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Dave Wilton at Wordorigins has a Big List post about the phrase been there, done that, which has a surprisingly specific origin, Australia at the end of the ’70s. He first goes over the shorter “(I’ve) been there” (meaning ‘I’ve had experience’), then continues:

But the addition of done that is distinctly Australian in origin. Pascal Tréguer has found an Australian citation from a 13 December 1979 column by Ian Warden in the Canberra Times that refers to a song about Alan McGilvray, the Australian cricketer and cricket commentator on the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC):

[…] The venerable, admirable and conservative McGilvray (“He’s been there! He’s done that!”) has become so indispensable to the proper, sober, traditional wireless broadcasting of cricket in this country that to exploit him in this way is a lot like producing a jingle which asserts “The Church is not the same without Wojtyla.”

[…]

The earliest use in print of the common wording of the catchphrase that I have found is in Tharunka, the student newspaper of the University of New South Wales, on 31 August 1981 in an interview with Michael Atkinson, a member of the folk music group Redgum:

Our only form of statement is what we sing. I’ve tried everything else—I’ve handed out leaflets at factory gates—been there done that—the music is all that I can do and it’s all that I can do well.

The following year, an Associated Press article about Lauren Tewes, one of the stars of the American television series The Love Boat, was published on 21 February 1982. Tewes is an American:

Tewes, who has just divorced, says she doesn’t plan to get married at this time. Using an Australian expression, she says, “Been there, done that.”

See the link for more history and citations; this is the kind of detailed investigation I love. (For what it’s worth, I would have guessed with reasonable accuracy that the phrase dated from the ’80s.)

A correspondent writes:

My mother (2nd youngest of nine, b. 1934) and her sisters used an expression that I took for granted, but never heard elsewhere. They’d say “gom and gower”, always in that order, with a hard “g”, rhyming with “mom and power” to refer to overhandling a substance or object the point of ruining. As in “I don’t want it after you’ve been gomming and gowering it” to decline a second helping of food offered after the offerer had carefully picked out the part they want, possibly stirring it. Or “don’t gom and gower it” if something needed to be left alone or only lightly stirred. But it wasn’t used exclusively in the kitchen; other projects were similarly prone to overwork or damage from too much fussing and needed to be left alone. (It may just be that kitchen memories are stronger for younger people.) […] It could be just a family expression, but it seems like more than that.

For any help it gives you, she was born in old Florida, to a family that traced its roots there to an English sailor to Barbados in the early 1500’s, the usual Scot-Irish protestants and Irish Catholics of Georgia and the Carolinas, and one German soldier arriving from Sweden after some war in the mid 1600’s.

I found the question intriguing and thought I’d pass it along to the Varied Reader. “Gom and gower” is a great expression, and I may start using it myself.

Via Laudator Temporis Acti, John Woods (translator of Thomas Mann) on his line of work:

Literary translating is about literature, it’s about being very, very skilled in your native language. Not only do you need to know the second language, and I mean know it well, but you have to love and work with and understand your own language. You have to know how to make it sing and dance. Being bilingual certainly is a leg up, but that doesn’t create a literary text. There are a lot of people out there who are bilingual. They think, “Well, I ought to be able to translate something.” And the publishing houses know that there’s this vast pool of workers out there, and so they farm the stuff out in piecework. The results are haphazard. Some great and wonderful translations are produced, and some that are not so great and wonderful.

[….]

Every German publishing house has editors who go over every translation, comparing it word for word, with the original. I don’t know of any publishing house that does that anymore in this country.

[….]

I’ve made lots of horrible mistakes. One in fact that Helen Wolff didn’t catch, in a small book by Günter Grass called Show Your Tongue, about a year he spent in Calcutta, India. And somewhere he uses the word “Schuppen,” which can mean the “scales of a fish” or “dandruff.” And in a moment of average inattention, I chose dandruff — and it should have been the scales of a fish. That sort of thing happens, it just happens. You’re working fast, you go back and check, but it never registers, and suddenly the translation is there forever in black and white.

