languagehat.com

I’ve quoted Anne Curzan, University of Michigan professor of English, repeatedly at LH (2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, etc.); she’s sensible and well informed as well as a writer of wit and charm. Now I learn that she and public radio host Rebecca Kruth have a weekly radio segment called That’s What They Say, and it’s well worth your while — each episode is about five minutes long, and the time flies. Try this one on the pronunciation of “schism” or this one on insipid (apparently now sometimes used to mean simply ‘bad’), cut a check, and the past participle of chide (briefly discussed here in 2011).

Two items, each a tad flimsy to stand on its own:

Spanish estar de Rodrí­guez ‘the state of being left at home alone to work by one’s spouse (wife, typically) and children, while they go on vacation,’ discussed in detail here.

Goofy statements allegedly uttered by Viktor Chernomyrdin; the most famous is “Хотели как лучше, а получилось как всегда” [We wanted it to be as good as possible, but it turned out the same as always], but many of them gave me a chuckle, like “Нам нет необходимости наступать на те же грабли, что уже были” [We don’t need to step on the same rake that was already there]. If you know Russian, check it out.

I was reading along in Deborah Eisenberg’s NYRB review of Motley Stones by Adalbert Stifter (translated from the German Bunte Steine by Isabel Fargo Cole) when I got to “The word that comes irrepressibly to mind regarding Motley Stones is ‘sublime’ in its now rather archaic sense that encompasses vastness and violence as well as extreme beauty.” I confess the word sublime has always made me uneasy; it covers too much ground and carries too heavy a freight of Significance, and I wish writers would pick something more specific and readily understandable. Unless, of course, they’re using or referencing the “now rather archaic sense” that the OED (entry updated June 2012) defines as follows:

9. Of a feature of nature or art: that fills the mind with a sense of overwhelming grandeur or irresistible power; that inspires awe, great reverence, or other high emotion, by reason of its beauty, vastness, or grandeur. Cf. sense B. 1b.
a1743 J. Baillie Ess. Sublime (1747) 10 Heavens diversified by numberless Stars, than which I grant nothing can be more Sublime.
1762 Ld. Kames Elements Crit. I. iv. 266 Great and elevated objects considered with relation to the emotions produced by them, are termed grand and sublime.
[…]
1996 D. Sandner Fantastic Sublime iii. x. 116 Such sublime landscapes appear often in Frankenstein.

B. n.
1. With the.
[…]
b. That quality in nature or art which inspires awe, reverence, or other high emotion; the great beauty of grandeur of an object, place, etc. Cf. sense A. 9.
The sublime is an important concept in 18th- and 19th-cent. aesthetics, closely linked to the Romantic movement. It is often (following Burke’s theory of aesthetic categories) contrasted with the beautiful (beautiful n. 2) and the picturesque (picturesque n. 1), in the fact that the emotion it evokes in the beholder encompasses an element of terror.
1727 A. Pope et al. Περι Βαθους: Art of Sinking 16 in J. Swift et al. Misc.: Last Vol. The Sublime of Nature is the Sky, the Sun, Moon, Stars, &c.
1757 E. Burke Philos. Enq. Sublime & Beautiful ii. §7. 51 Greatness of dimension, is a powerful cause of the sublime.
[…]
2004 Times Lit. Suppl. 10 Dec. 18/3 The sublime—with its connotations of the elemental, the raw, the primitive, the unfathomable and the disturbing—has driven all before it.

Now, I get the “element of terror” bit, and the 2004 TLS quote expands on it acceptably in “its connotations of the elemental, the raw, the primitive, the unfathomable and the disturbing,” but I’m bothered (probably unreasonably) by Eisenberg’s addition of “violence.” That seems to me to push it too far. But I am by no means a specialist in “18th- and 19th-cent. aesthetics,” and I wonder how others feel about it.
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We’ve discussed filler words a number of times (2009, 2017, 2021), but Anne Delaney’s JSTOR Daily piece has some things that weren’t in the previous posts, and I thought it was worth bringing to your attention. Some excerpts:

In spoken language, we see that many elements are universal, one being the way speakers listen and take turns in a conversation. These markers or thinking sounds (uh, uh huh, huh, hmm, er, like, right?) may be collections of sounds with meaningless lexical value, yet they pack a pragmatic punch.

