Elizabeth Manus has a charming blog called The Ys Have It; it’s a collection of words ending in Y, e.g. Governmentality (“Scholars are already familiar with this word. It is new to me.”):

As defined by Dr. Clare O’Farrell, “Foucault originally used the term ‘governmentality’ to describe a particular way of administering populations in modern European history within the context of the rise of the idea of the State. He later expanded his definition to encompass the techniques and procedures which are designed to govern the conduct of both individuals and populations at every level [sic] not just the administrative or political level.”

Check it out, especially if you like words ending in Y!

Rhodes Murphy has a, well, overheated but informative Slate article on the term glory hole; here’s the premise:

For most of the culture, this terms refers very specifically to a public, quasi-anonymous sex act involving gay men, bathroom stalls, and a handily placed hole. For glass blowers, the glory hole is a high-powered furnace burning at over 1000 degrees Fahrenheit—hardly suitable for sex acts of any kind. So why do they call it that? Which glory hole came first?

The answer to the last question is simple: the glass-blowing term, by a century. Of course Murphy is more interested in the cultural stuff, but here at the Hattery we focus on the language, so here are the facts (just the facts, ma’am):

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of “glory hole” in English comes in 1825, when it was described as “a receptacle (as a drawer, room, etc,) in which things are heaped together without any attempt at order or tidiness.” Twenty years later the term made its slang debut, being used to describe “a filthy, stifling cell” or small room for “degraded beings,” such as prisoners. […] The first recorded use of “glory hole” in glass blowing appears in an 1849 text called Curiosities of Glass Making by English glassware manufacturer and politician Apsley Pellatt.

The best arrangements for annealing may be foiled, should the Glass-blower unnecessarily lose time after finishing the work; as the hotter the goods enter the arch, the better; on this account, the large goods receive a final reheating at the mouth of a pot heated by beech-wood, and called the Glory Hole.

As the glass manufacturing industry grew, so did the term’s usage. One reason for its adoption, according to the Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, may have been the visual phenomenon that the furnaces produced in glassmaking factories themselves; the surreal effect of light beaming from the 2100-degree furnaces, piercing the smoke-filled factory air and creating an “illusion not unlike that seen in paintings of saints and angles where ‘The Glory’ radiated from their heads.”

The OED’s entry is from 1900 and the citations can doubtless be antedated, but I have not been able to find anything earlier than 1849 for the glass one (there are, of course, hits that Google Books dates earlier, such as a 1931 bulletin they date 1831). They have this draft addition from March 2021:

A hole in a wall, typically the cubicle wall of a men’s public toilet or booth at a sex establishment, through which people can engage in sexual activity incognito.
Originally and chiefly with reference to sex between gay men.

1949 ‘Swasarnt Nerf’ et al. Gay Girl’s Guide 10 Glory-hole, phallic size hole in partition between toilet booths. Sometimes used also for a mere peep-hole.
1989 M. Rockland Bliss Case ii. 52 Sometimes I’d sneak off to a porno peep show and hang round the glory holes.
2005 Gay Times Dec. 150/2 It’s a contemporary take on a cruisy men’s bar… A stylish little den of iniquity, though rumour has it that the glory-holes have been removed from the toilets.

The glass and gay terms are entirely unrelated (Green’s treats them in separate entries), but of course anyone familiar with the sexual sense (which, pace Slate, is probably not “most of the culture”) will wonder about its relation to the earlier senses, so the linked article is performing a useful function (as indeed do glory holes).

Abe Opincar wrote on Facebook:

My FB pal, John Emerson, read that Bela Bartok’s mother was of “Bunjevcian descent but considered herself Hungarian.” Unfamiliar with the term, “Bunjevcian,” Emerson turned to Wikipedia for clarity. What he found was the sort of ethnological maze that overwhelms folks unfamiliar with the Balkans, and confuses even Balkans themselves…

Wikipedia says:

Bunjevci (Serbo-Croatian: Bunjevci / Буњевци, pronounced [bǔɲeːʋtsi, bǔː-]; singular masculine: Bunjevac / Буњевац, feminine: Bunjevka / Буњевка) are a South Slavic ethnic group living mostly in the Bačka region of Serbia (province of Vojvodina), southern Hungary (Bács-Kiskun County, particularly in the Baja region), and in Croatia (e.g. Senj and surroundings, East-Slavonia, West-Srijem: Ilok, Vukovar, Županja, Vinkovci). They presumably originate from western Herzegovina, whence they migrated to Dalmatia, and from there to Lika and Bačka in the 17th century. Bunjevci who remained in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as those in modern Croatia today maintain that designation chiefly as a regional identity, and declare as ethnic Croats. Those who emigrated to Hungary were largely assimilated, and assumed Hungarian or Croatian designation. Bunjevci are mainly Roman Catholic, and speak the Štokavian dialect of the Slavic language Serbo-Croatian (pluricentric language) with Ikavian pronunciation with certain archaic characteristics. In the 18th and 19th century they made up a significant part of the population of Northern Bačka, but the majority assimilated with other larger minority groups in the Balkan region. […]