One of the things you learn, particularly in this job, is that there is no such thing as perfection in this existence. And you learn to live with that. It will never be perfect. Any translation can be made better both aesthetically and in terms of accuracy, and that’s why you correct four and five times yourself, and that’s why somebody else should look at it too. Because it will never be as good as it truly ought to be.

Refreshing modesty! And hurray for the German publishers who takes such pains to make sure translations are accurate.

Via Kerim Friedman’s Facebook post comes Han Cheung’s very interesting Taipei Times piece on indigenous naming systems, among other things:

Bukin Syu has only been using his current name for two years, adopting it after he began studying the lost tongue of his Taivoan ancestors. The Taiovan are one of the Pingpu, or plains indigenous groups who are not recognized by the government, and they have been using Chinese names for so long that Bukin isn’t sure how their original naming system worked.

“Bukin means mountain, and my father’s Chinese name includes the character for mountain,” he writes in a display at the O ngangan no niyah (自己的名字, “our own names”) exhibition on indigenous names. His parents’ village, Siaolin (小林), was wiped out by a landslide caused by Typhoon Morakot, and the name further honors his destroyed homeland.

The exhibition, which opened in January at the National Central Library but is currently on view at Ketagalan Culture Center (凱達格蘭文化館) in Taipei’s Beitou District, details the varying naming customs of the 16 official indigenous groups, how they were forced to adopt Japanese and Chinese names and their struggle during the 1980s and 1990s to revert to their “true names.” […] As the Ketagalan Culture Center is named after the local Pingpu people, it makes sense that a new section on Pingpu names has been added here. […]

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I ran across the word guipure and had only a vague sense that it was some kind of fabric; it turns out to be (per Wiktionary) “A kind of bobbin lace that connects the motifs with bars or plaits rather than net or mesh,” or (per AHD) “A coarse large-patterned lace without a net background.” The ancient OED entry (published 1900) says:

Etymology: French, < guiper to cover with silk, etc., < Germanic wîp-, represented by German weifen to turn, Gothic weipan to crown.

Well, that’s an odd assemblage of meanings, thought I. The AHD, after deriving it from French and Germanic, says “see weip- in the Appendix of Indo-European roots,” so I did:

weip-
To turn, vacillate, tremble ecstatically.
Derivatives include wipe, whip, and vibrate.

1. O-grade form *woip‑. waif¹, waif², waive, waiver, from Anglo-Norman waif, ownerless property, from a Scandinavian source probably akin to Old Norse veif, waving thing, flag, from Germanic *waif‑.
2. Variant form *weib‑.
a. wipe, from Old English wīpian, to wipe;
b. guipure, from Old French guiper, to cover with silk;
c. whip, from Middle English wippen, to whip. a-c all from Germanic *wīpjan, to move back and forth.
3. Perhaps suffixed nasalized zero-grade form *wi-m-p-ila‑.
a. wimple, from Old English wimpel, covering for the neck (< “something that winds around”);
b. gimp¹, guimpe, from Old High German wimpal, guimpe;
c. perhaps Middle Dutch wimmel, auger (< “that which turns in boring”) wimble.
4. Suffixed zero-grade variant form *wib-ro‑. vibrate, from Latin vibrāre, to vibrate.
[Pokorny u̯eip‑ 1131.]

I suppose “tremble ecstatically” is based on some descendant not shown in that list, though it seems like a strangely specific sense to reconstruct, and I can’t see anything at the much more extensive Wiktionary list that would fit (maybe Younger Avestan vaēpaiia, “to be homosexual”?). And where does “to crown” come in? At any rate, it does seem like an odd assemblage, and I suspect there’s been some dumping of similar forms under an increasingly large and shapeless umbrella.