They can be perceived with a range of filters, neutral or positive ones such as creating connection, agreement, and unity; or with a more negative view, such as a crutch, tic, parasitic word, or distracting habit. These exist in every language. The French utter eh bien; Portuguese have então, ta, pois; Japanese えーと (“eeto”), and なんか (“nanka”); Spanish – mira, vale, among others.

Understood by several labels, verbal fillers and hesitation markers are some of these universal elements, a type of discourse marker. Interjections and rejoinders also come to mind—words a listener uses to keep the conversation going and show the speaker she understands and even sympathizes with them; for language learners, using them adeptly (with the right syntactic placement, intonation, and timing) may demonstrate further fluency. […]

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Amanda Morris has an excellent NY Times story (archived) about recent changes to American Sign Language:

For more than a century, the telephone has helped shape how people communicate. But it had a less profound impact on American Sign Language, which relies on both hand movements and facial expressions to convey meaning.

Until, that is, phones started to come with video screens.

Over the past decade or so, smartphones and social media have allowed ASL users to connect with one another as never before. Face-to-face interaction, once a prerequisite for most sign language conversations, is no longer required.

Video has also given users the opportunity to teach more people the language — there are thriving ASL communities on YouTube and TikTok — and the ability to quickly invent and spread new signs, to reflect either the demands of the technology or new ways of thinking.

“These innovations are popping up far more frequently than they were before,” said Emily Shaw, who studies the evolution of ASL at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., the leading college for the deaf in America.

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Kensy Cooperrider reports for Aeon on what seems to me a self-evidently absurd theory, but since I am a known fuddy-duddy and since it’s been taken more seriously than I would have guessed and has a surprisingly long history, I thought I’d toss it out there:

Proposals about the origins of language abound. […] Over this long and colourful history, one idea has proven particularly resilient: the notion that language began as gesture. What we now do with tongue, teeth and lips, the proposal goes, we originally did with arms, hands and fingers. For hundreds of thousands of years, maybe longer, our prehistoric forebears commanded a gestural ‘protolanguage’. This idea is evident in some of the earliest writings about language evolution, and is now as popular as ever. […]

Anthropologists of the 19th century widely championed gesture-first theories, citing other intuitive arguments. Garrick Mallery – who saw gesture as a ‘vestige of the prehistoric epoch’ – noted that it is much easier to create new, interpretable signals with one’s hands than with one’s voice. Imagine ‘troglodyte man’, he wrote in 1882. ‘With the voice he could imitate distinctively but the few sounds of nature, while with gesture he could exhibit actions, motions, positions, forms, dimensions, directions, and distances, with their derivatives and analogues.’ In more modern terms, it is easier to create transparent signals with gesture – signals that have a clear relationship to what they mean. This observation has since been borne out in lab experiments, and it remains one of the most compelling arguments for a gestural protolanguage.

In the 20th century, scholars held on to these intuitive arguments for gestural theories, while also introducing new sources of evidence. One thinker in particular, Gordon Hewes, deserves special credit for this advance. An anthropologist at the University of Colorado, Hewes had an encyclopaedic cast of mind and an unusual zeal for questions about language origins. In 1975, he published an 11,000-item bibliography on the topic. But it was his article ‘Primate communication and the gestural origin of language’ (1973) that would initiate a new era of ‘gesture-first’ theorising. […]

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Nathaniel Rich’s NYRB review (October 7, 2021 issue; archived) of They Called Us River Rats: The Last Batture Settlement of New Orleans by Macon Fry opens with an amusing anecdote, a bit of historical geography, and a word new to me:

I’ve never met Macon Fry but I often meet his goats, Inky and Dinky. Every weekend—at least before Hurricane Ida shipped us on an all-expenses-unpaid vacation to Alabama—my young son and I take a bike path that begins at the corner of Audubon Park and follows the ridge of the levee upriver. The path is part of the Mississippi River Trail, which runs three thousand miles to Lake Itasca in Minnesota, but our destination is only two miles away. There, just past the US Army Corps of Engineers’ New Orleans headquarters, we reach what my son calls the “crazy houses.” Or as the local newspaper once put it, “A Queer Little City Built on the Batture, Where Society Is Divided, Where Queer Beings Live, and Where the Society for the Protection of Children Has Found Considerable Work to Do.”