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In this Wordorigins thread, ktschwarz has recounted a couple of fine examples of the kind of detective work which puts the OED head and shoulders above other dictionaries. In regard to the “ghost” citation for roger ‘penis’ from OED1 “1653 URQUHART Rabelais I. xi”:

The reference to Urquhart appeared in the First Edition, which was too prudish to give a definition for roger, and they suppressed the text of the quotations too, except for “a Man’s Yard” (I guess yard was too obsolete to be offensive). The Second Edition must have tried and failed to verify the quote. And now the Third Edition has solved the mystery (entry revised November 2010, modified June 2021). The quote from the Rabelais translation now appears, unexpurgated:

1694 P. A. Motteux tr. F. Rabelais Wks. i. xi. 44 And some of the other Women would give these Names, My Roger, my Cockatoo, my Nimble-wimble, Bush-beater, Claw-buttock,..my lusty Live Saucage.

Urquhart had published only the first two books of his Rabelais translation; Motteux revised and completed the translation after Urquhart’s death. But some editions, such as this one, are unclear or wrong on whether the first two books are the original or revised version; somebody must have read one of those and incorrectly attributed it to Urquhart. This is the original Urquhart, in Book 1 Chapter XI, “Of the Youthful Age of Gargantua”, from the Project Gutenberg link above:

And some of the other women would give it these names,–my bunguetee, my stopple too, my bush-rusher, my gallant wimble, my pretty borer, my coney-burrow-ferret, my little piercer, my augretine, my dangling hangers, down right to it, stiff and stout, in and to, my pusher, dresser, pouting stick, my honey pipe, my pretty pillicock, linky pinky, futilletie, my lusty andouille, and crimson chitterling, my little couille bredouille, my pretty rogue, and so forth.

The quote about “the nocturnal Sanct Rogero” is definitely relevant, but that’s from Book 3 in Motteux’s version, and the OED presumably didn’t want two quotes from the same book.

All in a day’s work at the OED! This is one of millions of reasons why they were right to make the investment in revising every entry and rechecking every quotation. Just twenty or thirty more years to go.

And today this addition:
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Dmitry Pruss has a Facebook post (in Russian) about a fish of great historical importance to the Pacific Northwest, Thaleichthys pacificus, which is known in English by a name conventionally written eulachon (/ˈjuːləkɒn/) but which, as that Wikipedia article says, is alternatively spelled oolichan /ˈuːlɪkɑːn/, ooligan /ˈuːlɪɡən/, and hooligan /ˈhuːlɪɡən/ and which is also called the candlefish. In the Etymology section it explains:

The name “candlefish” derives from it being so fat during spawning, with up to 15% of total body weight in fat, that if caught, dried, and strung on a wick, it can be burned as a candle. This is the name most often used by early explorers. The name eulachon (occasionally seen as oolichan, oulachon, and uthlecan) is from the Chinookan language and the Chinook Jargon based on that language. One of several theories for the origin of the name of the state of Oregon is that it was a corruption from the term “Oolichan Trail”, the native trade route for oolichan oil.

The OED entry, under Forms, says (unusually parsimoniously) “Also ulikon, ulicon, ulken. etc.” (the citations also have Oolaghans, Oulachan, ulichan, and olachen, among others; cf. 1953 Beaver Mar. 40/2 “Oolikan, olachan, eulachon, uthlecan, hollikan and hoolican—spell it as you wish”); the etymology is “< Chinook jargon ulâkân.” Dmitry writes:

Но русскоговорящих ихтиологов ввело в заблуждение написание eulachon, которое было похоже на написание греческих слов в английском, и поэтому в русском языке укоренилось псевдо-греческое написание “эвлахон”.

But Russian-speaking ichthyologists were led astray by the spelling eulachon, which looked like a Greek word in English guise, so the pseudo-Greek spelling эвлахон [evlakhon] has become normalized in Russian.

It turns out that James Crippen actually mentioned this odd word back in 2008 (“In Alaska it’s said (and usually spelled) ‘hooligan’”), but there were so many weird spelling/pronunciation matches in that thread I immediately forgot about this one.

Máire Ní Mhaonaigh writes for the British Academy blog about a 12th-century text that reveals “a multilingual medieval world”:

Extensive networks and international communications are often thought of as modern phenomena […] but contacts and connections with a wider world have been a defining aspect of past communities as well. For the Viking period, this is evident in archaeological finds bearing witness to dynamic exchange from Dublin, via Scandinavia, to Baghdad and beyond. Along such extended trade routes, ideas as well as objects were interchanged. Functional multilingualism facilitated such transactions. Widespread use in certain circles of the medieval equivalents of global English – Latin, Greek, Arabic – enabled intense interaction and discussion and transference of knowledge and views.

