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Nitsuh Abebe writes in the NY Times (archived) about a kerfuffle that had hitherto escaped me but is obviously in my wheelhouse, “Whose Punctuation Is More Human: Yours or A.I.’s?”:

There are countless signals you might look for to determine whether a piece of writing was generated by A.I., but earlier this year the world seemed to fixate on one in particular: the em dash. ChatGPT was using it constantly — like so, and even if you begged it not to.

As this observation traveled the internet, a weird consensus congealed: that humans do not use dashes. Posters on tech forums called them a “GPT-ism,” a robotic artifact that “does not match modern day communication.” Someone on an OpenAI forum complained that the dashes made it harder to use ChatGPT for customer service without customers catching on. All sorts of people seemed mystifyingly confident that no flesh-and-bone human had any use for this punctuation, and that any deviant who did would henceforth be mistaken for a computer.

Those deviants were appalled, obviously. I am one; I am, even worse, a former proofreader who could speak at length and with passion about the uses of the narrower en dash. I understand very well that this dash-happy lifestyle is maybe atypical, but I had not expected to see its whole existence questioned. The dash is a time-honored and exceedingly normal tool for constructing sentences! Dickens, Dickinson, Nietzsche, Stephen King novels, this magazine — all strewn with dashes. Part of what makes them popular, in fact, is that they can feel more casually human, more like natural speech, than colons, semicolons and parentheses. Humans do not think or speak in sentences; we think and speak in thoughts, which interrupt and introduce and complicate one another in a neat little dance that creates larger, more complex ideas. (Or, sometimes, doesn’t: The copious dashing in J.D. Salinger dialogue is a great illustration of all the thoughts we leave unfinished.) This is the whole thing punctuation is for. […]

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I heard a piece by the American composer and clarinetist Derek Bermel and liked it, so I looked him up and discovered he’d written a piece called “Language Instruction” that you can read about, and hear a snippet of, here. One of the quotes on that page is an excerpt from Allan Kozinn’s NY Times review (Dec. 8, 2003; archived) of a performance:

For all one hears about the classical music world being a museum culture, there is an alternative musical world in New York, just outside the spotlight focused on the big performing institutions.

Virtually every night new music is on offer, usually in the smaller halls (or in places that specialize in it, like the Kitchen and Roulette), performed by musicians whose interpretive interests draw them toward what’s next rather than what has been. […]

The centerpiece was Derek Bermel’s “Language Instruction” (2003), an amusing full ensemble work based on the rhythms and gestures of language tapes. The clarinet was, in effect, the voice on the tape, and the other instruments were the students — variously willing or difficult, competent or bumbling — who must repeat the phrases. Mr. Bermel spins this interaction into an increasingly chaotic fantasy that would have been perfectly at home on a program with Berio’s Sequenza III and the works by Ms. La Barbara, Mr. Aperghis and Mr. Gal.

It sounds like a lot of fun (I enjoyed the audio clip), and I’m very glad our local classical station plays a good deal of contemporary music instead of sticking with the mossy 18th- and 19th-century standbys. (And if you’re curious, as I was, about the surname Bermel, it’s a “habitational name from a place in Rhineland named Bermel.”)

I was over at XIX век and happened to glance at the list of Russian literature sites in the right margin, and my eye fell on the obdurately lowercase obdurodon. When I clicked through, I found an amazing collection of “Digital humanities projects,” many of them Russian-related, from The annotated Afanas′ev library (“Selected Russian fairy tales from the Aleksandr Afanas′ev collection with glosses and linguistic and cultural annotation”) to Twitter register variation (“Corpus-based study of linguistic properties of English-language tweets”). It’s well worth checking out. And “obdurodon”? Per Wikipedia, it’s “a genus of extinct platypus-like Australian monotreme which lived from the Late Oligocene to the Late Miocene”:

The holotype tooth was placed into the newly erected genus Obdurodon upon description in 1975 by American palaeontologists Michael O. Woodburne and Richard H. Tedford. They named the genus from the Latin obduro “persist” and the Greek ὀδών (odṓn) “tooth”, in reference to the permanency of the molars, a feature which is lost in the modern platypus.

So it’s a bastard formation, but if I can take “television,” I guess I can take “obdurodon.” (It’s not in the OED yet even though it’s been known and named for half a century.) I have no idea why the site is called that, but there’s an image of a pair of them at the top of the main page, and it’s quite cute.

