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Laudator Temporis Acti posts a passage from Basil Gildersleeve’s reflections on Pindar (American Journal of Philology 32.4 [1911], starting at p. 480) which includes this:

Commonplaces? Yes, there are commonplaces, but do we not all live by commonplaces? What gave ‘good old Mantuan’ his vogue for two centuries except his copy-book sentences? ‘Semel insanivimus omnes’ has become as familiar a quotation as any in the whole list of household words, though few of us stop at ‘semel’.

The phrase “good old Mantuan” meant nothing to me, and I was unfamiliar with that familiar quotation “Semel insanivimus omnes,” so I did a little googling. Baptista Mantuanus, traditionally known in English as “Battista the Mantuan” or simply “Mantuan,” was “an Italian Carmelite reformer, humanist, and poet” whose posthumous reputation was based mainly on his Adulescentia, a collection of Latin eclogues, and in the first of these we find the line “Id commune malum, semel insanivimus omnes” (118; in Lee Piepho’s translation, “’Tis a universal evil. We have all been crazy once.”). Horace Furness says rather unkindly in his notes to Love’s Labors Lost (1904, 2nd ed. 1906, p. 150, referring to the passage where Holofernes says “Ah, good old Mantuan!”):

As to the cause of his popularity in the schools of the sixteenth century, — I think it is not utterly incomprehensible; his verse is very smooth, — almost too smooth, — and, being no poet, his ideas are common-place, and, expressed in lucid language, quite suited to teachers of moderate intelligence and Latinity. One phrase, — it occurs in this very Eclogue quoted by Sir Nathaniel, — is become one of our hackneyed quotations: — semel insanivimus omnes.

Le pauvre vieux Mantouan…

Joel at Far Outliers is posting quotes from The Making of Eastern Europe: From Prehistory to Postcommunism, by Philip Longworth, and the following passages from his latest post seem to me of LH interest:

The Turks had long used a variety of paramilitary forces (armartolos, derbentsy, akinji, vojnuki, etc.) as auxiliary troops, frontier raiders, mountain-pass guards and the like; as we have seen, the Hapsburgs had followed suit; and the Cossacks constitute a parallel in Ukraine and southern Russia. Such troops usually received some pay and also rations or plots of land, but by no means always. There was an Ottoman category known as deli, young men noted for their dare-devilry who would take part in campaigns and sieges for no reward whatsoever, except the opportunity to share in any plundering. Another such type of predatory soldiery was known as haramia. These had an equivalent on the other side of the frontier in the unpaid heyduks and uskoks (venturini) attached to the ‘official’ groups of heyduks and uskoks employed by the Habsburgs to garrison frontier forts and stations, and the unregistered Cossacks of the Ukraine who were to play such a prominent role in the Khmelnytsky rising of 1648. […]

The subsequent economic difficulties and the onset of disorders no doubt increased the flow. In any case the numbers of heyduks called ‘Racz’ registered in Eastern Hungary (and there were units in which nearly two-thirds of the men bore that name) points to a sizeable migration northwards from the Balkans, for racz in Magyar (rat in Romanian) means ‘Serb’. Their names also indicate that, although most were or became linguistic Hungarians, some heyduks had originated in Slovakia (toth), Romania (vlach, olah) and Ukraine (kozak, rusnak) as well as in Hungary and the Balkans. And there were Hungarian, Romanian and Tatar names among the Zaporozh’e Cossacks, though most had migrated from Belorussia, Ukraine and Russia. Circumstances suggest that a proportion of these were peasants escaping serfdom, and this was also the case with the recently enserfed Szekels whose support for Michael ‘the Brave’ when he invaded Transylvania regained them their freedom as frontier servicemen.

As always, I am troubled by the issue of italicized foreign words with English plurals — technically, it should be (e.g.) heyduks, but that looks lousy and would add to the already considerable difficulties of proofreading such a text. In addition, it bothers me that he arbitrarily stops italicizing after a couple of usages. But never mind, there are some great words here; anybody know the history of racz/rat? (We got into the Székely in this peachy thread from 2004.)

A great story posted on Facebook by Bill Poser:

I happened on an article that mentioned a non-native man named Timothy Barrus who claimed to be a Navajo named Nasdijj, allegedly meaning “to become again”, and published several works, well-received until the hoax was revealed, about his fictional life. His publishers and the literary world were criticized for accepting his claims without any investigation. His fake Navajo name would have been a clue. There is no word <nasdijj>; in fact, no Navajo word ends in <jj>. There are no infinitives, so no Navajo word could mean “to become again”. But Barrus didn’t actually make up his name. There is a real Navajo word násdlį́į́’ meaning “(s)he has become again”, and at least one dictionary glosses this as “to become again”. Barrus evidently chose his Navajo name from such a dictionary and misread dlį́į́’ as dijj. If you’re going to pretend to be from another culture, you should probably learn its writing system.

Fakers beware!

Also, via Slavomír Čéplö (bulbul) on FB, a snarky video (3:39) called If YouTube Polyglots Were Honest in which a “hyperpolyglot alpha male gigachad” tells you about how he’s going to tell you about a bunch of languages he doesn’t know anything about. Fakers everywhere!

