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Via Catriona Kelly’s FB post, some Grauniad letters in which “Readers respond to Adrian Chiles’s article mourning the decline of our most poetic sayings”; the first one drove me to make this post:

My Scottish mother-in-law had a wealth of expressions which she’d use so appropriately […]. One saying that we use now and again, to excuse spending on a treat, is “there’s nae pockets in a shroud”. Another couple of wonderful ones to describe threatening weather are “it’s dark over Will’s mum’s”, plus a particular favourite, “it’s as black as the earl of hell’s waistcoat”. Real poetry.
Catherine Roome
Staplehurst, Kent

Real poetry indeed! My wife and I were both struck by the eerie specificity of “the earl of hell’s waistcoat” — not the more obvious “lord of hell” or, say, “cloak,” but “earl” and “waistcoat.” It sticks in your mind. (I like “Staplehurst,” too.) There are a few more letters, but none as good; the best idiom in them is, I’d say, “more edges than a broken pisspot.” And my favorite from the Chiles piece is “wet as an otter’s pocket.”

A nice piece of etymological discourse from Haggard Hawks (see this LH post):

Last week, a sweary fact about kestrels turned out to be not only HH’s most popular fact of the week, but one of our most popular facts ever. Back in the sixteenth century, kestrels were known as windfuckers and fuckwinds. Having said that however, there’s a theory that claims you should in fact change those Fs to Ss. Some etymologists (presumably looking to make the history of the English language slightly less offensive than it actually is) will have you believe that those windfucker and fuckwind nicknames for the kestrel are actually misreadings: they come from a time when the archaic long S character < ſ > was often used to be used in place of < s > at the beginnings and middles of words, and so it’s entirely possible that that long S was simply misread as a lowercase F < f >.

So those kestrels? Perhaps they weren’t so much fucking the wind as they were sucking it. So to speak. It’s a neat theory, certainly, but alas it’s not the case; these nicknames really were as uncompromising as they sound. Take a look at this page from Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, for instance, and you’ll see under the French word crecerelle—well, pretty clear proof that there was no sucking involved whatsoever […]

[Read more…]

Sarah Anjum Bari wrote for the Daily Star back in 2019 about a subject that interests me on a number of levels:

Think of some of the words we use most often in our daily lives in Bengali. The word for ‘pen’—kolom; the word for ‘sky’—asmaan; ‘river’—doria; ‘land’—jomeen. Think of the standardised farewell greeting of Khoda Hafez even among some non-Muslims in social situations, and the knowledge of most Muslim Bengalis of the Arabic script, even if they do not understand the language. Derived from Persian and Arabic origins, these words, expressions, and practices, among countless others, have become so deeply ingrained in Bengali that we seldom spare thought to their foreign lineage. But a glimpse into the history of these linguistic concoctions reveals just how porous and pulsating language can be, and how rich Bengali as become over the centuries as a result of travelling cultures.

As Suniti Kumar Chatterjee explains in The Origin and Development of the Bengali Language(1926), Bengali predates the age of the province of Bengal in pre-partition India, originally a part of the Eastern Indo-Iranian or Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. Having previously settled in Eastern Iran, Aryan speakers supposedly came to India around 1500 BC, when the first Vedic hymns are said to have been produced. Among the oldest references to Bengali include the ancient Brahmi script found in Ashokan rock edicts, the Bengali commercial and industrial works from the Kusana period mentioned in the Greek Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (1st century AD), Bengali place names found in inscriptions of old books from the first half of the 5th century AD, and a glossary of 300 words in a ‘scattered’ Sanskrit commentary on the Amara-kosa by Bengali Pandit Vandhya Ghatiya Sarvananda from around 1159 AD.

The Persian influence on Bengali dates back to the 13th century Turkish invasion of India. The year 1206 saw the migration of many Persian and Central Asian poets to India, resulting in the assimilation of Persian literary trends into the Indian cultural landscape. While the influence on the Delhi headquarters was particularly evident from the development of Urdu—a mixture of Hindi and Persian languages—its impact on Bengal stemmed from a number of sources over several centuries.

