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I just watched Godard’s 1966 La Chinoise, which is shockingly underappreciated; a film-studies guy who has done a number of Godard retrospectives says it’s the only one of his famous ’60s movies that never sells out. Obviously the reason is that it focuses on Marxism-Leninism — or, to quote someone who recently complained about it to me, “a bunch of self-important, privileged Parisian twits playing at politics” — but that’s like rejecting Moby-Dick because it’s about whaling. It’s absolutely gorgeous and frequently funny, and any lover of Godard should see it; Craig Fischer has a long and thoughtful take from 2011 that will provide some useful approaches.

But this is not a movie blog, and what induced me to blog about it is a remark by Michel Semeniako (who played Henri, the guy kicked out of the group for being “revisionist”) in an interview included on the Kino DVD. He said Godard addressed them as tu when they were engaged in shooting the movie, though he used vous when they met elsewhere — it was part of the intimacy of the workplace. I thought that was an interesting wrinkle. (It’s also interesting that Godard had Anne Wiazemsky, in her role as the intransigent Maoist Véronique, use lines in her dialogues with her onscreen lover Jean-Pierre Léaud that she had previously used with Godard, her lover in real life; understandably, it made her uncomfortable. But it goes with his general Brechtian insistence that actors should quote, not emote.)

We’ve discussed tu and vous a number of times, e.g. in 2012 (“Today, French people in their 20s hardly ever use vous”) and last year (“Je dis vous à ma mère et vous à ma femme”).

Nikhil Krishnan writes in the New Yorker about the extent to which “things that seem natural may be artifacts of culture”:

When I left India for college in England, I was surprised to find that pinching my Adam’s apple didn’t mean, as I had thought it meant everywhere, “on my honor.” I learned to expect only mockery at the side-to-side tilts of the head with which I expressed degrees of agreement or disagreement, and trained myself to keep to the Aristotelian binary of nod and shake.

Around that time, I also learned—from watching the British version of “The Office”—that the word “cringe” could be an adjective, as in the phrase “so cringe.” It turned out that there was a German word for the feeling inspired by David Brent, the cringe-making boss played by Ricky Gervais in the show: Fremdschämen—the embarrassment one feels when other people have, perhaps obliviously, embarrassed themselves. Maybe possessing those words—“cringe,” Fremdschämen—only gave me labels for a feeling I already knew well. Or maybe learning the words and learning to identify the feelings were part of the same process. Maybe it wasn’t merely my vocabulary but also my emotional range that was being stretched in those early months in England.

Many migrants have such a story. In “Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions” (Norton), the Dutch psychologist Batja Mesquita describes her puzzlement, before arriving in the United States, at the use of the English word “distress.” Was it “closer to the Dutch angst (‘anxious/afraid’),” she wondered, “or closer to the Dutch verdriet/wanhoop (‘sadness/despair’)?” It took her time to feel at home with the word: “I now no longer draw a blank when the word is used. I know both when distress is felt, and what the experience of distress can feel like. Distress has become an ‘emotion’ to me.”

Mesquita “came to believe that the idea of a culturally invariant core of basic emotions was more of an ideology than a scientific truth”:
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A piquant post at Laudator Temporis Acti:

Oxford English Dictionary, entry for helluo librorum:

Origin: A borrowing from Latin. Etymon: Latin helluo librorum.

Etymology: < post-classical Latin helluo librorum (in some medieval manuscripts of Cicero) < classical Latin helluō HELLUO n. + librōrum, genitive plural of liber book (see LIBRARY n.1).

In early editions of Cicero De Finibus 3. 7, it is said that Cato ‘quasi helluo librorum..videatur’ (‘appeared like a glutton for books’); the modern reading, restored from manuscript evidence by Jan Gruter in his edition of 1618, is ‘quasi helluari libris..videatur’ (‘appeared as if to devour books’).

The OED’s quotation from Cicero is faulty. For videatur read videbatur. The variant helluo doesn’t even appear in L.D. Reynolds’ OCT edition of De Finibus (1998); here is the text and apparatus from Claudio Moreschini’s Teubner edition:

Quo magis tum in summo otio maximaque copia quasi helluari libris, si hoc verbo in tam clara re utendum est, videbatur.

helluari NV BE: helluaris R, belluari AM, belluaris Pmg., helluo PLSY libri R PLSY, corr. P²

Madvig in his critical apparatus records manuscripts LC as reading helluo librorum.

A helluo is “A person who spends immoderately on eating, etc., a squanderer,” and helluor is “To spend immoderately on eating and other luxuries” (Oxford Latin Dictionary). There is no satisfactory etymology.

I suspect we can all identify with helluones librorum in this hattery.

