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Maria Bloshteyn writes for Punctured Lines about her family’s library, painfully assembled and now being disposed of equally painfully (her essay is preceded by Yelena Furman’s brief introduction):

The books are a heartache. I have been dreading this moment for years. My mother, the adored and formidable matriarch of our small family, had moved into a nursing home after struggling with dementia for the past several years. She doesn’t care now what will happen to the family library, but I do. These are, after all, the books that we brought with us from the Soviet Union, when we left it forever in 1979. I grew up looking at their spines both in our Leningrad flat and in our Toronto apartment: light brown for the complete edition of Pushkin, mauve for Heine’s poems, beige for Tolstoy’s collected works. The classics, the translated classics, the poetry chapbooks, the art albums, the subscription editions, children’s literature—they are all here. Once, they provided the continuity between the two vastly different worlds: one that was forever lost to us and the other that we were slowly learning to inhabit. Reading and rereading them kept me sane as I, rarely at a loss for words, found myself suddenly language-poor and unable to either defend myself against nasty verbal attacks I faced in school as the Russian kid, or to express myself adequately to friendlier others.

These are the books that I am now packing into large cardboard boxes, as I am deciding their fate. Lowering them in, one by one, I think of the books that we weren’t allowed to bring with us as we left: most prominently, unfairly, and painfully, the single volume of Pushkin’s poems that my grandfather, part of the 13th Air Army during World War II, sent to my mother, evacuated to a village in the Urals. We weren’t allowed to take it, because it was published before some arbitrarily assigned cut-off year, which made it, ridiculously, a possible antiquity of value to the State. The passage of years hadn’t dimmed my sense of outrage.

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Mitra Taj writes for the NY Times about the latest expansion of Google Translate:

When Irma Alvarez Ccoscco heard that the language she has spoken her entire life, Quechua, had been added to Google Translate, she hurried to her computer to try it out. “I said: ‘This is it. The day has finally arrived,’” Ms. Alvarez Ccoscco, a poet, teacher and digital activist, recalled in a phone interview. She started with some basic sentences. “I didn’t want to be disappointed,” she said. “And yes, it worked.”

It was more than a new tool for communication; it was vindication that Quechua and its several millions of speakers in South America deserved greater voice and visibility, Ms. Alvarez Ccoscco said. She and other Quechua activists had been making that argument for years. After all, Quechua is one of the most widely spoken Indigenous languages in the Americas. But now, “a company as big as Google says so,” she said. “It’s like saying to the world, ‘look, here we are!’”

Quechua — or more precisely southern Quechua, the main language in the Quechua linguistic family — was one of 24 languages that Google added to its translation service this month. Collectively, they are spoken by some 300 million people. Many, like Quechua, are mostly oral languages that have long been marginalized, spoken by Indigenous or minority groups. […]

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Jill Lepore, in her New Yorker essay on bicycles (archived), describes their origin story thus:

A few years back, the bicentennial of the bicycle wheeled past at breakneck, bike-messenger speed. In 1817, Baron Karl von Drais, the Master of the Woods and Forests to the Duke of Baden, invented a contraption called the Laufmaschine, or running machine. A climate crisis had led to a great dying off of livestock, including horses, especially in Germany. Drais meant for the Laufmaschine to be a substitute for the horse. It had a wooden frame, a leather saddle, two in-line wheels, and no pedals; you sort of scooted around on it, and a full-grown man could pick up pretty good speed. (“On descent it equals a horse at full speed,” Drais wrote.) In England, Laufmaschinen were called “swiftwalkers.”

