languagehat.com

I’m not crazy about Robin Robertson’s “Near Gleann nam Fiadh” (LRB, 30 July 2020; archived) as a poem, but it’s got some intriguing vocabulary. It begins:

All night preparing: the pelts oiled, blades whetted, the flanes
checked for truth and sharpness, set loose enough
there in the quiver, before the dawn, before the Becoming.
To hunt the stag with honour, Father said, you must
change your shape and nature: assume his form.
Latching on the headpiece, the skullcap with its horns,
I walked soft into the morning, alert, changed:
no longer man but hart, red deer, fiadh, stag.

Flane is an Old English word for ‘arrow’ (Beowulf 2438 “Syððan hyne Hæðcyn of hornbogan, his freawine flane geswencte”; Battle of Maldon 71 “Þurh flanes flyht”) that was occasionally revived by poets of an antiquarian cast of mind (1724 Poems on Royal Company of Archers 34 “Burnished swords and whizzing flanes”); the OED (entry not fully updated since 1896) says:

Etymology: Old English flán masculine and feminine = Old Norse fleinn (masculine), cognate with Old English flá: see flo n. The word survived longest in Scots; otherwise the normal form would have been flone.

I like that last bit of alternative-history lexicography. As for fiadh, it’s the Irish word for ‘deer’; Wiktionary says:

From Old Irish fíad (“wild animals, game, especially deer”), from fid m (“wood”).

But Buck’s Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal Indo-European Languages isn’t so definitive, saying:

NIr. fiadh = Ir. fiad ‘wild animal, beast, deer’, W. gwydd ‘wild’ (: Ir. fid ‘tree’ or ON veiðr ‘the hunt’? Walde-P. 1.230, 314. Pederson 1.111 f.). Specialization as in NE deer. Loth, RXC 35.35.

Later in the poem he uses cleuch (Scottish) “A gorge or ravine with precipitous and usually rocky sides, generally that of a stream or torrent” or “The precipitous side of a gorge; a steep and rugged descent”; “stooping him through with my dirk” (apparently the OED’s stoop 11. To plunge (a knife) in a person’s body. Obsolete. 1662 J. Lamont Diary “[He] was strangled in his bed priuately, and, fearing he sould recouered, a knife was stooped in his throat”); inmeat (Now rare exc. dialect) “Those internal parts or viscera of an animal which are used for food; hence gen. Entrails, inwards”; and redd² (Of uncertain origin) “To clear or clean out; To put in order, to make tidy.” In a single line we get:

Acorné, sanglant, fracted.

I can’t find acorné in either my French or English dictionaries (including OED and TLFi), but James Parker’s Glossary of Terms Used in Heraldry (1894) has (in the H section) “Horned, (fr. acorné) of the Bull, Unicorn, and Owl, when the horns are of another tincture”; sanglant is of course ‘bloody’; and fracted is “1. (heraldry) Having a part displaced, as if broken; said of an ordinary. 2. broken.” That’s my idea of fun.

I am saddened to learn of the death of Robert Farris Thompson, one of my intellectual heroes; Holland Cotter’s NY Times obit (archived) is lively and captures why he was so remarkable:

Robert Farris Thompson, a self-described “guerrilla scholar” who revolutionized the study of the cultures of Africa and the Americas by tracing through art, music and dance myriad continuities between the two, died on Nov. 29 at a nursing home in New Haven, Conn. He was 88. […]

Born into an upper-middle-class white family in Texas and educated at Yale, Professor Thompson is remembered by colleagues and students for his energizing thinking and his extravagantly performative presence.

In the Yale classroom, where he taught African American studies for more than half a century, he turned lecterns into percussive instruments. On research trips in Brazil, Cuba and Nigeria, he was known to exchange his J. Press madras shorts for the robes of an initiate into tribal religious societies.

He spoke and wrote of African civilizations as infinitely varied ethical, philosophical and aesthetic systems. To grasp their complexity and sophistication, he said, required a “guerrilla scholarship” that combined art history, anthropology, dance history, religious studies, sociology and ethnomusicology. This hybrid practice repeatedly took him out of the academic ivory tower and into rural Africa, the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and hip-hop clubs in the Bronx. In all these environments, he was equally, and exultantly, at home. […]

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Back in 2014 I posted about The Most Common Language In Each US State—Besides English And Spanish; now, courtesy of Anshool Deshmukh, I present an update based on the 2019 U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey:

Tagalog is the second most commonly spoken language in American households (after English/Spanish) with 1.7 million speakers, even though it only reaches top spot in Nevada. Unsurprisingly, Louisiana and states bordering eastern Canada have a healthy number of French speakers.

