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In one of those lists of Words for Things You Didn’t Know Had Names (e.g.) I saw an entry for vagitus ‘the cry of a new-born child.’ My initial reaction was skepticism — I assumed it was a Latin word dragged kicking and screaming into an English context where it didn’t belong — but a look at the OED (entry from 1986) showed that it is in fact used, however rarely:

a1651 Thou hast not yet the strength of a well grown Christian; well, but is there the vagitus of an Infant?
N. Culverwell, White Stone in Elegant Discourse of Light of Nature (1652) ii. 119

1825 Vagitus, the cry of young children; also the distressing cry of persons under surgical operations.
R. Hooper, Lexicon Medicum (ed. 5) 1237/1

1921 The various inspired articles..hardly went beyond the vagitus, the earliest cry of the new-born method.
19th Century & After July 28

1938 To go back no further than the vagitus, it had not been the proper A of international concert pitch,..but the double flat of this.
S. Beckett, Murphy v. 71

1957 He actually seemed to forehear the babe’s vagitus.
V. Nabokov, Pnin ii. 47

1977 My speech was to be nothing more than a vagitus, an infantile cry.
A. Sheridan, translation of J. Lacan, Écrits iii. 31

The etymology is simplicity itself: “Latin, < vāgīre to utter cries of distress, to wail.” And the pronunciation — pay attention, now — is /vəˈdʒʌɪtəs/ (vuh-JYE-tus, first two syllables as in vagina); if you’re going to use this extremely obscure and marginal word, make sure you know how to say it.

As dubious as I am about it, I give it major props for having been used by Beckett and Nabokov; if it’s OK with two of the greatest prose writers in English, who am I to say it nay?
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My wife and I are reading Nancy Mitford’s 1945 novel The Pursuit Of Love (as AJP recommended back in 2012) and we reached a passage that prefigured her famous 1954 essay “The English Aristocracy” and the Alan S. C. Ross article it was based on, about U and non-U English:

Uncle Matthew and Aunt Emily were now engaged upon an argument we had all heard many times before. It concerned the education of females.

Uncle Matthew: ‘I hope poor Fanny’s school (the word school pronounced in tones of withering scorn) is doing her all the good you think it is. Certainly she picks up some dreadful expressions there.’

Aunt Emily, calmly, but on the defensive: ‘Very likely she does. She also picks up a good deal of education.’

Uncle Matthew: ‘Education! I was always led to believe that no educated person ever spoke of notepaper, and yet I hear poor Fanny asking Sadie for notepaper. What is this education? Fanny talks about mirrors and mantlepieces, handbags and perfume, she takes sugar in her coffee, has a tassel on her umbrella, and I have no doubt that, if she is ever fortunate enough to catch a husband, she will call his father and mother Father and Mother. Will the wonderful education she is getting make up to the unhappy brute for all these endless pinpricks? Fancy hearing one’s wife talking about notepaper – the irritation!’

Aunty Emily: ‘A lot of men would find it more irritating to have a wife who had never heard of George III. (All the same, Fanny darling, it is called writing paper you know – don’t let’s hear any more about the note, please.)’

For notepaper, mirror, mantlepiece, and perfume, see the list at the Wikipedia article I linked above; I don’t know what the problem with handbags is, or why one should not take sugar in one’s coffee or have a tassel on one’s umbrella, but I’m sure someone here will enlighten me.

I knew, of course, that Blighty was an old-fashioned term for Britain, and I had the idea that it came from Hindustani, but having looked it up I find the details interesting enough to post. Wikipedia says:

“Blighty” is a British English slang term for Great Britain, or often specifically England. Though it was used throughout the 1800s in the Indian subcontinent to mean an English or British visitor, it was first used during the Boer War in the specific meaning of homeland for the English or the British. From World War I and afterward, that use of the term became widespread.

The word ultimately derives from the Persian word viletī, (from a regional Hindustani language with the use of b replacing v) meaning ‘foreign’, which more specifically came to mean ‘European’, and ‘British; English’ during the time of the British Raj. The Bengali word is a loan of Indian Persian vilāyatī (ولایاتی), from vilāyat (ولایت) meaning ‘Iran’ and later ‘Europe’ or ‘Britain’, ultimately from Arabic wilāyah ولاية‎ meaning ‘state, province’. […]

Blighty is commonly used as a term of endearment by the expatriate British community or those on holiday to refer to home. In Hobson-Jobson, an 1886 historical dictionary of Anglo-Indian words, Henry Yule and Arthur Coke Burnell explained that the word came to be used in British India for several things the British had brought into the country, such as the tomato and soda water.

