A hilarious/depressing post by the excellent Dan Hartung (about censorship of the comic strip Get Fuzzy) in his blog Stilicho (“a barbarian in the civilized world”—you know Stilicho, right?) led me to an investigation of the least respectable of the various meanings of the word beaver, which of course led me to the OED, where I discovered that the first citation of this meaning was:

1927 Immortalia 166 She took off her clothes From her head to her toes, And a voice at the keyhole yelled, ‘Beaver!’

(The next, from 1939, is from—wait for it—Finnegans Wake.) I did a little more investigation and discovered that Immortalia: An Anthology of American Ballads, Sailors’ Songs, Cowboy Songs, College Songs, Parodies, Limericks, and other humorous verses and doggerel is online, each edition lovingly photographed and the entire contents reproduced by John Mehlberg (who would like to hear from you if you happen to have a copy of one of the printings he knows of but has not seen). My hat is off to him, and you can see the actual limerick cited by the OED (number LIV, on page 166) here. (Um, not safe for work, in case you hadn’t figured that out.)

Update (2011). Alas, Dan has taken his blog down and Immortalia.com has been taken over by a link farmer, so there’s really not much point to this post any more. Ah well, I updated the dead “you know Stilicho” link to a Wikipedia entry, so at least one of the links works.

Update (2020). Apparently in 2011 I didn’t know about the Wayback Machine; I have now used it to restore several of the links, though neither the cartoon strip nor the Immortalia webpage (“Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.”) is available. However, an OCR of Immortalia, with downloadable PDF, is here.

I haven’t lambasted William Safire for a while now, and after his recent “Kifaya!” [archived], helpfully describing the meaning (‘enough!’), usage (political protest), pronunciation, and even derivation (quoting Hans Wehr’s Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic) of the titular exclamation, I was feeling downright charitable towards him. But no longer. His latest column [archived], called “Putin/Poutine,” is a nasty piece of work, spreading what he must know are lies in the service of an animus against the French that I thought was passé by now even among the most fervent conservatives.

His column makes two simple points:
1) The French spelling Poutine for the president of Russia “is pronounced poo-TEEN,” which is not how the Russians say it (“POO-tyeen”).
2) The reason for this is that they’re trying to avoid the spelling Putin, which “would be pronounced as putain in French — that is, sounding close to pew-TANH [– which] means ‘prostitute; whore.'”

Point 1 is true; point 2, the entire raison d’être for his column, is ridiculous. He must know perfectly well that Poutine is the only possible way to write the name in French, that there’s a standard way to render Russian names in French (Lénine, Staline, Khrouchtchev) and they’re simply following it. He must also know that the French can’t possibly pronounce it à la russe (unless, of course, they study Russian) because they don’t have a stress accent; stress aside, they do a better job than Americans do, with our alveolar t and reduced unstressed i. I hold no brief for Putin, a nasty piece of work himself, and anybody who wants to make fun of him has my blessing (perhaps by comparing him to québecois poutine, which Safire mentions only parenthetically, to “head off a torrent of e-mail from Quebec”). But his column is supposed to be about language, not politics, and even by his own standards I’d say he’s disgraced himself.

Update (Sept. 2025). In providing archived links for this post, I discovered that the last one, the “poutine” page, ends “For more information about poutine, try the Alta Vista or InfoSeek search tools.” Nostalgia!

A Japan Times article by Roger Pulvers has fun with the notion, dear to people in Japan, that Japanese is “the most difficult language in the world”:

No sooner had I closed my umbrella and entered the cab than the driver peered at me in the rearview mirror and said, in Japanese: “You’re not a Japanese are you.”
“No, I’m not,” I replied.
“Oh. Japanese is the most difficult language to speak in the world, you know. Isn’t it?”
Well, for the 15-minute ride home I strove to persuade my driver that this, in fact, did not seem to be the case. I pointed out the fiendish difficulties of the languages that I had studied in my life, Russian and, particularly, Polish being much more complicated in grammar and pronunciation, at least for a native speaker of English, than Japanese. I finished my discourse as we rounded the corner by my house.
“I mean, Polish, for instance, has elaborate case endings for adjectives, and even has a special one for the nominative plural of male animate nouns!”
Having listened attentively to my passionate, if pedantic, foray into the esoterica of comparative linguistics, the driver stopped the cab by my front gate, turned his head around to me and smiled broadly.
“Well, anyway,” he said, “Japanese is still the most difficult language in the world!”