Leanne Ogasawara writes for The Millions; the main focus is on creative writing workshops and MFA programs (everyone told her “Whatever you do, don’t get an MFA”), and there is some (to my mind) crap about the “pit self” of the Western world versus the “flexi-self” associated with “collectivistic societies,” but she has some interesting things to say about differing structures of storytelling:

After 20 years in Japan, where for the last decade I thought, dreamt, and read mainly in Japanese, my thinking and writing now reflects Japanese storytelling styles. I prefer more meditative writing with constant pivots and turns. I love surprises, and prefer the lyric over the concrete, the “nobility of failure” over the hero’s journey. And more than anything, I love books that refer to other books.

[Matthew] Salesses [author of Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping], who was born in Korea, reminds us that not all traditions favor conflict, or character-driven models, like the hero’s journey. He cites Chinese, Korean, and Japanese stories, which “developed from a four-act, rather than a three- or five-act structure: in Japanese it is called kishōtenketsu (ki: introduction; sho: development; ten: twist; ketsu: reconciliation).” The kishōtenketsu structure informs fiction, nonfiction, theater, and even the movements of the tea ceremony. It is a profoundly different aesthetic system from the Western model, with its primary focus on conflict. Perhaps the most common critique I hear from Western readers about Japanese fiction is that nothing ever seems to happen. […]

In workshop, “Nothing happens” is always meant as a criticism, an inherently bad thing. This can be stifling for a writer who doesn’t read for urgency or conflict in everything.

I too love books that refer to other books, not to mention books that openly discuss ideas — Matthew Salesses, criticizing the workshop model and the cookiecutter prose it produces, says of such stories: “Instead of a political argument, a character might angrily eat a potato.”

I always like it when I can combine both the remits of this blog, and Lola Méndez’s Smithsonian Magazine article “The Real Panama Hat” allows me to do so. Obviously it’s about hats, and in fact features a hat I knew nothing about; meanwhile, the third paragraph introduces a slew of plant names equally unfamiliar to me:

The Panama hat is infamously misnamed. The handmade straw headgear actually hails from Ecuador. Construction workers building the Panama Canal wore the hats, though, as their wide brims protected them from the harsh hot sun. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt inspected the construction of the canal in a white linen suit topped off with one of the Ecuadorian hats. Photos of Roosevelt unintentionally launched a fashion trend, and the name stuck.

The real Panama hat is the sombrero pintando (“painted hat”), also known as the pinta’o.

The pinta’o originated in the province of Coclé southwest of Panama City, where the hats are still made today. Like the Panama hat, the pinta’o is also handwoven with natural fibers, but it is defined by intricate dark patterns that are woven throughout the hat. Exquisite artisanship is required to craft the sombrero from the fibers of several local plants—bellota for the white part of the hat, chonta for decoration, chisná for dying fiber, junco to make the ornate tarco stripe, and pita for stitching the hat. The bellota fibers are boiled before being sun-dried for about a week, as the whiter the fiber, the more valuable the hat. After the fiber has dried to the desired shade, it’s woven into braids. To form the hat, braids are wrapped around a wooden block and carefully sewn together by hand. Intricate geometric motifs—straight lines, waves and zig-zags—are formed from bands of chonta fiber dyed with chisná leaves. The design creates the appearance of a “painted hat.”

It is indeed a fine piece of headgear; click the link for photos and history. Alas, I also have to put on my editorial hat and shake a monitory finger: the full phrase is sombrero pintado, as seen here, not “pintando”; pinta’o shows the perfectly normal development of the -ado ending in the spoken language, and in fact the Spanish Wikipedia article is called Sombrero pintao, with not even an apostrophe to mark the missing d. (Thanks, Bonnie!)

This YouTube clip (7:44) features the voices of Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), Robert Browning (1812-1889), William Gladstone (1809-1898), Queen Victoria (1819-1901), and Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892); the recordings, of varying quality, are accompanied by transcriptions and animated images (which are frankly a bit alarming, and I tried to ignore them). Browning’s voice is surprisingly high, Gladstone goes on forever (as befits a politician), and it’s amazing to hear Victoria at all — alas, the clip is only a few seconds long (they play it twice to compensate). A couple of odd pronunciations I noticed: Gladstone says his middle name, Ewart, so compressedly it sounds like “Yurt,” and Tennyson doesn’t reduce the final vowel of cannon — it sounds like “cannohn.” Thanks for the link go to Bathrobe, who points out “Tennyson appears to be rhotic.”

