languagehat.com

A couple of words that struck me while rummaging through my new Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate (see this post):

1) trough ‘a long shallow often V-shaped receptacle for the drinking water or feed of domestic animals’: pronunciations ˈtrȯf, ˈtrȯth, by bakers often ˈtrō. It never would have occurred to me that it was anything but the first (/trɔf/); has anybody heard the others?

2) jerrican ‘a narrow flat-sided container for liquids usually holding about five U.S. gallons (about 19 liters)’: etymology Jerry + can; from its German design. Who knew?

And a very happy new year to all those who follow the Gregorian calendar!

I’ve read a fair amount about the so-called Reading Wars over the years, but nothing as convincing as David Owen’s New Yorker article in the latest issue (archived). It starts:

In 2024, my niece Caroline received a Ph.D. in gravitational-wave physics. Her research interests include “the impact of model inaccuracies on biases in parameters recovered from gravitational wave data” and “Petrov type, principal null directions, and Killing tensors of slowly rotating black holes in quadratic gravity.” I watched a little of her dissertation defense, on Zoom, and was lost as soon as she’d finished introducing herself. She and her husband now live in Italy, where she has a postdoctoral appointment.

Caroline’s academic achievements seem especially impressive if you know that until third grade she could barely read: to her, words on a page looked like a pulsing mass. She attended a private school in Connecticut, and there was a set time every day when students selected books to read on their own. “I can’t remember how long that lasted, but it felt endless,” she told me. She hid her disability by turning pages when her classmates did, and by volunteering to draw illustrations during group story-writing projects. One day, she told her grandmother that she could sound out individual letters but when she got to “the end of a row” she couldn’t remember what had come before. A psychologist eventually identified her condition as dyslexia.

Fluent readers sometimes think of dyslexia as a tendency to put letters in the wrong order or facing the wrong direction, but it’s more complicated than that. People with dyslexia have varying degrees of difficulty not only with reading and writing but also with pronouncing new words, recalling known words, recognizing rhymes, dividing words into syllables, and comprehending written material. Dyslexia frequently has a genetic component, and it exists even in speakers of languages that don’t have alphabets, such as Chinese. It often occurs in combination with additional speech and language issues, and with anxiety, depression, attention disorders, and other so-called comorbidities, although dyslexia itself can have such profound psychological and emotional impacts that some of these conditions might be characterized more accurately as side effects.

[Read more…]

I just watched Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert again; every time I see it I find new things in it, and this time I scooped up plenty of Hattic material. As it happens, the movie itself is available on YouTube (for the moment) and the published screenplay is at Internet Archive; in what follows I will provide [minute:second] timings and follow each line in Spanish with the translations in the subtitles and then the screenplay.

The first bit that made me think “I’ll have to post this” comes shortly after Simon heals the man whose hands had been severed (and who immediately uses them to slap his daughter for asking questions):

Con estas entelequias nos hemos entretenido demasiado. [8:17]
We’ve spent long enough on these spiritual shenanigans.
We have spent too much time on these revelations.

The Spanish usage made me quiver with delight, because entelequia is one of those words whose literal definition — in this case, entelechy — is so recherché it’s known to almost nobody, but which in Spanish has developed the colloquial sense (per my trusty Harper Collins dictionary) ‘pipe dream, pie in the sky’; both the movie translations are inadequate, but at least “spiritual shenanigans” shows some awareness of the meaning, while “revelations” sounds like sheer guesswork.

Much later, Simon is delivering a sermon from his pillar, and he says:

No cedamos en la ascesis, tendámosla como un arco. [20:35]
Let us not yield in our asceticism. Let us spread it like an arc.
We shall not rest from our sacrifice. We shall span it like a bridge

Both translations have completely misunderstood the word arco; “tendámosla como un arco” means ‘let us draw it like a bow.’

Immediately after that, Brother Trifón, a monk possessed by the devil, starts spewing blasphemies; at one point he curses Christ “y su madre putativa.” [24:21] I don’t think I’d realized before that this is a pun on “y su puta madre” ‘and his whore of a mother’; the subtitler renders it literally as “and his so-called mother,” while the screenplay ignores the pun and has “and his whore of a mother.” Trifón then goes into a hilarious rant in which his blasphemies get more and more recondite, and the monks have increasing trouble figuring out how to respond:
[Read more…]

Trevor Joyce, the generous and inquisitive Irish poet so frequently seen around here as a source of Hattic items, writes as follows: “I’m sifting through some files of research on family history, and came across this, which drew my attention for its boozy air. The anecdote is obviously the thing, but when I went googling, expecting to find very many instances, I found myself flooded with BMX bikes, but divil the cocktail of this name.” Here’s the thing itself, quoted from the Boston Globe of June 11, 1893:

UNDER THE ROSE

Considerable curiosity has been aroused as to the exact nature of the beverage alluded to in Dr Frank Harris’ editorial of last Sunday, to wit, the “Frogtown racer.” None of the wine clerks seems to be familiar with it. Happening to meet the doctor, I ventured to ask him for the recipe. He said that the beverage was invented, or at least exploited, by that bohemian of medicine and literature, the late Dr Robert Dwyer Joyce, who consumed. according to his own account, two gallons of the “racer” while endeavoring to get Deirdre down from the tower into which he had put her in the course of his construction of the poem of that name.

