuse to use computers; thank goodness his work won’t disappear due to the good offices and hard work of both Lambert and Greene, and I look forward to Greene’s essay on the decline of reference publishing.

I’ve been putting off Maxim Gorky’s most famous play, The Lower Depths (Russian, English) — probably the most famous thing he ever wrote — for decades; it’s one of the few Famous Works of Russian Literature I had never read, even in translation. I didn’t have high regard for Gorky as a writer, and I was afraid it would just be a slush of socially significant characters saying socially significant things, and who needs that (except the Party, comrade)? But I noticed that Criterion Channel had filmed versions by two of my favorite directors, Jean Renoir (Les Bas-fonds) and Akira Kurosawa (どん底, Donzoko), and I didn’t want to see them without first becoming acquainted with the source material, so I plunged in.

As those of you familiar with the play will have expected, I was pleasantly surprised. Sure, it’s chock full of social significance, but it’s also got well-drawn characters and good meaty language, so I enjoyed it; one of the characters, Satin, is fond of randomly spouting impressive words he ran across (Органон [organon]… Сикамбр [one of the Sicambri]… Макробиотика [macrobiotics]… транс-сцедентальный [transcendental]…), which of course gave me extra pleasure. (Incidentally, I hadn’t realized that macrobiotic goes back to the 18th century in the now obsolete sense “Inclined or tending to prolong life; relating to the prolongation of life”: 1797 “Hence arises a particular science, the Macrobiotic, or the Art of prolonging it [sc. life], which forms the subject of the present work… The object of the medical art is health; that of the macrobiotic, long life.”) You can read a clumsy but reasonably accurate plot summary at the Wikipedia page; what I want to focus on here is the argument that goes on throughout much of the play about lies and truth, a theme that’s come up here more than once (in Crime and Punishment, in The Devils, in Rasputin’s Downstream). I’ll quote the (archaic but online) 1922 English version by Jenny Covan (from the introduction: “Here for the first time, the vigor, the virility, the humanity and the humor of the original survive the transfer from the Russian tongue to our own, without mysterious and vaguely symbolic ‘meanings’ gratuitously appended”) and provide a bit of the Russian for those who want to search the above-linked text for the original.
[Read more…]

Amy Glover reports for HuffPost on a phenomenon that seems to distress many:

You might already know that how long you can stand on one leg has been linked to your brain age ― the position involves coordinating different parts of your body and mind, making it uniquely useful as a marker of ageing. But not all the signs are medical, as anyone who’s ever looked at a festival lineup and thought “I don’t recognise a single name here” knows.

And recently, members of r/AskUK wondered whether or not the pronunciation of the letter “z” counts as one such marker. “I was horrified to learn that a fully British colleague of mine says ‘zee’ for the letter zed and he says he always has. Is this now common and I have just lost touch?”, a now-deleted poster asked. So, we spoke to clinical linguist and CEO of Dysolve, Dr Coral Hoh, about what was really going on.

“Yes, it’s generational but not confined to the UK alone,” the linguist said of the Americanised pronunciation. “It is also the case in other English-speaking regions,” she told HuffPost UK. “For example, in Southeast Asia, in countries like Singapore and Malaysia, speakers in their 30s-40s may use ‘zee’ and ‘zed’ interchangeably.” Meanwhile, she says, “their younger counterparts prefer the former, thanks to American influence.”

[Read more…]

I started Joe Zadeh’s Noema piece The Shrouded, Sinister History Of The Bulldozer and was pulled up short at the very beginning:

According to an 1881 obituary in a Louisiana newspaper, the word “bulldozer” was coined by a German immigrant named Louis Albert Wagner, who later committed suicide by taking a hefty dose of opium dissolved in alcohol. Little else is recorded about Wagner, but his term became a viral sensation in late 1800s America, going from street slang to dictionary entry in just one year. It likely originated from a shortening of “bullwhip,” the braided tool used to intimidate and control cattle, combined with “dose,” as in quantity, with a “z” thrown in for good measure. To bulldoze was to unleash a dose of coercive violence.

I like the fact that they link to the actual newspaper; the relevant text is most of the way down the left-hand column of p. 2 of the Donaldsonville Chief for November 5, 1881, so you can verify the summary. The lively little obit begins:

Louis Albert Wagner, a dissipated German about 45 years old, committed suicide in New Orleans recently by taking a dose of laudanum. He lived in East Feliciana parish a number of years prior to his death, and was the reputed coiner of the word “bulldozer” that has grown into general use and received recognition at the hands of our contemporaneous lexicographers.

But of course it’s absurd to take your etymologies from newspaper stories, however colorful, so I wanted to investigate for myself; happily, the OED revised their entries for bulldoze and bulldozer in 2022, so we have as authoritative an account as can be obtained. The latter entry says:
[Read more…]

Margie Burns, author of the new book Jane Austen, Abolitionist: The Loaded History of the Phrase ‘Pride and Prejudice’, summarizes her findings for The Conversation:

While 2025 marks Austen’s 250th birthday, the phrase “pride and prejudice” first appeared more than 400 years ago, in religious writings by English Protestants. As the daughter, sister, cousin and granddaughter of Church of England ministers, Austen was certainly aware of the tradition.

