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Michael Idov (“a Latvian American novelist and screenwriter”) has a NY Times piece (archived) on a subject that has often exercised me: the terrible names English-speaking authors come up with for foreign protagonists.

[…] Spy stories remain one of the most popular windows onto the way the world works.

Too bad the glass in that window is pretty wavy. Let me illustrate. The Italian composer Giacomo Puccini’s 1904 opera “Madama Butterfly,” which gets rightful flak for its bumbling Orientalism, is almost as hilariously clueless about the United States. The villain’s name is Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton — the modern-day equivalent would be something like “Ronald Reagan Microsoft.” Americans may not be used to this kind of naïveté about their own culture, but it’s exactly the level of thought many Western writers of spy novels and films bring to their attempts at naming Eastern European and Baltic characters.

The 1984 novel “The Hunt for Red October” is a classic for a reason, and Tom Clancy’s geopolitical research is rock solid, but trust me when I tell you that no Lithuanian has ever been named Marko Ramius. The word “ramus” means “peaceful,” which fits the character, but the only remotely common name in which it shows up is Ramintas. Arkady Renko, the protagonist of Martin Cruz Smith’s “Gorky Park” and its sequels, sounds as if he lost the first half of a Ukrainian surname (Titarenko? Limarenko?) in a gruesome accident. His journalist lover is often referred to as Tatiana Petrovna, a case of patronymic misuse that makes it sound as though he’s dating his schoolteacher.

Then there are lesser sins — names that aren’t wrong, per se, just odd. The parents of Dominika Egorova, the main character in Jason Matthews’s “Red Sparrow” trilogy, have certainly made a bold choice for their daughter’s name. (In Russia the film’s dubbers changed it to the more traditional “Veronika.”) In 2002’s “The Bourne Identity,” Bourne’s Russian alias is Foma Kiniaev. Foma is a more traditional name than Dominika — so traditional, in fact, that it is mostly associated with 19th-century peasants. Imagine, in a serious spy film, a foreign agent producing a passport in the name of, say, Jebediah Hoggs. (The Cyrillic characters in the same passport transliterate to “Ashch’f Lshtshfum,” but that’s for the film’s prop master to live down.)

He has a simple remedy: “Consult native speakers. Every time.” The thing is, I don’t think his examples are very good. Pinkerton is a perfectly normal English surname — I have no idea why he thinks it’s comparable to Microsoft — and Americans in the 19th century were very fond of naming their kids after founding fathers (I myself have an ancestor named George Washington Dodson). It may well be that Ренько/Renko is not an actual Russian/Ukrainian surname, but I’ve seen far sillier ones in English novels. (I don’t know whether the same is true of Ramius; Lithuanian-speakers should feel free to wade in.) I wish I could locate some of the truly absurd cases I’ve seen, but it’s definitely a real problem, and I wish authors would, as Idov suggests, consult native speakers.

Andrew Van Dam of the Washington Post decided to investigate the question What are the most American and most British words? (archived). After a long thumb-sucking introduction (“And for columnists with more curiosity than sense, Google offer lists of millions of words, sorted by year, language and (sometimes) country of publication”) and a fairly tedious excursus on spelling (“colour,” “centre,” “behaviour”: “Much of it goes back to Webster”), he moves on to a list of “Most distinctive words in each dialect, based on how common they are in books published in each country in the 2000s” (top US words File, Schedule, Mail…; top UK words Aim, Inquiry, Catalog…), and then gets more interesting:

In search of deeper differences, we returned to Google Books’ true superpower: time. All our metrics show the two Englishes looked quite similar in the early 1800s but diverged as Webster worked his magick. The gap grew as English immigrants to the U.S. were replaced by other nationalities and the U.S. expanded farther and farther from the Atlantic, Murphy said.

The divergence halted around when World War II’s global mobilization and cooperation increased verbal cross-pollination between the two countries, she told us, “and then the explosion and export of U.S. popular culture and mass comms increased contact.”

You can see this in words such as forever, which used to be a distinctly American spelling of “for ever.” After a rapid rise in the U.K. in the 20th century, it’s just about equally popular in the two dialects. Ditto for payroll, driveway, passageway and viewpoint. Even locate and location, once derided as tasteless and improper Americanisms, have burrowed deep into both dialects.

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This morning our local paper had a headline “City bans sale of synthetic kratom” that set my wife and me back on our heels: what the hell was “kratom”? A quick googling took me to the Wiktionary page, which explained that it was:

1. A tree, Mitragyna speciosa, endemic to Southeast Asia.
2. The dried leaves of this tree, used in traditional medicine or recreationally for their stimulant and analgesic effects.

