In the comments to my post on napoo, xiaolongnu mentioned the expression chin-chin, which I would have placed in the same WWI era and soldierly milieu (major raising glass of claret: “Chin-chin, old chap! Drink up, the Boche await!”); it turns out it goes back much farther than that. The Hobson-Jobson entry begins:

CHIN-CHIN. In the “pigeon English” of Chinese ports this signifies ‘salutation, compliments,’ or ‘to salute,’ and is much used by Englishmen as slang in such senses. It is a corruption of the Chinese phrase ts’ingts’ing, Pekingese ch’ing-ch’ing, a term of salutation answering to ‘thank-you,’ ‘adieu.’ In the same vulgar dialect chin-chin joss means religious worship of any kind (see JOSS). It is curious that the phrase occurs in a quaint story told to William of Rubruck by a Chinese priest whom he met at the Court of the Great Kaan (see below). And it is equally remarkable to find the same story related with singular closeness of correspondence out of “the Chinese books of Geography” by Francesco Carletti, 350 years later (in 1600).

The William of Rubruck citation takes the expression back to the thirteenth century:

1253.— “One day there sate by me a certain priest of Cathay, dressed in a red cloth of exquisite colour, and when I asked him whence they got such a dye, he told me how in the eastern parts of Cathay there were lofty cliffs on which dwelt certain creatures in all things partaking of human form, except that their knees did not bend. . . . The huntsmen go thither, taking very strong beer with them, and make holes in the rocks which they fill with this beer. . . . Then they hide themselves and these creatures come out of their holes and taste the liquor, and call out ‘Chin Chin.'”—Itinerarium, in Rec. de Voyages, &c., iv. 328.

The first evidence the OED finds for English is cited from Hobson-Jobson (I believe that’s what “Y.” means):
1795 M. SYMES Embassy to Ava 295 (Y.) We soon fixed them in their seats, both parties.. repeating Chin Chin, Chin Chin, the Chinese term of salutation.
And these illustrate characteristic twentieth-century use:
1929 J. B. PRIESTLEY Good Compan. II. vii. 439 Chin-chin, Effie my dear, and all the best for Xmas!
1938 HEMINGWAY Fifth Column (1939) I. ii, Downa hatch. Cherio. Chin chin.
1962 ‘M. INNES’ Connoisseur’s Case iii. 34 Going on your way, are you? Well, chin-chin!
1967 P. JONES Fifth Defector iv. 36 Two glasses appeared, with ice tinkling in the Scotch. Paul raised his, smiling. ‘Chin chin.’
For etymology, the OED says only “Chinese ts’ing ts’ing“; this is annoyingly vague both as to “dialect” and meaning—they should really add characters to at least the online edition. Does anyone have more detailed information about the Chinese use of this phrase?

The English word mocha (a kind of coffee) is pronounced “moka” and derives from the port in Yemen (Arabic المخا [al-Mukhā]). Ever since I learned that one of Melville’s sources for Moby Dick was a historical whale named Mocha Dick, I had assumed it was the same word, presumably from the sense ‘a dark chocolate-brown color,’ and pronounced it accordingly, but Chris Patterson at Wordorigins directed me to the Wikipedia article for Mocha Island (in Spanish Isla Mocha) off the coast of Chile, which informs me that “The waters off the island are also noted as the home to a famous 19th century sperm whale, Mocha Dick, the inspiration for the fictional whale Moby Dick”; clearly the name was pronounced just the way it’s spelled, with /ch/ rather than /k/. A small thing, but important to us pedants.

Conrad H. Roth, the learned and acerbic proprietor of Varieties of Unreligious Experience (and self-described “unmoored intellectual desperately seeking a thesis-topic”), has a post that brings to my attention an unusual slang term. After a discussion of “the old WW1 satirical journal, The Wipers Times” (Wipers being a jovial deformation of the name of the Belgian town Ypres), and quoting a nice quatrain by Gilbert Frankau, he concludes:

The Wipers texts, both prose and verse, are full of slang still vibrant and uncontained; a famous example is na poo or narpoo, from the French ‘il n’y a plus’, meaning ‘there’s none left’, or more generally, ‘no good’. Hence:

The privit to the sergeant said
“I wants my blooming rum.”
“Na poo,” the sergeant curtly said,
And sucked his jammy thumb.

