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I finally finished Makanin’s 1998 novel Андеграунд, или Герой нашего времени [Underground, or A hero of our time], about a Brezhnev-era “underground writer” who stopped writing and in the early 1990s is spending his time drinking and walking the corridors of the large, run-down apartment building where he makes a semi-legal living watching people’s apartments while they’re away; it took me three weeks, but I’m not going to make a post of it, because I’m not sure what to say about it other than that it’s long, dense, complex, and worth the reading, and also because it hasn’t been translated, so what’s the point of recommending it? At any rate, I moved on to Lyudmila Ulitskaya’s (much shorter) novel Весёлые похороны [The cheerful funeral, translated as The Funeral Party], which is set — very unusually for a Russian novel! — in New York, and near the start of chapter 2 I read:

Тетка села на самый край сиденья, растопырив розовые ноги в подследниках, которые на этом континенте не водились.

Her aunt sat at the very edge of the seat, spreading her pink legs/feet in podsledniki, which are not found on this continent.

Well, of course I turned to my dictionaries for the unknown-to-me podsledniki, only to find that it wasn’t in any of them, even the huge three-volume one. Fortunately, Google came to the rescue, providing descriptions like “Чулочно носочное изделие женское и для девочек, покрывающее ступни ног частично или полностью” [Women’s and girls’ hosiery, covering the feet in part or in full] and “это своего рода хитрость, которая позволяет даже самую неудобную обувь носить с комфортом и удобством” [it’s a kind of trick that allows even the most uncomfortable shoes to be worn with comfort and convenience]. So I had a decent idea of what it was, but no clue as to what it was called in English. I turned to my wife, who after hearing the description said “Oh, you mean Peds.” I had heard that term, but didn’t know what it was, so now I knew — but that word isn’t in dictionaries either! It’s a trade name that’s become the usual term, like Kleenex, but while the latter is in the OED (“The proprietary name of an absorbent disposable cleansing paper tissue,” first citation 1925), Peds isn’t, nor is it in any other reference book available to me. I thought at least Wikipedia would help, but the article PEDS Legwear is entirely useless, providing reams of corporate-history trivia but saying nothing whatever about the origin of the name or how long it’s been in use. A Google Books search turned up evidence of its existence in 1936, if the metadata for Broadcasting are to be believed, so that’s something, but it is, frankly, shocking that I can’t find out anything more in this twenty-second year of the twenty-first century. And I can’t help suspecting that the fact that the terms and what they represent are used largely by women has more than a little to do with their absence from lexica. (Another curious fact: a Russian Language Corpus search on подследник* gets zero results, so this novel is apparently not included in the corpus, even though other books of Ulitskaya’s are.) As always, any information is welcome.

Tobias Gregory’s “Don’t break that fiddle” (LRB, 19 November 2020; archived) is a review essay about literary imitation, a topic that has long fascinated me (cf. Axe Handles, Love and Theft, Against My Will, Mimesis); I’ll quote some good bits and let you head for the links if you want more:

How is imitation taught and learned? Is it like apprenticeship to a master, a matter of acquiring skill through practice? How would the apprenticeship model work if your master wrote in another language, time and place? Is imitation a phase, to be practised by a beginner and then dispensed with? How, as a reader or critic, do you identify, evaluate and discuss literary imitation? Does it require a demonstrable verbal resemblance between old and new? How can you tell when imitation is intentional, or when a precursor’s influence has crept in unbidden? Does it matter? On what grounds do you judge whether the imitating author has produced a living child or a lifeless portrait?

These are some of the questions that a history of literary imitation will explore. It is an enormous subject. Even if you want to stick to literature – a hard enough category to circumscribe – you can’t. Plato and Aristotle, whose discussions of mimesis started the ball rolling, were concerned with the way poets imitated reality, rather than their imitation of other authors. That somewhat narrower question emerged from the Roman rhetorical tradition, which is why literary imitation has usually been denoted by the Latin imitatio rather than the Greek mimesis. But the boundary between the broader and narrower senses has never been firm, and the history of literary imitation has always been bound up with the histories of philosophy, rhetoric and education. Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Virgil, Seneca, Quintilian, Petrarch and Erasmus will figure in any serious treatment, and from there it’s up for grabs. A different book could be written for each modern vernacular literature that bears the influence of classical antiquity. A thorough account will include both theory and practice: critical and philosophical writing on imitation, and the way authors have actually gone about it. Books, articles, whole careers have been devoted to studying particular cases: Virgil imitating Homer, or Renaissance humanists imitating Cicero, or English Romantics imitating Milton, or modern novelists trying not to imitate Joyce. A historian of imitation has to survey this vast body of scholarship without becoming overwhelmed. […]

