From the Palgrave Pivot anniversary page:
In October 2012 we launched Palgrave Pivot in response to feedback from the scholarly community that they needed a mid-form publication format for publishing their work. One year later we’ve published over 100 Palgrave Pivot titles across the Humanities, Social Sciences and Business.
To celebrate we are offering access to the first 100 Palgrave Pivot titles FREE for 100 Hours. From 9am on Monday 28th October to 1pm GMT on Friday 1st November you can access all 100+ Palgrave Pivot titles FREE on Palgrave Connect.
Unfortunately, their interface is clunky and maddening to use; fortunately, MetaFilter user Going To Maine has posted a complete list of available titles, with links, at the MetaFilter post where I found out about it. I’ve already noticed “Barbarian Memory: The Legacy of Early Medieval History in Early Modern Literature,” by Nicholas Birns, and “The Moscow Pythagoreans: Mathematics, Mysticism, and Anti-Semitism in Russian Symbolism,” by Ilona Svetlikova, and I’ve barely started looking at it. There’s less than two days to go before it all goes back behind the paywall, so check it out sooner rather than later; I’m pretty sure any LH reader will find something that interests them.
Addendum. Another MetaFilter post of LH interest: It knocks like a swearing finger, featuring posts from Stuff Dutch People Like on linguistic topics, e.g. “lekker” and Swearing with diseases.
I’ve done an Aaron Swartz on these (but no, Officer Obie, I am not going to hang myself for littering, or firestorm my LAN either). Any Hattics late to the party know where to apply.
You neglected to provide a URL for Officer Obie, so I supplied one; if it’s not satisfactory, let me know and we’ll see what we can do. Thanks both for your valiant archival labors and for leaving a comment on this poor lonesome post.
Have d/led all the poetry titles, and though I haven’t had time to read any yet, both the authors and titles are promising. It’s an intriguing new publication format (pivot I mean, not ebook), and it will be interesting to see how it fares. 110 books in 1 year would naturally make one wonder about the standards and quality, but we know what they say about books and covers. (Although a decent cover would be a welcome standard for these).
This “swearing-by-disease” is in fact a unique Dutch trait. No other language has similar curses.
Did your BS detector just go off? Of course it did, because a) statements like this are nearly always wrong and b) not counting Afrikaans, Polish and Czech also swear with diseases. Polish does so with “cholera”, Czech with “mor” (plague), “neštovice” (pox) and even “spalničky” (measles) and “ouročky” (seborrheic dermatitis). The first two often occur together in “mor a neštovice na” + object of one’s anger.
Hat: Thanks, that’s the one I had intended.
Bulbul: No doubt (Yiddish uses ‘cholera’), but Dutch is incredibly productive about these: any disease, however recently discovered, will do as a curse.
Then in Russian you’d find meta-swearing-by-disease: if you wish gonorrhea or heaven forbid cancer on someone, then you’d be wished, in turn, to get warts and ulcers on your own tongue: “Типун тебе на язык!” (Etymology of tipun is unclear; Vasmer considered, and discarded, a hypothesis of derication from German “Pips”).
We used to curse with diseases in English too – “a pox on you!”. Seems to have dropped out of favor.
John,
Dutch is incredibly productive about these
Quite so and by my experience, even the frequency of these structures is greater in Dutch than it is in, say, Polish. But the original claim was “No other language has similar curses” and that’s what I objected to, for ’tis indeed atrocious bullshit.
Norwegian:
Pokker ta deg!
Pokker ta!
Pokker!
For pokker!
(I imagine that’s a line of development)
… but synchronically, there’s no disease left in those, only medium-harsh swearing.