Last month ktschwarz quoted Alison Bechdel’s use of obtunding in her widely praised graphic memoir Fun Home, adding:
Fun Home is in the genre of in-direct-conversation-with-Ulysses (her father’s favorite book), with the last chapter drawing multiple parallels between her/her father and Stephen/Bloom as relationships that are profoundly connected yet incomplete. Also in direct conversation with Fitzgerald, Camus, Colette, and many others including the Merriam-Webster and American Heritage dictionaries—look out for the appearance of the Appendix of Indo-European Roots in a sex scene.
When I expressed interest, kts was generous enough to send me a copy for the holidays, and having just finished it, I enthusiastically second all the praise and recommendations — it’s certainly one of the best books I’ll read all year, and of course its use of dictionaries makes it prime LH fodder. But in the note that accompanied the book ktschwarz wrote: “Can you spot the [dictionary] where she used artistic license and did *not* copy it exactly as it is?” Alas, the edition of the unabridged Websters in the book is neither the Third International that occupies a majestic place on my shelf nor the out-of-copyright one that’s available in full at Google Books, so I can only hope someone will enlighten me. And thanks again, kts!
2¢: Fun Home is great. Didn’t read Are You My Mother? And, The Secret to Superhuman Strength is quite a letdown.
A few years ago* a translation of Ulysses was published in Bulgarian.
* 18? O.K… Time flies.
Didn’t read Are You My Mother?
I’m hoping I get a chance to do that.
I admit it was one of my favorite books when I was young, but…
(The plot summary in the wiki contains significantly more words than the book.)
Glad you enjoyed it! See also Stan Carey’s post on “eighty-six”, with the page where Bechdel passes on the story deriving it from a bar at 86 Bedford Street in Manhattan, which is not true; can’t blame Bechdel, though, since she is just quoting the American Heritage Dictionary (*they* should have known better). As I commented at Stan’s post, I love how every written word quoted in the book is a material object, with typefaces and handwriting traced, linebreaks reproduced exactly, and often with pages curved and hands holding the book in frame. You can tell from the linebreaks that she is indeed reading her father’s old copy of Ulysses, not the corrected and re-set edition that was in bookstores when she was in college.
The “mammoth” family dictionary is, as you guessed, Merriam-Webster’s Second Unabridged; on Bechdel’s own blog, she tells how she once met AHD’s Patrick Taylor and Steve Kleinedler, who “were able to ascertain with a few questions that it was the Second.” I’m sure it was the prominence of dictionaries in this memoir that got her invited onto AHD’s Usage Panel.
(The Second Unabridged is from the 1930s, at a nadir of text availability. Fortunately, I live near a university library that has it, so I could confirm the page. Seven more years until it’s out of copyright.)
So where was the artistic license? I’m all ears!
By that I meant the third featured dictionary, Merriam-Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate from the 1960s, which is where the shorter definitions come from. Like the others, this one is drawn with absolute fidelity, except for one panel: the definition of lesbian, where the caption narrates, “I first learned the word due to its alarming prominence in my dictionary,” drawing it as a guide word at the top of the page — but in that edition it wasn’t, it was almost a quarter of a page down from the top. It *was* a guide word in M-W’s previous Collegiate edition, from the 1950s, but with a different definition. Maybe she had a strong memory of the older one, but only had the 1960s one for visual reference?
(Dictionaries do make slight changes between printings — Kory Stamper’s podcast has the ugly details — but changes to pagination would be extremely unlikely. I searched for any other printings of the Seventh to see if there were any differences, but all the ones I could find were the same.)
And this is a great caption to another panel drawn from the same dictionary:
She may not have known phonetics as a teenager, but she does now: all 6 technical terms there are correct!
