I confess I’m not impressed with Jackson Arn’s New Yorker essay on the color red (Feb. 10, 2025; archived); it’s classic thumb-sucking, pseudo-eloquent philosophizing with infinite regard for the writer’s feelings about stuff and minimal interest in, you know, facts. It’s the kind of piece that uses “we” to make the author’s whims seem like universals (“unable to explain our response directly, we are reduced to saying…”). But it did introduce me to an interesting word:

To start with, “Girl with the Red Hat” was not intended to be a portrait of any specific person; it’s an image of a type. Art historians will tell you that this genre, popular in the Dutch Golden Age, is called tronie—you’re supposed to be looking not at an individual old man but at old man-ness, not at a soldier but at soldier-ness, not at a girl but at girl-ness.

I wasn’t familiar with the word “tronie,” and it’s not in the OED; Wiktionary has it, though: “(art) A kind of painting that depicts an exaggerated or characteristic facial expression.” We got it from Dutch, where it means:

1. (informal, Netherlands, slightly derogatory) a face, especially one with an unpleasant or unprepossessing look or expression

2. (art) a depiction of a person’s face with an expressive, often unflattering expression; a tronie.

Etymology
From Middle Dutch troenie, from Middle French trogne, possibly ultimately from a Celtic language, for which a Gaulish *trugna has been proposed (compare Welsh trwyn [‘nose, snout’]).

I’ll probably never have occasion to use the word, but at least I know it.

Neal Stephenson has a post The Wrongs of Thomas More (Wrong 5) that begins:

In my previous post I talked about spelunking through the Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of “wrong” to see how the usage of that word had developed down through the ages.

Embedded in that definition was a citation that caught my eye. But first I need to point out that “wrong” has many shades of meaning. The particular one to which the following quote applies is: “Not in consonance with facts or truth; incorrect, false, mistaken.” And one of the oldest, and certainly pithiest, examples of this usage is cited as follows:

1528 MORE Dyaloge III. Wks 210/1 Our hart euer thinketh the judgement wrong, that wringeth us to the worse.

Now, that one’s a beauty because it has one foot in the more ancient meaning of the word, and one in the modern. “Wringeth us to the worse” goes to the older, bending or twisting sense of the word, and means turning or wrenching us off course into a less desirable outcome. “The judgement wrong” refers to an error, a bad call. How do we discern between a right and wrong judgment? Our heart does it (the author, writing in 1528, doesn’t draw modern distinctions between the heart and the brain). Evaluating a particular judgment, our heart thinks that it’s wrong if its result is that our fate is turned or wrung in a bad direction.

The author is clearly engaging in wordplay here; he knows the etymology of this word. He’s amusing himself, and perhaps his more erudite readers, with the neat turn of phrase. Thanks to the OED, we less erudite moderns can get the joke too.

I was so curious about the context of this passage that I began tracking it down in the expectation that it might make for an interesting footnote. Instead I fell into a substantial rabbit hole.

The rabbit hole involves the purchase, “for a cool $150,” of a copy of A Dyaloge Wherin be Treatyd Dyvers Maters and the (very demanding) reading thereof, from which he concludes “it makes Thomas More look like a terrible human being.” You can see an image of the facsimile edition, where I note that immediately before the quoted bit there’s an occurrence of “theym ſelfe” (i.e., themself). I recommend also reading the preceding post, linked in the first sentence, which describes the semantic development of wrong. And from the OED entry I pluck this twisty quote from the Ayenbite of Inwyt: “Yef þe onderstondingge is wrong, oþer yef he tuysteþ oþer wyþwent.., al þe inwyt ssel by þiestre and þe hieap of uirtues.” I presume “wyþwent” is a form of obsolete withgo “To go against, act in opposition to, oppose; in past participle opposed (to),” but I can’t say I understand it.

Thanks, Trevor!

Retraction Watch reports on a spectacular find:

The phrase was so strange it would have stood out even to a non-scientist. Yet “vegetative electron microscopy” had already made it past reviewers and editors at several journals when a Russian chemist and scientific sleuth noticed the odd wording in a now-retracted paper in Springer Nature’s Environmental Science and Pollution Research.

The ludicrous phrase is what sleuths call a “fingerprint”: an offbeat characteristic found in one or more publications that suggests paper-mill involvement. Today, a Google Scholar search turns up nearly two dozen articles that refer to “vegetative electron microscopy” or “vegetative electron microscope,” including a paper from 2024 whose senior author is an editor at Elsevier, Retraction Watch has learned. The publisher told us it was “content” with the wording.

Searching for such clues is just one way to identify the hundreds of thousands of fake papers analysts say are polluting the scientific literature, as we reported in an investigation published last month in The Conversation. And the tale of “vegetative electron microscopy” shows how nonsense phrases can enter the vocabulary of researchers and proliferate in the literature.

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Dalya Alberge reports for the Guardian on an amusing literary find:

CS Lewis loathed one of his fellow Oxford academics so much that he satirised him in a series of seven previously unpublished poems that have been discovered. The Chronicles of Narnia author simply could not stand HC Wyld, deriding his lectures as elementary and dismissing his snobbery and his bullying of students, referring to him in his diary as “the cad”.