All that remains of this bustling city are a dozen houses, half-swallowed by the thickets of willow trees that shadow the riverbank. This row of houses, or camps as they’re locally called, is the Southport colony, named after the bend of the Mississippi on which it is situated. The camps do not appear on Google Street View, because they are not visible from any street. They stand on stilts on the batture (rhymes with catcher), the riverside slope of the levee. When the Mississippi is low, the camps are surrounded by lush gardens, sloping yards, and the occasional kayak or propane tank. When the Mississippi crests, the homes appear to float on it—or in it. My son and I rarely see any of the residents but we always encounter Inky and Dinky, freely roaming the batture. He likes to imagine that they are the Billy Goats Gruff, and that among the willows, hiding beneath one of the rickety catwalks that lead to the shacks, lives a troll.

I offer Rich my deep gratitude for the parenthetical “rhymes with catcher,” because you would never learn that from standard lexicographical sources; OED (entry from 1887) has /baˈtjʊə/ (“A river- or sea-bed elevated to the surface”) and M-W \ba-ˈt(y)u̇r\, both reflecting the word’s origin in French. But New Orleans famously has its own way of saying things, as explained in the site How ta tawk rite: A Lexicon of New Orleans Terminology and Speech (the link, featured in my 2004 post, miraculously still works):

A few words on New Orleansese: in a city whose very name is pronounced in nearly 100 different ways by its citizens, all the way from the filigreed, nearly five-syllable “Nyoo Ahhlyins” to the monosyllabic grunt of “Nawln'”, it takes a very sensitive ear, not to mention years of practice, to pinpoint the incredible binds the native speaker encounters, those specific words where the slow tongue gives up and makes a leap of faith. For those who have never heard it, you must begin by imagining Brooklynese on Quaaludes.

As I said in that post:

I particularly direct your attention to the section “A guide to the pronunciation of local place names” (most of the way down the page), where you will learn the proper pronunciation of the street names Burgundy (bur-GUN-dee), Burthe (BYOOTH), Cadiz (KAY-diz), and the like.

Batture-rhymes-with-catcher fits right in.

Via Laudator Temporis Acti, a quote from Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-Earth (Houghton Mifflin, 2003):

There is furthermore one element which seems to me a clear case of Tolkienian private symbolism, and that is the name of Smith’s main antagonist throughout the work, the rude and incompetent Master Cook, Nokes. As I have said repeatedly, Tolkien was for some time perhaps the one person in the world who knew most about names, especially English names, and was most deeply interested in them. He wrote about them, commented on them, brought them up in conversation. With all the names in the telephone book to draw on, Tolkien is unlikely to have picked out just one name without considering what it meant: and ‘Nokes’ contains two clues as to its meaning. One is reinforced by the names of Smith’s wife and son and daughter, Nell and Nan and Ned, all of them marked by ‘nunnation’, the English habit of putting an ‘n’ in front of a word, and especially a name, which originally did not have one, like Eleanor and Ann and Edward. In Nokes’s case one can go further and observe place-names, as for instance Noke — a town in Oxfordshire not far from Brill — whose name is known to have been derived from Old English æt þam ácum, ‘at the oaks’. This became in Middle English *atten okes, and in Modern English, by mistake, ‘at Noke’ or ‘at Nokes’. There is no doubt that Tolkien knew all this, for there is a character called ‘old Noakes’ in the Shire, and Tolkien commented on his name, giving very much the explanation above, in his ‘Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings‘, written probably in the late 1950s. Tolkien there wrote off the meaning of ‘Noakes’ as ‘unimportant’, as indeed it is for The Lord of the Rings, but it would be entirely characteristic of him to remember an unimportant philological point and turn it into an important one later.

