Jonathon Green has published another of his quarterly updates for Green’s Dictionary of Slang, in which he focuses mainly on one of those obscure language folk who I think should be better known:
The work of the independent Australian scholar Dr Gary Simes (1950-2017) has already been sampled for GDoS. Aside from a variety of general publications, often on gay themes, his Dictionary of Australian Underworld Slang, featuring two hitherto little-known glossaries of criminal jargon, was published in 1993, and a major discussion of early gay speech, ‘Gay Slang Lexicography’, was featured in the specialist journal Dictionaries volume 26 (2005). When he died in 2017 he was at work on his magnum opus, the Dictionary of the Language of Sex and Sexuality in Modern English. Like the OED and my own lexicon of slang, it is prepared ‘on historical principles’, i.e. underpinning each headword and its senses with a chronological list of citations of usage.
It would, undoubtedly, have been a major contribution to lexicography in general and that of (gay) sexuality in particular. Nonetheless, even though the project could not be finished, and absent substantial funding will never be so,² Dr Simes had typed up a manuscript from the many file cards which – he was no fan of computers – held his research. The ms is far from complete, but a substantial amount exists and much of the research, especially as regards slang, has never so far been included in a dictionary.
It is thus a text that deserves wider circulation. To that end, and thanks to the trustees of Dr Simes’ estate and GDoS contributing editor James Lambert, who is responsible for safeguarding and overseeing the use of the physical materials, we have been allowed to see the ms, and to extract from it for GDoS use such slang-based material as seems valuable. This is a lengthy task and will doubtless consume many months work. Extracted text will appear under the tag Simes:DLSS and new tranches will become available as the regular 90-day updates continue.
I am in equal parts charmed and annoyed by scholars who refuse to use computers; thank goodness his work won’t disappear due to the good offices and hard work of both Lambert and Green, and I look forward to Green’s essay on the decline of reference publishing.
I like that Green’s post on gay slang is illustrated with a pigeon (голубь)—just by coincidence? The etymology in the Wiktionary for голубой has some very specific details… I wonder, does this account hold up on inspection? Here is Anikin, Русский этимологический словарь, no. 17, on this sense of голубой, with none of that:
(LH readers who cannot read Russian will be able able to run this through their favorite online translator.) ЗРС 2004 is Вальтер Х. и др., Словарь. Заимствования в русском субстандарте. Англицизмы (2004), which I have not been able to consult. And the reference to голубóк 1 eventually leads to голубе́ц 1:
It seems like a good philological study devoted to голубой ‘gay’ ought to have appeared by now in Russian, but Anikin published this fascicle of his dictionary in 2017, so apparently none had by then… Maybe some LH readers can add to this?
(I will refrain from exploring an association with the other голубец (usually pl.), ‘cabbage roll stuffed with meat’.)
голубец
Not a good thing to consume before a night of cruising…
Reminiscent of פֿייגעלע.
And gonsel. And indeed Russian петух again.
It seems like a good philological study devoted to голубой ‘gay’ ought to have appeared by now in Russian
It certainly does. Maybe scholars have studied it but been nervous about publishing in today’s climate?
A small point, but it took me a while to figure out that you need to click on the “live” footnote link in what hat block-quoted in order to see the footnote in which Green threatens to write the essay that hat is looking forward to.
‘cabbage roll stuffed with meat’
Sigh. I used to walk miles for those, not just camels.
Food of the gods
Sigh. I used to walk miles for those
What happened? They’re frequently available at the meat counter at my preferred EDEKA market, and I guess Cologne also has its share of Russian and Polish shops, so they should be obtainable?
What happened?
Libido fail.
== > (I will refrain from exploring an association with the other голубец (usually pl.), ‘cabbage roll stuffed with meat’.)
I have it on good authority that proper gołąbki are made with buckwheat instead of newfangled rice.
I’ve seen “columbine” as a color name for light blue, in the context of housepaint swatches or premodern textiles.
I wonder if it’s named after doves or the flower, which comes in the same light blue as a dove’s neck?
Wiktionary says the flower name is from the petals looking like “five clustered pigeons.”
My understanding is that a dove is just a pigeon you feel well-disposed toward.
My understanding is that a dove is just a pigeon you feel well-disposed toward.
As the RSPB says:
#
People tend to refer to the smaller, more delicate birds as doves and the stouter and more urban birds as pigeons.
#
So it’s basically hicks versus New Yorkers.
My pigeon-racing coal-mining grandfather would (I think) not have appreciated any suggestion that he was keeping doves.
(I will refrain from exploring an association with the other голубец (usually pl.), ‘cabbage roll stuffed with meat’.)
I didn’t just pull this notion out of… thin air. French enviandé is at least a century old now.
I didn’t just pull this notion out of… thin air.
Lol. Of course you didn’t, dear. That’s why it resonated with me. I was not born under a cabbage leaf.
In the 70s I zhuzhed up my French vocab with comics by Copi. One of them was titled L’enculé de l’histoire. I suspect we all have experienced feeling like that at one time or another. It transcends gender. Like spitballs in classrooms.
@David Marjanović: Buckwheat would be really good too.
