I’m reading a (surprisingly good) book by Lucy Herndon Crockett called Popcorn on the Ginza (William Sloane Associates, 1949), about the first few years of the Occupation of Japan (she was there with the Red Cross from 1945 to 1947 and has left no biographical trace online that I can find, apart from a stint as a Bread Loaf fellow in 1949); on p. 144 I ran across a word that has stumped me: “The only death to date of an Occupationer at the hands of our former bitter enemy is that of an Air Force lieutenant who, about to return to his fiancée in the States, was poisoned in a geisha house by his corbito, who then took her own life.” (Italics in original.) “Corbito” gets a few hundred Google hits, but they’re all family names as far as I can tell, and the word is not in any of my dictionaries. It occurred to me that it might be an odd anglicization of some Japanese word based on hito ‘person’ (which can become –bito in compounds), but I haven’t found such a word in my Japanese dictionaries. Any ideas?

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As usual, I’ve dilly-dallied on reading the latest New Yorker until it only has a few more days on the newsstands, but for any fellow Adam Gopnik fans, the July 4 issue is indispensable (as usual, they don’t put Gopnik’s piece online—they know how to sell a magazine). “Death of a Fish” (“Through a glass bowl, darkly” [archived]) begins:

When our five-year-old daughter Olivia’s goldfish, Bluie, died, the other week, we were confronted by a crisis larger, or, at least, more intricate, than is entirely usual upon the death of a pet. Bluie’s life and his passing came to involve so many cosmic elements—including the problem of consciousness and the plotline of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”—that it left us all bleary-eyed and a little shaken.

It’s as good as “Bumping into Mr. Ravioli,” and that’s high praise indeed. A word of warning: those of you who have not seen Vertigo (and I must deplore the New Yorker‘s cockamamie tradition of putting movie titles in quotes) should not read the article until you’ve seen the movie, because there are spoilers aplenty. (Then again, why haven’t you seen Hitchcock’s greatest movie yet?) The rest of you, you know what to do.

Back when I first heard about the new Sappho poem (or, to be more accurate, filled-out version of Lobel-Page’s fragment 58) I said I’d love to see the Greek; now, thanks to serendipity (and I’m very happy to report that Chris is back and blogging up a storm), I can reproduce it here:

῎Υμμες πεδὰ Μοίσαν ἰ]ο̣κ[ό]λ̣πων
κάλα δῶρα, παῖδες,
σπουδάσδετε καὶ τὰ]ν̣ φιλἀοιδον
λιγύραν χελύνναν·
ἔμοι δ᾽ἄπαλον πρίν] π̣οτ᾽ [ἔ]ο̣ντα
χρόα γῆρας ἤδη
ἐπέλλαβε, λεῦκαι δ’ ἐγ]ένοντο
τρίχες ἐκ μελαίναν·
βάρυς δέ μ’ ὀ [θ]ῦμο̣ς̣ πεπόηται, γόνα
δ’ [ο]ὐ φέροισι,
τὰ δή ποτα λαίψηρ’ ἔον ὄρχησθ’ ἴσα
νεβρίοισι.
τὰ <μὲν> στεναχίσδω θαμέως· ἀλλὰ τί
κεν ποείην;
ἀγήραον ἄνθρωπον ἔοντ᾽ οὐ δύνατον
γένεσθαι
καὶ γἀρ π̣[ο]τ̣α̣ Τίθωνον ἔφαντο
βροδόπαχυν Αὔων
ἔρωι φ̣ . . α̣θ̣ε̣ισαν βάμεν’ εἰς
ἔσχατα γᾶς φέροισα[ν,
ἔοντα̣ [κ]ά̣λ̣ο̣ν καὶ νέον, ἀλλ’
αὖτον ὔμως ἔμαρψε
χρόνωι π̣ό̣λ̣ι̣ο̣ν̣ γῆρας, ἔχ[ο]
ν̣τ’ ἀθανάταν ἄκοιτιν.

Martin West’s translation:

[You for] the fragrant-blossomed Muses’ lovely gifts
[be zealous,] girls, [and the] clear melodious lyre:
[but my once tender] body old age now
[has seized;] my hair’s turned [white] instead of dark;
my heart’s grown heavy, my knees will not support me,
that once on a time were fleet for the dance as fawns.
This state I oft bemoan; but what’s to do?
Not to grow old, being human, there’s no way.
Tithonus once, the tale was, rose-armed Dawn,
love-smitten, carried off to the world’s end,
handsome and young then, yet in time grey age
o’ertook him, husband of immortal wife.

(Via Sauvage Noble.)

I’ve been awash in nostalgia reading Angelo’s reports on the LSA Institute at Sauvage Noble (1.1, 1.2, 1.3); ah for the days of splashing around in long-dead Anatolian languages and Tocharian transliteration! He reflects on “the basic nature of the divide between, e.g. Indo-Europeanists and ‘historical’ O[ptimality]T[heor]ists”:

Traditional historical linguistics is concerned with getting the description down, establishing the data, i.e. answering the question “what were the changes?”, and post-generative historical linguistics is concerned with accounting for “how and why were the changes?”. The former can be impressionistic regarding “how and why”, and the latter can play fast and loose with the “what”… (It’s striking to see how sparse the traditional classes are vs. the post-generative ones, that there’re more of us attending their classes than the other way around, at least based on my schedule and who I recognize.)

As I said in his comments, a thousand times better to have solid facts with insufficient theory than brilliant theory with undependable facts. (And I regret to say I’m not at all surprised at his parenthetical remark.)