It has now emerged that Lewis even inscribed derogatory verses about him across the blank pages of his own copy of Wyld’s 1921 textbook A Short History of English. One poem begins: “Loud-mouthed, a bully, publicly professing / The impartial, scientific attitude, / Yet, on the point of dialects, confessing / How pruriently class-conscious was his mood.”

Wyld was the author of several influential textbooks on the history of the English language, but he was so pernickety that he censured pronunciations such as “waistcoat” instead of “weskit”. Lewis ridiculed his obsession with analysing sounds at the expense of texts themselves: “He opens and closes his glottis at pleasure,/ Explosives and stops he is able to measure,/ No grunt and no gurgle escapes his attention,/ Religiously marking each slackness and tension”.

The poems were discovered by Simon Horobin, a professor of English language and literature at Magdalen College, Oxford, where Lewis himself taught. […] Joking that an infuriated Lewis had perhaps composed them during one of Wyld’s lectures, Horobin noted that one of them identifies Wyld through an acrostic with the initial letters spelling out the name “Henry Cecil Wyld”.

He added: “On the remaining blank pages he penned a series of additional satirical verses lampooning Wyld – one in English, alongside others in Latin, Greek, French and even Old English. It’s exciting to see Lewis composing poetry in a range of languages at this early stage of his academic career.”

You can see images and more of the texts at the link; thanks, Jack! (Wyld got a rap on the knuckles here from Piotr Gąsiorowski in 2017.)

Via Ways To Play (“a site about games, traditional and modern, that are played around the world”), The Games of Gargantua (1534—):

One of the most famous historical lists of games is that found in Chaper 22 of François Rabelais’ Gargantua, first published in 1534. In the original French the list contained 216 games, but in each translation the games that are named were changed and often expanded upon. Many of the games are either invented by Rabelais, or are games for which we no longer know the rules.

An in-depth examination of the games in the list lies below the table.

The first five columns give the lists from five different French editions; the remaining columns are from translations into English.

The lists of Nicolaas Jarichides Wieringa (Dutch, 1682) and Johann Fischarts (German, 1590) are given beneath the table as they diverge significantly.

Some of them are fairly invariant (au fleux is always a variation on flush), others are a motley mix (au moucōtēt is at the surlie, poor Jack, take miss, or the malcontent; a la blanche is at the lottery, blank draw, blanks, raffles, or whites).

Furthermore, the main page has a link to game names by language, which is also fun.

I’ve read several reviews of The Most Secret Memory of Men, the recent English translation (by Lara Vergnaud) of La plus secrète mémoire des hommes, by the Senegalese writer Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, and they’ve all made me want to read the book. But Ursula Lindsey’s NYRB review (archived) does so even more effectively by quoting a longish extract that grabbed me by the scruff of the neck. The protagonist, Diégane Latyr Faye, wants to be a great (French) writer, and he is inspired by discovering the long-buried work of T.C. Elimane: “The few known facts about Elimane are that he was from Senegal; that in 1938 in Paris, at age twenty-three, he published an acclaimed novel, The Labyrinth of Inhumanity; that the novel was embroiled in a scandal of some sort; and that he disappeared, never to be heard from again.” Lindsey says:

Sarr makes Diégane well aware of how ridiculous and even pathetic it is to care this much about writing—to want, more than anything in the world, to write a great book. But he also makes him a true believer, a man who, high on an unspecified drug one night on a Paris bench, receives a visitation from literature itself “in the guise of a woman of terrifying beauty,” only to be reminded by an inner voice

that desire isn’t enough, that talent isn’t enough, that ambition isn’t enough, that being a good writer isn’t enough, that being well-read isn’t enough, that being famous isn’t enough, that being highly cultured isn’t enough, that being wise isn’t enough, that commitment isn’t enough, that patience isn’t enough, that getting drunk off pure life isn’t enough, that retreating from life isn’t enough, that believing in your dreams isn’t enough, that dissecting reality isn’t enough, that intelligence isn’t enough, that stirring hearts isn’t enough, that strategy isn’t enough, that communication isn’t enough, that even having something to say isn’t enough, nor is working tirelessly enough; and the voice also says that all of that might be and often is a condition, an advantage, an attribute, a strength, of course, but then the voice adds that in essence none of those qualities are ever enough when it’s a question of literature, because writing always demands something else, something else, something else.

Now, I’m not one of those people who salivate when they see a long list in a novel; I generally like prose to keep moving, not stand still and sparkle. So the fact that this passage made me read it out loud and then go find the French and read that out loud made me realize I very much want to read the whole thing. In French.

Here’s the original:
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Laudator Temporis Acti presents a quote from Josephus’ Jewish Wars (5.272, tr. H. St. J. Thackeray):

Watchmen were accordingly posted by them on the towers, who gave warning whenever the engine was fired and the stone in transit, by shouting in their native tongue, “Sonny’s coming”; whereupon those in the line of fire promptly made way and lay down, owing to which precautions the stone passed harmlessly through and fell in their rear.

