The medievalist historian who writes the blog Blitztoire [defunct as of April 2012] has an entry [Google cache, which probably won’t last long], “Du positivisme historique à la critique des blogs” [From historical positivism to the criticism of blogs], in which he quotes a trenchant passage he ran across in Introduction aux études historiques (1898) by Charles-Victor Langlois and Charles Seignobos:

La tendance spontanée de l’homme est d’ajouter foi aux affirmations et de les reproduire, sans même les distinguer nettement de ses propres observations. Dans la vie de tous les jours, n’acceptons-nous pas indifféremment, sans vérification d’aucune sorte, des on-dit, des renseignements anonymes et sans garantie, toutes sortes de “documents” de médiocre ou de mauvais aloi ? Il faut une raison spéciale pour prendre la peine d’examiner la provenance et la valeur d’un document sur l’histoire d’hier; autrement, s’il n’est pas invraisemblable jusqu’au scandale, et tant qu’il n’est pas contredit, nous l’absorbons, nous nous y tenons, nous le colportons, en l’embellissant au besoin. Tout homme sincère reconnaîtra qu’un violent effort est nécessaire pour secouer l’ignavia critica, cette forme si répandue de lâcheté intellectuelle; que cet effort doit être constamment répété, et qu’il s’accompagne souvent d’une véritable souffrance.

(Translation below.) He applies this to the uncritical transmission in blogs of anything found on the internet, but it’s something well worth bearing in mind in general. (Via Madame Martin.)

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A correspondent has proposed an interesting question:

I am trying to find out about communities in the US/Canada that have historically been non-English speaking and are still hanging on to their native tongue (no matter how tenuous that grip may be). For languages like French, German, or Sorbian, this is easy enough using Ethnologue or the Census data—because immigration from those language groups dried up many years ago, any community that still speaks one of them must be “historic”. However, for tongues like Russian, Spanish, Chinese, or Japanese, it’s impossible to distinguish which are the areas of historical usage, and which are just full of recent immigrants. Do you know any resources on the internet that could help me out?

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In the course of conversation my wife happened to use the word “seamy,” and it suddenly occurred to me to wonder why the word means what it does. There’s no obvious connection between sleaze and seams. Well, it turns out this is one word that really does derive from Shakespeare (most words allegedly coined by the Big Shake are simply words for which he happens to provide the first citation in the OED); he has Emilia say (in Othello, Act IV Scene 2):
“O, fie upon them! Some such squire he was
That turn’d your wit the seamy side without,
And made you to suspect me with the Moor.”
Hence the OED’s definition reads: “Having a seam or suture; characterized by seams. seamy side, lit. the under side of a garment, etc. on which the rough edges of the seams are visible; fig. [after Shakes.] the worst, most degraded or the roughest side (of life, character, etc.).” It was still an allusion rather than a cliche in the mid-19th century:
1859 Sat. Rev. 2 Apr. 403/1 He appreciated to a considerable extent, what we may perhaps venture to call the seamy side of human affairs.
But by the end of the century it was taken for granted:
1899 H. A. Dobson Paladin of Philanthropy vi. 146 The knowledge of the seamy side of letters.

Language Log has been the site of an ongoing debate between linguists who think it’s a perfectly normal use of metaphor to say, eg, “faith is a verb” (Geoff Nunberg) and linguists who think that, on the contrary, it displays an egregious and potentially harmful misunderstanding of grammatical categories (Mark Lieberman, Geoff Pullum). Now Geoff Nunberg switches sides, and I (having been on the fence, waiting to see a convincing argument) have to go along with him. “X is a verb” is not just a cliched metaphor:

In a piece I wrote a few years ago for American Lawyer, I mentioned a decision by a Florida district court in a patent infringement case that turned crucially on the claim that the decoder key to a cable TV subscriber box was “not subject to revision or change.” The court concluded that subject was used in the claim “as a verb (in the passive tense),” and identified the relevant dictionary sense as “to cause to undergo,” as in “He wouldn’t subject himself to any inconvenience.” And on that basis, the court ruled that “not subject to change” meant that the decoder key could be changed but would not be changed. (See TV/COM International v. MediaOne of Greater Florida, No. 3:00-cv-1045-J-21HTS (M.D. Fla. Aug. 1, 2001)).