Narpoo indeed. An example of a word dragging meaning into itself like a vortex, the finest moments of a popular vocabulary; compare ‘fuck’ now, or ‘quoz’ in the 1840s (for which see Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions, chapter 13).

[Read more…]

Companionway is one of those words I’ve seen from time to time and never bothered to look up; the general sense ‘something you walk along on a ship’ sufficed for my purposes. But in reading Jane Stevenson’s The Winter Queen (I’m on a 17th-century kick these days) I hit the line “she pointed him speechlessly towards the stairs, steep as a ship’s companionway” and realized I had a completely misleading, if vague, image of a companionway, so I looked it up. Turns out it’s (in Merriam-Webster’s words) ‘a ship’s stairway from one deck to another’; M-W says it’s from companion ‘a hood covering at the top of a companionway’ and derives that “by folk etymology from Dutch kampanje poop deck.” You mean it has nothing to do with the usual word companion? thought I—but it turns out it’s not that simple. Here’s the OED:

cf. Du. kompanje, now usually kampanje, ‘quarterdeck’ (i.e. above the cabin in the old ships of the line), … corresp. to OF. compagne ‘chambre du majordome d’une galère’ (Littré), It. compagna, more fully chambre de la compagne, camera della compagna, … from It. and med.L. compagna, … ‘vivres, provisions de bouche’ (Jal).
The (camera della) Compagna was thus originally the pantry or store-room of provisions in the mediæval galley, found already in 14th c. Pantero-Pantera, Armata Navale (Rome 1613) iv. 45, describes it as ‘la camera della Campagna, che serve come una dispensa, nella quale sta il vino, il companatico, cioè carne salata, il formaggio, l’oglio, l’aceto, i salumi, e l’altre robbe simili’ (Jal). The name has passed in Du. and Eng. to other structures erected on the deck. In Eng. corrupted by sailors into conformity with COMPANION¹ (to which it is indeed related in origin).

So a Vulgar Latin word meaning ‘what one eats with bread’ (cum pane) becomes a Romance word for ‘provisions’ and thus (via a phrase ‘room for provisions, ship’s storeroom’) to a particular cabin and then the deck associated with it, but its Dutch form kompanje sounded enough like the word for ‘someone who shares your bread with you’ that English sailors pulled it back into that form. Lovely! (But why does M-W ignore this backstory and leave the word’s history at the Dutch phase?)

This Feb. 15 story by Jaime Ciavarra depresses me tremendously. It’s always sad when a bookstore goes out of business, but when the books are actually destroyed it’s horrible:

Thousands of books—torn, tattered, spines broken—were lumped into literary mountains on a Gaithersburg parking lot, men shoveling them into two green, 10-ton Dumpsters…

A Russian bookstore that has long been a haven for immigrants, researchers, and—some say—even spies and CIA agents during the Cold War, unexpectedly closed its doors last week when the owner was evicted.

Thousands of books, all in Russian and some still in plastic packaging, were taken to the trash transfer station at Shady Grove to be recycled.

Victor Kamkin Inc., one of the largest Russian book distributors in the United States, was nearly six months overdue in rent at the brick building at 220 Girard Street in Olde Towne, the property manager said.

Last week, when the store owner had not moved the books from the site, First Potomac Realty Trust began the eviction process, removing nearly 400,000 of the estimated 600,000 Russian books as customers watched, and tried to salvage some titles, in the bitter cold…

[Read more…]

Ben Zimmer of Language Log has a detailed discussion of the name of a newborn:

When Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes announced the birth of their daughter on Tuesday, celebrity-watchers were eager to find out what to call TomKat’s offspring (besides TomKitten, of course). The couple’s publicist revealed that the baby’s name is Suri, further explaining that the name means ‘princess’ in Hebrew and ‘red rose’ in Persian. Given the immense scrutiny the couple has gotten, it was no surprise that even this offhand comment stirred up some controversy…