I find it hard to believe I’ve never posted about rebetika, since not only do I love the music (when I was in Athens I sought out a dusty record store where I could buy some LPs I then had to lug back to New York) but the word itself is very interesting. For one thing, there’s no unanimity on how to spell it; Wikipedia has it under Rebetiko (“plural rebetika […], occasionally transliterated as rembetiko or rebetico), while the OED (entry from 2002) has it s.v. rebetika (sadly, it’s not in M-W or AHD under any spelling). Here’s the OED definition, which is quite discursive:

A style of Greek popular song, characterized by lyrics depicting urban and underworld themes, a passionate vocal style, and an ensemble accompaniment played esp. on stringed instruments such as the violin, bouzouki, etc.; (with plural agreement) the songs themselves. Also (in form rebetiko): a song in this style. Frequently attributive.

First recorded commercially in Turkey before the First World War (1914–18), rebetika is assumed to have long existed (under various other generic names) as an oral tradition in Mediterranean seaports and prisons. Following the Greco–Turkish war of 1919–22, the genre became associated with the numerous Anatolian refugees settling in Athens. Extensively recorded and performed in the 1920s and 1930s, notably by immigrants from Asia Minor, Piraeus bouzouki players, and Greek Americans, rebetika also became known in English as ‘Greek Blues’ or ‘Piraeus Blues’.

But it’s the etymology that makes it a must-post, and happily Martin Schwartz has sent me a recent article of his on the subject. First I’ll provide the OED version:

< modern Greek ρεμπέτικα, plural of ρεμπέτικο eastern-style song of urban low life, use as noun of neuter singular of ρεμπέτικος of vagabonds or rebels, probably < ρεμπέτης rebetis n. + ‑ικος ‑ic suffix.

Notes
On the further etymology, compare note at rebetis n.
The forms with ‑mb‑ arise from the influence of an idiosyncratic transliteration of the modern Greek (in which the sequence ‑μπ‑ normally represents b), originally in G. Holst Road to Rembetika (1975).

(I think of it as rembetika because I was introduced to it by that Gail Holst book, which I recommend.) Now to Martin’s “A rebetic roundup: people, songs, words, and whatnot” (published as ch. 27 of The SOAS Rebetiko Reader); I’ll quote some bits and urge you to visit the link for more:
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As I said back in 2014, John Berryman is one of my favorite American poets, and I welcome the imminent appearance of Only Sing: 152 Uncollected Dream Songs; Shane McCrae, who edited it and wrote the introduction, has a Paris Review essay about it from which I offer a few excerpts:

It has taken me years to realize that The Dream Songs is an epic—and a successful, even great one. For years, I searched for the successful traditional epic I felt certain must have been written by an American, and although I more than once encountered poems that seemed to fit the bill formally, none of them seemed an artistic success to me. Most often, they were let down by their language, which was commonly pedestrian, almost as if it were a secondary or even tertiary concern of their authors. But, of course, the language of an epic poem must be, in its way, as compressed as the language of a lyric poem—and in those moments when it is not compressed, the language must strike the reader as relaxed from compression, and loaded with the certainty of future compression. The language of The Dream Songs is always either compressed or suggestive of compression. The poem has this, and little else, in common with traditional epic.

But The Dream Songs also, of course, features a hero, as epics traditionally do—Henry. […] Henry, of course, is no Odysseus, though he more closely resembles Odysseus than all other epic heroes, with the exception of the unnamed protagonist of Dante’s Commedia (indeed, Henry strikes me as a combination of both heroes, but sitting in an armchair, sometimes a desk chair, at the end of a long day, talking, sometimes singing, sometimes shouting, in an otherwise empty room). Henry is an unheroic hero—a heroic hero has in-narrative effects upon the physical world and the people in it; Henry, for the most part, does not. When he does, the reader must take his word for it that he does; he, rather than the narrative of the epic, describes the effects he has. He is, in other words, a twentieth-century white American male, not especially remarkable, the sort of person who doesn’t establish or recover a nation, or parley with angels, or explore hell, but the sort of common person of whom nations are constituted, to whom angels were once commonly believed to minister in small ways, of whom hell was once commonly believed to be full. Henry is a hero for a disenchanted nation, from which once-common beliefs have mostly fled. He does not mourn the disappearance of those beliefs; he has held on to the beliefs he could. […]

In a 1968 interview with Berryman, Catherine Watson wrote, “Not all the songs about Henry are in the books, Berryman said, but ‘if there is a third volume, it will not take him further. It will be up to the reader to fit those poems in among the published ones.’ ” Berryman understood his epic to be complete, but he did not believe that its completeness could have only one form—although his remark does suggest that it has an established beginning and end; note the phrase, “fit those poems in among.” Only Sing collects 152 possible additions to the epic, each of which is worth reading for its own merits. […]

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I was reading James Hill’s NY Times piece “In This Parisian Atelier, Bookbinding Is a Family Art” (archived), which describes the work done in the Atelier Devauchelle and has gorgeous illustrations (some of which are video clips), when I came across a word that was more or less new to me (in that I may have seen it before but had no idea what it meant):

Naïk Duca has worked at the atelier for 19 years. She presses a thin heated roller onto foil to repair gold lines on leather book covers, a process known as gauffering.

