Nick Nicholas has been reporting at Facebook on his latest visit to his ancestral haunts in Crete (he lives in Australia and has been featured at LH many times, first in 2005), and this post expresses a particular form of linguistic distress I don’t recall seeing mentioned before:

There’s a melancholy in this visit, that wasn’t there the last couple of times. I had bits of it in Athens, and it’s been crystallised with a different trigger here in Sitia.

Through my thirties and forties, I’d come here and try to fit in, and be saddened when I realised that I wasn’t embraced as fully as I’d expect, that I didn’t fit in. People were not arseholes about it: this isn’t Italy or Ireland, where those who stayed behind have come to sneer at their diaspora. But there was always that recognition, five or ten minutes into a chat, that I wasn’t from these parts; or people that already knew me from online, addressing me as Nick and not Nikos. That hurt, the hurt of being left outside.

A couple of years ago, I made the decision not to try and fit it in. That turned out to work in my favour, because this country in the meantime has globalised enough, that I had more points of contact with Zoomer Greeks if I did not try so had to be Greek the way I recalled and constructed, from Boomer Greeks.

It’s worked all too well. This time around in Athens, I didn’t feel reassured by all the English code-switching and American trends: I felt alienated. My construct of Greekness was itself now out of place in my environment. I had that feeling I increasingly have back home, to my persistent surprise, of being a fossil.

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I’ll start the new year off with one of my favorite things (e.g.), writing in praise of books — to wit, Ed Simon’s Literary Hub essay Nothing Better Than a Whole Lot of Books: In Praise of Bibliomania:

Desiderius Erasmus lived his happiest months from late 1507 into 1508 at the Venetian print-shop of Aldus Manutius. A peripatetic scholar, the Dutch scholar had lived in Rotterdam and London, Basel and Paris, true to the dictum that where the humanist goes there is his home, but it was the smudgy, dirty, cacophonous, and chaotic shop on Calla della Chiesa near the filthy Piazza Sant’ Agostin that was heaven. For nine months, Erasmus spent his short nights in a modest dorm and his long days in the print shop, expanding on his collection of proverbs Adagiorum chiliades while Aldus proofread, craftsman carefully laying sets of print and rolling paper through the press.

In Venice, the great work of trade went on along the Grand Canal, or Carnivale revelers in spangled masks clung to the edges of Rialto Bridge like bats in a cave, but at the Aldine Press there was an entirely different city, a motley assortment of some thirty odd scholars (many refugees from Constantinople) that awakened every morning to the bells of San Giacomo dedicated to the cause of reading and producing books.

Here they were to “build a library that would have no boundary but the world itself,” remembered Erasmus. From the Aldine Press, where both italic print and the semicolon were invented, would come over a thousand titles, including a Greek original of Aristotle’s Poetics in 1508, with its invocation that literature “demands a man…with a touch of madness in him.” One of those copies of Poetics, frayed and damaged until it was barely readable, though still bearing the distinctive watermark of the Aldine Press featuring a dolphin wrapped around an anchor, eventually made its way to a Bologna bookstall.

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A couple of words that struck me while rummaging through my new Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate (see this post):

1) trough ‘a long shallow often V-shaped receptacle for the drinking water or feed of domestic animals’: pronunciations ˈtrȯf, ˈtrȯth, by bakers often ˈtrō. It never would have occurred to me that it was anything but the first (/trɔf/); has anybody heard the others?

2) jerrican ‘a narrow flat-sided container for liquids usually holding about five U.S. gallons (about 19 liters)’: etymology Jerry + can; from its German design. Who knew?

And a very happy new year to all those who follow the Gregorian calendar!

I’ve read a fair amount about the so-called Reading Wars over the years, but nothing as convincing as David Owen’s New Yorker article in the latest issue (archived). It starts:

In 2024, my niece Caroline received a Ph.D. in gravitational-wave physics. Her research interests include “the impact of model inaccuracies on biases in parameters recovered from gravitational wave data” and “Petrov type, principal null directions, and Killing tensors of slowly rotating black holes in quadratic gravity.” I watched a little of her dissertation defense, on Zoom, and was lost as soon as she’d finished introducing herself. She and her husband now live in Italy, where she has a postdoctoral appointment.

Caroline’s academic achievements seem especially impressive if you know that until third grade she could barely read: to her, words on a page looked like a pulsing mass. She attended a private school in Connecticut, and there was a set time every day when students selected books to read on their own. “I can’t remember how long that lasted, but it felt endless,” she told me. She hid her disability by turning pages when her classmates did, and by volunteering to draw illustrations during group story-writing projects. One day, she told her grandmother that she could sound out individual letters but when she got to “the end of a row” she couldn’t remember what had come before. A psychologist eventually identified her condition as dyslexia.

