The hotel is humongous
as high as clouds
the clouds are not small
nor yellow with a picture of blueberries.
They are pink but they still
are not weird like blue
string wrapped around it with
people on top.
Nobody is jumping on them. There is only
a window next door in
the hotel and light pink with
yellow light on
this rainy day.

  —Julia Mayhew

A NY Times story by David W. Dunlap in today’s Metro section, “Restoring Elegance Underfoot on a Street Long Past Its Prime” (about the restoration of the cobblestone surface of Bond Street), ends with the following admirable paragraph:

What New Yorkers call cobblestones are more accurately described as Belgian blocks — true cobblestones being rounded and irregular — but saying so is the province of a scold. And it is probably no more effective than insisting that the horse-drawn carriages on Central Park South are not hansom cabs.

That’s what I try to do here on Languagehat: provide accurate information without pretending that accuracy is always to be worshiped. I’m glad to know the correct term is “Belgian blocks,” but I will go on calling them cobblestones, just as I call tsunamis tidal waves. Let them scold who will!

A New York Times story by Edward Wyatt reports on the belated lawsuit by Pearson Education, the publishing company that owns the copyright to the Dick and Jane primers, against a division of Time Warner in Federal District Court in Los Angeles claiming that the book Yiddish With Dick and Jane violates Pearson’s copyrights and trademarks.

The brisk-selling book examines adultery, drug use and other tsuris that afflict Dick and Jane as adults. When it was published in September by Little, Brown & Company, part of the Time Warner Book Group, Pearson was farmisht and did not take any action. After an Internet video promotion of the book began attracting hundreds of thousands of viewers and the book’s sales topped 100,000, however, Pearson decided that the fun was over.
The book, by Ellis Weiner and Barbara Davilman, with illustrations by Gabi Payn, states on the front and back covers, spine and copyright page that it is a parody. But the lawsuit says the book “is not a parody, but is an unprotected imitation” because it does not use the copyrighted characters “for the purpose of social criticism.”…

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Having moved to Pittsfield, I naturally made it a priority to get a library card (the library is wonderfully called the Athenaeum), and the first order of business once I had it was to check out a few local histories. I have just begun reading The History of Pittsfield, (Berkshire County,) Massachusetts, from the Year 1734 to the Year 1800, by J.E.A. Smith (1869, repr. [1990?]), and I cannot resist passing along this sentence and footnote from page 7:

On the heights where Greylock lifts the topmost summit of the State, along the valleys of the Hoosac and the Housatonic, up the rude but flower-fringed wood-roads which penetrate the narrowing opes¹ of the Green Mountains, beauty is everywhere the prevailing element.

   ¹ The reader will pardon to necessity the employment of a word of merely local authority and very infrequent use. A hope — or more descriptively, without the aspirate, an ope — is a valley, which, open at one end only, loses itself at the other, sloping upward to a point in the mass of the mountains. The word is quite indispensable in the description of scenery like that of Berkshire; and its disuse has resulted in the adoption of such vile substitutes as “hole,” “hollow,” or even worse. Thus we have Biggs’s Hole and Bigsby’s Hollow, or more probably “Holler.” Surely neatly descriptive ope should not be displaced by such abominable interlopers as these.

   WEBSTER has “HOPE, n. — A sloping plain between ridges of mountains. [Not in use.] Ainsworth.” — But English local topographical writers sometimes use the word in the sense given it in the text.

Now, that’s interesting enough, but when I went to the OED (a resource not yet available to the good Mr. Smith), I found entries for both spellings—with no indication that they are related.

The second noun hope:

[OE. hop app. recorded only in combination (e.g. fenhop, mórhop: see sense 1). It is doubtful whether all the senses belong orig. to one word. With sense 3 cf. ON. hóp ‘a small land-locked bay or inlet, salt at flood tide and fresh at ebb’ (Vigf.).]

1. A piece of enclosed land, e.g. in the midst of fens or marshes or of waste land generally.

2. A small enclosed valley, esp. ‘a smaller opening branching out from the main dale, and running up to the mountain ranges; the upland part of a mountain valley’; a blind valley. Chiefly in south of Scotl. and north-east of England, where it enters largely into local nomenclature, as in Hopekirk, Hopetoun, Hope-head, Dryhope, Greenhope, Ramshope, Ridlees Hope, etc.

And the entry ope, a. and n, definition B.2.a:

2. a. Eng. regional (south-west.). An opening; spec. a narrow, usually covered, passage between houses; = OPEWAY n.

Note the 1886 citation: W. BARNES Gloss. Dorset Dial. 85 Ope, an opening in the cliffs down to the water side. Coincidence, or a misplaced unaspirated form?

Perhaps frequent commenter Eliza can provide information as to whether either of these forms is still in use.