Most dictionaries do not have this specialized sense of the verb: Merriam-Webster “to crimp, plait, or flute (linen, lace, etc.) especially with a heated iron,” AHD “To press ridges or narrow pleats into (a frill, for example),” OED (entry from 1900) “To make wavy by means of heated goffering-irons; to flute or crimp (the edge of lace, a frill, or trimming of any kind).” But Wiktionary does:

1. (transitive) To plait, crimp, or flute; to goffer, as lace.
2. (transitive) In fine bookbinding, to decorate the edges of a text block with a heated iron.

The odd thing is that the prevailing spelling is goffer: M-W says, s.v. gauffer, “variant spelling of ɢᴏꜰꜰᴇʀ,” AHD has “gof·fer also gauf·fer,” and OED’s entry is “goffer | gauffer.” Wiktionary, bizarrely, has one entry for gauffer and another for goffer, with differing definitions and no hint that they are related. As for the etymology, AHD says:

[French gaufrer, to emboss, from Old French, from gaufre, honeycomb, waffle, of Germanic origin; see webh- in the Appendix of Indo-European roots.]

For as long as I’ve been studying Russian (over half a century now), I’ve been amused, intrigued, and occasionally irritated by the cliché of the “Russian soul,” about which many books have been written (e.g., Russia and Soul: An Exploration, Mystifying Russian Soul, The Light of the Russian Soul, and A Window to the Russian Soul, to take a few titles from the first page of Google Books results; a similar search on the Russian phrase produces many, many results). We’ve discussed the Russian word душа a number of times (e.g., 2017), and I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with simply saying it means ‘soul,’ because even though the two words are often used in similar contexts, the Russian one has a wider variety of occurrences that often do not match the English word at all. So I thought a worthwhile approach would be to list some common idiomatic phrases where that is the case, which usefully complicates one’s understanding of the Russian. Happily, this page from the Русско-английский фразеологический словарь [Russian-English phraseological dictionary] site lists a large number of such idioms, with English translations and often examples of use when you click through. Some of them use ‘soul’ where English uses ‘heart,’ e.g., душа надрывается ‘one’s soul is torn’ or душа уходит в пятки, literally ‘the soul sinks into the heels’ where we say “one’s heart slipped down to one’s boots” or “one’s heart leaped into one’s mouth,” and it often seems to represent a person’s inner self as a source of feeling and desire: душа не лежит (‘the soul does not lie [that way], is not [so] situated’) “smb. has a distaste for smb., smth.; smb. has no fondness for smb., smth.; smb. is not particularly fond of smb., smth.; smb.’s heart is not with smb.; smb.’s heart is not in smth.”; душа не принимает (‘the soul does not receive [it]’) “one is sick of smth.”; для души “for one’s spirit; for one’s satisfaction; as a hobby”; души не чаять (‘not to expect the soul’ — a particularly odd idiom) “dote upon smb.; worship smb.; think the world of smb.; treat smb. as the apple of one’s eye”; с души воротит (‘it turns from the soul’? — I’m not even sure how this one works) “it turns one’s stomach; it makes one sick”; кривить душой (‘to twist with the soul’) “act against one’s conscience; go (play) the hypocrite; dissemble”; за милую душу (‘at/by/for the dear soul’) “1) (охотно, с удовольствием) with pleasure; most willingly; with a will; 2) (отлично, прекрасно) (get along, do smth., etc.) all right, fine; 3) (не задумываясь, без долгих размышлений) часто неодобр. do smth. without a moment’s thought; do smth. as easy as winking; 4) (несомненно, с лёгкостью, вне всякого сомнения, наверняка) no (without, beyond) doubt; easily; it won’t take a minute; cf. it’s mere child’s play for smb.; as sure as eggs is eggs”; плевать в душу (‘to spit into the soul’) “trample on smb.’s finest feelings.” The final two show душа encompassing the entire person: по душу (‘for the soul’): X пришёл по Y-ову душу “X has come for (after) Y; X has come to get Y; Y is the one X wants (needs, has come for),” and за душой ‘behind the soul’ in expressions like ни гроша за душой (‘not a penny behind the soul’) “(as) poor as a church mouse, not a penny to (one’s) name, not a penny to bless oneself with.” In such contexts the soul (as understood in English) seems especially out of place, and it makes me wonder how best to think about the “meanings” of such polyvalent words.

