OK, this is a little silly, but I can’t resist: someone has decided that August 22 is National Punctuation Day. I’ll take that as an excuse to pass along a history of punctuation (including English, Spanish, French, and East Asian) and an exhaustive account [by Nick Nicholas] of Greek punctuation, ancient and modern. (All links via a MetaFilter post by—who else?—?!.)

I’ll also use this opportunity to repeat my plea for a history of Russian punctuation, specifically the late-nineteenth-century change from a “natural,” intuitive system to the present artificial, rule-bound one. Anybody got a link?

The BBC is beginning a series of programs called Word 4 Word; Simon Elmes, the executive producer, says:

Word 4 Word is the Radio 4 outlet for a unique piece of social and linguistic research called VOICES conducted this year.
Dialect experts at Leeds University devised a set of word prompts for the VOICES survey. Then ‘audio-gatherers’ from local and regional radio stations recorded over a thousand individuals from across the UK. The researchers were interested in recording the vernacular (everyday words and phrases) rather than ‘Standard’ or ‘BBC’ or ‘Oxford’ English.
The fruits of this enormous exercise are explored on Word 4 Word from 3 August.
You can read more about the VOICS survey and add to the regional library of vocabulary on the VOICES website.

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No, not the kind of mat you sleep on—I’m talking about Russian mat (curse words), and the birch bark used for documents in medieval Novgorod and other areas of north Russia. A new blog, Language Geek, reports that “Archaeologists in Veliky Novgorod have dug up some birchbark documents containing Russian profanities” and quotes from a Novosti article:

Archaeologists did not disclose the texts. They only said one of the findings was a note written by a woman to her acquaintance in which she reprimanded the latter for not paying her debt. The other piece is said to be part of a larger document not found so far. … The first bark document did not contain profanities, but was rather unusual. It said a Velikiy Novgorod resident, known as Shilnik, had stolen pigs and horses.

I await further details with considerable interest.

The Geek also translates from a Russian article in Izvestia Nauka:

…This document said that a Novgorod resident known as Shilnik “poshibayet” other people’s pigs and horses. Historians note that in old Russian the word “poshibayet” had several meanings. In particular, it could mean “steals, robs”. “However, the word ‘poshibayet’ had another, quite different meaning for our ancestors,” the historians explained.

The implication seems to be that it had a sexual meaning, which might fit the quote “Аще кто пошибает боярскую жену, за сором ей 5 гривен золота, а митрополиту такоже” ‘if anyone poshibaet a boyar’s wife, for the shame five grivnas to her, and the same to the metropolitan’ (in an article by T.M. Nikolaeva on the language of medieval statutes) at least as well as Dahl‘s ‘hit, beat’ (implied in Nikolaeva’s “берет ее под защиту от побоев” ‘protects her against beatings’).

Incidentally, in looking up birch-bark documents on Amazon, I discovered an interesting sounding book Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c.950-1300, but when I looked at the price I got a shock: how can Cambridge University Press charge $70 for a 342-page book? It’s insane.

That’s the title of an article by Jack Hitt in today’s NY Times Magazine. It’s about the amazing increase in Native American population in recent decades, an increase fueled by change in self-identification rather than birth rates (and no, it’s not about cashing in on casinos). There’s a good deal about language, and the conclusion is that language-learning is a good way to prove who’s really serious about belonging.

Laura Redish sees language revival at the heart of the new anxiety of identity: “It also takes a commitment to learn a language. I’ve noticed that urban mixed bloods, especially, want to learn—to not be wannabes. And language shows they are serious about connecting to who they are.”

From a small country lane in Connecticut, Stephanie Fielding rambled down a few dirt roads to a small clearing beside a rushing river. Her great-great-great-aunt Fidelia Fielding died in 1908, and a memorial stone dominates the sloping cemetery here. Fidelia was the last speaker of Mohegan. Today, Stephanie Fielding is devoted to reviving the language that Fidelia Fielding spoke. She travels from library to library scouring books and ancient missionary letters and documents. She is putting together her ancestral language, brick by brick, word by word.

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Don’t miss Mark Liberman’s ongoing investigation over at Language Log of the history of the word bullshit as applied to deprecated speech acts. Having taken it back to 1914 or perhaps 1910, he’s now pushed it to 1900. Oddly, he refers to but does not quote the first cite for “B.S.” in the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, so I’ll reproduce it here as a public service:

B.S. v. BULLSHIT.
1900 Howitzer (U.S. Mil. Acad.) (No. 1) 118: B.S.—volubility of discourse, or verbosity. Ibid. 138: Be-esse. n….Rough, crude talk.

Mark does, however, quote the glossary provided in the 1905 Howitzer yearbook “for the benefit of our struggling relatives and others who try to read our letters”; it expands “B.S.” to… British science!

Still reading American Colonies: The Settling of North America, I just came across a detail that upended everything I thought I knew about the history of the cowboy. The context is the creation of the Carolina colony in the late seventeenth century; it was settled mainly from Barbados, which had too many people crammed into too little space (in 1680 the most populous town in British America was not Boston but Bridgetown), and it had to find a way to support itself—it was too far north to grow sugar, the crop that made the Barbadian landowners rich. The colonists traded with the Indians for deerskin and slaves, but those were “volatile and diminishing commodities”; they harvested pine trees for lumber and tapped their pitch to make tar, vital for shipping.

Carolina also became the preeminent cattle country in the English empire, as the Carolinians pioneered many practices later perfected on a grand scale in the American West, including cattle branding, annual roundups, cow pens, and cattle drives from the interior to the market in Charles Town. Many owners entrusted the roaming cattle to the care of black slaves, who had previous experience as herdsmen in Africa. In Carolina the black herdsmen became known as “cowboys”—apparently the origin of that famous term.