Fluent readers sometimes think of dyslexia as a tendency to put letters in the wrong order or facing the wrong direction, but it’s more complicated than that. People with dyslexia have varying degrees of difficulty not only with reading and writing but also with pronouncing new words, recalling known words, recognizing rhymes, dividing words into syllables, and comprehending written material. Dyslexia frequently has a genetic component, and it exists even in speakers of languages that don’t have alphabets, such as Chinese. It often occurs in combination with additional speech and language issues, and with anxiety, depression, attention disorders, and other so-called comorbidities, although dyslexia itself can have such profound psychological and emotional impacts that some of these conditions might be characterized more accurately as side effects.

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I just watched Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert again; every time I see it I find new things in it, and this time I scooped up plenty of Hattic material. As it happens, the movie itself is available on YouTube (for the moment) and the published screenplay is at Internet Archive; in what follows I will provide [minute:second] timings and follow each line in Spanish with the translations in the subtitles and then the screenplay.

The first bit that made me think “I’ll have to post this” comes shortly after Simon heals the man whose hands had been severed (and who immediately uses them to slap his daughter for asking questions):

Con estas entelequias nos hemos entretenido demasiado. [8:17]
We’ve spent long enough on these spiritual shenanigans.
We have spent too much time on these revelations.

The Spanish usage made me quiver with delight, because entelequia is one of those words whose literal definition — in this case, entelechy — is so recherché it’s known to almost nobody, but which in Spanish has developed the colloquial sense (per my trusty Harper Collins dictionary) ‘pipe dream, pie in the sky’; both the movie translations are inadequate, but at least “spiritual shenanigans” shows some awareness of the meaning, while “revelations” sounds like sheer guesswork.

Much later, Simon is delivering a sermon from his pillar, and he says:

No cedamos en la ascesis, tendámosla como un arco. [20:35]
Let us not yield in our asceticism. Let us spread it like an arc.
We shall not rest from our sacrifice. We shall span it like a bridge

Both translations have completely misunderstood the word arco; “tendámosla como un arco” means ‘let us draw it like a bow.’

Immediately after that, Brother Trifón, a monk possessed by the devil, starts spewing blasphemies; at one point he curses Christ “y su madre putativa.” [24:21] I don’t think I’d realized before that this is a pun on “y su puta madre” ‘and his whore of a mother’; the subtitler renders it literally as “and his so-called mother,” while the screenplay ignores the pun and has “and his whore of a mother.” Trifón then goes into a hilarious rant in which his blasphemies get more and more recondite, and the monks have increasing trouble figuring out how to respond:
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Trevor Joyce, the generous and inquisitive Irish poet so frequently seen around here as a source of Hattic items, writes as follows: “I’m sifting through some files of research on family history, and came across this, which drew my attention for its boozy air. The anecdote is obviously the thing, but when I went googling, expecting to find very many instances, I found myself flooded with BMX bikes, but divil the cocktail of this name.” Here’s the thing itself, quoted from the Boston Globe of June 11, 1893:

UNDER THE ROSE

Considerable curiosity has been aroused as to the exact nature of the beverage alluded to in Dr Frank Harris’ editorial of last Sunday, to wit, the “Frogtown racer.” None of the wine clerks seems to be familiar with it. Happening to meet the doctor, I ventured to ask him for the recipe. He said that the beverage was invented, or at least exploited, by that bohemian of medicine and literature, the late Dr Robert Dwyer Joyce, who consumed. according to his own account, two gallons of the “racer” while endeavoring to get Deirdre down from the tower into which he had put her in the course of his construction of the poem of that name.

The recipe indicates that the Frogtown racer is a very light whisky punch made with soda, into which a teaspoonful of maraschino is put and on top of this is carefully laid a “lemon float,” that is, a thin section of the fruit cut at the middle of the lemon. On this is gently poured a little port wine.

The effect is to make a drink of delicate flavor and presenting alternate zones of amber, yellow and purple whose relations, owing to the difference in specific gravity, are maintained during its consumption. This drink was a favorite not only of the doctor, but of the late Edgar Parker and many others of the Papyrus at a time when the club coat was a tradition.

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Per Vjosa Isai, reporting from Toronto for the NY Times, “Canadian Linguists Rise Up Against the Letter ‘S’” (archived):

Canadian linguists and editors are not pleased.

Words using British spellings have suddenly appeared in documents published by the Canadian government.

Gone was the “ize” construction standard in Canadian English in favor of the “ise” spelling used in British English. So “emphasize” became “emphasise,” and “trade liberalization” became “trade liberalisation.”

“At first we thought it was an aberration,” said John Chew, the editor of a forthcoming Canadian English dictionary being produced with the help of the Society for Canadian English. But the examples continued to pile up, both in a recent news release and, perhaps more notably, the federal budget […] Hundreds of words were spelled the British way: “de-industrialisation,” “amortisation,” “catalyse,” “digitalisation” and so on.

The choice undermines Canadian English, a group of linguists and editors said in an open letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney this month. They noted that the English adopted by Canada has been used by the federal government for half a century.

I could have gone with the similar story from CTV News, “Canadian English supporters urge Carney to abandon federal shift to British spelling,” but how could I resist the “Linguists Rise Up” hook? Thanks, Eric and Nick!