So far, so amusing, but Pulvers goes on to say:

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Chapati Mystery (a blog by Sepoy, “a doctoral candidate in History and South Asian Languages and Civilizations department at the University of Chicago”) has a great post about the history of the word termagant ‘a quarrelsome, scolding woman; a shrew.’ The OED says “Name of an imaginary deity held in mediæval Christendom to be worshipped by Muslims,” which is interesting in and of itself, but the question is, where did the name come from? Sepoy investigates various proposed solutions, all more or less unsatisfactory (ta-rabbi-l-ka’bati ‘by the Lord of Ka’aba’??); we’ll probably never know the answer, but this sort of quest makes us very happy here at Chateau Languagehat.

Having gotten back to reading Dead Souls, I hit another mysterious word, гальбик [gal’bik], which is not in any of my dictionaries. From the context (Этот, братец, и в гальбик, и в банчишку, и во все что хочешь [That guy will play galbik, bank, whatever you want], a few pages into Chapter 4) it’s obviously a game of chance, but which? (I’m not the only one who wonders; Vasili Utkin, a soccer broadcaster with a passion for literature, says in an interview: “моя самая любимая книга – “Мертвые души”… Если бы я нашел описание игры в “гальбик”, думаю, что один из интересов студенческой поры для меня был бы удовлетворен.” [My favorite book is Dead Souls… If I could find a description of the game of “galbik,” I think my curiosity of student days would be satisfied.]) Both Andrew MacAndrew, whose translation I have at hand, and D.J. Hogarth, whose version is online [no longer, as of 2012], give up and render it “faro,” which provides only a vague equivalent (the Russian word for that is faraon). The only hint I found by googling (and Yandexing) was that the same Russian word was used to translate passe-dix in Chapter 32, “Un diner de procureur,” of Dumas’s Les Trois mousquetaires: “plumer quelque peu les jeunes clercs en leur apprenant la bassette, le passe-dix et le lansquenet dans leurs plus fines pratiques”—as this translation has it, “to pluck the clerks a little by teaching them bassette, passedix, and lansquenet.” According to the OED the corresponding English word is “passage”:

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I have reported on politically inspired place-name changing in India; now it’s the turn of South Africa and Ireland. It seems the former country’s capital, Pretoria, is being renamed Tshwane, adding to a list of similar changes that includes, for instance, Pietersburg changing to Polokwane a few years ago. While I understand the desire to eliminate names associated with the apartheid government, in this case it seems like there must be better ways to spend the billion-plus rand the change is expected to cost. Of linguistic interest is the fact that the -h- represents aspiration, so the new name is basically pronounced “Tswane,” although I’m sure most English-speakers will use the /sh/ sound because of the spelling. Also, it’s not at all clear what the meaning of the new name is. The Hindustan Times story says:

Pretoria was named after Andries Pretorius, who settled here with the so-called “Voortrekkers” (front trekkers) a vanguard of Boers who left the Cape colony with ox-wagons in the 1830s and the second group to live in the area.
The first were Nguni-speakers, known as the Ndebele who named the place Tshwane, which means “Little Ape”. The word Tshwane is said to symbolise the chief’s motto — “we are the same.”

So that’s two possible meanings right there (though I’m not clear on what “symbolizing the motto” means); the page “Meanings of place names in South Africa” quotes a government website as saying:

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The much-loved folklorist and teacher Alan Dundes died this week; the San Francisco Chronicle obit says:

Renowned UC Berkeley folklorist Alan Dundes died Wednesday from an apparent heart attack suffered while teaching a graduate seminar on campus.
Dundes, 70, an internationally known figure whose enthusiasm and rigorous scholarship established folklore as a full-fledged academic discipline, died on the way to the Alta Bates-Summit Medical Center in Berkeley, campus officials said.
“Everybody’s in shock,” said the head archivist at Cal’s Folklore Archive, Kelly Revak, her voice breaking as she passed the phone to a colleague.
He collapsed shortly before 4:30 p.m. while conducting a graduate seminar on folklore theory and techniques in Giannini Hall, campus officials said. Ten students are enrolled in the class.

(Here is the UC Berkeley press release, with more details about his life and career and a good picture of him smiling behind a monstrous pile of papers, and here is the MetaFilter thread about him.) Renee, who was in his seminar, asked me to post this because she’s taken Glosses.net offline; my deepest sympathies to her and to everyone who knew Dundes, and I hope she will forgive my expressing the hope that at some point she revives Glosses, which has always been one of my favorite blogs and was an inspiration for this one.

A table of Simpsons characters with the versions of their names used in Latin America and Spain—which are often completely different. (Examples: Sideshow Bob is Bob Patiño in the Americas and Actor Secundario Bob in Iberia; Itchy and Scratchy are Tommy y Daly and Rasca y Pica respectively.) A major exception: Apu Nahasapeemapetilon is the same wherever you go. (The list is provided by Interlens en sus manos, where you will also find a tribute to Hatt Baby.)

