Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti quotes Augustine, Sermons 158.4:

There remains, however, the struggle with the flesh, there remains the struggle with the world, there remains the struggle with the devil.

restat tamen lucta cum carne, restat lucta cum mundo, restat lucta cum diabolo.

He asks:

Is this the first occurrence of this unholy trinity? I don’t have access to Siegfried Wenzel, “The Three Enemies of Man,” Mediaeval Studies 29 (1967) 47–66, rpt. in his Elucidations: Medieval Poetry and Its Religious Backgrounds (Louvain: Peeters, 2010 = Synthema, 6), pp. 17-38.

He’s definitely antedated Abelard, the first source cited in the Wikipedia article (other than stray Bible bits); that article says “The phrase may have entered popular use in English through the Book of Common Prayer,” which is probably where I first encountered it. At any rate, if anyone knows of other sources, or has thoughts about this famous phrase, by all means speak up.

Winston Manrique Sabogal of El País had a 2013 post “Las palabras más autóctonas de México, Panamá y Uruguay” [The most indigenous/autochthonous words of Mexico, Panama and Uruguay] that chooses three words to introduce the Atlas sonoro de las palabras más autóctonas del español: pinche ‘fucking, goddamned’ for Mexico, sinvergüenzura ‘an act of shamelessness’ for Panama, and celeste ‘pale blue, sky blue’ for Uruguay. Claudia Amengual, who proposed the latter, says it’s not from the uniform color of the Uruguay national soccer team but from the country’s flag, but Marcos in the comments objects, with a learned discussion of a 1910 soccer game; it’s all good fun. Thanks, Y!

Matt at planetmut had a splendid post about newspaper typos back in 2018, although “typos” is a wan and inadequate term for what he documents. After a minor example from the BBC (“The speaking cock turns 75 years old…”) and an amusingly bollixed-up quote from Wolverhampton Wanderers chairman Sir Jack Hayward, he gets to the good stuff: a “classic example of a production error” from the Times & Citizen (a headline reading “headline headghgh”) and the real gem, from “a 1979 edition of the now sadly defunct Peterborough Standard.” It begins:

CROWLAND’S Silver Jubilee committee was finally wound up on Thursday evening with a presentation ceremony at the library.

The jubilee fund, described by chairman Frank Parnell as ‘one of the finest efforts in Lincolnshire’, fremony at the library.

The jubilee fund, described by chairman Frank Parnell as ‘one remony atremony aremony at the library.

The jubremony at the library.

Tremony at remony at the library.

Thrremony at tremony at the liremony at the libraremony at the library.

Theremony at the library.

But it goes on and on, culminating in an “almost poetic segue” that introduces an entirely new plotline. (Ironically and perhaps inevitably, the transcription of the article contains its own error: in “Thrremony at tremony at the liremoay,” the last non-word should read “liremony,” as I have indicated in my own version above — there’s a slight blotch on the n that made the transcriber read it as an a.) To add to the fun, there is a clip of it being read aloud. As Matt says, “This is just magnificent.” Thanks, Trevor! (I should note that Trevor sent it to me with the very apposite subject line “Gertrude Stein in Peterborough.”)

Last month I posted about Lily Gladstone’s relationship to Blackfoot (her father is of Blackfeet and Nez Perce ancestry); I’ve just been enjoying Nora Mabie’s story “‘Bigger than the Oscars’: Blackfeet Nation honors Lily Gladstone with stand-up headdress” (with some glorious photos), and when I got to the end I discovered it was followed by a separate piece by Mabie, “Gladstone brought the Blackfoot language to the world stage,” that begins:

ōk̇ii niiksōk̇ōw´aiks nitṫǎanikk̇oō ṗiiṫǎak̇ii (no)mō˝ṫoōṫoō siksik̇aitsiitṫǔṗii… niṫtsiik̇ǎak̇ōmimm.

“Hello my relatives, my name is Eagle Woman. I arrived here from the Blackfoot Confederacy. … I love y’all!”

That’s what Blackfeet Actress Lily Gladstone said in her Golden Globes acceptance speech — first in Blackfoot and then in English — when she made history as the first Indigenous woman to win best actress.

Robert Hall, director of Blackfeet studies at Browning Public Schools, said when Gladstone spoke Blackfoot on the world stage, two things happened. Some Blackfeet individuals watched the show live and translated Gladstone’s words to their families. Other community members, Hall said, watched and didn’t know what Gladstone said. Later, they felt inspired to learn and translate her words.

“That’s powerful, too,” he explained.

And there’s an interesting passage on consistent spelling:
[Read more…]

Alonso Zamora at Tlacuilolli (which “focuses on Mesoamerican writing systems: Aztec, Maya, Mixtec, and more”) announced (on March 21) an exciting discovery:

Yesterday, a team of specialists of the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico, led by the historians Baltazar Brito Guadarrama and María Castañeda de la Paz, the philologist Michel Oudijk, and the Nahuatl specialist Rafael Tena, presented to the public the discovery of three new Aztec codices, collectively known as the Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco, formerly a part of the Culhuacan polity of Central Mexico, and nowadays located within the Iztapalapa borough in Mexico City. This is one of the most exciting and spectacular discoveries regarding codical sources in recent years, and is no doubt closely related to the topic of this blog. The discovery has been already covered by the Mexican press and explained in detail in yesterday’s presentation at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, which can be seen in Youtube. However, an English summary will be presented for the readers of this blog.

