languagehat.com

I usually ignore these “word of the year” stories, which are basically clickbait for lexicographers, but hell, this one (by Helen Bushby for BBC) includes splooting (“The act of lying flat on the stomach with the legs stretched out” — see this LH post), so how could I not post it? This one is useful:

Carolean: Of or relating to Charles III of Great Britain and Northern Ireland or his reign.

And the story also gives me a hook to vent about the repulsive term “quiet quitting,” defined as “The practice of doing no more work than one is contractually obliged to do, especially in order to spend more time on personal activities” — in other words, what I would call “doing what you’re paid to do.” The modern world has many terrible features, but one of the ones that makes me grind my teeth the hardest is the general acceptance of the idea that you owe your employer every speck of your time and brainpower (and this has, of course, only gotten worse with everyone being eternally connected). You’re probably not paid enough anyway, unless you’re a CEO or entertainment star; you don’t owe them a damn thing beyond what you were hired to do. Solidarity forever! (Thanks for the link go to the excellent cuchuflete, who is of course not responsible for my wild-eyed ranting.)

My pal Monica loves odd words as much as I do, and she recently sent me one so weird I have to share it with all and sundry. OED (entry from 1976):

hoden, adj.

Pronunciation: /ˈuːdən/
Forms: Also hooden.
Etymology: Origin uncertain: perhaps from association with wooden from the wooden horse’s head.

Kentish dialect.

Of or pertaining to the horse with wooden head and clapping jaws featured in a masquerade which formerly took place, spec. in Kent, on Christmas Eve. ˈhodener n. a performer in this masquerade. ˈhodening n. the name of the performance; also attributive.

1807 European Mag. 51 358 This [mumming] is called, provincially, a Hodening, and the figure above described a Hoden, or Woden horse.
1887 W. D. Parish & W. F. Shaw Dict. Kentish Dial. 77 Hoodening.., the name formerly given to a mumming or masquerade.
1891 Church Times 2 Jan. 20/1 ‘Hodening’ still goes on..at Deal and Walmer.
1909 P. Maylam Hooden Horse i. 2 Everyone springs up, saying, ‘The hoodeners have come, let us go and see the fun.’
[…]
1966 G. E. Evans Pattern under Plough xix. 193 The hobby-horses that appear in many countryside ceremonies and ritual dances, notably the Hodening Horse.
1971 Country Life 17 June 1533/1 The Hooden Horse, a mystic man-animal found only in East Kent, will be at large in Folkestone..June 19.

So much weirdness here, starting with the pronunciation, as if it were “ooden”! If there’s no /h/, why is it spelled that way? Do they no longer have the masquerade at all, even in the remoter regions of the county? Does the expression survive even if the thing itself has vanished? Any Kentishpersons (or persons of Kentishness) among my readership?

Via Catriona Kelly’s Facebook post (with some nice photos) I learn of the best church name ever, Saint Vedast-alias-Foster:

Saint Vedast Foster Lane or Saint Vedast-alias-Foster, a church in Foster Lane, in the City of London, is dedicated to St. Vedast (Foster is an Anglicisation of the name “Vaast”, as the saint is known in continental Europe), a French saint whose cult arrived in England through contacts with Augustinian clergy.

And if we follow that Vedast link, we discover that he’s called Saint Gaston in French. You first, my dear Gaston!

I just learned something interesting from M-W’s Word History post Why Jaywalking is Called Jaywalking:

The meaning of jaywalker is different than it was when it first began to be used. The word was formed in imitation of a slightly older word, the jay-driver. This initially referred to a driver of horse-drawn carriages or automobiles who refused to abide by the traffic laws in a fairly specific way: they drove on the wrong side of the road.

An article in The Junction City Union (Junction City, Kansas) on June 28th, 1905 begins “Nearly every day someone calls our attention to articles that have been appearing in The Kansas City Star concerning ‘The Jay Driver’”, and then goes on to warn against these miscreants who cannot seem to figure out that they should be driving on the right side of the road.

Stop at the corner of any well traveled street in the business part of the city and see how many know how to drive—that is to keep to the right hand side of the street—and you will be astonished at the number who don’t know that this is the right way to do or who are careless in regard to the matter.