Kasia Boddy (born in Aberdeen, grew up in Glasgow, studied at Edinburgh, teaches at Cambridge) has a good review essay on Dorothy Parker at the LRB (Vol. 47 No. 16 · 11 September 2025; archived); I’ll quote the beginning and let you click through if you’re interested:

Dorothy Parker​ dreaded repetition and found it everywhere. In 1919, when she was just 25 and only months into her stint as Vanity Fair’s theatre critic, she already claimed enough ‘bitter experience’ to know that ‘one successful play of a certain type’ would result in a ‘vast horde’ of copycats, ‘all built on exactly the same lines’. In quantity at least, this was Broadway’s golden age, just before radio and the movies ate up its audiences. At least five new shows opened each week and Parker sat through all the popular formulae: ‘crook plays’; Southern melodramas; bedroom farces; musical comedies; plays in which ‘everybody talks in similes’; and Westerns in which gold was ‘sure to be discovered at five minutes to eleven’.

Topical themes promised ‘novelty’ but that dwindled in the inevitable ‘follow-ups’. Parker noted a bevy of plays dealing with Prohibition, the ‘Irish question’ (‘what a rough day it will be for the drama when Ireland is freed’) and, worst of all, a ‘mighty army of war plays’ (‘I have been through so many … that I feel like a veteran’). Eventually the battlefield smoke cleared from the theatres, but the next slew of melodramas, about returning soldiers, was even more tedious. ‘Heaven knows the war was hard enough,’ she grumbled. ‘Now the playwrights are doing their best to ruin the peace for us.’

Once she had identified a formula, Parker didn’t devote much space to individual plays. Those she didn’t like could be summed up quickly – ‘The House Beautiful is the play lousy’ – while those she admired, such as Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, made her coy: ‘One is ashamed to place neat little bouquets of praise on this mighty conception.’ On the whole, she preferred ‘little, bitter twists of line and incident’ to ‘any amount of connected story’ and always had time for dog actors, swashbucklers and songs that rhymed ‘license’ with ‘five cents’. It was also easy to praise performances, whether on stage (Eddie Cantor, Jacob Ben-Ami and the ‘flawless’ Barrymore brothers were favourites) or in the stalls. Germs of short stories can be found in her descriptions of the couple who argue over Bernard Shaw’s symbols, the woman who ‘speculates, never in silence’ about what’s going to happen next, and the soldier who ‘condescendingly translated’ bits of French to his girl. ‘You heard that guy saying toujours? That means today.’

Parker was fired from Condé Nast in 1920, after some of Broadway’s biggest producers (all regular advertisers) complained about her constant savaging of their plays, and of Florenz Ziegfeld’s wife. She continued as a drama critic at Ainslee’s for another three years and then, in 1927, spent twelve months as ‘Constant Reader’, writing about books for the New Yorker and accruing what the magazine’s founding editor, Harold Ross, described as a ‘mountain of indebtedness’. ‘Her Constant Reader,’ he insisted, ‘did more than anything to put the magazine on its feet, or its ear, or wherever it is today.’

Later, Boddy goes into the biography (“Born in 1893, she was originally Dottie Rothschild, but not, she always pointed out, one of those Rothschilds”) and says of her verses “The first that earned her a cheque – for $12 – was ‘Any Porch’, published by Vanity Fair in 1915, the same year that ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ appeared in Poetry”; I was pleased to find that you can actually see that page of Vanity Fair at Google Books. And if you’re up for reading a piece on the decline of savaging, try Kelefa Sanneh’s “How Music Criticism Lost Its Edge” (New Yorker, August 25, 2025; archived).

A reader sent me Edward Denny’s Atlas Obscura post World’s Largest Pewter Tankard, saying:

There are a few things of linguistic interest here, including a few little puns, but the paragraph that caught my eye was: “The company received a royal warrant in 1979 from the sultan of Selangor, and in 1992, the company officially became known as Royal Selangor. The stupendous stoup is now a standard suitable for a singular sovereign of stannum.”

I’m not familiar with either stoup or stannum (and haven’t yet looked them up!) but find the entirely unnecessary alliteration absurdly amusing.

A stoup is “A mug or other drinking vessel,” and stannum is the Latin word for ‘tin’ (though it very occasionally crops up in English per the OED, e.g. 1812 “Tin or Stannum,” H. Davy, Elements of Chemical Philosophy 379). I myself was taken with another unusual s-word in this paragraph:

The museum also features a 1,578-kg box of swarf–the chips and shavings left over from the factory floor–as well as the famous “lucky teapot.” As the story goes, a man was scavenging warehouses for food during WWII when he bent over to pick up a wayward melon-shaped pewter teapot. Just at that moment, a bullet wizzed overhead, and the fortunate scrounger’s life was saved. The teapot was an original design of Yong’s, and the life-saving story made it famous worldwide.