I’ve just discovered Etymologeek, “A free multilingual dictionary that not only shows word histories but also draws them.” From the About page:

Etymologeek shows you the origins of the words you search for. However, next to the textual explanation, we also include an etymology tree (directed graph) to show graphically how the word is derived and to what other words it is related. Moreover, we also aim to include word definitions and other relevant information. […]

Our data is derived from open sources, primarily from the Wiktionary (licensed under the CC BY-SA license) or other public domain etymology data repositories. Much of the data has been automatically extracted: we have used tools such as Etytree by Ester Pantaleo to do that. However, we have also been gradually refining the data, making corrections, modifications, and manually reviewing some of the etymology entries.

I like the answer to “Can I trust your etymologies?”:

No. Etymology is inherently speculative and uncertain. Moreover, some of the automated data extraction we have performed to build Etymologeek has resulted in errors or inaccuracies. We encourage you to independently verify any data you see on our website, and we disclaim any responsibility for your use of or reliance on it. We also encourage you to submit corrections and report mistakes.

The website was built by “Linas, the founder of Interlinear Books.” I discovered it by searching for the etymology of Latvian padome ‘council, board; (historical) soviet’; Wiktionary was no help (“This etymology is missing or incomplete”), but I saw that Google also offered Padome etymology in Latvian | Etymologeek.com, where I learned that “Latvian word padome comes from Latvian dome,” and clicking on dome “(often plural) council (legislative or administrative organ)” got me the information that it “comes from Proto-Indo-European *dʰeh₁-” along with a nice visualization and a list of related words. I’ll have to start checking it regularly, and I hope it thrives and keeps improving.

Back in 2007 (in a very interesting thread which brought me the astonishing news that some young Englishpersons pronounced ginger with /ŋ/, to rhyme with singer, when used as an insult) michael farris wrote:

since we’re already here, is ‘ginger’ meaning red-headed (pretty alien to my dialect) related to ginger the spice? If so, why? Ginger IME is yellowish (yeah, there are some ginger-like spices that are orange-reddish but they’re not ginger in modern usage).

An excellent question to which I’ve never seen a good answer. Now, over at Wordorigins.org, Syntinen Laulu supplies (along with rhymes like “Ginger, you’re barmy,/ You’ll never join the army”) what seems to me a plausible reason:

FWIW, in my London-and-SE-England childhood and youth, although we routinely spoke of ‘ginger hair’ I don’t remember ginger being used as a noun for a red-haired person: we would have been more likely to say ‘X is a gingernut‘. This may well have been a regional thing. (And in this connection I’m surprised that anybody should have been needed an explanation for ginger being used to describe red hair: gingernuts and other ginger-spiced baked goods such as gingerbread men are indeed the colour of ‘red’ hair.)

(We have also talked about the complicated etymology of the word “ginger”, not to mention gingerly.)

A Redditor asks:

So I was doing a bit of reading on Islamic Empires and one of the things that I noticed was that a lot of Empires (Mughal, Timurid, Delhi Sultanate….) all chose Persian as their administrative language, but why Persian? Arabic was literally the language during the golden age and the religious language of Islam what made Persian so special?

There are a number of responses; the best is by Draig_werdd, and I’m reproducing it below (silently correcting a few errors in spelling or grammar):

There is a bit of historical context that explains this situation.

At some point soon after the Arab conquests, the area in Central Asia known as Khorasan and Transoxiana but now in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, North Afghanistan and parts of Turkmenistan and NE Iran became Persian speaking. Other Iranic languages used to be spoken there in the past.