Apparently, the name buckwheat comes from the similarity in shape of buckwheat seeds and beech nuts. Both are rather angular. Beech itself goes back more or less regularly to Proto-Indo-European.
@David E.: My pigeon-racing coal-mining grandfather would (I think) not have appreciated any suggestion that he was keeping doves.
I take it they didn’t live in a dovecote?
Certainly not. They lived in a pigeon loft, like all decent pigeons.
I come late to the comments, but just to clarify: The pigeon is not, I fear, remotely subtle. Let alone learned. It is no more than an example of a ‘blue-checker’, a variety of racing pigeon and its apperance is to illustrate one of the books I mention: My Blue-checker Corker and Me (1982) by Paul Radley. Radley was also responsible for Jack Rivers and Me (1982)and Good Mates (1985). In 1981, after winning the first ever Australian/Vogel Literary Award for the ms of Jack Rivers, Radley was named Young Australian of the Year. However in 1996 he revelaed that everything he had written had in fact been penned by his uncle Jack, who had been ineligible for the award, although he seems to have appeared in the acknowledgments of Corker in Radley’s debit ‘to the guidance of Canada Jack, a perennial old bastard.’ Slang’s type of guy, no doubt.
DE’s grandfather’s pigeons must have been rather upper class, if they weren’t doos living in a doocot (a wooden shed in my grandfather’s case, not an old stone one). Pronounced ‘DOOKit’, of course.
(I don’t think anyone keeping doos would translate it into English as ‘dove’ – they’re sociologically pigeons, if that’s the right word.)
FWIW, they are all duer [d̥uɐ] and the racing ones live in a dueslag on the roof.
@Jen:
These were English pigeons. They did not aspire to doodom.
Oh, well, that’s ok then. I apologise for doubting them.
(My sister just rewatched Geordie Racer, because her best friend was doing the Great North Run, in a bit of offline topic convergence!)
Taubenschlag; why it’s a hit is beyond me.
[Hat: Green’s surname twice misspelled in the post.]
Fixed, thanks!
My immediate guess: it’s short for Verschlag.
According to Hermann Paul’s Deutsches Wörterbuch (9th ed.) “In Tauben-, Hühners[chlag] ‘Raum, der verschlossen werden kann’.” and “einen Raum v[erschlagen] ‘durch Bretter absondern’, dazu Verschlag“. In other words, what is being hit are the nails you use to build a Verschlag or a Taubenschlag.
Norw. bislag (< Ger.) is a small attachment to a building, usually the main house of a farm. The typical referent varies between regions. In some places it can be an open front porch. At my grandparents’ farm in Northern Norway, it was a small, unheated room in front of the kitchen door where one took off ones boots and cloaks. (Later they renewed it into a fully integrated (and insulated) entrance room, and even found room for a modern bathroom with plumbing. I don’t know if the -slag element reflects actual hammering to the walls or if it’s an extended or metaphorical sense, e.g. the one found in tilslag “addition”.
Your grandparents’ bislag sounds like a mud room.
Yes! I remember the discussion and think I thought about mentioning it at the time.
Oh! Verschlag makes sense of it.
Zuschlag, though in quite different contexts.
The Danish word comes from German according to Wiktionary
We do have slå ~ ‘bolt’ for closing a door. Which is supposed to come from ON slá, clearly from the same root which also gives slag (noun) and slå verb = ‘hit’.
So Danish could have had slag in the meaning ‘enclosure’ from PG, but it didn’t. We also use slå i the verb for closing bottles, doors and boxes.
Oh, that’s interesting. I’m not aware of that in German, and Wiktionary and the DWDS aren’t either – but it makes sense of Verschlag. Anyone have a big fat Low German dictionary…?
Edit: or it’s backformed. Beschlagen refers to such things as putting horseshoes on a horse, so it’s easily possible that verschlagen once meant the completion of that (“all over”).
Hagelslag = chocolate shavings you put on bread at breakfast
You have this suffix in German, i.e., Blitzschlag, but maybe for you this is not “bolt”.
chocolate shavings you put on bread at breakfast
Chocoswarf!
Taubenschlag
An account of the sense development is given in the DWB, in the online entry here—scroll down to sense IV.4 (klappe, luke, niederfallendes fenster, das grosze bodenfenster… daher auch der mit fallthür oder klappe versehene raum für geflügel), where this sense is associated to schlagen, sense V.4 (heftig fallen, stürzen, von menschen oder auch von schweren gegenständen). The East Frisian Low Saxon citation from ten Doornkaat Koolman is here, p. 190a.
No, it’s the impact (Einschlag) – the event, not the thing. Likewise Steinschlag “falling rocks”.
Mystery solved, thank you!
Beslag (neuter, plural = singular) is fittings in general. En hestesko is not a beslag (to me), but fitting them is/used to be beslå/beslog/beslået. Though you can also sko a horse. You can also have jernbeslåede boots for scratching up the parquet floors.
Which all serves to confirm the root cognacy of slå and slag. Even if a specific sense detoured around the hanse, it could easily be conflated with the native version.
Verner – *h generalized in the north, *g in the south?