Incidentally, the Smith book is the source of the recent fuss about Pittsfield having the first recorded reference to baseball in America; as the SportsLine story says:

The evidence comes in a 1791 bylaw that aims to protect the windows in Pittsfield’s new meeting house by prohibiting anyone from playing baseball within 80 yards of the building…

Historian John Thorn was doing research on the origins of baseball when he found a reference to the bylaw in an 1869 book on Pittsfield’s history.

And there it is, at the top of pate 447: “…the exterior [of the meeting-house] was protected by a by-law forbidding ‘any game of wicket, cricket, base-ball, bat-ball, foot-ball, cats, fives, or any other game played with ball,’ within eighty yards of the precious structure.” Whatever they were playing in Pittsfield in 1791, however, it was certainly not the game of baseball as we know it, which was created (in primitive form) by Alexander Cartwright half a century later in Manhattan, true home of the game [just one of the forms taken by the English game of the same name, which was brought to America in the eighteenth century and developed various names, including “townball” and “roundball,” and various regional rules and styles of play; see David Block’s Baseball before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game].

I plagiarize that title from Gail Armstrong [N.b.: As of April 2012, Open Brackets appears to be long defunct], who borrowed it from Mark Ford, who stole it from Bob Dylan, who swiped it from Eric Lott, and who knows where Lott got it? Plagiarism, or more broadly the appropriation of previously written material for one’s own purposes, is Ford’s subject, and he starts off with the usual suspects (Sterne, De Quincey, Coleridge) before going in a surprising direction: Wallace Stevens’ magnificent “Sunday Morning,” with its unforgettable ending (which may or may not refer to the extinction of a species; the poem “was composed not long after the death of the last passenger pigeon, named Martha, in Cincinnati zoo on 1 September 1914. The world’s attention was fixed, of course, on other events…”). Ford used some of Stevens’ imagery for a poem of his own, which is how he shoehorns it into the essay; whether it’s a good idea to juxtapose your own stanzas with those of Stevens is another matter entirely. At any rate, Ford then goes on to an excellent example, and one that warms my heart:

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We Yanks say the first, the Brits (if I understand correctly) use the second; in any case, that’s what we’re doing tomorrow. The movers are coming first thing in the morning, we close on the house we’re selling in the afternoon, we close on the house we’re buying the next afternoon, and Wednesday morning the movers deliver our stuff to the house in Pittsfield. After that a new life begins, and I’m going to have to devote a lot more time to trying to find clients and earn a living on my own. It’s exhilarating but nervous-making; the salient point here is that any time spent on surfing and posting will be time not spent paying the mortgage, so posting frequency may fall off until I get my feet on the ground, and in any case it’s unlikely I’ll be back online before Wednesday. Bear with me, and try to ignore whatever spam accumulates in the crevices of old threads…

Update. Thank you all for your good wishes. I know you’ll be relieved to hear that the move went smoothly; in fact, let me put in a plug for City Moves while I’m thinking of it. They did just what they said they would, were friendly and professional, and didn’t break a thing. We’re getting acquainted with Pittsfield (the supermarket has a good wine department!), and I just bought a do-it-yourself book that will be vital for the series of home improvements we’re planning to perpetrate — in fact, my wife is in the basement replacing a gizmo on the washer as we speak. (We have a basement! And a fireplace!) Unfortunately, something seems to have gone awry with the wireless connection to my laptop, so I’m having to borrow my wife’s computer, but I’m sure that will be remedied soon, and I can get back to semi-regular posting. Meanwhile, I miss NYC but I think I’m going to like it here.

Lexicographer Erin McKean is a senior editor at OUP as well as editor of Verbatim, “the only magazine of language and linguistics for the layperson.” Yesterday on Public Radio International’s show “The Next Big Thing” she said she wanted to bring three obscure words into use (and tried to bribe John Linnell of the group “They Might Be Giants” into using all three in liner notes so she could cite them); the words were contrecoup, craniosophic, and limerent. The first means ‘The effect of a blow, as an injury, fracture, produced exactly opposite, or at some distance from, the part actually struck’ (OED), and there is a gap of over a century in citations, between 1882 (Syd. Soc. Lex., “Contre-coup.. is often very severe in the skull, for instance, the bone may be fractured on the opposite side to the seat of injury”) and a rash of uses in 2003; the second, meaning ‘learned in skulls,’ has been used only once, in 1819 (in a phrenological context); and the third is the adjective from the noun limerence—the noun, meaning ‘The state of being romantically infatuated or obsessed with another person,’ is common enough, but Erin wants more citations for the adjective (the latest edition of the OED has three, the latest being from 1998: V. C. DE MUNCK Romantic Love & Sexual Behavior iii. 80 If limerent, she would not have been able to stop thinking about Rhett”). What’s particularly interesting about limerence is its etymology, or lack thereof, as explained in this quote from Dorothy Tennov [Wikipedia], the word’s inventor:

1977 Observer 11 Sept. 3/9, I first used the term ‘amorance’ then changed it back to ‘limerence’… It has no roots whatsoever. It looks nice. It works well in French. Take it from me it has no etymology whatsoever.