[Read more…]

A correspondent writes: “Commonly we speak of felling trees when somebody is cutting them down, but apparently in the logging community it is more common to say things like ‘I’m going to fall that tree.’ I looked into this because somebody on Facebook shared this U. S. Dept. of the interior official sign warning loggers not to fall a tree because it is a seed tree […] There is some discussion of this usage here. (This discussion suggests that ‘fall’ is used informally, out west, mentions a similar image, and says the DoI is adopting the language of its audience, loggers.)” He adds other sites he found using the form; needless to say, I was intrigued, and fortunately the OED’s entry for the verb fall was updated in September 2017, so here’s the subentry:

29. a. transitive. To cut down (a tree, vegetation, etc.); = fell v. 3. Since the 19th cent. chiefly English regional, North American, Australian, and New Zealand.
Quot. a1325 (from a source whose scribal language is placed by Ling. Atlas Late Mediaeval Eng. in Ireland) is perhaps to be interpreted as showing fell v.: compare discussion at that entry.
In quot. ?1440 with the subject of the clause as the implicit object of the infinitive, with the sense ‘timber is to be felled’.
Early 15th-cent. currency of the sense is implied by quot. a1425 at falling n.¹ 3 [Bible (Wycliffite, L.V.) (Royal) (1850) Psalms lxxiii. 6 Thei castiden doun it with an ax, and a brood fallinge ax [L. in securi et ascia].].

a1325 (▸?c1300) Northern Passion (Cambr. Gg.1.1) l. 1246 (MED) In his horcherd a tre grewe..He dide hit falle [c1450 Cambr. Ii.4.9 fellyn] euche a bothȝ. Wan hit was fallid [Cambr. Ii.4.9 I fellyd] þei gon hit wirche.
▸ ?1440 tr. Palladius De re Rustica (Duke Humfrey) (1896) ii. l. 437 Now matere is to falle in sesoun best.
?1523 J. Fitzherbert Bk. Husbandry f. xliiiv To fall the vnder wood.
[…]
1685 in Colonial Rec. Pennsylvania (1852) I. 128 A Penalty to be laid upon such as Cutt or fall Marked..trees.
[…]
1744 R. Molesworth Short Course Standing Rules Govt. & Conduct Army iv. 65 Tools, as well for moving Earth, as for cutting down Hedges or Copsewood, falling Timber.
1803 H. Repton Observ. Landscape Gardening v. 75 The most beautiful places may rather be formed by falling, than by planting trees.
[…]
1875 W. D. Parish Dict. Sussex Dial. 40 These trees are getting too thick, I shall fall a few of them next year.
1883 Harper’s Mag. Jan. 201/1 We must fall a tree straight and true.
1913 U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals Rep. 118 182 The general custom is for the foreman to tell the men who are about to fall timber to be careful about teams and men who are working around.
1974 W. Leeds Herefordshire Speech 61 Fall, to fell (a tree).
1981 in Dict. Amer. Regional Eng. (1991) II. 341/1 They had each fallen a tree.
2010 A. Krien Into Woods 127 Well, of course we’re meant to fall them [sc. a few trees]. That’s why we’re here.

Are you familiar with this transitive usage? (Thanks, Martin!)

This is a long shot, but I’ve had luck with even more obscure questions, so I’ll toss it out there. I’m rereading Vladimir N. Brovkin’s superb Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War: Political Parties and Social Movements in Russia, 1918-1922, which I’ve been recommending for decades to anyone interested in the topic, and on p. 215 I came across this quote, said to be from K. F. Kirsta’s paper Put’ Rabochego: “These are shirye Talmudists, who cannot part with their yarmulkes on their heads. They, together with the Communists, have led Russia and the Russian workers to the abyss.” I can’t figure out what this “shirye” is or why Brovkin left it in Russian. (There’s a word шире [shire] ‘wider,’ the comparative of широкий ‘wide,’ but 1) there would be no reason to write it “shirye,” 2) it doesn’t work grammatically, and 3) it doesn’t work semantically.) The footnote references it to “Kolesnikov, Professional’noe dvizhenie i kontrrevoliutsiia, p. 121,” which seemed promising… but Профессиональное движение и контрреволюция is online, and the quote is nowhere in it (though there’s a section on Газета «Путь Рабочего» и ее платформа starting on p. 257). If anybody has a lead on either the meaning of the word or the Russian original of the quotation, please share. (I thought of writing to Brovkin to ask, but he seems to be a resolutely offline person — at least, I couldn’t find any contact information.)

Update. Having learned from my learned commenters that the word in question was щирые ‘real, genuine’ (pl.), a Ukrainianism found in southern Russian dialects, I thought to google “щирые талмудисты” and discovered Brovkin made a simple error — the quote is not from p. 121 of Kolesnikov but from p. 121 of G. Kuchin-Oranskii’s Dobrovol’cheskaia zubatovshchina (Добровольческая зубатовщина: Кирстовские организации на юге России и борьба с ними профессиональных союзов [Trud, 1924]), which he had cited in the previous note; the Russian is “Это «щирые талмудисты», заявляет он, не желающие ни за что расстаться со своими ермолками, держа на голове которые они во главе с коммунистами завели Россию и русского рабочего в пропасть и бездну…” I would prefer to translate it “It’s the genuine [shchirye] Talmudists, who absolutely refuse to part with their yarmulkes and kept them on their heads as they, together with the Communists, led Russia and the Russian workers into the abyss.”

