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Bloggers Karamazov (“The Official Blog of The North American Dostoevsky Society”) has an interview with Jeff Mezzocchi about his collection of books related to Crime and Punishment:

Rare book seller and high school teacher Jeff Mezzocchi has spent the past 10 years compiling a Crime and Punishment “bookshelf”—a collection of nineteenth-century works of philosophy, science, and fiction that form the novel’s intellectual backdrop. He has generously agreed to share his catalogue of first editions with our readers. You can access it here!

This week Greta Matzner-Gore sits down with Jeff to discuss his work. […]

GMG: You not only teach Crime and Punishment; you teach its intellectual context as well. In one of our email exchanges, for example, you mentioned that you discuss Feuerbach (!) with your students. What, in your opinion, is the most important philosophical background that students need in order to understand the novel? And how do you introduce this material to students who have little experience with philosophy? 

JM: By far, the most important philosophical background for students is understanding the ideas in Chernyshevsky’s works. I have my students read Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons for their summer assignment, and then as the year begins, we dive into excerpts from Chernyshevsky’s What is to be Done? I work with them on understanding some of the basics of philosophy: general distinctions in ontology (materialism and idealism), epistemology (rationalism and empiricism and, later, scientific rationalism), ethics (deontology and teleology). We read some excerpts from Plato’s Republic (the divided line and the allegory of the cave are particularly helpful to get a grasp on the language and distinctions between perspectives). This helps build a working vocabulary as we dig deeper into Chernyshevsky’s emphasis on positivism and rational egoism, his materialism, scientific rationalism, and utilitarianism. I actually have my students complete a project rooted in Chernyshevsky’s philosophy where they identify a problem in our world that creates suffering. Based on rational egoism, they must reshape public policy so that they eliminate the suffering, freeing people to pursue what is advantageous, allowing everyone to move towards happiness. Once they seem fully comfortable engaging with Chernyshevsky and his ideas, we pivot to Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and Crime and Punishment. It is a dense few months, but as we build through that sequence of texts, the students grow not only in their understanding but in their confidence. Class discussions become dynamic and engaging, and oftentimes I can sit back and just take notes on what my students say. 

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The Year in Reading feature at The Millions, in which people write about books they’ve read and enjoyed during the previous year, has been underway for a few weeks now; my contribution has traditionally been the first in the series, but this year there was a glitch in the transfer from one editor to another and I didn’t get the usual notification, so mine has just now shown up. I discuss Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, Nicole Eustace’s Covered with Night, Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai (still great after all these years!) and Lee Konstantinou’s fine companion to it The Last Samurai Reread, Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People, Keith Gessen’s A Terrible Country, Lucy Sante’s The Other Paris, Colin MacCabe and Richard Brody’s books on Godard, and the second (2020) edition of Ilya Bernstein’s Mandelstam (see my 2014 review of the first edition, as well as the Update to this post from earlier this year). Too late for Christmas gifts, but not too late to spur your own reading!

The NY Times book review section is running a series of pieces called “Read Your Way Through [City],” in which an author recommends books that will illuminate a traveler’s experience of a city they know well. The latest, by Tana French, is on Dublin, and its opening paragraphs are of Hattic interest:

One of my favorite things about Dublin is its relationship with words. History is embedded deep in language here. A lot of Dublin communities are tight-knit, with roots that go back centuries, so the dialect is sprinkled with words and phrases that have been passed down over the generations, even after they’ve vanished everywhere else. In Dublin, “my girlfriend” is still “me mot,” from the Victorian English “mort” for “woman” — long gone out of use in England, but still alive here. And back in the 16th century, “child” meant specifically a girl child; it’s been gender-neutral almost everywhere for hundreds of years, but within the last decade, when I had my second baby, older Dublin people still asked me “Is it a boy or a child?”

Even with so much ingrained history, Dublin’s language is the opposite of stagnant. Virtuosity and creativity with language aren’t seen as reserved for any kind of elite. They’re everyone’s birthright, and plenty of the most lyrical or wittiest or most original phrases aren’t carefully crafted by authors, but tossed into pub conversations by people who would never consider themselves to be literary types. And that creative eloquence isn’t a rarefied thing, to be treated with reverence; it’s cheerfully mixed in with every flavor of mundanity and vulgarity. If you love words, Dublin is a good place to be.

The OED’s entry for mort ‘girl, woman’ (updated December 2002) says:

Etymology: Origin unknown. See also mot n.³ [‘A promiscuous woman or girl; a harlot, prostitute’], and compare also English regional (Northumberland) moat woman.
With sense 1 perhaps compare mort n.³ [‘a young salmon,’ origin unknown] With sense 2 and mot n.³ perhaps compare Middle Dutch motte, mutte (compare motyhole n. [‘a term of abuse for a woman: a slut, a bitch,’ origin uncertain]). It has also been suggested that the word may be < Romani (1874 in G. Borrow Romano Lavo-Lil, but glossed ‘a cant word’), or an alteration of French amourette flirtation (12th cent. in Old French as amorete).