The feisty Scottish poet Liz Lochhead promptly used it in The Grimm Sisters (1981): “From limerance and venery/ She flinched as at fire,” which would seem to give the word a certain literary cachet. So let’s get limerent!

(Thanks to Songdog for alerting me to the show.)

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Mark Liberman has a most interesting Language Log post about two forms of encoded language, Vietnamese nói lái and French contrepets. The latter is a form of potential punning that depends on imagined malapropism; as Mark puts it:

These are exemplified by phrases like “que votre Verbe soit en joie”, which literally means “may your Word be in joy”, but which expresses a less spiritual message if the indicated sounds (not letters!) are swapped: “que votre verge soit en bois” = “may your staff be of wood”.

The Vietnamese form is (to me, anyway) more interesting:

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Or, to be more precise, Scandinavian Influence on Southern Lowland Scotch. The Project Gutenberg folks have put online this 1900 work by George Tobias Flom, a fine example of old-style philology, with plenty of examples and appendices and no attempt to appeal to the casual browser. From the Preface:

This work aims primarily at giving a list of Scandinavian loanwords found in Scottish literature. The publications of the Scottish Text Society and Scotch works published by the Early English Text Society have been examined… Norse elements in the Northern dialects of Lowland Scotch, those of Caithness and Insular Scotland, are not represented in this work. My list of loanwords is probably far from complete. A few early Scottish texts I have not been able to examine. These as well as the large number of vernacular writings of the last 150 years will have to be examined before anything like completeness can be arrived at.

I have adopted certain tests of form, meaning, and distribution. With regard to the test of the form of a word great care must be exercised. Old Norse and Old Northumbrian have a great many characteristics in common, and some of these are the very ones in which Old Northumbrian differs from West Saxon. It has, consequently, in not a few cases, been difficult to decide whether a word is a loanword or not…

And here’s his admirable explanation of his use of language names:

There has been considerable confusion in the use of the terms Norse and Danish. Either has been used to include the other, or, again, in a still wider sense, as synonymous with Scandinavian; as, for instance, when we speak of the Danish kingdoms in Dublin, or Norse elements in Anglo-Saxon. Danish is the language of Denmark, Norse the language of Norway. When I use the term Old Danish I mean that dialect of Old Scandinavian, or Old Northern, that developed on Danish soil. By Old Norse I mean the old language of Norway. The one is East Scandinavian, the other West Scandinavian. The term Scandinavian, being rather political than linguistic, is not a good one, but it has the advantage of being clear, and I have used it where the better one, Northern, might lead to confusion with Northern Scotch.

An example from his long list of loan words:

Beck, sb. a rivulet, a brook. Jamieson. O. N. bekkr, O. Sw. bäkker, Norse bekk, O. Dan. bæk, Sw. bäck, a rivulet. In place-names a test of Scand. settlements.

He also has a list of Some Words that are not Scandinavian Loanwords. A very thorough job, if doubtless superseded by later works not available for free on this wonderful internet we call home. (Via wood s lot [01.06.2005].)

Frequent commenter Map sent me a link to a Russian story she thought I’d enjoy, Р.В.С. by Arkadii Gaidar; she added that the author was the grandfather of Yegor Gaidar, briefly prime minister of Russia in 1992. I’d never heard of the author (which shocks Russians, who all read him in school), but I loved the story (about two young boys trying to save a wounded soldier during the Russian Civil War). Then I got some further background: Gaidar, whose real name was Golikov, was commander of a special unit of the Red Army, notorious for the brutal murder of deserters and civilian hostages (Russian links 1, 2). This, while distressing to learn, is not exactly LH material, but his pseudonym is. It seems Golikov’s unit served in Khakassia (a small region northwest of Tuva; the Turkic Khakass are now a small minority of the population), and the locals were so terrified of their depredations they were constantly asking “Khaidar Golikov?”: ‘where’s Golikov headed?’ (khaidar meaning ‘to where’). Golikov thought “Khaidar” was some sort of honorific and adopted it as his pseudonym. OK, that story sounds suspiciously like urban legend; I tried to check it out at the Introduction to the Khakas Vocabulary, but they haven’t added the words beginning with x (kh). In the unlikely event someone out there can confirm or deny the Khakass meaning, be my guest; otherwise I’ll regard it as not proven.

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