My wife and I are reading Olivia Manning’s School for Love at night and enjoying it, even though it’s very slow-moving (especially compared to her later and classic Fortunes of War series). It’s set in Jerusalem at the tail end of WWII; our hero, Felix, is an innocent and newly orphaned English adolescent in a rooming house run by the awful Miss Bohun (pronounced Boon), who takes ruthless advantage of everyone around her while constantly announcing her self-sacrificing generosity. He is rescued from his bewildered stupor by the advent of the young widow Mrs. Ellis, who drags him out to the cafes where she spends evenings with the louche intelligentsia of the Levant — Arabs, Jews, Englishpersons, and miscellaneous foreigners all more or less getting along and yammering about the prominent new cultural names. Felix, of course, has never heard of any of them, and he whispers to Mrs. Ellis “Who are they talking about?” She “broke up an empty cigarette carton and wrote on the inside: ‘Kafka, Palinurus, Sartre’.” The first and last are self-explanatory, but who or what was Palinurus (other than an obscure character in ancient epic, hardly likely to be on everyone’s lips in the 1940s)? Some googling provided the answer; it was Cyril Connolly, whose The Unquiet Grave was “written in 1944 under the pseudonym Palinurus.”

So that explained that, but why Palinurus? John Leonard, in his NY Times review of a 1982 reprint, says:

If you are soft on your Virgil, be reminded that Palinurus, the pilot, jumped ship just before one of the most important climaxes in the ”Aeneid.” Jung, according to Connolly, would have insisted that Palinurus stood for ”a certain will-to-failure or repugnance-tosuccess, a desire to give up at the last moment.” He opted, instead, for ”the unknown shore,” which perhaps explains why he is usually associated with the lobster.

So, too, did Connolly jump the ship of the novel after ”The Rock Pool.” It was at the beginning of ”The Unquiet Grave” that he made his famous declaration, ”The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.” He had persuaded himself that he could not produce such a masterpiece, even as he was busy doing so, and he retired to grade the papers of his inferiors.

One of my superiors, Wilfrid Sheed, has suggested in a fine essay that Connolly, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, was in ”his pure dedication to Art, his rambunctious melancholia, his rhythm of indulgence and remorse,” some kind of hopeless Celt who might have profited by a training in assertiveness. With respect, I wonder: Fitzgerald drank his way to a suspicious sympathy with characters who were versions of Fitzgerald. Connolly seems to have found in his cups and in his life a failure of nerve, a lack of heroism and of consequence, a longing for ”the role of sucker;” he willed failure.

This frog, this lobster, jumped ship before the moment of victory. If ”The Rock Pool” is not an altogether satisfying novel, it is because its author read and reviewed too many of them by other people, and forgot how good he was. ”The Unquiet Grave” – asking us to listen to the scarifying whisper between chunks of sanctified literature, such a weird amalgam of other voices and other rooms, such a book of uncommon places, so much art, love, nature and religion – sings.

Now that Connolly has largely been forgotten, that eloquent praise seems musty, but hell, Leonard himself, who bestrode the middlebrow American literary world of the late 20th century like a colossus, has probably been forgotten as well, as shall we all be eventually. At any rate, I’ve cleared up a minor mystery, and perhaps at least one reader of Manning will be spared perplexity.

I’m finally working my way through Skaz, the bilingual anthology I got for my birthday in 2020 from my generous wife, and one of the items it includes is Chekhov’s first published story, “Письмо к ученому соседу” [Letter to a Learned Neighbor] (1880), which Simon Karlinsky called “a remarkably old-fashioned piece of writing that imitated the form and standard devices of Russian eighteenth-century satirical journals.” It takes the form of a letter from an ignorant and barely literate retired uryadnik (Cossack NCO) to a scientist who has recently moved to the area, expounding a series of buffoonish ideas about the universe (refuting black spots on the sun: “Этого не может быть, потому что этого не может быть никогда” [That can’t be, because it could never be]). In the final paragraph he invites his neighbor to come for dinner, adding “Через неделю ко мне прибудет брат мой Иван (Маиор), человек хороший но между нами сказать, Бурбон и наук не любит,” which the translator renders “In a week, my brother Ivan (the Major) will arrive—a good man, though, between us, bourbon and sciences he does not love.” The rendering of Бурбон is so absurd (worthy of the uryadnik himself) that I had to post it, especially considering the oddity of the word.