For child (entry updated December 2013):

Etymology: Cognate with Gothic kilþei womb, inkilþō pregnant woman, probably < the same Indo-European base as (with a different root extension) Gothic kalbo calf n.¹ and classical Latin glēba glebe n. Perhaps compare also Sanskrit jaṭhara belly, womb, although its origin is uncertain and disputed.

And note this interesting passage on “variation in stem vowel”:
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Via Fiasco da Gama’s MeFi post: Auslan, the majority Australian sign language, has a visual dictionary with three recognised signs for ‘holiday’, of which the second is noteworthy. The first comment, by prismatic7:

Oh yeah. […] you think hearing Aussies are sweary, cynical, and irreverent, you’re gonna shit meeting Auslan speakers.

I have a very dear friend whose Auslan name is essentially “short but big tits”, and she has a friend whose name translates as “the guy who put his dick in a vacuum cleaner”.

Auslan is wild.

Sounds like my kind of sign language, and the dictionary is great.

Mike Cummings writes for Yale News about a new exhibit at Sterling Memorial Library; the opening anecdote grabbed me immediately:

In 1940, Vladimir Nabokov moved to New York City from Paris and needed a job. He submitted his curriculum vitae to Yale along with three letters of reference, including one penned by Nobel Prize-winning writer Ivan Bunin.

It seems that Yale didn’t bite.

“I couldn’t find any evidence that the university ever replied,” said Anna Arays, librarian for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian studies at Yale University Library.

I’ll bet they regretted that! (And jeez, how could they ignore a recommendation from Bunin?) Anyway, it continues:

Nabokov’s CV and Bunin’s endorsement are displayed in “Subjects and Objects: Slavic Collections at Yale, 1896-2022,” an exhibit on view in Sterling Memorial Library’s Hanke Exhibition Gallery through Feb. 5, 2023. The exhibit explores how Yale’s Slavic collections — assembled over more than 125 years and housed across the university’s libraries and museums — chronicle the experiences of those who ruled, inhabited, visited, and fled the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.

The exhibit also weaves a narrative of how the collections were built, focusing on materials from the Russian Empire and Soviet Union, which were the dominant powers in the Slavic world from the Early Modern period through the 20th century, and the heavy influence this complex imperial history had on the collections’ development. It also raises questions about how best to expand the collections three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union. […]

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Back in 2004 I posted about the Northeast Caucasian language Udi; now Patrick Cox of The World in Words (last seen here in 2016 investigating Ainu) has a piece about its current situation and ancient history:

Zinobiani is a village like many others in Georgia’s Kakheti wine region. Nestled beneath the towering Caucasus mountains, its roads are unpaved, its dwellings modest. Most people there are involved in the grape cultivation of grapes.  There is one big difference about Zinobiani: Most of its older inhabitants — mostly people over the age of 40 — speak Udi, a language with a long and rich history that linguists are feverishly documenting while it is still spoken. […]

Many dying languages take their secrets with them. Most are just oral languages, never having been written down. And we may never know much about them. Udi, however, is different. It has its own ancient alphabet and an unlikely grammatical feature that some linguists believe is unique. […]

The Udi language is spoken by as many as 20,000 people today in several communities scattered across Azerbaijan, Armenia and Russia. But it’s in Georgia where the language has attracted international attention from linguists and historians.

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Dave Wilton has a Big List post about a kind of car whose US name is well known to me but whose etymology I didn’t know and whose UK name was unfamiliar:

A station wagon, as we know it today, is an automobile that in addition to two (or more) rows of passenger seating, has a large storage area in the back with a rear door for loading and unloading. The name comes from the idea that the car is well suited for transporting people and luggage to and from railway stations. The name is American in origin and predates the automobile, being first applied to horse-drawn carriages used for that purpose.

It’s one of those things that when you’re told it you slap your head and go “Of course!” But I had never connected station wagons with railway stations, and now I feel silly. (There’s much more about the sense development at the link.) The post ends:

In Britain, such cars are labeled as estate cars. That name dates to at least 1937, when it appears in an ad for Renault vehicles in the Daily Telegraph of 7 October […]

But there’s no explanation of the name (nor is there at the OED entry s.v. estate: “estate car n. a light saloon motor car spec. constructed or adapted to carry both passengers and goods”); I can only presume it was meant to carry posh folk to their estates.