The second clue lies in the derivation from ‘oak’. ‘Oak’ had a special meaning for Tolkien, pointed out by Christopher Tolkien in his footnote to Shadow, p. 145. In his early career as Professor at the University of Leeds, Tolkien had devised a system of splitting the curriculum of English studies into two separate groups or ‘schemes’, the ‘A-scheme’ and the ‘B-scheme’. The A-scheme was for students of literature, the B-scheme for the philologists. Tolkien clearly liked this system, and tried unsuccessfully to introduce it to Oxford in 1930 with similar nomenclature (see ‘OES’, p. 780). But in his private symbolism ‘A’ was represented by the Old English rune-name ác, ‘oak’, ‘B’ by Old English beorc, ‘birch’. Oaks were critics and birches philologists, and Tolkien made the point perfectly clear in Songs for the Philologists, for which see below. As must surely be obvious from chapters 1 and 2 of this work, oaks were furthermore the enemy: the enemy of philology, the enemy of imagination, the enemy of dragons. I do not think that Tolkien could ever have forgotten this.

I am struck by the derivation of Nokes, and amused by Tolkien’s childish good-versus-evil approach to (of all things) critics and philologists. And what’s so awful about oaks? (I have omitted the footnotes, for which see the link.)

After finishing Fedin’s Города и годы (Cities and Years — see this post), I stuck with the mid-1920s for Zamyatin’s Рассказ о самом важном (“A Story about the Most Important Thing”); a bunch of Bunin stories; Ivan Shmelyov’s grimly powerful Солнце мертвых (The Sun of the Dead), set in war-ravaged Crimea in 1921; Mikhail Prishvin’s autobiographical Кащеева цепь (The chain of Kashchey), which I was enjoying until it turned into a standard-issue Soviet “how I overcame my youthful idealism and became a good materialist and Marxist” memoir; and Elsa Triolet’s first novel На Таити (In Tahiti), which she wrote because Maxim Gorky was impressed enough by her letters to Victor Shklovsky to say she should consider a literary career (she of course became famous for her later writings in French). Here’s what I wrote to Lisa Hayden (Lizok) about it:

So far I’m enjoying Triolet’s cool, descriptive style, especially refreshing after Prishvin’s overheated interiority; here’s the final paragraph of the first chapter:

На террасе — суета. Две темнокожих молодых женщины сломя голову исполняют приказания старой и огромной туземки, которая фыркает и шипит на них. Это приготовляют наш утренний завтрак и убирают комнату. На столе — хлеб, масло и неизвестные мне фрукты. Андрей пьет скверный кофе, сияет и верит в светлое будущее. Я тихо сажусь рядом с ним и думаю о том, что на меня из открытого чемодана, из-под белья, выползли три огромных, черных, мясистых таракана.

The terrace is abustle. Two dark-skinned young women are dashing around following the orders of an enormous old local woman who snorts and hisses at them. They’re making our breakfast and cleaning the room. On the table are bread, butter, and some fruits unknown to me. Andrei [her new husband André Triolet] drinks foul coffee, beams with pleasure, and believes in a bright future. I sit quietly next to him and think about the fact that onto me, out of an open suitcase, out from under the linen, have crawled three enormous, black, fleshy cockroaches.

It’s too bad it hasn’t been translated, but if you read Russian, I recommend it. It’s short and snarky.

