Radio station KCRW has a regular feature called “Bookworm” in which authors are interviewed about their work; the half-hour shows are available online, and I can pretty much guarantee you’ll find something of interest. I was delighted to hear the talk (audio link) with Jonathan Williams (thanks, Andie!), and there’s also a link to excerpts from his new collection Jubilant Thicket: New & Selected Poems. And there are interviews with Ian McEwan, Roberto Calasso, Susan Sontag, August Kleinzahler, Orhan Pamuk, William Gass, Alex Garland, Octavia Butler, Robert Creeley, W. G. Sebald, Walter Mosley… Well, you get the idea. Lots of good stuff.

Pita’s hat blog. It’s nothing but hats… and it’s in French! Need I say more? Check out this 1935 cover—there’s a whole novella in that image. Or this wide-eyed and perhaps a bit complacent gaze from 1900: little does she know what the century to come will bring, the sad retreat from hat-wearing being the least of it. And men are not entirely neglected. (Mille remerciements to Derryl Murphy of Cold Ground!)

Wayne Leman’s Better Bibles Blog is dedicated to “improving English Bible translations” not so much in terms of accurately rendering the sense of the original (though of course that’s important to him) but in terms of rendering it into good, effective English, a goal he finds many current translations fall short of. When I ran across his blog, I was afraid Wayne was concerned about the sort of thing people often mean when they say “good English” (sentences ending with prepositions, split infinitives, that sort of nonsense), but I’m happy to report that’s not the case:

I am not a prescriptive linguist (that is, someone who tells people how they should speak and write). Rather, I am a descriptive linguist, someone who observes how people actually speak and write. I observe, as do many others, that the majority of English speakers continue to use subject-verb agreement, so in a published book, especially one as important as the Bible, I feel it is important to point out when there is lack of subject-verb agreement. Similarly, there are a number of other language “rules” (or “principles”) that fluent English speakers and writers follow that I believe should be followed in a book intended to be in quality literary English—at least they should be followed until there is a sufficient consensus (a large majority) among English speakers that those rules need to be changed…
I believe people have and should have linguistic choices. I do not think that “language police” should tell us how to speak, regardless of how well intentioned they are. I do think it is appropriate for English teachers to explain to their students what the current consensus is for usage of various linguistic forms. A teacher can explain that “If you want to be hired for some jobs, you need to be able to speak and write in a dialect that is approved of by the administrators of that company.” But no one should ever tell people that they are “dumb” or “social rejects” if they speak a certain way.

Amen to that! (I’m a King James man myself, but that’s because I read the Bible as a literary masterpiece, not as the urgent communication it must be to a believing Christian.)

Your language needs you!

Did you eat a balti before 1984 or have a mullet before 1994? And do you know how they got their names?
In conjunction with a major forthcoming BBC2 series, the OED invites you to hunt for words and help rewrite ‘the greatest book in the English language’.
250 years after Dr Johnson wrote his celebrated dictionary with the aid of just six helpers, the BBC and the Oxford English Dictionary have teamed up to appeal to the nation to help solve some of the most intriguing recent word mysteries in the language.
The OED seeks to find the earliest verifiable usage of every single word in the English language—currently 600,000 in the OED and counting—and of every separate meaning of every word. Quite a task! The fifty words on the OED’s BBC Wordhunt appeal list all have a date next to them—corresponding to the earliest evidence the dictionary currently has for that word or phrase. Can you trump that? If so the BBC wants to hear from you.

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Piotr Gąsiorowski, who studied electronics and computer science at Warsaw Polytechnic from 1978 till 1984 and then, disappointed with “what computer science was like in Poland in those ancient times,” became a historical linguist instead, has put online some essays about Proto-Indo-European, notably one on stress and one on the verb system. While full of good meaty information, they’re written in such a way that readers without specialized training should be able to follow along, and with a sense of humor, always welcome in what can be a dry field: “I don’t know if any speaker of PIE ever said ‘O yoke’ to a yoke. I suppose the potential vocative would have received initial stress if it had occurred to anyone to use it.” (Via ilani ilani.)

Update (Sept. 2023). Piotr Gąsiorowski now at Google Scholar (he used to blog here, and occasionally makes an appearance at LH); Bridget D. Samuels of the ex-blog ilani ilani has a homepage.

I haven’t seen Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith yet, and I’m not sure I need to now that I’ve seen these screenshots of a bootleg DVD with English subtitles retranslating the Chinese translation used in the version copied. As jeremy (who bought the DVD and posted the screenshots) says, “amazingly enough, the beginning scroll is mistranslated even though the words are right there on the screen.” And the title Revenge of the Sith becomes “The backstroke of the west” (I can only assume that Sith got rendered as xi ‘west’). I’ll let you discover the rest yourself, but I can’t resist noting that “Jedi Council” becomes “Presbyterian Church.” (Via MetaFilter.)

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Abecedarium is the Guild of Book Workers‘ biennial exhibit for 1998/99; it shows a collection of modern books on the theme of the alphabet. Some of them are beautiful, some linguistically pleasing, some you wish you could touch. (Via wood s lot.)

A correspondent writes:

…here’s an interesting word, not found in the OED, which I came across in the lyrics of the old sea song “Rant and Roar,” specifically one of the Newfoundland versions.

“I went to a dance one night at Fox Harbour;
there were plenty of girls, so nice as you’d wish;
There was one pretty maiden a-chawin’ of frankgum
just like a young kitten a-gnawing fresh fish.”

The OED doesn’t have “frankgum” but the meaning is clearly “spruce gum,” since “frankincense” can also refer to spruce gum or other related resins, and if “frank-incense” then why not “frank-gum?” Still, I wonder if your distinguished readership has ever encountered this usage.

(You can find the full lyrics here; the word also turns up here under “Cuts”: “probably cuttin’ frankgum off a junk or something like that.”) So, distinguished readers: anybody know this word?

Patrick Hassel Zein has a pageful of links on the Chinese language, many of which look useful and/or interesting, but the one I want to highlight here is The most common Chinese characters in order of frequency. Boy, I wish I’d had this available when I was trying to learn Chinese; he explains:

The list was created using statistic list of Chinese characters and a number of thick dictionaries. All characters are presented in falling statistical order. Pronunciations are specified according to Pinyin and for some characters a number of different possible pronunciations are given. Examples of common words are given for most characters, however with no guarantee that all the most common words are listed or that the given examples are particularly common words. Some of the listed pronunciations for some characters are less used than other pronunciations for the same character, and in those cases translations and examples may lack. Some additional comments are given.

The first character is 的, of which he says:

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The excellent Russian-Israeli blogger Avva has a great story about a taxi ride with a driver he’d used several times before: “Judging by his face and Hebrew, a typical sabra (native Israeli), an Ashkenazi, about 45… He tells me he lived in America a long time; sometimes he switches to quite good English.” They had just exited from a tunnel and were behind a car that refused to move; the driver was turning into the next lane to pass when a bus shot out of the tunnel and sped past in that very lane. “The driver leans on the brake with all his strength and hollers” a stream of Russian obscenity, “without any accent whatsoever.” (I won’t bother reproducing the mat because anyone who could read it might as well read Avva’s whole entry—it’s short and funny.) As one commenter said, “It’s always like that—we speak in one language, switch to another, and curse in Russian.” I have to say that Russian is the best language for cursing I know, bar none.