languagehat.com

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.

In my readthrough of Russian literature, I’ve come to another author I’ve been anticipating for years, Mikhail Shishkin. I’ve now read the first three things he published, and while I’m very much looking forward to more, he’s certainly a stranger writer than I suspected.

His first published story was “Урок каллиграфии” («Знамя», Jan. 1993), translated by the wonderful Marian Schwartz as “Calligraphy Lesson” (it’s available in this collection); it made quite a splash, winning the Debut Prize for 1993, and I can see why — in only a couple of dozen pages it presents an entire world of experience and imagery. The protagonist, Evgeny Aleksandrovich, is a court clerk who describes the appalling cases he’s recorded (and, in the end, participated in) to a succession of women who are present only in brief exchanges, prompting him to further revelations, but the realia of the story are (in good modernist fashion) subordinated to the way of the telling, as you can see from the opening paragraph (Schwartz’s translation):

The capital letter, Sofia Pavlovna, is the beginning of all beginnings, so let us begin with that. It’s like a first breath, a newborn’s cry, you might say. Just a moment ago there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. A void. And for another hundred or thousand years there might still have been nothing, but suddenly this pen, submitting to an impossibly higher will, is tracing a capital letter, and now there’s no stopping it. Being the pen’s first movement toward the period as well, it is a sign of both the hope and the absurdity of what is. Simultaneously. The first letter, like an embryo, conceals all life to come, to the very end—its spirit, its rhythm, its force, and its image.

Заглавная буква, Софья Павловна, есть начало всех начал, так что с нее и начнем. Если хотите, это все равно что первое дыханье, крик новорожденного. Еще только что ничего не было, абсолютно ничего, пустота, и еще сто, тысячу лет могло бы ничего не быть, но вот перо, подчиняясь недоступной ему высшей воле, вдруг выводит заглавную букву и остановиться уже не может. Являясь одновременно первым движением пера к точке, это есть знак и надежды и бессмыслицы сущего. В первой букве, как в эмбрионе, затаена вся последующая жизнь до самого конца — и дух, и ритм, и напор, и образ.

This establishes the primacy of writing over everything else, which is a constant theme with Shishkin. Another thing to note is the name Sofia Pavlovna, which happens to be that of the female lead in Griboedov’s immortal play Горе от ума (Woe from Wit); as it turns out, there’s no happenstance about it, because the other named women are Tatyana Dmitrievna (from Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin), Nastasya Filippovna (from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot), Anna Arkadievna (the heroine of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina), and Larochka (presumably Zhivago’s Lara). This sort of thing will either send readers running for the hills or enchant them; I am in the latter camp. Shishkin has said that this story contains the germ of everything he has written since, and I believe it.
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Two things about this verb:

1) I learn after all these years that the -l- is not normally pronounced (M-W, AHD; the OED, like AHD, has only /bɔːk/); I just asked my wife and she is with the majority. I must have picked up a spelling pronunciation as a wee lad.

2) The author of “Why Managers Fear a Remote-Work Future” (an interesting piece in its own right: “But the anti-remote crowd seems to believe that the responsibility of a 9-to-5 employee isn’t simply the work but the appearance, optics, and ceremony of the work” — preach it!) doesn’t seem to know what “balk” means: he writes “Ultimately, Spielberg balked” when he means “Ultimately, Spielberg caved” (or “gave in”). None of the dictionaries I have consulted include such a sense. But after all these years I have learned that new senses often escape my notice, so I’ll ask the Hattic multitudes: have you ever seen or heard “balk” used in that way (to mean “give in”)?

My wife was looking at an ad for one of these things and asked me “How do you pronounce that?” while pointing to the word lame. I said “…I dunno,” and dashed for the dictionary. But it wasn’t in M-W or AHD, though they had lame (lām) ‘thin metal plate’ and lamé (lă-mā´) ‘shiny fabric woven with metallic threads, often of gold or silver’; it wasn’t even in the OED. Fortunately, any number of online sites, like this one, explain that it’s pronounced “LAHM” and that it’s from French; presumably it, like the words above, derives from Latin lāmina ‘thin plate.’ This has been a public service announcement, and a nudge to lexicographers.