Swarf is, again per the OED (entry from 1918), “The wet or greasy grit abraded from a grindstone or axle; the filings or shavings of iron or steel. Hence, any fine waste produced by a machining operation, esp. when in the form of strips or ribbons”:

1566 No person..shall die..black, any Cappe wᵗʰ Barke or Swarfe, but only wᵗʰ Copperas and Gall or wᵗʰ Wood [variant reading Woade] and Madder.
Act 8 Elizabeth I c. 11. §3 [actually §2; see mollymooly’s comment below — LH]
[…]

1640 Fileings of iron, called swarf.
Tables Rates & Duties in J. Entick, New History London (1766) vol. II. 174
[…]

1953 There’s swarf—chips of wood, metal, etc.—grinding around in your expensive machinery and shortening its life.
Times 23 October 5/3
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1973 In more ductile materials chips may remain partially bonded to each other to form continuous severely-work-hardened ribbons sometimes called swarf.
J. G. Tweeddale, Materials Technology vol. II. vi. 142

It’s also used for “The material cut out of a gramophone record as the groove is made” (e.g. 1977 “For a long-playing record, this swarf, a strip narrower than a human hair, might be half a mile long,” Times 18 April [Gramophone Supplement] p. iv/7). The etymology is “representing Old English geswearf, gesweorf, geswyrf filings, or < Old Norse svarf file-dust, related to sverfa to file.” Thanks, Andrew!

Seamus Perry reviews Zachary Leader’s Ellmann’s Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker for the LRB (Vol. 47 No. 16 · 11 September 2025; archived), and I find myself enchanted — Ellmann’s book may have been the first literary biography I ever read, and just picking the hefty volume off my shelf makes me want to reread both it and Joyce. Perry begins:

Richard Ellmann’s​ biography of James Joyce was first published in 1959 to an almost unanimously enthusiastic reception. Ellmann’s editor at the New York office of Oxford University Press told him it was ‘the most ecstatic reaction I have seen to any book I have known anything about’. William Empson welcomed ‘a grand biography’; Cyril Connolly, though naturally disappointed not to find himself mentioned, nevertheless recognised something ‘truly masterly’; and Frank Kermode wrote that Ellmann’s account would ‘fix Joyce’s image for a generation’, a judgment that, as Zachary Leader rightly comments, was if anything an underestimate. Leader, himself the distinguished biographer of Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow, has written an unusual and engaging book, half an account of Ellmann’s life leading up to the Joyce biography, and half a detailed history of the book’s composition and its subsequent place within Joycean scholarship. His admiration for the achievement is palpable and he describes the way Ellmann went about his task with the sympathetic warmth of a fellow labourer; but he is alert, as well, to some of the criticisms that have been made of the enterprise and gives them a fair hearing, so that the overall effect is a sort of primer in the possibilities and quandaries of literary biography. To write the biography of a biography already suggests a certain disciplinary self-consciousness. Ellmann emerges, Leader implies, as exemplary, the biographer’s biographer.

One of the excellences that Empson singled out was the happy chance of timing: the book ‘must be the last of its kind about Joyce’, he wrote, ‘because Mr Ellmann, as well as summarising all previous reports, has interviewed a number of witnesses who are now dead.’ The number of witnesses was in fact immense: Leader calculates that 330 people from thirteen countries are acknowledged somewhere or other in the biography and thanked for (as Ellmann says) having ‘made it possible for me to assemble this record of Joyce’s life’. He was evidently a disarming interviewer and managed to win round several crucial but initially unwilling participants, such as Sylvia Beach, the first publisher of Ulysses, and J.F. Byrne, Joyce’s best friend at university. A good deal of Ellmann’s research methodology was old-style charm. ‘He let them talk,’ one observer recalled. ‘He showed himself grateful for what they told him; now and then with a quiet question he would elicit some particular point of information, and in leaving would express his thanks again. He left them smiling and thinking, what a nice young man!’ He would write graceful follow-up letters: ‘It was very pleasant meeting you both and your charming daughter, and it is nice to know that Joyce had such good company in Zurich.’ Such a remark, Leader says with just a hint of drollery, ‘suggests the role sympathy as well as objectivity played in Ellmann’s approach’: success was sometimes a matter of ‘kindness and calculation combined’.

After some examples of Ellmann’s “tenacity of purpose,” Perry continues:
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