To get the obvious out of the way: yes, бурбон can mean ‘bourbon (whiskey),’ and that is the only definition given in English Wiktionary, but I guarantee you it did not mean that in 1880 Russia. What are the possibilities? In its earliest uses, the Russian word refers to the House of Bourbon (which is presumably the ultimate source of the whiskey name, though the details are unclear); the fact that the word is capitalized in all editions of the Chekhov story I can find might support this hypothesis, except that it makes no sense in context. No, the meaning is clearly that given in Russian Wiktionary: грубый и невежественный человек [rude and ignorant person] (so that the translation should read “he is an ignorant fellow who has no love for science). But where did this come from? Well, Dahl (or rather Baudouin de Courtenay, since the word is in brackets in the reprint of the 1903-09 edition I own) says “офицеръ, выслужившійся изъ нижнихъ чиновъ, изъ кантонистовъ и сдаточныхъ” [an officer who was promoted from the lower ranks, from the cantonists and conscripts], and Makaroff’s Dictionnaire russe-français complet (11th ed., 1908) defines it as “officier de fortune” [officer commissioned from the ranks] (see Charles J. Wrong, “The Officiers de Fortune in the French Infantry” [French Historical Studies 9.3 (Spring 1976): 400-431]), and the transition from this to the “ignorant person” sense is not surprising. The earliest relevant citation I can find in the Национальный корпус русского языка (National Corpus of the Russian Language) is from N.I. Lorer, Записки моего времени (1867): “К людям, подобным Скалозубу, носившим у нас название бурбонов, я не имел никогда симпатии” [I never had any sympathy for people like Skalozub, who we call burbony]. Skalozub is a character in Griboedov’s famous play «Горе от ума» [Woe from Wit], and you can get an idea of him from the image at the linked Wikipedia page. But why burbon? Alas, Vasmer doesn’t include the word in his etymological dictionary (presumably because it’s not in the first edition of Dahl), but perhaps some of my readers will have suggestions.

My brother insisted I watch Compartment No. 6 (Hytti nro 6) because he was so sure I’d like it, and indeed I did: it’s about a Finnish woman, Laura, who takes a train from Moscow to Murmansk to see the petroglyphs and has to share a compartment with a Russian guy, Lyokha (a common nickname for Alexei, though his actual name is never given), played by Yura Borisov, who is excellent (and is now starring to great acclaim in Anora, which I am eager to see). Lyokha seems at first to be a brainless, sexist brute, and our heroine flees the compartment to avoid him, but eventually (of course) he turns out to be more complicated and interesting. The movie is mostly in Russian, which Laura speaks well but not perfectly; at one point a fellow Finn joins them for a while, so they speak in Finnish, to the evident annoyance of Lyokha. The movie starts with a gathering of hip intelligentsia in a Moscow apartment, playing a game in which one person quotes a line and the others have to guess what it’s from (“Pelevin?” “Has to be Pelevin — is it from Omon Ra?” “Think higher…”); poor Laura has her pronunciation of Akhmatova corrected by a snooty young woman (she had put the stress on the penultimate).

All of this is Hattically interesting, of course, but what drove me to post is the bit where Lyokha, trying to chat her up, asks how you say various things in Finnish, laughing raucously at her answers, and when he asks how you say “I love you” she answers “Haista vittu,” giving a little smirk afterwards. Since it was not translated in the subtitles, I paused the movie and turned to the internet, where Wiktionary informed me that it means “fuck you (general insult)” and literally “sniff a cunt” (“Considered more vulgar than haista paska” [‘sniff shit’]). The phrase returns very effectively at the end, but the viewer with no Finnish is left in the dark, so as a public service I am providing enlightenment. (If I’ve aroused any interest in the movie, it’s available for a reasonable rental fee at Amazon Prime.)