The recipe indicates that the Frogtown racer is a very light whisky punch made with soda, into which a teaspoonful of maraschino is put and on top of this is carefully laid a “lemon float,” that is, a thin section of the fruit cut at the middle of the lemon. On this is gently poured a little port wine.

The effect is to make a drink of delicate flavor and presenting alternate zones of amber, yellow and purple whose relations, owing to the difference in specific gravity, are maintained during its consumption. This drink was a favorite not only of the doctor, but of the late Edgar Parker and many others of the Papyrus at a time when the club coat was a tradition.

[Read more…]

Per Vjosa Isai, reporting from Toronto for the NY Times, “Canadian Linguists Rise Up Against the Letter ‘S’” (archived):

Canadian linguists and editors are not pleased.

Words using British spellings have suddenly appeared in documents published by the Canadian government.

Gone was the “ize” construction standard in Canadian English in favor of the “ise” spelling used in British English. So “emphasize” became “emphasise,” and “trade liberalization” became “trade liberalisation.”

“At first we thought it was an aberration,” said John Chew, the editor of a forthcoming Canadian English dictionary being produced with the help of the Society for Canadian English. But the examples continued to pile up, both in a recent news release and, perhaps more notably, the federal budget […] Hundreds of words were spelled the British way: “de-industrialisation,” “amortisation,” “catalyse,” “digitalisation” and so on.

The choice undermines Canadian English, a group of linguists and editors said in an open letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney this month. They noted that the English adopted by Canada has been used by the federal government for half a century.

I could have gone with the similar story from CTV News, “Canadian English supporters urge Carney to abandon federal shift to British spelling,” but how could I resist the “Linguists Rise Up” hook? Thanks, Eric and Nick!

A correspondent writes:

So I’m reading a short novel called The Big Bow Mystery by Israel Zangwill and came across this description of one of the characters: “…white-handed and white-shirted, and gentleman to the very purse of him…”

My first (and so far only) assumption is that since one’s stash of money was so precious, something that must be guarded at all times, analogically his “gentleman-ness” was the most sacred part of his being, his inner core, and therefore most important for him to maintain. But I may be off base here.

Ever come across this use of “purse” before? Google didn’t help me.

I had not, so I thought I’d place the question before the Varied Reader. Ideas? (I might add that The Big Bow Mystery has apparently been called “the first full-length locked room mystery”; maybe I should give it a try.)

I wasn’t planning to do a separate Christmas post this year — I got a bunch of movies in foreign languages (Three Times by Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Fantômas and Les Vampires by Louis Feuillade, Lost Illusions by Xavier Giannoli, etc.), but that didn’t seem to justify a post. But then Songdog and family came over, and they got me something I’ve been drooling over and that is eminently Hattic: Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 12th Edition. I used Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate for my entire working life, and every time a new edition came out the bosses would provide us proofreaders and editors with a copy each, and I would spend some time comparing it with the old one, checking the additions and omissions. I think I must have had the Seventh New Collegiate, which was around when I was in college, but I’ve definitely got the 8th (which I used at my first proofreading job) and every one since. I thought there would never be a 12th, since everyone kept saying the print dictionary was dead, but lo and behold, they put it out, and now I’ve got one. An impressively expanded etymology is that for abide; the 11th had simply

[ME, fr. OE ābīdan, fr. ā-, perfective prefix + bīdan to bide; akin to OHD ir-, perfective prefix — more at bide]

Look what it is now:

{ME abiden, going back to OE abīdan, from a-, perfective prefix + bīdan “to bide, wait”; a- (also ā-, ǣ- under stress in nominal derivatives) akin to OFris a-, perfective prefix, OS ā-, ō- (unstressed a-) and probably to OE or- “outward, extreme, lacking (in nominal compounds),” OFris & OS ur-, or-, OHG ar-, ir-, er- unstressed inchoative verb prefix, ur “out of, away from,” ON ūr-, ör-, “out of, from,” ør-, privative prefix, Gothic us- “out of,” us-, privative and perfective prefix; if from pre-Gmc *ud-s- akin to OE ūt “out” — more at out entry 1, bide}

(For some reason they’ve started using curly brackets with etymologies.) You’d think you’d wandered into the OED!

And Slavo/bulbul gave me Echopraxia by Peter Watts, the sequel to Blindsight, which I devoured over a decade ago and have not ceased thinking about since; I can’t wait to dig in.

The omnipercipient Trevor Joyce sent me a screenshot of what appears to be a Facebook post by the poet Ben Friedlander, which reads as follows:

Best footnote I’ve seen in a while.

34 worms sing (kyūin mei 蚯蚓鳴): Or “worms murmur”? Readers may supply for the verb mei 鳴 whatever type of sound they would like the worms to make.