I’ll let you read Ben’s analysis of the Hebrew-princess issue (to which I can only add that Suri looks to me like a dialect variant of the name Sarah, which I believe is Sore in standard Yiddish, rather than a product of Kabbalah); personally, I’m more interested in the (uncontroversial) Persian word سوری, short for گل سوری gol-e suri ‘red rose,’ where suri is an adjectival derivative of sur ‘red color.’ This is apparently a cousin of the normal Persian word for ‘red,’ sorkh, which is related to Avestan sukhra; if anybody knows the details of the phonological developments involved, I’d love to hear them. (Incidentally, Ben might want to fix his quote from the Encyclopedia Iranica, which—due presumably to his not having downloaded the necessary font—gives the word as “sorkò” rather than sorkh.)
Ben says “That hasn’t stopped journalists and bloggers from finding alternate meanings for the word in various languages: ‘pickpocket’ in Japanese (Times of London), ‘pointy nose’ in the southern Indian language of Todas (AP), an epithet for Lord Krishna (Gawker), a breed of alpaca (Tabloidbaby), and so on and so forth”; to add to the fun, I’ll contribute Hausa ‘anthill,’ Pushtu ‘large sack,’ and (more attractively) Hindi (from Sanskrit) ‘wise, learned.’ When she gets old enough, she can take her pick.

Chris Kern has an entry on “ghost characters”:

Proving once again that the Japanese writing system is supremely screwed up, there are apparently certain characters called 幽霊文字 (“ghost characters”) that have no readings, meanings, or examples of use. Even if you look them up in a dictionary you get definitions like 意義未詳 (reading and meaning unknown). Examples of these ghost characters are 暃 and 碵.
They all come from the JIS set, which is a set of characters that are standard for computer terminals to display. Apparently during the compliation of the JIS set, some characters that weren’t actually characters got onto the list accidentally—either because they were miswritten versions of actual characters or the compilers misread certain kanji.

Matt of No-sword, in his post on the subject, shows that some of the characters are real, if obscure, but adds “even the JIS bigwigs admit that 妛 and 椦 are indeed just mistakes.” Something of a parallel to ghost words in English.

Lots of reading coming in over the transom and not enough time, so I’m just going to throw some stuff into the pot and call it burgoo:

1) An Etymological Dictionary of the Gaelic Language, by Alexander MacBain, via the indefatigable aldiboronti; it’s outdated (a reprint of the 1911 edition) but still useful if taken with a grain of salt. [Internet Archive]

2) I’m a big fan of Charles Reznikoff and quoted a brief description of his Testimony here; there’s a longer discussion by Edmund Hardy in the October issue of Jacket. (Via wood s lot, which also links to a nice review [archived] by Jenny Diski of Lost Worlds: What Have We Lost and Where Did It Go? by Michael Bywater, with plangent reflections on what it means to get older; I must, however, take issue with the title, “Who wears hats now?” The answer is, I do.)

3) A new blog, The Daily Growler, takes a break from its usual fare of over-the-top political commentary for a striking post called “From dust to dust” that begins with a hot Texas day suddenly turning cold (“The wind is now just flat-dab cold. And now the wind throws grains of what’s coming in my face and I breathe in and taste the first of what’s coming in my face and what’s coming in my face tastes like earth…”) and goes on to “one morning not so many years ago in New York City.” Yes, that’s what it was like.

A great AskMetaFilter question asks “What’s the new word for ‘cool’?”

As a Gen-Xer, I usually find myself pseudo-ironically using “rad” or “awesome” whenever I think something is totally killer. When a friend asked what word college students use now-a-days (he’s going to be teaching undergrads), I had to admit that I’m officially an out of touch old fogey. I know “cool” has spanned decades of continued usage, but what are the real generation-defining phrases of today’s 18-year-olds, in the same way that “cat’s pajamas” or “solid” are tied to an era?

There are plenty of answers from actual college and high-school students; executive summary (by the original poster; I’ve added italics for clarity):

● Sweet, awesome, nice, hot, and to a lesser degree sick, through the miraculous preservative powers of irony, have managed to maintain their coolness from 80’s surf/skate culture. Bitchin’, gnarly and rad? Totally bogus.
● Tight and dope have survived from 80’s hip-hop culture, while def, phat and fresh are not-so-fresh anymore.
● Shiny, official, pimp as an adjective, and possibly clutch have definite potential, and I hope to see more of these brash newcomers.

Sweet!

A couple of years ago I reported on the MLA‘s interactive language map of the US; Ben Zimmer of Language Log now informs us that the site has added new features, including actual density of speakers (which means you can see the counties where, say, Spanish-speakers are a large proportion of the population, even if there aren’t a lot of them—see Ben’s post for a nice graphic demonstration of the difference it makes in Texas). “Not only does the new improved site generate percentage-based maps for different languages, it has a whole host of enhancements, including a Data Center with statistics for more than 300 languages searchable all the way down to the municipal level.” Day by day, in every way, the internet gets better and better…