The second definition made pretty clear why it was subject to bans, and the etymology was interesting: “Borrowed from Thai กระท่อม (grà-tɔ̂m),” which itself is:

Borrowed from Pre-Angkorian Old Khmer កទម្វ (kadamva), កទំ (kadaṃ), from Sanskrit कदम्ब (kadamba), कदम्बक (kadambaka). Cognate with Khmer ក្ទម្ព (ktɔɔm), Lao ກະທ່ອມ (ka thǭm), Pali kadamba.

My uninformed guess is that the -r- in Thai is a hypercorrection, since spoken Thai tends to reduce etymological /kr/ to /k/. In any case, I was happy with all of that, but bothered by the pronunciation, which is given as [ˈkɹeɪ̯təm] (like “crate ’em”). That sounds like a parody of dumb anglicization to me, the way we used to call the baseball player Pedro Ramos “PEE-droh RAY-mohs.” Obviously if people say it that way, it’s a real pronunciation, but surely it’s not the only one? So I investigated further, and found that though it’s not in AHD, the OED added the word in 2023:

A tropical evergreen tree native to Southeast Asia, Mitragyna speciosa (family Rubiaceae), having large glossy ovate leaves and clusters of globular yellow flowers. Also (as a mass noun): the dried leaves of this tree or a preparation made from them, which is ingested or chewed as a stimulant. […]

The use of kratom as a recreational drug is illegal or controlled in many countries. It is also used medicinally, esp. to relieve pain or manage opioid withdrawal.

1926 ‘Kratom’ leaves from Mitrogyne speciosa are widely used for chewing purposes in Peninsular Siam and to a certain extent in Bangkok.
Record (Siam Ministry Commerce) January 155/2 […]

And it gives multiple pronunciations: British English /ˈkreɪtəm/ KRAY-tuhm, /ˈkratəm/ KRAT-uhm; U.S. English /ˈkreɪdəm/ KRAY-duhm, /ˈkrædəm/ KRAD-uhm. But I don’t like the secondary ones much better — what I want to say is /ˈkrɑdəm/ KRAHD-uhm, which seems to me the natural way to say a Thai loan in English. Does nobody really say it that way? If you know and use this word, how do you say it? (Incidentally, I looked up กระท่อม in Mary Haas’s Thai-English dictionary and discovered she doesn’t have this sense, only ‘hut, cottage.’)

I recently watched the charming 1989 “crime comedy” Breaking In (directed by Bill Forsyth and written by John Sayles — how could it be bad?), in which Burt Reynolds is an aging safecracker showing young Casey Siemaszko the ropes. The climactic robbery is of an old safe at an amusement park, and when they get to work Reynolds pulls on that big heavy cylindrical thing that you normally need a combination for and it pulls right out. He says “Hey, the hitch is open!” and they admire the piles of cash for a minute until they hear voices and hide; it turns out the park workers had just left it open for a minute while they went to get more sacks of cash. When they’ve put the cash in, of course they spin the combination lock, so now our heroes will have to use their explosives after all. Today I watched it with the commentary track (with Forsyth and Sayles), and Sayles said he’d done research into safes and safecracking and it turns out people fairly frequently don’t bother locking them, they just shove the hitch closed so that on Monday it will be easier to open up; in fact, experienced safecrackers routinely try just pulling it open, because some percentage of the time it works. All of which is interesting, but what’s this word hitch? There’s no such sense in the OED (entry updated just this year) or anywhere else I can find, and I have no idea whether it’s an established term that’s just too niche for dictionaries or whether it’s some bit of ephemeral slang that happened to be used in the late ’80s. Anybody know?

Victoria Livingstone writes about the ever-more-pressing issue of using machine-translated texts to save money:

I lived in Latin America for several years and I speak Spanish fluently, but I am not a native speaker. I proofread translations into English and my co-worker, who was a native speaker of Spanish, proofread Spanish. Together we were in charge of quality control for that language pairing.

We once received a machine-translated document that included the phrase, “HIP’s asthma program.” HIP was an acronym for “Health Insurance Plan,” but Google Translate (in a document sent by one of our clients) rendered the phrase as the colorful and absurd “asma de la cadera” (quite literally, “asthma of the hip.”) Machine translation has greatly advanced since then. I just put the same phrase into ChatGPT and even without the full context of the insurance plan brochure, the model returned “el programa de asma de HIP.”