Traces found along the earlier Silk Road, as part of a Viking hub, or in a medieval monastery, for example, provide the means by which a map of earlier interconnections can be sketched. Intricate layers of interaction are evident when examining early texts. Each source tells its own complex story, its content, language and history revealing influences and moulds. They form microcosmic strands in an overarching complex web, providing concrete evidence for specific contacts in a given time and space.

Research supported by the British Academy allowed me to study one such source, a 12th-century narrative from medieval Ireland. It chronicles Viking attacks on various parts of the country and the resistance to them provided by one southern dynasty under their king, Brian Boru (ancestors to the O’Briens). Presented as a strategic, skilful hero, he is depicted as continually opposing a ferocious Scandinavian foe, ultimately losing his life in a final encounter against them at the battle of Clontarf, a historical event fought in 1014. The title of this lengthy literary account, ‘The War of the Irish (Gael) against Foreigner (Gall)’ (Cogadh Gáedhel re Gallaibh), as well as its bombastic tone sets it out as a stereotypical story of ‘us v. them’. What can such a text then tell us about actual contacts between Norse and Irish at the time of its composition?

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Anatoly Vorobey (Avva) posts (in Russian) about a 300-page book (also in Russian) called Никудену [Nikudenu], ‘Our Niqqud.’ He begins:

Reading this book gave me an odd feeling. On the one hand, it’s written understandably, explains everything well, clears up many complicated questions and exceptions, and is beautifully designed (it’s a pleasure to leaf through). On the other hand — and here the author is not to blame in any way, of course — its subject, vowel pointing in modern Hebrew, is striking in its obscurantism and needless complexity.

У меня странные ощущения от чтения этой книги. С одной стороны, она написана понятным языком, все хорошо объясняет, проясняет много сложных вопросов и исключений, и прекрасно оформлена (просто даже приятно листать). С другой стороны – и тут автор книги ни в чем не виноват, разумеется – предмет, которому она посвящена – огласовки в современном иврите – поражает своим обскурантизмом и никчемной сложностью.

He goes on to explain the problems summarized in the Wikipedia article thus:

One reason for the lesser use of niqqud is that it no longer reflects the current pronunciation. In modern Hebrew, tzere is pronounced the same as segol, although they were distinct in Tiberian Hebrew, and pataḥ the same as qamatz. To the younger generation of native Hebrew speakers, these distinctions seem arbitrary and meaningless; on the other hand, Hebrew language purists have rejected out of hand the idea of changing the basics of niqqud and fitting them to the current pronunciation – with the result that in practice niqqud is increasingly going out of use.

Anatoly ends his post as follows:

In brief, it would be a great deal simpler, better, and easier for everyone simply to start writing modern Hebrew as it is actually pronounced. Only six points would be needed (a e u o i plus schwa) and dagesh for the three letters where it means something; everything else could be tossed out. But this won’t happen for complicated cultural reasons (the aforementioned asininity).

Короче, было бы намного проще, лучше, легче для всех просто начать записывать современный иврит огласовками так, как он реально произносится. Нужно было бы шесть огласовок (А Э У О И плюс шва) и дагеш только для трех букв, где он что-то значит, все остальные можно выбросить. Но это не случится по сложным культурным причинам (вышеупомянутый маразм).

I’m curious what my Hebrew-speaking readers have to say about this; of course my sympathies are with the write-as-you-speak crowd, but I have no skin in the game.

I’ve finished Vladimir Sharov’s Репетиции (The Rehearsals; see this post), and I’m having almost as much trouble deciding what I think as I did after reading Kharitonov’s Линии судьбы (Lines of Fate; see this post). I like the Sharov a lot better, and am looking forward to reading more of him, but I’m not clear what he’s doing here or why he’s doing it, or (which is perhaps another way of putting it) what kind of a novel it is. It starts off one way, goes in a different direction, and winds up with something else entirely. In order to explain all that, I’ll have to do a lot of spoiling, so you’ll have to decide if and when to bail out if you’re thinking of reading the novel yourself.