I thought this Facebook post by Alin Suciu was interesting enough to share:

I find it striking that most Eastern Christian traditions—with the notable exception of the Syriac—began to explicitly date their literary manuscripts only in the 9th century CE. From this point onward, scribes often recorded the date when the transcription of the manuscripts was completed in a colophon. Therefore, manuscripts copied before the 9th century must be dated based on more ambiguous criteria, such as paleography, realia, radiocarbon analysis, and archaeological context. This overlooked pattern of dating manuscripts starting from the 9th century CE marks a shift in scribal culture and may provide significant details about broader developments in book production throughout the Mediterranean world. So it’s worthy of more serious consideration.

The earliest known dated Coptic manuscript is a parchment codex housed in the Morgan Library & Museum, New York (M579), which was copied in 822/823 CE. In the Greek tradition, the first manuscript to bear a date is the Uspenski Gospels, copied in Constantinople in 835 CE. Christian Arabic manuscripts follow a similar trajectory, with the oldest known dated example being a Sinaitic codex (Sinai Arabic NF Parch. 3) whose transcription was completed either in 858 or between 858 and 867 CE, depending on how we interpret the second digit of the year recorded in the colophon—a brilliant discovery made by my friends Miriam Hjälm and Peter Tarras [Literary Snippets, p. 58]. The Armenian and Georgian traditions align with the same trend. The earliest known dated Armenian manuscript is the Queen Mlk’e Gospels, copied in 862 CE and now housed in the Mekhitarist Library in Venice. Similarly, the oldest dated Georgian manuscript was copied in Sinai in 864 CE (Georgian 32-57-33).

However, unlike the Coptic, Greek, Arabic, Armenian, and Georgian traditions, the Syriac stands out as an exception to this pattern, predating all others by over four centuries. There are at least six Syriac manuscripts explicitly dated to the 5th century CE. The earliest is British Library Add. 12150, a manuscript copied in Edessa in 411 CE. It was brought to Egypt in the 10th century by Moses of Nisibis and preserved at the Monastery of the Virgin in Wadi Natrun, the famous monastic hinterland situated west of the Nile Delta. It’s a mystery to me why the Syrians chose to date their literary manuscripts so early, at a time when the practice was most likely unknown elsewhere. The remarkable antiquity of this tradition highlights the unique textual culture of Syriac Christianity.

The fact that all the other Eastern Christian traditions began to date their literary manuscripts only in the 9th century suggests that a broader transformation in scribal practices took place all over the Mediterranean during this period. Whether this practice was due to administrative needs, a growing awareness of historical documentation, or external influences, it marks a significant moment in the history of book production. The implications of this phenomenon deserve further scholarly inquiry.

I’ve quoted the whole post; here are a couple of good exchanges from the comment thread for those without FB access:
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Peter McGuire’s Irish Times article on teaching Irish (Feb. 4; archived) starts by focusing on dyslexic students, concluding:

Much of the discussion around this, intentionally or otherwise, effectively pits one minority community (Irish-language speakers) against another (people with dyslexia). But many Irish speakers are dyslexic, and many dyslexic people want to learn Irish.

Then it goes on to more general issues:

At Leaving Cert level, Irish consistently has the highest number of top grades outside minority languages and music – subjects that tend to attract students who are already reasonably skilled. But despite decades of discussion about Irish language teaching, only a minority have anything approaching fluency.

While the focus on oral skills has increased (to 40 per cent at Leaving Cert), teaching of Irish remains dominated by the written word – in contravention of everything we know about language acquisition. So why does our education system continue to teach it in a way that is inaccessible to many?

“I want my daughter to study Irish,” says Fahey. “I want her to experience Irish culture and the language, but without expectation.

“She was struggling to learn English and the extra pressure of an additional language was damaging her confidence. I availed of the exemption for her, but asked her school – who have been great – if she could still take part in Irish class, just not be tested or have to read it. I have seen a huge change in her confidence and self-esteem.”