So then I decided to return to the present century and read Margarita Khemlin’s 2012 novel Дознаватель (translated by Melanie Moore as The Investigator). You might call it a police procedural — the narrator, a sort of junior detective named Mikhail Tsupkoi, is investigating the murder of young Lilia Vorobeichik. But although the case is soon closed, he keeps doggedly gnawing away at it, neglecting his marriage and his official duties in the process, and because this is Chernigov (now Ukrainian Chernihiv) in 1952-53, both Stalinist terror and the lingering horrors of World War Two are omnipresent and play a larger and larger role. The tale is cleverly told, with no chapter breaks to orient you, just a succession of short passages separated by line breaks and the fevered, repetitive, increasingly obsessive thoughts of Tsupkoi. I don’t know how I’d go about trying to tell you anything more about the plot; fortunately there are two good reviews I can send you to for that: Lisa/Lizok’s Busybody: Khemlin’s Investigator (she, like me, read the Russian original) and Kaggsy’s The complexities of detection under Soviet rule (she read the translation). I can therefore confine myself to discussing some of the linguistic material that caught my attention. (Oh, and if anybody finds historical maps as useful as I do, this one of Chernigov from 1908 was a great help to me.)
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Oxford University Press will be adding to its majestic shelf of language reference works with the Oxford Dictionary of African American English (ODAAE); Elizabeth A. Harris reports for the NY Times (archived):

The first time she heard Barbara Walters use the expression “shout out” on television, Tracey Weldon took note. “I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, it has crossed over!’” said Weldon, a linguist who studies African American English.

English has many words and expressions like “shout out,” she said, which began in Black communities, made their way around the country and then through the English-speaking world. The process has been happening over generations, linguists say, adding an untold number of contributions to the language, including hip, nitty gritty, cool and woke.

Now, a new dictionary — the Oxford Dictionary of African American English — will attempt to codify the contributions and capture the rich relationship Black Americans have with the English language.

A project of Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research and Oxford University Press, the dictionary will not just collect spellings and definitions. It will also create a historical record and serve as a tribute to the people behind the words, said Henry Louis Gates Jr., the project’s editor in chief and the Hutchins Center’s director. […]

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Recently I wanted to find out about a Book-of-the-Month Club selection from back when it was important influence on what Americans read, and I complained on Facebook that I couldn’t locate a complete list; the reliably knowledgeable Anatoly Vorobey responded with this link, saying “All ‘main selections’ (one book each month, I take it) up to 1977.” And it’s even better than that; here’s the self-description on the page:

The Books of the Century

This website compiles, by year, four different lists of books published during the twentieth century:

1. The top ten bestsellers in fiction, as recorded by Publishers Weekly.
2. The top ten bestsellers in nonfiction, also as recorded by Publishers Weekly.
3. The main selections of the Book-of-the-Month Club, which was founded in 1926.
4. Critically acclaimed and historically significant books, as identified by consulting various critics’ and historians’ lists of important books.

Not every list is available for every year. Click here to learn more about the lists and for some caveats about using them. Otherwise, simply follow the links to the left to delve in. Happy hunting!

Here’s the “learn more” explanation for the Critically Acclaimed and Historically Significant Books list:

This composite list was made by consulting numerous sources, including the Modern Library’s list of the hundred best novels and nonfiction books of the century and the chronology of historically significant books listed in the back of David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper, The American Intellectual Tradition, vol. 2 (New York, 2006). The last source is particularly useful, as it lists significant academic works written by specialists in addition to more general works. I have also added my own selections. It should be noted that “critical acclaim” and “historical significance” are two very different measures of a book’s import. One is a term of praise, the other is not. A book may be considered historically significant without being thought good, and, indeed, there are many different ways in which a book might become interesting to a historian. But all of these books command our attention today, whether it is because they are well-written, innovative, representative of an important historical episode, or causally significant. Although not all of the books on this list were written in English or published initially in the United States, the books that are included are ones that have been important to U.S. audiences.

I’m not sure why the BOMC lists end after 1977, but never mind — what a great project! Someone should do something similar for other literatures; it’s fascinating to see what was popular and/or considered important in previous decades. And the BOMC choices hold up, for the most part, far better than I would have expected. My most surprising discovery so far: the selection for June 1931 was M. Ilin, New Russia’s Primer: The Story of the Five-Year Plan! (The Marxists Internet Archive has put it online if you want to investigate it.) “M. Ilin” was the pseudonym of Ilya Marshak (1895-1953), and the Russian original was «Рассказ о великом плане» (1930). I’m not surprised it was translated and published in the US — people were, of course, curious about what was going on in Red Russia — but I would have thought the BOMC would have been more conservative in its choices.