Further analysis of these common languages reveals a fascinating story. […]

I’ll let you click the link for the map and the rest of the story, but it makes an interesting comparison to the earlier post. Thanks, Bonnie!

Last year Molly Young wrote for Vulture about a very familiar topic, corporatespeak (to use what is apparently a dated term), but does so in a lively and useful fashion:

I worked at various start-ups for eight years beginning in 2010, when I was in my early 20s. Then I quit and went freelance for a while. A year later, I returned to office life, this time at a different start-up. […] One thing I did not miss about office life was the language. The language warped and mutated at a dizzying rate, so it was no surprise that a new term of art had emerged during the year I spent between jobs. The term was parallel path, and I first heard it in this sentence: “We’re waiting on specs for the San Francisco installation. Can you parallel-path two versions?”

Translated, this means: “We’re waiting on specs for the San Francisco installation. Can you make two versions?” In other words, to “parallel-path” is to do two things at once. That’s all. I thought there was something gorgeously and inadvertently candid about the phrase’s assumption that a person would ever not be doing more than one thing at a time in an office — its denial that the whole point of having an office job is to multitask ineffectively instead of single-tasking effectively. Why invent a term for what people were already forced to do? It was, in its fakery and puffery and lack of a reason to exist, the perfect corporate neologism.

The expected response to the above question would be something like “Great, I’ll go ahead and parallel-path that and route it back to you.” An equally acceptable response would be “Yes” or a simple nod. But the point of these phrases is to fill space. No matter where I’ve worked, it has always been obvious that if everyone agreed to use language in the way that it is normally used, which is to communicate, the workday would be two hours shorter.

In theory, a person could have fun with the system by introducing random terms and insisting on their validity (“We’re gonna have to banana-boat the marketing budget”). But in fact the only beauty, if you could call it that, of terms like parallel path is their arrival from nowhere and their seemingly immediate adoption by all. If workplaces are full of communal irritation and communal pride, they are less often considered to be places of communal mysticism. Yet when I started that job and began picking up on the new vocabulary, I felt like a Mayan circa 1600 BCE surrounded by other Mayans in the face of an unstoppable weather event that we didn’t understand and had no choice but to survive, yielding our lives and verbal expressions to a higher authority.

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Julian Barnes has a piece in the new LRB called Flaubert at Two Hundred (archived); it’s a series of more or less random observations done with Barnes’s patented panache, and I’ll quote some bits that seem to belong at LH:

Obsession

Flaubert is a writer who, more than most, can provoke obsessive devotion and obsessive behaviour. One of the more arcane items of Flaubertiana is Ambroise Perrin’s Madame Bovary dans l’ordre (2012). Perrin is a member of Oulipo, and his project is very Oulipian: it lists, in alphabetical order, every single word, number and punctuation mark that occurs in the 1873 Charpentier edition of the novel. And by ‘list’, I mean list: the book has six vertical columns to a page, and prints out the word each time it occurs. So the word et, which features 2812 times in the novel, is printed out 2812 times, occupying almost nine full pages. La occurs 3585 times, le 2366 and les 2276, elle 2129 and lui a meagre 806 – from which you might perhaps deduce the sexual slant of the novel. Or not. In the same way, you could look up the names of Emma Bovary’s two lovers, Rodolphe and Léon, and discover that Léon’s name occurs 140 times and Rodolphe’s a mere ten fewer.

It is all vaguely witty, yet mind-numbingly useless. For instance, it can tell us that the word ecchymoses (bruises) and the date 1835 each occur a single time in Madame Bovary, but it doesn’t tell us where they, or any other word, occur. For that you have to go to the Flaubert website run by the University of Rouen.

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I’m going to quote the start of Lizok’s decade-old post Train Spotting: Buida’s Zero Train and Astaf’ev’s Sad Detective because it’s uncannily appropriate for this one: “There are so many trains in Russian fiction—and history—that I suppose it’s not at all odd that I read, absolutely unintentionally, two short novels in a row with strong railroad themes.” The Buida is one of my pair as well, but the other is Viktor Pelevin’s «Жёлтая стрела» (The Yellow Arrow), from which I recently quoted an extensive passage on the clattering of wheels. They’re both phantasmagorical metaphors having their ultimate origin in Gogol’s famous troika at the end of Dead Souls (Hogarth translation: “Is not the road smoking beneath your wheels, and the bridges thundering as you cross them, and everything being left in the rear […]? What does that awe-inspiring progress of yours foretell?”), but updated to a train; Pelevin’s is ultimately comic, if grimly so (it’s a Russian novel, after all), while Buida’s is tragic (in a way that reminded me of Valentin Rasputin’s Farewell to Matyora), and in the immediate aftermath I’m going to say that Buida’s is the better novel, though they’re both well worth the read, and neither will bore you for even a minute.