I was, of course, curious about this alleged “swiftwalkers,” a word I didn’t recall ever having seen. Sure enough, it is unknown to the OED. [Not true — it’s there, but hyphenated; see Jen’s comment below.] That doesn’t mean that it didn’t exist, so I turned to Google Books, where I got a lot of hits of the type “About 1817, Baron Karl von Drais of Germany created the Swiftwalker, an improved wooden model with iron wheels and no pedals” and “Another early 19th Century version was called the ‘Swiftwalker.’” Clearly, Lepore picked it up from some such modern history. But when I restricted my search to the 19th century, I got exactly two hits, to The Velocipede: Its History, Varieties, and Practice by J. T. Goddard (1869) and Digest of Cycles Or Velocipedes with Attachments Patented in the United States, from 1789 to 1892, Volume 1 (1892)… and when I clicked through and searched within the books, I got “no results found.” When I restricted my search to the 20th century, I got hits like “Dubbed the dandy horse, the swiftwalker, the velocipede, hobby, and the running machine, von Drais’s invention took off” and “The velocipede gained rapid popularity in France, and almost immediately migrated to England, where it was known variously as a Draisine, Swiftwalker, Hobby Horse, Dandy Horse, or Pedestrian Curricle.”

So my current theory is that someone joining the throng of people trying to cash in on the new craze decided to call their version a Swiftwalker; some later historian happened on this obscure and forgotten term, thought it was colorful, and added it to their collection of colorful terms (I have to say I myself am particularly fond of “Pedestrian Curricle”); and such lists proliferated in the same way as lists of supposed names for groups of animals (the “exaltation of larks” phenomenon), so that any later writer on the subject could pluck out whatever pleased them, and “swiftwalker” pleased Lepore. All well and good, and there would be nothing wrong with saying something like “In England, Laufmaschinen were called many things, including ‘swiftwalkers,’” but her actual phrasing suggests that “swiftwalker” was the English word for it, which is flatly untrue. This is the trouble with popularized history, even from actual historians — the temptation to be as colorful as possible leads you into the swamp of error.

(Oh, and Drais’s name is perpetuated in the draisine used on railways.)

The always clickworthy Poemas del río Wang has a post about Ouranoupoli and its history (it’s the last settlement before the border with Mount Athos); it’s full of the usual intriguing details and gorgeous illustrations, but I’m posting about this passage:

The tower of Ouranoupoli was probably built as early as the late 1200s, but the first written record of it only survives from 1379, when “Ioannes Palaiologos, Despot of Thessaloniki” stayed here and granted tax relief to the area. It is not clear who this Ioannes was. In this period, “despot” means an emperor’s son who is officially declared heir to the throne and is given the rule of an important province, such as Thessaloniki. In 1379, however, the despot of Thessaloniki, that is, the heir to the throne and local governor, was the later Emperor Manuel II, who held this office from 1376 until his accession to the throne in 1391. His son, the later Emperor John VIII – a participant in the Council of Florence-Ferrara, and a model for Piero della Francesca and Benozzo Gozzoli – was only seven years old in 1379, so he could not be it. As this Ioannes is mentioned on the Greek net only in connection with Ouranoupoli, and other Byzantine historical sites are silent about him, it is possible that he is just a long-surviving error of the historical literature. But tax relief, whoever granted it, suggests that the central government admitted that they could not pay the garrison, and in return they did not demand anything from what the soldiers produced for themselves.

It occurs to me that “despot” is a very misleading faux ami here; to ordinary (non-Byzantinist) English-speakers it means only (to quote M-W) “a ruler with absolute power and authority […]; one exercising power tyrannically,” which is not the sense needed here. I would suggest translating it in such contexts as “prince” or “crown prince.”
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I’m reading Bulgakov’s Белая гвардия (The White Guard), which is frankly not a good novel — if it had been set in the famous “city of N” I probably would have given up after a hundred or so pages. But it’s set in a very vividly rendered Kiev in the winter of 1918-19, and I’m a sucker for city novels, so I persevered and now have only eighty pages to go, and my understanding of that complex metropolis is now far greater than it was. At any rate, I’ve just gotten to a passage of Hattic interest: after the city has changed hands yet again, three grim men bang on the door and announce a search, and the language of their wolfish leader is described as follows (Marian Schwartz’s translation):

He spoke a strange and incorrect language — a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian words — a language familiar to inhabitants of the City who had spent time in Podol, on the banks of the Dnieper, where in the summer the wharf’s winches whistled and spun and in the summer ragged men unloaded melons from barges.

