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It’s time once again for Ben Zimmer’s annual Tucker Award post: “After another fucking exhausting year, it’s time once again for Strong Language to recognize the annual achievements in swearing.”

Best Fucking Swearing of 2021

We’ve run the numbers, and the pinnacle of profanity in this pandemic-weary year occurred in September when McSweeney’s published an instant classic by Wendy Molyneux entitled, “Oh My Fucking God, Get the Fucking Vaccine Already, You Fucking Fucks.” […]

Best Fucking Swearing on Television (Non-Fiction)

We might be a tad biased, but nothing on our televisions in 2021 could outdo the Netflix documentary series The History of Swear Words, the first season of which debuted in January. With Nicolas Cage hosting and Strong Language’s own Kory Stamper as one of the talking heads, how could you go wrong? […]

Best Fucking Swearing in the Movies

(Beware, Matrix spoilers ahead!) The long-awaited sequel The Matrix Resurrections has some surprise appearances by characters from earlier in the franchise, like the Merovingian, aka the Frenchman (played by Lambert Wilson). In 2003’s The Matrix Reloaded, the Merovingian explains why he chooses to speak French: “I have sampled every language, French is my favorite. Fantastic language. Especially to curse with. Nom de dieu de putain de bordel de merde de saloperie de connard d’enculé de ta mère. It’s like wiping your ass with silk. I love it.” (Google Translate renders the French line as “God damn fuck you motherfucker motherfucker shit,” which lacks some nuance.) […]

Best Fucking Swearing for Civil Liberties

It’s always cheering to see the right to swear upheld as a civil liberty in the courts, and it’s especially cheering when a cheerleader is at the center of the legal action. In a case that went all the way up to the Supreme Court, Brandi Levy prevailed against administrators at her public high school in Pennsylvania, who suspended her from cheerleading after she posted a photo on Snapchat with the message, “Fuck school, fuck softball, fuck cheer, fuck everything.” But while it was rightly hailed as a free-speech victory, the case exposed how major U.S. media outlets continue to dance around profanity, even when it’s undeniably newsworthy.

Fuckin’ A! Lots more at the link, of course. (Tucker Awards previously at LH.)

I was planning to write my review of Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Роман [Roman] today because I expected to finish the book yesterday. As it happens, I finished it a day earlier because I skimmed the last hundred or so pages in a few minutes, but I’m writing about it today anyway, because I had to catch my breath and figure out what I wanted to say about this enchanting, boring, disgusting, maddening piece of fiction. I’m still trying to figure it out, and I’m hoping that the process of writing will help me clarify what I think.

It’s not the first Sorokin I’ve read; that would be his famous 1991 short story Кисет [The tobacco pouch], in which a touching but clichéd reminiscence of a WWII veteran looking for a woman who gave him a tobacco pouch during the war descends into gibberish (I saw a reference to it on Anatoly Vorobey’s site a couple of decades ago and gobbled it up), and that’s Sorokin’s gimmick in a nutshell: present some pleasing cliché and violently deconstruct it. I completely understand why a lot of people can’t stand Sorokin; some hate the clichés, while others are repelled by the violence, which frequently involves torture, coprophagy, cannibalism, and the like. But for me the clichés are redeemed by the brilliant presentation (Sorokin is a superb stylist capable of any sort of pastiche), and as for the violence, well, as he points out, the characters aren’t people, they’re just words on paper, and what happens to them is about literature and language, not suffering human beings. Of course that’s a bit disingenuous, since it’s a rare reader who can entirely divorce a literary character from the humanity the character is constructed to mimic, but it’s also true, and I can handle the results. Except…

Well, let me describe the book in enough detail to give you an idea of it; this will necessarily involve spoilers, so click through to the rest only if you don’t care about that. (I should mention that this, the last of his major works to be rendered into English, is said to be forthcoming from Dalkey Archive in Max Lawton’s translation, and I’ll also point out that the Russian text I linked to above is on Sorokin’s own site — he generously presents his work for all to read freely if they don’t want to cough up for a printed copy.)
[Read more…]

Slavomír Čéplö aka bulbul writes on Facebook:

Some more good stuff from the Dragoman book: p. 161-162 contains a reference to a book titled Peregrinations written by a certain Jean Palerne and published in Lyon in 1606. Among other things, it contains a glossary of useful terms (p. 522 onwards) in French, Italian, vernacular Greek, Turkish, Arabic and Slavic. Not all columns are filled and so the first Slavic term we get is “Maistre – Maestro – X – X – Gospodaro” and of the useful phrases towards the end, we only get “Caco stoite” (< “Kako stojite”) as the equivalent of “Come state” (p. 540-541).