The OED, however, takes cowboy in this sense only back to 1849: “The Mexican rancheros.. ventured across the Rio Grande.. but they were immediately attacked by the Texan ‘cow-boys’.” Does anybody know about this earlier use in the Carolinas?

Update. Ben Zimmer, in a comment, points out that this theory “was first put forward by Peter H. Wood in Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 Through the Stono Rebellion, first published in 1974 … Woods simply writes, ‘It is even possible that the very word ‘cowboy’ originated through this set of circumstances’ (p. 31). He gives no evidence for this conjecture…” So it is a mere hypothesis, and to my mind not a very plausible one. Nothing to see here!

Today wood s lot features the inimitable Ogden Nash, whose off-kilter verse delighted several generations of readers. I don’t know if he’s much quoted today aside from the immortal “Reflections On Ice Breaking” (“Candy/ Is dandy/ But liquor/ Is quicker”), which everybody attributes to Dorothy Parker anyway, but anyone with a taste for absurd rhymes, invented words, and a jaundiced viewpoint (all on display in the three-word “Further Reflections on Parsley”: “Parsley/ Is gharsley”) should investigate the trove at PoemHunter.com. I’ll limit myself to reproducing “Peekaboo, I Almost See You,” which shows off the full range of his comic arsenal:

Middle-aged life is merry, and I love to lead it,
But there comes a day when your eyes are all right but your arm isn’t long enough to hold the telephone book where you can read it,
And your friends get jocular, so you go to the oculist,
And of all your friends he is the joculist,
So over his facetiousness let us skim,
Only noting that he has been waiting for you ever since you said Good evening to his grandfather clock under the impression that it was him,
And you look at his chart and it says SHRDLU QWERTYOP, and you say Well, why SHRDNTLU QWERTYOP? and he says one set of glasses won’t do.
You need two.
One for reading Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason and Keats’s “Endymion” with,
And the other for walking around without saying Hello to strange wymion with.
So you spend your time taking off your seeing glasses to put on your reading glasses, and then remembering that your reading glasses are upstairs or in the car,
And then you can’t find your seeing glasses again because without them on you can’t see where they are.
Enough of such mishaps, they would try the patience of an ox,
I prefer to forget both pairs of glasses and pass my declining years saluting strange women and grandfather clocks.
—Ogden Nash

My dictionaries of first resort, the OED, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, and American Heritage, all give a four-syllable pronunciation for the name of this New England Indian tribe; M-W renders it “wäm-p&-‘nO-(“)ag, AH is the same (rendered in their own system), and the OED differs only in having a schwa in the final syllable. But the original pronunciation was clearly three syllables; the first citation in the OED (Roger Williams, 1676) calls them “Wampanoogs,” and the ending must be the same as in the original Narraganset name for the Pequots, Pequttôog, and the word for Europeans, Wautaconâug ‘coatmen,’ which I presume are two spellings of the same vowel or diphthong. It was still three syllables in the early nineteenth century; John Greenleaf Whittier’s 1830 poem “Metacom” rhymes “Beneath the closing veil of night,/ And leafy bough and curling fog,/ …Rested the fiery Wampanoag” and “The scorched earth—the blackened log—/ …Be the sole relics which remain/ Of the once mighty Wampanoag!” In 1847, John Brougham’s parody of the wildly popular play Metamora: Or, the Last of the Wampanoags was titled “Metamora, or the Last of the Pollywogs,” which strongly implies a pronunciation WAMP-anogs. And I just found a recording (mp3) of Chief Wild Horse, the last speaker of the Wampanoag dialect, reading the Lord’s Prayer (followed by a detailed linguistic explication) in 1961, and both he and the guy who introduces him say WAMP-anog, three syllables. So why do the dictionaries list only the spelling pronunciation wampa-NO-ag?

Addendum. Martin, in the comments, links to some extremely interesting sites: an article about Jessie “Little Doe” Fermino, a Mashpee Indian who last year earned a master’s in linguistics and is trying to revive the Wampanoag language (there’s more about the revival effort here, where the table on the upper right is, oddly, the syllabary for Inuktitut, a language not mentioned in the piece), and the website for the Wôpanâak Language Revitalization Project (and I note that the address line at the bottom refers to the “Wampanog Tribe”).

I should also mention that I got the mp3 recording from this webpage.

A MetaFilter post introduced me to the writer Saadat Hasan Manto, who at the time of Partition left a successful screenwriting career in Bombay for a miserable existence in Lahore, where he wrote brilliant stories and drank himself to death in early 1955. (There’s an affecting account of his life here.) He’s been compared to Lawrence and Gorky for the unblinking honesty of his writing, which frequently got him in trouble with the government; his most famous story is Toba Tek Singh, which is available in both Urdu and English here (there’s even a set of notes on the language [from C. M. Naim, Readings in Urdu Prose and Poetry, no longer available online in 2025]). You won’t soon forget the lunatic’s nonsense mantra (اوپڑ دی گڑ گڑ دی اینکس دی بے دھیانا دی منگ دی دال آف دی لالٹین, uupa;R dii gu;R gu;R dii enaks dii be dhyaanaa dii mu;Ng dii daal aaf dii laal;Ten).

If you’re interested in book design and book covers, you’ll probably want to, er, bookmark Foreword, “a community in the service of books and book design, with authors in the US and UK.” Check out the collection of The Bell Jar covers and the book cover waiting to happen.