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Thanks to a recommendation by Abdul-Walid of Acerbia (soon, alas, to vanish into the dreamtime of the internet, not even archived [July 2 update: poof, it’s gone!]) I have discovered Dave Bonta’s epic poem Cibola, which he has been serializing on his blog Via Negativa since the start of this year; he’s reached the penultimate of the 120 segments into which he’s divided the poem, so you won’t have a long wait for the conclusion. Being partial to a poem containing history, I visited out of curiosity to see what Dave was doing with the long form; I was hooked as soon as I saw the first epigraph, a snippet from the John William Johnson translation of a version of the Malian national epic of Sundiata (or as Johnson eccentrically renders it, “Son-Jara”):

Though a person find no gold,
Though he find no silver,
Should he find his freedom,
Then noble will he be.
A man of power is hard to find.

I’ve always been fascinated by the Malian epic, so this immediately drew me in, and the further epigraphs by William Blackwater and Wendell Berry further ensnared me, so that I was ready for Dave’s own poetry, which begins:

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Another word that’s new to me: pratique is “Clearance granted to a ship to proceed into port after compliance with health regulations or quarantine.” The OED adds: “Especially used in connexion with the South of Europe”; from googling, this no longer seems to be the case. OED citations start with:

1609 W. BIDDULPH in T. Lavender Trav. (1612) 4 Zante. We staied ten daies in the rode of this city, before we could get Pratticke, that is: leaue to come amongst them, or to vse traffique with them.

and end with:

1897 Daily News 14 Jan. 3/5 The P. and O. steamer Nubia arrived in the Thames from Plymouth yesterday afternoon… Dr. Collingridge gave the ship pratique, and the yellow flag was then hauled down amid loud cheers.

As you can see from the first quote, it used to have an anglicized pronunciation (PRATT-ik), and that’s the first one given by the OED, but apparently everyone now says pra-TEEK. What puzzled me was the word itself, but it seems practice (of which this is a variant) used to have a sense ‘Dealings, negotiation, conference, intercourse’ (1584 R. SCOT Discov. Witchcr. V. viii. 85 There was not any conference or practise betwixt them in this case), and this is a specialization of that use.

The Manx Language Samples Page has two samples of spoken Manx recorded over half a century ago; I was thinking of using the longer one (The Pig and the Parson [.wav file]) as a Language Quiz a la Language Log, but I figured the URL would give too much away. (Via Incoming Signals, which got it from my favorite medievalist, Lisa Spangenberg, in a Making Light thread that contains discussion of the revival of Manx along with much else).

As a huge fan of Lorine Niedecker, I’m happy to report that Carlos has posted three of her poems at Halfway down the Danube; here’s one:

Consider at the outset:
to be thin for thought
or thick cream blossomy

Many things are better
flavored with bacon

Sweet Life, My love:
didn’t you ever try
this delicacy—the marrow
in the bone?

And don’t be afraid
to pour wine over cabbage

Of which Carlos says: “It nicely encapsulates the Wisconsin philosophy of life. (Especially the fourth and fifth lines.)”

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I just discovered that a squirrel’s nest is called a dray (4,160 Google hits) or drey (826). (Oddly, there are a lot more images under the “drey” spelling.) The OED has the word (“Origin unknown”), but neither the AHD nor Merriam-Webster does (though of course they have the ‘cart or wagon’ word). I just wanted to share the information.

An essay by J. M. Tyree on “Henry Thoreau, William Gaddis, and the Buried History of an Epigraph” (found via the invaluable wood s lot) reminded me of the clever (annoyingly clever, if you will) title of Gaddis’s last novel, Agapē Agape, in which

the first word is the Hellenistic Greek term for the early Christian love-communion. The participants were to greet one another, according to St. Paul, with “an holy kiss.” Originally, this was an open-mouthed mutual breathing, in which one “inspired” the Holy Spirit from the lips of another believer… But in the fallen state that Gaddis links to modern life, one is often merely “agape” when one opens one’s mouth, whether in sexual kissing, talking, or, as Tabbi suggests, the slack-jawed response to mass-entertainment culture and mechanized art… So little, after all—a mere Greek accent—separates the false cognates agape and agape.

Now, I don’t know what the last sentence means (accent as in “accent mark”?—but there is none in English—or as in “Southern accent”?—but presumably nobody but a few first-generation Greek-Americans says the English word with a Greek accent), but that’s not what interests me. [I should have checked the actual title of the book, which has a macron over the first e to represent Greek ēta. This is still not a “Greek accent” but at least I know what he means.] What I want to know is how you pronounce the first agapē, the word for “Christian love” (or however you want to define it). I’ve always put the stress on the second syllable, ə-GAH-pay, and this is the first pronunciation given in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary; I assume the stress derives from the accented syllable in the Greek (which was a stress, not pitch, accent by New Testament times). The second pronunciation given has the stress on the first syllable: AH-gə-pay. The only pronunciation given in the OED also stresses the first syllable (which derives from the tradition of pronouncing Greek words as if they were Latin, with the stress on the antepenult if the penult is short), but it is anglicized to AG-ə-pee (first syllable rhyming with bag). So, assuming you ever use the word in speech, how do you say it (please mention which country you’re from)? And (a separate question) which do you think fits better in the title: ə-GAH-pay ə-GAYP, AH-gə-pay ə-GAYP, or AG-ə-pee ə-GAYP? (I don’t suppose anybody knows how Gaddis pronounced the word, but if you do, please share.)