[…] It comprises three codices. The first is called Map of the Founding of Tetepilco, and is a pictographic map which contains information regarding the foundation of San Andrés Tetepilco, as well as lists of toponyms to be found within Culhuacan, Tetepilco, Tepanohuayan, Cohuatlinchan, Xaltocan and Azcapotzalco. The second, the Inventory of the Church of San Andrés Tetepilco, is unique, as Oudijk remarks, since it is a pictographic inventory of the church of San Andrés Tetepilco, comprising two pages. Sadly, it is very damaged. Finally, the third document, now baptised as the Tira of San Andrés Tetepilco, is a pictographic history in the vein of the Boturini and the Aubin codices, comprising historical information regarding the Tenochtitlan polity from its foundation to the year 1603. […]

Of course, new and very interesting examples of Aztec writing are contained throughout all these documents, including old and new toponyms, spellings of Western and Aztec names, and even some information that confirms that some glyphs formerly considered as hapax, as the chi syllabogram in the spelling of the name Motelchiuhtzin in Codex Telleriano-Remensis 43r, discussed in another post of this blog, were not anomalous but possibly conventional. Besides logosyllabic spellings, the presence of pictographs with alphabetic glosses in Nahuatl will be of great help to ascertain the functioning of this still controversial part of the Aztec communication system.

Images and more details at the link; thanks, Y!

Boy, here’s a word that didn’t gee. From Michael Eby’s 2001 history of the magazine Electrical Construction and Maintenance:

The magazine was first published in November 1901 as The National Electrical Contractor, the official trade journal of the National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA). Many of the articles in these early issues focused on activities related to the Association and on business issues related to electrical contractors.

In May 1918, the magazine changed its name to the Electrical Contractor-Dealer. […] However, the new name didn’t last long. In November 1921, the magazine changed names again to the National Electragist, and more simply to The Electragist in June 1923. The term “electragist” was adopted to replace the term “electrical contractor-dealer.” The name change coincided with the renaming of the Association to The Association of Electragists International at its annual meeting in 1922.

Thanks to the wonders of Google Books, we can read the National Electragist from the comfort of our devices; Volume 22 (1922) contains this vigorously stated passage on pp. 17-18:
[Read more…]

A puzzled correspondent sent me this quote, saying the final word was a mystery to him:

There were papers, letters, and paid bills and miscellaneous items, including the stuff from her room at the office, but there was no diary or anything resembling one, and there was nothing that seemed likely to be of any help. If it got too tough I might have to have another go at it or put Saul Panzer on it. I did use a few of the items, in Elinor’s handwriting, to check the writing on the letter that was in the box with the money. It geed.

  The Father Hunt, by Rex Stout (Bantam pbk., 1971, p. 18)

I sent him a link to Green’s Dictionary of Slang, but it occurred to me that this long-forgotten term might be of interest to others (and perhaps clarify similar mysteries), so here’s Green’s definition and a few citations:

gee v.¹
also jee
[? pron. of initial letter of SE go]

to fit, to suit, to behave as required or expected; usu. in phr. it won’t gee, it doesn’t suit, it doesn’t work.

c.1698 [UK] B.E. Dict. Canting Crew n.p.: It wont Gee, it won’t Hit, or go.
1719 [UK] in D’Urfey Pills to Purge Melancholy V 83: If Miss prove peevish and will not gee / […] / find out a fairer, a kinder than she.
[…]
1887 [Aus] Bulletin (Sydney) 5 Nov. 7/3: Italian opera ‘gees’ in a general way at Melbourne Royal, but not to any alarming degree.
[…]
1904 [Aus] West. Australian 12 Apr. 9/2: They all reckon they can bring […] in enough sentiment to make it gee.
[…]
1925 [US] Odum & Johnson Negro and His Songs (1964) 154: Yes, I hollow at the mule, an’ the mule would not gee.

I say “long-forgotten,” but of course I shouldn’t assume: are any of y’all familiar with this short, punchy verb? Also, how does Green know that last quote doesn’t involve gee “(intransitive) Of a horse, pack animal, etc.: to move forward; go faster; or turn in a direction away from the driver, typically to the right”?

I am inordinately fond of interviews with translators, and Asymptote has one with Susanna Nied:

A giant in world poetry and experimental text, much of Inger Christensen’s influence can be seen cascading to many generations of writers, in several languages. Her book-length poem, Det (1969) shook the foundations of Danish poetry, and in its translations, continues to startle and affect readers profoundly. Her essays have been translated into English and collected into a volume for the first time. To mark this literary event, poet and former Asymptote team member Sohini Basak spoke via email to Susanna Nied, who has translated into English Christensen’s poetic oeuvre as well as the forthcoming book of essays The Condition of Secrecy (New Directions).