Wiktionary also refers to Hobson-Jobson, but I can’t find the word in either my fat paperback copy or the online versions I’ve checked — the relevant entry seems to be this one:

BILAYUT, BILLAIT, &c. n.p. Europe. The word is properly Ar. Wilāyat, ‘a kingdom, a province,’ variously used with specific denotation, as the Afghans term their own country often by this name; and in India again it has come to be employed for distant Europe. In Sicily Il Regno is used for the interior of the island, as we use Mofussil in India. Wilāyat is the usual form in Bombay.

The OED (entry revised 2014) just says “< Urdu bilāyatī, regional variant of vilāyatī vilayati adj.”; the real meat is at that vilayati entry (first added in 2014). The definition is “South Asian. A foreigner; (originally) esp. an English, British, or European person,” and the etymology:

< (i) Urdu vilāyatī (also regional bilāyatī) and its etymon (ii) Persian vilāyatī foreign, especially British or European < vilāyat inhabited country, dominion, district (see Vilayat n.) + ‑ī, suffix forming adjectives expressing belonging (see ‑i suffix²).

Notes
The Urdu adjective is also reflected in occasional earlier borrowings of phrases, as e.g. Belattee Sahib, Blighty Sahib, literally ‘foreign gentleman’ (1833 or earlier; < vilāyatī šāḥib; compare sahib n.) and belaitee panee, belati pani soda water (1835 or earlier; < Urdu vilāyatī pānī, literally ‘foreign water’; compare pani n.).

In any case, it’s an enjoyable word, and I’m sorry it fell out of fashion.

John Jamieson’s Humanising the text: Walter Benjamin and machine translation has a good deal to say about Walter Benjamin’s ideas about language and understanding a text, as well as “the seemingly inexorable drift we are seeing towards a disembodied language — the language of machine translation output and AI.” He begins with “an article in a Finnish philosophy magazine about a new collection of Walter Benjamin essays translated into Finnish” and says:

The essential idea I gleaned from the article was the contemporary — that is to say, occurring about 100 years ago — decline in the art of storytelling. Particularly in “The Storyteller” (Der Erzähler), his essay devoted to the Russian author Nikolai Leskov, Benjamin describes and laments a transition from the epic genre, storytelling and the “exchange of experience” — firstly to printed texts and the novel, and then ultimately to mere “information”.

This transition from relationships to information provides a very useful and suggestive framework for describing linguistic communication on all sorts of different scales, and on many different levels, from the most general — the evolution of language as such — to the most specific — ie what happens every time we open our mouths or listen to what someone is saying to us.

It seems to me that the starting point on Benjamin’s transition — the genuine exchange of experience — is basically where speech comes from, where it originates.

But what I want to highlight, as usual, is the part where he gets specific:
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This one-and-a-half-minute video by Khalid Al Ameri will give you a brief introduction to some of the languages of India, as well as a good laugh. (Via Language Log.)

A guest Log post by Bob Ladd opened my eyes to a language issue I had never noticed:

A few days ago I received an editorial decision letter from a journal, which included a request to deal with a few typos. I had begun a sentence with the phrase “In the interests of brevity,” and the editor wanted me to remove the final -s from the word “interests”. Since I know that the editor is not a native speaker of English, my first reaction was to ignore the request, but I thought I should back up my insistence that this was not a typo with some sort of evidence, so I searched for the phrases “in the interests of” and “in the interest of” on Google n-grams. To my surprise, I discovered that both versions of the expression occur, with a roughly 60:40 preference for the version with “interest”, and that this proportion has been roughly stable since the early 20th century. Since Google’s book corpus permits the user to distinguish British and American English, I could also see that the version with “interests” is more common in BrEng and the version with “interest” in AmEng, but that both versions occur in both varieties.

He ends up with this:

I have never seen this difference cited as an example of British/American variation, and nor do I know of any prescriptive grumbling about people using the wrong version. In fact, until I received the editorial review last week, I was completely unaware of the existence of this variation. The consistency in my own writing suggests that individual speakers may settle on one form or the other and use it exclusively, but that the choice is essentially random.

Since modern sociolinguistics has made clear that much variation is meaningful, this conclusion is vaguely troubling. Only one observation from Google n-grams suggests something other than randomness: there is a striking diachronic difference that suggests that the choice between the two versions may once have meant something. Over the two centuries of the Google Books corpus, AmEng consistently prefers the version with “interest” in a ratio of about 3:1, while in BrEng there was a marked shift in the second half of the 19th century: over the course of 50 years or so British usage swung from 3:1 in favour of “interest” (as in AmEng) to 3:1 in favour of “interests”. The new British preference for “interests” then remains consistent through the 20th century, and this is what averages out to the 60:40 proportion in 20th century English as a whole. Could there have been a social motivation for the change in British usage?