Rosie Bissett, chief executive of Dyslexia Ireland, says growing awareness and diagnosis of learning differences and neurodiversity (a broad term that includes dyslexia, dyspraxia, autism, ADHD and more), as well as increased numbers entering the Irish school from abroad after the age of 12, have led to growing exemptions. […]

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The Random Link feature took me to this 2013 post focused on James Harbeck’s word blog Sesquiotica, and (as is my wont) I clicked through to see if the blog was still there. Against all expectations, not only was it there but it was still going strong, and the latest post was so interesting I thought I’d bring it here:

For brunch on Sunday, I made ramekins.

Can I say that? Is ramekin like casserole or paella, a dish (recipe) that has gotten its name from the dish (vessel) that the dish is dished from?

The answers to those questions are (a) yes and (b) no. Ramekin has not transferred the name of the container to the name of the foodstuff. In fact, it’s the reverse: the little round ceramic vessels (like cute little food parentheses) are named after a foodstuff that is made using them.

I should say, first, to be fair, that what I made is more typically called shirred eggs. But there are many ways to make shirred eggs, and the recipe I made also fits the definition of the culinary item called ramekin, which is, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, “A type of savoury dish based on cheese, mixed with butter, eggs, and seasonings, and usually baked and served in a small mould or dish.” The word has been used in that sense in English since the mid-1600s – borrowed over from French – while the metonymic transference to the ceramic vessel happened only by the later 1800s (Funk’s 1895 Standard Dictionary of the English Language defined that kind of ramekin as “a dish in which ramekins are baked”).

Did you wonder, when I said “borrowed over from French,” why it’s not ramequin? In fact, at the time we borrowed it, it was. So why did we change it? Well… we changed it back. You see, French didn’t invent the word; it traces back to regional Dutch rammeken and Low German ramken. It’s like mannequin, which came from the Dutch manneken – meaning ‘little man’. The -(e)ken suffix is a diminutive.

So the next question must be “Little ram?” Heh. That has produced some perplexity; the OED (and Wikipedia, citing it) scratches its head and says that it seems to come from ram ‘battering ram’, “although the semantic motivation is unclear.” Meanwhile, Wiktionary notes that Rahm is a German word for ‘cream’, cognate with Dutch room (‘whipped cream’ is slagroom, but I’ll have it anyway) and the now-disused English word ream (displaced by cream, which is, go figure, unrelated). That seems a bit more semantically motivating, for what it’s worth.

Fascinating stuff, none of which I knew (except the name of the container, which — if you’re unfamiliar with it — is trisyllabic: /ˈræməkən/). Harbeck goes on to provide his recipe for shirred eggs, in case you’re interested; I’ll finish up with some OED citations and their head-scratching etymology (the entry was revised in 2008):
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Carl Zimmer (brother of lexicographer Ben Zimmer, as J.W. Brewer points out in a comment on the Log post about this) has a story in the NY Times (archived) that starts with a potted history of Indo-European and then continues:

Linguists and archaeologists have long argued about which group of ancient people spoke the original Indo-European language. A new study in the journal Nature throws a new theory into the fray. Analyzing a wealth of DNA collected from fossilized human bones, the researchers found that the first Indo-European speakers were a loose confederation of hunter-gatherers who lived in southern Russia about 6,000 years ago.

The linked study is “The genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans” by Iosif Lazaridis et al., and the abstract reads:

The Yamnaya archaeological complex appeared around 3300 ʙᴄ across the steppes north of the Black and Caspian Seas, and by 3000 ʙᴄ it reached its maximal extent, ranging from Hungary in the west to Kazakhstan in the east. To localize Yamnaya origins among the preceding Eneolithic people, we assembled ancient DNA from 435 individuals, demonstrating three genetic clines. A Caucasus–lower Volga (CLV) cline suffused with Caucasus hunter-gatherer ancestry extended between a Caucasus Neolithic southern end and a northern end at Berezhnovka along the lower Volga river. Bidirectional gene flow created intermediate populations, such as the north Caucasus Maikop people, and those at Remontnoye on the steppe. The Volga cline was formed as CLV people mixed with upriver populations of Eastern hunter-gatherer ancestry, creating hypervariable groups, including one at Khvalynsk. The Dnipro cline was formed when CLV people moved west, mixing with people with Ukraine Neolithic hunter-gatherer ancestry along the Dnipro and Don rivers to establish Serednii Stih groups, from whom Yamnaya ancestors formed around 4000 ʙᴄ and grew rapidly after 3750–3350 ʙᴄ. The CLV people contributed around four-fifths of the ancestry of the Yamnaya and, entering Anatolia, probably from the east, at least one-tenth of the ancestry of Bronze Age central Anatolians, who spoke Hittite. We therefore propose that the final unity of the speakers of ‘proto-Indo-Anatolian’, the language ancestral to both Anatolian and Indo-European people, occurred in CLV people some time between 4400 ʙᴄ and 4000 ʙᴄ.