If ministers wanted to reproach their parishioners or their opponents, they attributed criticism of their sermons to “pride and prejudice” – as coming from people too arrogant and narrow-minded to entertain their words in good faith.

While the usage began in the Church of England, other denominations, even radical ones, soon adopted it: “Pride and prejudice” appears in the writings of Nonconformists, Anabaptists, Quakers, Dissenters and other representatives of “Schism, Faction and Sedition,” as one anonymous writer called them. One early takeaway is that, amid fervent religious conflicts, various denominations similarly used “pride and prejudice” as a criticism. […] At the same time, the phrase could be invoked to support religious toleration and in pleas for inclusiveness. […]

In the 18th century, advances in publishing led to an explosion of secular writing. For the first time, regular people could buy books about history, politics and philosophy. These popular texts spread the phrase “pride and prejudice” to even more distant shores.

One fan was American founding father Thomas Paine. In his 47-page pamphlet “Common Sense,” Paine argued that kings could not be trusted to protect democracy: “laying aside all national pride and prejudice in favour of modes and forms, the plain truth is, that it is wholly owing to the constitution of the people, and not to the constitution of the government[,] that the crown is not as repressive in England as in Turkey.” […]

After the philosophers, the historians and the political commentators came the novelists. And among the novelists, female writers were especially important. My annotated list in “Jane Austen, Abolitionist” includes more than a dozen female writers using the phrase between 1758 and 1812, the year Austen finished revising “Pride and Prejudice.”

Click through for more details; I had no idea of any of this. Thanks, Bathrobe!

Yvonne Seale wrote for History Today back in 2016:

In May 1756, an elderly governess died in the household of the Duke and Duchess of Portland, and was quickly and quietly buried in the churchyard of St Margaret’s, Westminster. Elizabeth Elstob left behind no family and few mourners, just some rooms full of ‘books and dirtiness’, as one visitor described them. Yet Elizabeth was a pioneer of medieval studies in England; in her youth, she became the first person to publish a grammar of Old English written in modern English, and would have accomplished much more if not for the restrictions which 18th-century society placed on women’s scholarship.

Born in 1683 to a merchant family in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Elizabeth was orphaned at an early age. The stern uncle who raised her at Canterbury – Charles Elstob, a prebendary canon of the cathedral there – largely disdained female education, believing that ‘one tongue is enough for a woman’, but Elizabeth still learned Latin and French as a child. Later, through her Oxford-educated clergyman brother, William, the teenage Elizabeth gained an introduction to a small but enthusiastic circle of scholars who worked on Anglo-Saxon history and culture. […] She claimed that her childhood in the north of England and a familiarity with its dialects and accents made it easier for her to grasp the language quickly.

[Read more…]

I was reading along in Miri Rubin’s NYRB review of Christian Supremacy: Reckoning with the Roots of Antisemitism and Racism by Magda Teter (archived) when I got to this:

The promotion of “purity of blood” (limpieza de sangre)—first legally applied in 1449—introduced distinctions aimed at separating New Christians, or recent converts, from Old Christians in Castile and later across the Hispanic world. The Castilian word raça, meaning a defect in a gem or piece of cloth, came to describe an immutable human quality.

I thought “I never heard that,” and dashed to Wiktionary, where I found “via Middle French race from Italian razza (early 14th century), of uncertain origin.” That sounded familiar; the linked razza page says “The etymology of this word is uncertain, with a large number of controversially discussed suggestions,” and it lists a number of those suggestions, none of which involves Castilian raça.

So I went to the OED, where I found that the entry had been revised as recently as 2008; their etymology says:

< Middle French, French race group of people connected by common descent (c1480 as rasse), offspring, descendants (1496), subdivision of a species represented by a certain number of individuals with hereditary characteristics (c1500), […], subdivision of humankind which is distinguished from others by the relative frequency of certain hereditary traits (1684) < Italian razza kind, species (a1388; earlier as masculine noun razzo (c1300 in sense ‘descent, lineage’, with reference to a horse)), group of individuals of an animal or vegetable species which are differentiated from another group of the same species by one or more characteristics which are constant and hereditary (a1446), offspring, descendants (15th cent.), further etymology uncertain and disputed. Compare Old Occitan rassa gang (late 12th cent.; Occitan raça), plot, conspiracy (13th cent.). Compare also Catalan raça (c1400), Spanish raza (1438), Portuguese raça (1473).