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Back in May, I posted about Osip Mandelstam. Translations by Alistair Noon, saying “On the whole, I think Noon does well; he doesn’t try to match the meters and rhyme schemes of the originals, but replaces them with his own rather than soggy free verse.” Now he’s come out with his version of The Voronezh Workbooks, the poems Mandelstam composed at the end of his life while living in internal exile in Voronezh, and the Guardian has published one of them, “Iota and Theta …” (translating “Флейты греческой тэта и йота…“), with Carol Rumens’ useful and well-informed notes:

Iota and Theta … from the Third Workbook, and dated 7 April 1937, is a response, according to Nadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir Hope Against Hope , to the arrest of a German flautist the couple knew, referred to simply as “Schwab”: he was accused of spying and died in a work camp near Voronezh. Nadezhda records her husband’s repeated anxieties as to whether or not Schwab had been able to take his flute to the camp, and, if he had, whether further incriminations had been the result. These anxieties seem interlocked by the poem with Mandelstam’s recollections of his own imprisonment, torture and attempted suicide, and some profound forebodings about the approaching post-exile period.

Displayed in the art museum built in 1933 in Voronezh, the Greek earthenware included depictions of flute-players. These images, and perhaps the “ditties of no tone” remembered from Keats’ Ode, provide the silence haunting Mandelstam’s quatrains. […]

In this poem as elsewhere Alistair Noon’s translation aims to carry over into English not only Mandelstam’s knotted density of meaning, but the metrical and assonantal effects of the original poem. The tetrameter rhythm may be quick, light, and agile like a flute, or heavy and thump-ish like clay, depending on the choice of diction. English tetrameter’s accentual instabilities add an improvisational quality – which is true to the nature of these poems. They are, to some extent, experiments – as Noon’s choice of the term “workbook” in preference to the usual “notebook” implies.

Rumens links to Vasily Moskvin’s “Стихотворение Осипа Мандельштама «Флейты греческой тэта и йота…»: поэтика неясности (The Poem of Osip Mandelstam «The Greek flute’s theta and iota…»: Poetics of Obscurity),” which is itself an extremely useful (and much more detailed) analysis. As I did in this post, I will juxtapose stanzas from all the English versions available to me — James Greene, Selected Poems (Penguin, 1991); Richard & ‎Elizabeth McKane, The Voronezh Notebooks: Poems 1935-1937 (Bloodaxe, 1996); Ilya Bernstein, Poems (Boston, 2014); and Noon — and let you be the judge. Here’s the first:
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LH’s favorite Russo-American poet is Irina Mashinski (see this for her poetry and this for her reading at Mount Holyoke), and she was kind enough to send me her latest book, The Naked World: A Tale with Verse (published by the wonderfully named MadHat Press). It’s an unusual mix of poems and short prose passages, often snippets of memoir but also featuring bursts of history like this paragraph, which illuminates the situation of poets in the Soviet Union:

In 1928, the poet Nikolay Zabolotsky shut the door tightly behind him and handed his wife a sheet with a poem about the Terror. Then he read aloud another, an innocuous lyrical poem about nature, in which the first lines and the rhymes are identical to the ones in the first — they were supposed to help him reconstruct the dangerous poem when better times arrived. Then he burnt the first poem.

The book title comes from one of the longer prose sections, similarly titled; here are the first and last paragraphs:

I sat by the window and ate red currants. Do you remember, Kostya, that short story of yours: you made it shorter and shorter, until all that was left was this single sentence. I took it with me to America — a crumbling yellowing page with just that one line. And see, now I can’t find it — I have neither your story, nor that dusty summer with its slightly sour twilight, the weak Moscow setting sun, fine city dust in the air. Nor do I have anyone of us here.
[…]

But who said “culture”? Who said that the skies should be worn-out from prayers? Try this parking lot. Try to live in this new winter light, with no rain and no snow, in this young naked world, reflected in the quiet craziness of the old ladies’ glasses, crisscrossed by telegraph cables and a few birds. Doesn’t it need me, along with the dent from my winter books on the table and the warmth of my unfocused sight?

That’s real poet’s prose — “the quiet craziness of the old ladies’ glasses, crisscrossed by telegraph cables and a few birds” — and I have to remind myself English isn’t her first language.
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