I was reading Lauren Beukes’ NYT review (archived) of Jenni Fagan’s novel Luckenbooth, and of course I was struck by the title — it turns out a luckenbooth is “a booth or shop in a market which can be locked up, common in medieval Sc. towns, and specif. in hist. usage of a row of such shops in the High Street of Edinburgh to the north of St Giles Kirk, demolished in 1817” (SND) and the etymology is:

[O.Sc. lukkin, locked, from 1438, webbed, c.1470, lwkyn bothys, 1456, Mid.Eng. loken, O.E. (ge-)locen, pa.p. of lūcan, to lock, which survived in Eng. as louk till the 15th c. and in Sc. till the 17th.]

You can read about the Luckenbooths of Edinburgh at Wikipedia, with images and lively quotes (Walter Scott: “a huge pile of buildings called the Luckenbooths, which, for some inconceivable reason, our ancestors had jammed into the midst of the principal street of the town”). But there were other interesting things in the review, like a reference to the “Brallachan — a brilliant shapeless creature of the night,” which is an error for brollachan (“The Anachan and Brollachan/ They love the Mussel-ebb”), presumably derived from Gaelic brollach ‘a mess’; see the Second Wiki article for details on this “dreaded demonic being in the Scottish highlands.” And this paragraph particularly grabbed me:

Like a magpie, Fagan picks the shiniest details from history that will have you Googling between chapters: a polar bear called Baska Murmanska that paraded with the Polish regiment just after World War I, Britain’s Witchcraft Act, the infamous International Writers’ Conference of 1962, a real-life ’70s gang who dressed in masks à la “A Clockwork Orange,” the notorious madam Dora Noyce.

The linked “edited history” of the International Writers Conference is long and worthy, but can make the eyes glaze over; as a supplement I recommend Stuart Kelly’s much perkier piece for the Guardian:

Writing to the philosopher Hannah Arendt, the novelist Mary McCarthy described it memorably. “People jumping up to confess they were homosexuals or heterosexuals … an Englishwoman describing her communications with her dead daughter, a Dutch homosexual, former male nurse, now a Catholic convert, seeking someone to baptise him.”

McCarthy also mentioned the conference’s most notorious contretemps, one which has resonances and ramifications to this day for Scottish letters, not all of them wholly positive. The second day, given over to the state of Scottish literature, had featured “a registered heroin addict [Alex Trocchi] leading the Scottish opposition to the literary tyranny of the communist Hugh MacDiarmid”. This was the notorious spat where Trocchi claimed all his writing was inspired by sodomy and MacDiarmid called him cosmopolitan scum.

I’m sorry I missed it!

1) Hungarian swears:

The Őszöd speech (Hungarian: Őszödi beszéd) was a speech Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány delivered to the 2006 Hungarian Socialist Party (MSZP) congress in Balatonőszöd. […] Not only the content but also the profanity of the speech has been heavily criticized. […] While giving the speech, he used – among others – the Hungarian word szar (i.e., shit) or its related terms (szarból, beszarni, etc.) eight times and the word kurva (i.e., bitch, whorish, fucking) seven times. The following table presents some of the profane remarks – of which not everything has been translated by the foreign (i.e., non-Hungarian) press in general – with their corresponding translations.

The full text of the speech is here. Oddly, the Wikipedia article doesn’t mention the use of baszik ‘fuck,’ which was the first Hungarian curse word I learned: “Bassza meg, ugyan nem értek egyet, de elengedem.” [Fuck it, I disagree, but I’ll let it go.] Thanks, Trevor!

2) Fellini gibberish:

“Asa Nisi Masa” is a well-known nonsense phrase used during a key scene in Federico Fellini’s 1963 film 8½. […] Although the phrase “Asa Nisi Masa” has no translation in any known language — and Fellini never publicly revealed the meaning of the phrase — it is generally thought that Fellini used an Italian children’s game, similar to Pig Latin, to create it. In the game the syllables “si” and “sa” are added to existing words to obscure them, which Fellini does with the word “anima”: A-sa + Ni-si + Ma-sa. The word “anima” has dual significance in this context; not only is it the Italian word for “soul” but it is also a key concept in the work of the Swiss psychotherapist Carl Jung (of whom Fellini was fond), where “anima” is the term for the female aspect of the personality in men, a common Fellini theme

I’ve seen 8½ several times and always wondered about that mysterious phrase; I’m delighted to learn this very plausible explanation. (I know there are many who prefer mysteries to explanations, but I’m not one of them.)

