As a resident of the Much Sass State myself (specifically, of Hey, Lad, between Tampon Thorn and Hamster), how can I resist passing along this brilliant map from Bostonography? It was originally posted on May 17, 2016 by Andy Woodruff and Tim Wallace, who said “Can you believe it’s almost the 400th anniversary of the the Pilgrims arriving at Hot Lumpy?” and added “Anagrams were all generated by the amazing Internet Anagram Server (or I, Rearrangement Servant).” They have other maps as well, for those who enjoy maps.
Also, I keep forgetting to mention that a couple of months ago LibraryThing dropped all membership fees and limits:
Our plan was to go free when we rolled out “LT2,” our upcoming redesign. But the coronavirus has changed our plans, along with everyone else’s. A lot of people are now stranded at home, with nothing to do but read and catalog their books, movies, and music. A lot of kids are at home too—free cataloging help. And with the economy in freefall, many are worried about money. We want everyone to be able to use LibraryThing. This is the right time to go free.
So, starting today, LibraryThing.com, both on the web and using our cataloging app, are free to all, to add as many books as you want. And, no, we’re not going to add ads. (We will keep showing a few Google ads to visitors, but they vanish as soon as you become a member.)
I’ve been a member for almost 15 years — I posted about it right after it opened — and I highly recommend it as an easy way to keep your books catalogued. And you can enter books in all sorts of languages.
Not quite an anagram but a friend long ago said she went to school near you in How Sadly.
Which may be an old joke in those parts, but I liked it.
I have passed many pleasant days in Corset Glue.
Ah — I like a good anagram, I do.
Good on LibraryThing for dropping its charges. I see you do the British thing and write “catalogued”. But LibraryThing’s “cataloging” is weird. Even spelling the root form “catalog” shouldn’t produce “cataloging”. Shouldn’t it be “catalogging” with “gg” as in waterlogging, zigzagging and debugging?
Shouldn’t it be “catalogging”
Why ? In order to conform to the rules of uniform English orthography ?? <* laughs hysterically *>
Here only yesterday I wrote “lead” as the past tense of “lead”. I think that is due, in myself, to “read” as the past tense of “read” (a word I use much more often than “lead”). I’m fed up: from now on it will be “I red that book several years ago”, as my modest contribution to uniform spelling.
“Should” be damned. Somebody has to set an example. Fools rush in where angels fear to tred.
What is it even with that past tense? The usual culprit would be spelling from one dialect, pronunciation from another.
Also lose : loose :: chose : choose. *joins hysteria*
Oh, I spotted a typo: Abohrs Bundt for Hubbardston should be ‘Abhors’. There are a lot of possible anagrams for some of these so I like their choices. I suggest keeping them: avoid confusion with places across the Atlantic. On the other hand it’s not going to be easy to sell a house in Snotty Bowels.
Now do the whole lot again only this time in German (I see it’s possible at IAS).
catalogging: It’s a legitimate question. When English speakers inflect novel words, or inflect words in novel ways, they make use of existing patterns, consciously or unconsciously. People started writing rehabbed, corncobbing, bathtubbing, yuppie, asshattery before they were in any dictionary, putting in double letters by analogy to similar words. Then why not catalogging?
The usual rule is that consonant doubling applies to words of more than one syllable only if the last syllable is stressed. That works fine for omitted vs. visited, but what if the last syllable has *secondary* stress, like catalog: does that count or not? I suspect this is also why there’s a high level of anxiety over benefit(t)ed (many dictionaries accept both).
rosie is right to look for analogies in other -g words. As a matter of fact, -g is the only final consonant that Fowler says is *always* doubled before a suffix beginning with a vowel, with no stress condition. (Possibly because a syllable ending with -g always has at least secondary stress? Is that true?) His examples: sandbagged, zigzagging, nutmeggy, periwigged, leapfrogging, humbugged.
So I don’t know why catalogging never got any traction at all. Maybe anyone who is uneasy about whether to double the g or not just says “screw it, I’m falling back on cataloguing”. That’s what I’d do.
People started writing rehabbed, corncobbing, bathtubbing, yuppie, asshattery before they were in any dictionary, putting in double letters by analogy to similar words.
It’s analogous but the real reason is to avoid misreadings as ‘asshatery’, ‘rehabed’, ‘bathtubeing’ etc.