What about more culturally charged phrases? My co-worker and I were once tasked with translating text into Spanish for a televised notice on water pollution. “Imagine water pollution as rubber duckies,” the ad began. It was accompanied by an image of thousands of swirling yellow ducks. My colleague pointed out that rubber duckie is a culturally charged term. It is iconic as a toy in U.S. culture. My co-worker was from Mexico City, and to her ear, using “patito de hule” (or something similarly literal) as a central analogy was bizarre. This was years ago, but I believe we translated the term more generally as “juguetes” (“toys”). Today I prompted ChatGPT to translate the phrase, and it returned “Imagina la contaminación del agua como patitos de hule” (a grammatically correct but uninspired rendering of “imagine water pollution as rubber duckies.”) The AI-generated translation, then, worked well with the asthma program but not with a culturally charged metaphor.

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Some items I’ve run across lately:

1) In Jennifer Wilson’s New Yorker piece on “DNA surprises” (archived), she writes: “When I arrived, I was greeted by Hourselt, in a colorful Ankara-print baby-doll dress…” I assumed, naturally, that “Ankara-print” had something to do with the capital of Turkey, but it turns out it’s from West Africa: Ankara “is a bastardised version (by African traders) of the name of Ghana’s capital, Accra.”

2) Watching Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (Edipo re), I was surprised to hear the title character referred to with the stress on the penultimate: /eˈdi.po/. I had always assumed it had initial stress, as in Old Italian (aka Latin), but Wiktionary says “/eˈdi.po/, (traditional) /ˈɛ.di.po/.” Anybody know when and why the traditional usage gave way to the modern one?

3) This MetaFilter post introduced me to Ask A Manager’s “Mortification Week” (“our annual celebration of hilarious ways that we and other humans have mortified ourselves at work”); there are many good stories in the linked posts, some of which are of Hattic relevance. From here:

3. The Latin dictionary

Many years ago, I worked in a bookstore in a mall. A customer came in looking for a Latin dictionary. I was super hungover and in a bad mood generally, and I argued with him that, of course, we didn’t have one because Latin is a dead language. He just stared at me like I was the biggest ignoramus in the entire world and walked out.

After he’d left, I realized how stupid I’d sounded. I still cringe, 30 years later.

From here:

13. The good riddance

For the longest time, I thought “riddance” was derived from “ride” and would cheerfully say “good riddance” when wishing people a safe and pleasant ride home.

And the “bad translation” story that leads off this page is pretty good too.

4) Japan to revise romanization rules for first time in 70 years: “The Agency for Cultural Affairs […] is recommending replacing the government’s long-standing Kunrei system with more widely used Hepburn-style spellings.” Bathrobe, who sent me the link, says “I like kunreishiki because it reflects native phonology but for foreigners it’s simply confusing.”

Nelson Goering, last seen here talking about Old English, has a Facebook post about another interest of his, Chinese history; he’s discussing Yuri Pines’ Zhou History Unearthed: The Bamboo Manuscript Xinian and Early Chinese Historiography:

One of the neat things about early Chinese literature is that people (sometimes archaeologists, but very often, as in this case, tomb robbers) keep turning up new manuscripts which are either completely new works, or older versions of received texts. This book, which I’ve just finished after way too long reading it in snatches, is on one of the completely new texts, called Xinian (“Linked Years”, though it’s not actually an annalistic text arranged year by year, and Pines is a bit critical of the editorial team for publishing it under this title): a bamboo manuscript bought by Tsinghua University in 2008. Apparently this was very big news, and there have already been a slew of articles and books about this (not terribly long) text.

It’s kind of an oddly structured book: a short monograph (just shy of 150 pages), followed by a heavily annotated edition and translation of the Xinian. It’s not an edition with a long introduction, and the first part is an analysis of history writing in China in, roughly, the -500s and -400s (and very early -300s). Pines covers a number of topics […]

I have no real basis for judging any of Pines’s arguments, but he writes clearly and cogently, and makes the interest of his subject felt. He’s occasionally a bit acerbic in his evaluation of other scholars’ arguments, which was sometimes entertaining (since I have no skin in the game), though I thought he was also too harsh at times. I most enjoyed the parts where he’d sketch out some mystery or discrepancy in the Zuozhuan or Shiji and use a (typically brief) comment in the Xinian to unravel the issue.