Update (Sept. 2025). I could only find one capture of Interlens en sus manos, apparently showing an “I’m outta here” post (you can’t click through to the post or read the comments, and all the archives have been deleted), and the tribute to Hatt Baby seems to be gone for good.

This interview with Dmitri Gorbuntsov, the editor of a new edition of Dostoevsky, more complete and accurate than any previous (according to him), reminded me of a question that’s been plaguing me for some years, ever since I saw a previous more-accurate-than-ever edition of Dostoevsky (or it may have been a volume of this one). But first let me quote an interesting passage, Gorbuntsov’s response to a question about differences from an earlier edition:

The Academy’s complete edition of the works of Dostoevsky, of which Soviet literary criticism was so proud, left something to be desired in terms of completeness. It contains many kon”yunkturnye [politically motivated] emendations that conflict with shades of meaning of the author’s orthography and punctuation. It’s only fair to say that they started correcting Dostoyevsky even before Soviet times, [in fact] right after his death. During his life that was almost impossible to do. When Dostoyevsky discovered interference with his text, he handed out tongue-lashings that the proofreaders and make-up men who dealt with him remembered for the rest of their lives. If in defending some correction or other they mentioned grammar, Dostoyevsky took sharp exception—every author (he’d say) has his own style and grammar, and other people’s rules have nothing to do with him.

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A couple of interesting stories from the New York Times. I can’t get a blogsafe link for the first, so it may disappear in a few days:
Composing the Work an Ill-Fated Poet Never Began, by Alan Riding, describes a new book about (and by) Marina Tsvetayeva:

Now, in a new book published [in Paris], Tzvetan Todorov, a Bulgarian-born French philosopher and literary critic, believes he has found a way of introducing Tsvetayeva to a larger public outside Russia. In “Vivre Dans le Feu: Confessions” (Éditions Robert Laffont), or “Living in Fire: Confessions,” Mr. Todorov has organized extracts from nine volumes of her letters, notes and diaries into what he calls the autobiography she never wrote.

“When I first read the material in Russian, I thought it was amazing, but also a bit difficult to follow,” Mr. Todorov said in an interview, “because when you take all this writing, it’s not a finished work. So I decided to carry out a labor of love, to compose a book that Marina had already written so that anyone could read the confessions of one of the great writers of the past century.”

That’s a book I’d like to read. The other story is about the new breed of young, hip lexicographers: In Land of Lexicons, Having the Last Word, by Strawberry Saroyan (no, that’s not an April Fool’s joke, it’s her name). It focuses on Erin McKean, 33, editor in chief of the Oxford American Dictionary, but features others as well:

They include Steve Kleinedler, 38, who is second in command at American Heritage and has a phonetic vowel chart tattooed across his back; Grant Barrett, 34, project editor of The Historical Dictionary of American Slang, whom Ms. McKean describes as looking as if he’d just as soon fix a car as edit a dictionary; and Peter Sokolowski, 35, an associate editor at Merriam-Webster and a professional trumpet player. Jesse Sheidlower, 36, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary, is best known among the group so far, partly because he is also editor of “The F-Word,” a history of that vulgar term’s use in English. He is known for his bespoke English suits, too…

Sidney I. Landau, a former editor of Cambridge Dictionaries and the author of “Dictionaries: The Art And Craft of Lexicography” (and at 71, a member of an older generation), said a shift in people’s interests had also played a part. “In the early part of the 20th century, science and technology were very big in terms of marketing dictionaries, and they’d make claims about having 8,000 words dealing with electricity or mechanics,” he explained. But now, he added, “I think there has been a shift in terms of recognizing the importance of youth culture and slang.” In other words, people like Mr. Barrett, who marvels at a term like “ghetto pass,” which refers to street credibility for nonblacks, are in demand. He can trace its mainstream usage back to the hip-hop artist Ice Cube in 1991.
John Morse, the publisher and president of Merriam-Webster, said many young lexicographers had a natural social aptitude that helped them rise in the field. “I think if you go back 20 or 30 years, dictionary editors kind of sat in their office, did what they were supposed to do,” he said. “But what we realized – at least what I realized about 10 years ago – is that we needed to put a public face on dictionaries. Editors needed to be engaging with the public. And I think that activity is something younger editors stepped up to.” Ms. McKean often appears on public radio talking about words, and she has been dubbed “America’s lexicographical sweetheart” by National Public Radio’s program “Talk of the Nation.”

The whole article is interesting, and it’s always good to see Grant Barrett getting some press.