The true value of the book lies in the final page, p. (5)554, which contains two lists of insults (“inivres”), one in Turkish (apparently addressed to Christians) and one in Arabic, both with French equivalents. Some are familiar (“giaour”, “quiopec” < “köpek”, quelb”), the rest, less so. I, for one, would love to have the whole list explained and annotated. Stephen, maybe if we engage the Hatters?

It took me a minute to figure out that “inivres” = “injures.” (You can run into it in early English texts as well; from Langford’s Meditations of Ghostly Exercise in Time of Mass: “See now that yow lykwysse forgyff all Inivres . displeasures . wronges and occasyons . for the Lowe of hym that thus meikly and mercefully Dyd forgyff hys trespasurs.”) At any rate, it’s an interesting challenge; what, for instance, is “brequiday” ‘cuckold’?

I recently came across the word adelgid, which means (per Merriam-Webster) “either of two aphids (genus Adelges) with a white woolly coating that have been accidentally introduced into North America” and (per the OED) “Any of various homopteran bugs constituting the family Adelgidae, closely related to aphids, which feed on the sap of coniferous trees, often form galls, and at certain stages of the life cycle are covered with a white, wool-like waxy secretion.” But my concern is not with the bugs but with the etymology. M-W says:

adelgid ultimately from New Latin Adelges, probably irregular from Greek adēlos unseen

Which struck me as odd. But the OED (entry created December 2011) says something quite different:

Etymology: < scientific Latin Adelges, genus name (J. N. Vallot 1836, in Mém. de l’Acad. des Sci., Arts, et Belles-lettres de Dijon 227); probably < -adelges (in either Phytadelges, family name, or zoadelges, both 1832 in Duméril: see note) + -id suffix³. Compare scientific Latin Adelgidae, family name (1931 or earlier). Compare French adelge (Vallot 1836).
Duméril derives scientific Latin Phytadelges and zoadelges < ancient Greek ἀδελγεῖν to suck, but this form is not attested in Greek; there may be some confusion with ancient Greek ἀμελγεῖν to milk, to suck up (moisture), to drink.

I wish scientists would routinely explain where they get the words they’re coining (and learn the classical languages if they want to use them)!

Incidentally, I found the word while reading the New Yorker — it’s in Ian Frazier’s annual New Year’s “Greetings, Friends!” doggerel. But Frazier either didn’t know how the word was supposed to be pronounced (/æˈdɛldʒᵻd/) or chose to ignore it, because his verse stresses it on the antepenult:

May every forest soon be rid
Of the woolly adelgid.

Over at Wordorigins.org, cuchuflete has discovered a briefly popular slang phrase of unknown origin:

Googling the phrase, “do the Hobson act” yields a small batch of quotations suggesting that it means kissing […]

Indianapolis Sun Newspaper Archives, Sep 29, 1899, p. 1

Thursday puckered up her lips to do the Hobson act to Dewey As she Shook his hand. Dewey s Flag officer pushed her away and the Admiral was saved
————-

“I won’t be embraced, I won’t, I won’t,” cried the old sailor, frantically. “Come, Captain, do the Hobson act,” said Walter, “the ladies expect it.” …
———

Page 6 — Indianapolis News 1 September 1899 – Hoosier State Chronicles

A young man in a Wabash paper mill tried to do the Hobson act with one of the ycung women employes, and she attacked him with a saw […]

I wrote:

Very interesting! Here’s another, from the Crawfordsville [Indiana] Journal, September 22, 1899, p. 5:

Did you see the kissing bug at the church Sunday evening? The young man in question didn’t wait for a better opportunity, but did the Hobson act right there in the church.

And from Town Talk [San Francisco], July 3, 1899, p. 10:

As the bride and bridegroom appeared at the door the old familiar wedding march was played and then it was decided that all the men present should kiss the bride and that the ladies should do the Hobson act with Mr. Bride.