Thanks!
ktschwarz’s Jan. 17 post prompts me to ask the denizens of the Hattery a practical question. I am in possession of my father’s purchased-as-an-undergraduate (late 1950’s) copy of Ulysses, which I read of my own volition in high school and then took away with me to college where it was on the syllabus for a class I took freshman year. Its binding has recently collapsed. I am thus interested in recommendations for any artisan in the NYC metro area who might competently re-bind it (enough to be functional, not necessarily to look pretty or good-as-new), recognizing up front that this would almost certainly cost more than the cost of the nicest currently-in-print copy I could find and would thus be an expenditure motivated purely by sentimental concerns. I feel like 20-odd years ago there was a place fairly high up Lexington Ave. that looked like it did that sort of thing but I would not bet much money on it still being in business at the same location.
Good lord, the world is chock full of coincidences. Forty years or so ago I myself had a purchased-as-an-undergraduate (late 1960’s) copy of Ulysses, whose binding collapsed after being thrown in anger by a person other than myself, who then repented and had it rebound. Alas, I fear whatever NYC artisan did the job is likely no longer practicing. But surely there is such another…
i feel like i should know an nyc bookbinder to recommend, but i don’t. however, the need for one came up in another context entirely recently (reassembling a book that was unbound to be scanned for a reprint edition), so i’ll be asking around, and will do my best to remember to report back in here if i find someone!
Once again the Hattery hangs together to promote the greater good.
A friend-of-a-friend recommends Judith Ivry, 25 East 4th St., 5th floor, just around the corner from me. The contact page says: “By appointment only. Phone: 212-677-1015, Email: ivryblock@gmail.com“
thanks, JC!
I’ve been reading The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, and have a word-related observation and a question.
The observation is that at some point, Bechdel stopped using expletives and started using grawlixes (grawlices?). I was a bit surprised because Raffi’s first word was, memorably, “fucks!” (comic 190, (c) 1994) (Raffi was echoing Clarice, who had just said that people were “too jaded to care if Bill fucks his cat.”) It’s tricky to figure out exactly when things changed, because DTWOF is not given to having strong language in every episode. But once I noticed grawlix, I remembered actual curse words having been printed not that long before.
I suspect that Bechdel toned things down once DTWOF was on the web and in front of more eyeballs. The amount of explicit nudity and sexual interactions also decreased.
The question has to do with comics 93 & 94 (titled “Fightin’ Words” and “The Cloudburst” respectively, both from 1990). Mo calls Harriet a “complacent carnivorous yuppie”; Harriet retaliates by calling Mo a “sniveling self-righteous . . . LIBERAL!”
And that term enrages Mo to the point where she flings a tomato. And she absolutely denies it, and furiously rejects being called that.
And I guess I’m baffled as to what implications “liberal” had back in 1990 that would have so enraged someone like Mo. I understand that she would prefer to identify as a progressive, politically, but I would have thought that progressivism would be a subset of liberal politics, as opposed to conservative politics.
What have I forgotten, or never knew, about the term “liberal”?
Yes, “liberal” is still used insultingly by progressives, much as Marxists used to hurl “bourgeois” at people. It implies “you claim to be on the side of good but in fact complacently go along with the conservatives unless your personal ox is gored” (or at least that’s how I’d interpret it).
And now I’m wondering whether J.W. Brewer ever got his copy of Ulysses rebound.
I thought the word “liberal” was skunked in overall Middle American during the 1988 presidential campaign, when GHW Bush attached it disparagingly to Dukakis, who foolishly ran away from it. Before that it was used disparagingly only by conservatives (noting especially “limousine liberals” and “lily-livered liberals”). I’m surprised that it was used like this by early 1990s leftists.
That’s the odd thing about “liberal” — it’s used by both sides!