Isn’t benefitted supposed to be British and benefited American, like develop(p)ed?
Kind of: in native words, -g always comes from -gg-.
Isn’t benefitted supposed to be British and benefited American, like develop(p)ed?
Yes.
Fools rush in where angels fear to tred.
Or perhaps to trod.
Much Sass State
I wonder how you call your neighbor – No, Yuck?
@stu
Apart from the spelling, I find present tense verbs in “d” with “pseudo-umlaut” in the past interesting, as German seems to have two verbs from the same root, one strong and one weak.
Lead/led=Leiten-leitete but cf. Leiden-litt
Breed/bred=brüten-brütete but cf braten-briet
Read/read=reden/redete but cf raten-riet
The spelling catalog (with cataloging, cataloged, cataloger, etc. began as a shibboleth of U.S. librarians, who picked it up from Melvil Dewey, an extremely influential late-19C/early-20C librarian. Wikt says: “In both the US and Canada, both catalog and catalogue are used, with catalogue commonly used in government and traditional institutions and catalog commonly used in informal, business, retail, and computing contexts.”
Dewey is best known today for the Dewey Decimal System, by which essentially all public libraries and 90% of college libraries in the U.S. shelve their non-fiction books (fiction is normally shelved separately and ordered by author’s surname, author’s other names, and title). The DDC assigns a three-digit number to each subject matter, which can be arbitrarily further subdivided by adding more digits after the decimal point: thus 400 is ‘language’ generically, 430 is ‘German’, and 432 is ‘German etymology’. As an extreme but not unusual case, 266.02373051 is ‘foreign missions of the United States in China’. An offshoot of it, the UDC, is used worldwide to classify bibliographic entries.
Dewey did a lot of other work too. He helped found and was president of the American Library Association, which does excellent work for libraries and librarians, as well as the right to read anything you want. He devised the standard size of catalog cards, back when catalogs had cards, and sold the cards and extra-sturdy wooden cabinets to keep them in. He founded the New York State Library School (part of Columbia, but state-supported.) He set up the system of traveling libraries which went to towns too small to support their own brick-and-mortar libraries. (He was also racist, Antisemitic, and touchy-feely around women, like most prominent WASP males of his time.)
But Dewey was also a spelling reformer who changed his name from “Melville” to “Melvil” (and from “Dewey” to “Dui”, though he later changed his mind about that). He helped found Lake Placid, N.Y. as a health resort, and the Adirondak Loj is still there, though its menu presumably no longer speaks of “Hadok, Poted beef with noodls, Parsli or Masht potato, Butr, Steamd rys, Letis, and Ys cream.” As you can see, he had no use for the English “double consonant makes the preceding vowel ‘short'” spelling rule. (His middle names were “Louis Kossuth”, who arrived in the U.S. shortly before Dewey was born in 1851, though his wildly popular nationwide tour did not start until 1852).
I wonder how you call your neighbor – No, Yuck?
Rye Wonk, perhaps. (Rye, N.Y. is in Westchester County, just north of “the city with two names twice”.
@John Cowan: While every public library seems to use the Dewey Decimal System,* I have not seen it used in university libraries. At every college library where I can remember using borrowing privileges (successively Willamette University, Oregon State, MIT, Harvard, Indiana, and South Carolina), they used the Library of Congress system. However, those institutions are all research universities (although running the gamut from just barely, to world preeminent), so the system may be different at teaching colleges.
* I would be interested to know what David Marjanović thinks of the attempted Styrian accent in that video. It doesn’t seem very good to me, by I have a hard time saying why.
Kossuth is an ancestor of Joseph Kosuth the artist. Dewey is not related to the other Dewey. It was a long time before I realised that what I’d heard as the due-decimal system had nothing to do with the Italian word for two.
He was also racist, Antisemitic, and touchy-feely around women, like most prominent WASP males of his time
Judging by the trouble it got him into, he seems to have been an outlier even for his time. Gotta watch those spelling reformers.
What David E. said — if he had just been a par-for-the-course specimen of his era he wouldn’t have attracted the contemporaneous criticism that he did. The point here of course is that he was largely a *failed* spelling reformer with perhaps the notable counterexample of “catalog.” I believe Noah Webster had a bunch of spelling-reform ideas that ultimately failed to take root but had enough that *did* take root and create systematic cross-Atlantic differences that he is more notable for his successes than his failures. If it prosper, none dare call it crackpottery?