I’ve long been a fan of Irish curses (2003, 2015), so how could I resist Éanna Ó Caollaí’s 54 Irish curses you won’t have learned in school (archived)? It starts:

One question I am sometimes asked as a native Irish speaker is why Irish has no swear words or slang associated with it. The answer of course is that it does, but such words and sayings are rarely, if ever, taught in our schools. Rightly or wrongly, the degree to which we are able to curse and swear with any degree fluency will never be measured in an exam.

And maybe we are the worse for it. I can’t think of many better ways of learning a language than by celebrating its aesthetic characteristics. Of course in most cases, the swear words, curses and slang many of us encountered in our formative years first reached our ears outside the classroom.

I remember as a child returning to school after our summer holidays in the west of Ireland armed with an arsenal of words such as crabadán, bobarún and búbaire and, to the amusement of the teachers, phrases such as buinneach shíor ort and a dhiabhal de phogaí among others.

Then he gets to Brian/Flann/Myles:
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Another of those projects the internet makes possible, eRomLex:

The First Romanian Bilingual Dictionaries (17th century). Digitally annotated and aligned corpus (eRomLex)

Project Abstract

The expansion of Catholicism and Protestantism in Eastern Europe in the first half of the 17th century determined a strong reaction of the Orthodox clergy, which led to the emergence of numerous Slavonic linguistic instruments, among which the Slavonic-Ukrainian Lexicon by Pamvo Berynda (Lexikon slavenorosskij i imenь tlьkovanije, Kiev, 1627). Considering the close relations between the Romanian states and Ukraine, Berynda’s lexicon had a strong impact in the Romanian space, which resulted in six Slavonic-Romanian dictionaries, all manuscript. Although they are the oldest Romanian bilingual dictionaries, and thus of great importance for Romanian culture.

The project proposes an online comparative edition of these Slavonic-Romanian lexicons. The lexicons will be displayed online, in a digital comparative edition, with an interface that will allow complex queries, combining the information available in lexicons and searching for parts of words. The comparative approach will allow establishing the relations between them, whether they are independent or copies of the same source. This online edition will be a very useful tool, easy to reach by lexicographers, specialists interested in old Romanian corpora and other aspects pertaining to their exploitation and will make available to those interested, as open access corpus, this important and almost unknown part of the Romanian cultural heritage.

The lexicon begins here. Hurray for this kind of thing!

Wikipedia says:

In number theory, a polite number is a positive integer that can be written as the sum of two or more consecutive positive integers. A positive integer which is not polite is called impolite. The impolite numbers are exactly the powers of two, and the polite numbers are the natural numbers that are not powers of two.

But it says nothing about why such numbers have the odd name “polite,” and that usage is not in the OED entry (updated September 2006). Anybody know?

I’ve now read another novel by Vladimir Sharov, Будьте как дети (translated by Oliver Ready as Be as Children), and I’m feeling much as I did after finishing his Репетиции (The Rehearsals; see this post): “I’m not clear what he’s doing here or why he’s doing it, or (which is perhaps another way of putting it) what kind of a novel it is.” Now, of course, having read two of them, I have more of an idea of what he’s up to, but I’m still (like so many of his characters) wandering through the wilderness toward an uncertain destination. Fortunately, I don’t have to try to describe the plot (such as it is), because the detailed review by M.A. Orthofer at the complete review does that for me; this paragraph will give you an idea:

There are three main strands to [the narrator] Dmitry’s compilation. One involves his godmother, Dusya, the woman who gave him his name. She is the dominant figure in the novel, and played a significant role in Dmitry’s own life and path, as do some of the important characters close to her, her spiritual father, Nikodim, and her son, Seryozha. Another strand involves Lenin, and the story of the last years of his life, when he suffered repeated strokes. And, finally, there are the Enets, a Samoyedic group whose history Dmitry — who becomes an ethnographer — takes an interest in.

The basis of the novel, as well as its title, comes from Jesus’ words at Matthew 18:3: “Verily I say unto you, except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.” Everything in the book revolves around the idea that we are pure and innocent and holy as children, but as soon as we start growing up (adolescence seems to be the turning point) we become sinners, and pretty much worthless. This idea is repugnant to me, but I’m willing to accept it as the framework for a work of fiction; the trouble is that this is not so much a work of fiction as a dramatization of the theological idea, with characters I find it impossible to care about (or, in some cases, to keep straight without flipping back and forth). Furthermore, as with the earlier novel, I fear Sharov expects me to take the theology seriously and to care as intensely as the characters do about (say) the alleged murder of the four-year-old girl Sashenka by Dusya, who prayed to God for her death (this occurs only a few pages into the novel, so is not a spoiler). I’m sorry, but you can’t kill someone by praying, so all the angst related to that plot line is wasted on me; it wouldn’t be if, as in Dostoevsky, the characters were so real to me that their concerns became mine, but Sharov (like Shishkin) apparently doesn’t believe in lifelike characters — they would distract from the grand points he wants to make. He once described Russian history as a commentary on Scripture, and that’s certainly what his books read like. But if I wanted a commentary on Scripture, I’d read a commentary on Scripture.
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Dave Wilton of Wordorigins.org has a new Big List post about the word blackmail, to whose etymology I don’t recall giving any thought. Dave writes:

The mail in blackmail is unrelated to either a type of armor or the postal service. It comes from the Old Norse mali meaning contract or payment. This use of mail, meaning a payment, appears in Scots from the late fourteenth century. The black probably comes from the unsavory nature of the practice.