Он говорил на странном и неправильном языке — смеси русских и украинских слов — языке, знакомом жителям Города, бывающим на Подоле, на берегу Днепра, где летом пристань свистит и вертит лебедками, где летом оборванные люди выгружают с барж арбузы…

That language is called surzhyk, “a range of mixed sociolects of Ukrainian and Russian languages used in certain regions of Ukraine and adjacent lands… The Ukrainian word surzhyk (from Proto-Slavic *sǫ — «with» + *rъžь — «rye») — originally referred to mix of different grains that includes rye or a product like flour or bread made from such a mix.” Melissa Mohr describes it at the Christian Science Monitor:
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I was stopped in my tracks by the second sentence in Chandni Singh’s “Spring Never Came to India This Year” (NYT, May 24, 2022):

I am no stranger to heat. I know the stifling breath of “loo,” the hot and dry summer winds that blow over North India and Pakistan.

I immediately turned to the OED, which has it s.v. loo, n.³ (entry from 1976):

Etymology: Hindi, < Sanskrit ulkā flame.

The name given in Bihar and the Punjab to a hot dust-laden wind.

1888 R. Kipling Phantom ‘Rickshaw 78 The loo, the red-hot wind from the westward, was booming among the tinder-dry trees.
a1936 R. Kipling Something of Myself (1937) iv. 98 A hot wind, like the loo of the Punjab.
1954 O. H. K. Spate India & Pakistan ii. 55 In the NW hot weather depressions generally take the form of violent dust-storms… Such dust-storms are distinct from the loo, a very hot dust-laden wind which may blow for days on end.
1965 E. Ahmad Bihar iv. 45 The hot scorching ‘loo’ winds of the Bihar plains during late April and May have an average velocity of 5–10 miles per hour.
1974 M. Peissel Great Himalayan Passage xi. 175 The Loo is caused by the hot expanding air of the Indian plains rushing into the cool hills.

Looking up Sanskrit ulkā (उल्का) I find it defined as “A fiery phenomenon in the sky, a meteor; A fire-brand, torch; Fire, flame”; Wiktionary says it “is related to Sanskrit वर्चस्- (várcas-, ‘luster’), from a root Proto-Indo-Iranian *waRč-.”
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In 2019 Richard Janko published a long article “Amber inscribed in Linear B from Bernstorf in Bavaria: New Light on the Mycenaean Kingdom of Pylos” in Bavarian Studies in History and Culture; here’s the abstract:

In 2000 the extensive fortified citadel of Bernstorf near Munich in Germany, which burned down in or after c. 1320 BC and had already yielded some gold regalia of rather Aegean appearance, produced two amber objects seemingly inscribed in Linear B. The authenticity of these objects has been questioned, on grounds that are as yet insufficient. A new reading suggests links with a place called *Ti-nwa-to, the existence of which is attested by the Mycenaean archives at Pylos and possibly at Knossos. Women from this place worked at both palatial centers as weavers, but it also had a wealthy ‘governor’. An analysis of the Pylos tablets suggests that this place was in western Arcadia. This material sheds light on long-distance connections in Mycenaean times.