It starts, as I said in that earlier post, with a guy named Kobylin, who disappears immediately, makes a brief reappearance after dozens of pages, and shows up again at the very end, so that in a formal sense the novel is tied together by his story. It doesn’t feel that way, however, because he’s not actually a character, just a plot device (the same is true for many of the others who populate the book’s pages). After that comes the Ilyin section I described in the earlier post; having read the entire novel, I’m not clear on what purpose it serves other than to provide some religious background (Ilyin never reappears either, nor does the narrator’s fiancee Natasha who’s mentioned a few times early on; the “oprichnina” I built the earlier post around also has no further resonance, so I’m OK with Ready’s decision to omit it here). Then comes Professor Kuchmy at the Kuibyshev college he first attends, who talks about the senselessness of human existence and the unique ability of writers to produce genuine progeny through their writing, and Professor Suvorin in Tomsk who is obsessed with women (the narrator is the only male student he ever accepts) and with Old Believer manuscripts, and it is here that the real plot kicks in — the materials the narrator acquires after Suvorin’s death form the basis of his career (which otherwise goes undescribed) and the rest of the novel. I can’t improve on the Russian Dinosaur’s description, so I’ll quote it:

The Rehearsals traces the self-destructive urges in Russian society all the way back to the mid-seventeenth-century Schism in the Russian Orthodox Church, when the Patriarch Nikon forced through radical changes in text and ritual against the will of many, including his former mentor Archpriest Avvakum. Sharov develops Nikon as a brooding, complex, deeply religious and profoundly dangerous character, who all but kidnaps a travelling Breton player, De Sertan, commissioning him to direct and produce a religious mystery play at Nikon’s New Jerusalem monastery. But before the “first night” takes place, Nikon is arrested and De Sertan and his Russian players sent into Siberian exile, where they form a unique sectarian community. Not only do they continue rehearsing their mystery play about the birth of Christ for centuries, they live permanently, and pass on to their children and grandchildren, the roles they act – so the community divides into “Christians”, “Jews”, “Romans”, and others. The role of Christ is never cast – Nikon’s hope, and the community’s unspoken conviction, is that the day the rehearsals are finally complete, Christ will appear and the world will end.

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I’ve long been interested in the Persianate world, and India was for a long time an important part of it (see this 2013 post); I just read Ramachandra Guha’s TLS review (archived) of Richard Eaton’s India in the Persianate Age: 1000–1765, which has some good LH material:

The conventional view of Indian history divides it into three periods; ancient or “Hindu”, medieval or “Muslim”, and a modern or “British” period. In India in the Persianate Age, Richard Eaton challenges this interpretation by substituting religion with language. Eaton builds on the work of the Columbia scholar Sheldon Pollock, who coined the term “Sanskrit cosmopolis” to describe the political and cultural world of ancient India. In the first millennium of the Common Era, argues Pollock, it was the language of Sanskrit that brought together kingdoms and territories across a wide swathe of South and Southeast Asia; it was in Sanskrit that manuals of statecraft as well as epic poems and plays were written. Eaton now suggests that from about the eleventh century, a “Persianate” culture emerged in India, which sought sometimes to supplant the world of Sanskrit and sometimes to constructively engage with it. Persian was the new language of rule, and of administration, promoted by the Turk and Mongol warriors who came to control northern India in this period. Further, writes Eaton, “as with the Sanskrit texts, from the eleventh century onwards a large corpus of imaginative literature in Persian began to circulate widely through West, Central and South Asia”. […]

When Eaton does depart from politics and warfare, he turns to architecture and literature. He writes insightfully of how mosques and shrines built by ostensibly Muslim rulers incorporated elements from Buddhist, Jain, and especially Hindu architectural traditions. Mosques, forts and palaces all showed the fusion of Persianate and Sanskritic traditions and styles. This cultural fusion also emerges in Eaton’s treatment of the reign of the fifteenth- century Kashmiri king, Zain al-’Abidin, himself a Muslim, who yet loved listening to poems in praise of the Hindu god Krishna (while sailing a boat in a mountain lake), and who patronized the translation of Sanskrit classics into Persian (and vice versa).

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John McIntyre, a favorite here at LH (see this post), posts about an important distinction that should be more widely understood:

I see this opening sentence in an article published by CNN: “GOP Rep. Jeff Fortenberry of Nebraska, who was recently indicted for concealing information and lying to the FBI regarding an investigation into illegal campaign contributions, has officially resigned from his committee assignments.”

Anyone care to guess what in that sentence has triggered my boundless scorn?

For.

In the Former Times, when journalism organizations employed copy editors, we were all schooled that that preposition for suggests certainty, established fact. And because people accused of criminal acts receive a presumption of innocence in our legal system, we never allowed indicted for to get into print, substituting indicted on a charge of.

Curious whether standards have shifted during my senescence, I plucked my Associated Press Stylebook from its place of repose and found: “To avoid any suggestion that someone is being judged before a trial, do not use phrases such as indicted for killing or indicted for bribery. Instead use indicted on a charge of killing or indicted on a charge of bribery.”

It may be a little thing, but following that guideline observes the fundamental principle that journalists are not to put their fingers on the scales.

He compares it to “the guideline of not using murder as a synonym for homicide or killing until after a verdict,” and quite rightly, too. (Sadly, the first comment on his post is an unrelated bit of peevery, and I expect more will follow.) So I’m helping to spread the word.