One particularly interesting passage involved him critiquing Sima Qian’s account of a duumvirate that supposed briefly ruled the Zhou kingdom in the -800s briefly ruled the Zhou kingdom under the term “Joint Harmony” (共和, gonghe). The Xinian tells a different story, saying that Gonghe actually the personal name of guy who held power during the interregnum in question. Pines gives an account of how Sima Qian, faced with very imperfect sources, came to his reconstruction, and basically portrays him as a pretty conscientious historian doing the best he could with very imperfect sources (in this case, concerning events more than 700 years before he was working). There’s a neat little etymological epilogue to this, since the term “gonghe” is the basis for the modern Japanese and Chinese words for “republic”, a very nerdy neologism based on Sima Qian’s portrayal of the supposed (and per Pines, phantasmal) “Gonghe” period.

The Xinian itself forms the second part of the book. It’s not exactly a gripping document, basically a fairly compact overview of early Zhou history, followed by some of the major interactions (mostly wars) between a few of the major states — especially Chu, of course, as well as its major rival Jin, along with a bunch of the smaller states between them. Pines does a wonderful job of mediating this rather dense material. He gives each section an introduction (usually *much* longer than the section itself), a translation, and notes on particular points (again, often far longer than the translation). I’ve included a picture of one of the shorter entries (there are 23 total), which fits on a two-page spread. Pines also has several detailed maps, which helped me a lot in keeping track of all the places mentioned. I think the text would have been basically meaningless to me without this apparatus, which made it at least basically intelligible. There were also some interesting little details. For instance, I learned from one of Pines’s notes that apparently the “Yellow River” was never called such before the Han Dynasty (roughly -200 to +200), but instead was described as “bright” (as in the Xinian) or similar. Apparently the change in colour can be related to deforestation in the river’s upper stretches, leading to more erosion and silt build up. Still, for me at least, the more interesting part was definitely the monograph portion.

I confess I enjoy scholars who are a bit acerbic in their evaluation of other scholars’ arguments; at any rate, I’m bringing the post here for the interesting information about the name “Yellow River” and especially the history of gònghé — I love that kind of twisty background to unassuming modern words. Oh, and Yuri Pines (Hebrew: יורי פינס; Russian: Юрий Анатольевич Пинес; born 1964) is a Ukrainian-born Israeli sinologist and the Michael W. Lipson Professor of Chinese Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Time to uphold the hat portion of my mandate! This 2015 post by johankaell begins:

This time we will go slightly of focus for the blog but we just have to put some light on this rather extraordinary well preserved medieval hat.

In 1938 they found an old hat. Its was a ordinary felted hat of 18 cm height and a brim with a 46 cm circumference. The hat emerged when a bog was being diked out. The special conditions of bogs can keep textile, especially wool, in a very good condition for a long time. […] A small piece was cut from the edge of the brim and sent for C14 dating. The test showed that it was from between 1310 and 1440, with a probability peak of around 1400. This makes it one of the best preserved medieval hats in Sweden, Scandinavia and possibly even Europe.

Before we take a look at the hat, lets have a look on where it was found. The north part of the Scandinavian peninsula was at this time not part of any kingdom. Norway claimed some tax rights of the Sami people on the eastern sides. On the Baltic coast Swedish traders, so called birkarlar, where the only ones from Sweden allowed to trade with the Sami, a right they kept for a long time. Traders from Novgorod, the forerunners of the Russian empire, also came from the north to trade. The trade was almost exclusively with furs. Bisshunters (someone that hunts mainly for furs) and furtraders lived and traded here. The trade then moved over Stockholm, as this was a stapletown which all trade in the region had to go through. In Stockholm foreign traders would buy the goods and transport it out to the customers in Europe and the world. The area of Lappvattnet also had trade with the Norwegians, getting English goods from the Norwegian ports. This paints us a picture of a harsh pioneer frontier, but with connections to modern cities and fashion for those of means. The hat probably belonged to either a bisshunter or a furtrader. […]

The hat does not look like a hat most people think of as medieval. But if you imagine it worn a bit different, it suddenly pops out of the sources as not very uncommon at all. Especially around the turn of the century 1300-1400. Most broadbrimmed hats are shown with the brim turned up, sometimes decorated. While most are roundtopped, there are some that have a clear point. Especially Russians in western art are depicted in pointy hats. These hats are somewhat more pointy as a rule, but there are all manners between round and pointy.