Judicial incompetence doesn’t come much grosser than that: it’s fair to say that someone who doesn’t know how to read a dictionary entry has no business adjudicating cases that call for interpretation of language — which is to say, damn near all of them. But courts are full of judges who have no more knowledge of grammar and meaning than the half-remembered dicta they learned at the end of Sister Petra’s ruler. Let’s by all means continue to flog these things, even at the risk of sounding like pedants.

I find myself forced to agree.

Geoff Pullum has a hilarious entry at Language Log about a Menachem Begin speech in his Classical Hebrew and the reaction to it by a working-class audience that spoke the colloquial “street” Hebrew of the Jerusalem area, in particular a 12-year-old Amos Oz. Enjoy.

The magnificent Lexilogos site links to all manner of reference works involving language: family names, etymology, place names, slang, and much else, usually starting with French and continuing with a scattering of other languages. To give just one example, check out this online dictionary of French family names; here’s the etymology of De Gaulle (from the Dawance-Decroix page):

Apparemment, il s’agit de la francisation d’un nom flamand, De Walle, qui signifie sans doute le Wallon (= l’étranger, celui qui n’appartient pas au peuple germanique, du vieux-haut-allemand walah = étranger, également à l’origine des toponymes Gaule et Galles). A noter l’existence du patronyme Waulle dans le Pas-de-Calais. Autre possibilité : walle = mur, fossé.

(Via Carnet de Zénon.)

Collins has a site they call the Word Exchange:

Is there a word or phrase you would love to see in the dictionary?
Well, now’s your chance as Collins Word Exchange revolutionises the way words are collected and enter the dictionary – throwing open the doors of language research and recording to embrace words from anybody and everybody!
At Collins Word Exchange not only can you search… the Collins English Dictionary, texting abbreviations, internet links and SCRABBLE® scores, access a wealth of advice on grammar and usage, and test your language skills, but you can also add your own words to the dictionary.
It couldn’t be easier to get your new words online – just register on the site, suggest a word for inclusion, enjoy the discussion as other users battle over its validity, and wait for your word to be added to the Living Dictionary. You’ll be contributing to a fantastic and ever-growing online resource and may even see your word entering the next edition of the Collins English Dictionary.

A nice idea, and I’ve already learned the word galactico.

All the cants they peddle
bellow entangled,
teeth for knots and
each other’s ankles,
to become stipendiary
in any wallow;
crow or weasel
each to his fellow.

Yet even these,
even these might
listen as crags
listen to light
and pause, uncertain
of the next beat,
each dancer alone
with his foolhardy feet.

    Basil Bunting, 1969

Geoffrey Hosking, in his superb Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917, describes an early-nineteenth-century attempt to produce a Russian-language Bible:

An integral part of Alexander‘s concept was the idea of making the scriptures available to all the peoples of the empire in their various languages. For this purpose he encouraged the establishment of the Imperial Russian Bible Society in December 1812, as a branch of the British and Foreign Bible Society, to undertake the work of translation, publication and distribution… The extent and coverage of the Society‘s work is demonstrated by the fact that in its first year it published or bought and distributed 37,700 New Testaments and 22,500 complete Bibles in Church Slavonic, French, German, Finnish, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Armenian, Georgian, Kalmyk and Tatar. For the purpose it set up new printing presses and imaginatively used retail outlets, such as apothecaries’ shops, which had never previously been used for selling books. By 1821 the New Testament and Prayer Book were starting to appear in modern Russian.