And of course in Europe it means something else entirely (a Quarter Pounder with cheese).
in the u.s., self-described “liberals” almost invariably treat everyone to their left as misguided people who would actually agree with them if only they thought things through “properly”, and vocally oppose them while collaborating wholeheartedly with almost anyone to their right*. those to their left look at self-described liberals’ actual practice rather than their abstract stated principles, and so see them as either active opponents or potential allies. generally, those who’ve held the latter position have fared a lot worse in the end, since it leads them to form coalitions with people who will eventually abandon them to attacks from the right (and often join in themselves).
while that’s been true since at least the 1930s**, the classic statement on this is from martin luther king jr., in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail – written in 1963, early in his definitive turn towards a more consistent left position. the passage, which is worth reading all of, begins:
First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
later that same year, malcolm x (similarly at the start of a turn towards more consistent leftism) said much the same thing in several speeches (also well worth reading), in punchier terms:
The white liberals from both parties cross party lines to work together towards the same goal. And white conservatives from both parties do likewise. The white liberal differ from the white conservative only in one way; the liberal is more deceitful, more hypocritical, than the conservative. Both want power, but the white liberal is the one who has perfected the art of posing as the Negro’s friend and benefactor.
i suspect that king’s use of “moderate” rather than “liberal” was meant to on the one hand make it easier for self-identified liberals to listen to what he was saying without immediate defensiveness, and on the other to push self-identified liberals decide whether they wanted to do things that got them lumped in with “moderates”. malcolm x, who did not see liberals as potential allies, was not interested in reaching out to them.
nina simone’s Mississippi Goddam takes a similar approach to king’s, with the self-described liberals’ axiom “go slow” never attributed to a particular speaker besides “you”. that model has a long history, with what’s implicit in, for example, the Almanac Singers’ Ballad of October 16 only receiving a name 25 years later in phil ochs’ Love Me I’m a Liberal (with a helpful explanatory introduction in this live recording).
.
* see for example gavin newsom’s recent anti-gay rhetoric, kamala harris’ attacks on trans health care and sex workers while california Attorney General and on immigrants while running for president, and (less recently) the ACLU’s refusal to represent paul robeson against the mccarthyite decision to deny him a u.s. passport and permanent enthusiasm for representing nazis.
** i don’t think the debates between “immediatist” and “gradualist” Abolitionists in the 1830s, or between craft-unionists and IWWs in the 1900s, used the word, though the same dynamics apply. similarly, the german Social Democratic Party’s legitimation and deployment of the Freikorps against the revolutions of 1918-19 wasn’t carried out in the name of “liberalism”, but the 1920s-30s german left’s “social fascist” label for the SDP describes the same dynamic in that contest (and accurately describes the SDP’s function throughout the weimar republic’s history).
(@hat: long comment with links held for moderation – just in case you see this before a mod notification)
The great Phil Ochs was using liberal derisively all the way back in 1965:
Yes, “libertarian”, or the pale imitations thereof we actually get. Javier Milei gets called ultraliberal sometimes.
In rarefied political discourse, people can be linksliberal (Austria’s current president identified his – Green – party thus, “with emphasis on liberal“, when he was its, uh, Federal Speaker and also a professor of economics some 10 years before he became president), and the Right can be subdivided into rechtsliberal, rechtskonservativ* and the more widely used term rechtsextrem.
* I haven’t encountered linkskonservativ, which is of course a contradiction in terms outside the aforementioned rarefied discourse; I imagine it applied to Brezhnev within the Soviet context.
I used to be friends with a Berlin sociologist who studied “die Rechtsextremen.”
The classic definition is “A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.”
I will add to the maelstrom of philosophical definitions of Liberalism Foucault’s take from The Birth of Biopolitics. Roughly paraphrased: “Liberalism is that ideology which holds the market to be the supreme arbiter of truth.”
I have since read Bechdel’s Spent, and Are You My Mother?.
One of the things that seemed like a bothersome inconsistency was the fact that Harriet and Mo, in DTWOF, seem to be roughly the same, politically. They both go to marches, protests, demonstrations, and parades. But “liberal”, as a scold/accusation would seem to be something that comes from someone a lot more political towards someone who is a lot less political. If there’s no disparity, it doesn’t seem like there is much justification.