Andrei, like the other passengers on the Yellow Arrow, has spent as much of his life as he can remember on the train, can see no end of it (literally — the train appears endless), and has no conception of the world outside, though he can see it speeding past the windows. He interacts with people who have various schemes for making money (mirroring the cowboy-capitalism phase Russia was going through in 1993, when both novels were published). Occasionally he clambers up to the roof, where various groups of people are always gathered for unclear reasons, but mostly he wanders the train in search of quiet places to read and think. The word in the corridors is that the train is headed for a broken bridge, but nobody knows anything for sure.

Buida’s protagonist, Ivan Ardabyev (known as Don Domino, the Russian title of the book, because he likes to play dominoes), is essentially nobody from nowhere — his father and mother were enemies of the people, and he has no parent but the Motherland, represented by an affectionate but terrifying KGB colonel who keeps telling him “I can trust you.” He is one of a group of lost souls working at a remote station on a branch line that services only one train, the hundred-car Zero Train (the title of the English translation by Oliver Ready), whose origin, destination, and cargo are unknown and a constant object of speculation to the people of the station. (Note that Pelevin’s characters don’t know what’s outside their train, while Buida’s don’t know what’s in it.) He is madly and hopelessly in love with Esfir (known as Fira), who is married to Misha Landau, and his desperate lust and attempts to quench it with the women provided for that purpose by the authorities are described with an impassioned eloquence that reminds me of Henry Miller. For more, I refer you to Lizok’s excellent discussion (the first link above); as she says, it’s “a nice balance of allegory, history, and reality,” and I would add that it’s superbly written, with canny use of repetition and a refusal to provide any information beyond that needed for the story he wants to tell — we don’t know where or when the events are taking place, or what happens to various characters. The cloud of unknowing reminds me of another great novel of Stalinist terror, Georgi Vladimov’s Верный Руслан (Faithful Ruslan — see this post): Ardabyev is almost as ignorant and unable to communicate as the dog Ruslan (at one point Buida says “Он боялся слов” [He feared words]), but his story is all the more moving on that account. For this kind of tale, less is more. Writers, even fine novelists like Yury Dombrovsky, run the danger of diminishing their effects by trying to tell too much. It’s not a cheerful read, but as I said here, it’s not depressing, because good writing is never depressing.

From TechTarget, s.v. cruft:

Cruft is a collective term for the elements of a program, system or product that are either useless, poorly designed or both. In computing, cruft describes areas of redundant, improper or simply badly written code, as well as old or inferior hardware and electronics. Cruft may also be used to describe a group of hackers, just as “pod” describes a group of whales, “exultation” a group of larks and “murder” a group of crows. […]

Cruft may also be used as a verb, describing the process of putting together a program, network or physical system in a poorly designed or implemented way. Crufting together a solution to a client’s specifications or organization’s needs may be necessary due to time, budget or staffing constraints. It is, however, rarely a well-respected practice in consulting, though more commonly encountered than many system administrators, VARs or information architects would prefer.

Urban legend in Cambridge, Massachusetts holds that the term “cruft” was coined by MIT students as a derisive comment on the electronics-filled windows of Cruft Hall at Harvard University. Cruft was part of the old physics building at Harvard, where it served as the department’s radar laboratory during WWII, which led to the existence of many kinds of wonderful but quite obsolete technological gadgets remaining on display.

Back in 2005, Andrew Dunbar commented here as follows:

Another word I can’t find in any dictionary seems more common to me: cruft

It’s not in my Shorter Oxford or my Macquarie. It’s not on the online Collins, Merriam-Webster, or Encarta. It’s not even on etymonline or WordOrigins. It is in the Jargon File.