SOHINI BASAK: For those of us bound by the English-language, it is because of you that we’ve come to know of Inger Christensen’s poetry. And as you’re the translator of her complete poetic oeuvre, it’s very interesting that you started with her first book (Light), and then the sequence almost coincides with the order in which the original collections were published … although not entirely. How did you decide your working order?

SUSANNA NIED: I actually didn’t do anything like choosing a working order. When I started on Light, in the 1970s, I didn’t know Inger had written anything besides Light and Grass. I didn’t even know who Inger was, and I certainly didn’t know that I was going to become a translator, much less her translator. I was just a university student browsing the library stacks for something Danish to read for pleasure, and I happened upon this little bibliography of contemporary Danish poets. When I got to “C” I found “Christensen, Inger”.

Her only two listed volumes were Lys and Græs – (Light and Grass). I liked the titles, ordered the books from Interlibrary Loan, was both grabbed and mystified, and started translating them just to try to understand what this unknown writer was doing and how she did it. (Of course, she was unknown only in the U.S.; in Germany and France she was already well known, thanks to her excellent translators.)

I am charmed by the anecdote, which fires me with nostalgia for my own days wandering library stacks looking for unknown pleasures. Here’s a nice passage on what it was like working with Christensen:
[Read more…]

One way I know I wasn’t cut out to be a philosopher is that I can never keep the concepts/vocabulary in my head. To me, metaphysics is “all that weird shit that doesn’t have anything to do with the world I can see and touch” (cue Johnson/Berkeley), epistemology is “how we know stuff,” and ontology is… what the fuck is ontology? The OED (entry revised 2004) says “The science or study of being; that branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature or essence of being or existence.” Well, yeah, ὄν is ‘being,’ I can see that, but “the nature or essence of being or existence” just floats up over my head and recedes into the distance like a balloon whose string has slipped my grasp on a windy day. Now I learn of the existence of Object-Oriented Ontology from Dylan Kerr at Artspace:

Ask yourself: what does your toaster want? How about your dog? Or the bacteria in your gut? What about the pixels on the screen you’re reading off now—how is their day going? In other words, do things, animals, and other non-human entities experience their existence in a way that lies outside our own species-centric definition of consciousness? It’s precisely this questions that the nascent philosophical movement known as Object-Oriented Ontology (arising from ὄντος, the Greek word for “being,” and known to the cool kids as OOO) is attempting to answer or at least seriously pose, and they’re setting certain segments of the art world on fire.

Now, this raises a number of questions, like “is it a philosophical movement or an art movement?” and “is the use of an acronym an infallible sign of coolness?” But my question is this: Is it a legitimate use of the word ontology, in the sense that it makes some sort of sense according to the standard definition (to those who understand that definition, of course), or is it a cheeky appropriation of a technical term for an entirely different purpose? That’s a question I can’t even begin to answer, because a clue is not something I have. If anyone can shed light on this, feel free to try to enlighten me, but I don’t promise to understand a word of it. (Thanks, Nick!)

Oh, and for amusement’s sake I have to mention M. R. James’s Professor of Ontography.

Apparently 3:AM Magazine (“Whatever it is, we’re against it”) has an occasional “Minute 9” series of essays discussing the ninth minute of a movie, and the latest is “Minute 9: Blade Runner” by Des Barry. It begins:

Torrential rain and flickering neon, pedestrians of miscellaneous ethnicities bump umbrellas, struggle through tight alleyways between a downmarket electronics store and a line of crowded street-food stalls. Seated at the counter of a sushi bar, close-up on his face and open shoulders, an unnamed man in a noir-style classic trench coat rubs the splinters off his chopsticks. Behind his right shoulder appears a uniformed torso with a police badge pinned to a bulky stab-vest. The cop has a deep bass voice:

—Hey, idi-wa.

It goes on to discuss the mishmash of languages known as “Cityspeak” which I posted about back in 2003; alas, much of the discussion is vitiated by Barry’s apparent ignorance of the page I posted then (which is, commendably, still there) — he uses absurdly mistranscribed versions of the dialogue (e.g., “aduanon koverhsim angam bitte” for azonnal kövessen engem bitte). But I liked his final reflection on modern urban life:

Now I live in another Pacific Rim city with a mixed — but not identical — ethnic make-up. It’s only 2023 — not so far from 2019 — but when I walk the streets of Naarm/Melbourne, the streets of Chinatown in the early evening winter darkness, umbrellaed under the steady rain and the flashing neon, with electric delivery bikes weaving crazily through the foot traffic, I get regular flashes of scenes from Blade Runner. I hear Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Hindi, Urdu, English, various versions of South American and European Spanish, French, Italian, Indonesian, versions of Arabic and African languages; and on more formal occasions Woiwurrung, the local Indigenous language. Languages mixed with English insertions, yes, but no hybrid language. Not yet. But I can imagine it coming.

(I still remember the thrill of that linguistic mix coming from the screen when I first saw the movie, over four decades ago now.)