The discussion and illustrations are extremely interesting, and as you will have noticed, there are a couple of words in the text that deserve special attention. The “birkarlar” are birkarls, “a small, unofficially organized group that controlled taxation and commerce in central Lappmarken in Sweden from the 13th to the 17th century”: “The name birkarl probably originates from an ancient Scandinavian word birk that has been used in reference to commerce in various contexts.” “Bisshunter” initially baffled me, but some googling got me this thread, which says “bisshunter – hunter of rabbits for fur,” and I eventually found the OED’s 1888 entry for byse (“Origin unknown: possibly French bis dark brown”):
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Yip Wai Yee reports for the Straits Times about the Taiwan Centres For Mandarin Learning:

How do you say “MRT” in Mandarin?

In this particular Chinese language class, the correct answer is “jieyun” – a Taiwan-specific term – and not “ditie”, which is used in mainland China.

Reading comprehension exercises here can be about Taiwan’s night markets, with references to stinky tofu and bubble tea; and writing is done in traditional Chinese characters instead of the simplified characters preferred across the Taiwan Strait. […]

The scenes described above provide a snapshot of what lessons are like at a Taiwan Centre For Mandarin Learning (TCML) – the Taiwan government-funded overseas learning centres which, as they admit, offer Mandarin education with “Taiwanese characteristics”.

Since their introduction in 2021, Taiwan’s Overseas Community Affairs Council has set up 88 centres across Europe and the US, in major cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, London and Paris, as part of Taiwan’s efforts to use Mandarin to promote cultural diplomacy. […]

Besides the programme, Taiwan also runs a long-running scholarship programme offered to international students, including from Singapore, to travel to Taiwan to study Mandarin.

A long-ago girlfriend of mine studied at the Stanford Center, and they seemed to do a good job (I joined her and taught English and linguistics at Tamkang University, an experience that convinced me I wasn’t cut out to be a teacher, although I remember my students there with great fondness). The link was sent me by Bathrobe, who adds “I didn’t know how jiéyùn was written so I looked it up. 捷運”; that, put into Wiktionary, enabled me to find out what “MRT” meant: Mass Rapid Transit. Thanks, Bathrobe!

Another Hattic tidbit from Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit Of Love (see this post):

“Poor Linda, she has an intensely romantic character, which is fatal for a woman. Fortunately for them, and for all of us, most women are madly terre à terre, otherwise the world could hardly carry on.”

I had no idea what the italicized phrase could possibly mean; fortunately, the OED has a helpful entry (from 1933):

1. Ballet. Applied to a step or manner of dancing in which the feet remain on or close to the ground.
French terre à terre ‘pas de danse qui s’exécute sans sauter’ Roquefort 1829.

[1728 Terra, a terra,..is also apply’d to Dancers who cut no Capers, nor scarce quit the Ground. Hence it is also figuratively apply’d to Authors, whose Stile and Diction is low and creeping.
E. Chambers, Cyclopædia]

1797 The grander sort of dancing, and terre à terre, is the best adapted to such dancers.
Encyclopædia Britannica vol. V. 668/1
[…]

1961 He regrets that the Bolshoi ballet seemed to pay so little attention to terre à terre dancing.
Times 27 May 6/2

1983 During the next year, 1912, Lydia..danced an extremely difficult terre-à-terre ‘toe dance’.
M. Keynes, Lydia Lopokova 59

2. In extended use: without elevation of style; down-to-earth, realistic, matter-of-fact; pedestrian, unimaginative.

1888 His very matter-of-factness, his terre-à-terre fidelity to his authorities.
Athenæum 6 October 443/3

1898 It is so ‘true’, and yet just removed from that terre-à-terre fact which distinguishes so much portraiture.
Daily News 25 October 2/3

1907 Shutting out all wider metaphysical views and condemning us to the most terre-à-terre naturalism.
W. James, Pragmatism vii. 268
[…]

1930 He was too frank not to admit that his friend and chief was, intellectually, very terre-à-terre.
Time & Tide 18 April 500/2
[…]

1981 She..was ‘a credible girl who suffered from menstrual cramps’… You can’t get more terre à terre than that.
Listener 26 February 284/3

(We discussed the name Lopokova in 2016. The 1930 quote is by Carlo Sforza — you can see the context here, in the middle of p. 342 — and once again I deprecate the OED’s casual attitude towards authorship; furthermore, the book seems to have been first published in 1928.) I am torn between thinking this is a useful (and descriptive, if you know the ballet origin) phrase and thinking it’s impossibly recherché and would make a reader think you were a priggish show-off for using it; is anyone familiar with it?