σκοποὶ οὖν αὐτοῖς ἐπὶ τῶν πύργων καθεζόμενοι προεμήνυον, ὁπότε σχασθείη τὸ ὄργανον καὶ ἡ πέτρα φέροιτο, τῇ πατρίῳ γλώσσῃ βοῶντες “ὁ υἱὸς ἔρχεται.” διίσταντο δὲ καθ’ οὓς ᾔει καὶ προκατεκλίνοντο, καὶ συνέβαινε φυλαττομένων ἄπρακτον διεκπίπτειν τὴν πέτραν.

He also provides Thackeray’s note on “Sonny’s coming”:

Probably, as Reland suggests, ha-eben (“the stone”) was corrupted to habben (“the son”); compare similar jocose terms, such as “Black Maria,” “Jack Johnson,” used in the Great War.

That’s wonderful, and I really hope it’s true.

This is very cool and brand new: Heindio Uesugi’s Old Avestan Dictionary is available as a free pdf from this page (in Japanese; just click the download button immediately below the image of the book cover). It looks very well done; here’s the beginning of the Preface, which explains its history:

The Old Avestan Dictionary (OAD) is an attempt at a lexicographic synthesis of Old Avestan studies since the Altiranisches Wörterbuch (1904) by Christian Bartholomae (1855-1925) with a particular focus on aiding the elucidation of the Gāthās based on the line of analysis laid down by Helmut Humbach (1921-2017). The dictionary is accompanied by a new annotated translation of the Gāthās to further facilitate the general reader in discerning the sense behind the respective terms and passages when reading, reciting, or studying the original Avestan texts.

This dictionary is the fruit of a seed planted by Karl Hoffmann (1915-1996). In the years following the war, Hoffmann resumed his research on Vedic texts, which had been interrupted by his military service, and in particular on the Vedic injunctive verbal mood, which would later produce his habilitation thesis Der Injunktiv im Veda (1951, but not published until 1967). He had the idea of completing this work by citing the Avestan parallels.

While he worked on the Vedas, he asked his mother to collect all the Avestan verbal forms along with their translations from Bartholomae’s dictionary into a card file so that he could analyze them. In going through the Avestan lexicon based on what he had discovered in Vedic, he noticed that Bartholomae (along with other scholars of his time) seemed to lack a clear idea of the single forms and of the verbal system of the Avesta, and in particular of the Gāthās.

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Marcin Wichary featured here a decade ago in a post on the pilcrow; now I’m happy to present his The hardest working font in Manhattan. It begins:

In 2007, on my first trip to New York City, I grabbed a brand-new DSLR camera and photographed all the fonts I was supposed to love. I admired American Typewriter in all of the I <3 NYC logos, watched Akzidenz Grotesk and Helvetica fighting over the subway signs, and even caught an occasional appearance of the flawlessly-named Gotham, still a year before it skyrocketed in popularity via Barack Obama’s first campaign.

But there was one font I didn’t even notice, even though it was everywhere around me.

Last year in New York, I walked over 100 miles and took thousands of photos of one and one font only.

The font’s name is Gorton.

If you care anything about fonts, urban history, or, hell, good writing, I urge you to devour the whole thing and enjoy the splendid collection of images. I really should read him more often…

Y sent me a link to Cid Swanenvleugel’s The pre‑Roman elements of the Sardinian lexicon (LOT, 2025; free pdf download), saying “It looks ambitious, and if not all true or even verifiable, at least interesting,” and I agree. Here’s the Summary (pp. 535-36):

One of the questions addressed in this study is whether the assumption of a single pre-Roman language, besides Punic, can account for all of the non-inherited lexical material. I have found that there is no geographical patterning in the phonological features found in words of pre-Roman origin. We can, however, discern a near-complementary geographical distribution in the pre-Roman prefixes *k(V)- and *θ(i)-, which have been argued in § 9.1.3 to be variants of one and the same pre-Roman morpheme (cf. also Swanenvleugel 2024). This prefix and other accepted pre-Roman morphemes exhibit an island-wide distribution. Pre-Roman Sardinian words, excluding punicisms with accepted cognates in other languages also occur across Sardinia. All of these findings constitute evidence supporting the hypothesis of a single language, or at least closely related language varieties, having existed all across Sardinia at the time of its romanization. This language coexisted with Punic. The coexistence of other languages with a smaller distribution cannot be ruled out.

The reality of many of the previously proposed phonological and morphological features attributed to a pre-Roman language in Sardinia cannot be confirmed based on the lexical material investigated in this study. This includes the pre-Roman vowel harmony proposed by Serra (1960; cf. § 8.4.2). The same goes for a number of putative pre-Roman suffixes (§ 9.2). What can be maintained is the pre-Roman phoneme *θ, the existence of word-final consonants, and various morphemes, such as *k(V)-/*θ(i)-, *-́Vr, and *-(V)s-.

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