It’s the syst[æː]m. Poor Conan recognized there’s no [ə], but couldn’t imagine unstressed [ɛ] and overshot. Perhaps he should have gone for no vowel at all and made the [m] syllabic.
the system may be different at teaching colleges
In addition, there may have been a shift: the stats I quoted turn out to be from 1927. The research libraries I’ve used are all Elsie rather than Dewey. The two systems are really very similar, except that Elsie numbers begin with two letters, so the top of the system has more fanout, and it is more balanced. in Dewey, religion is 200, but all non-Christian religions are packed into 290; class B is for philosophy, psychology, and religion, with BM, BP, BR, BQ for Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity, with BX for books on particular Christian denominations and BL for other religions. Dewey was originally devised for the needs of Amherst College Library (I wonder if it still does), whereas Elsie was made from the Library of Congress, a rather larger institution.
I note that the 1885 edition of Dewey has a rather long title with the Deweyisms “relativ” (which I approve of) and “pamflet” (which I am indifferent to).
Dewey is not related to the other Dewey.
WP lists two dozen famous Deweys, so this is a bit of a Rorschach test; I think of the philosopher John Dewey, and next of Thomas E. Dewey, the on The American tonalist painter Charles Melville Dewey does sound as if he were related, though. There are two origin stories for Dewey: that it is an anglicization of Dewi, the Welsh name for St. David, and that it is < Douai. Of course not all Deweys necessarily get their surnames from the same source.
“It’s analogous but the real reason is to avoid misreadings as ‘asshatery’, ‘rehabed’, ‘bathtubeing’”
That’s not a “but”, that *is* the analogy. Bathtubbing goes with rubbing, bubble, etc., and not with tubing, tuba, etc.
“Isn’t benefitted supposed to be British and benefited American, like develop(p)ed?”
No, that’s a myth (spread by Bryan Garner among others), perhaps due to confusion with the double L issue. In fact, benefited is much more common on both sides, endorsed by Fowler/Butterfield 2015 and the Guardian style guide, and it beats benefitted by over 10:1 in the British National Corpus. There *is* a decided preference for benefitted at, surprise surprise, The New Yorker, but I don’t know of any other publishers that are with them on that.
Developped is not accepted by any English dictionaries; you’re thinking of French.
I swithered for a long time over ‘focus(s)ing’, a word which comes up quite often both in the remunerative aspects of my life and in my Africanist potterings. In the end I went for brevity.
I was puzzled myself by the mention of developped; a quick look at Google Ngrams shows it’s never had any currency.
Dewey was (inter mult. al.) an obsessive about wasted time. He once screamed at his secretary for stopping work long enough to say “Good morning, Mr. Dewey,” but once he started talking about wasted time he couldn’t stop and would rant for hours. And he was a censorious moralist who couldn’t keep his hands out of the petty cash. And at a time when librarianship was an all-male profession with stern academic protocols (Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Library wouldn’t let anybody borrow a novel unless they also borrowed several works of non-fiction), it was Dewey who reconceived libraries as friendly homes and librarians as their hostesses. And he made his case with library boards by arguing that woman librarians wouldn’t have to be paid as much as men. And he was an antisemite who helped a Jewish woman, Annie Nathan Meyer, found Barnard College as a direct response to Columbia’s refusal to admit women.
AND the Dewey Decimal System isn’t quite as fundamental a classification as the periodic table, but it comes close. Before Dewey, libraries generally cataloged their books by shelfmarks, which meant that their arrangement was bound to the library’s architecture and there was no coherent way of changing the collection by addition or deletion. The codex that includes the manuscript of Beowulf, for instance, was cataloged by Sir Robert Cotton in the seventeenth century as Ms. Vitellius A.xv – meaning the manuscript fifteenth from the left on the top shelf of the bookcase with the bust of Vitellius on top. But ever since the idea of a decimal system of classification came to Dewey – literally as a revelation, in chapel at Amherst – libraries have been able to expand as much as they please, all the way to the Borges limit.
For technical reasons, the Dewey system works better than the LC system for libraries that are small or unspecialized, while LC is better for research libraries. Dewey would shelve a biography of Shakespeare with other biographies in class B, for instance, while LC would group it with books by and about Shakespeare. The library I work with at the University of Hawaii uses LC, while the Hawaii State Public Library System where my wife works is Dewey. The two systems complement each other for different readerships.