There are more details at both the Times article and the Log post linked at the start of this one; I suppose I could have added this to one of the earlier Yamnaya-related LH posts, but those threads are getting long and people have been sending this to me, so I thought I’d give it its own post. Thanks, Eric and Jack!

I was reading Miranda Seymour’s NYRB review (November 23, 2023 issue; archived) of Antonia Fraser’s new biography of Lady Caroline Lamb (which makes for very lively reading) when I hit the following paragraph:

Initially, and on some level irrevocably, Byron adored Caroline, addressing her, in the first flush of delight, as “the cleverest most agreeable, absurd, amiable, perplexing, dangerous fascinating little being that lives now or ought to have lived 2000 years ago.” But the born outsider also wanted a place in the Regency’s ton, the exclusive London circle presided over by the lady patronesses of Almack’s, the city’s most fashionable club. Caroline’s grand pedigree swept her lover across that threshold. Lady Melbourne, a charming but treacherous woman with whom Byron initiated a flirtatious relationship while seeking (but seldom heeding) advice on how best to handle her reckless daughter-in-law, did the rest.

I knew, of course, that ton was a borrowing from French and in general meant (to quote the OED) “The fashion, the vogue, the mode; fashionable air or style,” but I didn’t understand its use here. For that I had to scroll down to “b. transferred. People of fashion; fashionable society; the fashionable world”:

c1770 Miss P…D…will only..take engagements from billiard table gentlemen, gentlemen of the ton, and young shop~men.
in L. de Vries & P. Fryer, Venus Unmasked (1967) 33

1815 All the ‘Ton’s’ a stage, And Fashion’s motley votaries are but play’rs.
Sporting Magazine vol. 46 93

1855 The princess, the nobles, and all the ton had disappeared.
J. S. C. Abbott, History of Napoleon vol. I. xiv. 255

1969 A waste, when all the ton will flock here for this event.
H. Elsna, Abbot’s House 99

1969 The ton are here in force.
H. Elsna, Abbot’s House 103

Odd to give two cites from Hebe Elsna (Dorothy Phoebe Ansle), an obscure romance novelist who doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page — surely one would have sufficed to document its (presumably marginal) late-20th-century use? At any rate, it’s an interesting extension of meaning that I hadn’t been familiar with, so I pass it along.
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Nick Thieberger, Associate Professor in Linguistics at the University of Melbourne, writes for The Conversation about a great project:

Remember cassettes? If you’re old enough, you might remember dropping one into a player, only to have it screech at you when you pressed “play”. We’ve fixed that problem. But why would we bother? Before the iPod came along, people recorded their favourite tunes straight from the radio. Some of us made home recordings with our sibling and grandparents – precious childhood snippets.

And a few of us even have recordings from that time we travelled to a village in Vanuatu, some 40 years ago, and heard the locals performing in a language that no longer exists.

In the field of linguistics, such recordings are beyond priceless – yet often out of reach, due to the degradation of old cassettes over time. With a new tool, we are able to repair those tapes, and in doing so can recover the stories, songs and memories they hold.

Our digital archive, PARADISEC (Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures) contains thousands of hours of audio – mainly from musicological or linguistic fieldwork. This audio represents some 1,360 languages, with a major focus on languages of the Pacific and Papua New Guinea.

The PARADISEC research project was started in 2003 as a collaboration between the universities of Melbourne and Sydney, and the Australian National University. Like a humanities telescope, PARADISEC allows us to learn more about the language diversity around us, as we explained in a 2016 Conversation article.

