You may or may not know that the verb atone comes from the phrase at one (it originally meant ‘to be reconciled’); now that you do (if you didn’t before), it may strike you as strange that the “one” part is pronounced so differently from the number. Well, that’s the “correct” pronunciation; the one for the number has undergone a dialectal shift that also produced /wət/ for oat, although the latter has stayed dialectal. And the OED says: “The orthoepist C. Cooper (Grammatica (1685)) draws attention to the latter development when he describes the pronunciations wun for ‘one’ and wuts for ‘oats’ as ‘barbarous speaking.’” So there you have it: those who dutifully obey the dicta of modern orthoepists of the Safire variety should immediately cease using the barbarous pronunciation that has so unfortunately overtaken the word one. What matter if no one understands you? A small price to pay for knowing your usage is unimpeachable!

Derryl Murphy, a writer and editor who lives in Prince George, BC, and writes the blog Cold Ground, has a post about a couple of curious usages he’s noticed among the kids of his neighborhood:

It’s now proper to tell kids who jump the queue not to budge. Don’t budge in line. Hey, no budging.

Also, when teams face each other in a sporting event, or when there is any other sort of contest, it’s now Us verse Them. I versed him shooting hoops today. We’ll verse the Lions in soccer tomorrow.

He asks “Is it a Prince George thing?” and I’m curious too: is anybody familiar with either of these innovations?

On page 195 of Mason & Dixon, Pynchon writes: “Thro’ the Efforts of Count Paradicsom, in any Case, a Band of these Aliens the Size of a Regiment, were presently arriv’d in Gloucestershire.” Noting that the M&D index of references has not managed to find anything helpful to say about this in the eight years the book has been available for study, I thought I’d better point out here that paradicsom is the Hungarian word for both ‘paradise’ and (more commonly these days) ‘tomato’ (the latter comestible used to be called paradicsomalma ‘paradise apple’ until the mid-19th century). Since the Count was referred to just a few paragraphs earlier as “an Hungarian Intermediary,” this should not have been too hard to figure out.

[Read more…]

I’m sorry to be so late with this—you’ve only got another day to get this week’s New Yorker—but it has a moving piece by Elizabeth Kolbert, “Last Words,” about the Eyak tribe of Alaska and the last native speaker of their language, Marie Smith Jones:

When I asked her how she felt about [being the last speaker], she said, “How would you feel if your baby died? If someone asked you, ‘What was it like to see it lying in the cradle?’ So think about that before you ask that kind of a question.”

(One interesting point about the article is that it reproduces the scientific transcription of Eyak, which has things like an x with a dot under it.)
Update. Marie Smith died on January 21, 2008.

Still reading Mason & Dixon, and I’ve hit the following passage:

Below them the lamps were coming on in the Taverns, the wind was shaking the Plantations of bare Trees, the River ceasing to reflect, as it began to absorb, the last light of the Day. They were out in Greenwich Park, walking near Lord Chesterfield’s House,— the Autumn was well advanced, the trees gone to Pen-Strokes and Shadows in crippl’d Plexity, bath’d in the declining light. A keen Wind flow’d about them. Down the Hill-side, light in colors of the Hearth was transmitted by window-panes more and less optickally true. Hounds bark’d in the Forest.

The word “plexity” stopped me cold. It’s not in the OED or the big Webster’s, it’s not from a Latin *plexitas (-plex is only a suffix in Latin) and thus is not a plausible 18th-century formation, and the only modern use of it I can turn up is a sociological one that seems extremely unlikely to be relevant here: “Plexity refers to the type of transactions that we are involved in with other people. If, for example, Tom only ever plays squash with Barbara, the relationship would be considered a uniplex one. If however, Tom and Barbara lived, worked and socialised together it would be a multiplex one.” (From “Language, Society and Power” by Rachael-Anne Knight: .doc file, HTML.) So what’s going on here? Is it simply a nonce abbreviation for complexity, or something more… significant?
Addendum. The word occurs again on p. 505: “Yet aloft, in Map-space, origins, destinations, any Termini, hardly seem to matter,—one can apprehend all at once the entire plexity of possible journeys, set as one is above Distance, above Time itself.”