However, I noticed something while reading AYMM. Alison depicts some of her relationships, early and late. One of her early relationships, in the 1980s, was with a woman named Eloise. I couldn’t help noticing that Eloise was very similar, visually (and perhaps in personality) to Harriet, just as Alison is very similar, visually, and perhaps in personality to Mo. And Eloise is specifically described as being an activist.
=======================
Pg 193:
Panel 1:
Narration: It was the weekend after that conversation with Mom that I first met Eloise.
Panel 2:
Narr: She’d recently been fired from her job.
Alison: So you just drift up and down the eastern seaboard doing civil disobedience?
Panel 3:
Elosie: Pretty much. I’ve been hanging out up at the Peace Camp.
Narr: The Seneca Women’s Peace Encampment was an ongoing feminist antiwar protest at an army base upstate.
Eloise: Last week was “Zukes not nukes”. We stormed the fence and stuck zucchinis through the chain link.
Panel 4:
Narr: After our first dinner date, Eloise had to leave for a demonstration uptown.
Eloise: We’re gonna weave a web around the Armory.
Alison: Jeez.
[skipping]
Pg 195:
Panel 1:
Narr: The next day, Eloise arrived for the weekend. The scope of her political resistance was expanding.
E: I want to go to Nicaragua
Panel 4:
Narr: Curiously, however, we were about to attend a lecture she [Adrienne Rich] was giving that very evening.
A: So what’s this talk about?
E: Nicaragua. She just got back
Narr: I couldn’t quite understand this craze to go to a place where guerilla war was still unfolding in the aftermath of the Sandinista revolution.
[skipping]
Page 198:
Panel 1:
Narr: Adrienne Rich’s talk got Eloise even more fired up about going to Nicaragua.
A: I could never go. I could never even do civil disobedience.
E: Yes, you could. Anyone can. That’s the point.
Panel 2:
Narr: I admired and envied Eloise’s aptitude for noncompliance [ . . . ]
A: I’m too much of a wimp.
Narr: “The moment when a feeling enters the body is political”. [NB: a line from Adrienne Rich’s lecture, transcribed by AB, but not published in AR’s essay on the topic, “Blood, Bread, and Poetry”]
Panel 3:
Narr: It was only my lesbianism, and my determination not to hide it, that saved me from being compliant to the core.
=======================
So what I now suspect is that the scenes between Harriet and Mo of “Fightin’ Words” and “The Cloudburst” from DTWOF, might be a re-creation of a scene between Eloise and Alison. Presumably, if Alison had called Eloise something like a “complacent carnivorous yuppie” for eating meat and buying a VCR [a triggering incident leading up to “Fightin’ Words”], then Eloise, secure in her activist credentials, might well have blasted back with “liberal” to less-political Alison.
Maybe someday I’ll find the wherewithal to e-mail Ms. Bechdel and just ask, although I don’t know if she’ll have the wherewithal to read and respond.
…roughly the same, politically. They both go to marches, protests, demonstrations, and parades. But “liberal”, as a scold/accusation would seem to be something that comes from someone a lot more political towards someone who is a lot less political. If there’s no disparity, it doesn’t seem like there is much justification.
it’s an accurate portrayal of the usage in a lot of movement-adjacent spaces. sometimes it’s a ‘narcissism of small differences’ thing, more often it’s about the meaningful differences of concrete practice that exist between people or organizations that don’t necessarily have a lot of difference in their stated longer-term goals.
one way that plays out in Dykes To Watch Out For between mo and harriet is that within their shared commitment to legal equality for gay men & lesbians, harriet is heavily involved in advocacy for the right to state-recognized marriages, while mo (accurately, in my view, and borne out by what’s happened since Obergefell v. Hodges) sees that goal as one that leads to a diversion of energy away from campaigns for (among other things) workplace and housing discrimination protections and access to healthcare, without providing any more concrete benefits than already-existing (and at the time steadily expanding) domestic partnership legislation and policies, which are useful to many more people (gay and straight) and have been rolled back in the wake of Obergefell.