It starts with a lengthy description of the finds and their authenticity, continues with “Reactions to the discoveries” (“the finds at Bernstorf were too outlandish and remote for them to have attracted much notice from scholars of the Aegean Bronze Age, a field which has seen some notorious forgeries and hoaxes”), and proceeds to Janko’s own “fresh approach,” which involves interpreting the inscription “??? pa-nwa-ti” as ti-nwa-to, comparing it to other forms attested in the Linear B tablets, and concluding that it represents a place in the Western Peloponnese. There follows a detailed discussion of possible locations and implications, with “some hypotheses”:

If the amber from Bernstorf was incised with Linear B in the western Peloponnese, how did it reach Upper Bavaria, and why? Even in the Middle Bronze Age, valuable artifacts could travel vast distances. One can only offer hypotheses, since it is not clear on what basis we could decide between them, but at least only a limited number of them are available; considering them will shed light on several aspects of Mycenaean long-distance relations. If these objects are genuinely from Mycenaean Greece, they must either have been traded by Mycenaeans, taken from them by force, or paid by them for services of some kind, the most obvious of which is service in a force of mercenaries. They could then of course have been traded great distances, as far as Bernstorf, by other intermediaries. […] The whole story may never be known, but the discovery of Linear B in Upper Bavaria opens a surprising new window onto the Mycenaeans and their far-flung connections.

This kind of thing is extraordinarily interesting in theory, but I can’t help but feel that it’s an awful lot to make of a few scratches on a piece of amber. I’ll be curious to see what others think.

Erik McDonald has posted about the Russian word несессер ‘special container (bag, box, case, etc.) for small items’; as you might guess, this is from French nécessaire ‘box, case, briefcase, kit containing various necessary or convenient objects (for an occupation, an activity)’. The French word was also borrowed into English, and the OED entry (s.v. nécessaire) was updated in June 2003:

A small case, sometimes ornamental, for personal articles such as pencils, scissors, tweezers, cosmetics, etc.

1800 E. Hervey Mourtray Family III. ix. 177 A chance of his travelling necessaire, and all the apparatus of his toilet, being burned.
1854 W. M. Thackeray Newcomes I. xxviii. 266 Gousset empty, tiroirs empty, nécessaire parted for Strasbourg!
1876 ‘G. Eliot’ Daniel Deronda I. i. ii. 29 Gwendolen..thrust necklace, cambric..and all into her nécessaire.
[…]
1960 Times 16 Feb. 20/7 An old English gold and agate necessaire.
1967 V. Nabokov Speak, Memory (rev. ed.) xiii. 253 The handful of jewels which Natasha, a farsighted old chambermaid,..had swept off a dresser into a nécessaire.
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1989 Antiques Trade Gaz. 4 Mar. 50/2 (advt.) A small collection of objects of vertu including snuff boxes, etuis, necessaires, etc.

The presence or absence of italics and of the accent aigu seem quite haphazard. I wonder to what extent the word is used today. (Compare my 2019 post Indispensable.)

Via Laudator Temporis Acti, a quote from Joshua T. Katz, “What Linguists Are Good For” (Classical World 100.2 [2007]: 99-112):

To most administrators and to all too many of our own colleagues, linguists are covered in nineteenth-century dust, which is, as we all know, a far dustier dust, being tainted with old methodology, than what classical archaeologists encounter in the Roman Forum. Or, alternatively, we are interested in so-called modern linguistic techniques, but these have the stench of social science, which some of our colleagues think smells less good than the Roman sewers’ humanities. Either way, we linguists are narrowly focused misfits with a humorless eye for grammar and no interest in, much less imagination for, wider cultural questions. Such is our stereotype, but I have never met a good linguist who fit the bill (certainly none of my teachers did), and all of us must do what we can to combat it, in our scholarship and, even more important, in our teaching. Linguistics is a broad, vibrant, and result-driven discipline, not the recherché domain of fuddy-duddies, and it really shouldn’t be very difficult to persuade our students and colleagues that this is so.

It’s heartening to see an important point made so eloquently. (Of course, it applies to real linguists, not the Chomskyan kind who were so prevalent until recently. The phrase “broad, vibrant, and result-driven” is the tell-tale one.)