A couple of years ago I linked to Lameen Souag’s Grammar of Algerian Darja; now I’m delighted to report he’s started a language blog, Jabal al-Lughat, which means ‘mountain of languages’ in Arabic. Both his posts to date are extremely interesting: one is on the N’Ko alphabet invented by Soulemayne Kante in 1949 for the Manding languages Malinke, Bambara, Dyula and their dialects (Lameen explains “N’Ko is an old Manding term, meaning ‘I say’ in each of the mutually comprehensible Manding languages… and hence traditionally used as a general term to cover Manding”), and the other is on Rastafarian “blin’ty,” which they substitute for city:

The people of the city, from a Rasta perspective, are “Babylon”; they don’t see the truth, so why should the word “city” contain the sound of “see”? (In a Jamaican pronunciation, anyway…) Rather, they substitute the more appropriate syllable “blind”…

Ahlan wa sahlan!

John Emerson has been running Idiocentrism for six months now, and has taken stock of his goals and successes. He writes:

Idiocentrism is not a blog—I write very few topical or personal posts. I use this site to self-publish the fruit of about 43 years of study and thought. (Think of me as a freelance pamphleteer). This is my main publication forum, though I’m always willing to write for pay, and is also my only institutional affiliation.

My long-term plan is to publish 2000 words a week for ten years, if I live that long. (I’m on track). This will add up to more than a million words, and I hope for perhaps a fifth of what I publish to be of enduring value…

He’s one of the most original and wide-ranging thinkers out there, and doing it without any institutional support. (He says, and I agree with him, that “the university has a negative effect on independent scholarship.”) So drop by and show him some love, why doncha? And if you know how to get an RSS feed set up, he’d like to hear from you.

Update (Sept. 2025). Idiocentrism is defunct; after publishing at Haquelebac, Trollblog, and Seeing the Forest, JE can now be found at Epigrues.

In case you’ve ever wondered whether to keep the particle “de” when referring to a person of Frenchness, here‘s the answer (courtesy of this thread at the newly resuscitated Wordorigins):

The rule is this – a “de” attached to a single-syllable name stays no matter what. Anything longer, and removal of the honorific means removal of the “de”.
So you read de Gaulle’s books, but you peruse Tocqueville’s works – and Villepin’s, as the minister is also an author.
And “de”, by the way, is NEVER capitalised.

Just for the record, the new prime minister‘s full name is Dominique Marie François René Galouzeau de Villepin. (It took me years to fully absorb the idea that Dominique could be a man’s name; when I was a kid I was quite confused by the Singing Nun‘s “Dominique, nique, nique” and its references to “he.”)

Robert Elsie’s Albanian authors in translation:

This web site contains the largest selection of Albanian literature ever to have appeared in English translation. It comprises a wide range of Albanian authors from past and present, including writers from Albania, Kosova and the Albanian diaspora. These translations are the fruits of over twenty years of research in the field of Albanian studies. Some were published, but most of them appear here for the first time.

Compared to other Balkan literatures, very little Albanian writing has ever been translated into English… The scarcity of translations of Albanian literature has, thus, nothing to do with a lack of quality in the original (although there are admittedly many works of dubious merit which would be better left untranslated), but simply rather with a lack of literary translators from Albanian into English. It is to be hoped that the situation will improve in the future.

In the meanwhile I trust that these modest translations of mine will provide some stimulus.

An excellent idea, and I hope it does something to raise the profile of Albanian literature. (Via the irreplaceable Plep.)

A point of information: although the more familiar Serbo-Croatian name Kosovo has the stress on the first syllable, the Albanian term Kosova has the stress on the middle syllable (ko-SO-va).

Update (Nov. 2021). Elsie died in 2017.

I’m delighted to report that R. Devraj, whose marvelous blog Dick & Garlick I discovered a while back, has picked up where he left off back in November, with posts on the dismissive term vernac, the “hybrid French-Tamil expression” bonjour maa, and other goodies. Welcome back, and stick around!