A correspondent writes:

So I’m reading a short novel called The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill and came across this description of one of the characters: “…white-handed and white-shirted, and gentleman to the very purse of him…”

My first (and so far only) assumption is that since one’s stash of money was so precious, something that must be guarded at all times, analogically his “gentleman-ness” was the most sacred part of his being, his inner core, and therefore most important for him to maintain. But I may be off base here.

Ever come across this use of “purse” before? Google didn’t help me.

I had not, so I thought I’d place the question before the Varied Reader. Ideas? (I might add that The Big Bow Mystery has apparently been called “the first full-length locked room mystery”; maybe I should give it a try.)

I wasn’t planning to do a separate Christmas post this year — I got a bunch of movies in foreign languages (Three Times by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Fantômas and Les Vampires by Louis Feuillade, Lost Illusions by Xavier Giannoli, etc.), but that didn’t seem to justify a post. But then Songdog and family came over, and they got me something I’ve been drooling over and that is eminently Hattic: Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 12th Edition. I used Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate for my entire working life, and every time a new edition came out the bosses would provide us proofreaders and editors with a copy each, and I would spend some time comparing it with the old one, checking the additions and omissions. I think I must have had the Seventh New Collegiate, which was around when I was in college, but I’ve definitely got the 8th (which I used at my first proofreading job) and every one since. I thought there would never be a 12th, since everyone kept saying the print dictionary was dead, but lo and behold, they put it out, and now I’ve got one. An impressively expanded etymology is that for abide; the 11th had simply

[ME, fr. OE ābīdan, fr. ā-, perfective prefix + bīdan to bide; akin to OHD ir-, perfective prefix — more at bide]

Look what it is now:

{ME abiden, going back to OE abīdan, from a-, perfective prefix + bīdan “to bide, wait”; a- (also ā-, ǣ- under stress in nominal derivatives) akin to OFris a-, perfective prefix, OS ā-, ō- (unstressed a-) and probably to OE or- “outward, extreme, lacking (in nominal compounds),” OFris & OS ur-, or-, OHG ar-, ir-, er- unstressed inchoative verb prefix, ur “out of, away from,” ON ūr-, ör-, “out of, from,” ør-, privative prefix, Gothic us- “out of,” us-, privative and perfective prefix; if from pre-Gmc *ud-s- akin to OE ūt “out” — more at out entry 1, bide}

(For some reason they’ve started using curly brackets with etymologies.) You’d think you’d wandered into the OED!

And Slavo/bulbul gave me Echopraxia by Peter Watts, the sequel to Blindsight, which I devoured over a decade ago and have not ceased thinking about since; I can’t wait to dig in.

The omnipercipient Trevor Joyce sent me a screenshot of what appears to be a Facebook post by the poet Ben Friedlander, which reads as follows:

Best footnote I’ve seen in a while.

34 worms sing (kyūin mei 蚯蚓鳴): Or “worms murmur”? Readers may supply for the verb mei 鳴 whatever type of sound they would like the worms to make.

A little sleuthing suggests that this is from “61. Song of the Dragon Ryūgin 龍吟,” 59 “Everyday Matters” (“Kajo”) [see Correction below], a chapter in Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō. And further sleuthing turned up this passage in Liza Dalby’s East Wind Melts the Ice: A Memoir Through the Seasons (p. 85):

 Shamisen wo hiku mo sabishi ya mimizu naku

 Plucking the shamisen
 desolately
 as the worms sing

 –Takahama Kyoshi (1918)

Do worms really sing? Even the most desultory research on the subject in Japanese leads you to confident statements that what was once considered to be the keening of lonely worms is in fact the voice of the mole cricket, a rather ugly burrowing insect that emerges on autumn evenings to chirp weakly for a mate. Yet the image of the singing worm is considered charming, and so it remains, a poetic conceit of peculiar appeal in the world of haiku. Many images like this can be found to have classical Chinese antecedents, but wormsong seems purely Japanese. The only faintly similar occurrence that I have been able to ascertain in Chinese is a reference in an ancient apothecary to the phrase “singsong girl” as a local term for “worm” in the area south of the Yangtze River delta — and that could imply any number of lubricious comparisons, not necessarily that worms were chanteuses.

Although worms do not have lungs, they do have mouths, covered with a sensitive flap called a prostomium. Just as I was ready to accept that earthworm singing was merely a Japanese poetic conceit, I stumbled across a reference to a German naturalist, C. Merker, who claimed that he was able to hear the faint voices of earthworms in chorus as they deliberately flapped their prostomia open and closed over their mouths, in a series of sounds marked by a definite and changing rhythm.

She goes on to discuss the Japanese metaphor “worms climb trees.” And for lagniappe, Trevor included a link to Tony Burrello’s “There’s a New Sound” (1953); the sound (spoiler!) is the sound of worms.

Correction. Trevor sent me this from Ben:

Good sleuthing, with one minor correction: it’s from essay 59, “Everyday Matters” (“Kajo”) (and if it makes a difference, the worm line comes from a poem by Dogen’s teacher, Rujing, that’s quoted in the essay).

My apologies to Dogen’s teacher!