In 2018 I waxed enthusiastic about Elias Muhanna’s New Yorker piece about Ahmad Al-Jallad, a professor of Arabic and Semitic linguistics at Leiden University, and in 2020 about Al-Jallad’s Twitter thread on the origin of the word Saracen; now I’m here to recommend his lecture The Rise of Arabic, posted on YouTube last December. I don’t normally link to, or even watch, hour-long videos — I like to absorb information via the written word — but in this case his presentation is so lively and informative, and the ability to see the inscriptions and maps (and hear his pronunciations) is so useful, that I wasn’t bored for a minute. He says the question of why there seems to be so little early Arabic, why it seems to appear suddenly out of nowhere, is mistaken; it conceives “Arabic” as “what is described in Western grammars,” including the definite article al- and a certain form of past tense, but that renders not only earlier forms of the language but modern dialects non-Arabic. If we talked about Egyptian the way we do about Arabic, we’d conclude the language of hieroglyphs was entirely different from that written in the Coptic alphabet and wouldn’t be able to see a developmental line connecting them (he also uses Old English as an example, at which point, around the 25:30 mark, we get Alex Foreman reading a sample). He says there was an explosion of Arabic scripts in the second half of the first millennium BCE, but the modern script begins with Nabataean (which was originally used not to write the users’ native Arabic but the official language, Nabataean Aramaic, so when it started being used to write Arabic there were many Aramaicisms, the longest-lasting of which was bar ‘son’). It’s an hour well spent if you have any interest in the topic.

Dave Wilton at Wordorigins.org has a Big List post on the state name Illinois featuring the overturning of a false etymology that was accepted for centuries:

The Illinois people were an informal confederation of a dozen or so Algonquian tribes who lived in the Mississippi Valley, stretching from present-day Michigan to Arkansas, including what is now the state of Illinois. The tribes included the Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Michigamea, Peoria, and Tamaroa, among others. Their name for themselves is irenweewa (he who speaks normally). In Ojibwa, that name is rendered as ilinwe, or in the plural ilenwek.

The French, who in the late seventeenth century made contact with the Ojibwa, rendered the -we ending as ‑ois, using the conventions of seventeenth-century French spelling to make it Illinois. Subsequent to European contact, the Illinois people were decimated by disease, war, and forced relocation. Today, the primary organization of the people is the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma.

The name Illinois appears in English by the end of the seventeenth century. This translation of an anonymous account of René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle’s expeditions is from 1698 and mentions the Illinois people:

[…] He sent likewise fifteen Men further into the Country, with orders to endeavour to find out the Illinois, and left his Fort of Niagara, and fifteen Men under my command. One of the Recollects contineud [sic] with us.

And Louis Hennepin’s A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America gives an incorrect etymology for the name Illinois, claiming it meant “accomplished men.” This etymology has been thoroughly discounted, but it was accepted as correct for several centuries, and one will often still see it on websites and in popular press accounts of the word’s origin.

See the link for more, including a quote from Hennepin and the full version of the first quote. I myself am curious about how the word irenweewa ‘he who speaks normally’ works morphologically, if anyone knows.

Bryan Lufkin writes for the BBC about the surprising (to me) spread of a familiar word:

What do y’all think of when you hear the term ‘y’all’?

Perhaps the twangy accent of the Southern United States? You wouldn’t be wrong – the term, a contraction of ‘you all’, is a ubiquitous part of Southern speech that extends across demographic lines. For many people, it has a certain down-home, hospitable friendliness that sounds specific to the South

In other regions of the US, ‘y’all’ has historically been far less common. Yet, in the past couple years, ‘y’all’ seems to have exploded in use, including and especially among people who live far outside the South, in places north of the Mason-Dixon Line in the US, like New York City, and even overseas.

Australian Twitter users, many of whom have started saying ‘y’all’, are being playfully chided for trying to masquerade as Americans. Forty-something CEOs in the US have traded ‘you guys’ for ‘y’all’ under the influence of their more progressive Gen Z colleagues. And LGBTQ+ advocacy groups encourage the ‘y’all means all’ mantra, arguing that the term is preferred because it includes people of all gender identities.

‘Y’all’ is fun and useful – but the way the term has gradually slipped into conversation in other English-speaking regions and countries tells us a lot about how and why certain bits of language catch on. The more widespread use of y’all also signals a shift towards more careful use of language to be more inclusive, including within the workplace. […]

Bonikowski finds it interesting this evolution appears to be from the ground up. A top-down change in linguistics might be when a respected style guide announces a change: for example, recommending news organisations use ‘police officer’ instead of ‘policeman’. But ‘y’all’s’ ascent seems to be the reverse, starting from the speakers themselves and gaining traction on social media. “This grassroots acceptance of this is filtered into general public awareness,” says Bonikowski.

Much more at the link; thanks, Trevor!