A little sleuthing suggests that this is from “61. Song of the Dragon Ryūgin 龍吟,” 59 “Everyday Matters” (“Kajo”) [see Correction below], a chapter in Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō. And further sleuthing turned up this passage in Liza Dalby’s East Wind Melts the Ice: A Memoir Through the Seasons (p. 85):

 Shamisen wo hiku mo sabishi ya mimizu naku

 Plucking the shamisen
 desolately
 as the worms sing

 –Takahama Kyoshi (1918)

Do worms really sing? Even the most desultory research on the subject in Japanese leads you to confident statements that what was once considered to be the keening of lonely worms is in fact the voice of the mole cricket, a rather ugly burrowing insect that emerges on autumn evenings to chirp weakly for a mate. Yet the image of the singing worm is considered charming, and so it remains, a poetic conceit of peculiar appeal in the world of haiku. Many images like this can be found to have classical Chinese antecedents, but wormsong seems purely Japanese. The only faintly similar occurrence that I have been able to ascertain in Chinese is a reference in an ancient apothecary to the phrase “singsong girl” as a local term for “worm” in the area south of the Yangtze River delta — and that could imply any number of lubricious comparisons, not necessarily that worms were chanteuses.

Although worms do not have lungs, they do have mouths, covered with a sensitive flap called a prostomium. Just as I was ready to accept that earthworm singing was merely a Japanese poetic conceit, I stumbled across a reference to a German naturalist, C. Merker, who claimed that he was able to hear the faint voices of earthworms in chorus as they deliberately flapped their prostomia open and closed over their mouths, in a series of sounds marked by a definite and changing rhythm.

She goes on to discuss the Japanese metaphor “worms climb trees.” And for lagniappe, Trevor included a link to Tony Burrello’s “There’s a New Sound” (1953); the sound (spoiler!) is the sound of worms.

Correction. Trevor sent me this from Ben:

Good sleuthing, with one minor correction: it’s from essay 59, “Everyday Matters” (“Kajo”) (and if it makes a difference, the worm line comes from a poem by Dogen’s teacher, Rujing, that’s quoted in the essay).

My apologies to Dogen’s teacher!

The NY Times has published Quiz: Do You Speak 2025? (“An assortment of absurd, useful and funny words and phrases entered the vernacular this year”; archived), which goes from 1. “Imagine you’re wearing a new outfit. What culinary term would you not want someone to use about your appearance?” to 11. “In 2025, what phrase might one use to describe entering a state of focus in order to achieve one’s goals?” I got 7 out of 11 (“You more or less speak 2025”), but that was with a lot of luck (including the fact that I just the other day saw a story about “the Italian brain rot crew” and happened to remember the names, which are memorable). I know it’s fluff, but hey, it’s about language; actually, I might not have posted it if it weren’t for the inclusion of Le poisson Steve, which both my wife and I found irresistible.

I won’t make a separate post out of it because it will mean something only to Russian-speakers, but Anatoly at Avva has a very interesting post about how the word обыденный changed its meaning from ‘done/made in a single day’ (which apparently was an important concept in folk culture) to its current sense of ‘ordinary, commonplace, everyday.’ There’s material on etymology and on Ukrainian and Belarusian equivalents, as well as splendid examples of peevery (Yakov Grot: «обыденный, как ясно показывает его происхождение, может значить только однодневный»).

Also, let us all join Joel at Far Outliers in his “profound gratitude and appreciation to the doctors, nurses, technicians, and orderlies of Wojewódzki Szpital Zespolony w Kielcach for saving my life during my sudden blogging hiatus this month.” Click through for his harrowing experience.

Stan Carey at Sentence first posted A list of animals who:

The recent death of the great Jane Goodall brought me back to an old post about the use of who-pronouns with non-human animals, as in ‘swallows who flew past her window’, as opposed to ‘swallows that/which flew past her window’.

Goodall’s first scientific paper was returned to her with who replaced by which, and he or she replaced by it, in reference to chimpanzees. Goodall promptly reinstated her choice of pronouns, presumably seeing them as markers of the animals’ intrinsic value, and their substitution as an unwarranted moral demotion.¹ [¹ I learned about this incident from Gaëtanelle Gilquin and George M. Jacobs’s paper ‘Elephants Who Marry Mice are Very Unusual: The Use of the Relative Pronoun Who with Nonhuman Animals’. It has lots of data-informed commentary and is well worth reading if this topic interests you.]

Since then I’ve made note of other examples of animals who that I’ve read in books. This post compiles them in one place, where they form a kind of homemade menagerie of zoolinguistic solidarity.

There are sheep, ducks, cows, and many more, ending with ants, rats, and even trees (“As soon as the bright sunlight increases the rate of photosynthesis and stimulates growth, the buds of those who have shot up receive more sugar”). He ends with:

I’m sure my usage is inconsistent – it’s one of those grey areas in language that I find interesting. Maybe it’s something you’ve noticed in your own usage. In any case, it’s fun to see new animals join the who club (or the very important person club). All it needs now is some fungi and microbes.

Interesting stuff; I’m pretty sure I’ve come to use who for non-humans more and more in recent decades, and I think it’s a good development. (Not sure about the fungi, though.)