For what it’s worth, here’s what the OED (entry revised 2024) says:
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Via Andrew Garrett’s Facebook post, I once again learn of a death so recent Wikipedia hasn’t yet included it:

We are all saddened by the death of Prof. Robin Lakoff. Robin came to Berkeley in 1972, the year in which her book Language and Women’s Place created the modern field of language and gender. She was an articulate, passionate, and impactful writer in that field, in Latin linguistics (her book Abstract Syntax and Latin Complementation was published in 1968), and in language and politics (Talking Power, 1990; The Language War, 2000). After her retirement in 2012, she shared her memories in an oral-history interview: https://150w.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/lakoff_robin.pdf.

I’ve long admired her, but I don’t seem to have posted about her. That interview is interesting reading; here’s a section about MIT/Chomsky (and the salad days of lingistics as a profession):

Robin Lakoff:
Haj Ross, officially John Robert Ross, was part of our cohort at MIT. This was the mid to late sixties. And Haj was just wonderful. He was a terrific teacher, a brilliant theorist, great syntactician, wonderful in all kinds of ways. And, the way the MIT linguistics department was working then was that if you had the favor of God (aka Chomsky) and they wanted to hire you, you literally were hired to be an Assistant Professor the moment the ink on the title page on your dissertation was dry, and very shortly thereafter you got tenure.

Paula Fass:
Oh my goodness.

Robin Lakoff:
And in general, people got their degrees in a very short time. Linguistics in the mid sixties to mid seventies was extraordinary in the way it worked, very different from anything you see now, anywhere or the way most departments did it back then. So Haj got tenure in about 1968. But a group (of which I was a member) was beginning to invent a form of linguistics that was very different from what Chomsky was doing. We eventually came to call ourselves “generative semantics.” Chomsky, who is an anarchist in his political thought, is an archist in linguistics. He does not brook any argument: it was his way or the highway. Haj was a member of this group and it soon became clear that the work that he was doing wasn’t what Chomsky wanted done, and over the next few years every year he moved further away from MIT into the Boston suburbs and became more and more estranged from MIT. So it was not unreasonable to suppose, by 1971, that he could be tempted away from MIT.

And a bit from later on that gave me pleasure: “Reagan was still governor and of course he was busy firing Clark Kerr, and stuff like that. So maybe there was more freedom for people below him in the chain of command to do unusual things.” I like her style.

Addendum. I won’t make a separate post of this, but Ives Goddard has also died; the Algonquian Conference FB post quotes the obituary from the Smithsonian:

Ives Goddard III (1941-2025) passed away peacefully in his sleep on the evening of August 6. Ives earned his A.B. (1963) and Ph.D. (1969) from Harvard University. Following a stint as a junior professor at Harvard after his Ph.D., in 1975 he came to the Smithsonian to work as a linguist and as the technical editor of the Handbook of North American Indians. After he retired in 2007, he continued his research as a curator emeritus.

Ives was a renowned linguist known as a leading expert on Algonquian languages. He wrote his dissertation on Unami (Delaware/Lenape) morphology and has published extensively on the Unami community’s linguistic diversity. Goddard also wrote grammatical studies, dictionaries, and editions of texts in the Meskwaki (Fox) language as well as the Wampanoag (Massachusetts) and Munsee (Delaware/Lenape) languages. He contributed to the methodology of historical linguistics and demonstrated the value of archival materials for language revitalization. He was the Oxford English Dictionary’s chief consultant for all words of Indigenous American origin. And he was the author and editor of 15 books and more than 300 articles and book chapters.

He will be fondly remembered for his dry wit, encyclopedic knowledge of Indigenous languages, generosity to language learners and to other scholars, and passionate support for linguistics and language revitalization.

Back in 2017 I rejoiced that “The Australian National Dictionary has been made available online, free.” Now I learn from the great Jonathon Green that it is no longer being supported:

I approached the story of Australian slang lexicography in my history of the craft, Language! in 2014. Now, with the flimsy but ever-advocated justification of economic tightening, it seems that the Australian National Dictionary, home to all forms of Antipodean coinage and certainly not merely slang, and acknowledged as the jewel in Godzone’s lexical crown, is facing the chop. The literate end of bogan-world is no longer cashed up, the mazuma is no longer on offer for running the lexicon, now working on a third edition, and all the pleas (mine included) in favour of continuing with so vital a resource, are getting the arse.