Notes

Various explanations of the origin of Italian razza have been suggested. Two of the most popular of these suggest a Latin origin: one theory suggests a derivation < classical Latin ratiō ratio n., while the other sees the word as being shortened < classical Latin generātiō generation n. An alternative explanation (and one supported by modern dictionaries of Italian: see e.g. M. Cortelazzo and P. Zolli Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana at razza) derives the Italian word < Old French haraz haras [An enclosure or establishment in which horses and mares are kept for breeding; hence, †a stud, breed, or race of horses] n. For a full discussion and summary of these and various other competing theories see Französisches etymol. Wörterbuch at ratiō.

Nobody mentions any raça ‘defect in a gem or piece of cloth,’ though I presume it’s the same as the Real Academia’s raza² ‘Grieta, hendidura’ (‘crack, fissure’), from Latin radius. As always, all thoughts are welcome.

Guillermo Carvajal writes for La Brújula Verde:

A team of archaeologists has discovered in Knossos, on the Greek island of Crete, the longest Linear A inscription found to date. The script appears on a circular ivory object with an attached handle, discovered in a context of clear religious significance within a Neopalatial building. Besides providing the longest inscription in this yet-to-be-deciphered system, the find offers new perspectives on the use of Minoan writing in ceremonial contexts.

The object was uncovered in one of the rooms of a Neopalatial-phase building (1700-1450 BCE) located in the Anetaki plot, an area of Knossos characterized by its religious use from the Protopalatial period through later times.

The inscription was found in the so-called Ivory Deposit, a semi-subterranean structure where fragments of pottery, bronze, and other offering-related items were also discovered. The ivory object, provisionally identified as a scepter or ritual staff, features an engraved inscription in the Linear A script on all its surfaces. According to specialists who have studied the find, the total length of the text reaches approximately 119 signs, surpassing in length all other known inscriptions in this writing system. […]

The text on the ring is distributed across four faces, each containing inscriptions carved with an unusually high degree of precision for Linear A writing. It is distinguished by its calligraphic refinement, which suggests a ceremonial rather than administrative use, unlike most clay tablets inscribed in this system. […]

A particularly significant aspect is the absence of numerals, a feature that distinguishes this inscription from administrative texts on clay tablets. This reinforces the hypothesis that Minoan writing was not limited to accounting but also played a role in religious and ceremonial contexts.

The paper is Kanta, A., Nakassis, D., Palaima, T. G., & Perna, M. (2025), “An archaeological and epigraphical overview of some inscriptions found in the Cult Center of the city of Knossos (Anetaki plot)” (Ariadne, 27–43, doi.org/10.26248/ariadne.vi.1841). Thanks, Trevor!

It’s time once again to crowd-source my confusion! In Nathan Heller’s New Yorker review of the new memoir by Graydon Carter (archived), he writes:

Spy, which Carter launched, in 1986, with his former Time colleague Kurt Andersen, strove for a tone he calls “bemused detachment, but witheringly judgmental,” and was almost instantly a hit. Comic magazines like Mad and National Lampoon were zany, gag-filled, world-inside-your-head parodies, but Spy was a reported fact-and-trend magazine—closer, in some ways, to Time or Life. It had columns, features, sidebars, spreads, and crosswords, but in mischievously ironized forms.

Try as I might, I can’t grasp what’s meant by “world-inside-your-head parodies,” and I’m hoping someone can enlighten me.

Incidentally, I’m gobsmacked by the lifestyle of Timesters back in the day:

In the late seventies, when Carter arrived at Time, in a mid-level writing job, he was pleased to find that he never had to use his oven. Staffers charged restaurant dinners and even some family vacations to the magazine, often at their superiors’ urging. Time had a reputation as an apiary for buzzing young Ivy League types. “The general feeling was that everybody else could be making more elsewhere—a theory I did not subscribe to—but the expense account life made up for some of the shortage,” Carter writes. Every Friday, as the upcoming issue was put to bed, carts rolled through the hallways with hot dinner and wine, after which company cars took staffers home—or, in the summer, out to Long Island, where they rented houses in Sag Harbor. For Carter, who had his first Savile Row suit made during those years, Time was where the good going began.

A reader wrote to share the Merriam-Webster Word History of posthaste:

As an adverb, posthaste means “with all possible speed.” It’s found in contemporary writing, but we might think of it as an archaic expression, or at least one that cleverly alludes to days of yore, like on The Simpsons when Mr. Burns, making a rare venture out into the world in his horseless carriage without Smithers, commands to Marge: “You there, fill it up with petroleum distillate, and re-vulcanize my tires, posthaste!” […]

If you didn’t already know the etymology of posthaste, you might see the post at the beginning of the word and assume that it’s functioning as a prefix meaning “after,” the way it does in Latin words like postmortem, or in English words like postgame or postgraduate, or in movements of art or critical theory like postmodernism or post-structuralism.

Not quite. The post in posthaste is the same as in post office: it has to do with the mail. In Middle English, post haste was a noun for the speed with which a person delivering mail was pressed to do their job.

In the 16th century “haste, post, haste” was used to inform couriers (also called posts) that a letter was urgent. Post-haste later came to refer to great promptness and speed for any purpose, and was used in phrases like in post-haste and in all post-haste.

[Read more…]