I am younger than Ms. Bechdel but not so much (five years) that I don’t get all the “period” references. But Owlmirror’s quotes make me curious whether those passages are even comprehensible to readers now younger than let’s say 50, or if the glamor/mojo once associated in certain circles with the toponym “Nicaragua” has faded so far as to make it illegible to anyone who doesn’t have some sort of specific niche/hobbyist interest in bygone political trends.
if the glamor/mojo once associated in certain circles with the toponym “Nicaragua” has faded so far as to make it illegible to anyone who doesn’t have some sort of specific niche/hobbyist interest in bygone political trends.
I’m pretty sure that’s correct.
Owlmirror: “These two people do not seem very different politically” is not inconsistant with accusations of political apostasy. Two Pentecostals raised in the same church will call each other “unchristian” over transgressions that, assuming they’re not entirely fictitious to begin with, would be utterly invisible to an outsider.
We Leftists do love to throw “Liberal” around at the slightest provocation, including situations where it is an unfair criticism. But it would be folly to try and glean the meaning of Liberal from those instances of petty mud-slinging, just as it would be a bad idea to try and define Socialism based on a sample of Fox News accusations.
I approve.
FWIW there exist two old popular parties in Danish politics, the Liberal Left and the Radical Left, splinters of the mid-19th Left (parliamentary party) which was so called in contrast to the Right, after their seating in parliament. (The Right was the party of the old nobility and the landed gentry, favorites of the King, and the Left was the party of the “self-owning” farmers. Workers came in much later. The Right has become the Conservatives, probably the closest we have to social liberals, and much to the disappointment of the xenophobes further to the right they don’t want to play at rabble-rousing). We now have a center-left cabinet, supported by the Unity List which absorbed the Communists and the Greens at various points; the cabinet includes the Radical Left, who now mainly stand for fiscal conservatism. (Unlike the Moderates, nominally a bit further right but widely understood to be in the game only so their chairman can be Minister of the Exterior).
At one point the leader of the Liberal Left had the thankless task of trying to form a cabinet based on the “blue” right-wing MPs, but (to my utter satisfaction) there was too much bad blood between them for him to succeed. The task comes with the title of Royal Investigator, appointed by The King after the chairmen of the parliamentary parties have indicated their points of view to His Majesty. This is more or less the only role the King plays in the current version of Danish democracy; he also gives consent to laws in the Council of State, but a law is not valid without the signature of a minister, and it is the minister that bears the responsibility for following the constitution and other rules of jurisprudence.
“Minister of the exterior” sounds kind of strange, and possibly ominous. But what do I know? So far, no country has adopted my suggestion of changing “head of state” to “minister of the anterior.”
Me, I want to see Royal Investigator changed to Royal Instigator.
I like the Anterior idea but many countries have a head of state who is not the Prime Minister. Or a Minister at all. (We do have a Minister of the Interior).
So well, they call themselves the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But that’s just a vile euphemism, like calling the Minister of War the Minister of Defense. (We also don’t have a Military, we have a Defense Force).
Außenminister, short for Minister für äußere Angelegenheiten “minister for external affairs”.
…or, as a comicbook once had it, Minister für Inneres, Äußeres und Nebensächliches “minister for interior, exterior and irrelevant [stuff]”.
The PRC has us all beat: it has no armed forces whatsoever.
The Communist Party of China does; that’s what the People’s Liberation Army is.
(…arguably a slightly misleading translation; it’s not the liberation army that belongs to the people, which it doesn’t – it’s the army for liberating the people, the people-liberation army. Too unidiomatic in English, but in German it works and is actually done: Volksbefreiungsarmee.)
Edit: interestingly, it’s neutral Austria that has a Bundesheer, where Heer refers to any large number of armed people, whether soldiers or barbaric warriors.* Germany, which is not neutral, has a Bundeswehr, a Federal Defense (using the short poetic Wehr, which also means “weir”, instead of the usual Verteidigung). Both have a Verteidigungsminister:in, however.
* verheeren “devastate by sending an army through”; verheerend “generically catastrophic”.