It seems to have flared up in the summer of 1899 and immediately died out without leaving a clue as to its origin!

Perhaps someone can come up with more information? (If you’re wondering, the OED advanced search says “No results found for ‘Hobson act’.”)

The estimable Studiolum at Poemas del río Wang has a post about (to quote Wikipedia) “the only female Arabic-language Jewish poet attested from medieval Andalusia, and […] one of few known female Jewish poets throughout the Middle Ages.” He talks about the fragmentary remains of “the Andalusian Arab culture that flourished for eight hundred years” and of “the Jewish poetry in Judeo-Arabic that was born under Arabic influence in Cordoba in the 10th century,” then continues:

And if we know so little from Jewish poets, it is quite an exceptional coincidence that we are left with poems from a Jewish poetess as well. We know that women also wrote poems in Andalusia, and their contemporaries held these poems in high esteem, but we know only one medieval Jewish poetess, Qasmūna bint Ismāʿil – we know only her Arabic name, not the Jewish one – of whom only three poems survive. They were discovered by James Nichols in a 15th-century Arab poetic anthology by as-Suyūti from the Maghreb.

Qasmūna learned the craft from her father, Ismāʿil ibn Naghrilla, by his Jewish name Samuel ha-Nagid (993-1055), the grand vizier of the Zirid dynasty in Granada, and an acknowledged member of the Jewish poetry circle of Granada, which was presented by Ann Brener in her Judah Halevi and His Circle of Hebrew Poets in Granada.

I like the poems he quotes, especially the one about the gazelle, though I have little grasp of how Arabic poetry works. But I have a question about her name. The Wikipedia article says “sometimes called Xemone,” and Xemone looks like an odd equivalent for Qasmona. Anybody know what’s going on?

Agnee Ghosh writes for BBC Future about an effort to track down vanishing languages of India:

It was 2010 and Ganesh N Devy was concerned about the lack of comprehensive data on the languages of India. “The 1961 [Indian] census recognised 1,652 mother tongues,” says Devy, “but the 1971 census listed only 109. The discrepancy in numbers frustrated me a lot.” So, Devy decided to find out what was going on himself. […]

As a professor of English at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in Gujarat, Devy has always had an interest in languages. He has founded a number of organisations for their study, documentation and preservation, including the Bhasha Research and Publication Centre in Baroda, the Adivasis Academy in Tejgadh, the DNT-Rights Action Group, among others. As part of his work at the organisations, he used to go to villages where tribal populations lived and research them. He started noticing that these tribes have their own languages, which often do not get reported in the official government census. […]

Devy felt that it would take a long, arduous process to document every language in India, so he stepped in to help. He launched the People’s Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI) in 2010, for which he put together a team of 3,000 volunteers from all over the country. Most of these volunteers weren’t researchers, but writers, school teachers, and other non-professional-linguists who possessed an intimacy with their mother tongue that was invaluable to Devy.

[Read more…]

Christina Karakepeli writes for Bloggers Karamazov about an interesting bit of literary history:

The first translation of Crime and Punishment was published in Athens in 1889. At that point, the Greek nation was no more than half-a-century old. […] At the time, production of national—modern Greek—literature was low. After Greece became independent, the question of what modern Greek literature should look like—what should be its goals, language, style and themes—was constantly debated. Literary critics dismissed Greek literary works written at the time as a passive mimesis of European literary models that did not reflect the realities of modern Greek society. For newspaper editors, publishing imported—mostly French—literature was easier and more profitable. Daily newspapers of the time featured regularly in their pages the works of popular French authors. Not everyone was in favour of French literature though, especially Greek literary critics, who saw French novels as superficial and morally detrimental lamenting their popularity with the Greek audience.

The answer to French romanticism was to be found in Russian literature, which was promoted at the time as a model for everything that modern Greek literature aspired to be. In one of the first introductory texts on Russian literature in Greece, Russian literature was presented as an alternative to the ‘wrinkled’ and ‘exhausted’ literatures of European nations. Russian literature was praised for its ‘originality and national colour’; the ‘young and vivacious’ literature of the Russians, as the author described it, could be a prototype for an ideal national literature: inspired by the life of the common people, written in their language, with a stated purpose of social reform’. The dissemination of Russian literature in Greece could be ‘invigorating […] for [the] perishing Greek literature’, the author wrote. From the 1860s on, a steady rise in translations of Russian works attested to the fact that Russian literature was not only favoured by literary critics but also very popular with Greek audiences. The most translated Russian authors of the time were Ivan Krylov, Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy and Mikhail Lermontov. Of Dostoevsky’s works, only five works were translated in the 19th century: two Christmas short stories, two excerpts from A Writer’s Diary, and Crime and Punishment.