In October of that same year in The Kansas City Star, we find mention of the pedestrian version of these drivers:

Much annoyance would be obviated if people when meeting others going in the opposite direction would keep to the right and avoid collisions and being called a ‘jay walker.’

For the first few years that it was in use jaywalker had little, if anything, to do with pedestrians crossing the street, and was used solely to scold those who lacked sidewalk etiquette.

Both jaywalker and jay-driver are taken from a sense of the word jay, meaning ‘a greenhorn, or rube’. It is unclear why jaywalker shifted its meaning and survived for more than a hundred years now, while jay-driver languishes in obscurity. And if you are one of those who find the conduct of the jaywalker objectionable beyond words, take heart, for the sentiments of early 20th century America are in line with yours; in the words of The Chanute Daily Tribune in 1909: “The jay walker needs attention as well as the jay driver, and is about as big a nuisance.”

The OED (entry not updated since 1933) will presumably catch up to this derivation when they get around to revising the jaywalker entry, which currently says simply “Etymology: < jay n. 3d + walker n.¹.”

I am definitely not “one of those who find the conduct of the jaywalker objectionable beyond words”; as a proud New Yorker, even if I no longer live in the city, I think of jaywalking as a noble tradition, and am delighted to learn that California has eased up on its former notoriously intolerant laws. (I am, on the other hand, depressed to see the sloppy copyediting in the M-W post: the stray “The” in “The Junction City Union” and “The Kansas City Star,” no italics in “The Kansas City Star,” and only one properly italicized usage in “The Chanute Daily Tribune” — though my personal preference would be to ignore “The” in the names and just say, e.g., “the Kansas City Star.”)

In unrelated news, New giant bookstore in east Japan hopes to offer ‘treasure hunt’ with 500,000 volumes — holy cow!

In response to Dave Wilton’s Big List post on the words Gaelic, Gaul, and Gallic, zythophile wrote:

As I’m sure you know, Dave, the Irish tale of the was betweeb Brian Boru and the Vikings is called Cogad Gáedel re Gallaib, generally rendered in English as The war between the Gael and the Gall. I have long wondered about rhe origins of Gall meaning foreigner here, but I have yet to find an explanation.

Dave responded:

My knowledge of Celtic languages is close to zero. But my wild-ass guess is that Gall is cognate with Gael and both have a generic meaning of “people.” Gallaibh means foreigner and is literally something like not-Irish. That’s just guess work based on how demonyms work generically across languages.

I do see in the eDil—Irish Language Dictionary that finn-gaill means Norseman, dub-gaill means Dane.

I’m pretty sure the “Gall” here is just an Anglicization of the Irish root.

And I said:

For what it’s worth, James Henthorn Todd’s 1867 edition says:

The love of alliteration appears in the very title of the work, Cogadh Gaedhil re Gallaibh, “The wars of the Gaedhel with the Gaill,” or of the Irish with the Foreigners. Gall was in all probability a name given to all strangers who spoke a foreign language, and were therefore at first confounded with the Galli, or Gauls, the foreigners best known to the aboriginal Irish.

I have no idea what current Celticists say, but it would be interesting to find out.

I just looked up Gall in eDIL and found “(a) Oldest meaning a Gaul […] (b) a Scandinavian invader (finn-gaill being the Northmen, dub-gaill the Danes) […] (c) an Anglo-Norman, an Irishman of Norman descent, an Englishman […] (d) a foreigner […] (e) Hebridean.” Which would seem to support Todd’s guess, but I’m curious to find out if anyone knows more about the term. (The Cogadh Gáedhel re Gallaibh turned up in this post from last year.)