Back in the 1970’s heyday of the Symbionese Liberation Army there were jokes to the effect that e.g. since no one knew who the Symbionese were it would be difficult to assess whether and when they had successfully been liberated.
Wehr: I think (as in, not going to fact check) that the Danish instance used to be called Værnemagten (~ “The Protection Force”) in popular discourse, but that was skunked by die Wehrmacht being too obviously cognate.
in Germany, das Heer is simply one part of the Bundeswehr (the other parts being MarineLuftwaffe. And the -wehr in Bundeswehr is not poetic, but a euphemism for the politically impossible Wehrmacht (my father, who hated euphemisms, used Wehrmacht for Bundeswehr to the end of his life).
in Germany, Außenminister is the word everybody uses instead of the official Bundesminister des AuswärtigenAußenministerium is actually das Auswärtige Amt.
During the Weimar Republic and the first years of the Nazi regime, the armed forces had been called Reichswehr, which the Nazis replaced bei Wehrmacht. So Bundeswehr is a conscious callback to the Weimar Republic, with the usual substitution of Reich “Realm” by Bund “Federation”.
Maybe there’s something akin to that pejorative use of “liberal” in the self-pitying whining at the end of Herod’s soliloquy in the “Massacre of the Innocents” section of Auden’s “For the Time Being”: “I read all official dispatches without skipping. I’ve taken elocution lessons. I’ve hardly ever taken bribes. … I’ve tried to be good. I brush my teeth every night. … I object. I’m a liberal. I want everyone to be happy ….”
Followed after a comical interlude by the Soldiers by some both-sidesism (or stuck-in-the-middle-with-youism) in the mouth of Rachel: “On the Left are grinning dogs, peering down into a solitude too deep to fill with roses. / On the Right are sensible sheep, gazing up at a pride where no dream can grow.”
So, “Federal Minister of the Exterior”? Ominous…
Maybe only ominous if “exterior” is taken as a euphemism for an aspirational “future interior”? (See also the Russian ближнее зарубежье (“near abroad”).)
Mid-20th-century Commonwealth realms tended to have a Minister for External Affairs rather than Foreign Affairs, because they dealt with other Commonwealth realms as well as foreign-foreign countries. That never applied in the UK itself, where the Foreign Secretary and the Commonwealth Secretary were different people.* The latter’s 19th-century ancestor had the decidedly non-euphemistic name “Secretary of State for War and the Colonies”.
If a French political party has “radical” in its name, it tells you pretty much nothing.
*When the roles were merged, the official title became “secretary of state for foreign and commonwealth affairs”, but that was informally abbreviated to “Foreign Secretary” by the process I call Tobagonisation. (I see Rhode Island has finally eliminated the Providence Plantations.)
Also the German Occupation Forces reportedly issued an order that the German Wehrmacht was to be called Værnemagten in Danish. (Capitalized Nouns were abolished in 1948, for, um, reasons). There are citations from official publications as late as 1940-04-09 mentioning Den danske Værnemagt, but that only lasted for so long, it seems.
One does wonder whether the standardized use of “Wehrmacht” in English-language sources stems from a somewhat deliberate exoticization/othering of the Enemy, not unlike the way in which Kaiser Wilhelm was often Emperor William in pre-1914 texts but then less so once he was the Enemy.
I suspect that the contrast intended is not so much between Us and The German Enemy but between Bad Germans and Good Germans. Calling the WW2 German army “the Wehrmacht” helps with the narrative that the Nazi period was altogether a unique aberration, with no continuity whatsoever with the period before or afterwards. One understands the motive and sympathises with it to some extent.
en.wikipedia has separate articles “Luftwaffe” and “German Air Force”. The corresponding de.wiki articles are “Luftwaffe (Wehrmacht)” and “Luftwaffe (Bundeswehr)”
The story we were told here was that the Wehrmacht was the regular army, “just doing their jobs,” as if that were an excuse, and the Waffen-SS was where the guys who liked doing crimes against humanity worked. Of course there will have been exceptions on either side, but that was the general idea.