I don’t imagine that what follows will help mitigate this undeniable tragedy, but for what it may be worth I offer Language’s take on Australia’s first dictionary-maker and the nation-building dictionary he made more than two centuries past.

Go, feast your eyes on the image of the gorgeous Second Edition, read the rest of his account, and if you happen to be Australian you might want to pester the appropriate bastards.

Another Hattic passage from David Daiches’ Two Worlds (see this post):

My father seemed to take for granted that his own vast knowledge of Hebrew and rabbinics and Jewish religious philosophy would somehow filter down to us without too much active effort on his part. His own strenuous youth, in which he absorbed two different streams of education with a completeness that has always astonished me, was part of a world he had put behind him; he did not seem to expect us to emulate his own extraordinary feats of academic endurance. We belonged to the modern western world which he had trained himself to cope with and to which he had so thoroughly adjusted his own religious position without giving up anything material in Jewish orthodoxy. Our Jewish knowledge and traditions we would get as a matter of course, because we were Daicheses and his sons; our secular education we must work for. He thus took great interest in our schooling and would talk to us about our progress in Latin and Greek and mathematics, throwing Greek quotations from the Odyssey at us to see if we could translate them or asking what proposition in Euclid we were working at. True, he gave us Hebrew lessons, and as far as I can remember I was able to read Hebrew before I could read English (I suspect it was my mother who taught me to read both languages): I cannot recollect a time when the reading of Hebrew did not come automatically to me. But his lessons were unsystematic and sporadic, and were sometimes interrupted by urgent telephone calls or unexpected visitors. Every Friday night we sang, in the traditional intonation, the following Saturday’s portion of the law and the prophets, and so learned the synagogue cantillation by a gradual process of familiarisation — we never deliberately sat down to memorise it. From an early age I was able to sing any passage at sight. And I picked up biblical Hebrew by translating hundreds of passages in no sort of order and with no sort of system; I just found myself eventually able to read with understanding almost any part of the Hebrew Bible. To this day, if I am asked (as I occasionally am) how much Hebrew I know, I find it difficult to answer: it has often turned out that I know more than I think I know. Every now and again my father would decide that we did not know enough systematic Hebrew grammar and would bring in from his study a dusty copy of Gesenius’s Hebrew grammar and ask us to memorise the paradigms of verbs. But he would never stay long at this sort of thing. In the same sporadic way he would decide suddenly that it was time Lionel and I learned some Talmud, and he would appear with one of the huge volumes and take us at a galloping pace through Baba Mezia, ‘the Middle Gate’, with its famous opening deciding the proper legal procedure and judgment if two men simultaneously come across and seize upon a lost garment (‘really seize it’, comments Rashi in his commentary on the commentary on the legal core of the passage). Or he would have a spell at mediaeval Hebrew poetry, or at Rashi’s commentary on the Pentateuch (by some odd freak of memory I can still reel off the opening sentences of Rashi on Genesis): and once he thrust on me a Hebrew translation of Eugene Sue’s Mysteries of Paris. He always professed himself surprised that we did not know more than we did, forgetting that as he was our teacher the responsibility was his. Once he suddenly said to me at dinner: ‘If you were hiking in Palestine and wanted to find a place to spend the night, how would you explain yourself in Hebrew to a passer by?’ and he laughed with a mixture of good-nature and reproof when I said ‘hayesh po makom lagur’ (is there here a place to sojourn?) instead of ‘hayesh po makom lalun’ (is there here a place ‘to lodge for the night?).

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Marta Balcewicz has an amusing NY Times piece (archived) on why people have finally stopped butchering her name:

There was a time when I regularly guided people to pronounce my surname like that of David Berkowitz, also known as the Son of Sam. The worst part wasn’t pinning my identity to a serial killer but that our names in fact sound nothing alike, making the whole effort doubly pitiful. Berkowitz, being a person of notoriety, just provided a useful shortcut. He spared me from needing to explain the Polish rules of Bahl-TZEH-veech — the “C” and “W” reading as “Z” and “V,” the stress on the penultimate syllable, the final digraph possessing the gritty “ch-” of “churn” and not the soft one of “cheese,” an exquisitely subtle distinction most English speakers may not even recognize.

I have never gone out of my way to teach people around me how to properly say my name or to correct them when they butcher it; the task always struck me as Sisyphean. So a little while ago, I was startled when a bookseller in Toronto named Kyle got it right on the first try. I thanked him. But what could explain his flawless delivery? As my partner and I walked home debating the question, an epiphany came my way: “Kyle said he was a huge basketball fan!”

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