I normally read in chronological order; aside from my Long March from the beginning of Russian literature to now, if I get interested in a particular author I’ll start with the earliest stuff and work my way forward. But it’s a good thing I didn’t do that with the late and little-remembered Irina Polyanskaya (Russian Wikipedia — she doesn’t have an article in any other language), because if I had I might never have read her last and (to my mind) best novel, Горизонт событий [Event horizon]. As it is, when I got up to 2002 in the Long March, I noticed in my Russian Prose Chronology that someone had said of it “History is the thread that links the many heroes and personages of this virtuosically constructed, multifarious, intellectual novel,” so I decided to give it a try — if I didn’t like it, I could turn to something else. As it happened, I got more and more engrossed in it, and then the excellent translator Oliver Ready, who has Englished Dostoevsky, Yuri Buida, and Vladimir Sharov, among others, told me he was working on a translation of Polyanskaya’s earlier novel Прохождение тени [The passing/transit of a/the shadow] and highly recommended it, so I went backwards in time and read that, and I’m here to report on the experience.

It starts with a bravura chapter describing a solar eclipse as experienced by the students at a music school in the Caucasus, providing an obvious hook for the title (though there are lots of subtly deployed uses of тень ‘shadow’ throughout); we then see the (unnamed) heroine’s arrival at the school, her encounter with the four blind young men who will be her main companions in the “present-tense” sections (one a Georgian, two from Ossetia, and one from Taganrog), her reluctant acceptance as a piano student (“Исполнителя из вас не получится” [You’ll never be a performer]), and her being assigned to the same group as the four blind students on the basis of their all having perfect pitch. We then start getting flashback chapters describing her earlier life as the daughter of a nuclear scientist and a woman who defied her family to marry him and then regretted it: her early years in the Gulag camp where her father was allowed to carry on his research after being arrested because he was taken prisoner by the Germans in the war and worked for them, and the time spent with her grandmother in Rostov-on-Don (the former Старопочтовая улица [Old Post Office Street], now Улица Станиславского [Stanislavsky Street], and its now vanished bourgeois inhabitants with their high culture are lovingly described). There are some tremendously effective set pieces in the latter sections (her father as a young suitor arriving at his girlfriend’s home for the first time and gallantly tossing a large bouquet of roses at her mother’s feet, flowers the mother vindictively tosses into the stove as soon as he leaves; the young wife about to end the marriage for good when news arrives that war has begun and her husband leaves for the front; the tragedy that plays out when the Germans take over Rostov and drunken soldiers invade the family’s home), but Polyanskaya’s heart isn’t really in storytelling — what she cares about is what lies behind daily events, some combination of philosophy and esthetics as applied to history and personal fate.
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I just used the word bemused and suddenly asked myself where it had come from. I said to my wife “I wonder if it has anything to do with the Muses?” but was more or less joking — I didn’t see how that would work. But lo and behold, per M-W:

In 1735, British poet Alexander Pope lamented, in rhyme, being besieged by “a parson much bemus’d in beer.” The cleric in question was apparently one of a horde of would-be poets who plagued Pope with requests that he read their verses. Pope meant that the parson had found his muse—his inspiration—in beer. That use of bemused harks back to a 1705 letter in which Pope wrote of “Poets … irrecoverably Be-mus’d.” In both letter and poem, Pope used bemused to allude to being inspired by or devoted to one of the Muses, the Greek sister goddesses of art, music, and literature. The lexicographers who followed him, however, interpreted “bemus’d in beer” as meaning “left confused by beer,” and their confusion gave rise to the first modern sense of bemuse above. The newer (and common) use of bemuse to mean “to cause to have feelings of wry or tolerant amusement” is a topic of some dispute, as discussed here.

Whodathunkit! And I must say, knowing the origin of the “correct” sense in a misunderstanding makes me a lot more tolerant of the newer use that is “a topic of some dispute”; we discussed that back in 2012, when I quoted the AHD entry. I did not notice a decade ago, but do now, that that AHD entry is missing an etymology, which bemuses (but does not amuse) me.

Anne Enright’s NYRB essay on reading Ulysses (January 13, 2022; archived) is interesting in general, but I’m posting it for this passage near the end:

For some years now, I have lived close to the Joyce Museum in Sandycove, which is housed in the Martello tower where Joyce once slept and where he later set the first chapter of Ulysses. The sea, I am happy to say, is no more snot-green than Homer’s was wine-dark. But though the water resists Joyce’s famous description, the squat, round stone tower belongs almost completely now to the book. It is populated by shades both fictional and historical, and by living people who are their familiars. I walk through a neighborhood of Joyce tourists and badly behaved Joycean ghosts. There, up the road, is the house where the real playwright J.M. Synge lived and a fictional Dedalus pissed against the hall door—unless, as he says, it was Mulligan. (“—Me! Stephen exclaimed. That was your contribution to literature.”) Another example of Joyce fixing the real to the literary by a transgressive use of waste matter.