I am happy to report that as of March 2007 it is in the OED Third Edition:
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Chapter 6 of Pelevin’s «Жёлтая стрела» (The Yellow Arrow) begins with this bravura passage which wouldn’t be out of place in Pynchon (the setting is the train called the Yellow Arrow, from which there is no escape and on which the passengers spend their lives):

Andrei unfolded the fresh copy of Put′ [‘The Way/Track,’ a railroad periodical] to the center spread, where there was a heading “Rails and Ties,” under which the most interesting articles were usually printed. Across the entire top of the sheet was a bold inscription:

TOTAL ANTHROPOLOGY

He made himself comfortable, folded the paper in half, and immersed himself in reading:

“The clattering of the wheels that accompanies each of us from birth to death is, of course, the sound most familiar to us. Scientists have estimated that there are some twenty thousand imitations of it in the languages of various peoples, of which about eighteen thousand belong to dead languages; most of these forgotten sounds cannot be reproduced from the scanty surviving records, which have often not even been deciphered. They are, as Paul Simon would say, songs that voices never share. But the imitations that now exist in every language are of course quite varied and interesting; some anthropologists even consider them at the level of metalanguage, as cultural passwords, so to speak, by which people recognize their neighbors in the carriage. The longest turned out to be an expression used by pygmies from the Cannabis Plateau in Central Africa; it goes like this:

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Rober Koptaş writes for T24 about Zaven Biberyan and his novel «Մրջիւններու Վերջալոյսը» [Sunset of the Ants], first translated into Turkish as Babam Aşkale’ye Gitmedi [My Father Didn’t Go to Aşkale]. He starts by describing the novel and Biberyan’s life, then continues:

In the letter he wrote to Paluyan in 1962, Biberyan would say “If I honestly had to admit it, I regret writing in Armenian.” He had begun writing in French but had thought “Since I am Armenian I should write in Armenian”. The result were books each worthy of being masterpieces he published in a language nearly no one read anymore, no one would see, no one would discuss. Although he worked as hard as an ant his modest output contradicted his talent. Through his attachment to his country, his political struggle, his refusal to migrate, and his translations into Turkish, it is possible to discern a desire, at any cost, to find a channel of dialogue with Turkey and Turks. No matter how well he wrote, his milieu was not ready to listen to an Armenian writer, writing in Armenian, or the themes he wished to tackle. The reason for this lay primarily in his identity. Just as he says about Baret towards the end of the novel, for Biberyan, even if he began to write in French, later to return to Armenian and later yet to regret his decision, “Even though he realized was better not to be Armenian …It was impossible not to be Armenian.”

Despite being in this circle without exit, Biberyan’s stubborn perseverance to write and to struggle politically is as precious jewel in my eyes. Not imprisoning himself in the Armenian circles with whom he naturally quarreled, he insisted on positioning himself side by side with the Turkish intelligentsia and the Left-wing movement. His translations, his friendship with publishing circles in Cağaoğlu, his insistence on staying in İstanbul, all of these things made him more than a mere writer, it made him a stubborn resistor; an insurgent. Yet in the milieu he was involved with, was there anyone aware that he was writing novels in Armenian? Or was there anyone who was curious about what he wrote? Wanting to create, to speak, to not be silent, to show solidarity to him to end his silence? Unfortunately, we know that many of the answers to similar questions were not in the affirmative.

Those who knew him, describe Biberyan as a bad-tempered person who was difficult to communicate with.

I’ll bet; how could he not be? Koptaş writes at length about the effort to get a better Turkish translation published:
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Hard on the heels of discovering that many people use balk to mean the opposite of what it means to me, I learn of an even more alarming development — belatedly, since Grant Barrett posted about it on January 16, 2006:

The meaning of “to coin (a word or phrase)” is changing and there’s a clear-cut need for some kind of disambiguation.

The new meaning of the verb, supported by any number of news articles or blog entries, seems to be “to say, especially in a noteworthy fashion” and not the older “to create a unique expression; to say something for the first time ever; to neologize.”

This article claims two fellows coined the word redonkulous, but it’s not clear which meaning of “coined” was intended. Probably the old meaning—that the word was first said, ever, by the two men in question, in which case the reporter is wrong.

A clear-cut case of the old meaning of “coined” is in this article, where the author claims Clarence Williams, the Delta-born pianist and publisher, coined the word “jazz.” Here they are citing Williams himself who made the bold claim that he used the word first, ever, which is so far unsupported by the evidence.

In this article, when Raymond Graves writes, “President Bush coined the word ‘war’ to suit and fuel his desire to attack Saddam Hussein,” it’s clear the new meaning of “coined” is intended, because, of course, the word “war” was not first said, ever, by the president of the United States and nobody sane would think so.

No doubt the expression “to coin a phrase,” tacked on after things that the speaker knows has been said before, is influencing this change in meaning.

In my own writing, I think I’ll disambiguate by using the verb “neologize” when necessary and by avoiding “to coin” altogether.

(All the article links are dead, and the first two have not been archived.) I’m sorry, but that’s a bridge too far. Others can use it however they like, but when I say “coin” I mean what it traditionally means. I try not to be the guy flailing futilely at the winds of change, I want to be au courant, but it turns out I have my limits. Here I stand; I can do no other.