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Hard to believe I’ve never posted about this before, but now, thanks to Slavo/bulbul, I offer you GORAZD: The Old Church Slavonic Digital Hub. They have digital dictionaries, collections of digitized Church Slavonic manuscripts, Slavic Historical Dictionaries Online, and what bulbul brought to my attention in his e-mail, “the Old Church Slavonic dictionary from the 60s finally complete.” Go to that link and click on “Access to the database” and Bova’s your uncle. As a sample, here’s the entry for азъ ‘I’:

ἐγώ|я|I|já: азъ же по срѣдѣ вас ъесмь L 22:27 Zogr Mar; ѣко оутвръ(ді)шѩсѩ паче мене Ps 17:18 Sin; а не противи сꙙ мьнѣ акꙑ онисиї Supr 48:27; рьці ми • како подобаше створіті лоучъшъ Cloz 5а33; ꙗко и мене грѣшьнааго … съподобілъ ѥси Supr 103:6-7; помилоуи мѧ Euch 84b21; ѣко мілость твоѣ велиѣ на мьнѣ естъ Ps 85:13 Sin; чⸯто же г‹лаго›лѫ о сихъ • ѥже положі прѣдъ мноѭ Supr 49:9 ♦ тако ми +acc. μά,νή|клянусь (кем)|I swear (by somebody)|přísahám (při kom): тако ми богꙑ не имамъ тебе поштꙙдѣти Supr 104:21 ◼ ми μου|мой|my|můj: сꙑнъ ми ѥси Supr 243:21 (мои Ps 2:7 Sin) ♦ свои ми ὁ ἐμός|мой (собственный)|my (own)|můj (vlastní): ꙇли нѣстъ ми лѣть сътворити въ своихъ ми еже хоштѫ Mt 20:15 Mar; EuchN 26b20.—Zogr Mar As Sav Achr Bojan ZogrPal Vat En Sin SinN Euch EuchN Cloz Supr FragZogr

Amazing stuff; thanks, bulbul, and a very merry Christmas to those who celebrate it!

A couple of interesting topics came up in this thread, and since juha said “I think dative objects in Icelandic is a topic worthy of a separate thread,” I thought I’d start one.

Verb classes and dative objects in Insular Scandinavian, by Jóhannes Jónsson:

Dative case in Insular Scandinavian (Icelandic and Faroese) exemplifies a fairly complicated relation between syntax and lexical semantics. Thus, monotransitive verbs selecting dative objects in Icelandic fall into various semantic classes and many of these classes also contain verbs with accusative objects (Maling 2002). The same is true of Faroese although the number of two-place dative verbs in that language is much smaller than in Icelandic. The reason is that dative objects of many verbs have been replaced by accusative objects in the history Faroese and this process is still ongoing.

Despite the complexities surrounding dative case selection in Insular Scandinavian, it is clear that some lexical semantic features are more strongly associated with dative case than others. This is also true cross-linguistically as can be seen by comparing two-place dative verbs across languages.

Dative in Icelandic: throw that ball!

And for general linguistic oddity, courtesy of PlasticPaddy, Quirky subject:

In linguistics, quirky subjects (also called oblique subjects) are a phenomenon where certain verbs specify that their subjects are to be in a case other than the nominative. These non-nominative subjects are determiner phrases that pass subjecthood tests such as subject-oriented anaphora binding, PRO control, reduced relative clause, conjunction reduction, subject-to-subject raising, and subject-to-object raising. […] Icelandic was argued to be the only modern language with quirky subjects, but other studies investigating languages like Faroese, German, Hindi, Basque, Laz, Gujarati, Hungarian, Kannada, Korean, Malayalam, Marathi, Russian, Spanish, and Telugu show that they also possess quirky subjects.

There’s even a Quirky Subject Hierarchy (QSH).