@ktschwarz
Envelopped seems to have been a thing in the 18th century and recurs in 20-21C papers about enveloped viruses (maybe by L2 authors). I think this is more likely than developped as develOPED with long o and 3rd-syllable stress is an unlikely error for a reader to make, unlike envelOPED.
That’s not a “but”, that *is* the analogy.
First you said: English speakers inflect novel words [by using] existing patterns, consciously or unconsciously and then People started writing rehabbed, corncobbing, bathtubbing, yuppie, asshattery before they were in any dictionary, putting in double letters by analogy to similar words.
My point is that it’s done to avoid misreadings such as ‘ass-hate-ry’. It follows a convention of double letters, but following one convention or another isn’t a reason to add the extra letter. If that’s your point too, you don’t say so.
Jonathan Morse,
A lot of that is missing from the Wikipedia piece on Dewey. And I hadn’t realised that Barnard was founded because Columbia refused to admit women. The main McKim, Mead & White building matches the Columbia campus across the road, except for its Corinthian columns (actually it’s my favorite Morningside Heights building), so Columbia must have realised its mistake pretty quickly.
Baltimore’s Enoch Pratt Library wouldn’t let anybody borrow a novel unless they also borrowed several works of non-fiction
!!!
I would personally guess that Thomas E. is probably the most famous other Dewey, on the account of the “defeats Truman” joke. I would also personally guess that this specific incident is probably more famous than basically the rest of his life combined.
I think of the philosopher John Dewey, and next of Thomas E. Dewey
I would personally guess that Thomas E. is probably the most famous other Dewey
Doesn’t anyone remember Commodore Dewey any more? The Battle of Manila Bay? President McKinley presented him with a special sword custom-made by Tiffany! He ran for President in 1900, for Pete’s sake! How quickly they forget…
Admiral Dewey’s star may have faded a bit (although I thought of him before Governor Dewey), but the addressee of his famous quote at Manila (“You may fire when ready, Gridley”) still has a plausible claim to be the most prominent bearer of his surname in American history, if not indeed in world history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Vernon_Gridley
I actually told my 15-year-old the “Dewey Beats Truman” story last night, which she seemed unfamiliar with, but that was more in the context of the extra candidates in 1948 (Wallace and Thurmond) foreshadowing the fracturing of the old FDR coalition.
…
Dewey was an Admiral on Manila bay
…
Dewey love each other? Yes indeed we do.
“Dewey would shelve a biography of Shakespeare with other biographies in class B, for instance, while LC would group it with books by and about Shakespeare.”
What does LC do if both the biographer and the subject have their own sections? Mencken wrote a book about Nietzsche — is this of more interest to scholars of Mencken or scholars of Nietzsche?
That comes as a shock. I’m sure I was taught it explicitly.
It has 4,310,000 ghits, but many on the first page call it a misspelling.
I’ve been an editor for decades and don’t remember seeing it; if I did see it in a text I was editing, I would delete a -p- without a moment’s thought.
I associate developped with appartment, which is also neither English nor French. Apartment looks like it’s an English compound apart+ment, but it’s < French < Italian < Spanish. Per contra, apart < à part, though it fits in nicely with purely English words like aside, ahead, where a- < on.
@ David W., the Library of Congress classifies its holding of Mencken’s The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, https://lccn.loc.gov/73011058, in LC class B, “Philosophy (General),” and adds that the Dewey class would be 193, “Philosophy of Germany & Austria.” But I don’t know what rule led to that decision. I should think context would determine the classification of a book about e.g. Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch, the one that Shakespeare drew on. Would it be considered under Greek literature, Greek and Roman history, translation, or English literature?
I think in those cases the library is obligated to buy more than one copy.
@Plastic Paddy: Are you trying to remember the rhyme?
Oh dewy was the morning
Upon the first of May,
And Dewey was the admiral
Down in Manila Bay,
And dewy were the Regent’s eyes,
Them orbs of royal blue;
And Dewey feel discouraged?
I Dew not think we Dew!
Reference of course to the capture of Manila, May Day, 1898.
@rod C
https://campfirelyrics.tumblr.com/post/119857093341/dewey
Interesting example of the repurposing of a topical song, as I suppose it must be.