@Lars: That was the self-comforting myth told in (Western) Germany after the war as well. That myth was shattered in the 70s and 80s, when a new generation of historians started to document the participation of the Wehrmacht in war crimes, the holocaust, and various other genocidal activities, leading to very heated public debates subsequently.
Previous discussion of the “clean* Wehrmacht” myth.
* It’s „saubere Wehrmacht“ in German. The adjective comes from Latin sobrius, which had a similar range of meanings to English sober. In most West Germanic languages other than English, the clean word primarily means “small.” (West Frisian apparently has cognates with both meanings.) In North Germanic, the primary meaning is something like “feeble.” English also has the doublet gleam, which is much closer to the Proto-Indo-European meaning.
Well, I think the record of how armed forces behaved in places like the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda would sort of skunk the idea of a “moral” army. UN and US troops have not been exceptions, but for some reason there has been no tribunals about that.
The North Germanic word for “clean” is ren/rein. (Also in MHG, ON hreinn). We have a cognate to clean in Da klejn = ‘small’ (feeble, delicate), nicked from MLG of course. (Also a family name and in klejnsmed, possibly a more direct loan, a smith who produces fittings and more delicate work than the archetypal blacksmith does).
(l > r is not common in Germanic, I think; if it were, hreinn could easily belong there as well…)
The rein word for “clean” also existed in East Germanic (meaning Gothic). It has some use in West Germanic too (as in judenrein, since we’re talking about the Naxis), but not in English specifically, so far as I am aware.
P.G.
*hraini = pure, clean
*hrīnan = to touch
*hreþan = to sift
Old English has hrīnan from the second of these and hriðian = “to shake, quake, have a fever” from the third (there is also a related noun for fever in both O.E and P.G.).
Guus Kroonen has for the first:
—
A (vrddhi?) adjective to an unattested nasal present *hrinan-, cf. Lat. cerno ‘to sift, distinguish, decide’ < *kri-n-e-; Gr. κρίν[OMEGA] 'to separate, choose, decide' …. An archaic meaning 'fine' is preserved by the Swi. dialects.
—
Meanwhile, many countries on the mainland nowadays have a minister for European affairs.
…OHG sūbar, “probably loaned from Latin sōbrius“, says de.wiktionary, citing Seebold’s revision of Kluge’s etymological dictionary. Well, that explains my unawareness of any cognates… it does also mean things like “isn’t spying for the cops”.
Also a Ukrainian drone unit by now.
So horns are what you count animals by.
And what you pull them out by with a lasso.
I like that.
Yeah. But I forgot that it doesn’t work in Satem.
I’m back with my old idea that reindeers are “selected animals” (picked out of a herd, whether for taming, slaughter, or sale) rather than named by an awkward derivation from the “horn” root.
Not a lot weirder than G Rind n. “head of cattle”, E Rothermere & Rotherwood.
Pah. Easy. How about Toende Kusaal ɩɩl “horn”, ɩɩlɩm “milk” (of an animal)?
(These two nouns both have the stem ɩɩl- segmentally; I kinda hope they at least differ in tone, but Niggli’s dictionary doesn’t tone-mark the “milk” word, which seems to have no cognates whatsoever elsewhere in Oti-Volta. Maybe in Grũsi: Kasem yɩlɩna “mother’s milk”? But why only preserved in one dialect of one language in all of Oti-Volta?)
Just to report that I started reading Bechdel’s latest, Spent, and it promises to be good. A funhouse mirror of Fun Home and of her own life, and riffing on Das Kapital — it’s already grabbed me.
I’ve been re-reading Fun Home, and I noticed this page:
(the link has an actual image of the page)
We live in the stupidest timeline (as I’ve seen it called online) where a sitting president of the USA demanded the indictment of a political enemy for having posted an image of shells forming the numbers “8647”.
Just gloomily noting that.