[Read more…]

Whether you play Scrabble or not, this Stefan Fatsis piece for Slate is a good read if you like words, and I know you do: “It started at dinner two Saturdays ago, where the conversation turned, as it does at tournaments, to words that were played that day and words that were not…”

I got the link via MetaFilter, where potrzebie made a comment I can’t resist sharing here:

Once when I was playing Words with Friends with someone I was telling them about how my family’s Scrabble games always go off the rails and recounted this one specific dubious word my sister clearly made up and played, hoping it was real, and we challenged it but it turned out it was in fact real, and as a direct consequence she won the game.

Not five minutes later my friend played that dubious word. Six letter word, none of the letters super rare, but still, come on. My friend hadn’t heard the word before and I just handed off the exact word they needed to use most of their tiles a couple rounds later.

This has to have been ten years ago now and I still get all these feelings every time I think about it. Scrabble is fkn wild.

(The next comment was “And the word was..?” but potrzebie hasn’t responded yet.)

Via Laudator Temporis Acti, Edwin Muir reports on his cousin Sutherland:

Whenever Sutherland got drunk he began to invent language. I can’t remember now many of his feats in this way, but he liked words with a dashing Spanish sound, like ‘yickahooka’ and ‘navahonta.’ He was so pleased with the word ‘tramcollicken,’ which he invented himself, that he gave it a specific meaning which I had better not mention; but the word became so popular that it spread all over Wyre. From somewhere or other he had picked up ‘graminivorous,’ which struck him by its comic sound, and for a long time his usual greeting was, “Weel, boy, how’s thee graminivorous tramcollicken?”

One wishes he hadn’t been so reticent about the meaning of “tramcollicken” (and one wonders why “yickahooka” and “navahonta” were thought to sound Spanish), but a very enjoyable quote, and I may have to start saying “Weel, boy, how’s thee graminivorous tramcollicken?”

I had never heard of namburbi, but it’s such a fine word I had to post it. Wikipedia sez:

The NAM-BÚR-BI are magical texts which take the form of incantations (Akkadian: namburbȗ). They were named for a series of prophylactic Babylonian and Assyrian rituals to avert inauspicious portents before they took on tangible form. At the core of these rituals was an appeal by the subject of the sinister omen to the divine judicial court to obtain a change to his impending fate. From the corpus of Babylonian-Assyrian religious texts that has survived, there are approximately one hundred and forty texts, many preserved in several copies, to which this label may be applied. […]

The Sumerian rubric, NAM-BÚR-BI, which devolved from the broader class of counter-rituals, literally means “(ritual for) undoing of it (i.e of the portended evil)” or “apotropaeon,” where the Sumerian possessive suffix BI was originally a reference to a preceding omen apodosis. The impending catastrophe identified in the apodosis was to be averted by the implementation of an apotropaic ritual. In addition to dissolution NAM-BÚR-BI, it is also a generic name for rituals, NAM-BÚR written phonetically as nappulu in late Babylonian sources. In a few ritual descriptions of the 1st millennium BC, the caption NAM-BÚR-BI is found with its general, rather than the more specific “apotropaic ritual” context.

I don’t know what it means to say “NAM-BÚR written phonetically as nappulu” — are they implying that that’s the sound represented by the cuneiform spelling? I don’t know why they start off using “NAM-BÚR-BI” (in small caps, which I’m too lazy to reproduce) and then later in the article switch to “namburbi” (multiple authors and no copyediting, I suppose). And the last paragraph is absurdly speculative: “The profound psychological effect of the release ritual cannot be underestimated. For the private individual it would have had a deep impression, akin to absolution, but to a monarch it may have altered his behavior.” But it’s an interesting topic and a great word. Thanks, Ariel!

Thanks to the comments on Dmitry Pruss’s Facebook post, I went to Wiktionary and learned (or re-learned) that the familiar Russian word чемодан (chemodan) ‘suitcase’ is “Via a Turkic medium, from Persian جامه‌دان‎ (jâme-dân, ‘suitcase’)” [literally ‘garment-holder’]. And they add this very interesting fact: “Note that this Russian term has later become the source of re-borrowing into modern Persian چمدان‎ (čamedân) and many Turkic languages.” In the FB thread, Jamile Modarress Woods wrote “Chamedan is the name of a BBC program about Iranian exiles.” Reborrowings are fun.