Significantly, the language which aroused the greatest opposition when it came to translation was none other than Russian itself. The Bible existed in a Church Slavonic version, and many churchmen felt that only the Slavonic tongue, consecrated by ancient usage, possessed the dignity to convey adequately the meaning of the scriptures. The Society’s view, on the contrary, was that the Slavonic text was readily understood only by those who had been brought up on it since childhood, and that it was therefore unsuitable for evangelism. At Alexander’s express wish, work was started on a translation into modern Russian, in order ‘to give Russians the means of reading the word of God in their native Russian tongue, which is more comprehensible to them than the Slavonic language in which the scriptures have hitherto been published.’

From the outset, some Orthodox clergymen had opposed the Society’s activities… The resistance reached its apogee in 1824 with a denunciation of the Society by the abbot of the Iur’ev Monastery in [Novgorod], Arkhimandrit Fotii… In a memorandum presented personally to the Emperor, Fotii warned of certain ‘Illuminists’ — Freemasons — who were plotting to install a new worldwide religion, having first destroyed ‘all empires, churches, religions, civil laws and all order’. The Bible Society, he maintained, was preparing the way for this revolution…

Alexander was certainly susceptible to Fotii’s insinuations… In the last years of his life, [his fears of sedition] were intensified by the growth of secret societies inside Russia. He naturally associated them with the societies in Germany, Italy and Spain which threatened European peace and stability as guaranteed by his cherished Holy Alliance… He had hoped that the Bible Society would arm the ordinary people against atheism and sedition. Now he was being warned that, on the contrary, the Bible Society was part of the conspiracy… In the event, he drew back from actually closing down the Bible Society, but he dismissed Golitsyn as head of it, replacing him with the irreproachably Orthodox Metropolitan of [Saint Petersburg], Seraphim…

He also appointed to the Ministry of Education… Admiral Shishkov, the principal protagonist of Church Slavonic. Shishkov lost no time in putting pressure on Seraphim to stop the Russian publication of the Bible. ‘What! Who among us does not understand the divine service? Only he who has broken with his fatherland and forgotten his own tongue… And can this supposed necessity [of publishing the Bible in modern Russian] do other than degrade the Holy Scriptures and thus implant heresies and schisms?’

Seraphim did not take much persuading. Publication of the catechism and the scriptures in ‘the vernacular’ (prostoe narechie) was terminated… Remarkably but characteristically, the continued publication of the scriptures in other ‘vernacular’ languages did not bother the Orthodox hierarchy, but the Holy Synod ordered the burning of thousands of copies of the Pentateuch, which were already being printed in Russian.

The halting of the Russian Bible was fateful. It delayed by a fatal half-century the moment when ordinary Russians could have access to the scriptures in a language which they could read and study with ease. Peter the Great had carried through a kind of Protestant revolution in the church, but a dangerously incomplete one, since it had never been supplemented by mass reading of the scriptures among the population. Without that the domination of the state within the church always threatened to hollow out its spiritual life. The situation had been created where the postman hero of Leskov’s story Odnodum (The One-Track Mind) could be seen as a laughable and possibly dangerous eccentric merely because he was in the habit of regularly reading the Bible for himself.

The Archimandrite’s attitude is still maintained in some Orthodox quarters; this page on the Elder Nilus says “Archimandrite Photius of the Yuriev Monastery… passed into history as a true confessor who battled with the enemies of the Orthodox Church: the Protestants, Masons and the ‘ecumenists’ of that time – the Bible Society.” And you can get a different perspective (from a Jehovah’s Witness point of view) on the history of the Russian Bible here.

Geoff Pullum has an excellent Language Log post analyzing a quoted passage in which the speaker moves between she and they while talking about the same person. I love his summary:

There is a subtle and beautiful system here. It is not to be dismissed with the idiotic sexist authoritarianism of Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style (p. 60: “Do not use they… Use the singular pronoun… he“).