The discussion page has much discussion of woodies (with wooden panels), and  Syntinen Laulu writes:

The estate car has features in common with the shooting brake. The horse-drawn brake was a four-wheeled cart adapted to carry both goods and people (a large country house would probably keep a brake with seats to fetch guests and their luggage from the railway station), and a horse-drawn shooting brake had seats for the sportsmen and a sort of box or cage underneath the seats for their gun-dogs. I suspect that both car types were named out of a desire to convey the idea that the roomy space at the back was for elite leisure equipment rather than working tools or groceries.

The shooting brake was entirely new to me; Jared Paul Stern has a discussion with lots of images and the following tidbit:

The term shooting brake derived from a type of horse-drawn carriage called a “brake” that was used by the likes of the Prince of Wales on shooting parties in the 1890s, which subsequently evolved into a motorized vehicle. Originally it was distinguished from the station wagon or “estate” car by having only two doors, a much more rakish profile.

BBC News reports on a new finding about an old text:

A Sanskrit grammatical problem which has perplexed scholars since the 5th Century BC has been solved by a University of Cambridge PhD student. Rishi Rajpopat, 27, decoded a rule taught by Panini, a master of the ancient Sanskrit language who lived around 2,500 years ago. […]

Mr Rajpopat said he had “a eureka moment in Cambridge” after spending nine months “getting nowhere”. […]

Panini’s grammar, known as the Astadhyayi, relied on a system that functioned like an algorithm to turn the base and suffix of a word into grammatically correct words and sentences. However, two or more of Panini’s rules often apply simultaneously, resulting in conflicts.

Panini taught a “metarule”, which is traditionally interpreted by scholars as meaning “in the event of a conflict between two rules of equal strength, the rule that comes later in the grammar’s serial order wins”. However, this often led to grammatically incorrect results.

Mr Rajpopat rejected the traditional interpretation of the metarule. Instead, he argued that Panini meant that between rules applicable to the left and right sides of a word respectively, Panini wanted us to choose the rule applicable to the right side. […]

His supervisor at Cambridge, professor of Sanskrit Vincenzo Vergiani, said: “He has found an extraordinarily elegant solution to a problem which has perplexed scholars for centuries. “This discovery will revolutionise the study of Sanskrit at a time when interest in the language is on the rise.”

The last quote is ridiculously hyped, of course, but this is genuinely exciting news for anyone interested in Sanskrit. (Assuming, of course, that it’s true…) Thanks, Trevor!

Stan Carey investigates an international phenomenon:

The expressions swear like a trooper and swear like a sailor are so common as to be cliché. But why do we swear ‘like a trooper’ or ‘like a sailor’? And what else do we swear like, idiomatically, in English and other languages?

He explains that swearing has long been identified with the military, especially sailors (and includes the famous Ashley Montagu quote about “Get your ––––ing rifles!”), then says that “dozens of variants also occur, and even the more clichéd forms are often modified to make things more interesting”:

I used wild-card searches to look up the phrases swear like a, swears like a, swearing like a, and swore like a, and the equivalents with curse and cuss, in Mark Davies’s language corpora.

I disregarded examples like swears like a Christian, …French Canadian, …gentleman, …girl twice her age, and …kid that are descriptive rather than emphatic and idiomatic. Swears like an [X] results were sparse and also generally fell into this category. […]

The table shows a clear top three: sailor, trooper, and trucker. But in the historical corpus COHA (1820–2019), trooper has a slight edge and pirate jumps into third place.

There follow lots of graphs, one-off quotes (“a chef who has just burnt his fingers in the soufflé,” “a schooner full of drunken navvies”), and analysis, e.g.:
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OK, this is yer basic clickbait, but I learned some stuff from it and you might too. Danielle Abril of the Washington Post has a quiz (archived) with the following introduction:

With boomers, Generation X, millennials and Generation Z all in one workplace and increasingly communicating online, some of the quirkiness of each generation has come to light. The result: the potential for confusion and misinterpretations of what your colleague is saying, especially as younger workers introduce new lingo and expressions.

Avoiding misinterpretations of text and emojis will only become more important as more young professionals, who grew up communicating digitally, enter the workforce. Gen Z workers — defined as those born between 1997 and 2012 — are expected to more than triple in the United States, Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands and United Kingdom, accounting for 30 percent of total employment by 2030, according to a study by Oxford Economics.

So let’s put your knowledge to the test. How well do you think you can understand your Gen Z colleagues in the workplace? Here are six questions based on our conversations with Gen Z workers.

I got 5/6 due to sheer luck (the one meaning I know for “out of pocket” is irrelevant here, but I guessed right) plus a bit of knowledge and perhaps overly generous quiz construction (many of the proposed answers are obviously wrong); see how well you do. Thanks, Sven!