Recently, just to get the full experience, I sat on a bench near the Forty Foot, the swimming spot below the Martello tower where Buck Mulligan goes for his dip, and I read a page or two. It was a mild September afternoon. The day was so windless and still, I could hear a man address a quiet friend, one leaving, one arriving, both of them with their towels rolled.

“Hello there, young Thomas,” he said. “Were you aware that a certain gentleman is home this week? Your presence may be required.”

And it seemed to me a continuation of the book I held in my hand.

The dialogue in Ulysses uses tricks of speech that are as real and abiding as the streets of the city that Joyce worked so hard to recreate. This tone is not exactly camp, but it is rakish, mock-heroic; a glittering game that fills the verbal space between men who like each other—but not too much!

“I’ve been in since four,” the man went on, cheerfully. “Went for a walk, took a Barry White in the new jacks they have up there. Lovely.” The local council had recently reopened a nearby public restroom, so this good news was both personal and civic.

“Barry White” is rhyming slang for “shite,” and “jacks” is an Irish term for the lavatory (corresponding to English jakes).

The Economist has a pungent piece (archived) titled “Phrasebooks are dying out” but really about the oddities to be found in them. Some excerpts:

The phrasebook had looked so helpful. When Eric Newby, a writer, set out to walk in the Hindu Kush in 1956, he knew he would be visiting places no Englishman had been since 1891. Nonetheless, he was hopeful of communicating. In his bag he carried “Notes on the Bashgali Language”, a phrasebook published in Calcutta in 1902. Opening it one afternoon in the high Himalayas, his hopes faded. Whereas most guidebooks explain how to order a small glass of red wine or a coffee, this offered phrases of more opaque utility.

“Ini ash ptul p’mich e manchi mrisht waria’m” ran one which, it explained, meant: “I saw a corpse in a field this morning.” That was followed by “Tu tott baglo piltia” (“Thy father fell into the river”); “I non angur ai; tu ta duts angur ai” (“I have nine fingers; you have ten”); and “Ia chitt bitto tu jarlom” (“I have an intention to kill you”). Some struck a more conversational tone, such as “Tu chi se biss gur biti?” (“How long have you had a goitre?”). But on the whole the book left him with “a disturbing impression” of Bashgali life. […]

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John McWhorter has another linguistics-for-the-common-man piece, this time in the NY Times, called What Ever Happened to ‘You’? (archived). As so often with McWhorter, a good basic point (English is odd in having only one second-person pronoun) is vitiated by errors, overstatements, and just plain weirdness. Take this paragraph:

In creoles such as Jamaican patois and Gullah, which stem from a creole English created by slaves from Africa on plantations in the United States, right away a plural “you” pronoun, “unu,” was borrowed from the Nigerian language Igbo. In Gullah this comes out as “hunnuh.” For example, in the 1990s, Lawry’s Seasoned Salt ran an ad in Essence magazine, presumably in response to the film “Daughters of the Dust,” which featured Gullah dialect, with the Gullah translation for “We think great-great-great-grandma would’ve loved Lawry’s” as “Oona gal tink we’s nana beena lub de Lawry’s Seasnin’.” Why Igbo was used for creating a plural “you” is impossible to know. But the mystery itself seems almost to suggest a kind of urgency, as if the creators wanted to fix a problem so eagerly that they went with the first thing someone happened to seize on.

OK, the Igbo borrowing is fascinating (and Daughters of the Dust is a superb movie, see it if you can). But if hunnuh is a plural “you,” what’s it doing in the sentence “We think great-great-great-grandma would’ve loved Lawry’s”? Sounds like it should be first-person (inclusive “we,” maybe?). And what’s going on in the following passage?
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