Blackmail was first used to refer to protection rackets run by Scottish clan chieftains against farmers in their territory. If the farmers did not pay the mail, the chiefs would steal their crops and cattle. The earliest record of the practice that I’m aware of is from the trial of one, Adam Scot, who was beheaded in 1530 for blackmailing the people of the Scottish-English border counties […] Eventually, blackmail generalized to refer to obtaining payment through threat of force.

His “mali” should be máli, with an accent to show the long vowel; the OED (updated June 2000) has a fuller etymology s.v. mail, n.¹:
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I’ve always liked Kurt Schwitters — too weird for the conservatives, too staid for the dadaists — and I was pleased to see Hal Foster’s LRB review (10 March 2022; archived) of two Schwitters-related books; I extract some passages on his invented words and idiosyncratic usages:

Schwitters gathered all his activities under the banner of Merz, a term he first used in 1919 and went on redefining for the rest of his life, which after 1937 was spent first in Norway and then in England, in impoverished exile from the Nazi authorities. He stumbled on the neologism in a collage from 1919 ‘in which the word MERZ, cut and pasted from an advertisement for KOMMERZ UND PRIVATBANK, remained legible underneath the abstract forms’. Thereafter Merz became a prefix that Schwitters added to his poems, pictures, assemblages and constructions, a ‘special brand’. ‘Pure Merz is art, pure Dadaism is non-art, and both are intentionally so,’ Schwitters announced in Merz 1. ‘Whereas Dadaism merely asserts oppositions, Merz balances out oppositions by evaluating them within the artwork.’ Note that he positions Merz as a double overcoming: a sublation not only of found capitalist rubbish in the interest of a final balanced artwork, but also of Dada, which is at once cancelled, preserved and transcended (‘merz’ is contained in ausmerzen, to negate). Or that is how Schwitters wished Merz to be received, which is not quite how it is experienced: again, as viewers we oscillate between the trash and the form, between Merz as crap (we hear merde in the word) and Merz as composition (Freud and his colleagues speculated on the relationship of shit to art not long before Schwitters explored it in his own way). And this struggle between sublimation and desublimation gives Merz its intensity to this day (perhaps we hear Schmerz – pain – as well). […]

Although Merz is an activity of excessive addition, Schwitters also presented ‘a special form’ that he simply called ‘i’ (after ‘the middle vowel of the alphabet’, rather than Ich), and its operation is radically subtractive. Take an old tram ticket, he suggests by way of example, ‘cut a square from its right-hand corner and you have an i-drawing.’ ‘This describes the discovery of an artistic structure in the non-artistic world and the creation of an artwork from this structure through delimitation alone.’ An ‘i’ composition is collage at its purest, a simple cut (‘delimitation’) that connects like a copula, a montage that offers a ‘distinct expression as a composition’. Writing of ‘the path’ of the artistic idea in 1922, Schwitters claims that ‘“i” sets this path to = zero. Idea, material and artwork are identical.’ In 1915 Kazimir Malevich had called his Suprematist abstractions, such as Black Square, a zero degree of art; here Schwitters proposes his own version, which, contra Malevich, opens out to the world. Produced ‘through the act of seizing alone’, ‘i’ is also an early instance of the artistic appropriation of media images, a strategy with an important afterlife – in the détournement of found pictures and texts by Situationists, say, or the piracy of the same by postmodernists. Unlike these practitioners, however, Schwitters had only a limited interest in critique: art remained his primary aim.

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Bryn Stole writes for the NY Times (archived) about a treasure trove of old mail:

In a love letter from 1745 decorated with a doodle of a heart shot through with arrows, María Clara de Aialde wrote to her husband, Sebastian, a Spanish sailor working in the colonial trade with Venezuela, that she could “no longer wait” to be with him.

Later that same year, an amorous French seaman who signed his name M. Lefevre wrote from a French warship to a certain Marie-Anne Hoteé back in Brest: “Like a gunner sets fire to his cannon, I want to set fire to your powder.”

Fifty years later, a missionary in Suriname named Lene Wied, in a lonely letter back to Germany, complained that war on the high seas had choked off any news from home: “Two ships which have been taken by the French probably carried letters addressed to me.”

None of those lines ever reached their intended recipients. British warships instead snatched those letters, and scores more, from aboard merchant ships during wars from the 1650s to the early 19th century.

While the ships’ cargoes — sugar from the Caribbean, tobacco from Virginia, ivory from Guinea, enslaved people bound for the Americas — became war plunder, the papers were bundled off to so called “prize courts” in London as potential legal proof that the seizures were legitimate spoils of war. […]

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