I was saddened to hear of Roger Angell’s death — though not surprised, since he was 101 years old. He was the greatest baseball writer who ever lived (and he only got into the Hall of Fame by the skin of his teeth, since the sportswriters who do the voting didn’t have time for a magazine guy who wasn’t there day in, day out like they were); an annual highlight of my life as a fan was buying the copy of the New Yorker with his essay on the season just past, and I’ll never forget the palindromic title of the 1986 installment that culminated in the long-drawn-out, agonizing defeat of the seemingly eternally cursed Red Sox by my long-hapless, suddenly triumphant Mets: NOT SO, BOSTON. I am smuggling him into the hallowed halls of the Hattery by quoting a paragraph with an unusual verb usage, from his brilliant 1980 piece on Bob Gibson (the article link should work at the moment even for nonsubscribers, and anyone who loves the game should read the whole thing):

On another day, Omaha slowly came to a broil under a glazy white sun while Gibson and I ran some early-morning errands in his car—a visit to his bank, a stop at the drive-in window of another bank, where he picked up the payroll checks for Gibby’s—and wound up at the restaurant, where the daytime help greeted the boss cheerfully. Gibson seemed in an easy frame of mind, and he looked younger than ever. I recalled that many of his teammates had told me what good company he was in the dugout and on road trips—on days when he wasn’t pitching. He was a comical, shrill-voiced bench jockey, and a grouchy but lighthearted clubhouse agitator, who was sometimes known to bang a bat repeatedly and horribly on the metal locker of a teammate who was seen to be suffering the aftereffects of too many ice-cream sodas the previous evening. While he drove, Gibson, with a little urging, recalled how he had pitched to some of the prime hitters of his day—inside fastballs to Willie Mays (who feasted on breaking pitches), belt-high inside deliveries to Eddie Mathews, low and away to Roberto Clemente, and so on. He said that Frank Robinson used to deceive pitchers with his plate-crowding (Robinson was a right-handed slugger of fearsome power, whose customary stance at the plate was that of an impatient subway traveller leaning over the edge of the platform and peering down the tracks for the D train), because they took it to mean that he was eager for an inside pitch. “Besides,” he said, “they’d be afraid of hitting him and putting him on base. So they’d work him outside, and he’d hit the shit out of the ball. I always tried him inside, and I got him out there—sometimes. He was like Willie Mays—if you got the ball outside to Willie at all, he’d just kill you. The same with Clemente. I could throw him a fastball knee-high on the outside corner seventeen times in a row, but if I ever got it two inches up, he’d hit it out of sight. That’s the mark of a good hitter—the tiniest mistake and he’ll punish you. Other batters—well, somebody like Joe Adcock was just a guess hitter. You’d pitch him up and in, and he’d swing and miss every time. He just didn’t give a damn. I don’t know what’s the matter with so many hitters—it’s like their brains small up.” He shook his head and laughed softly. “Me, too. I got beat by Tommy Davis twice the same way. In one game, I’d struck him out three times on sliders away. But I saw that he’d been inching up and inching up toward that part of the plate, so I decided to fool him and come inside, and he hit a homer and beat me, one-oh. And then, in another game, I did exactly the same thing. I tried to outthink him, and he hit the inside pitch for a homer, and it was one-oh all over again. So I could get dumb, too.”

(I read aloud much of that paragraph, like so much else in the essay, to my wife, lingering with especial delight on “whose customary stance at the plate was that of an impatient subway traveller leaning over the edge of the platform and peering down the tracks for the D train.”) I was struck by Gibson’s “it’s like their brains small up”; the OED has an entry for the unusual verb to small (1. transitive. To make thin or small; to lessen, reduce. Also with down. […] 2. intransitive. To become thin or small; to diminish, grow less. Also with down, off), but no examples of it with up. Here are a couple of recent citations:

1999 National Geographic Dec. 47/2 The deer adapted to their environment by smalling down and enjoying having Big Pine to themselves.
2002 S. Burke Deadwater viii. 75 Her voice smalled off so pathetically that he might have hugged her but that she was responding too well.

Maybe now Gibby will make it in to the OED on Angell’s wings.
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