And the post itself featured the marvelous Russian palindrome “чемодан… а надо меч” [a suitcase… but a sword is needed], illustrated by an image of Julius Caesar being attacked by a horde of assassins. Sadly, no one thought to photoshop in a suitcase.

Addendum. I won’t make a separate post of it, but the immortal Yuz Aleshkovsky has turned out, alas, to be mortal after all; he died today in Tampa. Here’s my post about him.

Dave Wilton posted a Big List article about the history of the word bizarre that begins:

Bizarre is a word with a rather straightforward etymology. English borrowed it from French in the mid seventeenth century, which in turn had borrowed it from the Italian bizarro. But that has not stopped some baseless speculation about a weirder origin of the word.

The original Italian meaning of bizarro is angry. The word appears in Dante’s early 14th century Divine Comedy. […] In later Italian usage, bizarro developed the meaning of strange or odd, and French borrowed this meaning in the early sixteenth century. And this sense was borrowed into English in the mid seventeenth century. Edward Herbert, a soldier, diplomat, poet, and philosopher, is the first person known to have used bizarre in English. […]

Despite the etymology of bizarre being a rather ordinary one, a false etymology developed claiming that it comes from the Basque bizarra, meaning beard. The false etymology developed not only because the words are superficially similar, but perhaps out of a desire that a word meaning odd should not have an ordinary history, and also perhaps because Basque is a tempting language to associate with any word. […]

[Read more…]

Mana Kia has an Aeon piece called “Being Persian” that describes a premodern situation that has long been attractive to me. It begins:

At the end of the 19th century, under the looming shadow of European colonial encroachment, political and intellectual elites in Iran began to draw on nationalist forms of belonging as a way to unify the various ethnic and religious groups that lived within its territory. The nation was gaining ground at this time as the acceptable and legible idiom of collective political demands. As in most of Africa and Asia, nationalism was anticolonial, understood as a liberatory basis of solidarity to gain independence (or protect) from European colonial rule. Among its distinctive features is a conflation between land, a national(ised) language, and a people. But nationalism also sought to produce cultural homogeneity, and so fostered ugly forms of subordination and violence against peoples who, amid new ideals of the nation, suddenly became linguistic and religious minorities. In the case of Iran, nationalists seized upon the Persian language as a crucial basis of national identity, one that could be shared across religious and sectarian lines. But at the turn of the 20th century, fewer than half of the population of Iran spoke Persian as a first language (or at all).

Bound up in the spread of nationalism was not just repression of ethnic minorities (linguistic, as with Azeris, but also tied to other affiliations, as with the Sunni Kurds) and the repurposing of language as a basis of this necessary homogeneity, but a whole transformation of how it was possible to know oneself, one’s collective, and one’s relationship to other selves and collectives through the modern conceptual systems that came with a nationalist frame. In order for Iran to repurpose Persian as the national language of its people, it had to efface a number of significant aspects of its history and traditions shared with other countries. In the process, what it meant to be Persian changed profoundly.

Before modern nationalism, which led to today’s Iran (before 1934, the country was called Persia in European languages), Persians had an entirely different relation to land, origin and belonging. Prenationalist Persians (possessors of the Persian language) belonged to many lands, religions, kingdoms, regions, in what is now Iran and far beyond it. This earlier form of belonging allowed for a kind of pluralism, one in which Persians spoke other languages, observed different religions, and were part of various states or empires. Indeed, they accepted and even celebrated such overlapping multiplicity in language, religious affiliation and regional identification, which in more recent times has been the basis of so much conflict.

[Read more…]

Via Laudator Temporis Acti I learn of Max Nelson’s “Insulting Middle-Finger Gestures among Ancient Greeks and Romans” (Phoenix 71.1/2 [Spring/Summer 2017]: 66-88), which is available at JSTOR; it starts off mentioning the claim “that ancient Greeks and Romans used the insulting gesture in which a stiff middle finger is displayed (and sometimes also thrust upwards), with the palm facing inwards, in the same manner, and potentially even with the same meaning, as is common today in North America” and says “In what follows I attempt to demonstrate that there is no uncontestable evidence for this as a common gesture among ancient Greeks and Romans.” He begins with the Greek verb σκιμαλίζω, defined in dictionaries of ancient Greek as ‘to give someone the finger’ (in the sense described above), and shows that it seems to mean rather ‘prodding between the buttocks’ or ‘goosing.’ He discusses a couple of other verbs as well as a phrase meaning ‘extending the middle finger’ (horizontally rather than vertically), then proceeds to Latin phrases like infami digito and digitus impudicus. Here’s the final paragraph:

In conclusion, there is no incontrovertible evidence that ancient Greeks and Romans “gave the finger” in the same manner and with the same meaning common in North America today, or that the modern gesture descends from, or was inspired by, an ancient one. Various insulting gestures using the middle finger are certainly attested in ancient Greek and Latin texts. One source mentions holding the middle finger up in voting as a rude gesture and a number of sources make it clear that pointing to someone with the middle finger horizontally was insulting. Even ruder, as it involves the invasion of personal space and physical contact, was hitting someone’s nostril or nose with the middle finger, or goosing, that is, grabbing at someone’s buttocks or prodding someone’s anus, presumably as ways of ridiculing a male victim for his effeminacy or pathic nature (or maybe as an uninvited sexual advance, playful poke, flirtatious signal, or general insult). Finally, snapping the middle finger and thumb was thought of as impolite. Many of these gestures probably relied on the use of the middle finger to represent an erect penis. In fact the middle finger has been so used naturally and independently in many different contexts in disparate societies at various times. Therefore it would be rash to state that the modern gesture of “giving the finger” is directly linked to an ancient one. In the end then it is perhaps best to keep “the finger” to ourselves.

The whole thing is well worth a read, and incontrovertibly demonstrates the value of a classical education.

John Keay’s TLS review (November 13, 2020; archived) of Himalaya: A human history by Ed Douglas contains the following passage:

If “grasping after the particular” is indeed a Western trait, Douglas’s compendium turns it to good account by enlivening Himālaya’s disjointed history with a host of minor characters. Some are outsiders – explorers, philologists, plantsmen, sportsmen, mystics and mountaineers. Others are native observers whose testimony is often too oblique for standard works on “the mystic land of the lamas”. Who has heard of Zangbu Rabjamba, for instance, an early-eighteenth-century monk who “translated a Chinese work on European astronomy into Tibetan”? Before that, Zangbu had been engaged in conducting a survey covering the whole of Tibet. It anticipated similar exercises by the Survey of India in the nineteenth century and, during it, Zangbu evidently kept a journal. But we know of this work only by hearsay, and “the whole Tibetan contribution to the scientific understanding of their own country, the so-called ‘Lama Survey’, has faded from view”. Such unsung endeavours are a delight. They pop up in the text like marmots, the furry ground-squirrels of the Tibetan upland that bob from view before you can reach them, though not before their burrows have wrenched an ankle from its socket.

I like the marmot comparison (marmots at LH), but I’m curious about this Zangbu Rabjamba and his survey. I learn from Hosung Shim’s “The Zunghar Conquest of Central Tibet and its Influence on Tibetan Military Institutions in the 18th Century” (p. 75, n. 74; incidentally, the article has a very useful Appendix 1: Place Names in Different Languages) that rabjamba = Manchu ramjamba and Tibetan rab ’byams pa ‘doctor of Buddhist philosophy’ (we discussed Dzungar/Zunghar/Zungar/Junghar/Jungar/Dzhungar in 2017), so that’s Zangbu’s title… although now I learn from the more cautious Mario Cams in his Companions in Geography: East-West Collaboration in the Mapping of Qing China (c. 1685-1735) (p. 122) that La-mu-zhan-ba 藏布喇木占巴 “possibly stands for the Tibetan academic title of Rabjamba” (my emphasis). Cams also says “I have found no biographical information,” so I guess Zangbu is a dead end. As for the survey, googling “Lama Survey” gets me Clements R. Markham’s 1876 Narratives of the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet and of the Journey of Thomas Manning to Lhasa, which has a section (p. lxi) on the survey:

Kang-hi, therefore, resolved to have another map constructed, and accordingly two lamas were carefully trained as surveyors by the Jesuit Fathers at Peking, and sent to Tibet with orders to include the country from Sining to Lhasa, and thence to the sources of the Ganges, in their survey. The result was a map of Tibet, which was submitted to the Fathers, in 1717, and though not without faults, it was found to be a great improvement on the former attempt. From it the Jesuits prepared the well-known maps which were forwarded to Du Halde, and from which D’Anville constructed his atlas. The Lama Survey of Tibet still continues to be the basis of our geographical knowledge of that country, although it is rapidly being superseded by the efforts of Colonel Montgomerie and his native explorers.

Needless to say, all thoughts about any of this are welcome.