As I said here, NYRB Classics was kind enough to send me a review copy of Telluria, Max Lawton’s translation of Vladimir Sorokin’s 2013 Теллурия, and having finished it, I’m here to say a few things about it. It’s not really a novel in the traditional sense, in that there is no continuing plot and no consistent set of characters (except for chapters 39-41, which describe the same event from the points of view of the three characters who take part in it); it consists of fifty vignettes set in the neo-medieval future Sorokin created in День опричника, translated by Jamey Gambrell as Day of the Oprichnik, each with its own style and use of language (often a parody of some well-known writer). To give you an idea, the first is about two “littleuns,” Zoran and Goran, creating a set of brass knuckles; here’s a paragraph from Lawton’s translation:

Goran extended his hand demonstratively and poked his finger through the smoky stench of the packhouse. And there, seemingly at the command of his tiny finger, two biguns removed a crucible with the capacity of a hundred buckets and filled with molten lead from the furnace and carried it over to the casting flasks, a peal of thunder seeming to escape from their bellies. Even the steps they took with their bare feet made the packhouse tremble. A human-size glass clinked around in a glass-holder on the table.

The second takes the form of a letter from a visitor, beginning:
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I was reading along in a novel when I got to a line of dialogue that included the sentence “Thy shall be done.” After a moment of appalled bafflement, I decided the author must have written “Thy will shall be done” and some idiot grammar software (or, worse, an idiot human copyeditor) had seen “will shall” and just deleted the first apparent synonym, leaving gibberish in its wake. But then I decided to check Google Books, and discovered that there is a long tradition of this as “kids say the darndest things” humor; from Babyhood; the Mother’s Nursery Guide, Vol. 4 (1888), p. 38:

–A little boy of our acquaintance had had his use of shall and will so often corrected that one night in saying the Lord’s Prayer he said, “Thy shall be done” in place of “Thy will be done.”

–Y., New York.

And from Terrot Reaveley Glover: A Biography by H. G. Wood (Cambridge University Press: 2015), p. 212:

This entry in her father’s diary for 1906 shows Anna’s response to his religious instruction. ’22 July 1906. Heard Anna’s prayers. “Thy shall be done”, she said—so we discussed God’s will and its application to the nursery. But if you have a fight, I said and she chimed in, That would be Thy won’t be done.’

And then (since by now everything on earth has been discussed at the Hattery) I did a site search and found that, indeed, just a couple of years ago Jen in Edinburgh wrote in a comment:

Vaguely on the subject of archaic language – when I was little, I didn’t realise that ‘will’ in the prayer was a noun – I thought the line just meant something like ‘your things will be done’. And I knew that if you were being very polite you didn’t say ‘will’, you said ‘shall’, and if you’re talking to God you should be very polite, and so I misremembered it as ‘thy shall be done’. It still almost catches me out, sometimes.

Apparently this was so alien to my sense of English that I forgot it more or less instantly, and will probably do so again. At any rate, “Thy shall be done” is a thing, not a typo.

My wife recently came across what is apparently a new or newish slang term, sploot, defined here as “the pose an animal, especially dogs, cats, and other four-legged pets, makes when it lies on its stomach with its hind legs stretched out back and flat.” This news story by Melissa Reeves shows squirrels splooting and explains that they do it to cool down in hot weather; we have seen the squirrels in our yard doing it lately, and now we know what to call it, and so do you. An excellent word.

In the spirit of completeness, I must add that I have found another completely different use of sploot, but I don’t think it will catch on; it’s from p. 373 of “Reconfiguration of Satisfying Assignments and Subset Sums: Easy to Find, Hard to Connect” by Jean Cardinal, Erik D. Demaine, David Eppstein, Robert A. Hearn, and Andrew Winslow, in Computing and Combinatorics: 24th International Conference, COCOON 2018, Qing Dao, China, July 2-4, 2018, Proceedings (Springer International, 2018):

For each exact cover configuration C in the output instance, at least one maximally split configuration is reachable from C via a sequence of splits. Call the set of all such configurations the sploot set of C, denoted sploot(C).

Also, don’t miss xkcd’s Complex Vowels, which as a former math major I especially enjoyed. (Thanks, Sven!)

Yes, this is fluff, but it’s my kind of fluff:

It’s August once again, and in Japan that means its time to dust off our hat and huts to celebrate 10 August, which is known as Hat Day…or Hut Day. In Japanese the short “a” and “u” sounds of English are virtually indistinguishable, so the words “hat” and “hut” would both become “hatto” (ハット) in Japanese. This confusion is the true meaning of Hat Day, as well as Hut Day, and is probably best understood after hearing The Hat Day Story, also known as The Hut Day Story.

It all began in 2019, when automotive parts retail chain Yellow Hat approached the pizza chain Pizza Hut to work together on a promotional campaign called Hat Day. Yellow Hat had hoped to use the date of 10 August because the numbers “8” and “10” could be read as “hatto” together in Japanese. However, the deal went south after Yellow Hat realized that their would-be partner was not named Pizza Hat. […]

Yes, it’s sure to be a Hat Day to remember, and quite possibly the greatest Hut Day yet, so mark your calendars with whichever rendering of hatto you prefer and be sure to take part in the festivities.

Thanks, Nick, and a happy Hat(to) Day to all!