While many of the tapes we get are in good condition and can be readily played and digitised, others need special care, and the removal of mould and dirt. […] In 2019, my colleague Sam King built (with the help of his colleague Doug Smith) a cassette-lubricating machine while working at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. This machine – likely the first of its kind in Australia – allowed us to play many previously unplayable tapes.

More details at the link, along with an audio clip that allows you to compare the sound before and after restoration (the difference is really remarkable). Thanks, Bathrobe!

Via Adam’s Notes for January 30, I bring you this cacalicious quote from Chris Wickham’s Sleepwalking Into a New World: The Emergence of Italian City Communes in the Twelfth Century:

Girardo Cagapisto is significant for another reason, too: his name. It has not been stressed by most historians that so many of the Milanese political leadership had surnames beginning Caga- or Caca-, that is to say ‘shit’. The niceties of earlier generations of scholarship led them to neglect this, and older historians at most refer to it glancingly and uneasily, although an excellent recent article by François Menant finally lists the names and discusses their etymologies; but it was certainly important for Milanese identity and self-representation. (Similar names exist in other Italian cities too—Menant stresses Cremona in particular—but they are not usually so prominent.) Cagapisto probably means ‘shit-pesto’—as, for example, in the pasta sauce. In the case of the two brothers Gregorio and Guilielmo Cacainarca, again both iudices and active consuls between 1143 and 1187, their surname means ‘shit-in-a-box’. That of Arderico Cagainosa, consul in 1140 and 1144, means ‘shit-in-your-pants’. Other prominent families included the Cagalenti, ‘shit-slowly’, the Cacainbasilica, ‘shit-in-the-church’, the Cacarana, ‘shit-a-frog’, the Cagatosici, ‘toxic-shit’, and there were many more. The twelfth century was a period when nicknames became surnames or even first names in Italy; there was a vogue for Mala- names, boasting of evil, among the aristocracy, for example (as with the Milanese aristocratic consul Malastreva, ‘evil-stirrup’), whereas in more clerical Rome, alongside some Caca- names, many names were formed from Deus-. But what would, say, the German court have thought, full of snobbish aristocrats from old families as it was, to find an authoritative representative from northern Italy’s biggest city called Shit-pesto? In fact, we can tell; for one of them, Otto of Freising, when he narrates with some schadenfreude the travails of Girardo in 1154, calls him Girardo Niger, ‘the black’, a name never attested in Milan, which Otto must have invented as a politer alternative. This may have also been in the historian’s mind when, just before, he wrote his famous trope about how awful it was that Italians allowed ‘youths of inferior condition’ and even ‘workers in the contemptible mechanical arts’ to assume the miliciae cingulum, that is to say public office. Not that it is likely that any of the people we have just looked at were also artisans, as Otto implies, but there is no reason to take that statement too seriously—anyway, for Otto, a medium landowner called Shit-pesto with a leading civic role would have been quite as bad as a rude mechanical. It is important to recognise that shit-words were not taboo in Europe in this period; medieval Europe did not ever match the squeamishness of polite society in the years 1750–1950 in this respect. The Investiture Dispute, for example, has clear examples of Hildebrand being called Merdiprand and similar by ecclesiastical polemicists on the opposing side. But this in itself shows that shit-names were at least insulting, in many contexts, in our period. Not always in Milan, though, evidently. The earthy sensibility shown by local naming, I would go so far to say, is one of the major Milanese contributions to the ‘civic’ culture of the twelfth century; and it was both new and, as they must have soon realised, aggressive to outsiders.

Supercacafragilisticexpialidocious!

Not worth a separate post, but it has been brought to my attention that there is a word tetraplegia that is synonymous with quadriplegia and that, according to the OED (entry from 1986), has been around, if not in general use (it’s not in my print M-W or AHD), since 1911. Why?? I realize that quadri- is Latin and ‑plegia is ultimately from Greek (though we got it from Latin), but so what? Does that justify creating a pointless alternative term just to confuse people? What’s next, teleorasis for television?